The Dead Man seemed to recall that there were Aezin Wizards who had similar abilities. He wished the Gage were here, to explain exactly what was going on. But perhaps he could take the opportunity to ask Ata Akhimah.
At last they found the blond wood door in the golden stone corridor. A sweet breeze blew from the gardens. Some trace of foul smokiness rode it: burning ships, and gunpowder. But they could not hear the war.
The door stood open, and soft voices came from within.
Mrithuri looked at the Dead Man. He nodded and stepped forward, Syama at his flank. The bear-dog still kept a wary eye on him; she only had one mistress. But she seemed to have accepted him as at least a temporary ally, if not a full member of her pack.
Gently, he scratched at the doorframe. “The rajni,” he announced, as he had seen others do, and waited a few moments before he pulled wide the door. It wasn’t too different from how he would have served his caliph. When there were such a thing as caliphs in the world.
He checked the room before he moved out of the way. Within were only Yavashuri and Hnarisha, and they looked calm enough. As calm as did anyone in this palace, in these days. Behind them, beside the dead ambassador’s desk, was a dark pipe-narrow outline that could only be Nizhvashiti in its dark robes. When he stood aside, Golbahar preceded Mrithuri into the room and Syama flanked her, leaving him to take up the rear.
“So you found the Godmade,” Mrithuri said, pausing far enough within the room to allow the Dead Man to enter after her.
Hnarisha and Yavashuri looked at one another.
“After a fashion,” Yavashuri said. Warily, eyeing Mrithuri as if unsure how she might react.
Mrithuri visibly gathered herself. “Please explain.”
“Well. We found its body.”
The Dead Man opened his mouth and almost said, “It’s dead?” but stopped himself in time. Of course it was dead. And not in the metaphorical sense in which he himself was dead, either. Nizhvashiti was, after all, standing right there, swathed in black, obviously dead, staring sightlessly and fixedly toward some invisible horizon with two artificial eyes.
And just as obviously not falling over.
“It’s entranced,” the Dead Man said, who had seen this before. Albeit, while the sainted priest was alive. “I mean, I suppose. Unless its animating force has fled. How did you come to find it here?”
Yavashuri looked from the Dead Man to Golbahar, and then to Mrithuri. Her head tilted in a question under her comb-spiked hair.
“Sure,” Mrithuri said. “These two came late to the war. And the Dead Man almost died for me. It can’t have been either of them that bewitched Ata Akhimah’s coat.”
“One poison baked in a dish doesn’t mean a second can’t be dripped in at the table,” Yavashuri said direly. But she waved to Hnarisha with the air of one abdicating responsibility.
Hnarisha rubbed his hands as if to warm chilled fingers. He brushed the gold rings rimming his ear with the backs of them, making a faint chime sound. “We came to see if there was any clue who might have burned Mahadijia’s papers. I mean, it is possible he did it himself, if he was coming to kill you.”
“But you don’t believe that,” said Mrithuri.
“He wanted so badly to speak with you that he defiled the ceremony of Rains Return.”
Yavashuri looked faintly guilty. “I thought only that his master was an apostate and a heretic, and that he had no respect for your duties. In retrospect, I might have been wrong. I think I gave you poor counsel, my rajni. And I am sorry—”
Mrithuri waved her apologies away. “I thought as you did. If you were not counseling me differently now, I would not question that judgment. So there are two mysteries.”
Hnarisha nodded. “There are. Who destroyed his documents, and what was his purpose in coming to you when Chaeri killed him?”
“He had a bared dagger in hand,” Mrithuri said.
Yavashuri made a noise. Mrithuri looked at her, and arched a finger to summon forth her words.
Yavashuri sighed. “So Chaeri said.” Her mouth quirked, as if she anticipated a reprimand.
The Dead Man tilted his head at Hnarisha.
Hnarisha shook his head and said, “All our intelligence suggests that Anuraja wants to marry the rajni—begging your pardon, Rajni—not assassinate her.”
The Dead Man touched the cloth over his fresh scar. “Well, somebody does.”
The rajni rubbed her arms, an echo of Hnarisha’s gesture. It was not at all cold in the room. She opened and closed her mouth once or twice, swallowing whatever words filled it each time. She closed her eyes at last and said, “I had wondered how she got the knife away from him.”
It had the air of a great and painful admission, and the Dead Man’s heart twisted with admiration and discomfort at her courage. He wished at that moment that he could reach out and touch her arm, that there were not the glassy and invisible shield of rank between them. But there it was, as impenetrable as the Gage’s mirrored brass armor.
Then she squared herself and said, “But we don’t know.”
Hnarisha and Yavashuri shared a glance as the Dead Man schooled himself not to show disappointment. He should not, he told himself, allow himself to feel possessive toward this young queen. He must not allow himself to feel proprietary. Her choices were her own. She was the master of her own destiny, inasmuch as anyone could be.
That she was also master of his, and that her choices could put him and all her subjects at risk as well as herself … well, that was only how the world worked. He had dealt with the results before, and he felt himself to be committed here now.
Still, he was starting to develop his own ideas of how to deal with Chaeri.
Sadly, he could not think of a dutiful way to conceal such an intervention from the rajni.
When Nizhvashiti moved, the tension was not so much broken as redirected. The Dead Man jumped, and realized he had never resheathed his blade after the encounter with Mi Ren. It had been by his side in low guard ever since, as natural as his own finger. It gave him pause that no one had remarked upon it. What must Mrithuri’s people think of him?
Nizhvashiti had not done much—just spread its hands from its sides a span or so. Its fingers were like the knobby, twiggy sticks of a fan. Its face remained expressionless, glass and golden eyes each unblinking. Then it turned, and a strange light seemed to kindle in the depths of the glass eye—reflecting, refracting. Pooling there like the radiance that got caught in the fibers of a cat’s-eye stone.
Nizhvashiti opened dry lips that cracked without bleeding, and spoke with a voice that was not its own: windy and great and strange and cold, and resonating without booming, like the music of some great-reeded, great-chambered woodwind. “And then in the world there are islands, and each island is a ghost, a palimpsest of what has been and what is wrought upon it and what it could or might or will become. Each island has boundaries, that are more or less permeable to the ocean and the wind, and that may vary by the tide. And each island has connections to other islands, whether by necessity, accident, or desire.
“In this manner do islands resemble people. In this manner do people resemble nations. In this manner do nations resemble the winds of storms.”
The voice speaking through Nizhvashiti rose and fell with expression. It never paused and hesitated for breath, the dead priest’s bony chest neither rising nor falling. “Break my chain. Break my chain. Seek the mother of the Mother River. Seek the Origin of Storms.”
Mrithuri started forward. One step, two. The Dead Man almost caught after her arm before he remembered his place. It was Lady Golbahar who smoothly, without touching Mrithuri, interposed her slight body between the rajni and the Godmade, so that Mrithuri would have had to push her aside to move closer.
“Nizhvashiti?” she asked.
The Godmade did not answer. It raised one hand—the left hand—and extended a single finger tipped with a curved black nail like a claw.
“Lady—” the De
ad Man began. I do not think that that is exactly Nizhvashiti.
He did not have time to finish.
Nizhvashiti raised the long finger and tapped the dragonglass orb of its eye, which flared with that green light, kindled deep within, and sounded a single piercing chime.
Everyone stepped back: Mrithuri, Golbahar, Yavashuri, Hnarisha. And also the Dead Man.
It felt as if something in the room broke, the way laughter breaks tension, or the way humidity and stifling heat may be broken by the clean air after a storm. As if they were riding on a puzzle piece that abruptly shifted itself, turned, rocked, and seated itself in a place from which it had somehow been dislodged and was now home in.
“The spell,” Hnarisha said. “The rooms are unhidden.”
“How did you find them again?” the Dead Man said.
Hnarisha shrugged. “I have a few skills, and trusting the Immanent Sun does offer a route to knowing illusion from reality. Illusion … casts a different shadow.”
He grinned at the Dead Man, and the Dead Man realized that his free hand had automatically made the sign of the pen.
Mrithuri said, “That’s the second time the Origin of Storms has come up. The first time, it was in the message that the Godmade brought back from the other side.”
Hnarisha closed his eyes and quoted from memory: “‘Seek the Carbuncle. Seek the Mother of Exiles, blind and in her singing catacomb. Time is short, and more is at stake than kingdoms. Something stirs. Something vast and cruel stirs, to the east, beneath the sea. Your destiny lies with the Origin of Storms.’”
“Storms come from the sea thereof,” Yavashuri said. “Is something Anuraja or his sorcerer doing preventing the rains from reaching us?”
“Someone certainly wants us to think so.” Golbahar tilted her head to one side and studied Nizhvashiti. “But are they friend or foe?”
“Oh, for the old days, when wars were simple,” Mrithuri said, and threw up her hands. Her glass bangles chimed. “None of this is amounting to anything. None of this gets us closer to salvation.”
Golbahar said gently, “Your Abundance seems not much concerned about the siege.”
“There is food and water in the mountain. And the river shall soon enough rise.”
“Soon enough,” Hnarisha said, as if agreeing. “We can keep hoping it is soon enough, anyway.”
“Have you given further thought to sending your vultures to the troops at the border, my rajni?” Yavashuri asked.
The Dead Man said, “The carrion birds of the enemy—”
“I will not risk them,” Mrithuri interrupted.
Not the dolphins, and not the vultures. This is not their war.
“We can hang on until the Gage returns,” Yavashuri said soothingly.
“And then what? Give them a pregnant queen to capture?” Golbahar snorted.
Mrithuri’s scarf trailed as she waved them quiet. “Search this apartment. Perhaps there are more clues in it, which will be revealed now that the spells of confusion are broken. Or perhaps we missed something before. In any case, search it. Tear it apart. And see if you can’t wake up the Godmade and find out what in the deeps of nightmare it was talking about. I’ll be in my stellar. Yavashuri, Golbahar, with me if you please.”
She turned. Syama, who of course had never left her side, pivoted with her. The Dead Man watched her fuss with the drape of her tunic for a moment to give her women time to fall in beside her.
The sound of a cleared throat drew his attention. Hnarisha was on his left. “I wanted to talk to you about the war, anyway.”
The Dead Man shook his head. “What can I tell you?”
“Anuraja. He could be doing more damage,” Hnarisha said.
“He wants to take the city intact,” the Dead Man answered. “The city. And the queen.”
“Yes, and he is confident in his ability to do those things.”
The Dead Man nodded. “Too confident. Lying in wait.”
Hnarisha did not say “Chaeri.” Neither did the Dead Man. Not here, where Mrithuri could overhear them. But they shared a long glance, and the Dead Man was certain he knew what lay behind it.
“We’ll speak more while we search,” said Hnarisha as the door from the corridor slammed open, narrowly missing the rajni. Chaeri, alone and with her garments and hair in disarray, burst in.
12
The Gage and Nizhvashiti went into the destroyed palace side by side and without strategy, perhaps incautiously. But the Gage was nigh-invulnerable, and Nizhvashiti was already dead. And possibly not entirely real.
What was the worst that could happen?
This palace compound, while lightly fortified by gates and walls, had mostly been built long and low within them. The devastation within the palace was worse than that without. In the outer court, they found the long column-supported promenades had entirely collapsed.
The open colonnades might have seemed incautious from a defensive standpoint. But after all, war and invasion were an infrequent threat. The heat killed every summer. Building in stone at all in an area so prone to earthquakes might have been the graver mistake. But the Gage was not sure what options anyone might have, in such a bleak environment.
The reek of death was stronger within the palace walls, though there were still no bodies bloating amidst the rubble.
The bodies were beyond it.
The sight stopped even the Gage in his tracks. He set his leading foot down with a clang quite unlike his usual attempts to walk softly, and just stood. Had he eyes, he would have been staring—or perhaps covering them in horror. Nizhvashiti drifted to a stop beside him. Because those colonnades and the apartments they connected had largely collapsed, the Gage could see over them clearly.
To the mountain of dead that lay behind.
He might have cursed. He might have blasphemed. If he had been able even slightly to recollect the gods he had sworn by when he was alive, and their slanders. But whoever those gods had been, in this moment the memory of them utterly deserted him.
Neither was the priest inclined to speak. The two of them simply watched, stopped where they were for long moments. Until enduring the silence, at last, became worse than breaking it. Then the Gage managed to say, “Is that all of them?”
“Every one?” Nizhvashiti shook its hooded skull. Even being who it was, the gesture had a bit of a tremble to it. “We know some escaped. Sayeh Rajni herself. A few of her retainers. Some refugees who left in obedience to her will or through their own common sense, though the army ordered all to stay. And tried to enforce it. Not all chose to bow their heads to the army’s threats and decrees, however.”
The Gage would have frowned, had he a face for doing so. “How could you know that, Godmade?”
Nizhvashiti’s dead face rearranged itself in discomfort. “You know all sorts of things in dreams.”
The Gage contemplated that, along with the enormity of the pile of dead before him. “You hint that the army were not acting under Sayeh Rajni’s instructions.”
“In contempt of them, I would say,” Nizhvashiti replied with confidence.
The Gage’s mountainous shoulders collapsed a little as his posture slouched. “How terrible for her.”
“Yes. And how terrible for her subjects.” Nizhvashiti, by comparison, seemed to straighten. “Shall we go and see what we can do for the dead?”
They are the dead, the Gage wanted to snap. They are beyond my care or yours. The time for seeing what can be done for them is past.
But the truth of the matter was that he had little idea of what Nizhvashiti might be capable. And weren’t the Gage and the Godmade, not to point the thing too finely, both already dead in their own persons? And wasn’t this, after a fashion, evidence that the dead could in some cases still do for themselves?
The Gage followed Nizhvashiti over the rubble heaps, climbing the treacherous and shifting piles with his great weight, with considerably more difficulty than Nizhvashiti evidenced in gliding over them. They approached
the charnel heap with an unwavering implacability that belied the horror the Gage held within.
He had seen so many horrors in his life, and in his long existence. But before this one even he quailed a little.
There were thousands of bodies in the pile. They rose in a more steeply sided tower than the Gage would have thought possible, as if they were hung on some kind of scaffolding, or threaded on wires and drawn up by a gigantic hand toward an unseen point.
Nizhvashiti said it first. “It looks like someone’s building a pedestal. As if for a throne.”
“Like the Peacock Throne,” the Gage answered. They had stopped, and now looked up at the horror. Nizhvashiti craned its head back. The Gage just looked without eyes, as he did, which did not require any inclination or rotation of his featureless head.
“After a fashion.”
“Could you build a throne—or even a pedestal—just from a pile of corpses, though?”
“That would be too squishy,” Nizhvashiti agreed.
“Bodies do have some structure inside them.”
“Still,” Nizhvashiti said. “Something is holding them up there.”
“Yes,” said the Gage. “And I think we should make an effort to find out what.”
“We’re—”
“On a mission, yes. I don’t propose to wait long.”
“This was Sayeh’s place,” Nizhvashiti said. “What happened here is probably important.”
* * *
They did not have to wait long. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they did not wait for many hours, because any quantum of time must seem long in that terrible place.
The Gage watched as Nizhvashiti examined the dead. The Godmade blessed as many as it could reach with a smudge of slaked turmeric from a square cinnabar bottle that hung on its girdle. The Gage wondered at first if the turmeric was going to run out, and then began taking bets with himself on when it was going to run out—and finally, when Nizhvashiti began working its way up the horrible pyramid, blessing dead while floating twice its own height in the air, the Gage accepted that the bottle was of the rumored, blessed sort that would never run dry. Or perhaps it was just another miracle from the hands of the Godmade. The Godmade could not reach the bodies at the center without digging, and the Gage was grateful not to have to watch that.
The Red-Stained Wings--The Lotus Kingdoms, Book Two Page 18