In the palace, walls and doors shift open at Lussadh's approach, seal themselves shut once she has passed. The ceiling is impossibly distant, as though these hallways have been made to deific scale, an abode for deva to fill with their celestial breath and celestial footfalls. Lanterns cascade from wall sconces like grapes; lights spin in them, rose-gold and silver, in the manner of intoxicated fireflies. Non-military staff have already been restored—many of the personnel bow rather than salute, and at a glance she judges them to be noncombatants, not just from their presentation but the way they carry themselves. She spots a couple thaumaturges she's seen before back in the capital and a few clerks she suspects are intelligence operatives or assassins. They're always about, part of Lussadh's retinue.
"This is my apartment when I'm in residence," Lussadh is saying as they enter a palace wing guarded by a high gate wrapped in thorns. "The bathhouse is separate, over in the gardens. We can share a bedroom or not. I leave to you the choice."
"After the carriage, I'd never deny myself that joy. And did you not call me here so we could wake up beside one another?"
Lussadh laughs and ushers her into the suite. The general's quarters take up half the wing: rooms joined by twisting convex corridors, by alcoves inlaid with zircons and robed in shadow. There are slit-narrow windows, and there are ones broad and curved to fit two walls so that one can gaze out upon Kemiraj in full—a vertiginous view of latticework balconies, honeycomb pavilions, and bromeliad gardens. These are quarters grander than the queen's, and this is a city more splendid than the capital. Despite herself, Nuawa stands by the window, exhaling on the pane. "I've never seen anything like this."
"Life should be full of marvels. I've always wanted to show you my home." The general pecks her on the ear.
They unpack. The general lays out her clothes—getting a good look at her weapons in the process, not that Nuawa has anything to hide—and unfolds the diptych, putting it in a corner next to frothing potted plants. Lussadh does not remark upon it, having acclimated to its presence in their shared room back in the capital, the diptych of a painted forever sky and incandescent colors. A world in which it is always summer.
She takes off her coat, then slides off Lussadh's. Her hand hovering over the general's bicep, she says, "Who wounded you?"
"An enemy soldier. That happens."
"May I look?"
There is a pause. "Yes."
She thinks of the queen peeling the snakeskin off Vahatma, an act of unveiling something divine and dangerous, and she does likewise. Each article of clothing she removes from Lussadh with that same languor, that same force of intent. She puts her hand down the general's chest, over skin like embersilk and muscles like chiseled bronze. "Do you get tired of being told you are breathtaking, General?" The wound is hidden behind gauze, but she can see that it is like a crater, not made by something as neat as a bullet or even an arrow. "Yet it feels impossible to deny that you are. It feels impossible to say you're anything less than superb." She traces long, meandering lines around the site of injury.
"No virtue or effort of my own. My grandaunt the king selected—and bred—her potential heirs for many advantages, beauty among them. I was part of a batch; we all had a particular look." The general catches her hand, pulling her glove off. Kisses her knuckles, one by one. "We're getting distracted again, aren't we? I have to brief you. The queen let me know of this engineer she wishes to ... commission."
Nuawa slides off her other glove. "Penjarej Manachakul is hiding here under a different name, I assume. I don't know how she met Ytoba, or why she passed her rather esoteric knowledge on. It'd be helpful if ey had sketched us an image of the professor, but ey wasn't so obliging."
Lussadh's features tighten, minutely. "Ey is dead."
"I saw to it. The head I burned. The rest I separated—the governor of Kavaphat was visiting, and her tigers eat anything." She watches for any further opening, any sign, but the general betrays nothing else. "Do you suppose our engineer is still alive? After all this turmoil."
"We'll have to bet on the professor being a survivor. That does seem to be the way of your city."
Such a remark can mean anything. Nuawa chooses to take note but not dwell.
They go over ways through which a person might disappear, trace the paths Penjarej Manachakul might have taken to obfuscate her origins and identity. It is the closest to a precipice she has ever been since the tribute tournament, for though the professor is unlikely to have used the same methods as Mother Indrahi, still this strikes close to home. But Indrahi was a spymaster in her time; she knew how to disappear, and she hid who she had been to the end. Hid herself, hid Nuawa, hid even her estranged son behind the saffron robe.
"Nuawa?"
She must have allowed this line of thought to show. She swallows down the clotting weight, the hot press of grief. It will not do. Her mother raised her better than this. "I was thinking on whether Ytoba could have taught her to alter her shape in return for her expertise. Is that possible?"
Lussadh blinks and straightens. "Hah. Fortunately for us, no. It can't be taught, more a discipline struck deep into the flesh before birth. A hundred modifications of the skin and bone, and a hundred more when the shapeshifter reaches a certain age. Surgeries throughout their first ten, fifteen years of life."
"It doesn't sound pleasant."
"It wasn't; I watched children screaming under knives and flensing shadows, I watched their stomachs inverted and poured out. Kemiraj assassins are—were—a sect of their own. Conditioned to zealotry before they learned to talk, loyal to the throne because this purpose was all they had. Abolishing their order was one of the first things I did. So many orphans they'd taken in, so many mouths parents couldn't afford to feed. There were babies left in the dunes to feed the wind-lynxes. King Ihsayn thought it a sensible arrangement. The children would have died regardless, and the sect paid the parents well."
"Were they grateful? The children you freed."
The general draws out another roll of paper, one that records recent arrivals to Kemiraj. "The ones old enough to talk cursed my name, called me the al-Kattan seed gone to rot, and prophesied my doom. They'd be adults now, perhaps raising children of their own. I wonder if Ytoba ever returned to any of them in eir years of hiding, to stoke that fire, if there's anything more than ashes remaining."
One end of the paper curls, unruly. Nuawa weighs it down with a samovar. "We will find out, General. And I'm glad to be here, to see at last the land of your nativity." To behold and taste the country that birthed this creature before her, and perhaps to understand how monsters—like Nuawa herself—are made.
Three
The immigration office occupies a building of its own, one of the many adjunct compounds that share a platform with the palace. From the outside it is boxy, plain; from the inside it is cavernous, a few small rooms partitioned off for entrance and exit interviews, countless mezzanines overhead bearing countless typewriters. Paper spills from cabinets and workstations, sheets neat and crumpled, shreds on the floor and peeking from between a typewriter's maw. Nuawa moves her handlamp across the gloom, its beam falling on dust and girders. The building's ghosts have been shut down or released, leaving the lightbulbs dead, the typewriters and behemoth printing presses in hibernation.
On one of the mezzanines, three of Ulamat's clerks are sorting loose documents and exhuming folders from the cabinets. Volumes of departures and arrivals, residences granted and denied, registries of addresses and workplaces. They are efficient, the clerks, though watching them convinces Nuawa more than ever that this is a recreation of hell. An afterlife reserved for corrupt officials, destined to forever stack up and file and order paperwork that'd then be scattered anew.
On his part, Ulamat is surveying one of the many shelves and feeding tar-dark ghosts to a typewriter. Pulling a few levers, he coaxes the machine to reproduce the last thing it typed; it does with a guttering, metallic noise. "Ah," he says, "this ought to be helpful."
He gives her a smile halved by shadow and lamplight. "I was born of the enamel. In Kemiraj that carries a particular meaning. The prince selected me for salvation, and to her I owe everything—my education, my standing, my life. From her I've seen more kindness than from my own elders. In a place like mine, Lieutenant, one learns to be useful."
She does not know what it means to be enamel-born in Kemiraj. But it does trouble her that Ulamat accepted his lot, was trained into grateful obedience. Of course, the general has shown him more kindness than his own kin, who could hardly afford to clothe and feed him as well as a prince could. For Lussadh, funding a deprived child cost her nothing. "Your loyalty to her is exemplary."
The aide continues to smile. "I strive to keep it so. We should have the information you need in a day or two. It ought to be straightforward enough—Magistrate Sareha had no reason to hide Professor Penjarej. We'll keep an eye out too for recent deaths, though those aren't always registered, and obituaries are for those with means. Still, a few days. My people are good at what they do."
It is a dismissal, however polite: she is in the way, having herself no skill with paperwork and archives. There is a distance. Odd, for when they last saw each other Ulamat was pleasant, made small talk, asked her about her dueling career—even professed himself a fan. "I trust you with your work, Ulamat. Is there a temple in Kemiraj that serves those of my faith?"
"The Seven Spires. It's a collective house of worship but they have Sirapirat monks, an extensive ecclesiastic collection." He hands her a map.
"The priests, are they under house arrest?"
"As all civilians are. The general will transition them to a loose curfew soon. It's not good to keep citizens holed up in their homes too long." He stretches and moves to the next typewriter, casting a glance at the filing station where more volumes and loose papers await. "In point of fact, there are members of the clergy to whom Magistrate Sareha shared confidences, among the shrine-keepers of Kidashoten. I've already been at the Spires incognito, but the presence of an officer might smoke someone out."
Perhaps he means to see whether she's willing to rough up a few holy bodies, whether in white or saffron. "Let the general know I'll be out." She gathers her coat and furs, not that she needs them in a climate so warm. Habit wins out.
The boulevards of Kemiraj are wide, two lanes given to vehicles, the other two to stalls that must have until recently hosted street vendors. A thin sheen of ice rims the windows and street signs, clinging in curlicues to lamp posts and eaves, to the long-limbed fruitless trees that must have been transplanted from far away. They have generous, heart-shaped leaves shot through with silver capillaries, traces of lavender and pink.
The queen's image laces the air. Her face on the facade of a building, her crown in the banners that fly and snap in nearly every corner, monuments at each gate in her likeness: larger than life, carved of blue-white stone, with metal torques at arms and thighs, a sword-scepter in hand. Her bathyal gaze from high above, remorseless and omniscient. But having abided in the palace, where the genuine article is present and much more literal, Nuawa does not feel as suffocated by the queen's image as she once did. She catches a reflection of herself in a storefront; even wrapped up as she is, she is obliged to display the hyacinth. The things one gets used to, one compromise at a time.
An ache pulses in her abdomen, a warning. She finds a secluded corner between two stalls—both have tables, stained by spilled coconut milk and curry—and takes out the ivory case her Sirapirat chiurgeon gave her. One breath she draws, then another, waiting for the pain to rise. The medication is the one belonging she will not part with, for she has to take it twice a day to suppress the parasite she willingly hosts. By next year it'll be a part of you and removing it will be fatal, her chiurgeon warned. By year five it'll kill you dead, messily, and it'll be pure agony leading up to that. Is that what you want? Five years: a deadline she's imposed on herself to strive against the queen, though in the meantime the parasite shields her from malicious thaumaturgy, poison, etheric wear and tear. She's tested it against a few common toxins and so far the parasite has absorbed every one. A fair exchange.
Inside their case, the pills are bright yellow, tinged orange at the center. She dry-swallows one and screws the case shut. In a few months she will run out and need an alchemist willing to produce more of this for her or return to Sirapirat for a refill. Or perhaps in a few months she will be dead and no longer need any of these.
A haze pulls over her vision. Everything becomes silicate structure, translucent and perfectly geometric: the back of her hand is all bones, licked by frost. It passes and she is flesh again. She rubs at her eyes. This is not a side-effect her chiurgeon ever mentioned, but it's been happening lately, some symptom of the parasite unaccounted for.
The boulevard splits, one leading to a bridge that climbs, another to a ramp that slants below. Nuawa consults the map: it is well-illustrated and crisp, but it assumes familiarity with Kemiraj that she doesn't have. Landmarks are foregrounded, enlarged to the point they eclipse pathways, and it leaves the level ambiguous. The Seven Spires could be above or below her.
She goes down. The ramp is of darker, grainier stone and the buildings soon turn less manicured, their facades more papered: week-old broadsheets, laminated posters for theatrical productions and music and inventors' fairs. They are of a higher quality than seen elsewhere, but she's heading into a less refined part of the city and therefore almost certainly the wrong direction. Unlike Sirapirat, this is a city—she suspects—where the houses of worship congregate in a certain kind of neighborhood. She keeps on, nevertheless. It intrigues her to see what poverty might look like in this jeweled territory.
The stalls grow denser, the footpaths more crowded with extensions from teahouses—tables and benches, small canopies to shade from the sunlight. What sunlight it is: she's never seen day so bright as in Kemiraj, and she thinks back to the oneiric visions Ytoba brought her in the arena, from when this land was still a desert. Even the queen cannot entirely dim this brilliance.
Even the queen cannot reshape the world's laws completely.
"Absolute winter," Nuawa says under her breath and laughs, a dry, dead-leaf sound.
She walks past houses leaning close, under the tidiest laundry lines she has ever seen. The curtains twitch and faces peer out, but they quickly disappear. Not a single window is crooked and at nearly every door there are potted bromeliads, berry shrubs red or purple with fruit. The latter most of all catches her by surprise. In Sirapirat, being able to keep fruit-bearing plants—outside greenhouses, no less—would be the mark of considerable wealth.
By and by she circles back to the Seven Spires. A pair of soldiers guard the gate, a construction of bright iron and sheened ivory. The compound is nothing like the rest of Kemiraj, new and foreign, the queen's clearest handprint on the city. Tiered, wooden roofs painted in jade green and black and red, individual shrines with papered doors and bells in each god's colors. The walls are high but bare, absent the naga with which Nuawa is familiar, those gilded heads and silver fangs.
Of all the shrines, Kidashoten's is the greatest, twice as tall as the rest and three times as wide. The ceiling is strung with paper talismans, wishes and prayers, in gray or indigo according to its taxonomy. Kidashoten's statue rears on a plinth, one bare ankle haloed in candlelight. Wings grow from their back, their limbs, their flanks and hips; in place of hair, filoplumes and pinions sprout. There is more than a passing resemblance, Nuawa notices, between the god and the snow-girls. The cut of the features, the lightness of figure. She does not leave offerings.
More than a few times she catches sight of a temple janitor, layperson by the look of them, full-figured and compactly made. Much darker than Lussadh, a native of Johra
mu perhaps. They keep their gaze down, but there's something to their bearing, a certain sharpness. Nuawa takes note but keeps to her course.
She locates the monks' scriptorium; its signpost is in Ughali rather than the local Mehrut script. Entering she takes off her boots and adjusts her hyacinth, making sure it rides high and prominent on her shoulder. Such a delicate symbol for such unparalleled tyranny. A novice in sandstone robes greets her. She tells them that she wishes to speak to the senior bhikkuni or monk.
The novice ushers her through the prayer auditorium, where a statue of the Great Teacher sits beneath a tree of slow-moving hands noisily animated by clockwork. No ghost engine here, other than the central heating shared with the rest of the Seven Spires. The senior bhikkuni Kabilsingh receives her behind a screen of lotuses, nodding at Nuawa, not quite a bow—lieutenant or not, Nuawa is a layperson—and gestures at the floor. "How might I offer you succor, seeker?"
Nuawa lowers herself, folding her knees. It is habit: a bhikkuni or monk sits elevated, a layperson on the ground. She gives obeisance thrice. Whatever else, she was not raised to be a barbarian. "I'm far from home. This is my first assignment abroad and there's much to miss. Familiar sights, familiar food, familiar people."
Kabilsingh's smile is framed by deep, etched creases. Her vestments are thick embersilk and lamellar plates, almost like armor. "I believe I know who you are. I was born in Sirapirat and was part of Wat Totsanee some eight years ago, ten now maybe. Your victory in the games was broadcast. It's not often—indeed never—that I see a child of our city wearing the queen's flower."
Without missing a beat Nuawa says, "And I hope to do Sirapirat proud."
"Being the first can be a terrible burden." The bhikkuni studies her. "Or a rare opportunity. Kemiraj is a city of transplants, and many from Sirapirat came here in search of work they couldn't have found back home. I can point you to where most of them live, seeker, if community will soothe your spirit and give you solace in this foreign land."
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