The Red-Stained Wings--The Lotus Kingdoms, Book Two

by Elizabeth Bear

  “Keep the light steady!” the Dead Man barked.

  “Kind of busy here,” said Tsering, but the swaying spirals of his witchlamps steadied.

  “Sweet God, write this down better than it happened,” the Dead Man prayed. And committed himself to the blow.

  He had never been a headsman, but he thought he understood the principle. He struck fierce and hard with his blade horizontal, wishing for the Gage’s strength. Wishing for an axe rather than a saber. Glad of the broad false edge in the weak of his blade, which gave it extra weight and cleaving power. All these things at once, and a ferocious concentration on where the blow must land, to cut through cartilage and between vertebrae, and not to turn on bone.

  Like axing a chicken. But without the advantage of stump behind it.

  The blow landed, and it landed true.

  The Dead Man felt flesh part. Felt bone and cartilage snap away from one another. Felt also the fresh crunch of the trachea and the tugging resistance of death-stiff muscle. And something hard and brittle, as well, like striking glass. He felt all of it, every disparate texture.

  He felt also the instant when his rear foot, planted as firmly as he could manage among the slippery mess on the floor, skittered out from under him.

  He fell.

  And fell hard, although he held on to his sword. He would have been hard-pressed to let go of it, when his fingers were clutching for support and balance—and he managed to fall to the side, landing on his hip and shoulder rather than the blade or his wrist.

  The wind came out of him with a roar as he toppled into a pile of seething organs. “Ysmat, I am defiled,” he wheezed, rolling away as the walking corpse stomped at him. From this angle he had a profoundly unpleasant view up into its scooped-out, flapping abdominal cavity. As if staring up the nostril of a bloody-nosed giant.

  He had not entirely succeeded. He’d severed the spine, but the head flopped messily on a thick rope of meat, one side of the skin and muscle of the neck. Something fell upon the Dead Man as he rolled, small and puttering, stinging like pebbles. Loops of bowel wound about him, tightening like ropes. Pulling him down, though he thrashed and struggled against them. They tightened around his arms, his throat, binding his hands to his sides though they were not quite strong enough to strangle him. Somehow—in rolling among the stench of fermented, released bowels, in dodging the enraged stomps of the half-disassembled cadaver—he lost his sword. The corpse clipped the side of his head with a heel, dazing him momentarily. His eyes were blinded with substances that did not bear consideration. Something heavy and slick and cold humped up his neck and shoulder to cover his mouth and nose where his veil had twisted tight against them.

  He drew breath—one last full breath through a half-strangled throat, that must see him through the suffocation and keep him fighting if he was to live, though he would have liked to have expressed it in a horrified shriek. And then, suddenly, hands were on him. Hands were hauling him up out of the strangling foulness, and a small sharp knife nicked him as it sliced the loops of intestine free.

  Well, that’s going to get infected.

  Ata Akhimah pulled him stumbling to his feet and yanked him into the shelter of the curve of one of the cistern retaining walls just as Tsering-la raised an oil lantern he’d broken free of its chains and had wicked with a bit of rag. The Rasan Wizard dashed the lamp hard against the corpse’s midsection.

  The lamp broke open in a mess of bent bronze and a welter of shattering glass. Oil rolled down the corpse’s still-stamping legs, trailed by a rill of flame, as if the cadaver had pissed himself and it was burning. Flames danced, spreading across the quivering topography of flesh. Edges began to sizzle, and the corpse stamped more frantically as its legs crisped and scorched.

  Wet meat doesn’t burn very well, even when it’s soaked in lamp oil.

  “More lamps!” Tsering yelled, as Akhimah and the Dead Man panted and stared.

  Akhimah grabbed the nearest one, yanked it from its chains—which seemed to part unusually easily to her touch—and hurled it. Oil splashed, and the flames flared. Their light did little to brighten the cellar with Tsering’s witchlamps still burning, but it painted the columns and the walls of the cisterns with a monstrous light.

  The corpse staggered. It seemed to be burning on its own right now, its legs and lower body flickering with crawling, unnatural shades of green and coral flame. The flesh on the severed arms blistered, the nails blackening. Bubbles popped in the silverskin of the heart.

  Fortunately, there were a lot of lanterns. The Dead Man tore loose and threw the next one—he had been right, the chains were sturdier than Akhimah made them look—and three or four more followed. Akhimah, Tsering-la, and the Dead Man ringed the horrible, stinking, scorching thing, throwing lamps in turn as it lunged toward first one and then another. Like baiting a bear.

  Curiously, though the flames licked upward, the joists of the floor above never caught or even scorched and blackened. That must have been Tsering-la’s doing.

  The cadaver staggered. It reeled and fell to its knees, its feet burned away to stumps. It toppled.

  Having no arms, it could not crawl. But it wormed on the floor, thrashing, almost-severed head flopping like the ball on a mace alongside. The lips curled back from the teeth, the eyes poached. The teeth blackened.

  They had stopped throwing lanterns by then, because Tsering said he was having a hard time controlling the flames and keeping the rest of the palace from catching. The Dead Man’s sword still rested at the heart of the fire.

  “Well,” he said tiredly. “That’s not going to do anything for the temper.”

  That was when the palace fire brigade arrived, the scent of smoke and burning offal having penetrated to the upper levels at last.

  * * *

  Mrithuri was horrified to learn of the doings in the basement. But—if she admitted it to herself—not exactly shocked. She took herself aside, though, and interviewed each of the people who had been involved separately, with—at first—only Hnarisha as her chaperone and secretary. She met with each of the three—Tsering-la, Ata Akhimah, and the Dead Man—in her retiring room, near the throne room. It was a more formal setting than she might have liked, but there was a table to put tea on, and wine, and she thought it likely that everyone would need it.

  She spoke with Ata Akhimah first, and asked the Wizard to stay when they finished. The three of them together took Tsering-la’s report. Mrithuri found Sayeh’s Wizard to be precise, clever, and to have a good eye for detail. And she was very pleased that Hnarisha kept the tea coming.

  She would have preferred the wine, to be honest, but she needed to stay alert. Unfortunately.

  When the Dead Man replaced Tsering-la, Mrithuri was already exhausted. But at least she had her questions well-rehearsed.

  She tried, while she deposed him, to talk the Dead Man into letting her replace his red coat. It reeked of grease and burned flesh in the most terrible fashion. But some things are beyond the power of even the rajni of Sarathai-tia.

  She did, at least, manage to browbeat him into surrendering it and the rest of his wardrobe for cleaning. Mostly by dint of threatening to drop his entire wardrobe into an oubliette with him attached if he didn’t.

  “I don’t believe you have an oubliette, and I can do my own laundry,” he grumbled.

  “Try me,” she said, and prevailed. Though perhaps the laundresses would have preferred it if she hadn’t. She sent him away, and told him to attend her when he smelled better. Ata Akhimah laughed, which led Mrithuri to point her toward the bathing chambers also.

  In any case, the Dead Man was bathed, combed, perfumed, dressed in borrowed clothes and a borrowed veil, significantly empty of scabbard, and smelling only mildly of smoke and not at all of feces when he presented himself in her war room some time later, where no one attended them except Hnarisha. He even went so far as to admit that the Sarathai-style tunic and trousers in undyed ivory cotton he now wore were comfortable in the hot h
umidity.

  “You look handsome in ivory,” she said, arching an eyebrow at the head wrap and veil that covered his face and hair.

  He laughed.

  “If you won’t take a coat,” she said, “accept this.”

  She reached beneath the sand table—currently unanimated—and drew forth a long bundle wrapped in ivory silk. She relished the slippery texture on fingers for once—in this relative privacy—bare of jeweled fingerstalls.

  It was heavy when she held it out to him. She forced her arm to stay steady.

  He unwrapped a golden cord and the layers of ivory silk. The raw silk had a particular smell, slightly musty, reminiscent of dried leaves. He drew out a scabbarded saber, tilted his head to contemplate it, and made a curious little noise.

  He grasped the hilt and looked at her for permission. “May I?”

  Hnarisha looked up from his wax tablet and his stylus, but seemed unconcerned. It seemed he had accepted that the Dead Man was no threat to her. And she had recruited his assistance in procuring an appropriate blade from her storehouses, so the exchange could not be taking him by surprise.

  Mrithuri nodded at the Dead Man. “You’ll need it.”

  The blade came free with a whisking sound. It was long, curved, single-edged. Very like the one that had been ruined, but subtly different in its details of manufacture. A Sarathani sword, not an Uthman one.

  He turned it in his hand, watching the light reflect along the temper patterns. “I’m afraid I will.”

  He gave her a look over the forte of the blade that told her he fully appreciated the honor she did him, and the privilege of holding a naked blade in her presence.

  He sheathed it again.

  “Thank you.” He took the empty sheath from his sash, weighed it across his palm for a moment, and laid it across the edge of the sand table.

  Mrithuri thought she saw him close his eyes briefly, as if he hesitated or prayed. Then he shifted the blade and scabbard from left hand to right and slid them into place without looking down. It fitted close to how the old one had, Mrithuri noticed with pleasure.

  They looked at each other. “It’s hard,” he said. “Isn’t it?”

  “Giving away swords?” She made a dismissive wiggle of her hand. “So-so. When they are as pretty as that one I do want to keep them.”

  He laughed. It warmed her despite the itch in her veins, the craving for venom. She scratched her arm. His eyes followed the gesture.

  “Facing a siege,” he said.

  The playfulness fell away. That deserved a considered answer. “It might be harder if I had the option to go somewhere else,” she said slowly. “But this is my city.”

  He made a noise that was neither confirmation nor disagreement. Mrithuri heard the shuffling footsteps of the nuns in the passages behind the filigree walls, the soft rhythms of their chant.

  “You,” she said, “choose to stay. I imagine that’s harder.”

  His eyes unfocused, he glanced away. “It might be worse for me because this is not my first siege. You don’t know what it will be like.”

  A spark of irritation lit in her. “Are you trying to frighten me?”

  “It’s too late now for that to change anything.”

  Mrithuri turned around and poured herself a glass of tea, as much for something to do with her hands as because she was thirsty. “You do know what it’s going to be like. And still you stay, as well.”

  “It’s too late now for that to change anything either,” he said. Casually, he reached out and lifted one of the model cavalrymen from the sand table, turning it in his hand.

  He did not even pretend to place his attention on it. He gazed at her so steadfastly over it that she noticed the faint flecks of honey color in the darkness of his eyes. Whatever answer he might have been shaping in that silence, however, he never got to render, as there came an excited pounding on the door.

  Mrithuri sighed. She dropped her hand and stepped back. “Enter!” she called.

  Chaeri burst into the room, the ringlets of her hair in disarray. “Rajni! The enemy have us surrounded.”

  Mrithuri fingered the serpent torc at her throat. The scales were cool. She made her voice cool, for coolness would be expected. “That was no more than we expected. They won’t stay camped long, with the rains and the river flooding. The Mother will protect us.”

  Disappointment shadowed Chaeri’s face, quickly dismissed. Mrithuri contained a sigh. Chaeri did so enjoy being the center of attention, but the older Mrithuri got, the less she enjoyed the thrill of excitement. Life was difficult enough when everybody kept their head.

  “I’d better go and make sure of the defenses, in any case,” the Dead Man said. “Some of them might stray within shot. And the first offensive will come soon.”

  Mrithuri’s face seemed to numb as her expression was replaced by a mask. “Serhan.”

  He paused in the act of turning. “Rajni?”

  “There’s something the Wizards told me.” She took a breath, aware of the eyes on her. “The blood in the assassin’s arteries had turned to padparadscha stones.”

  Chaeri pressed a hand against her mouth in distress. She turned away, going to the low window, where she busied herself laying out crumbs on the sill for the birds.

  The Dead Man breathed out once, evenly, the cloth flaring over his nose. “Coral-colored sapphires again? That’s getting to be a theme.”

  “Himadra has a sorcerer,” Mrithuri said. “I think it is his signature. His horse’s tack was decked with them.”

  “You’ve seen this person?”

  “Guang Bao did.” Mrithuri gestured to where the phoenix snoozed upon a perch, one leg tucked up into the fluff of his belly, his head tucked under one wing. “I rode his memories.”

  Recalling it unsettled her. She put her hand before her eyes.

  Of course the Dead Man noticed. “What happened?”

  “He saw me,” Mrithuri said. Her pulse beat in her throat, fluttering against the skin-warmed embrace of the snake necklet. “The sorcerer. He saw me somehow. In Guang Bao’s memory.”

  “He saw Guang Bao?”

  “He saw me,” she insisted. “Although when he saw Guang Bao, I had not yet been there.”

  “Him, you say?” the Dead Man asked. It was not what she had expected him to say.

  “You know something I don’t.”

  “When I was in Chandranath, I caught a glimpse of Himadra and Anuraja. And there was a sorcerer in their retinue. Whose horse wore a tigerskin blanket, decked with padparadscha stones.”

  Mrithuri heard the note of hesitation. “But?” she prompted.

  “But it was a woman.”

  “A woman.”

  He nodded. “A person I met said Ravani was her name.”

  She turned to Chaeri, who had crouched by the windowsill and was chirruping softly to a finch that seemed to be ignoring her in favor of some bits of cake. Chaeri stood, smiling sheepishly, when Mrithuri said her name.

  “Send a page to fetch Yavashuri, and send the Wizards to the battlements to support the men guarding them.”

  * * *

  The Dead Man would have left then, but as he stepped toward the door, Chaeri finished by the door and returned, moving closer to the queen. The Dead Man was new here; he was a retainer of little standing. But he cared about Mrithuri, and he worried about Chaeri and her influence over the queen.

  It was not his place to worry. And Chaeri seemed to have set her cap for the Gage, before the Gage had gone away, and the Gage had not seemed resistant. Maybe he was misconstruing her, he thought. He had certainly gotten people wrong before.

  He worried, anyway.

  As he paused, he saw Chaeri lift something from the table beside the door.

  “Rajni,” Chaeri said. “You seem tired.”

  The Dead Man watched as Chaeri extended the box she had just picked up; a heavy case of aromatic wood carved into a filigree. Within, through the small gaps in the panels, he glimpsed sliding movemen
t. The Dead Man wasn’t sure exactly how many dwelt within, but he knew what the case contained: Mrithuri’s Eremite serpents, who took her blood in exchange for a venom that sharpened the mind and quickened the senses.

  The Dead Man had lived long enough, in enough varied places, to know that such drugs—whether they were of natural origin, sorcerous, or from the old poisonous world of Erem—never came without a cost.

  With an effort, he managed not to rest a hand on the hilt of the sword Mrithuri had given him.

  Chaeri’s hand was on the hinged lid of the box. The Dead Man breathed a sigh of relief when Mrithuri waved her maid away. He liked the look of Mrithuri’s fingers without the elaborate golden stalls on them; sinewy, articulate. Too thin, which worried him, but at least even in a siege the rajni would eat. So long as food could be had at all, anyway.

  “If only you had an heir,” Hnarisha muttered. He stood, holding his tablet and stylus by his side.

  Mrithuri picked nervously at her cuticles. That habit, at least, the stalls would prevent. The Dead Man wished she’d unhunch her shoulders and look less frightened. It was not good for her people to see her fearing defeat. Selfishly, he also knew that it was not good for him.

  Chaeri stepped back. She did not put the box of snakes away. “That’s what we sent the Gage to ensure, isn’t it? Perhaps he will return quickly.”

  The Dead Man set the carven cavalryman back down on the sand table. Superstitiously, he arranged the figurine among the ranks of his fellows in an orderly fashion, as if that might have some bearing on the combat to come. “Even if the Gage makes it back with some magical philter of baby-making before the city falls, how is the rajni getting with child going to lift a siege in progress?”

  Chaeri said, “It will cut down on Anuraja’s reasons.”

  The Dead Man said, “Kings don’t need reasons. They need excuses. And a tactical advantage.”

  At that moment, Yavashuri entered in a swirl of blue-green drapes and a quick shuffle of bare, brown feet. “I have written to your potential suitors. The vultures are on their way.”