"This blood," he said, "is fresh."

"I'm a slow bleeder."

He didn't seem impressed. I couldn't blame him. As lies went, it wasn't one of my better ones.

"All right," I said abruptly. "Do you want the truth?" It wasn't my normal style, but I figured I didn't have much to lose. "The truth is, we were attacked by members of the Skang Kei family. I don't know why."

"Who does?" demanded the soldier.

"Ho does," I told him.

"Your accent remains strange," he rumbled. "I'm asking you, who knows why you were attacked."

"And I am telling you, Ho knows why."

"Who knows why?"

"Ho."

"Who?"

"No, Ho."

"Who who?"

"Ho is who."

"Who is who?"

"No, Ho is who."

He swung a gloved fist and knocked me flat. In retrospect, all things considered, I suppose I couldn't blame him. My lousy luck that in Chinpanese the word for "who" was the same as in my language.

I lay on the ground, the sword still in my hand but nearly forgotten as I tried to stop the world from spinning. Then I yelped as a heavy pressure settled on my right forearm, immobilizing the hand holding the sword.

"Did you not know there was an edict from the Imperior that there is to be no public brawling!" he demanded.

"No, I didn't," I said with a grunt, "but thank you so much for bringing it to my attention. The problem is, it wasn't my fault! We were the ones attacked!"

"Then you should have let yourselves be killed rather than disobey the edict!" Remember earlier how I spoke of the una.s.sailability of someone who possesses both ignorance and arrogance? Such was the situation I was now faced with. I couldn't think of any response to the kind of thinking that encouraged being slaughtered instead of fighting back just to accommodate a rule I didn't know existed, made by a man I'd never met.

"Sorry" was all I could think of to say.

"Do you know what the penalty is for disobeying an edict of the Imperior?"

"A severe scolding?"

"Death!"

"Clearly," I said desperately, "you haven't considered the full ramifications of a severe scolding. The mental scarring it can leave is far more damaging to--"

He appeared unimpressed. Instead he gestured for Mitsu to be brought forward. Protesting, the young man was shoved in my direction and tumbled to the street next to me, the man standing on my arm giving way to make room for him. "Thanks for the support," I muttered.

"You would have done the same," Mitsu snapped.

"You don't know that."

"You deny it?"

"No," I said, seeing no point to lying given the situation. "I'm just saying you don't know it."

The soldiers converged, each of them with his sword out. The blades glistened in the sun. I gripped the tachi sword, knowing there was no place to go. My mind raced, trying to come up with anything, some brilliant lie, that would buy us some time. The emissary-from-the-foreign-land routine would probably be a dead end, literally, if Mitsu's earlier comments were true, but it might be worth a try.

Mitsu, for his part, was looking wildly right and left. As deft as he was with his hands and feet, there was no place for him to go that two or three sword blades wouldn't come at him from several different directions. He was fast, but he wasn't superhuman.

And at that moment, I heard Mordant's voice cry out. Naturally, since no one else was expecting an animal to speak, no one knew that he was the source of it. It came from above. He was doubtless perched upon a roof, keeping out of sight. And what he called out was: "Don't kill her, you fools! She's the princess!"

The huge soldiers froze in position, looking around for both the origin of the voice and also the alleged princess. Then the one who was gripping Mitsu firmly and painfully by the elbow looked down at him as if seeing him for the first time, and let out a cry of alarm. He released Mitsu's arm as if it were on fire and immediately prostrated himself upon the ground. "Highness!" he cried out.

The others promptly followed suit, and Mitsu, with an annoyed snarl, reached up and released his hair from the topknot. The black hair cascaded down to shoulder length, long and luxurious, and suddenly there was no doubt at all that this was a female and, from the arrogant look to her, a royal one at that. In a heartbeat, everyone in the fish market was on the ground, except for me; I was gaping at her.

The soldier who had been manhandling her cried out, with his face practically flat against the ground, "Divinity, in failing to recognize you and treating you in such a fas.h.i.+on, I have disgraced my good offices, my family, and my ancestors going back five generations."

"Yes. You have. You should kill yourself immediately," said Mitsu.

In a heartbeat, the soldier pulled out a small dagger, jammed it into his stomach, and ripped it up and then to the side.

"I was joking," Mitsu told him, looking profoundly annoyed.

"My mistake," grunted the soldier before he keeled over. He lay there in a rapidly spreading pool of his own blood.

"Divinity," said another, even larger soldier, who was on the ground along with the others, keeping his eyes fixedly down. "We are under the strictest orders imaginable. Your absence from the palace has been of great concern to your G.o.dly father, and he has commanded us that if we are to come upon you, we are to return you to the palace immediately, whether it is what you desire or not."

"Oh, very well," she said, rolling her eyes, and then she called out, "This is all your fault! I didn't want to come back here! But no, you insisted we had to come! Let it be on your scaly head, then!"

I, of course, was the only person in the place who knew whom she was addressing.

Then she looked at me and noticed I was making eye contact with her. "You realize I could have you executed on the spot for gazing upon my G.o.dly countenance."

"It's a bit late in the game for that. I've been staring at it for quite some time," I pointed out.

She shrugged. "Yes. You're probably right. Fine, then," she said with a dismissive wave. "You have enough trouble walking anyway, without having to concern yourself about not being able to watch where you're going."

"You're too considerate, 'Divinity,'" I said.

"Yes, I know," she replied, oblivious of the sarcasm. I found that annoying. Generally my sarcasm was more obvious than that. I might well have been losing my edge. "Get your horse. Let's go to the palace."

"Us?" inquired the largest soldier. He looked up, but in my direction rather than hers. "You would bring this... individual... to the palace?"

"This individual brought me safely back to the city and fought to protect me from a.s.sa.s.sins," she replied. "He is deserving of the highest honors we can provide him. He comes with us, and his person is to be considered sacrosanct."

"Divinity, I..."

"Sacro. Sanct. Do you all understand?" "Yes, Divinity!" they chorused as one.

Her comments caught me off guard, and she looked at me with a raised eyebrow and an imperious manner that seemed to say, See? It would serve you better to be my friend than my enemy. "Go get your horse and let's go. We might as well get this over with. I'm sure my father just cannot wait to see me."

Then she took a couple of delicate steps toward the dead soldier, said disdainfully, "Idiot," and strode over him.

When I'd been a younger man, I'd spent an inordinate amount of time with a borderline insane princess named Entipy.

The princess Mitsu clearly could have given her a run for her money. The best thing I could say about her was that she hadn't tried to set fire to anything.

Then again, the day was young.

Chapter 2.

Royal Pain

As insane as Princess Entipy had been, her father, King Runcible, had been a fairly harmless individual. His main sins were those of omission rather than commission... unless, of course, one counted his throwing me in a dungeon. Then again, considering that doing so had been a mercy, as compared with the endeavors to kill me that so many others had undertaken, Runcible's actions were positively benign.

I was hoping that the Imperior would fall into that same category.

That hope lasted for exactly as long as it took to meet him.

The soldiers were apparently members of some sort of warrior caste collectively called the "Hamunri."

They had been around for a few hundred years, rising up from an elite group of seven and becoming one of the single most powerful cla.s.ses in all of Chinpan. After a series of civil wars that had threatened to shred the entire cla.s.s structure, the Hamunri had wound up swearing fealty to the Imperior, and so it had been for five generations.

All this was imparted to me by Mitsu in a very offhanded way as we strolled side by side to the palace. As we walked, the people of Chinpan would automatically flatten themselves and avert their eyes lest they look upon Mitsu and... well, I wasn't sure what was supposed to happen to them if they did.

Probably they'd have to kill themselves the same way that poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d back in the fish market had. There were more Hamunri standing guard upon the elegant curved bridge that led to the palace. They began to reach for their swords as we approached, and then saw me, and then the princess, and they didn't know whether to bow or stare. They settled for looking down while casting quick, sidelong glances as we walked past.

Nowhere did I see Mordant, but I very much suspected that he was following somewhere. I could have strangled the little b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Here I had made the observation that Mitsu had the att.i.tude of a princess, but then I'd asked if Mitsu--whom I naturally a.s.sumed to be a male--was a prince. "No, not a prince," Mordant had said in his d.a.m.ned smirking manner. He could have b.l.o.o.d.y well told me at that point, but no, he had to play his little games. Granted, his well-timed shout out had resulted in my winding up very much not dead, but even so, I reserved the right to be exceedingly annoyed with him.

Once we got over the bridge, the first thing we were confronted with was stairs. I wasn't ecstatic about that; stairs were, and are, a problem for me. But there wasn't anything else for it, really. They were incredibly wide, wide enough to accommodate fifty men walking side by side. Nevertheless, they were too angled for me to remain on horseback, so I dismounted and made my slow way up what seemed to be a hundred steps to the main courtyard.

Mitsu, to her credit, made no effort to get ahead of me, even though I knew she could easily sprint to the top of the stairs with no difficulty. Perhaps she was being polite. Or it could have been that she wasn't in any hurry to get there.

Once we pa.s.sed through the main gate, we walked upon dragons etched in bold relief in pavement blocks of carved marble. The palace was not simply a single building, but rather a series of buildings of varying sizes, contained within a walled-in area. With the Hamunri keeping a wary eye upon us, as if afraid the princess might suddenly snap her fingers and vanish into thin air, we pa.s.sed through the main court area and into a smaller court on the farther side. There was perfectly trimmed vegetation everywhere--ornate trees carefully sculpted, and other trees with delicate fruits dangling from the branches.

The interior of the palace, the main hall, was breathtaking, and as different from Runcible's castle as the sun from the moon. In addition to the marbled floor, the ceilings were deeply paneled and there were vast, elaborate carvings on everything. First and foremost in all the ornamental designs were images of dragons. Winged, unwinged, legs and no legs. Mordant would have been wors.h.i.+pped there as a G.o.d if he'd chosen to show himself. I couldn't quite understand his reluctance.

There were incense urns and figures of bronze, gorgeous tapestries, statues of great warriors from throughout the history of Chinpan. And there were courtiers beginning to emerge, bowing and sc.r.a.ping to the princess and obviously being bewildered over my presence. I wasn't sure what the h.e.l.l I was doing there, either.

Several of the courtiers came forward and extended their hands for my horse's reins. "Don't worry,"

said Mitsu. "Your animal will be well groomed and attended to."

Reluctantly--reluctant because I didn't want to deprive myself of the option of a fast getaway--I handed the reins over to the closest courtier, and they led the horse away.

Ahead of us was a vast archway, and Mitsu glanced at me in a manner that could almost be described as impish. "Are you ready?" she asked.

"I somehow doubt it," I said. I turned to face her, and heard a few stray gasps from onlookers. Iflinched slightly, partly concerned that some outraged Hamunri would charge forward and behead me for my forwardness. "What am I doing here, Mitsu?"

"Not 'Divinity'?" she inquired with a faintly mocking tone. "Not 'Princess'?"

"t.i.tles mean very little to me. I tend to judge the person by his or her qualities as an individual, rather than the pretentiousness of a designation."

"And who are you to judge?" There was a challenge to her tone.

"No one and nothing, which makes me the ideal judge."

She actually laughed at that. She had a nice laugh.

At which point I nearly pulled out my sword and ran myself through with it. The absolute last thing I needed was to become enamored with another princess.

"Come then," she said and, with an inclination of her head, walked in through the archway. I followed her.

The room we entered was as ornate as any of the others we'd been through, but there was a large throne positioned at the far end of it. The armrests of the throne were dragons carved from what appeared to be gold and silver intertwined. It was accessed by three small steps that led up to it, and seated upon the throne was an old man with a long, wispy, white beard.

Slowly the man--whom I took to be the fabled Imperior--rose from his dragon throne. He was clothed in elaborate robes of red and purple, which seemed to envelop and even dwarf his body. He did not have enough hair on his head for a standard topknot, but instead his silvery hair hung short at the sides.

"Down. Now," Mitsu said softly, and I realized that proper respect was going to have to be shown, presuming I wanted to continue breathing. I noticed interwoven mats upon the floor directly in front of the throne, and immediately knelt on the closest one. Mitsu's description of her father's reactions to anything unknown weighed heavily upon me, but I had to hope that she wouldn't have brought me here if she didn't have some sort of plan to make certain I wasn't going to be killed.

Then I remembered how casual she had been over the demise of that one idiot guard, and had to face the possibility that my confidence might have been misplaced.

The Imperior stood at the top of the stairs for what seemed an eternity. Then he spoke, in a voice that was thin and reedy, but filled with strength. "So."

"So," said Mitsu.

"You have returned."

She nodded.

"You departed the Forbidding City without my permission," and his voice became louder. There was no anger to it. It sounded almost singsong. "Against my wishes, in fact." "Yes." She nodded again.

"If they are my wishes, they are the wishes of the G.o.ds. Do you defy the G.o.ds?"

"It was not my desire to defy anyone," Mitsu told him, "but simply to live my life. The life you would deny me."