The Yellow Silk - Don Bassingthwaite [29]
He had never before, however, been thrown into a jail cell normally reserved for traitors, assassins, and other dangerous, desperate types. Spandeliyon's middle town guard station had precisely one very highly secured cell. Among the folk of dockside-and even the middle town-it was a thing of rumor and speculation, mockingly referred to as "the King's Chamber." If Tycho had been in a better mood, he might have taken greater note of the place, maybe with an eye to embellishing on its rather ordinary appearance and using the experience to earn himself a few extra pennies at the Wench's Ease.
But he wasn't and he didn't.
"-acting like a horse that's been turned into an ore and made even more stupid] Tycho ranted for the seventh or eighth time. The words came out slurred. His lower lip was split and swollen where Li Chien had hit him. He rattled the manacles that chained him to the wall of the cell and held his arms suspended like a marionette. "Locked up for what? Because you apparently don't have the sense to be civil. Idiot!"
He glared across the cell, a matter of only about ten feet, at Li Chien. The King's Chamber was solid stone, with no features to it other than a heavy, steel-bound door and an assortment of chains hammered into the stark walls with stout pins. It was dark, the only light coming from a lantern on the other side of a small, barred window in the door. There was nothing between Tycho's behind and the wintercold floor except the fabric of his breeches. Li Chien was in no better situation. Somehow, though, he managed to look as if imprisonment bothered him not a bit. His smooth face was calm, his posture relaxed. He said nothing. His eyes were even closed. Tycho might almost have thought that he was asleep except that every so often his ears twitched slightly at a particularly vile insult.
It was the most reaction Tycho had managed to get out of him since they had been bundled out of the Dantakain house, bags over their heads and their arms bound, and marched through the snow. Tycho had caught the sound of Laera pleading and screaming with her father and of Jacerryl trying to argue with Mard. The only words to escape the captain of the guard's lips, however, had been a few terse commands for the captives to be searched and for Tycho's strilling and other effects to be collected and sent to the guard station. Unseen hands had taken everything from him-even the tube of beljurils. He had struggled at that, but Jacerryl's voice had been in his ear. "Don't worry. Mard might be furious, but he sticks to the law like honey. They'll be safe."
The trip through the snowbound streets had been remarkably short. They had been in the King's Chamber before the daze of having his head cracked against Li Chien's had even worn off.
His anger at Li Chien, however, had yet to fade. "I mean, going up to hightown in clothes that smell like beer and fish guts, walking right up to Mard Dantakain's house, and demanding to see him-just what did you think, that he was going to welcome you with open arms?" Through the shadows, Tycho caught a tightening of the muscles along Li Chien's jaw. He growled. "I know you can hear me, Li Chien." He switched to Shou. "Maybe you've just been having trouble understanding me-I said that you've got the brains of a horse, the grace of an ore, and the gratitude of a rabid weasel!"
Li Chien's eyes popped open and he sucked in air. His entire body seemed to clench at once "And you," he seethed in an explosion of rage, "are a liar with all the morals of a rutting goat! You were sleeping with the man's daughter!"
The venom in his voice was wasted. "I never even kissed Laera!" Tycho shot back.
"It looked like she was ready for more than a kiss."
"That wasn't my doing! If I'd gone into that library on my own, I wouldn't have let anything happen." A tiny whisper of doubt tickled Tycho's mind but he thrust it away. He would have rebuffed Laera's advances. "This is your fault," he said. "You attacked me, remember?"
"You lied to Mard Dantakain!" spat Li Chien. "You knew I was telling