The soft, high notes from a flute sounded from behind her. Gradually the heat began to feel soporific instead of life-threatening.
The spawn were not immortal. Lily knew that much, though now that she thought about it, Sam hadn’t told them how long the spawn lived, just that the ones born on Earth had long since died out. These spawn had still been boys when they arrived five generations ago. If a generation was thirty years, five generations would be a hundred fifty years. If it was twenty years, five generations would be a hundred years.
Is that how old the spawn were? Between one and one-and-a-half centuries? And did that matter?
Not immediately, she decided. What mattered more was how the spawn had arrived in this realm. Or had they been born here? Hatched, that is.
However human the spawn looked now, they’d hatched from eggs like any other dragon—small, brightly colored, and wingless. Unsurprisingly, Sam hadn’t said much about the spell needed to turn their bodies human, save that it had taken him at least a couple centuries to devise it. A complex and sophisticated spell, then. Who had performed it on these spawn? One of the dragons? If Sam could develop such a spell, another dragon might have thought of it, too.
The dragon she’d seen had been mind-dark, but there must be plenty here who weren’t. His presence did suggest that these dragons weren’t very careful about their hatchings . . . but this was Dragonhome, the place where dragons originated. Bound to be a lot of dragons here, so based on sheer numbers there probably were more botched hatchings. Maybe the question was whether or not someone other than a dragon could create a spell to change baby dragons into the human-shaped spawn . . . and get close enough to the babies to use it. That seemed really unlikely. Sure, she had played mental midwife at a hatching, but that situation had been wildly unusual, maybe unique.
Reno might know. He was bound to know more than she did anyway. Was he not here yet, as Cynna had suggested? What about Gan? And Rule, dear God, and Rule . . . and what did the spawn want from the Great Bitch? What was her role in this realm? Everyone she’d met so far practically worshipped the spawn. None of them had said one word about a female goddess or Old One, so where did she come into the picture?
The questions tumbled in her head, mixing with the heat, the soft sound of the flute, and the exhaustion of a long and terrible day. Lily blinked, trying to stay awake, to stay on her guard . . .
She was running. Running in the darkness. They’d taken away her shoes and every footfall hurt, but she had to keep going. This was no sprint, but a marathon, with miles and miles still to go. Rule. She had to get to Rule, but he was so far away . . .
Some sound jerked her awake. She jolted—and nearly fainted, her head light and swimming, and—shit, how had that happened? The thread of mind-stuff stretching away from her was gossamer thin, stretched out so far it was almost gone.
She’d tried to reach Rule in her sleep?
“. . . not good to stay too long in the hot water, honored lái, please, if you will come out now—”
“Yes.” The thread of mind-stuff snapped back into her gut. It still felt thin. She felt thin, as if she’d used up some of herself along with the mind-stuff. “I stayed too long in the hot water and am dizzy. Help me out, please.”
The tiny woman was stronger than she looked. With her assistance, Lily was able to climb out without falling flat on her face. She stood carefully still while Ah Hai patted her dry, and after a bit her head stopped spinning and she realized something.
She was starving. Ravenous. “Is there any food?”
Ah Hai was desolated to say that there was not. It was not the custom to bring food into a bathhouse, but perhaps a drink of cool water? She was further distressed to have to tell Lily that the Fist had expressed impatience and wished them to hurry.
At least, that’s what Lily thought she said. She didn’t dare unspool her mindsense to find out for sure. She did not get the massage with scented lotion the little attendant had planned to give her or any salves. She did get a drink of water and wrappings for her ankle, along with a pair of loose trousers and a sleeveless tunic. No underwear.
She did not get her boots back. Nor was she offered some other form of footwear. “You may tell the Fist I will be ready to go as soon as my boots are returned.”
Ah Hai was suffused by embarrassment. She bowed several times, but was finally able to stop and go whisper through a cracked-open door. Whoever she reported to passed the word on to Fang Ye Lì.
Lily didn’t catch everything that happened next, but either her ear for their dialect was improving or volume helped. The Fist was not happy. He demanded to know why Lily did not wear the sandals provided, then learned that no sandals had been provided. He asked someone outside the bathhouse if that were true. Someone tried to explain, saying that the other woman (Cynna?) had had her shoes taken away, and they had taken Lily Yu’s shoes just now. That’s when Someone got knocked to the ground. Someone, it turned out, was an imbecile.
The rest was harder to make out. Fang stopped yelling, and the dialect confused her when she didn’t have her mindsense to sort it out. But it sounded like Lily had a different status than Cynna. Not that of a warrior, like she’d tried to claim, but xi qi. The word or phrase didn’t tell her much. Depending on intonations she couldn’t hear with a wall between them, xi had at least four meanings, qi had dozens, and the combination might refer to something only poetically related to its components. But it didn’t seem to mean prisoner.
This culture was based on that of ancient China. Face mattered. Status was only one aspect of face, but it was one she could try to shift in her favor, and going barefoot here meant you were a slave, not just a prisoner. In the end, Lily limped out of the bathhouse in her own boots. The second one had been hard to pull on over her swollen ankle, but she’d managed. She might be exhausted, magically drained, and starving, but by God, she was wearing boots.
She wished she knew if it made a difference to anything except her feet.
FIVE
IT was full dark now, but mage lights bobbed over the paths. Lily glimpsed a few people on those paths, but no one moved through the central area. She allowed one of the guards to retie her hands and climbed back into the rickshaw and told herself to sit up straight. They did not need to know she moved through a gray fog of exhaustion, or how cold and clammy that fog felt.
She was on her way to the Qī Jiā—the Home of the Seven—where Kongqi awaited her.
He wouldn’t kill her. She thought he wouldn’t damage her too badly, either. The Great Bitch might only need her brain, but that brain required a reasonably healthy body to maintain it. But there were plenty of nonfatal ways to cause pain . . . only they hadn’t pulled out Cynna’s fingernails, had they? What would she do if Kongqi had three little kids with him to use as incentive?