The Stone in the Skull

by Elizabeth Bear

  Eyelashes lowered over that expressionless gilded orb, and the Dead Man shuddered behind his trained, impassive exterior as every speculation that this might be a coincidence deserted him.

  Usually, making people shudder was his job.

  He glanced at the Gage, who was not—of course—glancing back. Still, the Dead Man felt he was understood: this priest was bound where they were bound. On a similar errand, or a contrary one?

  “We won’t turn you out to die,” the caravan master said. “But this is a business, your divinity.”

  “Oh.” The tall figure’s lips curved to reveal teeth ranked as white as the peaks surrounding. “I have plenty of gold.”

  * * *

  They collected the caravan and their scattered people, and redistributed what they could salvage from the shattered ice-ship among the other three, which meant that more passengers were left to shank’s mare for their transportation. There was some grumbling at that, though the much-cloistered noblewoman seemed actually happy to get out and walk.

  She wasn’t fast, but she didn’t complain.

  One of the injured yaks had to be sacrificed. The other was limping, but the Godmade declared that it could be helped, and so it was given into Nizhvashiti’s charge. The Dead Man concealed his misgivings.

  For certain, the Godmade’s appearance was convenient. But that didn’t absolutely mean the whole thing had been planned. He tried to be charitable: if it hadn’t been planned, Nizhvashiti had saved his life and the Gage’s shiny hide. And if it had been planned, the priest might represent an allied power. Or even be another friend of the Eyeless One.

  You never knew, with Wizards, what they might be plotting. And what information they might choose to withhold, for purposes of their own. The profession attracted people of such a temperament as to treat knowledge as a precious thing, and they would either bore your head sore showing off how much they had hoarded, or they would lock it away and hide it from everyone.

  What the Dead Man couldn’t determine was what staging the whole thing could have accomplished better than just showing up with a bag of gold and purchasing passage.

  You’re too suspicious, the Dead Man told himself. You’ve been a sell-sword too long, and you were never cut out for it. You’re much too old for this.

  He wondered if there was a noble family somewhere in the Lotus Kingdoms who might hire a retainer of impeccable loyalty and training. He’d be willing to pledge both to the nearest reasonable liege that didn’t demand baby-strangling or kitten-stomping, and who was also willing to make all the complicated decisions without too much input from his or her minions.

  They did not stop that night at the edge of the spring atop the pass that sourced their river, as they had intended. They pushed on several more miles, finding less comfortable shelter in the lee of a sharp overhang that might discourage nighttime predators.

  At least there was a good meal of fresh, roasted yak to look forward to. For everybody except the Gage, who didn’t eat. Though he did do something mysterious with red wine on a fairly regular basis.

  2

  Mrithuri awakened in soggy silks and knew the rains were coming. Her bedclothes dragged at her skin as she arose from the softness of her pallet. The impression of her narrow body remained in damp cotton and wool batting beneath its tufted cover.

  Her mouth was dry and her limbs aching. She felt heavy, cramped, wool-witted, as she could not afford to be. She drifted through the predawn dimness in her nakedness. Knotted rugs of strong-hued wool and tiles of gold-veined indigo lapis lazuli warmed and cooled her soles by turns as she crossed to the window. The draperies were near-transparent layers of silk crepe in blue and violet and tangerine hues like dawn. They stirred over the pierced stone lattice. Mrithuri drew them aside with a hand still naked, soft-fingered, and merely human for now—decorated as it was only with elaborate stained patterns of henna.

  There were no guards within Mrithuri’s chamber. Her bhaluukutta, Syama, lay before the door, as tall at the shoulder as a big man’s chest, and twice as heavy as that same man would have been. The bear-dog’s eyes were open, but her head lay on her paws. Syama was better than any human guard. She could not be blackmailed, and she could not be bribed.

  Mrithuri’s servants slept lightly. Yavashuri, her clever middle-aged maid of honor, and Chaeri, a hypochondriac maid of the bedchamber, had already rolled from their thinner and less sumptuous pallets along the wall by the time Mrithuri reached the window. She ignored their movements as she leaned forward, veiled in her unbound hair. She wished to cherish the self-deception of privacy for a few moments longer.

  Her chamber overlooked the gardens. The white lattice and the rail of the balcony beyond framed a view like a Song silk-scroll watercolor. Whorls of mist caressed the gnarled boles of ancient cassia and almond trees, lay thick across planting beds. The trees would soon drip with blooms—pink or gold for the cassia, delicately blushed white for the almonds. The beds would surge with helleborine and lilies between their banks of rhododendron and laurel. But all were naked to the summer heat for now.

  And for now the sky above was transparent, and the killing drought of summer had continued unabated for so long that Mrithuri had to remind herself that other weather was possible. She took another breath of moister air. She turned her attention to the northern horizon, which showed a bright fine demarcation as the Good Daughter, Sahar, whisked her spangled drape off the face of the sky, leaving the brilliance of her Heavenly Mother, the sacred river, unveiled in the sky as on the earth.

  There were no clouds to the east, yet. The sea lay west, and the winds came from the west, and weather came from the west. But the storms that made a thriving city and agriculture possible, here in the heart of the arid lands—those came every year without fail from the east, and Mrithuri as rajni and priestess could feel their herald in her bones.

  Mrithuri stood in silence and watched the day brighten toward nightfall and the mist burn off. The edge of the veil slid higher, revealing indigo sapphire lit by a hundred thousand million stars as fat and sparkling as the diamond band restraining a rajni’s hair. If it weren’t for the mist cloaking the gardens below, Mrithuri could have looked down and glimpsed the broad expanse of the earthly manifestation of the sacred Mother River Sarathai from the edge of the garden-hung roof above. But as she raised her eyes to the heavens, the black disk of the Cauled Sun set in the south amid its nest of transparent silver flames and the celestial manifestation of the river’s full glory was revealed overhead. The sky and the gardens brightened and the evening blazed.

  Only the brightest stars could shine through the dark of day, dimmed as they were then by the Good Daughter’s shawl and the silver corona of the Cauled Sun. By night, however, the whole vast twisted arch of the river of light across the sky’s meridian lay revealed. Its brilliance glowed down from the vertex of the sky, wreathed in gleaming mist as befitted the heavenly extension of the river called Imperishable, called Daughter of Mountains, called White-Limbed, called Faithful, called Unmanifest, called Plaited, called Gilded by the Moon, called Peerless, called Mother of Bread.

  “Your Abundance?” the lovely girl Chaeri said, calling Mrithuri from her reverie. The title of courtesy amused Mrithuri, though she hid her smile: it was a silly title for a virgin rajni. Even when that rajni was also a priestess, and the personification of the great Mother River on earth, as the Good Mother was her personification in heaven.

  Mrithuri turned from the window before the mist was fully lifted, aware belatedly of the chill that had prickled her skin. The first cool evening of the season. Yavashuri held out a heavy robe of embroidered charmeuse. Mrithuri slipped into it gratefully, stretched her shoulders until the spine between them cracked.

  Chaeri limped over as if her joints hurt her. She lifted Mrithuri’s sandalwood box, large enough that the girl needed both hands to hold it. She raised it up despite Yavashuri’s frown of displeasure, and something heavy slid inside. The ache in Mrithuri’s joints itc
hed for the solace within, but it must wait.

  “Not this morning,” Mrithuri said, and was proud of her self-discipline.

  No one will know, Chaeri’s eyes said, as she lifted the lid. But Mrithuri turned briskly away, despite her aching heaviness. A good mother saw to her children first, as a good daughter saw to the needs of her mother. As the earthly avatar of both Good Mother and Good Daughter, Mrithuri could not betray that trust on a night when she felt the requirement to fast in her blood.

  Mrithuri spoke the words, then—the words that would begin her yearly silence, except for the necessary song and prayers. “Tonight will come the rains,” Mrithuri said, her bones ripe with the knowledge imparted upon a true sister of the sacred river, a true daughter of a true raj. Even the discomfort of a fasting morning could not entirely dull the sense of the Mother River’s constrained excitement surging through her. The river was hungry, after the long dryness. And today she anticipated the feast.

  Mrithuri’s women shared a glance. It was early in the year—very early!—and so many things would not yet be ready for the rains. But the sky did as it willed, and Mrithuri was only the messenger. They bowed, accepting what she said.

  Mrithuri heard the faint whispering, a susurrus of voices from within the pierced interior walls. The voices rose to song, an unaccompanied chant that rang through the rajni’s apartments as the cloistered nuns who moved through passages within the walls sang out their morning prayers. It was a sweet, powerful sound—so many clear women’s voices intertwining—but today, without the solace of the box, Mrithuri winced in headache.

  She hid it, as befitted a rajni. She closed her eyes and bowed her own head over her folded hands and—with her maids of the chamber—sang to them in answer her praises of the day, and of the rainy season come again.

  * * *

  After the morning plainsong, Mrithuri suffered herself to be bathed and coiffed and robed quite elegantly, in honor of the changing season. She wished she’d had the wit to realize how soon the rains would be coming, and eat something substantial before bed. But it was too late now. She would fast until after the ceremony.

  Chaeri and Yavashuri closed Mrithuri’s snake-collar about her throat, and slid into place the serpent’s head, attached to the flexible blade that curved within and locked the jewel in place. Her narrow hands vanished into the armatures of her fingerstalls, their long curving oval nails glittering with patterns of ruby, orange sapphire, and diamond. Her wrists shimmered with slender glass bangles that clattered and chimed. Her brown arms, seeming even more slender above the heavy drape of bracelets, were left bare to show the elegant intertwined outlines of sacred bull, tiger, elephant, dolphin, peacock, and bearded vulture that had been inked on her skin as she progressed through her training in the priestess mysteries.

  That had been five years before, on her nineteenth name-day, and Mrithuri had managed—so far—to remain unmarried. Someday, she knew, the lines would feather. Her courses would cease, and the skin of her limbs would slacken and lose its tautness. Perhaps on that day her counselors would finally cease their importunings that she marry and get an heir.

  She allowed Yavashuri to smooth the weight of her patterned vermilion drape over her shoulder and fasten it to her cropped silken blouse with a heavy jewel. Her belly would be chilly, but the dress would flaunt the red-gold glow of the Queenly Tiger in her navel. Perhaps the radiance of the jewel would remind her counselors and sycophants, after all, of who truly was rajni. Even if, being a woman, she could not sit upon the Peacock Throne of her grandfather—and of his grandfather before him, who had been the legendary Alchemical Emperor and unified the kingdoms of both Sarathai and Sahalai into the Lotus Empire, which had endured not a dozen years after his death at the age of one hundred and eleven.

  She rubbed her aching hands together and thought again of her scented sandalwood box, and the relief it contained.

  The servants of her chamber seated her upon a stool, then powdered Mrithuri’s feet with gold dust and decorated her bare toes with rings and jewels. They helped her to rise again and she stood under the weight of all that cloth, all that gold.

  The falling scarf of her drape demanded she hold her shoulders back, and high. The headdress demanded the same of her neck and skull. She took a breath and settled into herself; the posture of a ruler.

  She stepped from her chambers accoutered and constrained, every inch a rajni. Syama levered herself up with agile strength and followed, light rippling on the black and gold brindle of her coat as she passed before the windows. This was still Mrithuri’s private wing of the palace, where the rajni and the cloistered nuns lived. Only her household, and certain very specially honored guests, were allowed to tread here. Only the servants of her body would ever see her other than in her mask of majesty.

  Unless she deigned to marry after all, she mused, with a faint secretive smile.

  Her people paused and bowed as she passed, eyes downcast. As always, it struck Mrithuri as a tremendous waste, to spend so much time and money on making her resplendent when no one was allowed to look at her directly. Maybe she should take a husband. Just so somebody would be able to appreciate properly the results of all this fuss. The rest of her court spent all their time staring at her gilded toes.

  She walked sedately, in deference as much to her headache and the heavy dress as to her rank, and restricted herself to the gliding steps that would keep all her finery balanced. The scarf of her drape flowed out behind her on the slight breeze of her passage, while Syama padded silently at her heels, ever-watchful. Stout, dour Yavashuri and voluptuous, round-hipped little Chaeri followed her at a respectful distance. Their eyes would be downcast too, but they were mistresses of watching for any slipped hair or trailing hem through their own lowered lashes. The nuns in their cloister within the walls followed also; Mrithuri glimpsed their silver-threaded white cotton gauze veils and heard their slippered footsteps through the latticed stone.

  She hated shoes quite passionately. She would have never made a nun.

  Courtiers and the rest of her entourage—the people who fancied themselves important—awaited her beyond the golden gates that guarded the entrance to the rajni’s household. They fell in on all sides: counselors and sycophants, priestesses and courtiers, ambassadors and—for all she knew—assassins. Some were her favorites; some only thought they should be. She kept her measured pace and did not speak to any.

  Nor did they speak to her. Word had passed with the morning plainsong that today was a day of ritual. To distract her now would be to disturb her meditation. Which she probably should be paying attention to, though it was hard to do so as they passed the turning to the throne room and its storied, unoccupied chair. No one had sat in it since Mrithuri’s grandfather’s death. No one had dared.

  She squinted against the glare as her centipede chain followed her out into the bright morning sun. Instantly, a silken shade was raised over her—a blessing, as she couldn’t shade her eyes with her heavily decorated hand without risking putting one of them out on a fingerstall, and it would have been a break in decorum to do so anyway. She walked across smooth cobbles still cool with morning, down the narrow path bordered with jasmine and the imported, coddled ylang-ylang, neither of which were yet in bloom. It didn’t matter that they were still scentless. The spice and incense of the court atmosphere followed her into the fresh air of morning, carried on her clothes and the clothes of her entourage.

  She wished she could put on a tunic and trousers, shed all these bridal fripperies (elaborate enough to weigh down any flighty fiancée), and go skipping down the path at a run. It amused her to think of all the courtiers rushing after her, out of shape and out of breath. She bit her lip against the giggle.

  Mrithuri made herself instead stop decorously at the edge of the constructed rise her palace sat upon. The man-made hill elevated Mrithuri’s home safely above the yearly deluge while allowing the rajni to remain within sight of the sacred river. No dike had ever been raised that
could hold back the Sarathai when the floods began, fed as they were by the monsoon and by the meltwater flowing down from the Steles of the Sky, where spring began much later than in the hot lowland countries.

  Mrithuri turned her gaze up to the stunning vaulted sky above, the vast cool shining of the Heavenly River with its curving bands, the coppery rim of a full moon rising heavily to the north. No clouds yet, and the depths of the sky were as deep and transparent as the eye of a dragon.

  Her entourage held its breath around her. She turned thoughtfully, and was gratified to catch the eye of Ata Akhimah, the Aezin-born Wizard who was Mrithuri’s doctor, the court astronomer, and her closest adviser and friend. She wore flowing black trousers and a loose, white tunic, sleeveless to show off her velvety complexion and her muscled arms. She didn’t avoid looking Mrithuri in the eye. Silver bangles chimed and ivory bangles clicked as Ata Akhimah raised her hands. “Open the gates!”

  Three footmen sprinted down the hill toward the tall wrought gates that dominated the gap in the white stone wall. Watching them left Mrithuri envious again. They wore their long, full, white cotton skirts wrapped up between their legs into a sort of blousy trouser and ran without impediment, and their heads probably didn’t hurt. Unless they’d been drinking a little rice beer the night before.

  She thought longingly of the ivory-and-jet inlay of her sandalwood box. Chaeri would have it for her when this was done. She just had to get through the fast and the ritual, and she could have her breakfast and her tea and her bite as soon as the rain came down.

  The runners reached the gates. They were about to raise the bars and turn the keys when a loud male voice cried out, “Your Abundance, Your Abundance, I must speak with you immediately!”