Nuawa whips around. The Heron—that is who he must be—stands atop the high wall. White all over, whiter than even the queen: chalk, powdered pearl, new paper. Wings fan across his back, pinions cascading over naked hips and armoring his flanks, an image of the queen's god Kidashoten. A tuft of eider on his breast, plumage on his head in place of hair.
His stance is faultless, and in his hand a second spear builds, sleek and bathyal-dark. It is a beautiful weapon, despite everything, and it could have been made by a weaponsmith with intimate knowledge in the habits of weaponry—balance, wind resistance, penetration. She can see white hairlines along its shaft, even from this distance. Nuawa starts running, and as the spear shears through the air she shoots at its shadow.
The spear falls, its velocity wrung out, and shatters on the ground.
Nuawa heaves herself onto a window ledge, then a balcony. Up she climbs until she gains the roof, above the Heron. She sights him down, takes aim. He regards her with dark eyes fringed in pale, tiny coverts. The small wings at his side unfurl and catch her bullet. She keeps shooting; those wings keep intercepting her fire.
On the roof tiles her sword's shadows have spread a thicket of long hooks and bristling spines. She holds the blade out, its echoes rippling around her. "I'm the child of Indrahi," she says, first in Ughali then in Mehrut.
He gives her a long, curious look but says nothing. He produces yet another spear and advances, leaping up to the roof with avian ease. This close, Nuawa can see that the same silvery lines that reticulate his spear run over his limbs.
She keeps as far from the spear as possible, letting the shadows do their work. Each time they overlap with the Heron's they shred his wings, feather by feather. When she is forced to meet his blows, she lets them glance off rather than try to contest their strength. It is a narrow battlefield they have, but that is to her advantage—the echoes of her blade run wide, impossible to avoid. "The mirror shard you left in Sirapirat," she shouts.
He gives no sign of hearing her or even understanding human speech. His wings fray and his feathers fall. She strikes his spear hard enough to break and still it does not give. She carves lacerations into his flesh and still he does not slow. His expression remains vague, lazy, and he holds his ground.
In the world, as far as Nuawa is concerned there are three of them: the general lying broken below, Nuawa herself, this creature the Heron. And then, as though time has distended, there are four.
The Winter Queen stands manifest, shining with a hard, mentholated light: the pits of her eyes are black starbursts. She grabs the Heron by the back of his neck, lifting him up as though he is airy floss and desiccated leaves. There is a crack, a snap, of breaking bones. She flings him off the roof, down into the black, wet tree with its golden fruits.
In her other arm she has hold of General Lussadh, whom she cradles without effort. "Come with me," the queen says. "She is prone to mortality, after all this time, and I can only delay its onset."
Nuawa does not ask. She takes the queen's hand. Her teeth rattle, her sight turns to gauze and harsh brilliance. In a moment, they are elsewhere.
Nine
The chiurgeon has forbidden Nuawa entry—she is a potential contaminant, and they are operating on a very open wound—but they have not forbidden the queen. Nuawa is left outside the sickroom alone, and she uses that time to contemplate her own condition. She has not bothered to clean and there is dried blood on her sleeve. Lussadh's blood, by process of elimination: she has not lost even one drop and the Heron does not bleed.
It has been, perhaps, an hour.
When Guryin sits down beside her, she blinks slowly at the major. Then she realizes xe has been there for some time, and her awareness has somehow elided xer. “Major,” she says. “Her Majesty’s with the general.” Which Guryin must already know. She is being redundant.
“You’re in shock.”
Her hands are shaking. She stares at them, at the fingers trembling as though they've been seized by palsy, an abrupt acceleration of age. “I am?”
Guryin takes hold of her hands. Frowns. “Icy. Yes, you are. That’s normal. If Imsou’d been struck down, I would be a wreck too. Happens when you’re in love. Don’t think less of yourself for it.”
“I’m not—I don’t think ...” For the instant, just as the spear struck, she hated the general. “That is an inexact way to put it, Major.”
“Ah, you’re one of those people. The ones who don’t want to admit it in so many words. Stoic and intense is a magnetic combination, absolutely, but you don’t have to keep it up every waking minute. It doesn’t make you weak, just honest. I hope you will get around to telling her that you love her dearly.”
She gathers herself, as best she can. Her hands continue to twitch; she clenches them tight. “You seem very certain that the general will pull through.”
Xe draws xer knees up, cants xer head toward the tight-shut door. “I’m worried, very worried. But. The queen is in there, overseeing the process. Or breathing down the chiurgeon’s neck, at any rate. The queen is not luck or prayer or even fortuity, my friend. She is the deific force itself. What she wills, she causes to transpire. She wants our commander alive, thus Lussadh will live.”
“You put an extraordinary amount of faith in her.”
“I’ve seen what she can do. So have you. She doesn’t do much saving of life and salving of pain, but ...” Xe motions toward the operating theater, to include the collection of metal bed and gleaming instruments inside, the cascade of specialized miracles and bottled thaumaturgy. “Cold slows things down, even time. She’ll give the chiurgeon wriggle room to work with. Get up. We will get something to eat. You don’t want to be a nervous, famished mess when Lussadh’s awake. Going to ruin that stoic-and-intense thing. Better be fed, well-rested, and polished for it. No?”
"I'm not hungry."
"Your body is. At the least you need alcoholic fortification. When the chiurgeon emerges with the good news we'll be the first to know, Ulamat will make it so."
Another person that she must do something about. That sobers her—anger firms the resolve—and she follows Guryin to one of the many dining rooms. There the table has already been set and the food is prompt. A servant sets up the kettle. Ghosts hiss as they wake to warm the pipes, power the stove to a low amber glow. "We'll handle ourselves for the rest." The major tosses the servant a gleaming, black-silver coin. "Thanks."
Guryin must have ordered the dishes ahead of time. There is a plate of glutinous rice cakes folded in bamboo leaves, another of chicken and beef satay, baskets of flatbreads and bowls of yellow, long-grained rice. Xe shows her the tea leaves. "I nicked this from the general. She won't mind. Occidental, I think. Very exotic. Listen—the general didn't do this. She forbade Ulamat from meddling and told him to send the monk home. I understand he meddled anyway."
The tea comes out a deep violet, exuding a hint of fruit, tart and foreign. Nuawa sips. "I see." And it does mean something, a load lifted. "I didn't think it likely of the general." Guryin may have reasons to dissemble, but she will believe it, for now.
The major tears a flatbread into strips. "What do you see yourself wanting from Lussadh?"
"I am glad for the attention she has seen fit to grant me. She was a prince; I have never been anything so lofty."
Guryin clicks xer tongue. "Give me a real answer."
"I have." She opens the pot on her half of the table. Red curry with veal, a variation on Lussadh's favorite. Something inside her wrenches. So much for the mirror shard's purification of the mind, that metamorphosis from helpless animal to an engine of rationality. She blinks. The tablecloth is spotted dark and damp; her tears have come without warning. "I'm ..." She tries to apologize for this break in manners, this loss of composure. Instead, the noise she makes is that of asphyxiation, a terrible rattling gasp. She presses her palms against her face.
The major steps around the table, putting a hand on her shoulder. "You'll get to have tea and curry with Lu
ssadh again. I promise. Her Majesty, well. She is Her Majesty's heart."
"I'm not usually like this." Nuawa swallows and sucks in air and wipes uselessly at her face. "I am never like this."
"That I believe." Guryin offers her a kerchief.
They finish the food in relative silence, Guryin speaking on about xer betrothed, asking Nuawa if she has suggestions for the wedding and whether xe and Imsou could have a Sirapirat banquet. "In style, that is," xe says brightly. "Not so much in faith. I'm going to ask the general to officiate—you'll convince her, won't you? Much more fitting than any priest, Lussadh being the hierophant of winter, if you think about it. And you will dance with her at the party, her in red and gold, you in silver and blue. It will be magical, the two of you will be stunning."
Nuawa half-laughs, despite herself, her eyes still red and her nose still raw and her dignity still in tatters. "It's terrible manners to outshine the brides."
The major walks with her through the palace grounds, down the promenade that faces the Gate of Glaives. Xe points out a patrol trying to push a mobile barricade out of a frozen puddle. The queen is in residence and the climate has turned to obey. The air smells of imminent snowstorm. Frost lanugo has crept over the palace's pillars and collected on the edge of minaret roofs. It bleaches out the jewel colors of the spires, occluding them behind burial white.
In the suite, Nuawa is alone finally. The heating has to be turned higher, the ghosts churning harder, to maintain habitable temperature. She takes off her jacket, folds it into a neat square, hiding the blood. But preserving it as well. Royal blood, or blood that was royal once, whose letting reduces and halves Nuawa, makes her weak. Without the distraction of Guryin's chatter all she can see is that sanguine excess on the pavement, making a crimson bedspread beneath Lussadh; all she can see is Lussadh limp in the queen's arms, dyeing the queen that same shade.
From her shirt she draws the letter her mother left her. It has escaped the princely blood, remaining its pristine self. Such fine, expensive paper. The witching upon it too must have commanded a steep sum. She runs her fingers along the crisp edges, along the lines of green ink, the handwriting that she knows so well. Indrahi's house outside Sirapirat remains under her name, but she has not been back there since. Too much of a coward, despite everything. She hasn't kept the gun with which she executed her mother, either.
That house with its stripped trees, that conservatory with its persimmons.
Nuawa needs to make a copy, double-encode it, split the letter into fragments. She has memorized it, but memory is not a precise machine. It slips and betrays, creasing the fabric of truth.
For a long time, she clutches the letter, her eyes dry, her heart steady.
She tears the paper to pieces—the protection on it does not resist—and feeds the pieces to a lantern. They burn up easily. She turns the lantern off and taps out the cooling ashes into a dish, shielding it with her palm.
At the window she opens her hand and lets the gray flecks scatter. It is beginning to snow, and from the look of the sky, they will have a night of blizzard. Before she goes to sleep, she sends for Ulamat to request for her an audience with the queen.
* * *
For her part, Penjarej plays the terror-struck prisoner with what looks like born talent. The professor is wild-eyed, her head darting about, her breath steaming in the chill as she is escorted into the workshop. Each step, she is hardly steadier than a toddler, and she clutches her scarf and heavy robe to her as though they might confer protection.
Pretense or not, the abjection repulses Nuawa. She situates herself in the chamber that one of the queen's engineers have set up. It was a nursery once, for some royal child long gone to dust, and the ceiling glimmers with books. Volumes dangle from chains, covers made from hammered metal, pages from calcified fabric. Fables, she supposes, or lullabies or the other things that allegedly entertain children. She retains no recollection of what being a child was like.
She rises to greet Penjarej like a gracious, urbane host receiving an anticipated guest. Emulating the general, a little. "I trust my soldiers have treated you well, Professor?" She gestures to the tray of banana samosas, crispy and hot from the pan, drizzled with cardamom. "Please have some."
Penjarej waits until the soldiers who escorted her are gone before she digs in. From the look of her, it has been weeks—or more—since she had food this hot. When she has cleaned the plate and wiped her hand on a serviette, she raises her eyes to the worktable, the locked iron cabinet and the standing sarcophagus. The generous, uninterrupted space of the room with its trapezoid window.
"I belong even less here than the rest of the palace." Penjarej's robes are clean but worn, her jootis ragged.
"I'll have a better wardrobe arranged for you. The queen wants you kept in comfort."
"The queen—she's ... she's here?"
"Yes." Nuawa unlocks the sarcophagus. It is three or five times larger than a normal coffin and well-padded inside, velvet and satin, more luxurious than most people get in death. Scented with sandalwood and agarwood, as if it has been left next to burning incense.
In isolation, the god-engine Vahatma is small. Like Penjarej, it does not belong here, but for different reasons: the professor is too coarse, the god-engine is too fine. Vahatma is seated, holding a leopard in its lap, its two faces gazing forward at nothing. One face in meaningless peace, the other in impotent rage. Nuawa remembers her mother at this statue's knee, mangled and bruised, one arm bent and fingers broken. She never found out who did the torturing: the queen herself, some state official. The result on her mother was all she saw. Some nights, Nuawa dreams of the dry snap of fingers breaking, the rawness of a nail being pried off.
To the end, Indrahi did not give the queen anything.
"I have never seen Vahatma before." Penjarej's voice is hushed. "Not in person. Not actually."
"I have." Nuawa slides the cabinet open. In it, coils upon coils of mechanical parts. Spread out, they look impossible to fit into the god's shell. Cables like carotid arteries, pumps and bulbs that look pulmonary, gears larger than Nuawa's hands put together and teethed like an exquisite predator, all needle fangs. A nest of lenses fettered together, as though the god demands a hundred eyes for a hundred sights beyond this world. "Her Majesty's given me scant instruction. All she said was that she wants the god-engine activated."
"That's ... no easy task. Normally it'd need an entire team of engineers, mathematicians, a minor thaumaturge or two." The professor sorts through the components, her fingers passing over each; she is a little breathless, a votary meeting the object of her worship after a lifetime without. "Imagine if you were to fit yourself into a dress meant for a child. You'd get one arm through, at most. The god-engine is larger on the inside than the outside. The innards are altogether too much, but the original engineers were able to make it fit. So, transitive alchemy."
"The components were probably removed without much ceremony." She wonders if it was done in a rage, the queen tearing the chassis open with her bare white hands, ripping out the coils and intricate wheels with her bare white fingers. Those nails like talons, tearing the cables apart.
"Looks like so. They're all accounted for, I would say, the quantity matches my research. As for its activation—" Penjarej hesitates. "Even if the queen can assemble the right people who work well together, there's still the matter of the power source. As you might imagine, Lieutenant, this requires a lot more energy than a lamp."
"More ghosts than usual, then?" The queen owns an excess.
"Oh. No. It would need to be much more, a ghost that can function as the engine's animus. The ghost of something more potent than us, or the core of some mighty living machine." She pauses. "Like this palace."
Nuawa tries to imagine conveying this to the queen, and then the queen putting this question to Lussadh. By all accounts the palace is one of a kind, an entity of living architecture that responds to the al-Kattan blood alone. "That depends on how badly the queen w
ishes it. Can you infer what she wants with a god-engine?"
"It was built as a peerless defensive countermeasure. But it can be deployed as a siege weapon, an apocalyptic one." Penjarej spreads her hands. "I cannot begin to imagine what might be the target of her ire that she can't already ... admonish with her own will."
It is a fair point: the queen was able to defeat Vahatma. Perhaps her target is more abstruse, perhaps she has particular limitations. Nuawa files the thought away. "With this information, what do you think you could do, Professor?"
Penjarej meets her eyes. "As yet, not much. I am capable of assembling the parts, but I'll do nothing blunt."
Meaning she is not willing to obviously sabotage the engine and risk her own life for no reason. Until Nuawa finds out just what it is the Winter Queen requires. "And Ytoba?"
"Offered to severely hamper the queen. I found the thought compelling enough." The professor makes a cast-away gesture. "Ey also paid me in hard currency and I was on lean times. Ytoba already knew who I was. I could be turned in, or I could be paid and have a generous sum with which to run—to the occident, perhaps. But ey never did turn me in."
Nuawa thinks of informing Penjarej that she played a part in Indrahi's death, but that is not quite right, and it is ammunition best deployed strategically. Not now. She looks at the time and excuses herself.
The queen has summoned her to the southeastern minaret, a long way up by foot. The summit chamber is hexagonal, convex of ceiling, each side dominated by an oblong, tinted window. One damask, one blue, another pastel green, and yet another bleached amber. Each corner holds scrambled tiles. She finds the queen pushing at one such puzzle, turning each piece this way and that to no apparent avail. And Her Majesty somehow looks small. The bend of her spine, the plainness of her dress. Her brocade is half-layered, the color of a wet owl, so tousled that she might have gone to sleep in it and only recently woken up.
"If you turn the top-left one counter-clockwise three times and move the bottom-right one to the middle, Your Majesty," she says. The pane to her side gives a view of post-blizzard Kemiraj. Wilted banners and building facades swathed in silver. On one there is, barely visible, an image of the queen riding a chariot. Larger than life, in the most literal sense.
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