The Yellow Silk - Don Bassingthwaite [74]
"What happened?"
Tycho sighed dramatically. "He never made it to Brin. Lander-you know who Lander is?-got him first. Ihappened across him in his last moments. He pressed the weapon on me and begged me to see his vengeance on Brin through." He coughed. "I'm not that stupid."
"No," the Hooded said, "I can see that. Twenty-two for the dao?"
"I would consider thirty."
"Maybe. Did this angry warrior say why he wanted vengeance on Brin?"
The Hooded was fishing for information now. Tycho held back a smile and said casually, "For the death of his brother while Brin was a pirate on a ship called Sow-."
He blinked as the Hooded stiffened sharply and gloved hands tightened around Li's saber.
***
It was enough. Li took a slow, deep breath and drew out the Calishite scimitar. No one reacted.
Of course, no one could see him either.
Wily old Veseene's plan had been a good one. Tycho would get himself in to see the Hooded by using the dao and an offer to sell it as bait. Talk alone wouldn't get them the beljurils, though. They needed a way to get past the Hooded's defenses and force their hand physically. They needed magical aid, something more than Tycho could provide.
And so once everything else was prepared, Veseene had brewed up her triple-strength wasp venom tea. Li had been amazed at the transformation in her as the tea took effect. While her personality had been formidable before, with her palsy temporarily suppressed Veseene stood tall and regal, wondrous and confident. And when she began to sing, it was like listening to the imperial performers whose songs drifted over the walls of the Forbidden City in Kuo Te' Lung, except that Veseene wasn't singing for the Emperor but for him! Magic had filled her song, lending it even greater power. She had reached out and touched him and he had vanished from sight, completely invisible.
Spent by the magic, Veseene had collapsed onto her couch. Tycho had almost cried out, but Veseene had warned them this would happen. They had left her in the care of Laera Dantakain and departed. The magic would only last so long, Veseene had said, and it only hid him from the sense of sight, not from touch or hearing. Tycho had done an excellent job of covering for him as they walked into the Hooded's stronghold, keeping doors open long enough for him to pass through and covering up any sounds he made in climbing the stairs.
It had been a good thing that he had been behind Tycho and the tall guard on the stairs, though. As they had stepped into the Hooded's hall and he had seen the Hooded, Li had frozen. For a moment, he was back in his family's garden, this time on the occasion of his own Blessing Ceremony.,
There had been no betrothed to present him with the tools of a man-Mother had stepped forward with a box containing the dao that was his chosen weapon-but that was tempered by the knowledge that in a month's time he would leave Keelung to take the imperial civil service examinations. A son in the service of Shou Lung was better than a good marriage.
As Father and Mother and all of the assorted relatives in attendance had returned to the house, Li drew Yu Mao aside.
"Look!" he said, thrusting the dao into his hands. Yu
Mao gave him the knowing gaze of an elder brother already used to the formalities and trappings of adulthood, but drew the dao anyway.
"Very nice," he said approvingly. He had already reached his full growth. For a silk merchant, he was a powerfully built man, tall and broad. Some day, Li thought, I'm going to be just like him.
In the end, he had ended up taller, though not so broad, and the dao of his Blessing Ceremony had been lost and replaced twice over. His father wouldn't have recognized his current dao if it had been placed before him.
'But the Hooded was tall and broad and when he drew the dao out of its scabbard, the gesture was so familiar that Li had caught his breath. And when the Hooded gasped at the mention of Sow and a murdered Shou…
Scimitar drawn, he moved closer.
His foot pressed down on a loose floorboard. A sudden squeal broke the silence of the