The corpses were corpses, all right, the flesh bloating and sloughing after days of rain and heat. But the rotting flesh was supported from within by a scaffolding. Not just of bones, as might have been expected. But by fretworks of stone, that could be seen protruding where the flesh had rotted away. They forked, like the roots of a tree—
“Oh,” the Gage said aloud, as it dawned on him. “That’s the arteries.”
“And the veins,” Nizhvashiti agreed.
“What a terrible way to die.”
The Godmade’s hood had fallen back from its dark, shaven skull. “I think they were dead already when the transformation occurred.”
“Well,” the Gage said. “That’s a small mercy.”
The Gage crouched down, examining the horrible litter at the base of the pyramid. There were crumbled bits of stone there, black with parched flesh. Steeling himself, he rubbed one gently with his fingertip.
The organic matter flaked off, showing a glimmer of translucent orange-pink within. The Gage held it up to the light. “It’s a crystal.”
Nizhvashiti’s papery voice drifted down from near the top of the monument of corpses. “A crystal?”
“Padparadscha sapphire,” the Gage elaborated, with emphasis.
“An unusual stone.”
“Very. And a little obvious, don’t you think?”
“Obvious?” The Godmade had not yet run short of slaked turmeric. It was performing a holy office, the Gage knew. Still, he would have shuddered at the thought of what Nizhvashiti was touching, if his maker had left it within him to shudder—or to know the sensation of touch.
“The padparadscha ring on the assassin. Now a heap of bodies partially converted into stone. And don’t the Qersnyk riders call their throne the Padparadscha Seat? If we’re being directed to suspect the plains tribes as masterminds, the effort is not subtle.”
“The Padparadscha Seat is just a fancy name for an old saddle,” Nizhvashiti reminded. “I have a sense that this is a more personal symbol. Perhaps even a mage’s signature.”
“Signature?” the Gage asked, in the same tone in which Nizhvashiti had said, “Crystal?”
“Are not your Wizards of Messaline known for imparting specific qualities, unique to each, to objects affected by their spellcasting?”
“Hmmm,” the Gage said. “I suppose they are.”
Nizhvashiti settled beside him in a slow flutter of robes that trailed over the ground but did not seem to brush it. It stoppered its little vial and said, “I don’t think this enemy can help but leave a trail of evidence in the form of orange sapphires.”
The Gage stood statuelike, in silent contemplation.
Nizhvashiti tipped its head back, frowning up at the tower of dead. “Does that remind you of anything?”
The Gage had an answer. He considered it for a moment before just spitting it out. Metaphorically speaking, as he did not have lips or a tongue to spit with. “The pedestal that comprises the Peacock Throne has a similar … profile.”
“More than similar. As identical as two artifacts can be when one is made of gold and jewels and the other is a heap of rotting corpses.”
“Jeweled corpses,” the Gage qualified.
“As you say.”
“You know, I’d hazard a guess that there’s something symbolic going on here.”
“Or metaphysical.”
The Gage asked, “Is there a difference?”
Nizhvashiti flared its sleeves like mantling black wings. “One affects the hearts and wills of people. The other affects the heart and will of the world. If people don’t know about it, it can’t really serve a symbolic purpose. But it can serve a metaphysical one. Affecting, as it were, the structure of the world.”
“Setting up a throne in opposition to the Peacock Throne.”
Nizhvashiti said, “That wouldn’t happen if there were an emperor on the throne. Its metaphysical power over these lands—to represent these lands, and their people—would be sealed. But without one…”
The Gage waited a moment or two before making a throat-clearing noise. “Without one?”
Nizhvashiti made a disgusted gesture. “That power can be arrogated. Contested.”
“Claimed by someone else?” a mild voice offered from behind them.
Nizhvashiti whirled. The Gage, who did not rely on organs of perception for his senses, did not put himself out so far as to turn.
The person behind them was on foot, and had appeared as precipitously as if he had stepped sideways from under the flap of a folded universe.
He was tall, and imposingly built, wearing his jet-black hair in a long tail that fell down over the rippling agouti wolf fur of his cloak trim. To the surprise of no one, he wore a heavy silver collar over the fur, each hammered link set with a square cabochon of chatoyant padparadscha sapphire that gleamed with a band of light like the pupil of a tiger’s eye.
He seemed to the Gage as if he were working very hard to be impressive, from jeweled earrings to polished boots, and very nearly succeeding.
“Is this your work?” the Gage asked, having taken the time to consider his words.
He still did not turn, preferring the mental effect of keeping his back to the other while continuing to observe him. Perhaps the stranger would know little enough of Gages to mistake his position for a disadvantage.
“Oh, not all of it,” said the tall man, as if humbly declining a compliment. “And I should think nearly all of them would have wound up dead before too long anyway, and hardly so usefully. Human beings are not noted for their … durability over time.”
The man made a sweeping gesture with his gloved hand that tended to include both the Gage and Nizhvashiti. Coral-colored crystals—or faceted padparadscha sapphire beads—sparkled on the unblemished white leather. “But I see I do not have to explain mortal frailty to such as you.”
Nizhvashiti had gone very still. A breeze, redolent of corpses, ruffled its robes in waterlike rills that only served to accentuate the breathless motionlessness of its hands and face and frame.
“Are you not human, then?” the Gage asked. There was utility in the obvious questions.
“Oh, no. But who would be, that had another option? They are so … disposable.”
Now the Gage did turn, more ponderously than necessary, to provide the impression that he was offering the stranger his full attention. “And yet here you seem to have found a use for them.”
The stranger smiled without teeth.
“If people are of so little account to you, why interfere in their little lives?”
“Are these people?” the stranger said.
The Gage did not step forward. He did not extend a hand. He could see the frown of concentration on Nizhvashiti’s strange-eyed countenance. Whatever the Godmade was thinking about so hard, the Gage had no intention of disrupting it with an ill-considered, uncommunicated action. So it seemed as if his best course was to keep the stranger talking.
“My apologies,” the Gage said. “We seem to have neglected to introduce ourselves. I am a Gage. This is Nizhvashiti, a priest of the Good Daughter.”
“Of course you are. I am Ravana,” the stranger replied with a smile. With a sudden, athletic sideways vault, Ravana perched himself atop a fallen column of butter-white stone. It was fluted, delicately carved at the finials. It had been a masterwork by some great artisan. Now it lay tumbled, cracked in a half-dozen pieces.
Ravana settled his haunches more comfortably on its side, flipped the wolfskin-trimmed cloak so that it flared and draped pleasingly, and kicked one foot like a petulant student. “Do you deny,” he said, sounding as if he were enjoying himself, “that the evidence suggests anything but that man is a stumbling adolescent? That there’s a human cultural moment of adulthood they keep avoiding, that they might achieve when they accept that nobody’s hands are fucking clean and stop making up legends about how their people arose out of oppression and therefore it’s totally okay if they take those other people’s stuff
?”
“Perhaps,” Nizhvashiti said, as uninformatively as possible.
“Are your hands unclean?” the Gage prompted.
Ravana laughed. “Oh, very. No worse than anyone else’s, though—whether by deed, or ancestry. Where did the Alchemical Empire come from? Its lost glory is founded in terrible things, isn’t it? Conquest and genocide?”
“I hadn’t really considered it much,” the Gage admitted. “I’m not from around here.”
Ravana’s sparkling hand made another pass in air. “They make a lot of their right of kings, this family, while slaughtering each over inheritances their ancestors stole. But did you ever ask yourself how it is that everybody on this broad and divided patch of earth came to speak the same mother tongue? Where do you think emperors come from, anyway?”
“Usually, from building empires,” the Gage admitted. “A messy business.”
“The messiest,” Ravana agreed. “And yet, these creatures like to tell stories about it as if it’s a glorious endeavor, worthy of mythology. They’re creatures incapable of even recognizing their own motives and obligations on an individual level, much less acting responsibly around them.”
The Gage contemplated. “Is that a fancy way of saying that most people don’t know who they are or what they’re doing, or even why they’re doing it?”
“Oh,” said Ravana. “I’d say that people know it. But these—” He shrugged. “And when there’s a lot of them, they’re even more useless. They can’t manage to make a basic decision for the common good in the face of overwhelming peril, without making it all about their personal power and gain, even when the alternative is a pile of corpses.”
His glistening glove indicated the obscene cairn. “They had time to evacuate, you know. They had warning. They could have worked together and saved their lives. But all they did was use the overture to the catastrophe to squabble and make postures of dominance over one another. And look at them now.”
Nizhvashiti folded its arms. This was its first motion in so long that the gesture rang through the Gage’s awareness like the blow of a hammer. He saw no indication that it had any similar effect on Ravana, who still sat idly kicking his toe.
Nizhvashiti said, “And were these people emperors?”
Ravana cocked his head. “Pardon?”
“Were these the folk who made those decisions? To squabble? Not to cooperate?” Nizhvashiti said politely. “Or are they merely people who were confused, who did not know who to follow, and when their leaders argued, who delayed too long?”
“If they did not decide, then can they be said to be people? Or are they pets? Livestock, like most men.”
“You have not answered my question.”
Ravana turned his attention, if it could be called that, back to the Gage. “Haven’t I?”
Again, the Gage made a ponderous show of considering. He drummed his metal fingertips on his metal cheek. “No, I do not believe you have.”
Ravana shrugged again, even more elaborately, as if to say he had done his best and it was not his fault they were slow learners. Perhaps they were boring him.
“What reason have you for building that?” The Gage waved a hand over his shoulder at the pyramid. His hand, he was pleased to note, also glittered quite well. “For influencing human affairs?”
“Oh.” Yes, Ravana definitely looked bored. Or, to be precise, more bored. “They’re in the way. And what good are they to anyone? They’re children. Worse, because children grow up to be people. These just breed more.”
Ravana glanced at the pile of corpses and made a tching sound. “Oh, now you’ve gone and blessed a lot of them. I’m just going to have to unbless them again after you are gone. What a nuisance priests are.”
“Right,” Nizhvashiti said in some irritation.
Then it roared.
It was not a sound that the Gage would have expected to come from a human throat. Especially a dead one. Especially one so prone to shaping papery, whispery speech as that of the Godmade. It started low in the ground, as if it came up from under the Gage’s feet like a geyser. The rumble rang through his metal body as if he were a bell tuned too low for human ears to hear.
And Nizhvashiti sprang.
Not, to the Gage’s bemusement—and evidently that of Ravana—at Ravana. But at the fermenting throne-heap, in all its horribleness. It struck out, a striped hardwood staff lashing on a long arc, the elaborately knobbed head smacking into one of the corpses with a sound like an axehead sinking into a melon.
“I can’t let you do that,” Ravana said, in the time it took Nizhvashiti to crush two more skulls.
He raised a jeweled hand. The Gage started forward. But no flare of magic burst from the sorcerer’s fingertips. Instead, a rustle—and the cracking of stone—rose from the pile of bodies. The whole thing shifted. Heaved. Hands groped and clenched. Unclenched. Clawed. The whole mass lurched, and a thin keening sound came out of it. Within the pile, some bodies lay still, limp and stiff at once, like rag dolls hung on iron wires.
The Godmade turned its head toward Ravana and frowned. “I don’t believe you’d risk something you worked so hard on. And I blessed more than that, sorcerer.”
It tapped its new and faintly luminescent eye. The dragonglass chimed.
The pile of corpses was as it had been: a heap, a mockery of the massive throne back in Sarathai-tia. It twitched faintly, but the sliding, festering movement of the whole mass vanished as it if had never been.
The Gage heard Ravana sigh.
“Well, sometimes I guess you have to do things yourself.” He stood from his pillar, lithe in his red boots, and brushed his cloak behind his left shoulder with an idle hand. Insouciant, he reached over his shoulder and with one hand drew free a bastard sword.
It was a western style, straight and double-edged, heavy through the diamond-shaped cross-section of the blade. Its hilt was styled to be used with one hand on the grip and the other on the pommel. He held it before him in guard with an expression of utter boredom.
The blade caught fire.
“Oh,” Nizhvashiti said. “I don’t think you’re real either.”
It tapped the dragonglass orb in its socket once more. The chime rolled forth, more sonorous and clearer than ever.
Ravana … wavered. He said something that by its tone was fearful, though the Gage could not quite make out the words. That in and of itself was unusual, as the Gage knew most languages by virtue of how he had been made.
Nizhvashiti tapped the chime once more. The Gage felt it through his feet.
Ravana wavered again, like an image cast on smoke. This time, he blew away.
The ground heaved under them. Not from Nizhvashiti’s howl this time, but seemingly on its own. A faint hiss surrounded them. A smell of rotten eggs and farts garlanded the air.
“You woke up the volcano,” the Gage said.
Nizhvashiti looked longingly at the cadaver throne. “I want to bury the dead.”
The earth heaved again, like a captive testing his bonds.
The Gage started walking. “You have blessed what you can. There will be more dead if we pause to bury these.”
Reluctantly, the Godmade drifted beside him. The Gage sped his steps to a run that shook and cracked the stones underfoot in its own right.
The Godmade spoke without effort, keeping up. “There will, in any case, be more dead.”
“That,” the Gage admitted, “has always been the case. What was that language?”
“Eremite,” Nizhvashiti said. “We’re lucky we’re not alive. It would have blistered our eyes.”
They ran. Or the Gage ran. Small rocks bounced in harmony with his stride. Nizhvashiti streamed alongside like smoke.
Nizhvashiti said, “Do you think he’s setting the Kingdoms up against each other?”
“I think he as much as told us he is. Of course, who knows how trustworthy his self-assessment is?”
“At least we’ve identified the source of the illusions and assa
ssins.”
The Gage laughed while he ran. “Let’s see if we live long enough to get out of these deadly lands, to Mrithuri’s bird and tell her.”
“‘Live.’”
“You know what I mean. I do wonder, why wouldn’t he have his corpses attack?” A veil of sulfurous steam drifted across the Gage, leaving behind a dewing of caustic condensation.
“The throne mattered more to him. The earth is cracking.”
It bulged like an abscess. The Gage gathered himself and leapt the long, spidering, crumbling trench. He landed, and pried his feet from the calf-deep divots to run on. Behind them, the earth ruptured, showering them with searing mud that bubbled with superheated steam after it fell.
“I can survive this,” the Gage said.
“Can you survive lava?”
“Have you seen some?”
Nizhvashiti did not answer.
The Gage ran on.
13
Chaeri’s entrance was not at all as Mrithuri had anticipated. She looked as if she had come from the garden at a run, heedless of thorny borders and reaching branches. The long spirals of her hair, usually oiled so smooth, were raddled and stuck with twigs. Her sweet face was bloated by the poppy she had been taking to aid her sleep of late, and her eyes were glassy, the pupils contracted as if by bright light. The hem of her gold-spangled deep blue drape was raggedly torn. It fluttered with each jerky step, showing plump flashes of calf.
She did not have the sandalwood casket of serpents with her, Mrithuri was annoyed to note. That annoyance allowed her to realize something else. When she looked at Chaeri, what she felt was not affection and comfort, or even the flash of ephemeral anger one might expect when confronted with an inconvenient and disappointing lifelong friend.
What she felt was rather a complex swirl of anxiety, need, and dread. It did not feel to her like herself at all. She felt … like a copy. A simulacrum with something to prove.
The Red-Stained Wings--The Lotus Kingdoms, Book Two Page 19