Heart of Steel - Meljean Brook [20]
Next to Yasmeen, Barker eyed the woman with a different sort of appreciation. Of course he did. She’d been designed to provoke that response.
“Don’t try,” Yasmeen warned him.
“She’s a little older, but I like the mature—”
“She’s gan tsetseg, one of the elite guard who serves the Horde royalty and the favored governors.”
Barker didn’t hide his surprise—or his doubt. He studied the woman again, as if trying to see beneath the demure posture and discover what had earned the elite guard their terrifying reputation.
He wouldn’t see it. The elite guard earned that reputation when they dropped that modest posture, not when they wore it.
He shook his head. “She’s not Horde.”
“She’s not a Mongol,” Yasmeen corrected. The Horde weren’t a single race. In five hundred years, their seed and the empire had spread too far for every member of the Horde to be Mongols. Only royalty and the officials from the heart of the empire were still relatively unmixed, but since they provided the face of the Horde to New Worlders and the occupied territories, the assumption that everyone in the empire were Mongols had been carried along with it. “Just as not every man and woman of African descent born on the southern American continent is a Liberé spy . . . or a cart-puller.”
His face tightened. “Cart-puller?”
“I am saying that you are not. You cannot even hear it without being ready to go to war again?”
“Because you haven’t been called one,” he said, before adding, “I wasn’t a spy.”
Yasmeen snorted her response.
He grinned and glanced over at the woman again. “Why is she here? No one in Port Fallow is Horde royalty.”
“Then she’s here to kill someone, or to take them back to her khanate.” Obviously not Yasmeen, or she’d already be dead. Instead, she was forgotten. The woman was watching the house again . . . waiting. “Whatever her purpose, don’t get in her way.”
“All right.” Barker leaned forward and tapped on the cab driver’s shoulder before dropping a few deniers into his palm. “Shall we walk? By the time we return to the docks, I’ll be ready for that drink.”
Yasmeen would be ready for three.
Yasmeen drank three, but not quickly. Barker took his leave after finishing the one she owed him, but Yasmeen stayed on, nursing hers until they were warm. Some nights in a tavern were meant for drinking, and others were meant for listening. Fortunately, nothing she heard suggested that word of the sketch had gone beyond Mattson and Kessler. She turned down one job—a run to the Ivory Market along the Gold Coast of Africa. Lucrative, but he hadn’t been willing to wait until she returned from England, and she wasn’t inviting anyone onto her airship before the sketch was in the Iron Duke’s fortress.
She hadn’t always been able to turn down jobs. Now she had enough money that she could be choosy. Even without the fortune that would come after selling the sketch, she could retire in luxury at any time—as could her entire crew.
She never would.
Midnight had come and gone when Yasmeen decided she’d heard enough. She emerged from the dim tavern into the dark and paused to light a cigarillo, studying the boardwalk along the docks. It was just as busy at night as during the day, but the crowd was comprised of more drunks. Some slumped against the buildings or slept beside crates. Groups of sailors laughed and pounded their chests at the aviators—some of them women, Yasmeen noted, and not one of them alone. The shopgirls and lamplighters walked in pairs, and most of the whores did, too.
Yasmeen sighed. Undoubtedly, she’d soon be teaching some drunken buck a lesson about making assumptions when women walked alone.
She started toward the south dock, picking out Lady Corsair’s sleek silhouette over the harbor. Familiar pride filled her chest. God, her lady was such a beauty—one of the finest skyrunners ever made, and she’d been Yasmeen’s for almost thirteen years now. She knew captains who didn’t last a month—some who weren’t generous toward their crew or not strict enough to control them. Some were too careful to make any money or too careless to