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

by Elizabeth Bear

  And he walked in the lonely places too, where he passed no villages and fewer refugees from the war he was leaving behind—when he returned to the roads as was convenient. The armies had not yet been here. The Gage, when he spoke with Mrithuri’s people, left them with a warning that they soon might.

  He carried the rajni’s symbol on his shoulder. Her people listened to him.

  And the only advice he could give them was to hunker down, preserve such food as they were able to, and be ready to run.

  He clanked his irritation to himself. If he could do more—

  But for now, this was what he could do. This was the work before his hand.

  * * *

  On the tenth day, the Gage walked out of the rain. He came over a ridge in the mountains and beyond the narrow pass, found himself in a dry place. A desert, stretching out in a great bowl before him—and in the far distance, the shimmer of water, and a roil of cloud or steam.

  He brushed the cowl down from the featureless mirrored oval of his head. He spoke to the vulture on his shoulder. “Well. Do you suppose that is the Bitter Sea? It certainly looks as if a volcano happened.”

  The vulture cocked its head, examining the reflection of its own crest and brilliant eyes in the Gage’s metal dome.

  This slope of the mountain range was obviously the drier side. It seemed that the clouds of the rainy season had broken for now, revealing the dark face of the Cauled Sun. The Gage’s soaked robe steamed in the heat as he descended. Though the sky held clear overhead, storm clouds were piling up on the far horizon, striving as if held back by an invisible wall.

  The Gage’s path, still carved as straight as he could carve it, would take him by the shore of the inland sea he overlooked. He wouldn’t risk walking through it, all musing aside. Brass might corrode, and the bottoms of bodies of water were notoriously soft and silty. He might wind up mired there for millennia if he weren’t careful.

  But he did wonder if it would cost him significant time to skirt the water more distantly. He probably wouldn’t survive the direct impact of a volcanic eruption. That would melt the brass and fuse the gears of his limbs. But a cloud of steam, and perhaps of sulfuric acid?

  Well, it wouldn’t be healthy for him. But it probably wouldn’t be fatal. And his parts were replaceable. If they happened to get acid-etched.

  It might be worth going closer. Just to examine the damage.

  Of course, he would have to send the vulture by a different route. But he had known all along that there would come a time when the bird and he must part ways, because nothing living could approach the Singing City of the dragons without succumbing to their flesh-rotting curse. He had known since he left Sarathai-tia that he would be traveling to places that nothing living could safely enter. This was just … a little sooner than anticipated.

  Yes, he thought. I will go and see what I can see. And I will trust the bird to have the sense to stay away from me while I do.

  * * *

  So it was that the Gage was alone when he found the city of Ansh-Sahal. Or the ruins of it.

  There was no life left within.

  The city had not been flattened, obliterated, as the Gage anticipated. There was evidence of earthquake damage, certainly. Crumbled walls and collapsed ceilings, empty streets, the stinking corpses of livestock and pets, the reek of sulfur still rising from the poisoned earth.

  The craning, barren, withered corpses of the trees. The blighted husks of crops and flowers.

  Ansh-Sahal had been made a terrible place. A hot and empty hell.

  Too empty.

  Because as the Gage walked—at his unrelenting, unvarying pace, about half again as fast as a trained human soldier—he noticed something missing. There were dead horses, dead chickens. Dead dogs and monkeys. Corpses bloated and peeling in the steaming heat. They lay amongst the stones of tumbled buildings, the tiles of collapsed roofs. They had been scalded by the steam of a boiling sea and crushed beneath the arches of a falling bridge.

  There were so many dead animals. So many.

  And none of the corpses were those of human beings. Not a single one.

  * * *

  It was while he moved through the emptiness of the dead city that the Gage found Nizhvashiti drifting beside him. Perhaps it was a hallucination, brought on by the fumes or the horror, if the Gage was capable of hallucinations. The Gage was not actually sure. In any case, there was Nizhvashiti, floating alongside smoothly, black robes trailing in the dust.

  “Where did you come from?” the Gage asked equably.

  The Godmade, gliding effortlessly a handspan above the ruined street, inflected a hooded face toward him. Nizhvashiti seemed to be gazing at the Gage, and perhaps smiling slightly with those drawn, cracked black lips. But neither eye in its dark face blinked, and neither was really an eye, anymore. One was a featureless orb of gilded stone; the other the translucent, chiming crystal that the Messaline Wizard-Prince called the Eyeless One had sent as her only weapon to help Mrithuri—along with a few lines of doggerel.

  The effect of that regard was profoundly unsettling, even to one such as himself.

  “What?” Nizhvashiti asked, in what would have been an utterly ordinary tone had it not been so dry and whispery.

  “I’m beginning to understand why people find me so distressing,” the Gage admitted, watching the featureless reflection of his own mirrored visage move across the mirrored surfaces of the Godmade’s mismatched eyes. “Are you avoiding my question?”

  “Of where I came from? No, I am not avoiding it. It’s just that I do not exactly have a precise answer.” The Godmade sighed, even more whispery. It seemed to find not having that precision at its disposal painful. “I suppose, first principles—”

  “When a mommy saint and a daddy saint love each other very much—”

  The laugh rasped more than whispered. “The word you are looking for is ‘ansha.’”

  “Ansha.” The Gage felt it resonate within the empty spaces of his body.

  “You say Godmade, but really what I am is … God-inhabited. A part of a whole thing,” Nizhvashiti explained. “A fragment. As I have within me a fragment of the Good Daughter, embodied in this flesh, which hath a human mind and will of its own that nevertheless strives to be obedient to the demands of the godhead.”

  “That sounds terrible,” the Gage said, unthinking.

  “Speaks one who knows.”

  It was the Gage’s turn to laugh, more in startled surprise than in humor. His laugh boomed across the devastated landscape, hollow and strange, and he felt at once awkward and terrible when it echoed back to him. What monster laughed in an apocalypse?

  As the sound trailed off, Nizhvashiti gave him what might have been a sympathetic look through its drawn and wasted face. “We laugh when the pain and fear would otherwise be too much.”

  “And our laughter sounds like pain.”

  “Mine certainly does,” the Godmade admitted. “I suppose my lungs will one day dry up entirely, and I shall have no voice. But … no, to answer your question of so many steps ago, I do not know how I came to be here. Things are … perhaps things are a little as if they were in a dream. If I travel, it does not seem to be entirely by will. Or my own will, under my own direction. And it does not always seem connected, one place to another, by the places in between. I was … elsewhere. And then I was here.”

  “Elsewhere?”

  Nizhvashiti shrugged, robes rising and falling along with the emaciated shoulders as if there were nothing but bones within.

  Honestly, that seemed likely. If not now, then soon.

  “Do you think that has to do with being dead? Or with—” The Gage tapped the mirrored egg of his facelessness where an eye might have been.

  Watching as Nizhvashiti’s concealed feet never touched the street, the Gage realized what else was missing, besides the human cadavers. Though this was a city destroyed by a volcano, there was no ashfall. And no lava. Just fallen stones from the shaking earth, and animal
s dead of scalds and poisoned air.

  “The Eye of the Eyeless One?” Nizhvashiti asked, disrupting his—well, you couldn’t quite call it an epiphany. “Perhaps. Who can tell where the currents of She Who Nourishes will bear us, except that as we are obedient to them, we shall wind up borne to the sea?”

  I never get to road trip with an atheist. The Gage sighed inwardly.

  He would have said it out loud, to the Dead Man. He did not feel he knew Nizhvashiti that well.

  “Are you really here?” he asked instead. “Or are you—”

  “A projection? I am uncertain, though my lack of contact with the ground would seem to argue in favor of the theory. If you’d care to, you may poke me, and find out.”

  “Not just yet,” the Gage said dubiously. What if he poked Nizhvashiti and it vanished?

  He found he wanted the company.

  As they had been walking—or as the Gage had been walking, and the Godmade had been gliding—they had made their way closer to what must have been the palace precincts before the city fell. The stench was growing worse, the Gage noticed. That he had no more nose than he had eyes did not any more stop him from smelling than it did from seeing.

  He wondered if the Godmade could see, with two mineral orbs for eyes.

  He didn’t feel he knew it well enough to ask that, either.

  And then Nizhvashiti said, “Fascinating, is it not, that we are both after a fashion manufactured?”

  “How so?”

  “You by a Wizard. I by my God.”

  Perhaps they did know each other well enough for awkward questions, after all. “They call you Godmade, and yet so much of what I see before me is your own design. It seems to me that you have made yourself more by your own will than been formed by your god’s.”

  The dead priest chuckled. “Would anyone do such a thing if not driven to it by an immanence?”

  “Isn’t that what the Cho-tse call their deity? The Immanence?”

  “I don’t think they would call it a deity, precisely.”

  It was the Gage’s turn to shrug, which he did with a certain grinding and a hollow rattle. He needed sealant. Well, that was easily remedied.

  “They say the self-blinded have the power of far-sight.”

  “So they do say,” the Godmade answered agreeably.

  Since they knew each other so well now, the Gage asked, “Where do you suppose all the human bodies are?”

  Nizhvashiti drifted along for a moment, hands folded inside its sleeves. “It’s possible survivors came and claimed them.”

  “Through this?” The Gage waved a brassy gauntlet through a tendril of yellowish, suffocating miasma.

  “‘Possible’ and ‘likely’ are not such close cousins they must avoid marriage,” Nizhvashiti said, and whatever that meant it had the tone of an admission.

  * * *

  The palace of Ansh-Sahal seemed very different from that of Sarathai-tia, to the Gage’s perceptions. The city was not, for one thing, built up and carved out of a constructed, conical mountain, rising in a terraced spiral to the crowning fortress. Nor did it project into the broad flood of a sacred river on a slender, sweeping peninsula. This city, from its position among the hills, atop a cliff overlook, commanded the approaches across the Bitter Sea. But the palace was not raised above the city it had until so recently ruled and defended, but rather surrounded by it.

  This was all poisoned, too. The Gage missed Vara. He was glad it had gone on to wait for him.

  It was past sunset by the time the Gage and his possibly spectral companion at last reached the square outside the palace gates. Those weirdly piled clouds still heaped up along the horizon, like smoke swirling behind glass but somehow weightier. As if there were a pressure behind them—the heaviness that presages a storm, but constrained until it built up intolerably in the hollow spaces of the Gage’s constructed body.

  There was no Cauled Sun in the sky, no Heavenly River spooling its brightness across the firmament. There was blackness, and the blackness was picked out in little stars that shone with a cold silver light that cast no shadows but made everything seem as flat and foreign as cut paper shapes layered on a canvas. The Godmade’s dragonglass eye shimmered with its weird green light. It was bright enough for the Gage to see. It would have been dark, for a human.

  “What is this?” the Gage asked.

  Nizhvashiti let its head fall back on its emaciated neck, staring blindly upward. “This is a dead sky.”

  Those palace gates had been immense constructions of relief-carved sandalwood once, hung on iron hinges as thick as the Gage’s forearms. The Gage and the Godmade discovered them blasted off their hinges. Now, the thick dovetailed boards lay shattered into splinter-edged shards, and their sweetness could not cover the miasma that rolled with nearly visible thickness from within.

  The Gage turned one hand up, cupping a puddle of reflected starlight in its hollow. He extended it toward the shattered gates. Should we check it out? the gesture offered.

  Nizhvashiti gave one of its tattered sighs. “I think we’re obligated.”

  “Only because we elect to be decent people.”

  The Godmade placed bony hands on hips that were no more than a suggestion under the flowing robes. “Honorable Gage. Do you suppose that at this point either of us really, entirely qualifies as a people?”

  “I have a broad definition,” the Gage responded. He started forward, feet ringing on the cobbles with distinction.

  Nizhvashiti followed, rustling. Together, they swept within.

  9

  Himadra, Farkhad, and two other men rode hard but not incautiously. Himadra tried to keep his thoughts from circling back to the dead horses.

  Nothing was without risk, of course. Especially not travel. But the waste and the delay both griped him. They would be slower now, sharing horses.

  The road ahead was muddy and slick, rutted with much passage. Still, the tracks of the nurse’s horse were by far the freshest, and stood out like fresh ink on the palimpsest of a scraped hide.

  Himadra wondered where the rains were. They should be far from over.

  He also wondered where his damned sorcerer was.

  Drupada’s nurse was not much of a horsewoman. As far as Himadra knew, she’d never ridden at all before he and his men kidnapped her in order to keep the heir of Ansh-Sahal alive. So it was doubly impressive that she’d managed to rein her horse away from the others in the thick of the fight, stay clear of the bear-boars, and try to run for home. Maybe not the best thinking, but Himadra had to admire her for doing any thinking, under the circumstances. Himadra’s vivid imagination was one of the things that made him a good tactician, and he could hardly have kept himself from visualizing the harried, terrified woman with too tight a grip on the reins, the snapping jaws and skewering tusks, the thrusting spears at every turn. He could see the mud-stained gray horse eye-rolling, head-tossing, slopping lather as it yanked against the bit, slipping in mud that could kill it with a misstep.

  Perhaps desperation had given the nurse an edge, howling babe and all. Perhaps the horse had merely bolted, and she had had the presence of mind to somehow stay on. Or even to direct it.

  Velvet’s gait was not so fast as a gallop, but it was much smoother. Bearable for Himadra, if he gritted his teeth, even at her top speed. She could maintain that running walk for a long while. The other three horses kept up at an easy canter.

  They could have galloped pell-mell after the runaway, but the nurse in her lack of horsewomanship had let her steed stretch to his fullest length and race away unrestricted. If Himadra’s men tried to follow the same way, they ran the same risks—of their horses sliding in the mud, breaking legs, throwing riders. And the nurse’s gray would have bolted himself to exhaustion. He’d be staggering along at a heaving walk by now. The other horses had been in a fight, but they had also had a breather. If Himadra could restrain himself from the temptation to chase after the nurse at top speed, he and his men would run her mount down
in short order.

  Fortunately, if there was anything Himadra had learned from a lifetime of physical frailty, it was restraint. Caution. Consideration of the likely outcomes.

  He was impressed with the nurse, that she had managed to stay in the saddle. She might be naturally gifted. Maybe they’d make a rider of her by the time the party reached Chandranath.

  If she didn’t die first in the poisoned remains of Ansh-Sahal. Or while running blindly toward it, Himadra thought, as they passed the point where a half-dozen other sets of racing hoofprints swung out from behind an outcrop and churned the nurse’s tracks into oblivion.

  Farkhad rose in his stirrups and glanced over. “What do you think?”

  “Brigands!” Himadra had to shout to be heard over the horses. “Go on without me!”

  It would be dangerous, running in the mud. But the consequences of being too slow had just redoubled. Leaving Drupada and the nurse at the mercy of brigands—because who else would be lying in wait behind a rock on a road lately frequented by refugees—would be far worse.

  “Farkhad!” he yelled, before the other could kick his mount away. “We need their horses!”

  Farkhad raised a fist, and gave his horse its head. The tired gelding accelerated, the other two pounding past Himadra in its wake. Velvet snorted in frustration: just because she was a gaited horse did not mean she couldn’t run, and the herd was leaving her. But she remained obedient to her reins and training, and the other horses swept away.

  They vanished around a switchback in the muddy, descending road. Velvet didn’t love the sloppy going, but she was sure-footed. Himadra’s men, meanwhile, might be riding into an ambush as well as at unsafe speeds. He had nothing left to him except to follow as safely and swiftly as possible, and trust in his men.

  * * *

  Himadra could still hear the horses long after he lost sight of them, and as he rode after them as hard as his body would bear, the sounds did not vanish entirely. He performed the mathematics of engagement in his head. The brigands’ horses were fresh. Those of his people, including Drupada and the nurse, were not. But confronted with a lone woman, well-dressed and riding a quality horse, and a baby, bandits were unlikely to resort to bullets and arrows when they would see an opportunity to ride down their unarmed target alive.