Hark! hears he not the sea-nymph speak
Her anger in that thrilling shriek!
-- Sir Walter Scott, The Lord of the Isles

As was normal in situations like this, the news was all over Tsalenlaki before the people most involved had heard of it. As was normal in situations like this, the version of the story that got around bore no resemblance to the truth.

The customer heard it from a cousin who worked in the telegraph office. The waiter heard it from the customer. The conductor heard it from the waiter. Half of the orchestra heard it from the conductor, and in turn passed it on to the other half. Mizushiro Reiji heard it several different times from several different musicians, and none of the stories resembled each other. Forget agreeing in minor details, they didn't even agree on the places or people involved!

One flautist swore it had happened to Rusudan herself in the middle of Tsalenlaki, not half an hour ago. Another insisted it had happened to the Queen in her summer palace, and the culprit had been Princess Ketevan. A lutist swore it was another example of madness in Belgonkorovo, and really what else could you expect from them? The organ involved changed from a heart to a lung to a brain to a pair of lungs depending on the person telling the story.

Reiji listened to them all and said very little, only agreeing with each speaker that the world was in a terrible state, and it just went to show. What it went to show was up to them to interpret.

The orchestra performance went ahead as scheduled. The last note of the concerto rang out, the conductor took his bow, and the curtain fell. Reiji carried his yeru[1] back to the instrument storage. Although inwardly he was wild with curiosity, he knew the proprieties had to be kept. The conductor, as always, offered to buy drinks for the entire orchestra, and the orchestra, as always, gratefully accepted. Refusing for anything short of a death in the family would have been the height of bad manners.

Once they all got to the restaurant, Reiji waited until a suitable amount of time had passed before politely excusing himself.

His fellow musicians might have been astonished at his behaviour as soon as he was out of sight. Or possibly not; there were very few people from Shindari in Vakaryan, and no matter how secretive Rusudan was about her organisation, rumours still leaked out. Someone might have heard of the Two-Headed Wolf's Shindarish lieutenant and drawn conclusions about the Shindarish musician who performed in the Tsalenlaki Orchestra.

Reiji sedately walked away from the restaurant, turned a corner, looked around to make sure no one was watching, then climbed up a shop's awning onto its roof.

He hurried along, bent almost double so his silhouette wouldn't show against the sky. It was amazing how few people bothered to look up, but he couldn't take any chances.

The house on Tsqelomi Street was notable for how ordinary it looked. The ground floor was a shoe-shop; a perfectly legitimate one run by a retired lieutenant who had lost an ear in a fight with a rival gang. The second storey was a storeroom. And the third storey, a cramped and poorly-furnished attic, was Rusudan's real house. She had an official one, of course, a mansion on the city's outskirts. But this was where she really lived and supervised her organisation.

Reiji climbed in through the skylight.

The room was divided by movable screens into a bedroom, sitting room and dining room. The bathroom was little more than a cupboard. Rusudan was bending over the washbasin in the bedroom.

She had removed the illusions around her face. She was bathing the gaping, empty socket where her right eye had been.

The poet Mtkruliashvalë had written, several centuries ago, that nothing on earth was as close as the bond between two soldiers who had fought together. If Reiji had met the poet Mtkruliashvalë, he would have had no compunctions about telling him he was a fool.

Reiji was not Rusudan's most trusted lieutenant because they had fought together against the Aruktai. Rusudan was not Reiji's chosen employer because of any lingering friendship from the army. They stuck together out of necessity. Reiji had found himself on the wrong side of an ocean when his homeland closed its borders and refused to let anyone, not even its own people, back in. Rusudan had offered him a job because she correctly guessed that no one else would take him in. No one was as loyal as the person who had no other options.

Now that Reiji had thrown in his lot with Rusudan, he was loyal enough to make sure she stayed his best option. She understood that; that was why she sent him on her most important missions. Or possibly it was to tie him in so deeply that he couldn't get out if he wanted to. Probably both.

"I've heard strange rumours," he observed neutrally.

Rusudan straightened up. She pressed her fingers to the side of her ruined eye. The illusion recreated itself. The scars smoothed away and her eye reappeared. It was useless, but no one outside her most trusted circle ever knew this for sure. She'd trained herself to pick up on what was happening on her blind side. Reiji had helped her do it, picking things up and setting things down and moving around until they were both sick of it.

"Not half as strange as what Darejan told me," Rusudan said.

She sat down on the old crate that served as a window seat. Reiji took a seat on the only chair at the small round table.

"Elamirja is on the rampage," she said bluntly.

Reiji's eyebrows flew up. "But wasn't he—"

"Driven into exile when the last mer were killed, yes. Or voluntarily exiled himself." Rusudan frowned. "Though I doubt the mer are as dead as they're said to be. I met a boy a few years ago..." She shook her head, her way of getting her thoughts back on track. "Anyway, Elamirja is back. He smashed the slave-ship, killed everyone on it except Dariko, and has sent her back with a message for me. She told me what it is: a human liver."

There was nothing to say to that, so Reiji said nothing. He couldn't keep the shock off his face, though.

"Why?" he asked.

Rusudan's lips twisted ever so slightly down at the right corner, a sure sign she was facing unwanted consequences of her actions. "Have you read the Collected Fairy-Tales of Vakaryan?"

If he hadn't known better, Reiji would have wondered if she'd lost her mind.

"Fairy-tales," he repeated flatly.

"There's a copy behind you."

Reiji was so used to Rusudan having books on her table that he had paid no attention to the one on it at the minute. He turned. The book was open to a page about three-quarters of the way through. His grasp of written Vakaryanese was poorer than his ability to speak it. Slowly and laboriously he read it out.

"A tale originally from Belgonkorovo. G'očeyi removed his soul and hid it in a rock in the middle of a desert of small stones[2]. He could not be killed until his soul was retrieved and destroyed. Whoever held the rock containing his soul had power over him. To counteract the person's power, he had to consume human flesh, especially..." Reiji stopped.

"Especially human livers," Rusudan finished.

Reiji closed the book. "This isn't just a fairy-tale then."

"Possibly G'očeyi is fictional. But the idea of gaining immortality by removing your soul and putting it in an object is real. As far as I know Elamirja was the first person to succeed."

The book's cover artwork depicted a montage of various fairy-tales. Reiji scanned each of them. There was the Swan-Prince, and the Three-Headed Dragon climbing the castle tower, and the Bride of Winter. In the lower right corner was a drawing he didn't recognise, of a knight in armour — that was implausibly on fire — bursting out of a tomb. Behind it, with his long hair melding into the darkness of the tomb, was a man dropping a glowing stones amidst several identical stones. Reiji looked at each piece in turn. Finally he felt he could speak without screaming.

"How do you know this?"

Rusudan cleared her throat. "I have several sources—"

For once Reiji set good manners aside and interrupted. "Did you steal Elamirja's soul?"

"I didn't know then it was his soul!"

He closed his eyes for a second. Once more he looked at the artist's impression of G'očeyi. It wasn't truly comforting to note that the wizened old man in the painting bore no resemblance to reports of Elamirja. In fact it raised the disturbing question of how many people had removed their souls, and the terrifying one of how many souls were lying around for Rusudan to steal.

"You didn't know it was his soul," he repeated flatly.

He heard Rusudan begin to pace back and forth. "Imagine you hear someone is keeping their soul in a diamond. Would you really believe that? Or would you think that it was an ordinary but very valuable diamond, worth so much that they protected it as if it was their soul?"

Reiji sighed internally. Then he sighed externally for good measure. "Why did you want to steal a diamond from a Ghost King?"

"For money, of course," Rusudan said.

Reiji, who was proud to say that he had made a considerable fortune through legitimate means as well as illegal ones, still wasn't convinced. "You could have stolen from anyone else."

"I could have, but I had already told the buyer that I would give him a unique diamond owned by one of the oldest ghosts around."

This story just got worse and worse. Reiji turned round in his chair and fixed Rusudan with an expression of equal exasperation and exhaustion. "I think you should begin from the beginning."

~~~~

The beginning was embedded deep in the fabric of Çarisar. The empire had been threatened by a rival kingdom on its borders. The khan found a unique way to solve the problem; he hired the kingdom's army to raid other countries and enslave their people. The men were worked to death in quarries and as galley slaves, the boys were raised in barracks and turned into soldiers, and the women and girls became sex slaves[3].

A woman from Vakaryan tried to ransom her village. She offered the khan all the jewels in the royal treasury. He demanded something rarer and unique. She thought long and hard, and decided to steal the diamond set in the Sea-Ghost's necklace.

~~~~

"And he lied," Rusudan finished. "He said he'd free them all. All fifty of the people his army stole. He only freed one."

Reiji kept a mental tally of how many things Rusudan left out of her story. There were at least twenty. The most important was... "How did you get the diamond in the first place?"

Rusudan pretended not to hear. "That khan's dead now, and good riddance. His grandson is reigning, and still has the diamond somewhere in his palace."

Talking about the past could wait. Reiji turned to the present. "How do we steal it back?"

For once Rusudan was silent. She sat down on the side of the bed. Her teeth were clenched so tightly that a muscle twitched at the side of her jaw.

Another question occurred to Reiji. "Why is Elamirja only demanding the diamond now?"

"I have an awful feeling I know," Rusudan said, and refused to elaborate.

~~~~

The Zadrolok Mountains loomed in the distance. The wedding procession — all fifty wagons, eight hundred soldiers, three hundred servants, and three princes of it — had stopped for the night. Another day's march would bring them to the first pass, where the Khan of Çarisar's representatives would be waiting to escort them to the capital, the wedding, and the assassination.

Konstantine didn't know who was in on the plot. His servants, all carefully selected by his father? The soldiers? His half-brothers? The entire procession, or only one person in it?

A week ago he had been escorted out of the Summer Palace and into the carriage designed specifically for him. It was so large it contained a sitting room and two bedrooms, one for his bodyguards and one for him and his half-brother, and needed eight horses to pull it. This ludicrous contraption was the main reason the procession travelled so slowly.

It had been designed as a temporary lodging for the emperor while on a hunting trip. He had ordered it refurnished, repainted, and hung with appropriate decorations for a wedding. All of the red silk curtains that blocked the windows had a practical purpose: they kept Konstantine from signaling to anyone outside.

He hadn't been allowed to speak to anyone except his bodyguards, the master of ceremonies, and his half-brothers. Gao Cheng Yi, the seventh prince, spent most of his time on horse-back and slept in his own carriage. Gao Cheng Xi, the fourth prince, stayed with Konstantine at all times.

For a spy, and possibly a half-witted spy at that, Cheng Xi wasn't bad company. He was either unbelievably naïve or pretending that he didn't see anything odd about his previously-unknown, previously-illegitimate brother being plucked out of obscurity and sent to marry a foreign princess. He was happy to spend hours discussing poetry and art from around the empire. Konstantine went along with it. He had to talk to someone to stay sane.

Maps were forbidden in Konstantine's carriage. His world was the four walls and red-tinted glimpses through the curtains. Making an escape was impossible while he didn't know where he was.

But now he saw the three peaks of Mount Masgud silhouetted against the sky. He knew exactly where he was. And he knew where the Blood Water was.

Konstantine bided his time. He had already made up his mind on how he would escape. Now he just had to wait until Cheng Xi was asleep.

The only time the three brothers were together was when they had their meals. The procession stopped for the evening, the soldiers took up their positions around the perimetre, and Cheng Yi joined Konstantine and Cheng Xi in the carriage. A servant prepared the meals outside and handed them through the door. Another servant carried them to the table.

Cheng Yi was silent all through the meal. So was Konstantine. It didn't make much difference, since Cheng Xi talked enough for all three of them and the servants too.

"Have you heard that in Çarisar, there's a fight between two religious factions? One thinks music is too common to be used in worship, and the other thinks it's too holy to be used outside worship. What will you say if they ask your opinion, Cheng Yin?"

No matter how many times he heard it — and his family went out of their way to use it even when protocol would dictate an honorific — Konstantine couldn't associate the name his father had given him with himself. He was Konstantine Niðarajë. Gao Cheng Yin was his father's sacrificial victim.

He took another dumpling to give himself more time to answer. Cheng Xi was either completely oblivious or actively mocking him, and he wasn't sure which was worse.

"I doubt they'll ask me," Konstantine said coolly, speaking for the first time.

Cheng Xi seemed to register that he'd spoken but showed no indication of hearing what he said. He changed the subject to musical instruments in Vakaryan. He was happy to talk, and Konstantine was happy to let him. Cheng Yi stared morosely into his soup bowl.

Konstantine had his escape attempt planned out. He couldn't will either of his siblings to do what he wanted; their father had warned all of them that he had mild telepathic abilities and to be suspicious if they suddenly started doing things they wouldn't normally. The emperor could have saved his breath for the second part. Konstantine's powers were weak enough as it was; when someone was aware of them, they became practically useless.

Shapeshifting into a dragon was no good when his brothers were also shapeshifters -- and full-blooded merong shapeshifters, not half-zimej like Konstantine. Therefore his best chance was to sneak out of the bedroom while Cheng Xi was asleep, order the guards and anyone else he encountered to pay no attention to him, steal a horse, and gallop for the Blood Water.

All he had to do was wait for night. Then Cheng Yi went and threw a spanner in the works.

"Commander Li is setting up a card game," he said glumly.

Cheng Xi sat up straighter. "Now?"

Cheng Yi nodded. In a voice that suggested things were getting worse and worse, he continued, "He's going to invite some of his friends after dinner."

For a minute Cheng Xi was visibly torn between wanting to join in and what he felt was his duty. "Should we allow this?"

"I doubt we could stop it," Cheng Xi groaned, giving up all hope.

Cheng Xi continued to waver. "Are you going to be there?"

Cheng Yi looked at him as if he had announced his intention to run away and join the circus. "I can't stand cards."

Konstantine was sure that if he listened carefully, he would hear the collapse of Cheng Xi's devotion to duty.

"I think one of us should be there. To keep an eye on things." He looked hopefully at Cheng Yi. "Eleventh Brother, would you stay with our brother tonight? Just until I get back."

Cheng Yi sighed morosely. "I suppose so."

Konstantine thought a few words that would have turned the air blue if spoken aloud.

Chapter Footnotes:

[1] yeru = Zither-like instrument similar to the koto.

[2] Adapted from the Russian fairy-tale character of Koshchei the Deathless, who in most stories hid his death in a needle within an egg, which was hidden within an animal, which in turn was hidden in a remote place. The detail about consuming human flesh is entirely my invention, inspired by zombie stories.

[3] All of this is based on real Ottoman history.