Any day without sounds of looting and pillaging is a good day. She checked briefly to make sure her pajamas were decently arrayed—another wardrobe item brought into her possession by charity—and called a greeting. Her voice rasped through a sleep-thick throat.
Still, it surprised her when the eyes that peered around the sliding edge of her door were those of Mrithuri Rajni. Sayeh would not expect a person of her rank to run her own errands. She swung herself upright and reached for her crutch. It turned out that if she was careful, she now only needed one. This, pleasingly, left her a hand free to do other things with.
Sayeh got herself to her feet—well, foot—while Mrithuri made her way into the chamber. Mrithuri’s Caliphate bodyguard (and, Sayeh guessed, much more than that) followed her a handspan behind.
The rajni looked terrible. Much worse than Sayeh had, the last time Sayeh had steeled herself for a glance in a mirror. The hollows under her eyes were a darker shade of sickly green than the rest of her skin. She looked bloodless and scraped, and her hair was dull and frayed. Sayeh thought she was probably holding herself up by sheer will.
The Dead Man slid the door closed behind him, and wandered away from the women, out onto a small covered balcony. He leaned on the railing, a thoughtful silhouette against the still-gray sky, rain falling behind him. Sayeh looked away. No wonder she had no idea what time it was. The light could hardly have been more watery and indistinct.
“Please,” Sayeh said. “Sit. Excuse my dishabille.”
“Excuse mine,” Mrithuri answered, picking a cobweb off her shoulder. “This is rather a mess.”
Mrithuri sat, and Sayeh found herself wishing she had something to offer: tea, cakes. But she was here under Mrithuri’s hospitality, so—comforting though it would have been to have something to do with their hands—it would have been the rankest presumption to turn that hospitality around and offer it back to her hostess.
Mrithuri—shoulders hunched, shivering in the heat—took that pressure off of her by simply saying, “So you want me to marry Anuraja.”
“Anuraja wants you to marry Anuraja.”
“And the sorcerer you mentioned?”
Sayeh shook her head. “She has her own agenda. She looks for ways to get promises out of people. Ümmühan is of the opinion that those are wedges for her magic.”
“Ümmühan seems very experienced.”
“Well,” Sayeh said judiciously. “This is not her first existential threat.”
Mrithuri smiled, a little painfully, and rubbed her arms.
“Are you well, Sister?” Sayeh asked her, leaning forward. “Should one of your healers be called?”
“I’m all right,” Mrithuri answered.
Whether it was a lie or wishful thinking, Sayeh wasn’t quite sure. “Are you free to marry?” she asked.
“I am a maiden,” Mrithuri said, which wasn’t quite an answer.
Sayeh’s eyes cut to the Dead Man, out of earshot on the balcony. That’s what they all say. “What about your lover?”
With an effort, Mrithuri sparkled. “There are other ways to be together and give pleasure,” she remarked blandly, adopting a worldly air.
Sayeh giggled behind her hand. She liked this young woman. She hoped for Mrithuri’s sake, for her own sake, that her mad plan had merit.
She was a priestess of the Mother. She was the chosen one of the Mother. Her understanding of metaphysics was not, in point of fact, particularly poor. Her mad plan had merit. She must believe in it.
“Will you do it?”
Mrithuri’s forced brightness cracked. She heaved a sigh and closed her eyes. “The sisters in the walls say they cannot clean the water. I spoke with Nizhvashiti—sorry, a Godmade, you will meet it soon, I am certain—on the way here, and Nizhvashiti does not have a means to help. Ata Akhimah says the means she has for purifying water is the same as that which the befouling spell bypassed to do its evil work. And Tsering-la says we can build a still, but cleaning enough water for the ten thousand or more of my subjects crammed within these walls … Well, we don’t have time to build that many stills.”
Sayeh watched the young woman dispassionately, then nodded. “All right then.”
“What will he offer us for terms, if we surrender? The safety of my people—”
“He will assure that,” Sayeh said. “Your guard captains, generals, and Wizard must go into exile.”
“My women?” Mrithuri asked.
“He does not worry much about the capabilities of women,” Sayeh said. “I do not think he will notice them. Unless they are pretty. Then I’d say get them out of sight.”
The Tian rajni sighed in relief. “One is. And young. But she is friendly with the cloistered sisters. I’m sure they will hide her. Will he vow to protect my nuns?”
“I don’t know,” Sayeh said. “But it seems from your complexion, begging your pardon, that they must have means of protecting themselves. And you said … there was a Godmade.”
“Indeed,” said Mrithuri. “Perhaps not even Anuraja will face such wrath as that simply to indulge himself among the pretty girls.” She glanced out at the balcony. “My familiars must be protected. And an honor guard. Three men. Also my personal secretary.”
“Get him to take those Cho-tse earrings out and I’ll see what I can do.”
22
The Gage alighted from the Many-Legged Truth swinging in its access cage, and did not take it even slightly amiss when they dropped him against the drifting sand with somewhat more force than was necessary.
He probably deserved it.
He disembarked, and the cage was winched away from him hastily. It would not have mattered; the Many-Legged Truth had a thousand feet, and from where he stood, the Gage could have reached several of them.
It was an abomination. And it was an abomination in which people who did not deserve his wrath suffered and lived.
The Gage held his fury, though it cost him. He turned his back on the Many-Legged Truth. He did not turn to regard it (he did not need to turn to regard it) as its gears and pulleys cranked up before the turning of the wind, and its locked feet released, and it accelerated smoothly, step by step, away.
He let it walk away from him, and he did not smash it, for all it deserved smashing. He did not smash it, for the sake of those trapped in its spidery embrace. He did not smash it, out of pity.
He turned his back on it instead.
He faced a bleached autumnal skeleton of what had been a city, in its time.
He understood how it got its name. Because here he was, looking at it across a bleached alkali flat, everything simmering in mirages. At this distance it was white as chalk, white as lime. The tall spiraling oryx-horn towers of the thing itself were bleached and perhaps melted into unsettling shapes that made him think of the bones of coral, when the animals within are dead and scoured away.
And still it sang.
It sang the hymn of wind through worn passages. Its multiphonic flutelike notes were shrill and bright, and sharp. Not in the sense that you could have cut yourself, but the sense that they were a touch off-key. Perhaps that was indeed because the city was melted. Perhaps it was because the ears who were meant to hear its tones were not, and never had been, human.
The Gage squared his metal shoulders and began the long, searing march across the dusty plain.
He was coated in alkali by the time he made it to the other side. If he had thought the powdered glass of the rotdust storm was fine and penetrative, he had reckoned without this stuff. It was unto dust as silk was unto burlap, and it infiltrated and coated and clung.
It was so fine that it did not bind and grit, however. One small mercy, then.
The drifted dust and sand was slowly eating a pavement, and he went out onto it with footsteps that first shuffled and then rang. The pavement led him into the city on a stately spiral, somewhat similar to the one that wound its way up the artificial mountain of Sarathai-tia. It was, the Gage could see, a kind of processional, and no
t intended for regular use. There were buildings that never came close to it and there were no alleys or side roads to connect them. There were no doors leading onto it, though the Gage could see ledges far above him, leading to enormous gaps in the facade.
The city was, overwhelmingly, designed for massive beings. Massive beings with wings.
* * *
The processional ended in a square. An enormous square, sprawled out in the shadow of these even-more-enormous towers. And mostly filled by what the Gage at first took to be another enormous thing, a dune of white alkali sand.
As he stared at it, more details of the shape emerged, white on white in the bleaching sunshine. It lay across the dust of the courtyard, ghostly and corrugated, and the Gage wondered if it could be the shed skin of a dragon. Then he saw the gaunt arch of rib cage, the thin skin taut and stretched between ribs, the tatters of membranes stretched likewise between the bones of sprawled wings. He saw the lids that sagged wrinkled over sunken sockets and the broken talons that splayed on the drifted cobblestones.
It was a corpse. The most enormous corpse he’d ever seen, and the Gage had seen some big ones. On this trip, in fact.
“So that’s where the poison comes from.” As with the green glass desert, the places where dragons died—or lived for long, for that matter—were toxic to all life, and stayed that way forever. He walked up to it, and even a Gage could feel awe at what had lived here once, and lived no more.
“So.”
The voice was a papery sigh, sand slipping on sand.
The Gage, who feared nothing, scrambled back as the ghost-pale head rose, bony and cadaverous, shedding streams of dust like water falling from a mossy stone. It cast about, eager whiskers cat-quivering, but the lids still drooped, and the Gage realized it was blind. The whiskers brushed him, paused, brushed back.
He stood very still indeed.
“So,” the dragon said again. The flesh on its neck had withered to piteous swags; its scales were dull and brittle-seeming as shells worn translucent by the sea. “Someone has come, finally.”
Of course it was not dead.
Of course there was one dragon living.
Otherwise the sky above would not have blazed with livid suns. It would have been empty, except for distant stars, like the sky over dead Ansh-Sahal.
What it meant that the suns of Erem blasted this dragon city, he began to speculate.
The dragon didn’t seem about to crush him. Indeed, it huffed air over him as it drew back, like a dog seeking an elusive scent.
“I am a Gage,” the Gage said.
“I am Kyrlmyrandal,” the enormous creature answered politely, in a voice like paper ashes rubbed between fingers. “Some call me Mother of Exiles.”
“You are the mark that is made,” the Gage answered, wondering at a useful thing a Wizard had taught him. “And the act of marking.”
“I am the thing that is left behind,” the dragon said, and showed toothless gums in a thing that might be a smile. “What does it mean, Gage?”
“I am a thing that was made for revenge against the man who killed my family, and who would have killed me.”
“He did not manage?”
“He left me for dead.”
“And were you?”
“Only my soul. My heart still beat. A little.”
“Enough to power that machine.”
“The heart’s long gone,” the Gage said.
“But what does the word mean?”
“Oh,” the Gage said. “It means a pledge or a troth. A guarantee. A word-of-honor. It means the object given as security on a loan. A gage is a thing used to take a measure. It means a hand. Or a gauntlet. It means the object thrown upon the ground in challenge.”
“That is a fine set of meanings for a name. Are you all of those things?”
“I am,” the Gage said. “Must names have meanings?”
“Ours must,” said the dragon. “Ky means (the being) and indicates that what follows is a name. And you are correct, myrandal means the thing that marks, and the act of making that mark, and also the mark left by the act of marking. I am also called the First of Dragons.”
“‘I am the word and the pen,’” the Gage quoted. The wind-song of the towers had a tendency to creep into his hollows and echo inside of him, as if his body were only one more sinus in its gigantic, convoluted sounding chamber. It was an uncomfortable, shivery sensation, and it blurred his vision a little. An unsettling sensation for someone without eyes.
“More or less,” said the dragon. “Your poetry?”
“My best friend’s religion.”
“Ah,” said the dragon. “I have been drowsing here a long time. I am glad the world still has such things as friends.”
“And religions?”
“I have never concerned myself much with religions.” The dragon pushed her nose against his carapace. The flesh looked velvety soft, like a horse’s muzzle. “I am glad you are here. I do not seem to die. And I have been so very lonely.”
“I have come a very long way seeking you,” the Gage said. “Or at least, seeking the Singing Towers.”
“Singing Towers? Is that all they call us now.” Kyrlmyrandal tilted her head. From whiskers to the broken stubs of horns, the head was as long as a wagon. The creature might be twice the size of the ice-drake the Gage and the Dead Man had encountered with the caravan that brought them to the Lotus Kingdoms. Or she might be three times larger. She was so big he could not estimate.
The ice-drake had been big enough to casually carry off a shaggy mountain ox.
The dragon asked. “What is it about the Singing Towers, as you call us, that you have come such a long way to seek?”
“I think a Wizard sent me to you for help.”
The dragon froze, as if crystallized. The Gage feared for a moment that he had offended her. But then, creakily, she began to laugh.
If her voice was the rumble of a speaking mountain, her laughter was the hollow boom of waves in sea caverns. Finally she stopped, and wiped her eyes one by one, carefully, with her handlike, taloned front feet, though the Gage did not see any tears. Still gasping a little, she said. “That’s really funny, because—as you can probably tell by looking at me—I cannot help anyone.”
The Gage wished he had eyes to close in frustration. “That … is not what I wanted to hear.”
“Did you come with that walking city?” the dragon asked.
“They scooped me out of the storm.”
“A rescue? I had not heard they were like that.”
“They came looking for me, I think. In particular. They wanted…” The Gage indicated his burnished chassis with the flat of a hand, passed downward. “To be more like me. They tried to take that.”
The dragon preened her broken claws with all the brittle dignity of an elderly cat. “Did it occur to you to wonder how they knew to come looking?”
“It did, actually.” The Gage found himself examining the improbable specter of the ancient dragon, the wrinkled skin stretched soft and slack between scales that had lost any color or iridescence they might once have had. He remembered the ice-drake, how it had shone in the sun, how its wings had been veined in glacial colors. It had been white. This being was … bleached. “Those people. They have links to Messaline, of old.”
“Your human cities are a mystery to me,” the dragon admitted.
“Old Erem,” the Gage said. “Messaline is built on the site of Old Erem. Not Ancient Erem, which is in the mountains not too far away.”
“Hmm,” Kyrlmyrandal said. “Is this where you are from?”
“I have dwelt there recently.”
“And who there knew where you were going?”
Kyrlmyrandal had a rather nuanced concept of betrayal and subterfuge, not to mention circumstantial evidence, for a nonhuman monster possibly older than the very stones. It was an excellent question. And one whose implications the Gage resisted, because as far as he knew, the only person in Messaline who could ha
ve told anyone that he might be en route to the Singing Towers was the one who had prophesied the need for the journey.
“It can’t have been the Eyeless One,” the Gage said.
“Eyeless One?”
“A Wizard of Messaline. The Wizard of Messaline. My sponsor, occasionally. She would be a very strange betrayer, having helped us so significantly along the way. It would make no sense at all for her to turn on me when this entire expedition was undertaken in her service. She could have just had us stay home and saved herself the fee.”
There were certainly stories where villains did stranger things, such as hiring an assassin to investigate and avenge their own crimes. But that would be pointless, and the Gage could not imagine the Eyeless One expending her considerable strength on anything … pointless.
“You’re very certain.”
“She has everything she could want. Except godhead.”
“And what if she saw a way to get that? What if someone offered it to her?”
The Gage might have blanched, had he not been made of metal. “I am not at all certain that she would desire such a thing.”
“Wise,” the dragon mused in her cracked voice. “My experience of godhead is that it is not all that.”
Thinking of Nizhvashiti, the Gage was inclined to concur. Then another thought occurred to him, and he said, “Interesting.”
“Many things are,” agreed Kyrlmyrandal. “I have lived to see the oceans shift their coastlines and the very mountains rise and fall. I am the oldest living thing I have ever met. And I have yet to find the thing that is boring, if you know how to address it.”
“True,” the Gage said, after pausing to consider. “But I was speaking in this case of a coincidence.”
“Those are especially interesting. On those rare occasions when one finds a coincidence to be truly so.”
“What do you mean?” the Gage asked, his thought process interrupted by his own curiosity.
“Well,” said the complacent dragon, “there is usually something meddling.”
“… Gods?”
The Red-Stained Wings--The Lotus Kingdoms, Book Two Page 38