It is like thaumaturgy, after a fashion. They fall back like leaves shriveling in fire, whatever oath to healing they swore when they began their profession.
The operating chamber's door is unlocked. She enters, politely enough. Inside there is harsh, bright light: the chiurgeon wrapped in carapace and thick gloves, a slab of iron on which a person lies covered up to the neck, strapped in place and insensate.
"Doctor." Nuawa raises her gun and thinks of how she has become not just what she despises, but a thuggish caricature of it. Blunt force. Mindless action. "Your client is almost certainly a fugitive. I'm to apprehend her and would appreciate your cooperation. By all accounts, you're a citizen of sterling character."
The chiurgeon looks at her through the mask that leaves only eir eyes visible. When ey speaks eir voice is not entirely steady. "Officer—this is my patient. Can this ..." Ey takes a breath, loud. "Can this not wait?"
Nuawa thins her mouth and backs the chiurgeon into the wall. It helps that she is taller than em, more sturdily made. "Your patient. Has she ever gone by the name Penjarej Manachakul?"
Eir expression is hidden behind the carapace, but the flinching is answer enough.
Nuawa looks at the prone body, the face slack by sedation. Plain, with rounded eyes and a smattering of scars deepened by sun and age. A person who could have disappeared into any crowd. A gun makes its own dialogue; it is an instrument of brute monstrosity. She can conclude this now with a simple pressure—aim, trigger. The engineer would be dead, and the Winter Queen would be thwarted. But that would mean Nuawa's execution and leave much unresolved. The queen will not fall for lack of Penjarej.
She activates her calling-glass and contacts the nearest district patrol. "Corporal? This is Lieutenant Nuawa. I have a criminal suspected of treason against the Winter Queen. Yes, come at once. Absolute winter."
How odd to command the queen's personnel, and odder to be obeyed. It is borrowed authority, but it sits on her well, like a gorgeous pelt ripped from the furnace bodies of rare wolves. The words are simple, the act is simpler still. By and by you shall become her creature in truth as well as pretense.
Six
The prisoner is slow to wake, and Nuawa has brought a book to while away the wait. It is a slim volume with a garish cover, a tale of espionage and adventure in the occident. In these books, the western lands are feverish and savage, the women scantily clad, and no one has any manners. She turns a page to the part where the detective Sushmita infiltrates an occidental death cult where the faithful flagellate themselves with thorned whips and brand their feet with hot iron.
By the time the prisoner stirs, Nuawa is nearly done with the book: at this point the detective Sushmita has beheaded a wicked priest, liberated human sacrifices, and freed a few occidental women from their ludicrous corsets. Nuawa puts the volume away. On the cot her prisoner twitches and shudders as though in the grip of a nightmare and comes awake all at once with a rattling gasp. She watches Penjarej's expression turn from blankness to panic.
"It's not the best accommodation in the palace," Nuawa says, "but my colleagues would have stuck you inside a cell. This guest room is usually used by visiting dignitaries. Is it to your standards, Professor?"
Penjarej pushes herself upright, unsteadily. Her eyes fall on Nuawa, on Nuawa's uniform and hyacinth. Her breath leaves her in a rush, loud, as though she has been punched in the gut. "I—" She touches her face, groping for bandages and indentations, for rearranged cheekbones and redrawn philtrum. Her hand drops. She goes quiet.
"There's water by your bedside. Do you need help with it?"
The woman reaches for the brass cup and takes hold of it with a shaking hand. She stares into it, at her reflection. Warped as it is in the cup, she must be able to tell that her face remains her own, the same one she was born with. She lowers the cup, brings it up again to sip. Her throat visibly undulates, as though the act of swallowing clean water causes strain.
Nuawa turns her chair around and straddles it—the only way to sit comfortably, this piece of furniture being mostly wire and a few twists of velvet. Whoever occupied this room before had strange tastes; the cot has a frame made of bone, reinforced by steel at joints and load-bearing points. Paper cranes dangle from the ceiling, swaying against scraps of scrimshaw and ivory. "Why do you think you are here, Professor?"
"I'm not—why would you call me that?"
"You work as a womb technician in the hospital. A long way from home and from tenure track at the Sirapirat Academy of Innovation and Applied Theory. Did your dean deny you equitable pay and make you resign?"
Penjarej rubs at her eyes and gets a good look at Nuawa, assessing her actual features rather than the symbol of the uniform. "You're the victor of the Sirapirat tribute. The first tribute to take place in Sirapirat." The engineer is already haggard, gray with exhaustion; she somehow blanches further. "I know who you are."
"Yes," Nuawa says blandly, "I too know who I am. I appreciate the thought, but I haven't spontaneously developed amnesia."
“You are—you're Tafari’s and Indrahi’s child.”
She stares at Penjarej, all of her gone to stone.
The professor scrunches up a patch of blanket, her mouth pinched as though she wishes she could have unsaid it, could have swallowed back the words. She folds herself smaller still, pressing herself into the corner. "I don't plan to spread this around. I wish only to live as a subject to winter. Nothing else."
Nuawa counts in her head. One, two, three, four; whatever the roiling of her temper, that sequence does not change. “What were you,” she says in a low voice, “to the women you believe were my mothers?”
“I was nothing. Just an acquaintance.”
"That strikes me as tremendously unlikely." The more she speaks, the further she sinks herself into this trap. But she must know. She will secure Penjarej's silence, one way or another. "Among the queen's favored, I'm perhaps not the most charming. Would you rather speak to one of the others instead? General Lussadh is busy, but she could spare you a few hours." A bluff: that Nuawa cannot be blackmailed, that what Penjarej says—to the general, to anyone else—cannot possibly be used against Nuawa.
"No, I ..." Penjarej takes a deep breath. "I was more than an acquaintance. Yes. But that was in the past. I deserted their cause long ago. They merely consulted me—I helped them with some mechanical work here and there. Showed them the inner workings of a ghost-kiln as I understood it. I barely had any idea what they were about at first. Once I learned they were radicals, I left Sirapirat. Because I wanted nothing to do with that and because I was sure Indrahi would have me killed."
Nuawa is silent for a time, looking at this woman, this traitor. If what she has said is even true: Penjarej has nothing left to lose and would say whatever she thinks will secure survival. From her perspective, seeing the hyacinth, this confession is the safest path. Nuawa may well let her continue to believe that, for it is safest for Nuawa too. But Mother Indrahi would not have let so loose an end go, had she and Penjarej parted on terms as acrimonious as the professor insists. "What was that about then? The ghost-kiln?" Her voice is flat, even. An interrogator chasing potentially seditious information and nothing more.
"They had a hypothesis. That a body which goes into a kiln can survive it if it is in ownership of two souls, or at least two soul-like substances. And they were not wrong—the ghost-kiln is a simple machine, with finite capacity. I built them a miniature model, tested with pairs of mice sutured together. It was crude, but it worked and proved their theory more or less right. The mice didn't survive whole, but they survived."
"You can reproduce a ghost-kiln?" The secrets of whose making are privy only to the queen and a small handful of engineers. Kilns are made piecemeal, the parts transported and assembled in black-site ateliers. Nuawa herself has never witnessed the process.
"Not exactly. It was crude, approximate, it'd never have worked on people—only small animals, birds and rabbits and rodents. I have ... an apt
itude with certain types of machines."
The god-engine Vahatma. Nuawa wonders at this sudden overflow of information, this undammed willingness. And then at the planning her mothers did, down to this, to ensure that Nuawa would emerge from the kiln. Eight years old. She can hardly recall having been that helpless and that small. "All this is well and good, Professor. I'm pleased you have decided to be helpful." She laces her fingers together, leans so the seat tilts forward, precarious on its wire-and-velvet legs. "But Indrahi and Tafari Dasaret did not live under those names forty years ago."
Penjarej is entirely still, the way prey animals can be, as though they believe pretending paralysis can fool the predator into thinking them dead and therefore no longer interesting to chase. Even the professor's chest is held tight; perhaps she is willing her respiratory processes to suspend. A corpse gives up no information, cannot be tortured into answering questions.
"You clearly didn't sever ties as thoroughly as you claimed," Nuawa goes on, still in the same disinterested voice. "When did you last correspond?"
The professor blinks, hard. A tear. Two tears. They run and commingle. "Why are you doing this?"
"I don't know, Professor. Why are you?"
"Your mothers left you one last thing." Penjarej wipes at her face. "If you haven't already destroyed it. Tafari's diptych. There's a panel in the back, the only round one. Look for it and open it. Do at least that. You owe your mothers that."
Nuawa cocks her head. "You don't believe I would shoot you where you sit."
The professor turns to meet her eyes. "No. I do believe it. I do believe you would, without hesitation."
* * *
When Nuawa is allowed into their shared suite again, she finds the general alone, looking deep in thought and more than a little wonderstruck. The gaze of someone who has been granted rapture, audience with a higher power, even if that audience didn’t bring glad tidings. Lussadh nods at her, absently. “Pardon me. I didn’t mean to lock you out of what is, after all, your room too.”
“I heard that you were attacked, General.” From Guryin, who told her not to take it personally that the general did not let her know right away. She’ll be talking to the queen first. It wasn’t just any assassin.
“So I was.” Lussadh puts her calling-glass away and steps past the diptych. “Come walk with me. This concerns us all and I think better when I’m moving.”
Nuawa does not allow her eyes to linger on the diptych. Time for that later—it is not going anywhere. Instead she takes note that this time there is no minimizing from the general, no waving the attack off as merely normal when one is on the field. Major Guryin has hinted as much, but this more than anything tells Nuawa the matter is grave, the assassination attempt out of the ordinary. She walks side by side with the general to the throne hall, Lussadh pausing on the way to tell the soldiers stationed there that she and Nuawa will have total privacy within.
Nuawa shuts the heavy door behind them. The general cranes her neck and shields her eyes from the skylight. Dawn has come prematurely and the first of it bleeds on the clouds, a dainty hemorrhage. "This was a much busier place once. There was so much memorabilia to dynasty and conquest. I used to think nothing about it could possibly change, but even the land is mutable, the cliffs and the crags, the mountains and sometimes the sea. Why not a throne and all that contains it?"
"I cannot say I've lived long enough to see landscape shift, General. You haven't changed out of your feasting clothes." She reaches over to a rucked sleeve, pulling it flat until it is again a smooth line. Her hand moves to the front of Lussadh's jacket where she repeats the motion, tug, pull. Her finger grazes bare skin. "Still looks good, of course, by virtue of who's wearing it."
"You're too gentle on my pride." Lussadh walks in slow circles around the dais. To the side are yet more of the faceless statues Nuawa saw in the streets, though these are clothed in pailletted sherwani, crowned in complex hairnets and bristling coronae. They don't look native to Kemiraj. "The man who attacked me is called the Heron. He was the queen’s earliest retainer but deserted her ... a long time ago. She warned me—and I saw for myself—that he’s exceptionally difficult to kill. The weapons Her Majesty grants us will not work on him. Most pertinent to you, he means to eliminate all glass-bearers.”
“That is—why?”
“As to that, I am not privy.” Lussadh stops and gazes, without seeing, at a tapestry stretched between two featureless figures: one holding a khanda inlaid with brass curlicues, the other holding a dismembered demon head with feline eyes and a tusked mouth. "Her Majesty did say that she lost a glass-bearer to him four decades back, before my time. The Heron ages glacially, but then so do some priests and alchemists. He can make ice into arms, and where winter reigns he’s able to manipulate the frost somewhat. I’ll start carrying conventional ammunition. The queen will come herself to handle him, though it’ll be a while; she’s presently preoccupied. She assured me that we are safe at the palace. The Heron has his tricks, but penetrating our defenses is beyond him."
Nuawa studies Lussadh's profile, the chiseled planes that give away no expression. “You seem shaken, General.”
“Is that so?” Lussadh runs a hand down the demon head, down the neck where the sculptor—familiar with the details of a decapitation—made sure to add a drip of blood, a trail of spine. “The queen suspects what happened at the feast might be his work. The symbolism is too neat not to be, though she is certain the Heron is incapable of doing that specific thing to us. She did not disclose what might motivate him.”
That lack of information—and perhaps by implication lack of trust from the queen—troubles Lussadh more than the encounter or the Heron's alleged powers. “Can it be envy? Of your place particularly.”
“Possible, though the queen has never expressed interest in men.” Lussadh turns to look at her, an eyebrow raised. “Glass-bearers all begin smitten with her. Some never stop, others wean from it, but without exception they are infatuated. Is that not the case for you?”
"She's magnificent in her grace and puissance, but I can't say the thought has crossed my mind." No more than the thought of bedding a cobra. “I felt a draw to you alone, albeit one I tried to put off.”
“Oh? Why is that?” The tone light, teasing.
Lussadh is looking for a diversion: away from that vulnerability, that glimpse into the person underneath winter’s general. Nuawa cants her head. This is an easy lead to follow; she needs only to respond the way leaves shift in the breeze or rivers flow to their natural courses. More than that, she wants. To be distracted from her own freight, her own weakness. She does not think of Penjarej—that gets in the way. "You seemed out of reach. No doubt you were used to receiving suit from marquesses and emperors." She hooks her hair behind her ear, making the gesture delicate, inviting. "While I am ambitious, the thought of bedding you was just too extravagant. Like scaling an impossibly high peak or hunting an impossibly rare tiger."
"And has it been a good, worthy hunt?"
"I've yet to come to a conclusion. You could persuade me."
"Indeed? I will have to outdo myself." Lussadh bends to kiss her hand and then draws her up to the dais. "The throne of Kemiraj is said to be indestructible. We are both strong; how'd you like to test that claim?"
The surface of the throne is etched in bas-relief, black suns with a thousand rays, an endless sky. No armrests in the way. Nuawa's breath quickens as Lussadh presses her into it, the stone cool against her skin, and removes her belt. Slowly the general winds it around her wrists, securing her to the throne. They’ve agreed on a terminating word that, once said by either of them, will put it all to a stop. She does not anticipate uttering it. Her belt is looser than she’d like, and she says, "Tighter, General."
The general chuckles and murmurs into her ear, “To think that I never imagined you’d be the type in want of tying up.” The belt winds over a second time until there is no further slack, and though Nuawa could still break free, the illusi
on of restraint more than suffices.
She hears Lussadh move behind her. The general loosens her shirt; one hand slips under and plucks at her nipples. “A shame that I could prepare no other ... paraphernalia. I might have blindfolded you.”
Nuawa thinks of someone walking in on this, on her bound and panting, such a filthy and shameless sight. The idea turns her slick, slicker. “By your order, we will not be disturbed. What if they hear noises?”
“You’re always quiet. I trust your discipline.” The general’s hands glide over her belly, dip low, then come up again to knead her breasts. None too gently, firm just as she likes it. A painted nail scrapes a line down her stomach.
When Lussadh finally pulls open her trousers, Nuawa turns her cheek to the cool stone, straining to remain silent. Lussadh is still clothed, not a single button undone, though there is a flush in her cheeks and her breathing is not even.
“I’m entertaining the idea of leaving you like this, wet and wanting. For a few minutes, or as long as an hour,” Lussadh rasps. Two fingers become three; they make sopping noises inside Nuawa, incongruously loud. “Or I could keep doing this until you cry for mercy, and then I’d fuck you until you’re insensate and that belt is the only thing keeping you upright.”
Nuawa licks her lips. “I’d like to see you try.”
Lussadh pushes her thumb into Nuawa’s mouth, dragging it over her tongue. One of her hands has captured both of Nuawa’s, holding them in place. It seems impossibly long before Lussadh slides into her.
The general is not small, and the angle makes passage excruciatingly snug. Nuawa clenches her jaw and braces against the stone, though pinned down as she is, there’s little room for her to move. For a split second she pictures the Winter Queen in her place, yielding control entirely to Lussadh, and then the general bites her ear and it becomes difficult to think. In sight of Kemiraj's seat of power, on that seat, they push and strain, Lussadh keeping the pace a slow agony.
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