The Forbidden City

by Deborah A. Wolf

  “No,” Ismai whispered. “No, no.”

  We must leave. Kithren, we must run now. They are killing your kind, your warriors who will not join them. I can hear them dying, I can feel—they are killing my kin as well, those few who are bonded. They will kill me. More softly she added, They will kill you.

  Ismai watched his people being herded like goats to slaughter, away from the inferno that had been Aish Kalumm. What of the old, the sick? What had become of the new mothers, bedridden and unable to run? His fist tightened on the hilt of his shamsi, and his heart tightened on the hilt of truth.

  Ehuani, he thought. There is beauty in truth, just as there is beauty in the sword.

  Beauty can be deadly, Ruh’ayya agreed. We must go.

  You must go, my beauty. I must stay and help my people.

  Are you sure, Kithren? It seems a foolish thing to do. Are you not afraid they will kill you?

  It does seem foolish. And I am afraid. Ismai drew a deep breath. That is how I know it is the right thing to do.

  Those great eyes regarded him, starslight and moonslight and fire all at once. I was right to choose you, Ruh’ayya said at last. She butted Ismai with her head so hard he staggered and nearly fell. By the time he regained his balance, she was gone.

  Ismai let his sword fall to the sand and waited for the Mah’zula. He filled his lungs with the sharp, clear air of a desert night. His last as a free man, he suspected. It tasted as sweet as wine, as bitter as blood.

  FORTY-TWO

  Daru stared long at the small map, drawn carefully so many ages past. He was tempted to push his finger along the faded line that showed him the way to the surface, to sun and stars, to food and safety, but he kept following the dotted line instead, the one leading to the chambers where the exceptional children were kept locked away from all these good things.

  “Where they were kept,” he insisted, in a petulant voice that would have earned a growl from Dreamshifter. “A long time ago. It is doubtful that they are still there, right, Pakka? I mean, the library was lost for so long that hardly anybody even believes it ever existed. Right, Pakka?”

  “Pip-pip-prrrr-mmmf,” Pakka crooned. She was nibbling on the head of her latest kill. She liked the ears best. Daru thought of Khurra’an nibbling on his ears, and winced.

  “Even if they are there, who knows if I can still find them? These passages are so old; surely some of them have collapsed or been filled in by now, right?”

  “Pip-pip,” she replied. Daru thought she sounded disapproving.

  “And even if I can get to them, what am I supposed to do? Surely there are guards…” His voice trailed off as Daru stared at the sketches. The lines were strong and sure, and the hand that had drawn them had been steady, but here and there were splotches as if the young artist had wept to record such a thing.

  “Fuck,” he said, despite his earlier vow. It made him feel better, somehow—strong and certain, like Istaza Ani. What would the youthmistress do, if she thought there were children being stolen from their families and imprisoned underground for some fell purpose? Would she sneak out the side door, hoping to remain undetected and safe, while others suffered?

  She would not, he knew, and neither will I.

  With that settled in his mind, Daru tore a thin scrap from the hem of his tunic and used it to mark his place in the journal. The cloth was filthy and he made a face, but what was he supposed to do? Fold the page down?

  “I may be a barbarian,” he explained to Pakka as he stood, “but I am not a savage.”

  “Pip-pip-trrrr,” she agreed, and swallowed the mouse’s head whole.

  Daru shared most of his remaining water with Pakka, tucked two spare torches into his belt, checked his knives, and made his way toward the wide stairway. Not without a glance back over his shoulder, not without a sigh or three of longing. He had found the Library of Kal ne Mur, and was walking away with just a single book. All the knowledge of ages past, his for the taking… if only he could carry more. If only he were not so weak.

  “If only you were a churra,” he told Pakka.

  “Pip-pip!” she scolded. Daru grinned and gave the stacks and scrolls, codices, and rolled maps one last, lingering stare.

  “I will be back!” he cried to them. “I promise!”

  Promise, promissssse, the shadows chuckled. They shunned the library and whatever magic it held, preferring to lay in wait for him in the tunnels ahead. Promisssse.

  “Shut up,” Daru snapped. He pulled the bird-skull flute from his pocket. The shadows would be hungry, and he would rather they fed on music than on boy. Turning his back on his heart’s desire, he began to play.

  * * *

  The way was long, his legs short, and the shadows in the Downbelow, having fed for so long upon nothing but their own malice, were famished. Daru played his bird-skull flute for strength, he played to give the shadows something to gnaw on besides his bones, and he played in the hopes that dreamshifter might hear echoes of his music in the Dreaming Lands and remember her small apprentice.

  It was wrong that she had not come for him, that she had not sought out his kima’a in the green lands and used it to find him. He was her apprentice, and she the closest thing Daru had to a mother. She was supposed to care for him. Long had he lain where he had fallen, wishing for rescue, before binding his own arm and making his own way, and in some ways that abandonment hurt worse than the broken bones.

  It occurred to him, at last, to wonder whether something bad had happened to Dreamshifter, and so she was not able to come to him. That thought was more terrifying than the notion of wandering the Downbelow, lost and blind and eaten by shadows, so he pushed it away with his music.

  “Pip-pip-peeeeeeeeee,” Pakka trilled, bobbing back and forth in time to his music. “Pip-peeee-peeee-oh!” She rubbed her hind legs together, adding her scritchy, scratchy little bug-music to his. Crick-rick-rick! Rick-rick! Daru and Pakka danced down the belly of the dragon, playing a dark little, merry little tune, and the shadows danced in their wake. We are almost good enough to play in the Spectacle, Daru thought, and he laughed through his music.

  The shadows laughed, too, in voices like sorrow and ground bones, and Daru wove that into his magic, as well. “If you cannot dance with a friend,” Hannei had said to him, once when he was little and too weak to go to Hajra-Khai, “dance with an enemy. All roads lead to the Lonely Road, and in the end we will dance together.” She had kissed his forehead and sat with him through the night, and once again he had disappointed half his people by not dying.

  Daru blew his heart into the music, and sent the shadows into a mad spin.

  Someday, Ja’Akari, he vowed again, I will dance with you.

  The flames of his torch flickered to one side, and then the other. They had come to a crossroads of sorts. Tunnels gaped like hungry mouths to the north—so he thought—and to the… southeast? Maybe? Daru pulled the journal from his belt and opened it, juggling the book and torch awkwardly with one good hand and one bad.

  Yes, he thought, just here. The tunnel on this hand—he glanced up—leads to the Chambers of the Exceptional Children. He did not bother to repress the shudder that took him, though it made the bones in his arm grind painfully. And the one on this other hand leads to… he traced the path with his little finger, wishing with all his heart he might follow it to safety.

  To freedom, the shadows whispered, dancing around him and laughing. One of the shadows, bolder than most, braved the light of Daru’s torch to tug at his tunic. Freedom, freedom. This way, this…

  “Ahhh.” Daru sighed out loud, though it was dangerous to address them so. His heart leapt halfway into his own throat, and Pakka clung to his hair as the shadow pressed close. “You think I should go that way? To the surface?”

  Yes yes yesyesssssss, they responded. This way, thisthisssss—

  “You do not think I should go this way?” He gestured with his torch. “And try to rescue the children?” The tunnels fell silent as the shadows w
ent still.

  “Well then,” he told them, with a smile that did not reach his heart, “this is the way we are going. I am going to the Chambers of the Exceptional Children, and if they are still there I am going to—”

  The shadows began to wail, a noise that itched deep in his skull. The pain of it was blinding. He dropped the journal, scattering pages everywhere, and nearly dropped his torch. Pakka screamed into his ear, which did not help at all. The shadows swirled around them once, twice, three times like a dark storm, like sand-dae full of teeth and hatred, and then they were gone.

  Daru stood for a long moment. His torch fluttered, his heart fluttered, and Pakka buried her little face in his hair. Finally Daru sighed, gathered up the pages and put them carefully back in the journal. He took a last, long look at the map, committing it to memory, just in case.

  Just in case of what, he did not ask himself. Nor did he linger on the realization that he, a dreamshifter’s apprentice, a mere boy and weak besides, was choosing to face something so bad that it scared the shadows away.

  All roads lead to the Lonely Road, he reminded himself, and, It is a good day to die, and, Life is pain… only death comes easy. It helped, a little.

  “Pip-peeee?” Pakka asked, clutching his ear with one dainty serrated claw and peeking over the top of his head. “Peee-oh?”

  “Well,” he told her, and firmed his grip on the torch, “I always wanted to be a hero.”

  Down they went.

  * * *

  Daru found himself in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. Darkness pressed down upon him like a blanket meant to smother a weakling child. He was hungry, and he hurt all over. These things were all awful, and painted a bleak picture of his future, but he had a friend, and a torch, and his mother’s knives—not to mention a map.

  These things, taken together, shone brightly enough to banish those shadows in his heart that urged him to lay down and die. So on he trotted, mostly down as far as he could tell, nipping past the passageways that yawned to either side of him and promised a very short lifetime of adventure.

  Eventually he came to a room with seven walls. A temple, he thought, a meeting place of sorts, perhaps, with walls of dragonglass polished smooth and engraved with all manner of symbols and scenes. He counted left one, two, three, walls and ran his fingers reverently along a very fine carving of Zula Din rousing her hounds to the hunt.

  This is it, he thought. This is the way. He reached into his pocket and touched the bird-skull flute for confidence. I have faced worse, he reminded himself. All by myself in the Dreaming Lands, I faced worse than this and survived.

  He was very young.

  “Pip,” Pakka whispered, close to his ear. “Pip-pip.”

  “It will be fine,” he whispered back as he took that final passage. “They are just children, after all. Like me. Just children.” Far behind him, Daru could hear the shadows laughing.

  Jusssst children, they giggled. Jusssst children.

  “Hssst,” he shushed, impatient with them and with his own fear. “They are children, and I am going to find them.”

  * * *

  The chamber lay not far beyond that seven-walled room. He smelled it before he saw it. Daru found himself breathing through his mouth long before he came to the arched doorway overlooking the chamber. The light seemed to spring from his torch into the high-ceilinged room, and when he saw—

  Daru choked on a breath that was half a sob.

  They are children. His heart wept, echoing his careless words. Children! Row upon row of them, they lay, swaddled and draped in red, stacked foot-to-face like fish in the bottom of a boat. At first Daru thought they were dead, they held so still. One boy—he thought it was a boy, at least—hung from the wrists on one wall. His head lolled to one side as if he no longer had the strength to support it, and row upon row of inked script scarred the inflamed skin of his back.

  I have made a mistake. Daru made a strangled noise deep in his throat, and Pakka clung to him in terror. A terrible mistake. I should not have come here. I should have sent—

  Who, exactly, might he have sent? Hafsa Azeina had not come looking for him, and Daru knew deep in his heart that she was probably dead. For all he knew, the Dragon King himself had put these children here. Who could he send? Who would come? Who in all the world cared for the fate of children who were weak, or slow, or… different?

  Only me, Daru thought. If I do not save them, nobody will. Trembling from the soles of his feet to the roots of his hair, he stepped into the chamber.

  The children were not dead, after all.

  As one, they turned their heads as he entered the room. There was no other movement, just that, and it sent the hairs on the back of his neck to prickling. Eyes wide and unblinking as an old blind man’s, they stared and breathed, stared and breathed as a low breeze rustled through the hallway.

  No, not a breeze, he realized. The children were whispering.

  “Sleep,” they crooned. Sleep, they commanded. Sleep, they begged. “Sleep, sleep, sleeeeeeep…”

  The voices were raised from a whisper to a howl, and though the children did not move at all, not one of them, Daru felt a cry of fright rising in his own throat. Pakka screeched and launched herself from his shoulder and darted off, her pale little light fast disappearing back the way they had come. Unable to tear his eyes from the sight of the children staring up at him, mouths dark O’s as they howled at him to sleep, to sleep, he backed away—

  A hand closed over his shoulder from behind. Daru yelled and spun, forgetting all about the exceptional children, forgetting about Pakka and tunnels and hunger as he stared up, up, up. A black cloak billowed about the form of a man who drank darkness.

  He is a shadow, Daru screamed, deep in the Downbelow of his own soul. He is all the shadows. Indeed shadow rippled across that perfect, ruined mask, and the eyes behind it creased in a smile.

  Those eyes, Daru thought, mindless with panic. Those eyes. This was worse, much worse than anything he had ever faced in the Dreaming Lands. And yet, and yet…

  You will live, Daru. Hannei’s voice, a hand brushing hair from his fevered forehead, a kiss. You are stronger than they know.

  Daru gathered his strength. “I know you,” he whispered, clutching the journal. “Somnus.”

  “And I know you,” the man said, in the voice of someone who had screamed himself awake for a thousand years. “Nightmare boy.” His free hand darted to his waist, then flicked toward Daru’s eyes. “Aaaah,” Daru cried. His eyes stung. They burned so that he dropped the torch and rubbed at his face with his good hand.

  “Aaa—” He wobbled, sank to his knees. The man released his grip and Daru slid gracelessly, bonelessly, to the dragonglass floor.

  “Sleep,” the man whispered.

  “Sleeeeep,” the children whispered. Daru thought that they were weeping. Or was he weeping? It was hard to…

  His eyes dragged shut.

  He slept.

  FORTY-THREE

  Jian dined on squid in ginger sauce, and drank pepper tea, and marveled at the strange dream his life had become. More of a nightmare than a dream, really, he mused, but the food is very good.

  Accompanied by two dozen of his most trusted dammati, he had arrived at the comfort house as Akari Sun Dragon dove behind the Mutai Gonyu. He sat at his ease, dining, drinking, and playing cards with others like himself, Sen-Baradam who had sworn to wage war upon the Forbidden City and break the emperor’s hold on their lives for all time. It was most likely, he knew—they all knew—that this rebellion would end as others before it had ended, with their heads and guts staining the floors of the Palace of Flowers.

  “Either way, we are most likely fucked,” Mardoni had said into his ear earlier that same evening, laughing as he did so. “Us, our dammati, our families, and the towns we grew up in, as well.”

  “We are already fucked,” Jian had observed. He had drunk a bit too much of the rice wine, and it had loosened his tongue.

&n
bsp; “Exactly!” Mardoni had cuffed the side of his head, laughing, as a favorite uncle might have done. “So we might as well fuck the emperor, too, on our way to the Lonely Road!” They had all laughed at that, stuffing food into their faces and gambling away what monies they had, as rice wine and pepper tea flowed like tears.

  Jian himself had some two hundred and thirteen dammati, at last count, and their ranks swelled by the day as Yellow and Red Daechen—even a few Blacks, to his surprise, Daeborn princes who had already walked three years down the road to Khanbul—came to Jian to drink from the blooding cup. They wore lacquered armor like his own, blue and silver and black, with his silver issuq rampant on chest and shield. They had chosen to swear their lives to him, to throw in their lot with a traitorous Sen-Baradam.

  Like as not, they had chosen the quickest road to death.

  Jian’s visor had been fashioned to look like the snarling black face of a sea-bear with silver tusks and blue-rimmed eyes. It sat now on the low table before him and to his right, keeping company with the silver-and-white stag helm of Mardoni Sen-Baradam, the black-and-gold mymyc’s head helm of Kouto Sen-Baradam, and the red-and-copper mountain eagle of Latukhan Sen-Baradam. Their dammati stood guard, straight-backed, hard-faced and proud.

  Pretty young men and women in the red robes of saiku—comfort boys and girls—served noodles and spiced meats and tea, rice wine and dumplings and steamed vegetables. They played the loutan and flirted with the Sen-Baradam as if the men had come for pleasure and not to speak of treason.

  “Jian, here, try the peach wine!” Mardoni pushed the bottle closer to him, and laughed as Jian shook his head. “Why so serious, boy?”

  “I have drunk enough already,” Jian said. He was not lying. The room spun dangerously.