A Flight of Broken Wings, page 25
part #1 of The Aeriel Chronicles Series
“Where to?” Ashwin asked, turning his head.
“Ibanta, of course. Didn’t you hear what your sister was saying? That’s what we were there for, isn’t it?” he sighed. “I have what I need now. All that’s left is to do the legwork. Tauheen isn’t going to track herself.”
“Okay,” Ashwin nodded. “I’m coming with you.”
“Absolutely not.”
The Aeriel frowned, clearly displeased. “What’s that supposed to mean? I’m the only reason you know where to look in the first place. I’ll be damned if I let you wander off without me. Besides, she’s my mother. I have a moral responsibility to see her nice and dead.”
“You’re morbid.”
“And right.”
Ruban shook his head, exasperated. “Don’t be ridiculous. For starters, you’re still injured. You haven’t recovered fully yet, not if your sister’s reaction was anything to go by. Which leads nicely into my next point. I would rather not be decapitated by Safaa for getting you killed, if Tauheen or any of her lackeys manage to get the better of us.”
“Aw. I didn’t know you cared,” Ashwin laughed. “You’re not responsible for my safety, Ruban. Nobody expects you to be. Not even my overprotective big sister who really should learn to mind her own business. Besides, you know as well as I do, you don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell going up alone against mommy dearest. Taking me with you increases both our chances of survival.”
“But–”
“No more buts. Besides, if I have to spend one more day cooped up in this goddamn flat, I might just be tempted to indulge in some terrorism myself. And then you’d have to Hunt me, which will be awkward for everyone concerned.”
Ruban rolled his eyes. “Fine, do what you want. We’ll have to return Hiya to the house, though, if we’re both leaving town.”
Ashwin looked thoughtful. “Are you sure she’ll be safe?”
“Safer than she will be in Ibanborah with us. I’ll tell Sim and Hema to keep an eye on her, maybe even put surveillance on the house until we get back. We won’t be gone for long. Unless we end up dead, that is.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to just tell your uncle what happened? He’s the Secretary of Defence. No offence, but he’ll be able to arrange for better security than any Hunter.”
Ruban shook his head. “That’s exactly the problem. Who he is. How do you think he’d react, if he knew what had happened to his daughter? How close he had come to losing her? And if it’s true that Tauheen has an informant within the IAW, they’d know that he knows. There’d be a witch hunt in the Department of Defence for the traitor. Because there has to have been one, for the Aeriels to know where to find Hiya, at what time to get her from school and all that. We would be destroying any cover we might have had in Ibanta if we did that, and with it any chance of finding out what Tauheen’s been up to.”
After a moment’s silence, Ruban continued. “Besides, this is his family we’re talking about. His child. His wife. I’m not going to burden him with the truth, Ashwin. Not until I know the whole of it myself. Nobody deserves that, to know that somebody took the thing you loved most away from you, destroyed it forever. And to not know why. To spend your life wondering. I know what that feels like. And I wouldn’t do that to anyone. Certainly not to Uncle Subhas.”
Somewhere beside him, Ashwin sighed. Ruban had almost forgotten about the Aeriel.
“Alright, we’ll do it your way. Off you go to bed, then,” he said, giving Ruban a pat on the shoulder as he made his way to the balcony. “I’ll just go make sure none of mommy’s lovely henchmen are lurking anywhere in the vicinity.”
Chapter 11: Ibanborah
“Don’t be late for breakfast, then,” said Luana Lei, directing an emerald wink at Ruban even as her hand connected with Ashwin’s behind in a sharp little smack. The Aeriel giggled, and Ruban groaned. Watching Ashwin Kwan in action had been strange enough when he thought the man was real. Watching the Prince of Vaan giggle nervously after being spanked by the owner-cum-manager of their little bed and breakfast was nothing short of surreal.
A part of him hoped Safaa didn’t have any spies in the vicinity.
A direct train to Ibanborah being unavailable before the weekend, they had decided on an overnight stay at Daranj, a little town on the border of Ibanta, before boarding a local train to the state capital the next morning. And this was only after Ruban had firmly – and at one point rather aggressively – rejected Ashwin’s blithe offer to fly them directly into the city.
“That woman’s infuriating,” the Hunter snapped, throwing his damp towel over the backrest of the nearest chair as the door swung shut behind their hostess. “I almost wish she was an Aeriel so I could skewer her with a clear conscience, no offence to you.”
“None taken. And she isn’t so bad,” Ashwin smirked. “This place certainly delivers on the promise of ‘personalised service’, if nothing else.”
Ruban frowned. “You shouldn’t be encouraging her. I’m not sure your sister would appreciate you getting distracted on the mission and spawning the next generation of hell-raising vankrai with the local hospitality staff.”
Ashwin doubled over, tears running down his face as he shook with spasmodic laughter. Ruban had to suppress the urge to slap a hand over his mouth, lest somebody hear them. Now that he knew what he was looking at, he found it hard to believe he hadn’t noticed it before. There was something innately inhuman about that laughter – both Ashwin’s and Safaa’s. Like an orchestra of temple bells. It would be impossible to miss for anyone paying the slightest amount of attention.
Not that he had ever heard an Aeriel laugh before. The ones he had had the displeasure of meeting – before Ashwin came along – certainly hadn’t been known for their sense of humour. He supposed few mortals living could really claim to know what a laughing Aeriel sounded like, which was probably the only thing keeping Ashwin from a sif-lined cell in Jahagrad.
Not that he truly believed Jahagrad could hold Shwaan for long, unless he wanted it to. If he ever had to take the Aeriel prince down, Ruban knew he would just have to kill him. “Safaa wasn’t kidding when she said discretion wasn’t your strong suit, was she?”
“My sister rarely ‘kids’ about anything, and would be mighty offended if she knew you had accused her of such a thing,” Ashwin gasped, finally pulling himself together. “Come on, we don’t want to keep the lovely Luana waiting, do we now?”
Rolling his eyes, Ruban followed the Aeriel down the stairs and into the common dining hall.
The dining hall was big, sparsely decorated with mismatched curtains and generic prints of rural scenery on the walls. The dining table – a humongous weather-beaten ten-seater – was covered with a table-cloth that had once been white. Now it was a tapestry of coffee and curry stains occasionally intermingled with what Ruban suspected might have been baby puke. The scent of stale tobacco permeated the air, coalescing strangely – though not unpleasantly – with that of freshly baked Southern bread.
Six people, including their libidinous hostess, sat at the table, helping themselves to bread and watery tadka. Three of them were middle-aged men, business travellers in sensible suits carrying large briefcases. The other two were women. One was a local lady of about sixty – she had hazel eyes and umber skin, which led Ruban to believe she was a native of the state. Being just a short boat-ride away from Kanbar, Ibanta hosted a lot of immigrants, and consequently saw a far greater incidence of green eyes and darker skin amongst its citizenry than the rest of the country.
The other was a young woman, little more than a teenager, with lanky brown hair and a face that looked like it had just recovered from a vicious outbreak of pimples. She was reading a book that looked to be almost double her weight as she shovelled bread-wrapped tadka into her mouth. There could have been a dead mouse in her food and Ruban didn’t think she would have noticed. One of the aspirants for the civil services exams scheduled for the end of the month, he supposed.
“Ruban, my dear young man! Do come in. Have a seat,” Luana exclaimed the moment they stepped into the hall, her voice brimming with far more cheer than Ruban thought the occasion warranted. “My lord,” she turned to Ashwin, her enthusiasm undiminished. “Take a seat. Have some tadka. It’s our speciality, you know. You’ll find nothing like it in all of Vandram.”
If Ashwin doubted the veracity of this tall claim, he gave no indication of his misgivings, seating himself primly to Luana’s right and giving her one of his beatific smiles. “Ah yes, I’m sure. It smells wonderful,” he said, his speech slightly warped by the heavy Zainian accent that Ruban couldn’t remember having heard until that moment. He leaned slightly closer to Luana. “And please, call me Ashwin. Vandram is such a lovely country, with such lovely people. I’m quite in love with it. It feels like a home away from home, doesn’t it? So let’s not allow such formalities to come between us.”
Luana all but swooned, which made Ruban feel vaguely sorry for her, but not enough to suppress the snicker that rose unbidden to his lips. He snatched a napkin from the table and pretended to dab at his mouth with it, seating himself opposite their hostess.
As Luana ladled steaming tadka onto his plate, Ashwin directed a winning smile at her and said with the air of nonchalant, touristy curiosity: “And you were saying something about a body…”
“Oh, so you heard that, did you?” Luana shook her head, although her eyes lit up in a way that made Ruban think she wasn’t as crestfallen at having been overheard as she would have them believe. “Not the kind of thing you want to talk about with guests to the country, now is it? It’s quite true, though. They’ve found a body upriver. Near Chetla, I think it is. Happened just the day before yesterday, if I’m not mistaken. Quite the shock, as I’m sure you can imagine, my lord – ah, I mean Ashwin.” Ruban would never have thought a simple two-syllable name could be enunciated with so much subtext, but somehow, Luana managed it. “I was just saying to Geeti,” she nodded at the hazel-eyed, elderly woman seated to Ruban’s left. “What a shame it is that such things are happening in Ibanta now. It used to be so peaceful here back when I was a girl. Nothing but boats and fishermen. And of course, the foreign traders passing by on their way to Ragah and the central cities.”
“It’s all these tourists,” the old woman said, biting into her bread rather aggressively. “Time was, there’d only be tourists in the winter, for the pilgrimage. But now they’re here all the time. Like bugs. Drinking and gambling and making a disgraceful mess everywhere they go. Of course you have bodies turning up all over the place! What else can you expect, with all these tourists?”
“Oh Geeti, I do think you’re being too harsh,” Luana said, shooting Ashwin an apologetic glance. “They’re not all bad.”
“This probably had nothing to do with the tourists anyway,” said one of the men, taking a sip of his coffee. He was dressed conservatively in a dark green coat that fell below his knees and loose black trousers. Heavy, black-rimmed spectacles sat uneasily on his wide, stubby nose. “As likely as not, it was the gangs. Apparently, the man was stabbed, then dumped in the river. And his eyes were burned out when they found him. Acid, they say. That’s a premeditated murder if ever there was one, not just some random bar-brawl gone wrong.”
Looking up from her book, the young woman shuddered. “Eyes burned out with acid? Who’d do something like that?”
“The gangs do it sometimes,” said Ruban, sitting back in his chair. “When they think somebody needs to be taught a lesson, or to send a message to a rival gang. That sort of thing. Or, of course, if they’ve managed to find a new source for their raw material.”
“You think this has got something to do with the feather trade?” the girl asked curiously.
“Everything in this part of the country has something to do with the feather trade,” said the man in the green coat. “It’s bloody ubiquitous.”
“Well, at least it’s not as bad as it used to be,” said the man sitting beside him, sporting a more casual, waist-length maroon jacket over a long, cotton tunic. “They’ve become more organised over the years. Certainly far better than when I was living here. Still, I’d never heard of anything like this happening in Chetla before. It was one of the few neighbourhoods in Ibanborah untouched by the gangs. Had the most beautiful houses too.”
Ruban hummed. “Not that I ever lived in Ibanta for any length of time, but I did spend some of my summers in Chetla as a kid. My father’s grandmother was from Ibanborah, and I think her family left her the house in Chetla. Baba used to visit the place every few years for maintenance and stuff. It really was a beautiful house. And so far as I can remember, it used to be a pretty quiet neighbourhood, though it’s been a while since I last saw the place.”
“Ah, so you have Ibantian blood?” said Luana, her lips quirking upwards. “That explains a lot.”
Ruban raised an eyebrow.
“Ibanta produces handsome men,” said their hostess, raising one shoulder in a careless shrug. “What can I say? It’s just a fact.”
“What are you called then, young man?” the woman called Geeti asked, leaning forward with some interest. “I spent a few years in Chetla myself, before my marriage.”
“Ruban. Ruban Kinoh,” he said with what he hoped was a friendly smile.
The old woman tilted her head to one side. “Kinoh…Kinoh. Ah yes, big house by the river. How odd,” she said, squinting doubtfully at Ruban. “I’d have expected you to be older. What’s that no-good brother of yours doing these days?”
Luana laughed. “I think you’ve got the wrong Kinoh there, my dear Geeti. I do believe this is Abhas’s son, aren’t you dear? Your father used to be quite the sensation in these parts back in the day, you know.” She smiled, a faraway look in her eyes. “I do hope he’s doing well.”
Now that Ruban thought about it, Luana couldn’t have been much younger than his father. She was fifty if she was a day. “He...ah. He passed away a few years ago, I’m afraid,” he said, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. This was not a conversation he wanted to have. Not now, and definitely not here.
Luana’s face crumpled, and for a moment he feared she was going to cry. She didn’t, though. She simply sat still for a few seconds, her eyes bright. Then she smiled a watery little smile at Ruban, dabbing at the corners of her eyes with a tissue. “Oh,” she said after a moment. “Oh, I am so sorry to hear that, I am. He was a good man, your father. A very nice man. Of course I was only a girl when he left for the capital to be a bigshot officer,” she laughed. “He never did like being cooped up in a small town, that one. And then Subhas went after him, following in big brother’s footsteps. I can hardly believe it’s been so many years since I last saw either of them.”
“Y-you knew my father?” Ruban stammered, staring wide-eyed at Luana. He supposed he looked like an idiot, but he couldn’t bring himself to care.
Luana nodded. “Of course. My mother worked at the Kinoh House, way back in the day. Prettiest house in Chetla it was too, less than a five-minute walk from the river. Still is, I’d say. All these great modern buildings with their chrome and glass exteriors. They look like bloody great mirrors, in my opinion. And ugly to boot. I’d take a cosy little old-fashioned villa any day over all this modern rigmarole. Well, your father left for Ragah soon after my mother passed away, and then Subhas went after him. I got married and moved out here to Daranj the year after they left. It’s strange, isn’t it? How quickly time goes by. I remember them all like I saw ‘em yesterday.”
Ruban frowned. “My father…he went to Ragah?”
“He did, indeed. He’d gotten a scholarship to that Hunter training school in the capital. Bracken, it’s called, isn’t it? Yes that’s it,” she nodded, a hint of pride in her voice. “He’d always wanted to study there. Although everyone said that it was almost impossible to get in. Not that that was going to stop Abhas, of course. He got a full scholarship too; I remember that day as clearly as if it was only last week. It was just before Mummy got sick. And then he took Subhas with him to Ragah a couple of years later. I believe he went to Bracken as well.”
“Well, couldn’t have been that hard to get in then, could it?” scoffed Geeti, taking a derisive bite of her bread. “Not if that no-good boy got in.”
Luana laughed. She seemed to have gotten over some of her melancholy. “Subhas wasn’t that bad. I always think he only acted out sometimes because everybody kept comparing him to his brother. Couldn’t have been easy, that.
“Still, ‘tis a very pretty lady that lives in the Kinoh House now. A relative of yours, is she? Don’t remember having seen her around here before. Now that’s a lady pretty enough for that beautiful old house, I always say to Lidan. That’d be my son, of course.”
“A lady? At the Chetla house?” Ruban repeated, his brow furrowing in surprise. “Uncle Subhas never told me he was planning to sell the house…though I guess it’s just as well. Not like there’s anyone to look after the place anyway.”
“Ah, so you don’t know her then?” said Luana, collecting their plates. “That’s a shame.”
“Well,” began Ashwin, rising to take some of the utensils from their hostess, despite her protests. Ruban had almost forgotten the Aeriel was still there. “I suppose it can’t hurt to go and introduce ourselves, if she’s as stunning as you say she is. Wouldn’t you agree, Ruban?”
Ibanborah looked like it was in the middle of a festival. But then, Ibanborah always looked like it was in the middle of a festival. Canopies of multi-coloured fairy-lights illuminated the streets, forgoing the mundane street-lamps preferred by the more mainstream towns. The houses, especially those closer to the river, were exquisitely designed and painted in colours more exuberant than anything one would ever see in Ragah. Stalls selling everything from junk food to handicrafts lined the pavements, displaying their wares under colourful awnings. Rickshaws done up like old-fashioned carriages plied the streets, giving the whole town the general feel of an elaborate cosplay.
