“You may leave me now, old friend.”
And so the empress began to edit again, line by line. She cast and recast her master spell. Its intricacy was just as cold and beautiful as the world.
Soon, confined in the expanse of her spell, Vivian discovered that infinity stretched only from one sentence to its close and that eternity was well contained within an hour.
Leandra was continually being surprised by the stupidity of men. Not that she hadn’t done a few stupid things herself. Not that she didn’t have regrets, some of them powerful. But if she were a man, she’d never be so idiotic as to threaten a woman guarded by two gods.
Even if she hadn’t recognized the gods—in this case, Holokai and Dhrun—she would have at the very least trod lightly around a man brandishing a paddle studded with shark teeth and accompanied by a four-armed wrestler.
No matter how she looked at it, two pairs of muscular arms on one body seemed like one very compelling reason—or four very compelling reasons, depending on how one looked at it—for any and everyone contemplating mischief to piss off now and forever.
This was why she was so surprised when the beggar came at her with a knife.
They had been walking north into the Jacaranda District via the Utrana Way, about a quarter the way up the city. Beyond the walls, the terraces became mirrorlike flooded rice or taro paddies. To the east, the bay stretched out and the many dappled clouds cast a giant checkerboard pattern upon it. At the bay’s edge the Standing Islands serrated the horizon.
It was a beautiful and tranquil morning, casual in its tropical brilliance, and of a kind that reminded Leandra of why she had fallen in love with the city.
Utrana Way itself was nothing grand, but nothing dingy either. It ran along the fifth of the city’s sixteen terraces. On the bayside stood a waist-high wall; volcanoside, houses and pavilions. A lone monkey had been perched on a gutter, scanning the street with larcenous intent.
Leandra’s party had passed light traffic: young women carrying baskets of fruit, an elephant hauling timber for some new building, a rice merchant pushing a cart laden with heavy sacks. Then they had passed the beggar.
He was a squat man, with a dirty lungi and a single wooden bowl. He had been singing. They’d heard it a long way off. “A ruuu-pee. A rupee please. A rupee for a simple man and his starving children.” At the end of this refrain, he would shake his wooden bowel causing the few coins inside to jingle. Then he’d start again. “A ruuu-pee. A rupee please.”
As Leandra had walked past, he had shaken his bowl three times rapidly and then flung his arm out. In the next instant, he was on his feet lunging at her with a knife.
Leandra jumped back, cried out in alarm. Before a thought could form in her mind, Dhrun’s lower right hand clamped down on the attacker’s wrist. He diverted the man’s thrust away from her and pulled along the axis of the thrust, making the attacker yelp as he fell forward.
There was a slap and then a twittering sound. Dhrun’s right upper arm snapped up and, as if performing a conjuring trick, held the shaft of a small vibrating arrow. A moment later Leandra realized that a few steps down the street, another beggar was pointing a crossbow at her. As she realized that Dhrun had caught the crossbow bolt, the god of wrestling wrapped his upper right arm around the forehead of the man who had lunged at her and then twisted. There was a crack.
Behind Leandra someone bellowed. She spun around and began fumbling for the knives in her belt, but then she saw that Holokai was standing over a third attacker, a big man dressed in a fine lungi. He lay sprawled out, his mouth working as if he were trying to speak. A ragged wound ran down the man’s left collarbone, his chest, and then opened up into his belly. At the end of the wound lay Holokai’s long-handled leimako, its shark’s teeth glistening with blood.
“Wait!” Leandra screamed. “We need to question—”
But Holokai’s eyes had gone black. The skin on his face and belly were white as paper. His arms and back were dark gray. He crouched and with a powerful jump leapt at the man who had been holding the crossbow.
The would-be assassin turned to run. But Holokai flew nearly eight feet into the air and closed the distance between them in moments. With a vicious overhand slash, he brought the leimako down on the man’s back. When the weapon made contact, the shark’s teeth sprang out, becoming twice their size, digging into the crossbowman.
“No!” Leandra found herself yelling. “Alive. We need them alive.” But she turned to Dhrun and saw that he had thrown the knifeman to the ground. The thug’s head tilted at an angle that was not possible with an intact spine. “We need … to question them,” she finished lamely.
Dhrun turned around, looking up and down the street, up to the rooftops. Suddenly Leandra realized with relief that Dhrun had held his human incarnation, the one called Dhrunarman. If he had assumed his most powerful incarnation, the neodemon named Dhrun, there would be potential for massacre. “Keep your incarnation,” Leandra heard herself say stupidly.
“Of course,” Dhrun growled.
Meanwhile Holokai was pacing around them both, his overly long face fixed into a rictus, his teeth large and serrated.
An eerie moment passed, silent save for the slap of sandals on paving stones. Then someone distantly began shouting an alarm.
Leandra lowered her hands, tried to make herself breathe calmly. She looked around for more attackers but saw none. Foolish though, she realized, for her to expect to see a threat if Dhrun and Holokai had not yet spotted any.
“Creator damn it!” she swore while looking down at their three assailants. Those that Holokai had sawed in half were filling the street with pools of red. She would have to get Holokai away from them.
“Who in the God-of-god’s name is that bloody stupid?” Leandra asked with a calmness that belied her racing heart. “How amazingly, incredibly, mind-blisteringly dumb do three humans have to be to attack us?”
“At least one of them was a spellwright,” Dhrun said beside her. He showed her his upper left forearm, which was stained with blood weeping from a long smooth wound. Thanks to Dhrun’s divinity, the gash was already closing. The would-be assassin had cast some wartext against Dhrun.
From farther down in the city, shrill whistles began to sound. Leandra heard faint footfalls of running. Someone had alerted the red cloaks, the city watch.
“Lovely,” Leandra growled. “Just lovely. I’m a quarter mile from home and now we’re going to be interrogated.”
“There’s no evidence you were here,” Dhrun said. “I can tell the watch it was just me and Captain Crazy Fish.” He nodded over at Holokai, who was still circling.
“No, someone might have seen us,” Leandra grumbled before raising her voice. “Kai!” He kept circling but turned his black eyes toward her. “Kai! Stop pacing, for pity’s sake, and stand farther away from the blood.” She made a shooing motion.
Holokai’s face remained as blank as stone, but he made one more circuit around them and then stalked away down the street. The whistles and footfalls grew louder. Leandra turned and saw two men with thin red cloaks and short spears trot up the Jacaranda Steps and toward them.
“Do we have a story?” Dhrun asked as the red cloaks approached.
“No, the truth. But let me do the talking,” she said while moving into the shade of a building and undoing her headdress. She hoped one of the red cloaks would recognize her.
“Sacred ocean, damn it all,” one of the watchmen muttered while looking down at the bodies. “Another one.”
Both of the red cloaks were lean, lanky men, wearing short lungi