Ambassador 8: The Alabaster Army

Chapter 3-1

3

MY DECISION TO GO into town the next day was not met with universal enthusiasm from my team, which was as I had expected.

Thayu told me as much after a restless night. “Why don’t you let someone else deal with it? It’s not your job to be this woman’s personal investigator.”

“It’s quick to do and will give us some funds. It keeps us in the good books with the people of influence in Miran—”

She raised her hands.

“—Yes, I know you’ll say, ‘So what? They’re only Miran and they’re old-fashioned and quaint,’ but I care. Who knows when we’ll need something from Miran that we can get only because I’ve been helpful to them in the past?”

Thayu snorted. “Want something from them? They don’t even grow mushrooms.”

But she was laughing and I laughed as well. One could take this all too seriously. “Look, whatever my reasons, I want the woman off my back. I want to know what she’s on about, whether she wants her husband found or not, or whatever it is she wants, and then we can palm her off onto someone else, and maybe get some money and get on with important things.”

“Like, how to get you back to health so you can perform the honours to get me pregnant in the first place.”

“Watch what you’re saying.” I lunged for her, but she jumped out of the way. I lunged again, but she jumped further.

“Nope, nope, you’ll need to do better than that to catch me. Prove yourself to me, show off all your little swimmers to the medico.”

There was that, too. Lilona had said that, before we made another attempt, she wanted to check me out fully. All this meddling into what was supposed to be private was rather tiresome and slightly embarrassing. Especially when somebody poked electrodes to see if particular anatomic functions did their job. But enough about that.

Thayu left the room. I got dressed and went after her.

All the members of my team sat around the dining table for breakfast. Even Evi and Telaris were there.

Ayshada squealed when I came in. He held his arms out, and I picked him up, setting him on my knees. Being Coldi, and a toddler, he didn’t yet have the ability to vary his body temperature, and holding him was much like handling a hot water bottle. He didn’t feel so warm today, and I wondered if this was because I had a fever or my temperature was permanently going up.

Deyu was showing Karana images of creatures from all over the inhabited worlds. I recognised a picture of my father’s llamas. Karana pulled a face. Those things were so temperamental, and Deyu had been the only one who had managed to come close to them.

She flicked to another picture. It was an elephant, a big male with its ears flapping.

“Hey, Veyada, an elephant,” Deyu said.

This would normally draw some kind of remark from Veyada, depending on his mood, but he was in discussion with Sheydu and didn’t hear her. They were speaking in low voices. Their interactions had held an uncomfortable intensity ever since Veyada had come back from wherever he had been, and I couldn’t say that I liked it.

“I’m going for a short trip into town today,” I announced.

Everyone around the table fell quiet and watched me. They didn’t question my judgement to go into town in front of the others. That was something I had never realised: the dynamics within my association. I told them what I’d decided, and with the exception of Thayu and Nicha, they never questioned.

It was an odd thing, realising this and realising that I had never noticed this before.

Eirani would have questioned my plans, but she had left the room.

I continued, feeling a bit rattled. “We may have a little job to do, and I may ask some of you to assist, but meanwhile, keep doing your regular jobs. Anyone who has time is free to volunteer to come with me.”

That’s what I would normally say, but it also felt wrong to me. None of them mentioned it, and I wondered if it felt wrong to them, too. Maybe it had always felt wrong to them and it was just me who had become attuned to this.

Or maybe I was just crazy and lingering medical issues were playing games with my brain.

It was awkward; it put a hole right in the place that I’d thought relatively safe from upheaval: my confidence that if I handled the matter in a certain way, my association would understand me.

But nothing was certain anymore, and my confidence lay in shards on the tiled mosaic floor in the hall.

Evi and Telaris volunteered, again because they didn’t realise that my asking for volunteers was wrong. I should tell them.

Blood roaring in my ears, I randomly chose someone. “Reida?”

He looked up. “Yes, of course I’ll come.” His eyes widened. Was he shocked?

I glanced at Thayu, wondering what I had just done, but she didn’t act like she’d noticed anything unusual. My heart was hammering. What was wrong with me?

I spent most of breakfast watching the members of my team interact, nervous, wondering what was different and why.

Veyada and Sheydu were talking about whatever was going on between them. Reida was talking to Nicha. He acted subservient even if his body language didn’t clearly show it. How did I know?

I didn’t figure it out. Just . . . saw it.

After breakfast Eirani told me that she would help me get ready.

I protested. “That’s not really necessary.”

“Of course it is. You can’t go into town like this.”

So I went to the bedroom, and a moment later Eirani came in carrying a basket. Protruding from the top was a soft hairy thing, that looked very much like a—

She set the basket down on the dressing table. “Look, I got this for you.” She pulled out the hairy thing. Locks of black hair tumbled down. A wig.

“Oh, no, I’m not wearing that.”

“But Muri, you look like a prisoner. Aliandra Ilendar won’t think much of you if you turn up like this.”

She might well be right, but no. “She is not going to be there. I’m just going to pick up something from the staff.”

“They won’t think much of you either.”

Also true.

“Just try it.”

She put the thing on my head. It was hot and itchy. The black hair fell to my shoulders. It was not fake hair, I realised. Coldi hair tended to lose its sheen after while.

“Now have a look at yourself.” She turned the chair so I faced the mirror.

Disturbingly, I looked only half as ridiculous as I’d imagined. And even more disturbingly, I barely recognised my own face. The lines in my face had become hard, my eyes sunken, my irises quite dark in this low light. I leaned to the mirror. Yes, my eyes were still blue, but didn’t seem as light as they had been.

The skin on my face was soft like a Coldi’s.

“Doesn’t that look much better?”

I had to admit that it softened my skeleton look. “I’m still not wearing it.”

“Why not? You look good like this.”

“It’s not always about what we look like, but who we are.”

She pulled the wig off. “And like this, you look like a sick skeleton that has escaped from prison.”

I stared at my mirror image, emaciated, hollow-eyed. I looked like . . . I was transported back in time to when I was six, and my father gently pushed me into a hospital room. It was getting dark outside. I’d come from school and gone to my grandparents who had brought me here.

I couldn’t help but stare at the figure on the bed.

That was my mother? What had happened to her silken hair? What had happened to her full cheeks?

She reached out her hands to me.

“Come on, say hello,” my father said behind me.

I was too scared to move. She looked like she would break if I touched her.

“Muri?” Eirani’s voice shook me back to reality.

“It’s all right.” I wiped my eyes. “I’m still not wearing it.”

Eirani mumbled something about looking like a criminal, but she helped me put on my blue shirt and jacket.

When she had packed up and left the room, I got up and looked at myself in the mirror. Eirani had rather overdone the jewellery, but I let it be. She was determined to make sure that whatever stupid choices she thought I made about my attire, I wouldn’t look like a prisoner.

Then I noticed movement in the corner of the mirror. Thayu was standing at the door. How long had she been there?

She came to me and ran her warm hands through the stubble on my head. “What colour do you think it will grow back?”

“Not black,” I said.

“No, I think it might be white or grey.” She studied the top of my head. “The colour is odd, though.”

Her fingers massaged my scalp. The feeling was soothing. I closed my eyes.

“Black looked good on you, though.”

I opened my eyes. “Did you see that wig she got?”

“She’s been talking about it a bit.”

“Do you think I should wear it?”

She shrugged. “You can decide.”

Great, now I felt like an arse. Eirani meant well. I should apologise to her. But it only made me more determined not to wear a wig. My mother had worn a wig, in those last days of her illness. Wigs were for sick people.

But we were ready, and met Evi, Telaris and Reida in the hallway.

We left our apartment walked through the hall down the stairs and outside onto the bright and sunny boulevards of the island. People greeted me, and some even asked how I was. I assumed that the news of my stay in hospital was general knowledge.

The trip into town was uneventful.

On the train, I asked Reida about his training. Since his rocky start with us, Reida had doubled down on his learning. He’d taken lessons in formal Coldi, he’d taken an apprenticeship with a company installing security equipment, and then I’d sent him to a specialised training program for listening to and interpreting captured electronic signals. He’d been making little robots and zooming them around the house—much to the delight of Ayshada.

I asked them if there was anything else he aspired to.

“I want to be the best.”

“What do you need in order to be the best?”

He looked down. “I would want to go to the spy academy in Athyl.” His cheeks coloured.

“Thayu went there. Why don’t you ask her how to get in?”

“They will never accept me.”

“No, Thayu never said that.” She said it would be hard, not impossible. “If you are the best, the most promising student, they will take you, regardless of the fact that you’re from the wrong clan.” And he definitely was. Reida was a true Asto Ezmi, straight from the zeyshi rogues of the Outer Circle. He even had the zeyshi tattoos. “Don’t be ashamed of where you’re from and who you are. Show what you can do. They will accept you.”

He was still looking down and didn’t seem convinced. I reached out and pushed his chin up until he looked at me. It was a typical Coldi gesture that I had despised when I’d first seen it. But it was not as demeaning as it looked from human eyes. It was a gesture of care and intimacy. A gesture a teacher would make to a student.

“They will accept you,” I repeated. “Do the work, and they will have no choice. You’re good, Reida; you know that.”

His cheeks coloured.

We got out of the train at the airport and walked up the hill to the Exchange.

Benton Leck lived in one of the large houses behind the main square, a multi-storey affair that, maybe a hundred years ago, would’ve belonged to one of the large local families. Maybe a counsellor or some business man with a lot of money. These days those houses were mostly subdivided into smaller units, because few people had huge households anymore, and certainly none lived in one house with all their Pengali domestic workers.

Except it seemed time had passed this house by.

Vines cascaded over the wall, creeping through the gaps between the metal gate and the wall. The gate hung crooked and creaked when I pushed it open. The pond outside the front door was full of leaves, and clumps of marsh grass had come up in the water. The walls of the house needed painting, and in places the stucco had come off the walls, displaying the bare stone underneath.