The Veiled Throne, page 89
“As if following the rules is something Tiphan Huto cares about,” scoffed Teson.
“We don’t have enough people to put on a dinner service at all,” said the widow, her brows knitted with worry. “What about the Treasure Chest’s people?”
“Those who came to the Urn with Tiphan fell sick that night, but they were better by morning, just like us. A few decided to quit, saying that they didn’t want to have anything to do with the Urn, whether working for or against us. But Tiphan hired the monks at the temple to do a cleansing ritual for them.”
“If the cleansing didn’t work on us, why would it work for them?” asked Lodan.
“Apparently Tiphan received an oracle at the temple: ‘Treasure pleasure; burn urn.’ Most of the staff then agreed to stay,” said Teson.
“I wonder how much of a donation Tiphan promised the monks before that oracle,” said the widow with a sigh. She closed her eyes. At length, she said, “We’ll have to concede.”
“No!” shouted Lodan. “I’ll serve all the customers myself if I have to.”
“How are you going to serve two hundred customers all by yourself? Have you developed the art of dividing yourself into twenty people?”
Lodan had no response to that. Mati hugged her sympathetically.
“Let’s spend the rest of the time settling our accounts and paying off our bills,” said the widow.
Teson looked alarmed. “Mother… you’re not thinking—”
“We can’t run a restaurant if no one wants to work for us,” said the widow.
Teson lowered his head. “I’m sorry. I should have insisted that they leave when they came to us in such suspicious circumstances….”
Widow Wasu shook her head. “Of course it’s not your fault. I was the one who invited them to stay…. Maybe it’s a sign. We’ve had a good run in Ginpen, but nothing lasts forever.”
Teson looked devastated. “We’ve always done the right thing and treated our customers with respect. Why?”
“I know you’ve put a lot of sweat and tears into building up the Urn here in Ginpen,” said Widow Wasu, laying a hand gently over her son’s shoulder. “The race goes not always to the swift. Why don’t you go home to Zudi and look for another opportunity to invest the funds once we’ve sold this place? I’ll stay to handle the concession and wrap up affairs here.”
Lodan and Mati were too shocked to speak as they clung to each other.
* * *
Kinri and Dandelion came to see the Blossom Gang.
“Have you figured out how they did it?” asked Kinri.
Widi shook his head. “I’ve met with Mozo in secret, and she’s devastated. She swore that she prepared all the buns herself, and she even tasted everything ahead of time. If someone had tampered with the food in the kitchen, she would have fallen sick before anyone else.”
“And as it happened, one of the cooks saved a few buns from the feast for her children,” said Arona. “After everyone got sick, no one touched them. We fed the leftover buns to feral dogs and rats we caught. They were fine after eating them.”
“But we know something was wrong with the food,” said Kinri. He pounded the nearest wall, frustrated.
“I agree with your theory,” said Widi. “None of us ate the food, and none of us fell sick that night. But we can’t figure out how Tiphan did it.”
“Wait,” said Dandelion. “That’s not true. I ate food from the feast, and I didn’t get sick.”
“Me too,” said Kinri. “I just figured I didn’t eat whatever was spoiled.”
“You did?” asked Widi, perking up. “Tell me exactly what you ate and how.”
After much questioning, Widi determined that while Dandelion had been in such a hurry that she had eaten only a bun without any dipping sauce, Kinri had gotten to the feast so late that he didn’t eat any of the buns, only some sauce with lettuce.
“That must be it!” said Dandelion. “Tiphan did something with both the sauces and the buns. But it’s only if the two are put together that you get sick. That explains why Mozo didn’t get sick earlier, when she tasted the buns in the kitchen.”
“That does seem possible,” mused Widi. “But how do you know this?”
“My… aunt is a skilled herbalist,” said Dandelion. “I remember her explaining this technique for assassination by poison. The Tiro kings employed teams of food tasters, but if you divided the poison into two portions, each of which was harmless by itself, you could apply one portion to the appetizer and another to the dessert. For a long feast, two different tasters would be used, which would allow the poison to remain undetected until it was too late.”
Widi nodded. “That must be the trick Tiphan used. Except he didn’t want to murder us, only to add to the impression of a curse.”
“What about the other strange events?” asked Dandelion. “Have you made any progress on the caterpillars, the feral dogs, and the rats?”
Widi shook his head. “The feral dogs could have been collected from anywhere around the city. The caterpillars weren’t from around here, but no one has been able to tell me their origins. The rats were definitely from the neighborhood, since all the cellars around here now are rat-free, but I don’t know what they were so terrified of on that night—though I detected some suspicious smells…. I know that’s not much, but there are still a few leads I want to check.”
Kinri sat down, dejected. “It doesn’t matter anyway. All the cooks and waitstaff have left. It really is over, like the Grand Mistress said.”
“You just need servers, right?” said Dandelion. “I can pitch in.”
Rati shook her head. “Even with all of us helping, we don’t have enough people to handle a full restaurant—assuming the customers and judges even dare to show up after all these rumors of curses and spoiled food. Besides, what do we know about efficient service? There’s an art to every profession.”
Kinri closed his eyes.
We don’t have enough servers and can’t hire new ones or train them in time. If only there were some way to allow the people we do have to work as though they were many more… Lodan mentioned something about wishing she could divide herself into twenty people….
* * *
- If only Lutho were around—
—he’d be able to come up with something!
- Sisters, I thought you weren’t that interested in this minor spat among a few cooks and waitresses!
- The thing about the mortals is that—
—there’s always drama, even in the most unlikely of places.
- Just like a hurricane starts out as the eddies around the tips of a butterfly’s wings, small scuffles far from the centers of power may have big consequences.
* * *
The next day, Dandelion returned to the Splendid Urn in the evening to find Kinri sitting by the door, staring into space.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
Kinri jumped up, shaken out of his reverie. “I’ve been thinking about… how to turn Lodan into twenty people.”
Dandelion laughed. “That would be a neat trick. If you could figure that out, you’d be as great an inventor as Na Moji.”
Kinri blushed. “I know it’s unrealistic. But… Anyway, where did you go?”
Dandelion was dressed again like a kitchen maid, though this time her disguise was far more convincing. The lessons with Arona were paying off.
“Mota and Arona took me to the refugee camp to help unload the food Granny Wasu donated,” said Dandelion.
With such a reduced staff, the Urn couldn’t run its regular lunch or dinner service. Rather than having the food in the storehouse spoil, Widow Wasu had asked Magistrate Zuda whether she could donate it to the refugee camp outside the city. Mota and Arona volunteered to drive the goods, and asked Kinri to come along, but Kinri had turned them down, afraid that one of the refugees from Rui might recognize him and reveal his true identity.
Dandelion had apparently taken up the offer in his stead.
“Are… the refugees doing well?” he asked cautiously.
“They seem well,” said Dandelion. “After we unloaded the supplies, I got to spend some time with the children, telling them stories and teaching them songs I learned as a little girl. The parents are hopeful that their interrogations will soon end so that they’ll be allowed to leave and make their way in Dara.”
She kept her tone upbeat and light, and Kinri knew she was doing so for his benefit. He was also supposed to be a refugee from Ukyu-taasa, after all. But he could tell there was a trace of melancholy in her expression.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Something is troubling you.”
She tried to deny it, but gave up the effort with a sigh. “I chatted a little bit with the parents, and they told me what had happened to them back home. It was horrible. I can’t imagine real people, not villains from the old sagas, being so cruel. I’m going to have nightmares, I’m sure.”
Kinri said nothing. He did have nightmares still from what he had seen in Kigo Yezu.
“I don’t understand why the Lyucu are like that. Do they really want to kill everyone who’s not Lyucu?” She shuddered in disbelief and terror. “My brother… he always said he wants to fight the Lyucu, and I think I understand how he feels now, at least a little bit.”
Kinri tried to keep his face expressionless. Her words reverberated in his head like thunderclaps. How will she react when she finds out who I am?
“Maybe they’re not all like that,” he said weakly. “I… I knew some Lyucu culeks and naros, and even thanes, who… didn’t want to kill everyone….”
His voice drifted off because he didn’t know how to defend his people. If the refugees were all telling tales of atrocities, then he had to contemplate the possibility that Cutanrovo wasn’t the only monster. He didn’t know how to square what he had seen in Kigo Yezu with the re-remembered tales of Tenryo’s compassion and courage; he didn’t know how to accept that what he had seen was true, that what the refugees had told Dandelion was true, that what Master Nazu Tei had hinted at was true, without questioning Emperor Thaké’s dream of the Lyucu living together in harmony with the natives, without distrusting his mother’s insistence that he learn as much as possible about the culture of Dara, without doubting the very ideal of the Lyucu conquest being an effort at freeing the natives from the bondage of their tyrants.
It was growing ever more difficult to believe what he had been taught by the court-appointed tutors back in Kriphi. The contrast between Ukyu-taasa and Dara proper was simply too great. The compassion, love, joy, silliness, exuberance, and even pettiness he had experienced among the people of Dara under the regency of Empress Jia—Lodan and Mati, Grand Mistress Wasu, the Blossom Gang, Dandelion, even Tiphan Huto—all pointed him to one undeniable truth: This was not a society in bondage, not a people under the yoke of a tyrant.
He loved Ukyu-taasa, his homeland, but Dara was free.
Is this what Master Nazu Tei meant by learning from experience?
He forced the thought away. That couldn’t be the truth. Couldn’t. He had to be wrong; he had to be missing something.
He had to hold on to the possibility that Cutanrovo and the others who agreed with her were aberrations, that they did not represent the true Lyucu spirit. Had to.
Dandelion looked at him strangely. “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “After all, I didn’t live in Unredeemed Dara. I don’t know what it’s really like there.” After a pause, she added, “I also feel terrible because of what Mota and Arona said on the way back. They told me that even after they leave the camp, the refugees have a hard time. A lot of people don’t trust them, thinking that they are cowards for submitting to the Lyucu or that they’ve become tainted, no longer true members of the people of Dara. They have trouble finding steady work or practicing their trades. Some of them end up going to Crescent Island, trying to scrape out new farmland in the wilderness; others end up joining criminal gangs or pirates—which makes people even more mistrustful of the refugees; still others try to find shelter at temples and shrines deep in the mountains, where monks and nuns are more compassionate. Even though they’re free to move around Dara, they never feel at home.”
Kinri nodded, unable to offer any words of comfort because his heart was a tangled mess.
“Arona and Mota said Granny Wasu and Uncle Teson are very special because they took you in without any questions,” said Dandelion.
“I’m lucky,” said Kinri. “I can’t imagine what would have happened if I hadn’t been rescued by them.”
“If only there were a way to turn them each into twenty people!” said Dandelion. She smiled in a way that made Kinri’s heart ache. But the light soon dimmed in her face. “Only… it looks like the Urn won’t survive much longer.”
Kinri seized on Dandelion’s last thought. He was powerless in the grand clash between the Lyucu and the natives, but focusing on the specific problem of how to survive the next round in the competition made him feel not so helpless.
“You’ve read a lot more books than I have,” he said. “Do you remember any stories about… contraptions that could behave like people?” It was a wild, desperate idea, but he had nothing better.
Dandelion looked thoughtful. “My education is a bit of a mess, since I didn’t like my first tutor that much—never mind, that’s a long story. The point is I have read a lot of books of romance and adventure with fantastical machines…. Let me see… Oh, I remember an account of Na Moji building the King of Xana a team of mechanical men who could play the moaphya with great skill.”
Na Moji was the founder of the Patternist school, and possibly the greatest engineer in Dara’s history. Kinri’s heart sped up. “Do you remember if the book explained how the mechanical men worked?”
Dandelion shook her head. “Na Moji didn’t write down detailed instructions for many of the wonders he built, and even when he did, most of the instructions were lost. The account I read was from a noble at the court who witnessed one of the performances. But the writer provided only a general description of the mechanical orchestra, with few details. He was mainly concerned with the king’s reactions, who was present on that day, and what they discussed during the concert. To him, war and politics were far more important, while Na Moji’s invention was just a piece of entertainment.”
“That’s a pity.”
Still, Dandelion said that the noble had recorded that the team of wooden musicians were mounted on a platform in front of the moaphya, with a separate wooden man standing before each hanging bronze slab. A team of assistants had to crank a mechanism concealed under the platform. As the assistants turned the crank, the wooden men came to life in a coordinated dance, each striking its mallet against his bronze slab when the song called for that particular note.
“Did the musicians play a single song or did they play different songs?”
Dandelion struggled to remember. “I think the orchestra played the same song several times. When the king was tired of it, Na Moji had to call for a short intermission to adjust the mechanism. After waiting long enough to boil a new pot of tea, the musicians played a different song.”
“Adjustments? Did Na Moji have to take the musicians or the platform apart?”
Dandelion shook her head. “That wasn’t in the account. But I imagine not. If they had to take everything apart, it wouldn’t have been nearly as interesting to the king. The orchestra seems like a magic act, and a magician never reveals his secrets.”
To Kinri, this suggested that the mechanical orchestra could be “taught” to play a new song within a short period of time. But exactly how this was done eluded him.
“Did Emperor Ragin ever have anything like that at his court?” asked Kinri.
Dandelion shook her head. “No.” Then, as though realizing something, she added quickly, “Not that someone like me would ever know.” A grin appeared on her face. “Now that you mention it, I suppose Emperor Ragin would have enjoyed an orchestra like that.”
Arona Taré, who happened to be passing through the ground floor of the restaurant at that moment, stopped at this exchange. Quietly, she ducked down and crept closer to the front door. Staying out of sight behind some tables, she listened intently.
“Why?” asked Kinri. “Was Ragin very musical?”
Dandelion nodded. “Emperor Ragin played the coconut lute and sang, and though he wasn’t the most skilled performer, he was never self-conscious about entertaining his friends and family, and that made it fun for those who listened to him.” She chuckled. “I’m sure he would have liked to see mechanical musicians and perhaps even challenged them to a music competition.”
“I had no idea the bandit-emperor could be so… amiable,” said Kinri. It was odd to learn about this aspect of the butcher of Naza Pass. Somehow, the tyrant no longer seemed to him just an embodiment of villainy, but more like a real person.
“Emperor Ragin was known to have a silly side,” said Dandelion. “In fact, even his Imperial name was a bit of a joke.”
“How so?” Kinri had always understood Ragin’s Imperial name to be a Classical Ano allusion that disguised his base origins and unsavory past.
“Well, most scholars say that ‘Ragin’ is an allusion from a passage in Kon Fiji’s Treatise on Moral Relations, in which a robber debates the One True Sage, but that’s just the Moralists trying to comfort themselves. My… uh, Ragin wasn’t interested in making the Moralists happy. It’s true that most Imperial names are supposed to be very serious. For example, Mapidéré’s name means literally ‘the first to try.’ ”
Kinri nodded. Master Nazu Tei had explained this to him.
“ ‘Ragin,’ on the other hand, is an onomatopoeia that literally means ‘banging’ or ‘ringing’ in Classical Ano, and the emperor definitely intended no connection to Kon Fiji trying to ‘ring the bell of moral clarity in the face of a stonehearted robber,’ as the Moralists claim. In reality, when the emperor was young and a bit of a lazy layabout, his sister-in-law used to bang an empty pot when he came home to show that there was no more rice for him to eat. The emperor decided to reference that episode of his life to show that he never forgot the music of his humble origins.”
