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

by Elizabeth Bear

  He watched as Velvet grazed calmly on what scraggly stems poked up between rocks. What should have been lush and verdant with the season was yellowed and dry. It might as well have been straw to look at. Himadra hoped for the horses’ sake that it was at least a little more nutritious. But—supplemented with small quantities of the grain they carried—it was all they had to offer.

  Himadra dined on meager fare in his own turn. The fresh, roasted meat they had gleaned from the bear-boars had been eaten quickly, before it could rot, and now they were back to trail rations and the smoked meat—and not much of either of those. The quartermaster had a flat stone enhanced with some Wizardry that made it hot enough to boil water. He moved it carefully in its case, because it was hot enough also to burn flesh. It made it possible to cook without light. Important, because the day was slowly darkening around them as the Cauled Sun rose and the Veil covered the sky. They did not risk a fire, and anyway the day was hot and growing hotter.

  Himadra sat quietly and sipped thrice-brewed tea without milk or spices. The quartermaster—who was also the cook, in so small a band—made paper-thin pancakes using the stovestone as a griddle, brushing its surface with butter-oil. In better times, those pancakes might have been stuffed with pulses, vegetables, even a little meat, and served with spiced yogurt. Today, Himadra felt fortunate to have a scoop of cold lentils flavored with dried and pounded onion. Hunger was a constant now. And he knew it did not torment him nearly so badly as it did the full-sized men around him.

  Himadra was the warlord. He could not have complained even if he were worst-off. This whole thing had been his idea in the first place.

  Even Drupada ate his small portion without fussing, exactly as if that were usual for boys his age. He seemed to understand that there was not more, and chewed his food with seriousness and attention, if without coordination or manners. Himadra (and the nurse and quartermaster) were all doing their best to make sure the child never went truly hungry. But it was often a near thing.

  In some little time, Navin returned from the scouting mission, panting hard from a sprint across rocky terrain. Farkhad and another man lifted Himadra’s shield and brought him to where Navin was resting and being given water, so he could hear the report in private.

  They set Himadra down in another place that was under cover a little from the heat.

  Navin had a surprise for them. The mass of people ahead were neither solely soldiers nor civilians, but a mixture of the two—and not soldiers and camp followers, in this case. And the soldiers among them wore the livery of Ansh-Sahal.

  Himadra caught himself before he could glance over his shoulder at Iri, the nurse, in surprise. He was glad he had caused his shield to be carried well out of earshot before taking Navin’s report.

  “Where do you think they’re going?” Farkhad asked.

  Himadra gestured for Farkhad to lower his voice, glancing over at Iri and Drupada. “As far away as they can get from whatever’s left of Ansh-Sahal.”

  “I think they are refuges, Your Competence,” Navin agreed. “They look tattered. And more focused on taking the next step before them than watching the terrain.”

  “Pity we can’t march up to that army and demand supplies,” said Farkhad, following the direction of Himadra’s gaze.

  “I think we could ambush them,” said Navin. “Or at least some stragglers. They have no discipline.”

  “They’re likely as skint as we are,” Himadra answered. “If not more so. We had time to pack.”

  Drupada had begun to wail, the thin cry of a tired child. Himadra looked away, to allow the nurse to deal with him. But sitting there, watching the day darken and those in his entourage eat, Himadra had the beginning of an idea.

  “What was it Ravana said? About declaring myself the boy’s regent?”

  “That you could slit his throat after, Lord Protector.”

  Himadra waved that away in disgust and lowered his voice further. “That army doesn’t belong to Sayeh. It belongs to Drupada.”

  “That army can’t even live off the land or forage until we get among people again, and the first people we reach on this road are our own. Even if these soldiers accepted you as Lord Protector. Which they won’t.”

  “Are you sure?” Himadra asked mildly.

  “Do you suppose these are her loyal troops?”

  “If they didn’t die because they got out ahead of the explosion, it seems likely,” Himadra said. “I had word from one of my people in Ansh-Sahal that she had ordered an evacuation after the first bad shake, and the leaders of her army countermanded her. But some of her folk left anyway.”

  “Well, those leaders are all dead now,” Farkhad said, with the utter conviction of somebody who believes in the just retribution of God. Of course insubordinate soldiers would be struck down by the very waters his people held sacred, in the person of the Mother. It was just the way the world worked, and how the gods kept it orderly.

  Himadra’s agent was probably dead now, too.

  Himadra half-wished he had the kind of faith that made Providence seem self-evident. But the truth was that even on those occasions when he managed to convince himself there was a divine presence behind the Mother River he had a hard time extending that conviction to a belief that she cared about humans or the outcomes of their lives.

  Maybe as a category. Definitely not as individuals.

  “Anyway, if we do make contact, what’s to keep Iri the nurse from selling you out to them as a kidnapper?”

  “Nothing,” Himadra said. “Unless she figures out that following me is in her own best interests. And those of Drupada. And of Ansh-Sahal. But she’s got to accept it before they can.”

  “I guess that means you need to talk to her.”

  Himadra made a disgruntled noise.

  “And assuming this works. What are you going to do with a starving army and a pack of refugees commanded by a toddler in the middle of a wasteland?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Himadra said. “Right now? Bring them home.”

  * * *

  Himadra caused himself to be carried to Iri on his shield, and wondered if she would know it for the honor he intended. She rose as he approached, sweeping Drupada against the trousers she had wrapped her skirt into, but she seemed less apprehensive. And the boy mostly seemed curious. Farkhad and his other bearer set him down beside her, and Farkhad gestured for her to be seated.

  “Please take the prince for a small walk?” Himadra said to the other bearer.

  Farkhad grimaced at him—worried for his safety against this woman, no doubt—but Himadra brushed his concern aside. She could certainly break every bone in his body if she went for him. Or at least quite a few of them, before Farkhad could stop her. But there were only so many risks a man could avoid without feeling like his entire life was devoted to running away.

  Iri, too, seemed as if she wanted to protest. He saw the muscular flinch through her body as she kept herself from rising, and thought that Anuraja would have enjoyed that flinch, and the shadow of fear that followed it. Her eyes tracked Drupada as he was led away.

  “You have questions,” Himadra asked her.

  She startled back into focused attention. “Your Abundance … what do you want with my prince?”

  “I want to give your charge back his royal seat. Maybe.”

  Her lips tightened. “I will do what I must to ensure his safety and well-being.”

  Himadra laughed. “Let me tell you what you see when you look at me,” he said. The anger might have gotten into his voice. Must have, because her expression of concealed disgust grew an element of fear. He let it hang there. He couldn’t be arsed, right now, to worry about her feelings. “You see a squashed little thing, not even a man, don’t you? You find yourself wondering how you came to be trapped here with me. Dependent on me. But here you are.”

  He sighed heavily, because what was in him had to come out and there were no words for it. No words that would give him the result he wanted, anyw
ay. And it was obvious that she wasn’t quite grasping the conversation.

  “You pity me,” he said. “And you also find me disgusting.”

  “Yes,” she said, ashamed.

  It was good, he supposed, that she had the courage to admit it. “Do you despise yourself a little for needing me?”

  The shock on her face told him more clearly than any denial that she did not. Had not. Had never even considered it. That interested him. He steepled his fingers to indicate that he was listening.

  Even seated, she towered over him. He pretended not to notice. He waited her out.

  At last, when his frustrating body ached with sitting still, she said, “It is the way the world is.”

  “What is the way the world is?”

  Tiredly, as if to a child who had demanded “Why?” once too often, she explained. “I am a commoner and poor. You are a raja and others do your bidding. I need you because there is no other way for me to exist. Because a commoner must have a liege, and a lord must have subjects. Men and women to support him.”

  Will you teach Drupada that? Himadra wondered.

  “That is the way we have built the world, yes.”

  She looked at him as if the words he was saying made no sense to her.

  “Do you think it has to be that way?”

  She frowned at him in consternation.

  “Can you envision another way?” He was growing angrier, and his voice was tight. Iri dropped her eyes and cringed. Himadra reminded himself that he was not angry with her, per se. He was angry with … he wasn’t even sure. The world. The way it crushed people until they did not even mutter to themselves, There has to be a better way.

  There had to be. He needed to believe it. Even if he didn’t know yet what it might be.

  Iri abruptly threw herself down on the ground, lowering her face into her arms.

  “Iri,” he said.

  “Raja!” she gasped.

  He looked at Farkhad.

  “Will you cast me out to find another protector or perish?” she asked, in a small voice that made him ashamed of himself. “I am sorry to have offended you, Your Competence. Please tell me how I may make amends.”

  He silenced her with a sigh, too exhausted suddenly to speak. He gathered himself and managed, “I will protect you, Iri. Inasmuch as I can. Sit up please.”

  She did, and sat huddled, still too shaken to dust herself off.

  “I meant only that I will put Drupada back on his throne, if that is what is best for his people. Your people. I’m certainly not turning him—or you—over to Anuraja, if that is what you were thinking I implied.”

  She nodded slightly, staring at her hands.

  “Look at me.”

  She studied him, unsmiling. Perhaps what she saw in his expression reassured her. “I still do not understand what you want.”

  “A different world with different rules,” he said. “I want to build that.”

  Her face tightened around her mouth, as if she were thinking intently.

  “There is an army ahead of us. It is Sayeh’s men, and refugees from the city of Ansh-Sahal. Will you be my representative and messenger, Iri?”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Tell them I offer my protection, and a home in Chandranath.”

  “For the able?”

  “For all.” He waved at himself. “Who is to say where ability lies? Driving a plow is not the only work for a man.”

  The suspicion had not left the cast of her expression. But perhaps something else was joining it. “Some may not listen to me.”

  He shrugged. “Then let them go on without us. They are refugees, and refuge is what I offer.”

  She glanced after Drupada. The prince was out of earshot but well in range of sight, and obviously enjoying being lifted up to pet a soft-nosed Velvet, who seemed equally pleased with the interaction. Himadra let her think.

  Silence, he sometimes thought, was his greatest persuader.

  “I will do this thing,” she said. “If you will give me your vow on the line of the Alchemical Emperor that Drupada will come to no harm at your hands or by your will while I am gone.”

  “Drupada will come to no harm by my hands or by my will under any circumstance,” Himadra swore calmly. “That oath is not limited by time, unless he becomes an enemy of his own choice when he is a man grown.”

  Iri assessed him. Then she nodded. “I will go now, with your permission.”

  “Get Navin to take you.” Himadra jerked a hand at his legs. “You may rise, Iri. Don’t wait for me.”

  She rose, indeed, and went so swiftly and silently in search of Navin that if not for a smooth place in the dust, she might never have been.

  “I’d suspect you of harboring anti-royal sympathies,” Farkhad said, when she was gone.

  Himadra snorted. “Who’s to say I don’t?”

  “Self-defeating.”

  “Don’t worry, Farkhad. You’ll always have a job. At least until I’m murdered and deposed.”

  15

  When the Gage and the Godmade came to the cliff on the eastern edge of Ansh-Sahal, they found the Bitter Sea below them. It was boiling slowly.

  No sun or suns had ever risen. The sky was still black and strewn with dim stars in streaks and swaths, as though someone had cast handfuls of salt across dark velvet. It was not the sky of the Lotus Kingdoms. It was not, as far as the Gage knew, the sky of any land at all.

  Nizhvashiti clasped its cadaverous hands. “This is what a place God has abandoned looks like.”

  “Has She abandoned it?” the Gage asked. “Or was She driven from it?”

  Below, the thick sea bubbled silkily. Liquid domes popped like blisters. Like the roil of gruel. Splattering steaming mud on the cliff wall.

  “Maybe She abandoned it,” Nizhvashiti said.

  “You don’t know?”

  “She does not tell me all her plans.”

  Sustaining the banter required a terrible effort before the specter of that seething sea. Even black humor felt like too much levity.

  The Gage went silent.

  The night reeked of sulfur, charred meat, and putrescence. The Gage was glad that even his superior senses could not perceive too clearly through the gloom to the water below. Its surface was no doubt churning with live boiled seafood, and its depths as barren as the land they had passed through.

  The Godmade was gliding softly away, and the Gage went to follow. “Where are we going?” he asked after a few steps had caught him up.

  “There’s a temple near here,” Nizhvashiti said. “I choose to pay my respects.”

  Of course they did. Their god was the god of duty.

  “Is that really something you want to see?”

  “I have to assume that it was why I was brought here,” Nizhvashiti said, thereby answering the Gage’s question without actually answering.

  * * *

  The temple was worse than the Gage had anticipated. He wondered if it might be worse than Nizhvashiti had anticipated, too. No one had collected and repurposed the dead, here. Whether because falling on hallowed ground had rendered them consecrated and defended them from the sorcerer’s mischief, or for some other reason, the Gage did not know.

  But there were bodies in plenty. And all of them were women.

  The temple’s entryway had once been a vast, vaulted structure. Now it was a ruined garden, full of boiled trees and poisoned with shards of dragonglass that had tumbled from the skylights above. Some of those shards, daggerlike, had found a place impaled in the bodies of priestesses and acolytes. Not all of them—by their positions and by the black puddles of rancid blood that in this terrible place could not even draw flies—had been dead when it rained knives on them. Some, it appeared from the positions of the bodies, had been trying to help one another crawl away or administer to one another’s wounds when the poisoned, boiling air had followed.

  “Does this make you want to pray?” Nizhvashiti asked, bending to touch throat aft
er throat in a fruitless quest for a pulse.

  The Gage wondered how dead flesh felt to undead fingers.

  “Quite the opposite, actually.”

  “I wish I had time to bury the dead.”

  “There will be more dead if you pause to bury these.”

  “There will, in any case, be more dead.”

  “That,” the Gage admitted, “has always been the case.”

  “The Wizard—”

  The Gage made a sound as if clearing a throat he did not have. “I believe you will find that that tigerish individual is, in fact, a sorcerer.”

  “What’s the difference, other than that Wizards have a Royal College of some sort and a social club behind them? They have a diploma and a lot of friends, and sorcerers are social outcasts and self-taught?”

  The Gage tipped his head. “Shouldn’t you know this? Aren’t you meant to be the prophet and the wielder of the powers of the metaphysical realm in this conversation?”

  Nizhvashiti drifted forward, not bothering to appear as if it were walking. “Not in my own person. And all those thaumaturgical types seem pretty similar to me.”

  “Well,” the Gage said, “your sorcerers are usually going to be the necromancers and such, though not always. They sacrifice other people to feed their power.”

  Nizhvashiti looked as skeptical as an emaciated cadaver could.

  “And Wizards,” the Gage continued, “generally sacrifice some aspect of themselves. Time; love; freedom; their ability to bear children.”

  “And you’re going to maintain that the Wizard who made you did not sacrifice you.”

  “I sacrificed myself. The Wizard … facilitated.”

  “And yet you are not a Wizard.”

  “Well, I didn’t go to college for it. And Messaline Wizards, of the sort that, for example, created me—they tend to be self-taught. Or apprenticed.”

  “And so there’s never been an evil Wizard.”

  The Gage laughed, and this time kept on laughing. “Dear Nizhvashiti. There have been thousands.”