Read Dragons on the Sea of Night for Free Online Page B

men invaded his villa, looking for Miira. They found only empty rooms.
    In another quarter of the capital, the chief ministers were assaulted in their bed chambers. Blood flowed in the streets, as Bnak had feared. Chaos reigned as the old was destroyed and the new sought to solidify its power in the corridors of the ministry and in the streets. Thousands died; the capital was turned into an abattoir as the loyalists battled the insurgents.
    During those dark weeks of brutal warfare and death, Miira rose each morning in the cave at the northernmost outskirts of the city to tend to the wounded men and the women who had been beaten and raped. She no longer had the time nor the desire to make up her face, and yet, out of habit, she continued to look at her reflection in her Shinju mirror. She did this mainly to keep the memory of Bnak alive. In the moment just before he was ambushed, she had been pulled out of sleep by a harsh shriek that, upon awakening, she knew existed only in her Shinju mind. In that shriek was carried the crosstown assault and imminent death of her husband. Also, the hastening bootsoles on the street along which their villa was set. She had leapt out of bed, grabbed clothes, money and her mirror and had fled the villa by a secret passage just moments before it was invaded by those sent to kill her.
    Now, in the cave of war, she looked daily upon her reflection. It was a wholly different image that greeted her. It had been frequently said that there was a kind of magic running through the Shinju. Rumors still surfaced, now and again, but no civilized man believed them, of course. Why would they? If the Shinju actually possessed magical powers would Bnak’s people have been able to invade their land, slaughter them, take what had once been theirs?
    And yet had anyone else been present to gaze into Miira’s mirror they might have had grave second thoughts. For her reflection no longer bore the imprimatur of her husband’s love. Bnak was dead; their son, as well. Miira’s heart was cold, gray ash. Her normally calm and flexible spirit had become the dark adamantine jewel of fury.
    Even as she tended the wounded and dying, counseled the psychologically battered, she burned for vengeance. And, staring into her mirror at what was reflected there, she knew what she must do to dissolve that dark jewel, though she had vowed never to do so and to break the vow meant certainly that she must die.
    As Bnak’s enemies had done so cleverly before her, Miira now made a comprehensive diary of the new regime’s comings and goings. She listed all the key ministers and, after their names, the times of the day when they were inside the ministry building.
    After a month of this diligent detective work, she sat down to evaluate her copious notes. By this time the worst of the fighting had subsided to sporadic outbreaks among the last remnants of the die-hard loyalists. The stranglehold of the new regime was all but complete. There was, she discovered, the hour of midnight when all the ministers met in council. Midnight, she thought, putting aside her diary. The hour of Bnak’s death.
    How she slipped past the phalanxes of guards is anyone’s guess. In any event, no one saw her enter the ministry; no one saw her inside until she appeared within the central chamber of state and by then it was too late.
    She passed around the great oval table at which her enemies sat, sleek and self-satisfied. Those murderers. There was still time to turn back, to forego vengeance. But her mind was filled with memories of Bnak and of her baby. And she broke her sacred vow.
    She used her power; the power of the Shinju, for all the rumors were quite correct. As she passed behind each minister, she placed her mirror before them, and each had no choice but to look at his image reflected there.
    What they saw no man, perhaps, can say. But I suspect it was different for each of them. One by one, they clawed the air as if