The Tangled Lands

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  “We are not thieves,” my father said. He had seen the bundle tossed into the ditch as well.

  The nearest guard had a bracelet on his upper arm that identified him as an officer. He seemed disgusted and annoyed all at once. He looked back at the duke. “They have no jeweled gauntlet, my Duke. They have barely a few coppers, and just some food. If they have harmed you, follow them down the road and take your revenge at night. Or let it be. But you are wasting my time.”

  I prayed to the gods that this would break the duke’s interest. But his eyes narrowed and his rage increased at what he saw only as disrespect.

  “Captain, I told you I would haul these thieves before the Majister himself. He happens to have come out a day early to see the clearing of the new estates from the stranglehold of bramble itself.” Malabaz saw my father turn pale at the words, and he nodded. “Did you think I made an idle threat? To haul you before him? Bring them, Captain! You will also answer for your insolence.”

  The guards shoved us across the newly reclaimed fields, the dirt still caked in the ash of recently burned bramble. They prodded us with the butts of their spears whenever we faltered, the metal plug smacking cruelly into the small of my spine and making my eyes water.

  My mother said nothing, nor made any sound. She only stared at the ground as if wishing she could become invisible. My father looked ahead in horror. He clutched a pack with our food and some wine in it as he pulled the cart. He would clutch it harder to himself as the guards struck his shoulders to move him along.

  Ahead, a figure in long black robes appeared through the ash clouds and setting sun. My chest squeezed down on itself, forcing my heart to skip and race, and I could hardly breathe. It was Majister Scacz. Scacz himself stood before us, flanked by two dog-headed men in city guard uniforms. The flesh where dog met human was seared by magic. The fused flesh twisted and contorted as the lean muzzles turned to stare at us, regarding us with glowing hunters’ eyes.

  I felt like a tiny sewer rat.

  Two beardless merchants stood with the Majister, watching the lines of laborers where the bramble became thick enough it was an implacable wall. Their fine silk robes whipped in the wind, showing the rotund curves of their ever-filled, rich bellies. Behind them stood even more city guards. Though these ones, mercifully, had human heads. Untouched by the Majister’s magics.

  Duke Malabaz had us shoved before the Majister and his men gleefully. Our knees struck the ash and stirred it up into a cloud that made us choke. The Majister’s face pinched and he spared us not even a second glance. He waved the dust away with a gesture. Suddenly the air was cool, clean, and smelled faintly of rogia oil.

  “What is this interruption?” he asked coolly.

  “Majister!” Malabaz said with friendly exuberance that was not returned, though Malabaz seemed not to notice it. “I’ve come to demand justice for myself and my house.”

  The Majister sighed. “Malabaz, as you can see, I’m busy. Send me your request in writing, I will consider it then.”

  I saw the city guard captain behind the merchants smile with just the tiniest corner of his mouth. I looked over at my father, trying to catch his eye. The duke was not the fearsome creature we thought him. Or at least, not to the Majister.

  The Majister was to the duke as the duke to us.

  Yellow, I mouthed. But my father was too scared of the dog-headed guards and Majister Scacz to think.

  Malabaz’s voice rose an octave as he actually wheedled with the Majister. “My lord, you promised support to me, if I held the lands you cleared for me. I have come for your support!”

  Majister Scacz cocked his head. “I did promise that, Duke. What an optimist I must be, to assume that the lords of Khaim will hold the lands I gift them effectively and with little botherment. Please, pray inform me, how may I support you this fine day?”

  Malabaz regarded the ground, suddenly realizing now that he had the Majister’s full attention. This was the man who could loft bridges into the sky, or refashion human flesh to his whim. Malabaz’s voice, now low, mumbled. “I will just turn them over to the captain of the guard, Majister.”

  “Oh no,” said Majister Scacz. “You have already interrupted me and taken my time. That is the one thing we can never unspend, Duke. Time. Now that you have used it, I would be careful about outright . . . wasting it.”

  Malabaz quickly blurted, “These blacksmiths have stolen something valuable from me. Gauntlets to fine armor that I commissioned. I want them punished, Majister. Not killed, they are valuable, of course, but certainly . . . punished.”

  “All this, it is over some pretty gloves.” Majister Scacz fairly tutted. But there was a glowing interest in his eyes that chilled my blood as he turned in our direction. “Forward, blacksmiths!”

  The guards threw my parents before him like meat to a dog. But I was young enough they left me in place. I moved to step forward and join them, but the captain who had captured us twitched slightly and moved the tip of his spear over my sandaled feet.

  I froze at the feel of the spear point casually pressed against my toes.

  Majister Scacz’s dog-headed guards stepped forward, sniffing the air and curling their lips at my mother and father. My father had slumped forward, bowing to the Majister, his face completely buried in the ash.

  The Majister regarded them incuriously for a moment, and then muttered something under his breath. The air around him rippled slightly. He spoke flatly, as if bored. “Knowing that I can see a lie, and pull the truth from you with my magic, tell me: Did you steal these gauntlets?”

  “Yes,” my father confessed without even pausing. “Mercy, Majister. They are in the ditch, near my cart, in a bundle of pig iron.”

  Duke Malabaz glared at the guards.

  Majister Scacz shrugged and looked back to the duke. My parents had confessed, and now it was time to sentence them, I saw.

  “Yellow!” I shouted, startling the captain next to me.

  Malabaz paled.

  The Majister turned and looked at me. I stood transfixed in his glare, like a fly drifting toward a white-hot lamp. “And you are an apprentice, or daughter, perhaps?”

  “Yes, Majister,” I managed, the words awkward in the shimmer of air. “A daughter.”

  “You like colors,” the Majister observed, “and shout them out randomly?”

  I’d thought about the words and repeated them in my head several times while I stared at the Majister. They came out in a jumble. “He demanded a suit that glowed yellow, using vitreous ndeza, Majister. I suspect him of using magic, and like all of Khaim, I am obligated to turn him in to protect us all, as you require!”

  “No, no, no!” Malabaz screeched as it was his turn to be impaled by Scacz’s attention. He dropped to his knees, beseeching the Majister. “It was for my son. It was for my son.”

  “Glowing. Yellow.” Majister Scacz rolled the letters around in his mouth, seeming amused by them. “Duke Malabaz, you wouldn’t, perhaps, be considering using magic while surrounded by the glow of yellow?”

  “For my son,” Malabaz almost sobbed. “I would never.”

  Majister Scacz frowned. “You speak true. Is that how your weasel of a boy pretends his strength? Interesting.”

  Malabaz said nothing, doing his best not to implicate himself any further. He just waited.

  Majister Scacz looked back to me. “Was the armor truly for his son, and not the duke?”

  Transfixed, the air between us wavering with the crackle and sulphuric scent of magic, I could only speak truth. “It was, Majister.”

  The air rushed from my body when he looked to my parents. He waved a hand, a piece of parchment dropping from his long sleeves into his fingers. He twirled his fingers around the edges of it. The smell of burned spelled paper struck us, and then the Majister roared.

  The ground twisted and dropped in on itself, becoming a deep pit where my parents had stood just a second before. I screamed, ran forward, and almost fell over the edge of the grea
t hole the Majister had opened beneath them.

  Fifteen feet below me, my father and mother stared up at us.

  We screamed one another’s names as the Majister silenced our lips with a spell, and then threw magic into the air at the pit’s opening. Bramble curled, appearing around the numinous edges of blue light, and then spread rapidly as Scacz continued fill the wind with paper and magic.

  The bramble grew thick, hard and cagelike around the pit’s walls until it reached up over my parent’s heads into a roof that forced both my father and mother to crouch. At first I could see their faces through the lines of bramble. But within seconds it solidified into a wall as thick as any around the farms on the far edge of Lesser Khaim.

  Scacz swept his hands again. Dirt rose from the ground, raised by whirlwinds that tore through our party to land on top of the bramble in the pit, sealing it off and returning the land to its ash-caked smoothness.

  As if nothing had happened.

  As if they had never been standing there, just moments ago.

  I lay on the ground and wept as Scacz straightened his robes. “There is your punishment, Duke. I have not killed them, as you requested. At least, not yet. They have some air in there, and if you listen, you can almost hear them weep. It will be days before death will reach them, or they fall into the bramble’s sleep. For though I have let them live, I cannot allow the lesser people to go around stealing pretty gloves, now can I?”

  “Of course not, Majister,” Malabaz whimpered.

  “And as for the yellow: I guess a father would worry about a son, when dukes’ velvet houses clash in the streets, though I have forbidden such things. Maybe such a son, not from a particularly martial house, would risk using magical trickery to save his neck in the heat of battle?”

  “Maybe,” Malabaz sniffed.

  “Well, if he were ever foolish enough to do such a thing I would have him executed.” Majister Scacz looked around, found the captain, and added, “And I would have it done in public, to make an example to other nobility. To remind them all that no one is exempt.”

  “Of course, my lord.”

  “It would be like the execution of your wife, wouldn’t it?” Majister Scacz continued with acid in his voice. “What was her name again?”

  Malabaz cowered. “I . . .” He couldn’t bring himself to say anything.

  “Ah, your ability to mentally discard so quickly those you suddenly consider inconsequential has always been something I admired about you, Duke Malabaz,” Scacz laughed. “I aspire to forget those who disappoint me as profoundly as you appear to.”

  The Majister made a sign and the two dog-headed guards snapped to his side. He walked over to his carriage, which was no longer obscured by ash dust. Carved from raven wood and wrapped in iron staves, it crawled with gold and silver serpents that dripped venom from their fangs as they tried to break their tails free of the structure, where they were fused into the very carriage itself. The cinder-horses at the front stamped their feet and kicked up flurries of burning ash.

  “By the way,” Scacz called out over his shoulder. “Duke, your house color are now yellow. If I ever see you, or your family, in any other color, I will end your bloodline.”

  His retinue entered the carriage. Once the doors shut, the horses burned a trail of fire wherever their hooves struck until they all lifted off the ground, blazing off back toward the floating palace.

  Malabaz turned to me. “You!”

  I gathered my linens up in my hands and ran for my life.

  Malabaz struck me from his horse with a club and sent me sprawling and tumbling in the ash. Blood spurted from the back of my skull. When I stood to run again, I could barely focus my eyes.

  He grabbed my hair, and when I spun to pull him loose, he struck me in the face. I raised my hands to ward off each frustrated, angry blow. He dismounted, then clubbed me back down to the ground and kicked me in the ribs, stomped my shoulders, then kicked me in the head.

  He was an old man, yes, but the boots rung hard. Blood filled my eyes and spattered on the ash, turning it to mud.

  There was nowhere to flee where he couldn’t ride me down on his horse.

  This was the way it was for those in Lesser Khaim.

  He was velvet. I was mud.

  I could only wait until the blows stopped.

  Malabaz finally stopped beating me down, panting and resting against his horse. He held his sides and belly, grimacing. He grabbed a spear and limped back over to me when I stirred to try to sit up. He dug the tip into the dirt right by my chin. He leaned on the haft, still trying to catch his breath as I watched him from between my swollen eyes and the steady little rivers of blood stinging my eyes.

  The guards stood behind Malabaz’s horse and did nothing. I knew that if I ran again they would help Malabaz after me.

  I could lift Malabaz. I could snap his arms as easily as I could bend a rod of metal when glowing hot. I could drive my fist into his face with all the strength of my years of pounding at the metal alongside my father, and I would break it.

  And then the guards would kill me.

  There might be satisfaction there, for a brief moment. But it wouldn’t bring my parents back. It wouldn’t save me. So I continued to do nothing.

  Because I was mud.

  “Kill me,” I told him, and grabbed the spear’s point. “You killed my parents. Kill me now too.”

  But the fire in Malabaz had been banked.

  “No,” he said, thoughtful. “You’re going to go get those gauntlets. Take them back and continue what your house promised mine. Your parents bragged about your skill. Now you will use it to finish the armor.”

  I spat blood out into the stirred-up ash between us. “Who cares about the yellowed armor now? It won’t hide your son’s magics.”

  “I care!” the duke roared at me. “It will still be great armor, and you owe it to my son. That is why. That is all. I’m a duke and you’re a blacksmith’s daughter from Lesser Khaim. Gods behold, child, you’re dirt between my toes. You are part of a transaction and you must hold to your end of it. The suit will be delivered on time. As promised.”

  I stared at him as if he was crazy for a moment. “Why?” I asked.

  Malabaz gaped at me. He even looked around, as if to confirm who the crazy one was. The guard’s faces remained blank as they stared thoughtfully off in the distance. They had no interest in this. “Why?” he repeated.

  I stood up, my legs shaky, and wiped blood onto my sleeves. I was taller than the duke, I realized. I looked down at him. “What will you do if I refuse? You’ve already killed my parents. You can order me to do something, but I have no reason to do it. Maybe you will threaten me with something worse than death. I’ve heard such things. But the moment you do that, when you’re done, I’ll just give myself the mercy cut.”

  The guard’s captain regarded me for a moment with something that looked like respect, I thought. He gave me a faint nod, and his men suddenly looked interested in the exchange between me and the duke.

  Malabaz raised his spear and pointed back the way I’d run. “I’ll show you why you’ll do it,” he said. “Walk with me.”

  I stood in place, but the guards pushed me forward, forcing me to limp back over my own footsteps to return to the freshly covered pit. Malabaz stepped over the fresh dirt and jammed the spear deep into it. When he let go it quivered and remained in place, a terribly thin post in the dimness of evening’s fall.

  “You’ll do it because I can save your parents,” Malabaz hissed. “They yet live inside that pit. Yes, the bramble covers the top of it, but I can still faintly hear their screams. Can’t you?”

  I stopped wheezing and listened. “I think so.”

  Malabaz continued. “They can still breathe. They likely will starve. Or give each other the mercy cut, knowing they are trapped alive.”

  I looked over the butt of the spear at him.

  “Oh yes,” he said. “I won’t threaten you. Instead, I’ll promise you some
thing. Give my son the greatest armor and I’ll announce it is to mark the changing of our house color. I’ll say it is to honor the Majister’s request. I will follow his edict, but I will claim it a sign of our special relationship. And I will dig up that field and burn the bramble out so that your parents can go free. The Majister never said I had to leave them in there, only that he had punished them. It’s important to listen to what people really say, don’t you think?”

  Malabaz was a devious, wrinkled little thing, I thought. But I nodded. “I have no money to finish the suit.”

  “Here.” The duke threw four gold coins into the ash in front of my feet. “It does not all have to glow, it’s original purpose has changed. You can be creative with that, and no more. Make my house proud with armor that will draw envy, but most importantly protect my son, and you will have your parents back.”

  He walked away from me and clambered awkwardly back onto his horse.

  “You have four days, or I leave your kin to their death. On the morning of the fifth day, I arrive for my armor. And I will make a hell of your life if it is not ready that morning, for what little of your life will be left!” he shouted as he spurred his horse.

  “Four days . . .” The words died in my mouth as the duke trotted away from me, unhearing. The captain ordered three of his guard after the duke with a sigh.

  As the ash cloud trail of the duke meandered off across the fields, two guards arrowing in to join him on either side, the captain cleared his throat. “You know he won’t ever release your parents. He’ll open the hole and throw you in there with them, to see you all suffer once again. To laugh into your faces.”

  I looked at him through my swelling eye, broken lips, and blood splattered face. “I’m lesser born,” I said. “Not stupid.”

  “Then you should take those coins, right now, and run,” he said. He looked at his two men. One of them had lit a torch and held it up between them. “Would you stop her?”

  They grinned through the sickly yellow flamelight. “To see that toad of a man spit and huff in disappointment? We would see, and say, nothing.”