Read Online The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay - Free Book Online Page A

her patient. “I’m not leaving you here to wait for them alone.”
    Husari actually smiled again. “What will you do, my dear? Offer sleeping draughts to the veiled ones when they come?”
    â€œI have worse than that to give them,” Jehane said darkly, but his words forced her to pause. “What do you want?” she asked him. “I am running too fast, I’m sorry. It is possible they are sated. No one may come.”
    He shook his head decisively. Again, she registered the change in manner. She had known ibn Musa for a long time. She had never seen him like this.
    He said, “I suppose that is possible. I don’t greatly care. I don’t intend to wait to find out. If I am going to do what I must do, I will have to leave Fezana, in any case.”
    Jehane blinked. “And what is it you must do?”
    â€œDestroy Cartada,” said the plump, lazy, self-indulgent silk merchant, Husari ibn Musa.
    Jehane stared at him. This was a man who liked his dinner meat turned well, so he need not see blood when he ate. His voice was exactly as calm and matter-of-fact as it was when she had heard him talking with a factor about insuring a shipment of silk for transport overseas.
    Jehane heard Velaz offer his apologetic cough again. She turned. “If that is so,” Velaz said, as softly as before, his forehead creased with worry now, “we cannot be of aid. Surely it will be better if we are gone from here . . . so the lord ibn Musa can begin to make his arrangements.”
    â€œI agree,” Husari said. “I will call for an escort and—”
    â€œI do not agree,” Jehane said bluntly. “For one thing, you are at risk of fever after the stones pass and I have to watch for that. For another, you will not be able to leave the city until dark, and certainly not by any of the gates, in any case.”
    Husari laced his pudgy fingers together. His eyes held hers now, the gaze steady. “What are you proposing?”
    It seemed obvious to Jehane. “That you hide in the Kindath Quarter with us until nightfall. I’ll go first, to arrange for them to let you in. I’ll be back at sundown for you. You ought to be in some disguise, I think. I’ll leave that to you. After dark we can leave Fezana by a way that I know.”
    Velaz, pushed beyond discretion, made a strangled sound behind her.
    â€œWe?” said ibn Musa carefully.
    â€œIf I am going to do what I must do,” said Jehane deliberately, “I, too, will have to leave Fezana.”
    â€œAh,” said the man in the bed. He gazed at her for a disquieting moment, no longer a patient, in some unexpected way. No longer the man she had known for so long. “This is for your father?”
    Jehane nodded. There was no point dissembling. He had always been clever.
    â€œPast time,” she said.
    Â 
    There was a great deal to be done. Jehane realized, walking quickly through the tumult of the streets with Velaz, that it was only the mention of her father that had induced Husari to accept her plan. That wasn’t a surprising thing, if one looked at the matter in a certain light. If there was anything the Asharites understood, after centuries of killing each other in their homelands far to the east, and here in Al-Rassan, it was the enduring power of a blood feud, however long vengeance might be deferred.
    No matter how absurd it might appear—a Kindath woman declaring her intention of taking revenge against the most powerful monarch to emerge since the Khalifate fell—she had spoken a language even a placid, innocuous Asharite merchant could understand.
    And, in any case, the merchant was not so placid any more.
    Velaz, seizing the ancient prerogative of longtime servants, was blistering her ears with objections and admonitions. His voice was, as always, appreciably less deferential than it was when others were with them. She could remember him doing this to her