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

by Elizabeth Bear

  “I am surprised to find you alone,” said Khaldi, which was not exactly an answer. “Where is your Wizard?”

  “I am on an errand,” the Gage pretended to explain. “You want to show me your amazing machine?”

  Khaldi laughed and raked his flawless fingers through that luxuriant hair. He, in the very least, did not seem to be suffering from poison. “I have every intention of talking you into a love affair with it,” he admitted. “But now that that’s out of the way, let’s go look around!”

  He had changed his sand-colored bandages and masks for clothes in shades of russets and grays. He led the Gage now down a corridor so clean and well-lit it seemed like no ship’s gangway, nor even any castle corridor, the Gage had ever seen. “This is the main crew-way,” Khaldi explained, gesturing to the knots of men who passed them. All men, the Gage noticed, and did not remark. All wearing wimples cut close to cover their necks and jowls, and close-fitting caps on shaved heads. All wearing shades of violet, and russet.

  “Are those uniforms?” the Gage asked.

  “We are a crew,” Khaldi said proudly.

  “What does your crew do?”

  “Where do you think the dragonglass that decorates palaces and temples comes from? We harvest it.”

  The Gage thought of the protective gear. He thought of the dust. The people of this walking city … no, this harvester … must have good technology.

  “That’s a risky business.”

  “It’s not dangerous unless it’s broken,” Khaldi said with an airy wave. “It’s the dust that kills. Or if it cuts, the wound will fester.”

  “How do you harvest a thing,” the Gage wondered, “without breaking off a piece?”

  Khaldi seemed to recognize that this was a rhetorical question. He said, “We did not expect to find one such as you walking the storm. Did you come here for the glass? Did your Wizard send you?”

  Well, that would save on some explanations.

  “I came here to get across it, mostly,” the Gage admitted. “I did not expect that it would be so bad.”

  “Headed where?” They walked down passageways that seemed endless. The Gage was slightly disconcerted that his footsteps neither thumped nor rang. The springiness of the dragonhide underfoot reminded him of how walking had felt when he had elastic tendons, cartilage, flesh. When he was not a structure of unyielding metal. He felt uneasy, and strange.

  Khaldi looked at him speculatively, considering the depth to which the decking was stretching beneath his feet. “I think it would end badly, if I put you on a ladder. Do you mind another climb on the superstructure?”

  “Does it involve going out in the storm?”

  The Master Mechanic laughed. “No, I think we will climb up the inside. Follow me.”

  They climbed up the inside. It was more dragonbone, and the Gage noticed that Khaldi pulled on a pair of heavy gloves before touching it. Maybe they did have acceptable protocols for handling the stuff.

  Maybe the Gage could learn them. Not for himself, obviously. But for the people at home.

  They climbed only one level, and the effort was trivial. More walking on the trampoline of dragonhide, and now they began passing people—workers—in the corridors. Those people also wore the uniforms. It occurred to the Gage that he had not seen a person out of one.

  “Is this a military vessel?”

  “It’s a city, basically,” said Khaldi. “Why?”

  “I have not seen anyone who seems to be off-duty.”

  “Well,” Khaldi said, “this is the production floor. You wouldn’t.”

  The uniformed people in this area did not wear filter masks. The Gage assumed they were not working directly with dragon-poison. And yet, here they lived in this … ship, this city. Many of them, he saw, had suffered for it. He saw mottled scalps, flaking skin. Oval, purple discolorations along their hairlines looked like finger-bruises, except the color was flat and unvaried and the lesions were unnaturally smooth and slightly depressed. Festering sores appeared white-edged on lips, around eyes and nostrils. The Gage saw more than one eye blinded and milky-blue with cataract.

  Some had even become deformed. Noses had collapsed, flat against faces, the bone within eaten away. Fingers clubbed, as if the victims suffered leprosy. Heavy goiters hung from throats, and strange bulges rose near collarbones. The most afflicted, the Gage noticed, wore the plainest and most worn uniforms. They did not raise their eyes when he and Khaldi passed. They ducked their heads and skirted, backs to the wall and not to the Gage and the Master Mechanic.

  “Are these your folk?” the Gage asked. “Do you lead them?”

  “These are not mine,” Khaldi said. “These report to the Master Sorter.”

  “And your mechanics? They seem to have better protective gear.”

  “They are skilled labor,” Khaldi said. “Expensive to replace.”

  “So these are slaves? Conscripts?”

  “We are free men,” said the slavemaster. “We labor for no king. It is for our own profit that we do this.”

  The Gage thought about the masks caked in green poison. He looked at the sores encrusting cracking hands, the goiters, the mottled scalps shedding clumps of hair. He held his speech.

  Khaldi followed the arc of his gaze. “They’re not slaves. They’re debtors.”

  The Gage had seen a lot of bullshit in his time. “Debtors.”

  “Men who owe money to the city. Working off their debt. They might become investors in time. Like me.” He slapped his chest with self-pleasure. “The trick is not to spend your whole life in the city. You can stand a little exposure.” He ran a hand through his thick, dark hair. The Gage wondered if it was a nervous tic, an unconscious statement of status, or a self-soothing gesture. “You can make a fortune here in a very short time.”

  Certainly, the Gage thought. If you do not come in already burdened.

  He turned to the nearest laborer, a man dressed in a worn blue tunic, his feet wrapped in rags through which spots of blood and lymph were seeping. All around him, the Gage smelled suppuration.

  “Are you a free man?” he said, without preamble.

  The laborer jumped back, nonplussed at being addressed by a faceless tower of bronze. As, the Gage supposed, anyone might be. “Free,” he said, scratching at a welted hand. He looked dubiously from Khaldi to the Gage.

  “It’s safe,” Khaldi said. He folded his arms over his chest in anticipatory amusement.

  “Are you suggesting I ain’t free?” the laborer asked, lifting his chin. He must be blind in one eye; he looked as if his teeth and possibly his jaw were rotting.

  “I’m asking you,” the Gage said. “How do you feel?”

  “I do honest work,” the laborer said. “I pay my note. I feed my family.”

  You breed another generation to be consumed by this machine.

  “You work so hard,” the Gage said, in pity. “Surely you must rest.”

  “Oh, aye,” the man said. “Every tenth day is a rest day. We ain’t slaves.”

  The Gage wished he had eyes, so that he could have closed them. He wished he had a gaze, so he could have turned it away. As it was, he took his courteous leave of the laborer, and watched the man limp away along the corridor.

  Whistling.

  “You could take better care of your workers,” the Gage said. “You could keep them healthy.”

  Khaldi shrugged. “There’s only so many shares of profit to go around.”

  “That man is rotting from the inside out, and it is your profit that has poisoned him.”

  “True,” Khaldi said.

  He waited, but the Gage waited longer.

  “Ah,” Khaldi said. “But what if we became men like you?”

  That made a peculiar amount of sense.

  “You want to buy my body.”

  Khaldi shrugged. “Say we want to re-create it. Say we want to use your expertise to make workers who will not suffer when exposed to the dragonbone and the dust.”

  “
If you became men like me, you would not be men.”

  “We’d give you fair price for the knowledge.”

  “Have you Wizards?”

  Khaldi, by means of exposition, waved to the enormous edifice that surrounded them. If the Gage concentrated, he could feel the individual falls of each knifelike mechanical foot. He could feel the minute shudder that ran through the insect-city with each increment that bore it forward, scuttling and utterly level, across the blasted plain.

  “We have Wizards,” Khaldi said.

  “And how is it that you would select who became like me?”

  “Those who volunteered, of course,” Khaldi said. “We are not monsters.”

  “Would you pay them to undergo the process? Forgive their debt?” Privately, the Gage wondered what mechanisms were in place to assure that the maximum possible debt was accrued. Everything costs something.

  Perhaps that was true.

  “Well,” Khaldi said judiciously. “They could no doubt pay off their debt faster, if they did agree.…”

  The Gage could not have been less pleased if he had discovered slaves on treadmills. He had discovered slaves on treadmills, in fact, without stretching the metaphor. He restrained a momentary desire to smash this place, to start crushing and disassembling.

  He turned his head toward Khaldi, which was not necessary for the looking at him. The looking at him, very sadly, took care of itself in the Gage’s case.

  He let himself think, I could ruin this place with less effort than this “Master Mechanic” puts toward self-awareness.

  “What sort of training goes into becoming a Master Mechanic, friend Khaldi?”

  Khaldi cocked his head. “Well, it depends, I guess.”

  “Depends.”

  “If you are buying in, like me … not much training. Mostly on the job. Your seconds will usually teach you the ropes as you go.”

  “You might expect that,” the Gage said, without actually agreeing. It was always a little bit of effort, because of the way he was made, not to just agree with people, not to just go along with whatever self-delusions they professed. “And if you are not buying in?”

  “Well, if you are working your way up from the ranks—” Khaldi shrugged. “There are a series of skill tests. And of course recommendation from one’s betters plays a part in promotion.”

  “Of course,” the Gage murmured. “How did these cities come to be, Master Mechanic?”

  “They were built by the Alchemical Emperor, in his day. To harvest dragonglass for his palaces and monasteries. It was a conceit of his.”

  “I see it was,” the Gage said, contemplating dragonglass skylights and dragonglass-lined walls. “And now you have no princes?”

  “We’re a joint-stock company,” he said cheerfully. “We’re only beholden to ourselves.”

  It would be easier, the Gage thought, if this were just slaves on treadmills. He could … he could just destroy everything. Why would the Alchemical Emperor, say, build these enormous machines, and then staff them with people from as far away as Messaline?

  So as not to poison his own people, obviously. Let someone else do the dangerous, murderous, messy work. Keep your own family as far away from it as possible.

  Where were the women and children associated with all these men? The Gage hoped they were far away, somewhere a little safer from the poison dust. He hoped they were not kept on some high and private level of the ships, slowly rotting away.

  He could just destroy everything. He could disable this harvester. He could tear it apart.

  And then everybody who lived inside it would die even faster, in the desert with no way to escape. He could tell himself that that would be a cleaner death, but the truth of the matter was that, no, it wouldn’t.

  The Gage thought about the exploited, rotting laborers. He thought about their inevitable fate.

  That would be wrong, he told himself, and tried to make the fire inside him believe it. It would not be mercy.

  It would be mercy if it were a horse with a broken leg. A jackal fix-eyed and slavering in the initial stages of rabies. It would be mercy for any other creature whose doom had been fixed.

  Men, he reminded himself. Men are not like other creatures.

  The Alchemical Emperor the people of the Lotus Kingdoms so revered with nostalgia was turning out to be no better than any other emperor, after all. The Gage was not, in particular, surprised. Honestly, he was weary enough with men and the worlds of men that he didn’t even manage to feel disappointed.

  “Things are much better now! We work for ourselves, and are not enslaved by princes.” Khaldi clapped the Gage on the shoulder with his gloved hand.

  The Gage rang like a bell.

  Even beyond Khaldi—who was nothing, really, except a small man with a small sinecure and the abiding desire to feel important—even beyond Khaldi, the Gage knew, there would be others. The people who were really making gold off this deal, and who would never place themselves in a position of even such reduced jeopardy as the one this Master Mechanic inhabited. Those were the people with real prestige, who might come and tour the harvester. Even stay overnight. But who would never deign to spend a risky amount of time here.

  Destroying the harvester would do nothing to harm them. Except in the pocketbook, which was tempting and perhaps the blow they would feel the most. But it was not his place to make decisions for other creatures of sensibility. Beings who had come to this place somehow, and had not left it.

  There was always the problem of a sweeter peach on the next bough, to keep you reaching.

  Khaldi said, “Will you help us make our people safer?”

  Safer. Unhumaned. Rendered tireless. Rendered unneeding of rest. Able to toil without ceasing.

  “No,” the Gage replied.

  He turned to Khaldi, though he did not need to orient himself by rotation to enjoy the sickly greenish pallor seeping down Khaldi’s olive face. He turned entirely for the drama, so he could lower his own burnished head down over Khaldi’s and enjoy Khaldi’s expression as he saw himself mirrored in the Gage’s faceless face. The Gage had a sense that maybe his mirror finish had been softened a little by the wearing dust. Well, staring into your own eyes was still a moment of truth, even if they were a little bit blurry.

  “What I will do for you,” the Gage said, “is this. Once the storm is over, and your city is once again in control of its passage and its destiny, I will make you this offer. Deliver me to the Singing Towers—”

  “We don’t go there!”

  As if he had not been interrupted, the Gage continued. “Deliver me to the Singing Towers, and I will refrain from disabling your abomination of a city, and thus killing everyone within it much faster than they are dying already.”

  Khaldi folded his arms across himself and rocked back.

  “This city. This … Many-Legged Truth. This thing you have purchased a share of, without contemplating what poison you are paying for. Your Many-Legged Truth is built from the stolen bones of dragons, and it slowly poisons everyone within it. Do you doubt that one such as I can destroy it?”

  “You are not a monster who would kill ten thousand innocents,” Khaldi said confidently.

  The Gage permitted himself a laugh. “You rely on indentured labor. Desperate men who will die for a little money. What would it harm me to kill them a little faster, and far more mercifully?” The Gage shook his mirrored head.

  “I owe you a debt for the rescue, even if you performed it for your own reasons, so if you help me a little bit more, I won’t hasten their end. But—” He reached out to the bulkhead and sank his fingers into it without strain. “I would shoot a cow infested with the river-worm, Master Mechanic. Out of pity. And you are far worse than the river-worm, my friend.”

  19

  “Marry me,” Mrithuri said in the dark.

  “For a day?” the Dead Man answered dreamily.

  He was warm against her back, a wiry curve fitted against the bones of her spine. The
ir hips bruised each other when they slid together. She liked his spareness. He made her feel, for a moment, as if she were not too thin. She was cold all the time now, even in the heat of what should have been the rainy season. Gooseflesh stood out on her clammy skin. She imagined it puckering the outlines of the sacred animals inked into her skin: Bull, tiger, peacock. Dolphin, elephant, bearded vulture.

  Strength, fierceness, confidence. Speed, steadfastness, wisdom.

  She was not sure she had any of these things.

  She put a hand out from under the covers and laid it on Syama’s back. The bhaluukutta breathed sleepily, warm and unconcerned.

  There was a war outside the walls. There was a war at their very gates.

  But there was no war in the room with them, and out of simple animal pragmatism, Syama and Serhan made use of the time to rest.

  Mrithuri could muster nervous energy enough for all of them. The simple act of lying still, curled in the Dead Man’s arms, was an act of will. Moving was an act of will as well, because fear weighed her chest like a stone. She had been telling herself—telling everyone—that the river would come to their rescue.

  But the river was not rising. And Hathi had plucked for her a blood-red lotus.

  Red for birth. Or red, for war.

  She drew a breath. “For a day,” she answered. “For an hour. For the rest of our lives. That might not be too much of a commitment. What do you say?”

  “Why?” He touched her face with the back of his hand.

  Tears pressed the slits in her closed eyelids. “Because that old monster is coming, and I do not know if we can keep him out much longer. And if he gets in, he will take me. And I’ll be the sixth dead queen of Sarathai-lae.”

  “Not because you love me?” he teased.

  The gentle affection in his voice only deepened her despair. And his words stopped her cold, though his hand in her hair did not grow any less gentle. The pattern of his breathing encouraged hers to soften. She let it ease her a little. She let it smooth her ruffled sensibilities.

  The weight on her chest was still there. But maybe it was a weight that she could breathe around. She pressed the back of her head into the hollow under his chin.