The Stone in the Skull

by Elizabeth Bear

  “You’re going to love somebody,” said the Gage. “And their fragility is going to break your heart. It’s easiest if it’s their frailty of courage or of honor. When it is their character that breaks, and the love breaks with it. That hurts, but there’s the refuge of betrayal. Righteous anger can see you through almost any sort of winter, Chaeri, if its flame is stoked hot enough.”

  He could not sigh, but he mimicked the sound of a sigh anyway. Sometimes one performed like an actor, for the sake of communication.

  He said, “The worst frailty in a lover, though, is when it’s the frailty of the body, through no fault of their own, because then you cannot even be angry for it. There is no one to blame but the world.”

  “No one else? Not ever?”

  “The world. And perhaps whoever brought this harm down upon the beloved.”

  They paused to watch Hathi browsing. The foliage made ripping sounds like fabric as she pulled it apart. She must keep a platoon of gardeners busy.

  Chaeri mused, “What if I love you?”

  “Because I am not frail?” The Gage contemplated it, reflections chasing his empty mirrors. At last he replied, “How will you know that you love, if there is no terror of losing? Is it love at all, if there is no risk? If it is safe?”

  “Is that why you became what you are?” she asked, with a perspicacity that left him feeling flensed. “The terror of losing?”

  “Revenge,” he replied. “That is why I became what I am. Because this shape could hope to face a Wizard, and win.”

  “Did you get him?”

  “Him?”

  “The Wizard who killed your wife?”

  “Husband,” the Gage replied, and watched her face rearrange itself cryptically again. “The Wizard stole my husband’s soul and locked it away.”

  “So it wasn’t revenge. Not exactly. You had to get your husband’s soul free. Didn’t you?” She spoke so soothingly, as to a child, startling him. Who saw a metal automaton half again her own height as a fragile thing in need of comforting?

  He said, “It was revenge.”

  She did not step away from him. Her hand was on his arm, so heavy for its size. The white elephant had taken two steps away and was picking through rain-beaded tree leaves with her trunk, every so often selecting and plucking one in particular that seemed identical to all the others, except she popped that leaf over all others into her maw, where she more folded and mouthed it than chewed.

  Chaeri was still looking at the Gage. He wished to sigh and said, “And yes, I did. Find him. Put a stop to it. That was how I met the Dead Man. He was looking for the same fellow for similar but not identical reasons.”

  “His wife?” Chaeri asked. As if on some prearranged cue, they turned shoulder to shoulder once more, and started walking toward the palace again. Hathi ambled after, though no one suggested or required her attendance.

  “I never asked,” the Gage said. “But I am certain that she died, in the sack of Asitaneh, and his sons and daughter too.”

  “Dead Men have sons,” she said, as if it had never occurred to her before.

  “And Dead Men have daughters.”

  “How’d he survive, then?” Her gaze was avid. “If his family perished?”

  The Gage shrugged. “That is his story to tell.”

  She frowned, but did not press him further. “And you? If you survived after your husband’s murderer, what kept you here? Doesn’t something like you have a purpose and a limited time of use, customarily?”

  “I am a machine,” the Gage said. “That does not mean I am without feelings.”

  “Desire to live, then? Like every other thing?”

  The Gage thought about it, and did not know the answer. “I think I stayed alive on charity.” He meant his own, as well as that of others, but he wasn’t sure if Chaeri understood him.

  Mercurial, though, she straightened up and sparkled at him. “Conveniently, my duties are not always strenuous. It may be that I have the time for charity.”

  “Really?” he said.

  She grinned, flashing creamy teeth in the dimness. “It’s completely out of pity,” she teased.

  He regarded her. He watched her hair move in the rain. When he spoke, it was softly, and as much as to the girl, he spoke to the rain. “I think I would like to experience your charity.”

  * * *

  As nightfall gathered with a growing brightness, the rain tapered off and threadbare clouds began to fray and tear. The Gage helped Chaeri return Hathi to her stall—a pen only by courtesy, he thought, as he could have battered it down almost effortlessly and he could not imagine any different of the elephant. Then he walked her back to the palace, and left her by the entrance to the rajni’s rooms. His carapace was still rain-spangled, light collecting and seeming to amplify in the droplets, as if he had been jeweled in cabochon diamonds.

  He found the Dead Man, to his surprise, awake, and sprawled elegantly across three steps of the palace’s curving grand stair with one leg propped higher than the other.

  This put the Dead Man slightly above eye level. At least, to those who had eyes.

  “You look louche,” the Gage said, pausing at the bottom of the stair.

  The Dead Man lifted his head. His eyes were red with lack of sleep, but he did not seem drunk and no reek of alcohol surrounded him. His clothes were rumpled and his shirt half-open, but it was the lack of a blade that made him seem naked. “You look drenched, on the other hand.”

  “Walking in the rain will cause that.”

  “Patrolling the boundaries?”

  “Walking a lady home,” the Gage admitted, though he had a sudden strange desire not to mention it.

  “A lady.” The Dead Man sat upright, swinging his legs down the stoop, then seemed to come to the conclusion that straightening his spine was too much effort and slumped forward with his elbows on his knees. “I thought your preference ran the other way, old friend.”

  The Gage demonstrated his dripping robe and his brass armatures with a conjuror’s sweep of his hand. “I can’t see it mattering much one way or the other to me, when it comes right down to it. But it was just a conversation between strangers who might perhaps become friends.”

  The Dead Man nodded, and did not caution him against making friends in places they could not stay, which the Gage found … slightly curious. Instead he said, “Do you want to stay for the war, then?”

  The Gage shrugged. Water slid down his carapace to litter droplets on the floor. “The Eyeless One would certainly owe us a favor, after.”

  “She does seem enamored of … of this little queen.”

  Ah, the Gage thought, with resignation. “You think we were part of the message?”

  The Dead Man sighed and ran his hands across his veil, through the sweaty disarray of his curls. “I do.”

  * * *

  In the morning, word of the armies came. The Gage and the Dead Man were drilling troops near the barracks. They were less desperately unseasoned than the Dead Man had feared, though perhaps not quite what the Gage had hoped.

  One of the acrobat lads, who were functioning as pages for the time being, came scrambling up with his bare horny feet slapping the practice-yard clay. His sweaty face and wild eyes told the tale before he even got the words out.

  “Where are they, lad?” the Dead Man asked, while the Gage was still formulating his questions.

  The lad stammered.

  The Dead Man rolled his eyes and silenced the boy with a wave. “Well of course you don’t know where they are, exactly, this minute. Where were they when the scouts spotted them? Do they have an idea of the terrain? The rate of advance?”

  The child shrank a little from being interrogated as if he were a professional field runner. He glanced over his shoulder, looking for a place to bolt, but there was only the wide, noisy, wet clay yard full of shouting, pushing soldiers and the clatter of blunted, weighted practice blades.

  “Dead Man,” the Gage said, stepping between them gentl
y. His bulk should have been intimidating, but he knew how to make it seem like a protective wall. “You’re flustering him.”

  The Dead Man’s sigh puffed his veil. He gave the Gage the eyeroll that translated as, So you’re Sympathetic Mercenary this time, then? and turned back to the drilling soldiers as if nothing had happened at all.

  The Gage led the boy aside. The lad was at least situationally tough and rallied well, pulling himself together fast. The Gage steeled himself against a moment of self-loathing, that he was assessing the suitability of boys to become soldiers yet again.

  Maybe it was time for him to find a quiet lonely place to lie down and rust, after all.

  But was it better that a boy such as this become a soldier, or that he be left in innocence a little longer that he might then be overrun, conscripted, raped, or some combination of those?

  The Gage placed a heavy metal hand on the lad’s bony shoulder, careful not to let him feel the full weight. “Now tell me,” he said evenly. “Do you know whose soldiers these are? Or if not, who told you to run and see the Dead Man and me?”

  * * *

  Nizhvashiti awaited the Gage at the top of the palace’s grand external stairway, as if the Godmade had known from which direction he would approach. The daily rains were blowing in, and the sky was mottled. Black robes whipped in a freshening wind, revealing the cuffs of jet-colored silken trousers. The overall effect was of a raven struggling on storm winds, silhouetted against a knotted sky.

  The priest’s gold eye glinted as the Gage approached. The skin of the brow above it had split slightly, perhaps due to dehydration. Within, the flesh seemed pale and waxen, as if the juice and vigor were already gone.

  “You need to keep your strength up for the war,” the Gage said. “Try having a cup of tea with some milk and sugar, and maybe a little less poison in it.”

  “There is strength and there is strength,” the Godmade intoned. It would have been pretentious if it weren’t for the little wink—that split the cracked brow further. No blood trickled. The Gage wished, anyway, for thread and a needle.

  The stones settled under the Gage’s weight as he climbed them. He was careful to step toward the back and keep his bulk forward, so as not to chip the edges of the stairs. They were well-masoned, laid in the earth with a level, sandy foundation. He had not cracked one yet. Not in this palace, anyway.

  There were other dwelling places where the stonemasons were less skilled, or less scrupulous.

  He paused a step or two below Nizhvashiti, so their heads were level. “Your messenger found us.”

  “And the Dead Man?”

  “We’re dividing the duties. He’s scaring the troops, and I came to interview you.”

  The Godmade turned, robe skirts flaring so heavily the Gage wondered if there were weights stitched into them. When it came down to it, everything was theater and theatricality: his own mirror of a mask no different from the Dead Man’s veil, the Godmade’s swirling cloaks, the rajni’s towering headdresses and claw-wrapped fingertips.

  He followed up the stairs.

  “How bad is it?”

  “Ata Akhimah has a map room ready.” And would say no more.

  * * *

  The map room was a peculiar chamber, oval in design, with high piecework windows and heavy chandeliers hanging low enough that the Gage must move with grave caution among them. Their branches were twisted bronze, wrought to look like the stems and leaves of water lotuses, with the illuminated portions standing in for the blossoms. They bore no candles in their sconces, though: these fixtures burned with witch-lanterns in sunlit shades of peach and soft rose, casting a warming light on the faces of those assembled.

  The room was full of reluctant generals, and their haggard complexions needed all the flattering such a soft glow could offer. Mrithuri Rajni stood at the head of a long and wide sand table dotted with tiny figures, out of her full court garb and headdress but still formally painted. Beside her was Ata Akhimah. Along the far side of the table were two men the Gage had never seen before, the older one smaller and more scarred than the younger, both in tunics and trews but both with the look of soldiers.

  Ata Akhimah quickly introduced them—the general and the lieutenant general, Madhukasa and Pranaj. The Dead Man had spoken to them about drilling the troops, the Gage knew, but this was the first that he, himself, had seen of them. He liked the way Madhukasa both deferred to his queen, and seemed always to be protectively but unobtrusively near. He reminded the Gage of a father walking alongside the pony upon which his child is learning to ride: protective, but careful to stay out of the way.

  The queen’s maid of honor—Yavashuri was her name—stood behind her and to her left, hands folded and head bowed. She was a sharp-faced woman of medium height, slender of bone but stout of flesh, her hair dressed plainly despite court. As if to make up for it, and her restrained jewelry, she wore a tunic and trousers that were somewhere in color between a ripe orange and a ripe peach, trimmed with bullion and crimson embroidery. Some part of the Gage’s mind wondered where, where on the earth, the Sarath-Sahali peoples got these amazing dyes. They were known throughout the world for their colors—but the Gage was starting to believe that the best ones were never exported. This was some Wizardry to make his own construction seem a little plain and everyday.

  Behind the women, Syama the bear-dog lolled on coffee-colored tile, the flecks of gold in her eyes picking up radiance from the flecks of gold in the glazing.

  The Dead Man was not there, but before the Gage and the Godmade had even settled themselves on the near side of the sand table—both ducking chandeliers the whole way across the room—the door behind them opened one more time and the Dead Man slipped inside. He wore his threadbare red wool again, but the trousers and the shirt beneath it were new and clean and in the Sarathai style, so he’d taken a few moments to tidy himself after the practice field.

  The Dead Man nodded to the room in general and to the Gage in particular. Then the Gage watched with a failure of surprise as the Dead Man crossed the entire room to stand beside the queen. That the queen turned her face to the Dead Man and cocked her eyebrows in a silent smile, though—that would have brought a frown to the Gage’s face if he had one.

  Well, if they were definitely staying, then, he might as well make himself comfortable. He wondered if there was a nice, reinforced, dry cellar somewhere he could set up with a heap of stones to serve as an unbreakable chair.

  Mrithuri called their attention to the sand table once the introductions were all finished, and they gathered around it while the Wizard rolled up her sleeves. With a sweep of her hand, she gathered quartz dust and held it loosely, a soft thread filtering and falling between her fingers, its pale straw color warmed by the roseate light.

  She said something then, singsong and under her breath so it was barely more than hummed, and when she moved her hand all the sand on the table moved with it. It rose up as if connected to the falling thread like a snake with a hook through its mouth, writhing and sliding, following her gestures and the sweep of that thin trickle. When she was done, the sand had piled itself neatly into what the Gage recognized immediately as a sort of topographical representation of a piece of unfamiliar terrain: a map, but in three dimensions.

  The tiny figures—the Gage could see now that they were minuscule representations of men-at-arms, cast in lead and painted in any of several bright and easily distinguishable colors—had neatly sorted and stacked themselves against one edge of the sand table in the process. They were close to him and he would have liked to pick one up, weigh it in his hand and examine it more closely. But lead was soft: it would have dented under his lightest and most delicate touch. He left them be.

  Once the map was completed, the Gage expected that either the general or his lieutenant would step forward and begin arranging the little men—some mounted, some afoot, some holding particular weapons or other banners. There were miniature cannons and siege engines too, and more than one tiny fig
ure of an elephant.

  He’d seen war elephants in use, and the giant beasts the Kyivvan called indrik-zver. He never cared to witness such again. Far more so for the sake of the beasts, as it happened, than for the inevitable savage carnage they wreaked among the men.

  But it wasn’t the general. It was the queen’s maid of honor, Yavashuri, who stepped forward briskly once Ata Akhimah was done with the table and pulled her long henna-decorated fingers from her sleeves. Working with quick concentration and occasional glances at a list of notes on pale thick paper that was crumpled to softness in her hand, she set up the tiny figures as if she were laying out a board for a game of Rank and Ruin.

  Each piece, the Gage knew, would likely represent not a single soldier but a company, a specialized battle group of some sort. Infantry, cavalry, pikemen, archers, musketeers, Wizards, cannon. And that did indeed seem to be how Yavashuri was deploying them. She spread little figures over the miniature hillsides for some time, but when she was finished the Gage felt the tension shift in the room. He leaned his own head to one side and considered the layout.

  There were not so many of the enemy as he had feared, though more than he would have been happy to accept as a reasonable minimum to keep things challenging. What this was, though, was not an overwhelming force. Simply one against which the overmatched and inexperienced forces they had at hand could not reasonably hope to hold off without some sort of miracle. The Gage’s help in combat, he knew, might prove to be exactly that sort of miracle.

  If he’d been hoping for a clear direction to arise from better knowledge of the enemy, it seemed he would have to resign himself to being sadly disappointed.

  “How did you come by this information?” Nizhvashiti asked, leaning forward. A long finger hovered over the sand table, but did not touch.