“I love her,” Thennjay said, in the space left by her departure.
It was just the two of them now, if you didn’t count Rider. Adi’s brief encroachment had brought back the gravity of the situation and the depth of the uncertainty they were mired in. Mokoya said, “What do you know about Tan Khimyan, the raja’s advisor? What did Akeha tell you?”
“About her?” Thennjay shrugged. “Nothing, except that she interferes with all his plans, and he would like to acquaint her with a pit of vipers. You know how he is.”
That didn’t help Mokoya assemble a mental image of the woman, so she simply substituted the blank in her mind with a clone of her mother, equipped with the same face, the same mannerisms, and the same motivations. “She wants to destroy Bataanar. We have to stop her.”
“Do we know that?” Thennjay drew in a huge breath, rotating his shoulders. “I’m not convinced she’s controlling the naga. You saw it too. I don’t know if that beast can be controlled.”
Mokoya folded her arms. “That naga used slackcraft. You felt it, didn’t you?” When Thennjay nodded reluctantly, she pressed on: “Animals don’t become adepts—they’re in no way complex enough. Something’s been done to that naga. And that means whoever’s experimented on it also developed a way of controlling it.” She was definitely thinking of her mother now. “They wouldn’t make a weapon they can’t leash.”
“Okay,” Thennjay said. “Fair. But what if it’s gone rogue?”
“Then we’re not any less dead, are we?”
Thennjay shut his eyes, put his hands over his face, and sucked air through the gaps.
A familiar presence drew near, emerging from the swamp of activity around the tent. A narrow blade of focused purpose. She knew who it was before he came through the flaps. “Keha.”
Sanao Akeha entered the tent with a frown, which was his default expression. The captain of Bataanar’s city guard scanned the tiny, canvas-bound space, and the frown dissolved as he caught sight of his sister. “Moko. Thank the Almighty.”
He crushed her in a hug, which she returned. Her twin stank of grease and dust and wood char, but he was alive and unhurt. She let go of the last dregs of resentment.
“I didn’t get a hug,” Thennjay grumbled.
Akeha remained unimpressed. “You didn’t wipe her snot when she was six. Deal with it.”
Mokoya elbowed Akeha in the chest, and he grunted. His gaze fell upon Rider’s form on the bed. “Who’s that?”
“A friend,” Mokoya said, in the same moment Thennjay said, “Mokoya’s new lover.”
Akeha looked from one to the other. “All right.” She saw him dismiss Rider as unimportant, a small but distracting pattern in one corner of a larger tapestry, and wanted to protest: Wait, not so fast.
But Thennjay was already moving the conversation onward. “Where’s Yongcheow?”
“In the city. Trying to get Lady Han on the talker. Everything’s gone to pieces around here.” Akeha looked hollowed out. With proximity, Mokoya noticed how his hair hung in tangled clumps around his chin. Was that blood? She reached for it, and he batted her hand away.
Thennjay said, “We were discussing the naga before you arrived. We thought it might be under someone’s control.”
“That’s wonderful. We’ve got bigger problems,” Akeha said.
Mokoya squinted at him. “Bigger problems than that naga?”
His lips formed a grim line. “The raja has sent for Protectorate troops.”
“That fool.” The words burst explosively from Thennjay. “After Bengang Baru? Did he learn nothing?”
Mokoya remembered Bengang Baru: a sleepy fishing town with a small pewter factory, population five thousand. Unremarkable until it had accrued an unhealthy reputation as a Machinist hub. Officially, it had been flattened by a Machinist experiment gone wrong. But Mokoya had walked through the cratered, smoking streets, still hot and glowing with the bones of fisherfolk and the timbers of factory workers’ houses, and she had seen the hand of the Protectorate everywhere. In the traces of slackcraft lingering still in the fire. In the wounds left in buildings by Protectorate guns. In the utter, ruthless devastation that was her mother’s signature. No one had been left alive to tell the truth.
“You know Mother’s just waiting for an excuse,” Mokoya said. Protectorate troops would come not to defend, but to destroy. How could the raja be so stupid?
“His advisor has been trying to manufacture crises in the city for months now,” Akeha growled. “Now she’s finally got what she wanted.”
“She’s the one controlling the naga,” Mokoya said. “I’m certain of that now.” A narrative had lodged in the tracks of her mind. Tan Khimyan, disgraced Tensor, exiled to the wilds of Ea, seeking a way back to the capital. Decides to curry favor with the Protector by sacrificing a city—a Machinist base, after all, had to be destroyed, never mind the thousands who lived in it.
It was what Mother would do.
“We must ask him to rescind the call for aid,” Thennjay said.
Akeha scowled. “Can you recall an arrow that has been fired?”
“What’s the alternative?” Mokoya asked. “Sit around and wait for death?”
“Will I sit around? Are my people the type to simply wait?” Akeha countered, between his teeth. Fire burned in him, a gleam of light fixed on the spectacle of martyrdom.
“Keha.”
“Come on,” Thennjay said, alarm gathering on his face. “We can’t just prepare for the worst. Come on. We haven’t even tried talking to the raja. We have to try.” He looked at Akeha, as close to desperation as she’d ever seen him. “Just let me try.”
Chapter Nine
BATAANAR WAS A CITY of curling streets, stacked with multilevel clay abodes and strung with shops that sold spices and fabric and hammered cook pots and cheap printed scrolls. The smell of roast meat and hot mutton fat hung over the outer quarters like a curtain. The three of them pushed their way toward the raja’s palace in the center of the city, elbow to elbow with the thick unquiet of Bataanar’s citizenry. First sunfall had come and gone, and the bazaars were wreathed in strings of sunballs, proper ones that dutifully gave off light and were unlikely to erupt in a volcanic pulse of heat and radiation.