Ship of Smoke and Steel (The Wells of Sorcery #1)(12)

A door slides open on the other side of the sitting room, and a man enters. He’s slim, balding, dressed in gray, with circular wire-frame eyeglasses. Seeing me through the doorway, he gives a thin, humorless smile, and beckons.

“Ms. Gelmei,” he says. “Please. Come and sit.”

I get to my feet, a little wobbly. He crosses the room and sits on one side of the table, gesturing for me to take the other. I do, cautiously, and watch as he pours clear water into two glasses. No point in being paranoid about poison—if they wanted me dead, I’d be dead. I drink deep, washing the taste of vomit out of my mouth.

“Welcome, Ms. Gelmei,” he says. “I apologize for the way you were treated, but my operatives do not take kindly to a lack of respect. Your decision to silence your companion was … perhaps rash, although I must admire your cold-bloodedness.”

“Your operatives,” I mutter. My eyes go wide as I realize who I’m talking to. “You’re Kuon Naga.”

He inclines his head. “I am.”

Kuon Naga. Childhood companion of the Emperor. Widely considered the second-most-powerful man in the Blessed Empire. Head of the Immortals. Here, talking to me.

I can’t decide if this is good or very, very bad.

“What do you want with me?” I say.

He sighs. “I am a busy man, Ms. Gelmei. Please do us both the favor of not wasting my time. It would be best for you to assume that I know absolutely everything, and proceed on that basis.”

“All right.” I close my eyes, trying to decide how to play this. Tori is all I can save. “I’m a Melos adept. And ward boss for the Sixteenth, though I doubt you care I’m a criminal. You’ve got me. What happens now?”

“I’m sure you’re aware that hiding the fact that you are mage-born is in direct contravention of His Imperial Majesty’s wishes, and thus considered treason.” Naga sipped from his cup. “Those taken as children are often spared, on the condition that they agree to use their talents to the benefit of His Imperial Majesty and the Blessed Empire. You are, unfortunately, too old for such clemency. Neither the Legions nor my Immortals would ever consider you reliable.”

“That sounds bad for me.” I give him a slight smile. “But you had one of your ghulwitches fix me up, so I’m guessing you’re not going to have me executed.”

“Insolence is the refuge of the weak.” Naga picks up an orange, delicately. His long fingernails slice easily through the peel, which he pulls off in neat strips. “You think yourself desperate, that you have nothing left to lose. I have men in my employ who could show you how very wrong you are.” He holds up the naked orange and pulls it in half. “There is always further to fall, Ms. Gelmei.”

I keep smiling, because it seems to annoy him, and reach for one of the oranges myself.

“But I suspect we will come to an agreement,” Naga goes on. “There is the matter of your sister.”

I fumble the orange. It hits the table, bounces onto the floor mat, and rolls away. I feel like one of Naga’s goons has punched me in the stomach all over again, but I try to keep my face still. He can’t know. He can’t know. “I don’t have a sister.”

Naga sighs. “What did I say about wasting my time?”

“I really don’t—”

“Her name is Gelmei Tori, and she lives in the Second Ward, in a house you pay for. She enjoys paper folding and dancing. Once a week, she visits the Painted Market, and lately she’s been meeting a boy to talk about how to address the problems of society. He’s been giving her books—”

“Stop.”

“Do I need to remind you how easy it would be for something to happen to her, Ms. Gelmei? She has no family, no protector, no one to petition the Ward Guard on her behalf. No one but you. If the alley she takes to the market happened to contain a gang looking for fresh meat for the brothels, who would know?” He separates a slice of orange, eats it with the delicacy of a bird. “There are clients who will pay well for highborn girls, or at least”—his mouth quirks upward—“convincing fakes. Have I made myself clear?”

I stare at the table as though the secret to saving Tori is hidden in the wood grain. So it had all been for nothing. All the work, all the blood, all the death. I’d climbed out of the dockside garbage heap one corpse at a time, lifting my sister over my head so she wouldn’t be stained by the filth. And for all the rot-sucking good it had done, I might as well have slit my wrists and left Tori to fend for herself.

Hagan had died for this, because I’d thought he might talk. I suppressed a hysterical laugh. They might not even have interrogated him. Why should they? Naga already knows everything.

I feel like I’m in free fall, my fingers scrabbling at a crumbling rock face, searching for a handhold. There has to be something. I want to scream, to break the table in half, to break Naga’s smug face. But I stop, because—

“You’re about to tell me there’s a way to save her.”

He arches a delicate eyebrow. “And why would you think that?”

I hold up a hand, and one blade ignites with a crack-hiss. The green light shimmers and gleams off his glasses.

“Because if you know so much about me, you know there’s nothing else I care about,” I say. “And if you tell me there isn’t a way I can save Tori, then there’s nothing to stop me from carving you apart like a rotting turkey.”