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“Evemer,” Kadou said suddenly, “what do you think are the most valuable things about you?”
“I work hard,” Evemer said slowly. “I’m very disciplined.”
“What else? What do you like about yourself?”
Where in the world was His Highness going with this? “I never break promises, even to myself. I like that.” It was only the month of practice he’d just had in speaking his true thoughts as he meant them that allowed him to add, “Why?”
“I just wanted to know. I wanted to make sure there was something.”
Maybe not careless-flighty-negligent, but still very, very strange.
They had lingered at many different establishments all over the foreign quarter and the harbor district of Kasaba City—public houses of all varieties, gambling dens, a few not-quite-brothels. Two nights ago, they had overheard someone mention a particular incense lounge—the woman was recommending it to a foreign acquaintance as a reliable place to change the rest of her money to good Arasti gold, since they offered a markedly better exchange rate than the average. Not so much better that it was immediately and obviously suspicious, but His Highness had begun to lose his confidence several days ago. An unofficial money changer might be up to some other scheme, and Evemer felt that discoveringanythingat this point, even if it was irrelevant to their investigation, would help greatly in bolstering His Highness’s conviction.
Evemer could smell the Jasmine Tree long before he saw it; wafts of delicate perfume filled the street. As required by city ordinance, the incense lounge had a green awning out front, hung with long orange tassels on the corners.
Without needing to be told, Melek stationed çemself inconspicuously on the street corner, and Kadou and Evemer entered the incense lounge alone. Inside, the entire floor was covered with layers of worn carpets, and low wooden tables were scattered throughout the room, each surrounded by several rather flat cushions. Kadou drifted toward a table in one of the front corners, near to the door, where it was more private and shadowed. The rest of the parlor was dimly lit by hanging lamps, many of which were covered with globes of pink glass.
An attendant approached, setting a brass incense burner on the table between them. Evemer eyed it disapprovingly—even in the dim rosy light, he could see that it was flimsily made and gaudy.
“What’s the cheapest incense you have?” Kadou asked the attendant before she could say anything.
“Lavender.”
His Highness made a face. “All right, what’s the second cheapest? Sorry. We don’t have much money on us, and I can’t stand lavender.” This was one of His Highness’s little tactics to convince people that he was not rich. Evemer could have told him it didn’t precisely work the way he intended it to—his clothes were too clean, the cloth too good, his elocution too refined.
The attendant was clearly bored to tears and didn’t care either way. She blinked slowly at them. “There’s a spice blend. Or Mistress Sidur’s house blend.”
Kadou sighed and tipped his head back against the wall, closing his eyes. “Either of those sound fine. Surprise us.”
They sat in silence until the attendant returned again. She placed a cake of black incense in the center of the burner and lit one corner of it with a long rushlight, then covered it with a brass dome perforated in botanical patterns (also rather cheaply made, Evemer noted). In a moment, the smoke began trickling through the holes in soft ribbons and twisting up to the ceiling—it would have some intoxicating quality to it, though Evemer doubted that a place like this would provide anything particularly potent. Kadou shifted closer and wafted a breath of smoke into his face, inhaling deeply and sitting back. Evemer watched him with wary eyes—Kadou glanced at him and shook his head, murmuring, “Don’t worry, I’m not having much.”
“You’re better with your head clear,” Evemer said. “You need to be sharp.”
“I’m going to be sharp. I’ll be sharper if I’m not worrying myself into a useless heap.”
Evemer eyed him. He hadn’t realized that Kadou was that much on edge. He was doing a better job of concealing it today. “Is that why you drink so much?” He was always a little surprised with himself when he managed to ask things outright like that, even after the month of practice. It was much like the first few times he’d managed to perfectly execute one of the verses of Beydamur’s progression for the sword—that moment of stumbling surprise that hehadn’tstumbled, that muscle memory was setting in.
Kadou shrugged, not meeting his eyes. “If there was anything else that helped, I’d take that instead. I don’t like the sensation of being drunk, but it’s better than . . . you know, the alternative. Embarrassing myself in front of people. Needing to be coddled and petted.” He sat back heavily, his hands in his lap. “I really hate it, sometimes. Or all the time.”
Evemer hadn’t been expecting him to say anything more—His Highness did not like to talk about his condition. Carefully, tactfully, he said, “Surely there are medicines of some sort that would be more effective than drink.”
“Sure: Laudanum. Opium. Blueash. More addictive than alcohol, and more dangerous, and they would take me too far out of my own head. Even hashish just knocks me out or leaves me catatonic, which in practice is no better than laudanum—I have to be functional and alert. Tobacco can help calm me, but only for half an hour or so, and then I feel worse when it wears off. Everything else is about as effective as chamomile tea. The incense doesn’t do anything for me except take the edge off. It blunts just the sharpest corners.” Kadou shook his head. “Don’t worry about it.”
Evemer shifted, but said nothing for several long minutes. The smoke streamed upward, only getting thicker. He stayed well back from it. He would have had to lean right into the stream and breathe deep several times to feel a significant effect. “Is it that you think we are not making fast enough progress?”
“Partly.”
Evemer quietly fumed to himself—not about Kadou, but about the situation in general. If he could have solved it by sheer force of will, surely they would have broken through something by now.
They lingered for an hour or so, until the ribbons of smoke in their burner had long since died out. The incense lounge was, by all appearances, a perfectly normal one, though more than slightly shabby. When contrasted with the generous exchange rate that they were offering for money changing, Evemer couldn’t help but find that shabbiness suspicious. Establishments that offered money changing as an afterthought to whatever their main purpose was, as this one did, had a tendency to be geared toward a much higher class of clientele—merchants, business owners, solicitors.
There wassomethingoff about this place, something that warranted further scrutiny, and Evemer knew without having to ask that his lord thought the same.
When they went out onto the street, Kadou managed to murmur a few words to Melek so that çe would move closer to the door and keep an eye on things both inside and immediately nearby while he and Evemer looked around the back.
The alley was, at first glance, also perfectly normal, cluttered with empty crates and full rubbish bins and water barrels. This part of the city was very old and had not been carefully engineered—the alley was full of strangely shaped nooks and shadowed corners where the buildings butted together unevenly at odd angles.
“Come on,” Kadou whispered. The benefit of the low, rosy light of the incense parlor was that his eyes were already fully adjusted to the dark—though it wasverydark. The night was cloudy and the moons were in the wrong phases to provide much help.
