by Devin Madson
“I refer to the escape of Deathwalker Three. Miss Marius left us earlier this evening and we have as yet been unable to recover her.”
The hieromonk laughed. “Outwitted by a whore, some brain you have. I will take the empress then and search the house to be sure.”
“Very well,” the Witchdoctor said, and I gaped as he stood aside to invite them in. Why give in to this man who had gone back on his deal? This man who had threatened him—he a god who could not be killed and had nothing to fear.
You are not very observant.
“Shut up,” I hissed, as out in the court the soldiers moved forward. “I need to think. We have to get out of here.”
It’s Saki.
“What?”
It’s Saki. He would give up anything to protect Saki.
“Oh, don’t give me that romantic shit,” I said. “He’s a god and she’s a girl who can’t even talk, she—”
Can remove a soul from a body with her hand. Without apparent effort. Working for a man who studies how the soul works. He might have been directing each and every one of those tests he put you through, but could he have achieved any of them without her?
I stared at the figures in the Wisteria Court. The first soldiers were passing Torvash, entering the house, and he just stood there letting them by. No sneaky attack, no attempt to stop them, nothing but that impassive, beautiful face owning neither heart nor soul nor trace of empathy. He was not going to fight for us.
Kocho told me Saki is the first of her kind that Torvash has ever found. He can find more of you. He can find more of me. We are just numbers on a scroll.
Footsteps thundered through the house. They drowned out the rain, drowned out the voices, drowned everything but a creeping dread I could not shake. Why run? They would only give chase. Why fight? I could kill a hundred and there would still be another left to take me down.
Really? That’s it? You’re just going to give up?
“You wanted to die.”
To die, yes, not to be taken hostage, not to be used, to be made into a weapon against my people. If this is really it, if there is no way out, then kill us both now before it’s too late.
She was right. Better to die than be in the hieromonk’s power, but even as I accepted that thought a fresh flood of anger spilled through me. How dare he make me so afraid? How dare he leave me with so little choice? I would rather die than let him take me, but I would die cracking his skull not my own.
There was no time to run. They were coming, shouts and footsteps filling the house. Any moment someone would see the lantern, would come through the door, and when they did, I would be ready. I gripped the club in both hands, determination all that kept me standing. “Come on,” I muttered under my breath. “Come on. Come and get me.”
A soldier entered, his pace the quick step of someone expecting to glance around and hurry back out. But he kicked the lantern, sending it skidding across the wooden floor. In the wake of the noise, his expression rolled from shock to confusion, to something all too like amusement. He smiled, as one might smile at a child attempting to look big walking in their father’s shoes. “Going to swing that at me, are you?” he said, and I realised without the robe and the headdress and the throne, Empress Hana was a small, unthreatening woman with blonde curls like a child’s doll.
I shuffled a step back.
Grinning broadly, the man strode in, glancing over his shoulder only once as though he might call others to join the fun, but why share a woman if you didn’t have to? He sauntered closer. “You may as well drop that now, Your Majesty,” he said. “You might hurt yourself and His Holiness wouldn’t want you injured. Much.”
I hated to agree. It probably would hurt, but as long as he died it didn’t matter. The club was not the weapon we needed.
The man stopped just out of reach and spread his arms. “Well?”
His knees were bent, ready to step or swing or duck and catch me off balance, but he thought he was facing a frightened empress, not a killer.
I stepped, signalling every intention to swing, only to thrust the club hard into his gut like a punch. Air burst from his lungs, and as he doubled over, I wrenched the weapon up into his face. The crunch of his nose breaking was blissful, bested only by the crack of his skull as I smashed the side of his head. Even before he hit the ground the yearning call of death sang.
Dropping both club and knees to the floor, I touched the man’s bloodied forehead. His temple had been smashed in, his skull fractured. He was dead and calling to me and yet… I could not use him. No matter where I pressed my hand I stayed resolutely inside the empress’s body.
What’s wrong?
I stared at the mangled skull, oozing blood in the light of the toppled lantern. All around us footsteps milled through the house. “He’s calling to me but I can’t… The Witchdoctor was right. You can’t move me into the dead. I can’t move me. I can only move you. You have to do it.”
What? No! I don’t know what to do.
“And you think I do?” I said. “Just get us the hells out of here.”
Wait, how do I—
I touched the body again, and though Empress Hana did not flow with the same ease as Her, she did flow. Slow and sticky like treacle, like she was holding on, clawing not to leave. But leave she did, passing out through my hand as She had done back in Koi, and upon the hillside when we had separated for the first time.
Footsteps approached. “Casius!” someone shouted, but when a figure darkened the doorway it was not alone. Two men looked at the body, then at me, kneeling at its side, but before either could move, the dead soldier stirred. His arms twitched. His legs shifted. Then the empress got unsteadily to her feet inside the dead man’s skin and looked down at her hands. Big, strong hands attached to big, strong arms. It didn’t matter that blood still leaked down the side of her head.
“This is amazing,” she said in the man’s deep tone, and hearing the sound she laughed and looked at me, one eye wide, the other a popped mess. “Now where’s that club? We’re getting out of here.”
She found it before I could answer, and still laughing, strode toward the two men. The club smashed the shock from the first soldier’s face, cracking his jawbone like an eggshell. He fell in a spurt of blood.
“What the fuck, Casius?” The second soldier’s voice shook as he looked from the empress to the man she had just killed, blood and brain ooze mixing on the gallery floor. “We’re your friends.”
“Are you?” she said in the man’s deep voice. “That’s a shame. Which one of us decided attacking a peaceful house of learning was a good thing to do?”
“What? We… We just do what we’re told.”
She lowered the club and grunted. “Then we chose the wrong master.” Her blood dripped from ear to shoulder. “Get out of here, but if I see you again, I won’t spare you a second time.”
“Hey!” I said. “You can’t let him go, he’ll run for others. Do you want to get out of here or not?”
The soldier stepped backward, glancing from me in my empress skin to the empress in her Casius skin. “Of course I want to get out of here,” the empress snapped in her deep voice. “But I am a better judge of character than you, and I will thank you not to interrupt me.” To the trembling soldier, she added, “Your friends are dead. Go before you’re dead too.”
The man turned and ran.
“We’re going to pay for that,” I said as the empress strode toward the door. I shuffled after her, detesting the stabbing pains in every joint. “He’s going to tell everyone what he saw and the hieromonk won’t believe for a second that I’ve already escaped.”
Empress Hana shot a scornful glance over her shoulder, Casius’s burst eye making the expression all the more horrible. “He’s just going to run,” she said. “I know the sort. Forget him, we have to find another way out.”
“But there isn’t another way,” I said, snapping along at her heels amid the echoing din of searching soldiers. “Lechati said t
he place was surrounded.”
“It’s a big place,” she rumbled back. “So unless the hieromonk has a lot more soldiers at his command than he used to, that’s a damn thin line. I know this place. The last Laroth was the man who kept me hidden from Kin”—she hacked an odd, constricted laugh—“while also serving as his military commander. I hated him in the end, but I have wished for his guidance more times than I would like to admit.” She stopped and I almost walked into her sweaty back. “That way,” she said, pointing down a narrow passage full of shafts of lantern light. “There’s a door into the garden near the long gallery.”
“But there are sol—”
Empress Hana lifted her hand, and though I bared my teeth I stopped and listened. Distant voices filled the narrow passage, carrying from rooms being torn apart in the search. An exultant cry erupted ahead, followed by the metallic clink of jewellery.
“Look at this!”
“That doesn’t look like either of the bitches we’re looking for.”
“Oh, fuck off.”
A man dashed into the passage, his lantern flaring. “Casius!” He almost dropped it. “Your face!”
“Just a bit of blood,” the empress said. “But I found me an empress.”
A second soldier appeared in the doorway, followed by a third. “Good job,” one of them said. “Better get her to His Holiness before he starts shouting again.”
“Fuck yes, let’s go,” another agreed, eyeing me around Casius’s shoulder. “Why ain’t she running? Happy to be saved from these freaks, eh, Your Majesty?”
I scowled as the man stepped toward me saying, “I’ll hold her so she doesn’t make a break for it.”
“Hands off,” the empress said through Casius’s lips. “You think you can weasel in on my prize? Go find the other one.”
The three men looked at one another in the shifting lantern light. “Right then.” One stepped back into the doorway. “You better get going.”
Murmured assent came from the others and I screamed into the silence of my head. She had given herself away and now strode on, carrying her Casius skin with the pride of an empress unable to hear my warnings.
I followed, but as I drew level with them fingers closed around my arm. Spinning back, I gripped the man’s wrist, twisting it in the way I had perfected on many a drunk and leering lord. His wrist snapped. Or rather it ought to have. The empress’s hands were not as strong as mine and the man merely cried out and backed away, cradling his hand. A snarl tore along the passage. Two knives had been buried in Casius’s back, but rather than fall, the empress swung around and caught both attacking soldiers with a great sweep of her club. They fell in a crash of wood and bones and paper screens, leaving only the one with the injured wrist cowering. Unwilling to leave another witness, I pulled one of the knives from Casius’s broad back and stuck it unceremoniously into the man’s throat before he could even begin to babble pleas for mercy.
“Fine, you’re right,” the empress said, checking all three were dead with a nudge of her boot. “Of course they know what a Deathwalker is.” She jabbed a finger at me. “No ‘I told you so’ either, you hear?” She laughed. “It feels strange telling myself off. I hope I don’t usually look quite so much like a stunned hare.”
“Not the time to wonder,” I said in a low whisper. “We’re not going to make it to the garden without running into more of them. I’ve got a better idea.”
“Then by all means lead the way, Miss Marius.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know where we are in this maze of a fucking ugly house. Where’s the tree room? We need to get upstairs.”
“There’s a narrow servants’ stair nearer the west courtyard, would that work?”
“Servants’ stair. Really?”
“Can’t have them walking around where people might see them,” she said, and it was impossible to tell with Casius’s s broken face if she was joking or not. Either way she led me on, stopping now at the end of each passage as she hadn’t before. Knives to the back seemed to have reminded her that even dead bodies could be broken.
With her knowledge of the house, we reached the servants’ stair without running into anyone else who wanted us dead. All sounds faded as we left the Wisteria Court behind.
The servants’ stairway spat us out in the upper passage, light from the central hall tracing shapes upon the floor. It lit a trio of figures from behind—one slightly hunched and shuffling, one seeming to glide, and the third like a shadow following in their wake.
“Kocho! Lechati!” I called, hurrying toward them with tired, aching steps. “Saki!”
They must have heard me but they did not stop, just rushed on down the other passage and out of sight.
“Hey!” The empress dashed after them in her Casius skin. “Wait! What—?”
As she reached the corner a distant door slammed. “I told you so,” she scoffed, turning to walk back. “We’ve been sold for Saki’s safety. What’s this brilliant escape plan of yours?”
“So you’re allowed to ‘I told you so,’ but I can’t?”
“Yes, Miss Marius, because whatever bodies we currently walk in, I am an empress and you are not.”
“You mean you were an empress.”
She stopped before me and folded Casius’s arms. “You think we have time for this?”
I held her gaze in challenge for longer than I ought, precious seconds slipping away. She didn’t budge, might have stood there until morning without backing down had I not rolled her very own eyes at her and turned away toward my room. It was as dark and empty as it had been when I came in search of Her less than an hour earlier.
“If we can smash the frame, the hole should be big enough for me to climb through,” I said, pointing up at the shuttered slit of a window. “This body is quite a lot smaller than mine was, and you’ve got a very handy club.”
She grinned, a stiff, lopsided smile with a broken man’s face.
The crack and smash of wood was loud enough to give us away, but with the dead body’s strength she made short work of the frame. “Once I’m up there, I’ll reach back for you,” I said, stepping into her cupped hands to be boosted. “A touch was always enough to pull Her back.”
“But I could just walk out in this body,” she said. “He’s one of the hieromonk’s soldiers.”
“With a great big hole in the side of his skull and blood dripping everywhere.”
“I don’t care! This body is amazing. It doesn’t tire and it’s stronger than I ever was and—”
“It’s dead,” I snapped, turning to glare at her. “It’s dead and it will only get more dead. Bodies don’t stay all warm and limber, Your Majesty, if you haven’t noticed. They go stiff and cold and lose their ability to move. Remember that man you thought was Leo Villius? My second soul, my… Kaysa was in there. And all she could do with it by the time I arrived was open her eyes and stare, trapped inside and frightened.”
Casius’s one good eye widened. I pressed my point. “So if you want to get a few more good hours out of it only to be trapped in it forever, fine, stay, but there’s no guarantee I’ll be able to find you again. Just lift me up to the damn window so I can get out of here.”
She did so without apparent effort, and reaching through to grip the outer sill, I wriggled my way out. The chill wind whipped at my face as I emerged into the night like a moth birthed from its cocoon, and balanced on my stomach, I reached back a shaking hand.
The empress didn’t take it. “But can I jump myself from body to body?”
“Fuck, I don’t know!” I said through gritted teeth. The windowsill was cutting into my stomach. “But Kaysa couldn’t and you’re not even a Deathwalker. Just take my fucking hand and let’s get out of here.”
Still she hesitated, gnawing the dead man’s lip with the dead man’s teeth, before at last she sighed. “Fine, but we have to do this again.”
“No problem. Anytime. Now let’s go!”
Empress Hana reached Casius’s hand up
to mine and the moment our fingers touched her soul poured back into my flesh like air into lungs, stretching them to bursting. The soldier finally fell, crumpling into a bleeding heap on the reeds. Freedom called from beyond the window, blown on the cold, stormy breeze, and feeling heavy now I wriggled on through the narrow gap toward it, already considering the best way to navigate the turn and drop and wishing I had a body better able to hold its own weight.
It’s a long way down. Perhaps we ought to have thought twice about this.
“It’s nothing if you know how,” I grunted, hoping she wouldn’t sense my fear of the looming drop.
Hoping I won’t notice only makes me notice, Miss Marius. Perhaps you should put me back inside—
A hand closed around my ankle. I squawked a strangled cry and tried to turn, to kick, but the window was too narrow. The fingers tightened and pulled. My hold on the outer sill slipped as I was tugged back, but I managed to hook my elbows outside of the window and wedge myself in the aperture.
“It is not my intention to break your arms, Deathwalker Three,” spoke the impassive Witchdoctor. “But if you continue to hold on like that then it is the inevitable outcome.”
“Shit!” I tried to turn and pull free, but he gripped my other ankle. Pressure mounted in my shoulders and every attempt to lever myself out merely infused my body with a pain like it was stretching, ready to snap.
“I believe it is the accustomed practice to count to three in order to warn recalcitrant children of impending consequences,” he said. “We can employ such a method here if you would find it useful.”
“Fuck you, god-man,” I said, and kicked with both feet, catching him on the chin with the tip of one wooden sandal.
He didn’t even grunt. “One,” he said, the implacable voice sending panic fizzing through me. “Two. Thr—”
I drew my elbows in and we slid back through the window to land ignobly in his waiting arms. “I see Her Majesty’s good sense prevails again,” he said. “Well done.”
“Hey!” I snapped, about to point out I had been able to make that decision all on my own, thank you very much, but he had already started walking toward the door without putting us down. “We can walk.”