The Tangled Lands

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  “I can see that, fool.” The duke’s mottled gaze swept the room. He was not a large man, or vital, but his sunken eyes glittered with malice. “Gods, the room is full of its stink. I want to know who murdered my man? Who spelled him dead?” He surveyed the bent assembly like an aged vulture. “Which one of you so despises the work that comes from my largesse?”

  When no one answered, Malabaz asked, “Who knows something, and desires to thrive under my protection?”

  Mop glanced worriedly at Lizli, remembering the stories of the man stepping over his headless wife, his robes trailing blood, to receive his rewards from the Mayor and Majister for turning in his relations for spelling.

  And now Lizli stood to make the same reward.

  “Shall I take a head and see if that loosens tongues?” Malabaz asked.

  On the bed, Rain slumbered on, unbothered by the duke’s threats. Unbothered by the dead linemaster who had sought to take advantage of her.

  Looking at Cojzia’s corpse, Mop felt a dark satisfaction that even if he had not saved his sister, he had at least avenged her. Even if Lizli gave him up, he had done his duty.

  But inside the hut, no one spoke. Cojzia’s blood dripped, a steady patter filling the silence.

  “I can have all your heads for this,” Malabaz said. “And as soon as the censori arrives, I’ll catch the speller anyway.”

  Lizli cleared her throat. Mop braced himself for what was to come.

  “It glows with magic, Lord,” Lizli said.

  “I can see that!”

  “My meaning is that if it glows, it came from the city. To glow blue, it must needs come from the city, passing through the sentinel smokes. The sentinel smoke is only in the city, and now that . . . comb . . . glows with its touch.”

  A murmur of relieved agreement rippled through the farmers and bramble pickers.

  “From the city. From the city.”

  “Yes, yes. From the Blue City.”

  “It glows blue. It must needs come from the Blue City.”

  “From Khaim?” Malabaz murmured, his eyes widening at Cojzia’s corpse. “Did Cojzia have such enemies?” His anger was replaced by an anxious knitted brow.

  “It’s a woman’s comb,” Lizli supplied. “And bejeweled . . .”

  Malabaz bent to study the comb. “An expensive trinket, that’s true.” He reached out to touch it, then seemed to think better. He drew his hand away, unconsciously wiping it on his robes. “Someone highborn, then? A woman he dallied with, who discovered his soft-eyed habits? Disgusted with his perversions? Or is this a message from Malvia Hill to me? Magic . . . Who would risk such an . . . open . . . attack?”

  Lizli cleared her throat again. “A velvet intrigue, sire. Above us and our dirt. Above our simple lives.”

  The others were all nodding. Malabaz didn’t seem to hear—he was an ancient, fearful man still staring at the comb, looking as if all Takaz’s demon wives were coming for him.

  A guard took pity on them. “The workers . . . they can go, sire? If it wasn’t to do with these rabble, they can go?”

  Malabaz nodded absently. The pickers and peasants pushed for the door. Lizli gripped Mop’s elbow to guide him out, but Mop shook her off. He approached the duke, fighting to keep his bramble-numbed tongue loose. Behind him, the others were all scrambling and shoving and scuffling to their exit, glad to flee.

  “My . . . the . . . the bramble body,” he mumbled thickly. He pointed at Rain. “It needs burial. Rats . . .”

  Malabaz’s eyes rose from the malevolent comb buried in his linemaster’s back. “I missed someone,” he murmured. “Who did I miss? Who seeks me now? Some hidden niece?” The man’s eyes were wide, haunted by the mountain of bodies he had climbed to reach his station, the enemies he had made. “Who seeks me now?”

  “We should bury the body,” Mop repeated.

  Slowly, Malabaz’s hunted look receded, and his sunken gaze centered upon Mop. “You care for this one?”

  “She worked on the line. Before.” Mop shrugged helplessly.

  “Of course.” Malabaz nodded with distaste. “And Cojzia took her for his own when she fell.” He waved his hand, giving permission. “As you will. Give her the mercy cut and be done. She deserves that much kindness, anyway.”

  Mop clumsily tried to drag Rain from beneath Cojzia’s bulk. The dead man weighed heavy. With Mop’s own bramble-kissed weakness, he feared he would fail, but then, miraculously, others were gathering around, all of them silent, but all of them helping. Many hands, rolling the linemaster off the girl, and then cradling Rain.

  “She is ours, too,” someone murmured as they bore her out.

  Outside the linemaster’s house, more people gathered, lending their strength to Mop. Lizli guided them to her own house, where they laid Rain upon the old woman’s bed. Many hands washed Rain and dressed her as if she were still alive, preparing her for Borzai and her final passage to Kemaz’s halls, where she would live, safe and happy, with all the innocents of the world.

  Finally, Mop knelt beside his sister, alone.

  I’m sorry. I tried. I don’t know how to save you. I’m sorry.

  He accepted now what he had to do. There were too many like Cojzia in the world, and Kpala’s children would come eventually. Better to send his sister on to Kemaz, where children lived in joy and were well-protected. Safer than this troubled place, in truth.

  Mop fumbled for his knife. Drew the blade. He felt empty inside. He lifted the steel, preparing himself for the mercy cut.

  A hand gripped his, staying his strike.

  “No need for that, now.” Lizli pried the knife from his hand. “We will care for her. You need have no fear, now. Look. See.” She pointed to the door, where seed pickers and burnmasters pressed to see within, expressions solemn.

  “I told them that it was her comb,” Lizli said, “come back to save her. Come all the way from the city, to stay Cojzia’s hands. She fought him even though she slumbered.”

  The bramble pickers and paste makers and burnmasters and apprentices entered at Lizli’s invitation. Some bore candles that they lit beside her bed, others draped marigolds across Rain’s body. More and more people squeezed inside the hut, all of them bearing offerings. A man laid copper coins in Rain’s hands. A woman lit incense. Thick smoke began to fill the hovel. The scent reminded Mop of the temple to Kemaz that his family had endowed so long ago.

  The candles burned bright around Rain’s sleeping form. The piles of offerings grew.

  “No one can keep her from Kpala forever, but she will be cared for,” Lizli said. “As long as she lasts, she will be cared for. She is all of ours, now.”

  Outside, the sun was rising, light streaming in through the slitted windows of the stone hut. More and more bramble workers came to kneel in obeisance, each of them making offerings before leaving to burn the bramble wall. All of them making offerings in the hope that if they were unlucky enough to feel bramble’s kiss, that they might still find shelter. That they might win protection under the hand of the sleeping girl who had defended herself, despite the permanence of bramble sleep.

  1

  THE DAY MY FAMILY RAN out of food my back ached from bending over the bellows. The pain had built from deep within my spine. Over the next hour it started jabbing and slashing at the muscles in my back. My arms, strong on the leather handles, had yet to give out. But oh, my poor back burned.

  There was no time to rest. No time to slack. There was only the great suit of armor for the Duke Malabaz.

  Or rather, his son, Savar. Who’d leered at me when he’d come in to be measured by me with my marked rope. Who kept hissing my name as I ran the rope around his body. “Sofija, Soooofiiijaaa . . .”

  Only one person had the right to call my name like that, and it was Djoka. His family still saved coppers for the day our two humble houses would join. Then Djoka and I would stand under the Three Faces of Mara and he would offer me three rings and three vows for Woman, Man, and Child, dancing.


  A straw dummy stood in the corner of the forge with a melon for a head and broomstick skeleton. We draped the armor as we pieced it together.

  It was a bargain with one of Takaz’s demon wives to take on a commission like this. Call on a demon, it was said, and you could maybe bend it to your will. But you always ended up paying a price you didn’t expect, even if you got what you wanted.

  Our family got the prestige of making the duke’s armor. But we were struggling to finish it.

  “We used to cast a spell at the bellows that made them belch fire for hours,” I complained out loud as I stood and stretched, finally unable to stand the pain any longer. “My back feels like it is being stabbed with one of those spears!” I pointed at two of the longer city guard’s spears hanging from the rafters above me. Unfinished, the tips were only wooden, to remind my father of the size the captain demanded. There wasn’t enough metal, or time, to make them right now.

  I pushed hard on my lower back with my thumbs, shoving them deep into the muscle under the skin until my eyes watered. Kneading the knots out. Leaning from side to side.

  My mother stopped tapping fine gold inlay into the set of greaves she had on the old wooden bench in front of her. She’d been following a finely laid-out groove my father had carved into the metal with the pattern of the Malabaz house sigil: a tiger with wicked claws grasping a money cord. My father had hammered out the lines with a glowing hot chisel and evenly weighted hammer for the last week, and sworn every time his hand had slipped and touched the lower part of the chisel. “I’ll take a hand.”

  “Your neck will hurt more than your back if we ever choose to spell the bellows again,” my father said quietly, moving the breastplate in front of him back over the fire, then picking up the larger hammer.

  The sound of metal against metal filled the workshop. My father had a rhythm to his strikes, one that sounded near-musical in its precision.

  As a child I’d curled up on cold nights near the fires of the forge, lulled to sleep by that steady, strong clank. Now, dripping sweat and swaying in place, my back offering up thanks to Mara in all her faces for the ability to stand straight, I could feel myself slipping as the steady strikes took me away into meditation.

  “I might be taking the bellows!” my mother shouted, breaking me out of my lull. “But you don’t get to just stand there like a statue. Make yourself useful and go fetch wood from the pile.”

  I jumped in place. I hadn’t realized my eyes were half closed with exhaustion.

  My mother grimaced when I looked at her, and I knew that if my back hurt, hers hurt more. Youth had left her somewhere early in my memories of learning how to walk, with her scolding me away from the fires and slapping my hands away from tools. Where my arms were brown, with veins like ropes when I grabbed the hammer, she had gone to pale and her veins were green, like ink under a spelled parchment.

  Still, she had the strength to cuff my head hard enough to make my eyes water if she wanted. Even an old, slowed-down blacksmith was stronger than any other tradeswoman.

  I scurried out of the forge with a nod.

  Rain so soft it hung in the air like gauzy curtains swept across the cool air of the packed-dirt road. The family forge was on the other side of the Sulong from Khaim, and in between the jeweler’s and ferrier’s huts I could see the brown water of the large river lazily flowing away.

  And Khaim, the Blue City, on the other side.

  The blue light, even in the late midday, came from the hundreds of alchemical braziers that cast the city in blue smoke. The magical blue clung to anything—and more importantly, anyone—that used magic.

  That was why we couldn’t spell the bellows even though I’d complained about it. If we used magic, which only the great Majister Scacz could do, we would lose our heads to the executioner’s blade.

  Or worse.

  I picked up several pieces of wood, checking them first to make sure there was no bramble that could prick me hidden away in the dark crevices of the pile. Very little survived inside the city walls, but some still crept in here or there. I stepped back into the choking heat of the forge. It was a simple place, a large round house with the main forge at the center. Open, warm, and filled with our tools on benches or hanging from the walls. The shelves held scraps of metal. They used to hold things we’d made for the people of Lesser Khaim, but since accepting the duke’s commission, we’d made nothing but pieces of armor.

  We slept in alcoves against the outer wall, though my parents had a thick curtain over their bedding. My mother would cook over the forge fire, using tongs to pull simple cakes out of the coals the same as she would a bar of metal that had been heated to be beaten.

  I leaned over, my lower back complaining, and took the handles of the bellows from my mother and started pumping. The fire rose, and my father grunted with approval. He wouldn’t have to leave the metal in as long for it to turn pliable now. We’d finish the basic shaping of the breast plate faster.

  When we broke for dinner my linens were soaked through with sweat, my back again in agony, and I drank an entire pitcher of watered wine from the casket by our foodstuff table so fast I dizzied and the room spun around me.

  My father and I sat near each other at the roughly hewn table, my father drinking just as heavily and noisily from a pitcher, spilling some of the watered wine down his thick, hairy arms.

  “Is it enough?” I asked. Something caught in my throat. “And what will the duke think?”

  My father looked away from me toward the forge and stroked his mustaches. “We will see after tonight’s work,” he said. “When we glaze the breastplate and helmet.”

  What he left unsaid was . . . if we glaze it.

  I knew we only had enough for one attempt.

  My mother sat down, and we split the last loaf of our gritty bread between the three of us. And after that, we seized the head-sized melon that had been the dummy’s head in the forge.

  That was how I knew we had run out everything to eat, and that all our family’s money had been tied into the making of Savar’s armor, hoping to impress the duke.

  An unfinished suit, no less.

  I stabbed my piece of melon angrily, imagining it was Savar’s sneering face. But after that was done, all that was left was hunger. We hadn’t had any meat in days, and there was a pit in my stomach. Bread and melon would not fill it, and every stroke of the bellows made it yawn larger.

  I was hungry. And I knew that after that last piece of slightly dried-out, tasteless melon, there was nothing left. If the duke was not happy tomorrow, we would starve.

  Or worse.

  Lakil, the rag-boy, told me several days back about two brothers he’d known who’d been approached for a well-paying, mysterious job in one of the new estates in northern Khaim, carved out of the bramble in fresh new fields. They’d been blindfolded and taken in a covered cart to the estate, and lived inside for two whole months, their jobs to recite incantations and spells, covered in foul smelling mints and jhordril leaves, until they were blue and stinking with magic.

  Then they spent a month hiding in a clearing room with other boys, slowly waiting until the sulphuric smell of magic had dissipated. They were paid, and then blindfolded again, and dumped out in Lesser Khaim.

  But the one brother had gone back, sure he could remember the twists and turns of their trip. Hunting for the blue that would let him turn in the velvet lord he was sure he worked magic for, thinking that turning them in would make his fortune.

  They found his body in the river Sulong two days later with his throat cut.

  That was the way it was for the people of Lesser Khaim. We meant nothing to those who lived across the river.

  We began the glazing after the sun set, once the last gleaming lines of light faded away from the inside of the forge. The evil red glow of the coals glimmered as we took out five vials.

  “Vitreous ndeza,” my mother murmured, putting two of them by my father’s bench.

  I took the three
containing the yellow iron oxide and set them down as well.

  My father used mortar and pestle to carefully mix the ingredients into a sickly yellow paste. Once smoothed, with not a single bit of grit left in the mix, he scooped the ingredients out and transferred them into a larger wooden bowl.

  And now we added the other liquids. Translucent fikik tree sap that was normally used to coat cogs and axles, songbird oil, distilled water. The paste built into a slurry, and then a smooth, slightly yellow broth.

  “It isn’t glowing,” I said, my voice wavering slightly.

  “Won’t until it’s fired,” my mother reassured me, putting a hand on my shoulder. She’d been putting the fire under the kiln, bringing the heat up. There’d been a small blaze glowing under it as we’d eaten the last of our food for dinner, now it burned bright with all the wood I’d brought inside earlier crackling underneath.

  We’d had to rent it from a potter, for no small fee, and have it delivered. Test objects in it. Fire small pieces of armor with the vitreous ndeza mixture.

  These were not normally things blacksmiths did, but the duke had been quite clear about what he wanted from us.

  And my father had agreed.

  Though now I knew he regretted it. I could see it in his dark eyes when he thought we were not watching. The moments when he hung his head, or pushed the heel of his hand against his brow.

  He continued to whisk the mixture as the kiln heated. The pot-bellied chamber glowed, the air around it rippled, and after what seemed a minor eternity, my mother finally nodded.

  My father turned to me with a fine, horsehair brush in his hands, holding it almost like he would a newborn in his massive, calloused palms.

  “Here,” he said. And no more.

  My mother put a hand on my forearm. “You are good with the brush. Do not doubt yourself.”

  Of course, her telling me made me do just that. I took a deep breath. We should have been able to dip the breastplate in a vat of the nasty smelling yellow liquid, then transfer it to the kiln. But we simply didn’t have any more than the bowl in front of us. The ndeza came from a far off mine, via caravans on the old roads, created back when Jhandpara was a vast empire and Khaim nothing more than a sleepy roadside stop on the way to the sea cliffs of Rusajka.