There was knowledge here, if he was willing to take it.
He stood. Instead of leaving the brothel, he crossed the room and entered the corridor leading to the poet’s salon.
There was no one else in the corridor to watch him, but he made a point of swaying as he walked anyway. An ungainly, drunken sway. He knew he smelled of tobacco and the opium pipe, of wine—his jacket was open, his hair loose. He had no marks of status: no chakrams like bracelets on his arms or necklaces of pearl around his throat, no fine blue Aloran turban, no brace of daggers on a belt at his hips. He wore instead a plain necklace of prayer stones, fruit pits polished and joined with darts of silver, the kind all Parijati men wore. And that was what he was. Not a nameless prince of Alor, prophecy-born, but a Parijati highborn, rich and doltish and deep into his cups.
He stopped, slumping to the ground. Closed his eyes.
Listened.
Soldiers in the room, and women weeping, and men murmuring in low voices. The soldiers were asking questions and one of the men—not the poet, Rao knew his voice—was arguing. “We’re scholars, sirs, and artists. We’re not rebels, we only discuss ideas.”
“No one said you were rebels,” the soldier replied, which made one of the women start weeping more fiercely.
The poet and his followers were rebels, though, of a kind. In this room, he’d heard them speak of secession and resistance through the medium of Parijati poetry—the metaphor of rose and thorn, of poisonous oleander, of fires and honey, turning Parijat’s own language against itself.
He thought of the lies—and truths—he’d had to pay to learn their secrets. The discontent among Ahiranya’s highborn. The threads of unease that united them, and their merchants and warriors and potters and healers. The way the mishandling of the rot, the deaths of farmers, the banning and debasement of Ahiranyi language and literature, had all culminated in the work of an unknown number of masked, armed rebels who murdered Parijatdvipan officials and merchants with pointed viciousness, and a much vaster number of poets and singers who spread the image of a free Ahiranya.
The poet and his followers were not the masked rebels of Ahiranya’s forest. But they were part of the soul of the resistance against Parijatdvipa, bound to highborn funders, and Rao had hoped they would have use to him.
Now, unfortunately, their use was gone.
A noise. Rao raised his head.
“You there,” said the soldier. He wore Parijat’s white and gold, with the regent’s mark on his turban. His booted footsteps were heavy. “What are you doing here?”
Rao hadn’t heard him approach. Perhaps he’d drunk slightly more of the arrack than he thought he had.
“L-looking for the way out,” Rao slurred. “Sir.”
He could see the soldier weighing up his options: leave the drunken sot he’d found in the hallway to be thrown out by one of the brothel’s capable guards, or drag him into the salon to be interrogated alongside the poet and his acolytes? Rao saw the soldier’s interest in him waver. Rao was a drunk fool, there was nothing of note about him—he’d made sure of that—and how likely was a Parijati man to be involved in the Ahiranyi resistance? He would vomit, perhaps, or cry. Much better to leave him.
Rao gave a drunken hiccup and tried to straighten up. The soldier rolled his eyes, muttered something unsavory under his breath, and turned to go.
Behind them, in the salon, a woman screamed. One of the men began to shout, then went abruptly silent, as a thud echoed down the corridor. Thud of flesh, of metal, of blood.
The soldier reached reflexively for his own sword. He looked at Rao once more. The shock of the noise had made Rao straighten up, his spine iron, his eyes wide. He was holding himself far too steady.
The soldier’s eyes narrowed.
“You,” he said. “Get up.”
Rao swallowed. Searched for the slur his voice needed. “What—”
He had no more time to dissemble. The soldier grabbed him by his arm, wrenching him up so suddenly that if Rao hadn’t been naturally light on his feet the movement would have dislocated his shoulder. The soldier dragged him through the corridor and into the salon.
He was flung to the floor. He just about managed to get his hands under him before his nose cracked down on stone. Scrambling up, he was shoved back down by the boot of the same soldier who’d found him.
A dozen sets of eyes turned on him: a handful of the regent’s imperial soldiers, dressed in Parijatdvipan white and gold, sabers at their belts; a huddle of terrified women, holding one another; a few men still in their shawls, one slumped to the ground, his throat cut, his blood pooling on the floor.