*
“I know what to call them.”
“What? What time is it?”
“I said, I know what to call the weapons.”
“Akeha, go back to sleep.”
“Sunballs. We should call them sunballs.”
“ . . . what?”
“They explode with the brightness of the sun. We should call them sunballs.”
“You . . . I can’t believe you woke me for this.”
“I thought you would find it funny.”
“I’ll find it funny when it’s not the unmentionable crack of night. Go back to sleep, you turtle bastard.”
“I love you.”
Chapter Nineteen
THINGS STARTED TO GO WRONG after prayers at first sunrise. Pain seared through Akeha’s veins; he doubled over as though he had been shot, breath emerging in ragged gasps.
“What is it?” Yongcheow asked, alarm suffusing him as every possibility from poison to a hidden arrow to a heart attack flashed through his imagination. “Akeha!”
Akeha couldn’t answer. He staggered across the room, grasping for his pack, searching for something that burned in his mind like a coal brand. A sense of danger had hit him, an impression of suffering so powerful the blood struggled to reach his head. He felt like he was dying. Perhaps he was.
His hands found what he was looking for. A flat, black medallion of volcanic rock, its center scooped out and replaced with faceted glass. It was one half of a pair, entangled in the Slack like talkers. Thennjay had the other half. When the glass changed colors, it meant something had happened. It meant Return to the city. Something is wrong. An emergency that couldn’t wait for a letter to wend its way to them.
Akeha had carried it for years, and for years it had remained dark. Until now. In his shaking hand, the glass glowed red, the color of blood fresh from the vein.
“What is it?” Yongcheow asked. “What does it mean?”
The initial blast of pain had broken over him, leaving numb chill in its receding wake. Akeha closed white fingers around the stone. “Mokoya.”
*
Because they had no safe house in Bunshim, they stayed at an inn of unsavory reputation, an all-hours place where patrons could be trusted to turn a blind eye to anything. A mix of weathered scowls and wild-eyed hunger prowled its wooden interiors, selling everything from sex to drugs to murder. Akeha, having gathered his belongings, went downstairs to find someone willing to lend him a carriage.
He could not get Thennjay on the talker. Whatever had happened in the capital, it was serious. Not knowing was the worst part, the part that was eating a hole in his stomach, the part that was sending his thoughts on bright and terrifying excursions. Had Mother done something? Was Mokoya hurt? Was she dead?
He thought of the sunball he carried, and of the insatiable flames that had consumed the defector’s lab in Chengbee. What if—?
All-hours establishments followed neither sun and moon nor day and night. The ground floor was unpleasantly drunk in the collar of time after first sunrise, shouts shaking the rafters and fumes of spilled wine stinging the eyes. Akeha, having put on a reasonable mask of calm, stood three steps up from the chaos and surveyed the scattershot tables for faces he recognized.
Behind him Yongcheow said, “That’s Banyar the silk merchant, isn’t it?”
Banyar owed them a favor from years back. She was tucked in a corner, plying a boy far too young for her with drink. She liked to travel in ostentatious conveyances, lacquered with gold, topped with riotous carvings, laden with more silk than a concubine’s quarters. Not the best way to slip into the capital unnoticed.
“We can ask her,” Akeha said.
As he descended, a table of revelers tore into his focus. A group of rough men, faces shiny and red and unfamiliar, squalling dialect from the lower quarters of Chengbee. The stink of money lingered around them. Akeha recognized the wretched pattern of tourists on a binge, here to taste Bunshim’s seedy delights, spending ill-gotten wealth on the golden dancers and pleasure ships in the harbor.
As he walked by their table, his anxiety expanded till it clotted his heart. Laughter peppered their conversation, which stewed in a foul delight. Some tragedy had just happened in the capital, some sort of explosion. Their oblique references were hard to parse, a story with no head and no tail. But someone had died. Someone important.
His chest twisted. Mokoya, her body dissolving in a sunball flare.
A man with a thin, wormy mustache commanded the largest share of the attention. He said, “If she was so damn powerful, how come she didn’t predict this disaster?”
The table shook under open-palmed howling. Akeha turned to him and said, “Tell me what happened.”
His companions crackled with more laughter as he said, “Oh, you haven’t heard the latest out of Chengbee?”
Slowly, through the roaring in his ears, Akeha repeated, “Tell me what happened.”
One of the man’s more observant friends tugged at his sleeve, whispered in his ear. The man squinted, suddenly hugely interested in Akeha’s face. Then his laughing returned threefold. “Oh, you’re her brother, are you? Oh, pity, pity!”
He stood up, drunk beyond all sense. “Do you see this, friends? This man, the Protector’s son, standing here, and he has no inkling! No inkling of what’s happened to his sister!” He slapped Akeha on the arm, pulled at his shoulder.
“Is she dead?” was all he could manage.
“Oh, not so, not so! But she will be soon, I hear! Too bad about that half-breed brat of hers, eh? Incinerated, I hear.”
His high, thin voice pierced like a bee sting. Mokoya’s daughter. His niece. “Incinerated.”
“Yes. Monastery went up like a firework!” As Akeha felt the skin across his knuckles tighten, the man continued crowing, “Must be a relief for your mother, huh?” His mouth was wide, full of ugly yellow teeth. “No more embarrassment from a Gauri half-breed running—”
By the time Akeha registered what he was doing, his hand was fisted in the man’s hair and a knife was halfway to his throat. It sliced clean, under the jaw, spraying him with fine, warm blood.
Akeha dropped the body first, then the knife.
The dead man’s companions shot to their feet, and he knew then that these were people who hurt other people for a living.
Air ignited over his clenched right fist. He would burn them, peel blackened skin from bubbling flesh—
“Akeha!”
Yongcheow. Akeha did not budge. He was facing five men. They would be no problem. He could see the same knowledge on their faces, as they realized who and what it was they faced. What they had unleashed.
Around him, the inn emptied in a determined, quiet fashion. The patrons had seen things like this happen before, and they didn’t like how it ended.
“Oi, oi.” Tze-Fong, the inn’s owner, moved her bulk between the abandoned tables, indignant hands on solid hips. “You going to pay for my furniture?”