His, he thought suddenly. It was a troubling thought. She could not be his. Not for long. This could not be his place. Not for long. He had made decisions that had removed that future from the realm of possibility.
Well, enjoy it while it lasted.
Or maybe he would die here. He was too old to be going to war.
Whatever the future held, he had no time to be thinking about it—or thinking about anything—right now. He had a job to do, a job he had been raised to and trained for since infancy. A job that was the entire reason for his existence.
Mrithuri’s security was his responsibility, and there was no place in that responsibility for daydreaming. Only animal awareness and trust of his instincts. Thinking could only get in his way.
He knew he should have felt far more in his element. But this was a foreign land. A foreign culture. A foreign queen.
And he had never been called upon to bodyguard his lover before.
Poor life choices, Serhan, he told himself. But he couldn’t much bring himself to regret it, even as he forced his mind back into the broad, aware, receptive state that would let him recognize a threat before he consciously became aware of it. There were few things more frustrating than trying to work while one’s own mind was doing everything possible to oppose one.
He wished he had a little more attention to spare for the tumblers and acrobats, who were marvelous. He also wished he could allow himself to spend himself on sidelong glances at Mrithuri, who seemed as brittle and beautiful as a dragonmoth.
But he was here to be her guardian, and this day he was determined not to fail at that task. As much as he knew it was irrational to hold himself accountable for the fall of an entire caliphate, that guilt was there, pressing at him.
That guilt would also only impair his ability to do his job. It did not want to be set aside. It fought him.
Guilt was a living thing, like desire. It did not want to die. It did not care to be ignored. It had no interest in whether it was destructive in any given environment. It cared only if it could survive—even flourish—there.
He would starve it out.
He walked silently in the rajni’s entourage, head swiveling like that of some wary desert bird. He comforted himself that he was not her only protector. Those tumblers were armed with real swords they knew well the use of. The Wizards flanked Mrithuri. Every so often, with the edge of his vision only, the Dead Man could glimpse the phantasmal flicker of the shield that Tsering-la had placed around her.
Chaeri was there, though not inside the shield—despite her pouting. The Dead Man was relieved by that. He no longer harbored any doubt that Chaeri was a danger. Ritu and Yavashuri were as aware of that as he was, however, and Yavashuri at least had traction with Mrithuri. That was more than he, a foreigner and a temporary favorite, could rely on.
The crowd lining the streets and hanging from windows to view their rajni surprised him by seeming almost gleeful. He would have expected far more terror, or at least apprehension, in the face of a siege. But it seemed as if Mrithuri’s people were with her, at least in the face of an enemy so universally loathed as Anuraja. There’s something to be said for vilifying your rivals after all.
That was good. That was worth remarking upon to the council of war. Morale was a thing worth sustaining and encouraging. Especially as the Dead Man suffered no doubts that Anuraja would have placed agents in the city, and that they would already be working to erode that morale.
Yavashuri probably had her people working on it. But it wouldn’t hurt to mention it to her all the same. In, of course, a polite and deferential fashion.
Not for the first time, the Dead Man remarked on the defensibility of the street plan. Most of the cities in the Lotus Kingdoms, as far as he knew, were built on an ancient and invariable grid. They had their aqueducts and sewers and hypocausts, and he had heard that it was their ancestors who had, indeed, invented such things. Each would have at least one bath, such as the one he had visited in Chandranath, and depending on size at least one granary. Each would have a palace.
Sarathai-tia was a more modern place. Built from scratch by the Alchemical Emperor, raised from level plains to be his capital and the symbol of his power, it was meant to give a message to any who would think to challenge that authority.
The main road wound the perfect spire of its artificial mountain with the regularity of a snail shell, lined on either side by buildings that housed shops on the ground level and the houses of proprietors above. The Dead Man thought again that it would be a terrible channel of death to fight up. The palace had its own high terraced walls, tiers of them, so that it sat like an elaborate crown at the peak of the mount.
The docks had spread out along the riverbanks, but they were outside the defensible walls of the city and had been burned during the retreat. In war, some things were sacrificed.
When the Dead Man turned his head again, he found that he was walking beside Ata Akhimah. She smiled with the corner of her mouth, not making eye contact. “You’re wondering why this city is so different from other cities.”
“For defense, I assumed. And to show off the Alchemical Emperor’s power. It’s not everyone who can call a mountain up out of a muddy plain.”
“That’s one reason,” she agreed. “But there are thaumaturgical considerations as well. He had some help from Wizards, but much of the power was his own. His seat was here. Not just metaphorically. The Peacock Throne is an object of great puissance, and it derives that power by tapping into the strength of the Mother River, and the River of Heaven, and the very land. This is the place where they meet and are focused, you see.”
It sounded like advertising to the Dead Man, but he held his tongue.
Ata Akhimah continued, “The energy spirals up the tiers and is focused through the dragonglass and the structure of the throne room. It charges the throne until the throne can hold no more. Any overflow cascades down the back side of the city. Down the steps. Rejoining the flow of the Mother River.”
“And a rightful emperor is supposed to be able to use that power.”
“Or an unrightful one will be destroyed by it,” she agreed.
“Pity we haven’t got an emperor handy.” He waved in the direction of Anuraja’s army. “Some red-hot thaumaturgy would come in pretty handy right now. I’d settle for a nice big wave of river water.”
“The Alchemical Emperor was quite the student of Vastu Shastra, the science of building. It is not so different from the geomantic skills of my own tradition of Wizardry, but is much a lost art now.”
“Surely that was not so long ago.”
“It was eradicated.”
“Do … the Lotus Kingdoms have no tradition of Wizardry of their own?”
“They did,” said Ata Akhimah. “A very great one. The Alchemical Emperor drove the other Wizards of the Lotus Kingdoms—the Lotus Empire, in his day—into exile. Some went to Messaline. Some to Aezin. Some to Song, or Rasa. None stayed here.”
“None stayed here and lived, you mean.”
Her smile was tight. “That we know of.”
“What about Nizhvashiti?”
“Not a Wizard. But the royal line might be said to have some Wizardry in it. Wouldn’t you say?”
Her eyes cut sideways at Mrithuri, and at Syama pacing mildly beside her. The Dead Man thought of Mrithuri’s way with beasts, and nodded.
He said, “Excuse me. I should speak with the rajni.”
He stepped in beside Mrithuri as Ata Akhimah went a little wider, taking his former place in the buffer zone. Mrithuri smiled at him sidelong as she waved, and waved.
The Dead Man lowered his voice for her ears only, ignoring the sweet glare Chaeri leveled. He said, “Your people do not seem much concerned with the siege. Nor do you.”
“They know it is no matter. The Mother will rise soon,” Mrithuri murmured. “Then let them try to blockade us by land, or even with boats.”
“You put a lot of faith in the river.”
&nbs
p; “You put a lot of faith in your god, too. You do not see me mocking Her.”
Her voice was not cold. It held, only, the warning of coldness. It was enough.
He stepped back, feeling that he had lost more ground to Chaeri. There were unfriendly eyes in the crowd, hidden behind smiles. They had to be there; he knew they had to be there.
And his faith in his god had not saved him before.
* * *
At the foot of the stairs back up to the palace, the Dead Man stopped the Wizards. Tsering-la was on the plump side, but not too much taller than the Dead Man.
“Let me borrow your coat,” the Dead Man said.
“Are you passing for a Wizard?” But Tsering began unbuttoning. His collar of pearl and jade plates looked odd above the simple white shirt, stained and darned in places, that he had worn beneath the coat. Wizards without their trappings looked bare as shorn cats.
The Dead Man handed his own new coat to Ata Akhimah and donned the black one, turned inside out to show the lining. It was well-made, with closed seams. It would pass.
“No.” He wound a strip of cloth around his sword-hilt. “A rogue.”
He did not return to the palace with the rajni and her men and women. He went out into the city on his own, in the coat that did not fit him well, with his veil wrapped in a different style than he wore it commonly. He found a tavern. Food might be growing less varied and fresh, but his coin would still buy beer. Less of it, to be sure. But real famine and lack would not stalk the city for some time yet.
The Dead Man had no doubt that if the siege was not lifted, it would come.
So he sat and drank, and listened.
The conversation was not as subdued as he might have expected. And it was interesting, though not for the reasons he’d been afraid. Mrithuri’s confidence, for all it worried him—for all he wondered how much it was founded in the effect of the Eremite venom, and a ration of the comforting self-delusion of youth—Mrithuri’s confidence did seem to encourage her people for the better.
Comforting, but not useful.
He left that tavern, and found another.
This one had a darker and more suspicious air, even as he entered under a sign in the backward, left-to-right local writing that proclaimed the place to be named The Blind Dolphin. Lamps flickered on wicks trimmed short and chary of oil; the low tables were gritty and their edges whittled. The Dead Man seated himself on a bolster that smelled musty, with perhaps the memory of cat urine. He was grateful for the camouflaging, herbal aroma of cannabis and bidi from two currently unused water pipes along the side wall.
He ordered wine. Safer, he thought, to choose something stronger than beer under these sanitary circumstances.
It came in a clay cup. As he linked his hands around it, he found himself thinking of the Gage, wondering where his old friend was and whether time would find them together again, sitting across from one another and drinking. The Dead Man sipped his wine in the traditional fashion, insinuating the cup under his veil. The Gage, if he were here, would have taken it in through some mysterious process of absorption.
It was just as well the Gage was not here. Monstrous brazen automata were terrible at undercover work.
It did not take long for the Dead Man to determine that this time, he had located the proper bar. A skinny, weedy fellow dressed in wrapped workman’s trousers, his narrow nose once-broken and his narrow mustache suffering from undergrown gaps, was holding forth on his political opinions from a position a few cushions to the left. His comments were ostensibly directed at his drinking companion, who was a potbellied, sunken-chested little fellow with stringy hair. But they were pitched to carry throughout the establishment, and obviously meant to engage the ear of anyone who heard them.
He spoke at length of how poorly trade and fishing had fared under the young rajni; how her grandfather should have married her off and found them a proper lord before he died. What a tragedy it was that her parents had died so young and left her so unprepared for her role in life. And that she was so full of ideas that did not suit her station. “That was the old raja’s failing,” the man with the terrible mustache said. “He missed his son so much he spoiled the granddaughter, you ask me. And now, since she thinks she’s too good to marry and get us a proper raja, reunite the southern kingdoms … well, we all pay the price.”
The Dead Man glanced at the proprietor. A taller fellow, though also not overly well-fed, he was engaged in dusting racks of serving dishes and rolling his eyes whenever his back was turned on the first man. He didn’t interrupt him, though. It was the shopkeeper’s eternal quandary: which custom did you want to drive away? None of it, by preference, unless trade was so good one didn’t have to care about losing a little.
Trade did not seem to be so good here that this particular landlord could afford to send people away because he did not care for their politics. The Dead Man did wonder if his business might not improve if he sent offensive little rats like this one packing … but then, based on the state of the men’s facial capillaries and the number of wine jugs scattered around their table, these two might almost be enough to keep a business afloat—so to speak—all on their own.
The Dead Man sighed, and finished his wine. It wasn’t good, and under ordinary circumstances he might not have minded discarding it. But a siege was no time to waste sustenance. As the drunk men waved for food and more wine, he wondered where men dressed as common laborers found such excess of coin.
The landlord brought a basket of flat, risen bread, made with flour that looked to be of better quality than the wine. Another client paid his reckoning and left, sharing a long glance with the landlord. The man with the mustache and his even less prepossessing friend tore the bread and dabbled it through clarified butter and herbs. It was still steaming; perhaps it would be safe to eat. The smell made the Dead Man’s stomach surprise him by rumbling.
Perhaps it was still possible to feel hunger after all. Even in such a world as this.
“That looks like good bread,” the Dead Man said to the landlord. He made his voice loud enough to be heard by all. “May I have a basket, too?”
“Certainly. And more wine?”
The Dead Man touched a forefinger to his veiled brow in agreement.
The weedy man turned. “Are you one of those foreign mercenaries?”
The Dead Man considered, for a moment, how to answer. “I serve the rajni.”
The potbellied one turned and spat. On the floor.
No wonder these two were so endeared to the proprietor.
“Do I not see you eating, right now, wheat from the royal stores? Her largesse fills your belly.”
The fellow with the mustache wiped wine out of it onto the bare back of his arm. “The river would fill it better. And that Anuraja won’t do nothing to the common folk. We’re beneath notice or ransom, us. And it’s we who feed the city.”
“Oh, so she should just turn herself over and lie down to be fucked by a poxed murderer so you can get back to fishing.”
The man flushed mahogany in embarrassment or rage. “From what I hear, he wouldn’t be the first foreigner to stick it in her. One of your lot, isn’t her lover supposed to be?”
“I had heard she was a maiden,” the Dead Man said noncommittally.
“Every wench will tell you so. But then, every wench will tell you anything to get what she wants from you.”
Or because she’s afraid of what might happen if she told you the truth, the Dead Man thought. The hot bread arrived, and the butter-oil fragrant with coriander. He noticed that his portion had a sprinkle of mild fresh cheese on top, and wondered if the landlord’s wife or daughter were in the back, kerchiefed and red from the stove, listening through the swinging door of slatted reeds. His wine, he thought, probably didn’t have too much spit in it. He tore off a morsel of bread, noting the faint pattern of clay swirls on its crust where it had been slapped against the chimney of a clay oven to bake. He swirled it through the butter and slipped it
beneath his veil. Smoke and grain, herbs and garlic and the grit of gray sea salt. Delicious.
It made him homesick for the puffed, stone-baked bread of his youth, leavened by heat and steam.
Having swallowed, he said, “You think your rajni is disposable.”
“She’s a wench,” the man sneered. “What’s a wench good for?”
His stringy-haired friend might have been a little less drunk, or a little less well-paid. He scooted his threadbare orange cushion out from between the provocateur and the Dead Man.
“When the wench is a queen, to say such things is treason,” the Dead Man answered. His voice was low and soft now, without threat in it.
The Dead Man turned to the proprietor, who had moved closer to both of them and was cleaning a bottle on the none-too-spotless sleeve of his mustard-brown robe. Two, drunk or half-drunk, and at best armed with small knives slipped inside their trousers: that, he could handle. Three, and one sober and armed with whatever he kept behind the counter to protect his establishment? That would be dicing with the will of the Scholar-God.
He met the man’s eye.
The man shrugged. He shifted his grip to the neck of the bottle. “Do your mercenaries drink?”
Ritu and her people were mercenaries after a fashion, he supposed. And there was Druja and the wranglers, teamsters, and roustabouts of the stranded caravan. Those folks definitely drank.
The Dead Man nodded. “Maybe not as much as these two.”
“Oh, well,” the landlord said. “Who does, really?”
The fellow with the mustache made his mind up. Like many of his decisions, the Dead Man suspected, it was a poor one. He got to his feet and pulled a filleting knife from his trousers.
Somebody was at least marginally dedicated to maintaining his cover.
The Dead Man didn’t bother lowering his veil as he stood, careful not to overset the table. He would not insult the landlord’s wife (or, perhaps, daughter) by spilling the food she had roasted herself near the hot clay oven to prepare. He did not draw his guns, either the one Ata Akhimah had modified for him, or the one she had built from the model of the first. He picked up the battered orange cushion, which was wheel-shaped, with a circle at the center, and quite hard. Stuffed with sawdust, if he was not mistaken.
The Red-Stained Wings--The Lotus Kingdoms, Book Two Page 26