The Lost Daughters

by Leigh Grossman

  And why would the Central Alliance attack on the same night, but send only three ships, with their own channelers unprepared for the creatures that haunted the harbor? Why was the harbor chain not in place?

  More important at the moment was the question of how to get out of the palace alive. Sperrin seemed to be thinking the same thing.

  “Will the old sally tunnels be dry?” he asked us both.

  My father ignored the question.

  I thought back to a dozen history lectures. “They should be. They were built for the Holy War, and they were used to launch attacks when the city was flooded originally. I think there’s some special way of keeping water out.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Sperrin. “But how do we get to them? The entrance I know is in the foundation of the West Tower, down the back stairway from the guardhouse. That will definitely be underwater by now.”

  This was the chance I had been waiting for. I pretended to think over each of the other entrances to the sally tunnels. Sperrin and I both knew that all of the ones in the newer parts of the palace would be inaccessible. But perhaps somewhere in the old palace. “The theater,” I said finally, trying to put a note of hesitation in my voice then seeming to gain confidence. “It was built on a hillside originally for the natural light, so it will be above floodwaters. And there is a tunnel entrance from the old dressing room. I don’t know why it’s there, but I’ve been in it.”

  I looked at my father, wondering if he would give a more authoritative answer that would ruin my chance to recover another costume. Of all the city administrators, he knew the escape routes and emergency plans better than anyone. I had seen the heavily annotated maps and copies of emergency plans in his offices, even though I’d never been allowed to read them.

  My father wore a neutral expression, but still said nothing. He just listened to us silently. I had a feeling he knew why the theater connected to the sally tunnels. But it would be pointless to ask him directly—the best we could hope for, till he regained his old self, would be that he continued to come with us quietly.

  I looked out the window again at the refugee-clogged road and the flooded city. The sun had fully risen over the harbor. A slight cool breeze off the sea ruffled my hair.

  I wondered if I would ever see the city where I’d spent so much of my life again.

  This wasn’t the way I wanted to remember the Drowned City. The only thing I carried with me to remember it by was the cased Talisman hidden at the small of my back. The last, failed symbol of my dead city, and my dead friend.

  Chapter 9

  Ketya

  The Drowned City: The day after the Loss

  We approached the theater through a side passage. Although deep underground now, the hallway had once been an open atrium filled with artwork and cut flowers when this had been the hillside annex of a younger, smaller palace.

  I led the way, surefooted even in the dimness of the passage. The candle in the lantern had almost burned out, but even in its barest flickerings I knew the way from a hundred childhood memories.

  Sperrin held his blade righthanded and gripped my father’s elbow firmly with his left hand. He pulled the silent chancellor along with little resistance.

  The old part of the palace felt dry; even the air smelled dry, although we had crossed below the waterline outside. We would have to go lower still to reach the tunnels, but after the flooding above I found the dryness of the air refreshing.

  We’d seen no signs of godsent attackers since entering the old part of the palace—not even bodies left behind by them. Whether that was because so few people spent any time in this part of the palace at night when the gods had struck, or because of some innate warding power, I didn’t know. But out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed the familiar blue of the runes Tenia had told me no longer existed. I sensed them in places I never had before, as if the long-dormant old magic now reacted to the unwelcome intrusion of gods.

  “This way,” I said, turning into an alcove. The white door with its gilded decorations looked gray in the dimness. “This door leads to the seats on the right side of the hall. It’s quicker than the main entrance. Be careful, there are three steps down.”

  The tiny details about the theater that I remembered after all these years surprised me.

  I pushed the brass handle downward and the door swung inward silently, same as always.

  “This is...different.” I hadn’t meant to say the words aloud.

  The theater had transformed. The seats in front of me looked plush, their worn flax covers replaced by rich velvet. A warm blue glow radiated from the walls—from everywhere, really. The stage shone most brightly: A wide ring of blue runes glowed on the center of the stage floor.

  There was nothing elusive or half-glimpsed about these runes.

  Tenia had told me they didn’t exist. And I had just spent several years at the Empress’s Academy studying all there was to know about magic in Ananya, and I had never seen anything like those runes. I might not be a very good channeler, but I was a very good learner. I knew that if anything like this had been touched on at all by the Academy instructors, I would have remembered it.

  Stepping down the stairs, I started toward the stage, slowly. I couldn’t help myself.

  Behind me Sperrin entered, still holding my father firmly by the elbow. He closed the door behind us.

  “It looks like the magic in the theater is not quite so dead as the rest of the city,” Sperrin said. “Why is this room lit?”

  “But the magic is dead,” I answered. “I don’t know what the light and these runes are, but I don’t feel anything like magic inside me. This isn’t Ananyan magic.”

  My father laughed drily. It was nearly the first sound he had made since we left the dead soldiers and the tower. “Ananyan magic is exactly what it is. It is the very heart of Ananya’s magic. You think there was no magic in Ananya before the Holy War ended? Do you think we always suffered with what little magic the gods doled out to us? Fools!”

  “Why can I see it now? No one can use the old magic anymore.”

  “It was a gift from your mother,” said the chancellor, the words coming out sounding more like a curse than a statement. “A gift from beyond the grave.”

  I had no idea what he meant. I just gaped at him.

  “What do you mean?” asked Sperrin.

  My father turned. He looked Sperrin up and down slowly, as if seeing him for the first time.

  “Did you address me?” my father asked, for a moment every bit the chancellor. He shook his elbow free of Sperrin’s grip and took a couple of steps back from the soldier.

  Sperrin gave my father a puzzled look.

  “What did you call me?” the chancellor repeated.

  There was no stopping my father when he got that tone, I knew. I’d certainly heard it often enough. Even if this seemed like an odd time and place for it.

  I had a feeling that Sperrin wouldn’t defer to my father the way I did. The way everyone else in the palace who wasn’t royal did, too. I didn’t want to hear an argument. I hated the way my father crushed people who disagreed with him. It was the job of the chancellor, he’d told me often enough. But sometimes I wished he wasn’t quite so rigorous in performing that part of his job.

  He’s still my father, and a great lord of Ananya. I would love to stand up to him sometimes, but I can’t. Even if it is my place. I thought the words, but I didn’t really believe them. I didn’t want to stand up to my father. A part of me just wanted to be the kind of girl who would, like Tenia. The same way a part of me had wanted to be a real channeler, like all the dead women back in the Presentation Chamber.

  I waited for the onslaught.

  Sperrin spat on the floor, as if to clear dryness from his mouth.

  “This doesn’t seem like the place for titles.” Sperrin emphasized the word titles. “I would have used your name, but you don’t have one. Did you ever have a name?”

  The chancellor gave him a look t
hat would have withered me. “I did. My wife, my parents, and my Empress had the privilege of addressing me by that name. All of them are gone now. You may address me by title, as all others do.”

  So he knows the Empress died, I realized. At least a part of him is still here with us in the present.

  Sperrin seemed unmoved by the words. He glanced at me before he spoke. “Even your daughter?”

  “Especially my daughter.”

  Except I never call him by title. I call him “father.” So what is he talking about?

  I brushed a loose strand of hair out of my face, checked to see my ponytail was secure, and tried to keep walking toward the stage and ignore the brewing tension. I felt the cased Talisman snug at the small of my back, scratching a little against the fabric of my shirt, and it calmed me. It let me pretend I could ask Tenia for advice.

  Has my father gone crazy? No, Tenia would have told me. Angry and upset by a situation beyond his control. And frustrated because he has no one to take his anger out on. But he’s still sane. He’s still my father. I still have to trust him, even if he’s lost his way.

  Sperrin shook his head and took a guard position, watching my father as carefully as he watched the doors. Sperrin had a look on his face like someone’s pet dog had just tried to bite him.

  I wondered if the big soldier thought my father had gone mad. I wondered if that was what my father wanted him to think. But mostly I wondered why this room was lit and filled with glowing blue runes, while everywhere else in the palace the magic was gone.

  Reaching the stage, I pulled myself up onto the polished wooden planks.

  Blue light radiated upward from the wide circle of runes that filled the center of the stage. The runes themselves glowed steadily; they didn’t pulse or flicker like flames. Something about them felt tremendously old.

  They’ve been here all along, I realized. All the time my friends and I play-acted on this stage we were dancing on a nexus of magic. We just couldn’t see them before. Something hid them. Were they hidden by the Empress’s magic?

  Then whose magic is this? I had no idea. Who in Ananya had magic before the gods? How did it work? I knew the old magic existed, that it had been used to injure or even kill some gods, but the history books said nothing useful about it—they were banned from saying anything too specific by the treaty itself.

  Carefully, I walked around the circle of runes.

  Within a few moments I found myself wandering backstage. A wall of silence descended; for a moment I didn’t have to think about saying the wrong thing or about my father’s cutting words. I didn’t have to think about Tenia’s body in the water or the Empress’s blood covering me. For a moment I was twelve years old again, wandering in a thick forest of costumes that none of us had ever dared to touch.

  I needed one of those costumes.

  My hand reached out and touched the Snake Slayer’s glittering armor lightly. Blue light flashed. I pulled away suddenly at the unexpected warmth.

  What is happening here?

  The costumes looked the same as I remembered. Immaculate, as if they’d been freshly mended and cleaned and put on the racks a day ago.

  One of the seamstress’s dummies stood empty. I’d seen it in my father’s room: The Mouse King was missing.

  I turned back to the glistening armored scales of the Snake Slayer. The blue flash had surprised me, but it hadn’t hurt. The silvery cloth had given off an almost soothing warmth.

  I put my right hand on the sleeve and held it there.

  This time the warmth came slowly, soothing my palm and spreading as far as the back of my hand but no further. Blue wisps wrapped like tendrils around my wrist and hand, slowly spreading along the sleeves of the costume. Blue pulsed gently outward from within the Snake Slayer’s shirt of silver mail, till it seemed covered in a fantastic blue filigree.

  Slowly, as if in a dream, I put my left hand on the other sleeve, and lifted the blue gossamer from the dressmaker’s stand. The costume felt barely substantial, like a shirt of spiderwebs.

  I want this, I thought. It’s stupid, but I want to know what’s going on.

  I pulled the oversized garment over my head, putting my hands through the sleeves. It seemed to settle on top of my clothes and then slowly sink through them, shrinking to fit me closely. I felt warmth against my skin, like an armor of snakeskin. The Snake Slayer’s armor felt substantial and insubstantial at the same time, as if I wore a weightless coat of mail. I shrugged my shoulders, getting used to the feel.

  Should I take it off? I wondered. I didn’t even know how. And we did need to bring it with us, so someone could talk with the gods if my father’s recovery took too long.

  The blueness faded from around me, leaving me alone in the dressing room again.

  How long have I been here? I wondered why Sperrin and my father hadn’t checked on me. It felt like I’d been backstage for a while.

  But when I reemerged onto the stage, they were just climbing up the brief flight of stairs at stage right. Had it been only a few moments?

  I walked forward, my foot touching the ring of runes before I realized it.

  Sperrin yelled and rushed toward me. At the same time, my father pulled away from the soldier and shrank back from the circle.

  I looked at my hands and saw silver gloves over impossibly long, thin fingers.

  “What is... ?” I started, but my nose tickled from bushy mongoose whiskers. I sneezed.

  I took a step back, out of the ring of runes.

  I was a girl again, no longer the festival Snake Slayer. Sperrin stopped, a few steps short of me. He stood in the middle of the circle of runes.

  “What happened?” he asked. “Are you safe?” He looked puzzled, unsure what he had just seen.

  “I don’t know. I think so. But is it safe for you standing inside the ring?”

  “What ring?”

  “The runes on the stage. You’re standing in the middle of them. They changed me when I touched one of them by mistake.”

  Sperrin froze. “I don’t see any ring.”

  At the edge of the stage, my father laughed hollowly. “Of course he doesn’t,” he said to me. “This man is just a common soldier. He has not a drop of uncommon blood in him. You have the blood of two gods in your veins.” He laughed. “There are many things you and I can see that this man cannot.

  But that doesn’t explain it, I thought. Tenia had the blood of gods and she couldn’t see them. She insisted that no one else could, either. But for some reason I could.

  Sperrin slowly edged back toward my father, who didn’t seem inclined to say any more.

  I looked again into the runes, taking a long gaze this time. They felt intensely magical and old. Why have I never seen this before?

  But a part of me had always known it was there. Wearing the insubstantial armor of the Snake Slayer’s costume against my skin, momentarily I felt the same joy I had experienced dancing onstage and speaking to the empty chairs.

  I wonder which gods I’m related to? I knew I carried the thinnest tinge of the goddess Bayinna’s blood on my mother’s side. It wasn’t uncommon in Ananya to have a trace of god’s blood, especially in a family of channelers. My father had never mentioned that he too had the blood of a god. Had he needed it to become chancellor?

  I felt young and foolish, realizing how many things that I thought I had understood remained almost unknown to me. I wished Tenia was here. She would have known the answer, or how to get it.

  Somehow, asking my father to expand on his words seemed like a bad idea.

  Silence spread through the theater.

  Finally, Sperrin broke the emptiness. “We had best get to the sally tunnels,” he said to me. “Since you know where the entrance is, can you lead the way, please?”

  If Sperrin noticed anything amiss with the missing costumes, he didn’t mention it as we walked backstage.

  * * * *

  By the time we reached the entrance to the sally tunnels, the Snake Slaye
r armor felt like a memory, the barest presence against my skin. The tunnels smelled earthy and dry. As I reached the bottom of the ladder that led to the tunnel, blue streaks glowed on the walls, the same blue as the runes of the stage. The same blue I’d been almost-seeing for years, but now vivid and luminous. Each of the three tunnel branchings that met here had a distinct blue symbol.

  “Can you see it?” I asked Sperrin. “There’s magic down here.”

  “What kind of magic?”

  “Old magic.” I reached out a finger and almost touched one of the streaks, then pulled back.

  “All I see is dirt.”

  “But you can see a little bit, like in the theater?

  “Yes,” Sperrin answered.

  I lowered the dying lantern to my side.

  Something slammed into my back, and I hit the floor. Metal flew over my head, clattering into the far wall. Half dazed, I rolled over and looked up.

  Sperrin faced off against a silvery scaled creature with luminous golden eyes. It had legs like a human, but spines up its back like a mane. Its face looked more fish than man, with gill slits and whiskers like a catfish. The axe in its hand looked manmade. I saw the axe’s twin against the far wall: It had been thrown at my head, I realized. Sperrin had pushed me down to save me.

  He and the merrow circled each other warily. Sperrin had a little bit more height, but the sea-creature outmassed him. What’s it doing in the tunnel? I wondered.

  The merrow lunged, and Sperrin blocked its advance. The axe blade clattered against his sword with a shower of sparks.

  The creature lunged again, as if trying to force Sperrin to give way by sheer weight.

  That’s exactly what it’s doing, I realized. And then it hit me: It’s not trying to get at Sperrin, it’s trying to get past him.

  But what’s on the other side of him that’s so important?

  Behind Sperrin, my father huddled against the far tunnel wall.

  The creature seemed to get angrier as Sperrin kept blocking it. It mouthed words—at first they sounded like howls, but I gradually realized they were in my own language, just distorted by the merrow’s facial structure. Something about the harbor, and betrayal. Betrayal in the harbor? Harboring betrayers? If it was a warning about betrayal, it seemed a little late. And coming from a golden-eyed sea monster swinging an axe, it hardly seemed like the clearest message. I’d read accounts of merrows before, but none had said anything about those eyes.