“Hmm.” High-magic realms produced more mutations. Deformities might be common here—and something to hide, out of shame? Or something to be killed, out of fear. “What about failure to educate?”
“You needn’t worry about breaking that law,” he said as if making a mild joke. “It applies to village elders or councils, not individuals. Children must be taught courtesy, after all, as well as history and heavenly law. We have arrived.”
The building in front of Lily was small, stone, single-story. The roof was thatch. A woman stood outside, bowing as they came to a stop. She was shorter than Lily by a good four inches and looked like a strong breeze would blow her away. She wore what Lily thought of as traditional Chinese women’s garb: a wraparound top with a long skirt sashed high. Top and skirt were a light blue linen with dark blue bindings on the sleeves and lapels. No shoes, Lily saw, but she wore a straw hat shaped like a flattened pyramid that shaded her face . . . her white, wrinkled, Chinese face. White as in lacking pigment entirely. Her eyes were so pale a blue that the irises almost vanished. Her eyebrows, too, were all but invisible.
She was an albino. A true albino, not an imitation like Alice Báitóu. A world worried about mutations might not be kind to albinos.
To Lily’s surprise, the Fist Second ordered one of his guards to remove the rope binding her wrists. As the guard did that, Fang looked at her. “We will await you here, by the door. Understand that it will not help you to harm the attendant or attempt to take her hostage. We would regret her death, but it would be laid on your account, not ours.”
The attendant bowed to Lily and whispered that she was honored to serve the Zhuren’s . . . what? Lily didn’t recognize the word she used and her mindspeech wasn’t as clear as Fang Ye Lì’s. Given how soft her voice was, maybe she didn’t really want to be heard. Was this tiny woman supposed to guard Lily inside the bathhouse? Lily tried to picture her as some kind of aging ninja, capable of guarding dangerous out-realm prisoners. She failed.
Why was she being treated to a bath anyway? Cynna had said their captors were clean freaks, but there were easier ways to make sure prisoners didn’t offend their captors’ noses. Lily shook her head at all the unanswered questions and followed the tiny woman inside.
It was a single room, dim and hot and humid. She caught a faint whiff of sulfur in the heavy air. Heat, humidity, and that sulfuric tang came from the pool that occupied much of the space. A natural hot spring, Lily thought, and wondered if hot springs were common here. Not that she knew what it would mean if they were. She had the vague notion that hot springs were associated with seismically active areas, but that might be wrong.
Low wooden stools were placed around the pool. The attendant pushed her hat back to dangle from its cord, revealing hair the color of sun-bleached winter grass. She bowed and whispered that perhaps the honored lái would remove her clothes and sit?
Ah—that was the word she’d used before: lái. This time Lily caught the meaning that went with it—“new arrival.” A term for fall-throughs, maybe? “Tell me your name first, please.”
“This lowly one is called Ah Hai.”
Surnames came first here, as they did in China. Lily commented that “Ah” was not a surname where she came from.
“I have no family name, honored lái.”
The absence of a family name suggested a tragic lack of standing—bastardy, maybe? Or slavery? Did her bare feet betoken her lowly status? They’d taken Cynna’s shoes away. What did that mean here? Lily wanted to ask, but she needed this woman to feel comfortable answering questions, so she turned the conversation to a less fraught topic—namely, how this bath was supposed to proceed.
Ah Hai was comfortable talking about her area of expertise, and her mindspeech became more intelligible. The basic procedure sounded similar to the way brownies bathed, a communal affair in which you soaped and rinsed off before you got into the hot water to soak. Or to play, if you were a brownie. This bathhouse was usually used by female servants who worked in the compound. Servants didn’t rate a bathing attendant, so Fang had requisitioned Ah Hai, who worked at an upper-class bathhouse in town.
Lily was a prisoner, yet Fang had gone to some trouble to obtain a temporary servant for her. That had to be a status thing. But why? What about Lily made her status high enough that she was supposed to have a bathing attendant?
Ah Hai was happy to show Lily the things she’d brought for Lily’s comfort that weren’t available at a servants’ bathhouse: soft, scented soap; heavy linen toweling; hair oil; three kinds of lotion and two salves. Also a small bamboo flute.
It seemed that Lily was receiving the deluxe treatment. This made her deeply suspicious, but she couldn’t see that it would make any difference for her to refuse the attendant’s services. They needed her alive to give to the G.B., right? Anything else they might do . . . well, they could do it whether or not she cooperated with her bath. Might as well go along and see what happened. She wasn’t crazy about getting scrubbed by someone other than Rule, but he was so damnably far away . . . injured? Alone? Still in Dis? She hated that idea, but it might explain why he felt so distant.
No, that was wrong. If it was a week earlier here than it had been when she left Dis, he wouldn’t be in Dis yet. He wouldn’t even be in California. A week ago they’d still been at Leidolf Clanhome in North Carolina. A week ago, Toby had been at Nokolai Clanhome with his grandfather. He hadn’t been kidnapped yet.
She went very still at the thought, possibilities and improbabilities tumbling through her head. Finally she quit trying to sort them out and sat on one of the low stools to pull off her boots. They laced up the front like combat boots, so she expected them to come off okay in spite of her ankle, which had to be swollen. The first one did; the second did not.
She persevered and ended up with a badly throbbing ankle, two grimy socks, and two bare feet. The blasted ankle would probably swell up even more now. She sighed, stood, and began stripping. When she was naked and uncomfortable about it, Ah Hai snatched the pile of dirty clothes off the floor along with Lily’s boots and socks and hurried to the door.
“Hey!” Lily’s ankle slowed her enough for the attendant to pass everything to one of Fang’s men outside. The door slammed shut again. “Why did you do that?”
Ah Hai bobbed in a nervous bow. “They are dirty, honored lái. They must be cleaned.”
“Is that what the Fist told you? That my things would be cleaned?”
“The honorable Fist Second told me to give them to his man, but surely they will be cleaned.”
“And returned to me?”