They had spent the afternoon drifting past flotillas of lotuses that grew thick at either bank, the milky water rilling at their edges. Now, a tall solitary bluff rose up downriver, and at its peak, something glittered under the light of the revealed Heavenly River.
“Well,” Nizhvashiti said from the rail beside the Dead Man, “it’s certainly prettier than Chandranath.”
That was an understatement. The grim little stockade in the mountain didn’t even seem as if it should be allowed the same noun as this gleaming edifice.
The Dead Man guessed that what he and the Godmade could pick out so clearly from this distance was the palace. He could make out golden stone, so clear in color it seemed almost translucent under the starry light, and tiles in speckled blue and white and green, shrunk with distance until they seemed like the sequined dust of a butterfly’s wing.
A castle—a palace—that size must have a teeming community surrounding it. The Dead Man thought they would have to come closer to see any such town above the level of the floodplain.
“You’ve been here before. What’s that glow?” The Dead Man raised a finger to indicate the faint green-blue radiance along the ridgeline of what he took to be the great hall, or whatever the local architectural equivalent might be.
“Probably skylights of dragonglass.” Nizhvashiti’s voice was mild, unworried. “The stuff shines with its own light, and they use it a lot in palaces.”
The Godmade grew ever more skeletal. The golden orb winked in its socket whenever Nizhvashiti glanced around. The dark olive face was drawn up against the bones so tight that it was startling that the Godmade could speak or smile without that leathery complexion cracking. A harsh metallic scent lay on Nizhvashiti’s breath.
Still, the Godmade moved with strength, and no apparent weariness or discomfort.
The Dead Man winced. Dragonglass. He’d heard of the stuff but never seen it, and the idea made his skin crawl. Everyone knew that dragon treasures were cursed and poisoned, and that anyone who touched them or took them from the lair would die, slowly and horribly.
Nizhvashiti laughed like a bell at his posture, or perhaps whatever they could see of his expression. “It’s perfectly safe stuff. As long as you don’t crush it and breathe the dust in. I mean, I probably wouldn’t sleep on a bed of it, either. But they use a lot of it for windows in this part of the world and I’ve never heard of anyone sickening from that.”
“Look,” the Dead Man said, wanting to change the subject to anything but how amusing his fears were. “Is that the top of the city wall?”
It was of the same golden stone, patterned with something gray, like granite. And along the tops, it glittered too, and faintly shimmered. “They’ve set more dragonglass into the mortar,” he realized, then also realized that he’d spoken aloud.
“Shards along the wall-top.”
“Well,” he said. “That will keep the riffraff out.”
Beyond the wall, the tiled roofs of the city were larger speckles and flat sequins of glazed green, blue, white, and occasionally yellow. Flowering trees crowded the base of the palace walls, but had been kept clear of the lower walls of the city, which was set back behind and beneath the castle, away from the river. It was high enough to be above the flood, at least. The Dead Man wondered if it was built on fill to keep its feet dry. That didn’t bode well for the walls having deep footings.
He sighed when he realized that he was already making plans about defending it from Himadra. For no good reason at all, except that he disliked a man who would raid a wealthier neighbor, even if he himself was poor.
No, the Dead Man and the Gage would not be traveling on with the caravan. And not just because the Dead Man felt the terrible pang of need in his chest easing as their objective hove into sight. He itched to give their message to the queen, but beyond that, his decisions again felt like his own.
He remembered then that Druja’s brother Prasana still rested in the hold, slowly strengthening. And that the injuries Prasana was strengthening from had been incurred as he was escaping the lands and possibly the hands of that same Himadra.
Caravans transported news as well as trade goods and travelers. And they also transported secrets.
The Dead Man felt a shiver of epiphany. Perhaps the caravan would not be traveling on past Sarathai-tia. Without his partner, and him.
* * *
They drifted past a heavily guarded mooring serviced by a swept and polished alabaster stair that must have been the water-gate for the palace. This was upstream of the river frontage of bustling Sarathai-tia proper. You wouldn’t want your pleasure gardens sprawling beside the outflow sewage of the city.
The river here was so wide and slow it might almost have been a lake, but the shipping and docks of the town were wildly busy. Boats of shallow draft zipped across the placid water in complicated patterns. Stevedores heaved cloth-wrapped bundles and crates marked FRAGILE with recklessness.
The Dead Man’s heartbeat accelerated. Soon, he thought, they would be rid of the current task, the precious message. They would be rid of a blood debt to a powerful Wizard, though that was a different story. And he might be rid of the geis that itched under his skin, if a geis it was and not just his own pathologically overdeveloped sense of duty.
And then? he wondered, as the prow of the ice-boat swung heavily toward the pier and the waiting dock crew. Where would they go, what would happen? What fate awaited in the heathen lands, for a Dead Man and a metal one?
He wanted to go home. That was why he had been giving the Gage such a hard time. He wanted to go home. And home was a place that not only didn’t remain, but had never existed.
* * *
As the caravan tied up, a slender boy in livery bustled between bare-chested, sweating stevedores and dockhands until he balanced at the edge of the pier. The boy raised a speaking horn to his mouth with the flourish of a trained herald and called out, “Is there a messenger aboard from Messaline?”
The Dead Man almost failed to register that the question was directed at him. He hadn’t expected to be met at the docks by a royal entourage—travel being what it was—but apparently the package the Gage was holding was important enough to the intended recipient that every new arrival in Sarathai-tia was being checked against the need to expedite. Either that, or the rajni had some way of knowing that her answer would come aboard this particular caravan.
He turned and found Druja at the top of a newly affixed gangplank, negotiating duties with a harbormaster. Druja looked up from the sheaves of thick, soft rice paper long enough to say, “Go see about your errand. We won’t leave the dock for a couple of days. You can have your pay later. Or … sign on for the next leg?”
In which case, Druja would continue to hold the money. The Dead Man would have to talk that over with the Gage. There would be work here for mercenaries. But the Dead Man had fought on enough losing sides for a while. Where by “a while,” he meant “a lifetime.”
He wanted to stay. He wanted to go. He wondered who Druja—and Prasana—were really working for.
He remembered his first lingering look at the city: the shimmering walls, the golden palace. Reflexively, he imagined it in flames. He’d probably already made his decision, but he wasn’t really ready to admit it out loud yet.
Besides, he remembered his suspicion that Druja too might not be moving on particularly quickly. Was this then a gambit to hold the Dead Man in place, as well?
“The Gage must come with me,” the Dead Man said.
Druja looked a little unhappy at this, which reassured the Dead Man that he hadn’t been planning to skip out without paying them. He’d want the Gage offloaded before he made any attempt to leave behind the Dead Man. “Don’t be gone long,” Druja said. “I’m still paying you to guard this caravan.”
Technically not true, as their contract ended the moment the ice-boats made port in Sarathai-tia. But it wasn’t currently worth fighting over.
The Gage joined the Dead Man at the base
of the gangplank. The Lotus acrobats were swarming off the boats as well—this was as far as their passage was booked. The Dead Man wondered if he’d ever have a chance to see them actually perform. Ritu waved from across the docks. He waved back to her.
Then he turned and followed the Gage over to the waiting herald. The boy looked even younger up close, with long-lashed eyes as brown and liquid as a heifer’s. Perhaps he’d been chosen as much for his beauty as for his carrying tones.
He greeted them effusively, with much low bowing. “Honored guests, this poor herald would ask that you name the one who has sent you, that Her Abundance my mistress may be assured of your authenticity.”
That emphasis came through clearly, perhaps intended to assure them that they were not being deceived in turn. The Gage said, “The one who has sent us is Eyeless.”
The Dead Man held back, the weight of damp heat sticking his veil to his face, and let the Gage handle the introductions and negotiations. The Dead Man was trying to re-accustom himself to the bustle of a city of this size.
Sarathai-tia had been the imperial capital, when there had been a Lotus Imperium. Now, it was a major trade center for the divided, tangled network of principalities that made up the Lotus Kingdoms, or Sarath-Sahal, or Sahal-Sarat, or any of the various other things that various representatives of the various local populations called it.
It was a peculiar political arrangement, the Dead Man thought. All the little Lotus Kingdoms seemed to take great pride in their former Imperium and the history of the Alchemical Emperor from whom their various royal families were derived by means of his various wives and even more various concubines. But they had as much trouble uniting against outside enemies as any group of principalities, despite their common ancestry and nearly common languages.
One thing the people of these broad and ancient river valleys had in common, though, was a ceaseless hunger for novelty and the exotic. This city was no Messaline, no Mother of Markets, but it bustled and hummed with strange imported people and strange imported wares. As the herald led the Gage and the Dead Man through the teeming streets, the Dead Man saw such a variety of faces and garbs that he could almost imagine himself back in the City of Jackals from whence he and the Gage had embarked so many months before.
The herald led them through what was obviously an immigrant Song neighborhood, peopled by a fairer folk with narrower eyes. They passed through streets full of veiled women and men with their heads dressed in bright cloth that both reminded the Dead Man of his home and seemed simultaneously more alien than the bulk of the Sarathani populace. Perhaps it was because they should have been so perfectly familiar, and yet the styles were slightly different.
He spotted a temple of the Scholar-God in the central square of that quarter, though, and made himself a promise that before he left this city, he would go there and pray properly. How long had it been since he read the words of supplication under a sky-colored dome? Since the caravan had left Asitaneh.
He thought of all the Sarathani he had met in his travels, and how cosmopolitan they all seemed, how comfortable with and accepting of other cultures. He thought of Nizhvashiti, adopting the self-excoriating religious rites of the far Banner Isles.
These people, in this city, didn’t even seem particularly distracted by the existence of a giant metal man walking through their streets accompanied by a comparatively diminutive veiled and red-coated swordsman. The Dead Man could get used to not being notable, he realized. Or at least, to the metropolitan air of worldliness that encouraged people confronted with an unfamiliar sight to act as if they saw such things every day. Even in Messaline, he and the Gage drew a little more interest than this. Maybe ignoring the strange was a form of Tian politeness.
The herald pointed out a few sights, but mostly they walked quickly and without talking. The Gage had adopted the careful gait he used on paved streets, so as not to crush the cobbles into accidental rubble. His footsteps clicked, muffledly. The Dead Man’s scuffed in his soft, worn boots, but he was far more comfortable walking now that he’d left behind the mukluks that had kept his toes from freezing in the mountains.
Their winding path through the city took up the better part of an hour, even walking at a brisk pace. No Mother of Markets, no. But Sarathai-tia was a proper imperial capital after all—even deprived as it was now of its Imperium. And when they left behind the markets and the houses built wall to wall, defending interior courts full of fountains and bright birds that the Dead Man glimpsed through guarded, elaborately wrought iron gates, there was still more walking left before them.
The causeway leading to the palace was broad and well-graded, though steep in places. It curved in an inviting arc up the perfectly conical hill upon which the palace rested, resembling the long train of a Kyivvan noblewoman’s gown. The palace complex that crowned the hill like some elaborate diadem sprawled even more impressively from this angle—long curved wings jeweled with bright glazed windows reaching out to either side; trees heavy with bloom shedding petals as a maiden strewed confetti when she danced for the blessing of the Scholar-God.
The wind that blew across the hill was sweet and sharp and musty with the scent of the trees and the scent of the river. The Dead Man breathed deeply and thought with slight sadness of the Gage, who had no nose. He had no eyes, and he could see; no mouth, and he could speak—and even taste the rich red wine he liked to imbibe, occasionally. Could he also smell the flowers?
The Dead Man realized that he’d never asked. He knew that the Gage had no sense of touch, no sensation should he stroke the fur of a kitten or crunch a man’s bones with his fist. So what else was there?
You couldn’t catch the Gage looking at you, but the Dead Man glanced over at the automaton’s featureless head anyway, to see his own face distorted and reflected.
“Just a little further,” the herald said. “I’ll usher you in past the guards. It’s quickest that way. Otherwise you’ll have to spend half the day dealing with issues of protocol, and Her Abundance made it very clear that she was eager to hear your message.”
They passed within with only a little trouble. The guards at the outer gate let them past unmolested. After they navigated a complex labyrinth of corridors and halls and chambers, they came to the ornate doors that controlled entrance to the audience room. The guards in the antechamber to that audience room insisted on relieving the Dead Man of his saber, his powder horn, and his pistol. The Dead Man offered not so much as a token by way of protest. He hadn’t expected to be allowed into the royal presence with a gun.
They didn’t take any weapons from the Gage, because the Gage did not need or carry any weapons. He was far more dangerous to the royal presence in his own body. But you couldn’t very well relieve him of that body, and the rajni had, herself, requested that he be shown in.
The doors were sandalwood and rosewood, redolent of spicy resin, and not gilded. The contrasting colors made tiers, each of which was worked with relief carvings illustrating significant events in the life of the Alchemical Emperor. They were a history lesson in miniature, the bodies of lords and ladies and common soldiers all carved in the round-limbed, idealized Sarathani style. The Dead Man wished he had time to study them more closely.
But those doors were swiftly thrown open—silent on their hinges—and the youthful herald led the messengers within. His black hair was thick and slippery, parted on the side, and by now they had been following it for long enough that the Dead Man thought he would recognize the back of the young man’s head anywhere.
Glancing up in the audience chamber, the Dead Man caught his breath at vaulted arches carved to imitate a towering forest of smooth-boled trees. Between the stone limbs, dragonglass panes shimmered, tinting the Heavenly River’s pure white shine with unnatural colors.
The Dead Man had seen a great deal of architecture in his life, coming as he did from a caliphate that celebrated construction as one of the sacred arts of Wizardry. What struck him about this place was how light the stone
seemed—not as if the hall had been lifted by brute force and science against the pull of gravity, but as if it had lofted itself there on light and living wings.
The floor had been scattered with gold dust, and as the herald walked forward it swirled into the air on either side of him, filling the hall with an ethereal shimmer. The Dead Man had expected an audience hall full of people, a court in swing. Instead, the echoing chamber was all but empty, so all his attention focused on the things at the far end.
The queen—the rajni, the Dead Man supposed he ought to call her—sat at her ease upon a large, boxy chair on a raised dais. Her chair of estate was draped with heavy, glowing silks. A hulked shape of some sort crouched on a heavy pillar beside her. Her chair, despite the dais, was below and to the right of the enormous flowed-wax shape that the Dead Man knew must be the storied Peacock Throne.
The queen might have been almost lost in the dazzle of its jewels, each curl of its footings being paved with tiny diamonds and sparkling, colored stones to imitate the eyes of a peacock’s tail feathers, but her calm charisma was sufficient that the massive object served her merely as a backdrop. As they came forward across the gold-scattered tiles, the Dead Man could see now that the thing at her right hand was a heavy perch. Upon it an enormous, rust-red and black bird of prey roosted, its dagged crest upraised half-curiously. He could see now that at the queen’s feet lay a beast whose attention made the Dead Man’s heart race uncomfortably when it raised its head.
It levered itself to its feet, and as it came casually down the steps toward their little party its size and ferocious aspect caused him to catch his breath. He told himself that what he felt was wonder. The beast was slope-shouldered, round-rumped, bobtailed. Big as a bear, but with sleek short fur brindled with broken copper and black stripes that gleamed over the bulges and hollows of writhing muscles. The head was a mastiff’s, with the rose-petal ears of a gazehound folded softly against the massive skull. It probably weighed as much as a big Cho-tse, and it moved like a monster in a dream.
The Stone in the Skull Page 21