The Stone in the Skull

by Elizabeth Bear

  The bird was enormous. Its head, from the hooked tip of the beak to the crested occiput, was as long as the Dead Man’s own from top of skull to point of jaw, though considerably narrower. It was shaped like the business end of a hatchet, a heavy bone-splitting thing, and a little tuft of black feathers made a goatee under its chin. The head was crimson—the Dead Man had heard that the birds stained themselves with ochre—with a sharp black stripe across the eye. The breast and legs were also colored like blood, and the feathers of the long wings and tail—the pinions—were charcoal at the edges and crimson near the shaft.

  The vulture on the man’s gauntlet stood taller than his head. He tilted his arm a little and it fanned wings with a span greater than the Gage’s height—and this bird wasn’t even the largest of those arrayed on the perches.

  The austringer handed the jeweled hood off to one of his journeymen, and supported the elbow of the arm that bore the bird with his other hand. The bird seemed disquieted, fanning its wings and moving its head with a snakelike sway. It lifted a talon as large as a woman’s hand and placed it down again, edging along the man’s arm until brought up short by the jesses.

  The austringer brought the vulture to the queen, walking up to the edge of the dais and levering the bird up to her. It fanned again and began to bate, but even as the wings made their first heavy downstroke, Mrithuri leaned forward without moving her hands or opening her eyes, and seemed to whisper in its ear. And the bird—enormous, with a beak that looked as if it could sever a finger—quieted. In fact, it cocked its head, and seemed to listen.

  The Dead Man watched with that odd sensation one gets when discovering something completely unexpected about a new and adored lover. Mrithuri, her eyes still closed, reached down into a pot that rested in her lap and dipped something up on to her fingertips. She offered it to the bird and the Dead Man’s pulse quickened: the bird could have snapped her fingers off at the joint.

  Instead, the big head dipped ceremoniously. The bearded vulture accepted whatever she offered with surprising gentleness, then began to preen the substance through its feathers, leaving behind fresh streaks of a brighter red. Ochre, yes. And perhaps blood?

  The Dead Man was unsurprised when the austringer turned from Mrithuri, lowered his arm, and jerked it up again heavily, releasing the jesses and tossing the bearded vulture into the air.

  The bird beat hard to climb, its wings sweeping storms of gold dust from the tiles. Eddies and currents flowed around its feathers, little swirls of precious, shimmering metal flooding from its wingtips. The pinions brushed the Dead Man’s arm, and he could imagine the force with which it could strike if it cared to.

  Then it was higher, over the heads of the assembled, and folding itself tight to arrow through the open casement.

  The process was repeated with each vulture. The Dead Man watched with growing concern as Mrithuri seemed to tire with every word she whispered to each of them. She swayed heavily by the time the fourth bird was launched, and after the austringer brought her the fifth one, there was a pause while Chaeri was sent for the Eremite serpents.

  While she waited, the Dead Man took it upon himself to approach her with a cup of wine. She accepted gratefully, sipped it, and said, “It would be easier if I could use the throne.”

  Her gesture indicated the molten-looking mountain of gold behind her.

  The Dead Man realized that from where he stood, he could hear quiet conversations from the others in the room. He glanced up at the arches overhead: a whispering vault, that brought sound to this focal point. So the monarch could stay informed. He glanced up at the Peacock Throne, a massive, invasive presence behind them. The real focal point was probably up there. The spot this chair of estate stood upon was likely intended for a queen, or a trusted counselor.

  Well, a queen sat here now. With more on her hands than merely advising a raja and bearing his heirs.

  Such things as the vault were common in Asitaneh architecture: it was one of the tricks of his own people’s Wizards. He’d never before seen it in a realm that stood outside the influence of the Scholar-God. These Sarath-Sahali were not, in fact, barbarians, no matter how heathen their gods.

  “It helps you talk to vultures?” the Dead Man asked.

  “Among other things,” she said. She gave him back the empty cup.

  He frowned, remembering her bones so close beneath the skin. “When was the last time you ate?”

  She waved a hand. “I’m not hungry.”

  Not with the snakebite in your veins. But he swallowed his sigh and persisted. “A sweetmeat or two during our discussion of tactics? And what since then?”

  She didn’t answer, just frowned. But then she said, “All right,” and sent Hnarisha for a plate of food. The little castellan gave the Dead Man half a grateful smile before he went.

  “Where are your guards?” he asked next.

  She sighed. “Readying the city for siege, Dead Man.”

  “It comforts me not.”

  “You will have to be my guardian, then.”

  It was meant to mollify him, and she made her eyes twinkle when she said it. But he nodded, accepting the charge most seriously. So he would, be her guardian, then.

  * * *

  The food arrived before Chaeri did, and the Dead Man and Hnarisha between them managed to coddle her into eating almost half of it.

  Chaeri seemed to take a long time. The queen grew irritated. Then the snakes were there, and Mrithuri again set her will to charming vultures. She needed the snakebite one more time before she was done.

  The Dead Man did what he could for her and tried to ignore the way each successive bite spread wider red patches on the bandage she pressed to her chest. He carried water to her. Sometimes the humble act of carrying water is the finest service one can do.

  And there was worship in that, too: he carried water for the queen, and for his lover, and for the Scholar-God herself. All in the same person of this stubborn young heathen whom he was growing to so admire.

  At last, all the vultures were launched. Mrithuri sagged against the jewel-set back of her uncomfortable-looking rectangular chair of estate, her spine curved so her belly looked sharply hollow. Her complexion had gone not just waxy, but greenish. She still attempted to wave away the cup of broth Hnarisha and Yavashuri brought to her, but the Aezin Wizard insisted as well, with an appeal to Mrithuri’s responsibility to her subjects.

  Through his worry, he found himself admiring Akhimah’s skill at wrangling royalty. There was an art to it, one that the Dead Man had excelled at in his day. Remind, suggest, make them think it was their own responsibility or their own idea. Ata Akhimah was a pretty good politician.

  When she stepped away, the empty cup that had held broth in her hands, the Dead Man went to her. He lowered his voice to a murmur that would not carry, even under the whispering vault overhead, and said in her ear, “Are we done?”

  She shook her head. “That was only the beginning.”

  He wished he could say, “But she’s not strong enough for this!” and have it mean anything. The truth was, he had no claim on her—she had offered none. And the truth was, he admitted, that he did not know what she was strong enough to do or not do, and he had no place making that decision for her.

  He withdrew to stand beside the Gage, who was waiting as quietly as a statue so as not to damage the infrastructure. They stood side by side, arms folded and legs braced in a nearly identical posture. The Dead Man breathed. The Gage did not.

  Mrithuri pulled herself up and laid her hands on her knees once more. She squared her shoulders and settled herself with the air of one pulling on a cloak of determination. She heaved a breath and closed her eyes.

  The generals drew close. Madhukasa actually crept up on the dais, though he crouched beside the queen so his head never overtopped hers. Pranaj stood at the foot, a stylus ready. Ata Akhimah and Hnarisha brought in armloads of maps and laid them on a table that had been made ready as the perches were being cleared
away. The apprentice and journeyman austringers were gone: only the master remained.

  Mrithuri spoke. Her voice was not the strained rasp that the Dead Man expected, but low, detached, dreamy. Like someone in an opium trance, almost—as if she were speaking from far away, relaying back experiences that were happening to someone else, somewhere else.

  “We go high,” she said. “Above bowshot. We will be safe from arrows.”

  And from pistols, the Dead Man thought. He put a hand on the butt of one of his own brace, which had been returned to him. They were not so accurate when shooting upward, as his experience with the ice-wyrm had reminded him. Though there was no true safety: somebody could always get lucky, even at extreme range.

  “The wind is from the west,” she said. “But as we climb, it sheers northward. The world is bright and the sky is high. Some of us ride the wind. Some of us fight it. We climb. We part. We spin.

  “We see no soldiers, none but our own men. Our people flee: there are boats on the river, so many carts and walkers on the roads. All come this way, running before the army from the west and the north. The south is peaceful.

  “We can see the trail, what an army might have left. But it ends. It just ends. As if they had vanished in their own furrows and ruts. We see the trail end near Star Cross, where the roads are paved. Could they have split up along the roads?

  “We see—now that is strange.”

  The Dead Man held his breath. He wanted to interrupt, to leap forward and demand the next words. He slipped a hand inside his coat and pinched the skin of his arm.

  “Horses,” Mrithuri said. “Horses, running fast. They are tired, and covered in the dust of red clay mud. They have riders. Not all of them, but some. They are coming hard for the city. I see them, two men and a woman. The woman is old, too old to ride so hard. One of the men wears a Rasan Wizard’s coat.”

  Then her voice went strange and hard, dreamy no longer but precise, razorlike, with inflections the Dead Man recognized immediately. She said, “There is a skull. A stone within it.”

  No one in the room moved, or spoke. Or perhaps even breathed, except for the young queen, who caught her breath on a terrible gasp and arched as if in spasm before shouting. “Where is the stone in the skull? Why have you not listened to my warning? You cannot prevail without it!”

  The Dead Man, his heart seizing in his breast, glanced frantically over at Ata Akhimah. The Wizard was looking at him and the Gage. She nodded: she heard the inflection as well. It was the Eyeless One, the Wizard so powerful she had become the de facto ruler of the Mother of Markets, the greatest city in the world, mighty Messaline. The Eyeless One, who was sometime teacher to Akhimah and sometime patron to the Gage and the Dead Man, was speaking through the queen.

  Mrithuri managed one more breath and then collapsed forward, her forehead bending until it pressed her folded shins. She shuddered, long and hard and repeatedly, then seemed for a moment to relax. The Dead Man started forward, not caring if everyone in the room noticed his concern. So did the Wizard.

  They reached the queen at the same moment. She was slack, her flesh chill when the Dead Man, greatly daring, touched her. But she roused to his caress and blinked dark, wet eyes that were wholly human and unconfused at him and Akhimah.

  “Drink this,” Akhimah said. Hnarisha had placed a mug of sugary spiced tea thick with creamy milk in her hand. She pushed it under Mrithuri’s nose. Mrithuri turned her face away, but Akhimah was insistent, and though she was green and bloodless with fatigue and nausea, she eventually accepted it and drank.

  A little color came back into her face.

  “Those people are important,” she said. “The ones on the horses. We must find them and bring them in.”

  Lieutenant General Pranaj was already moving toward the doors.

  “The Godmade,” she said. “Have you—I saw them.” She shook her head. “In the gardens. Where is everyone? I need my maidens! Have them attend me, now!”

  “What did you see?” the Gage asked, from his place beside the wall. “About the Godmade?”

  “A stone,” Mrithuri said. “A stone in the skull.” She shook her head again, as if aware that she was making little sense, as if trying to shake all her thoughts into their proper channels so they would run smooth. “We must search the gardens,” she said. “The Godmade is out there. Very ill. Perhaps it is not too late.”

  She started up from her chair of estate. She staggered and would have fallen hard down the tiled steps if the Dead Man had not steadied her.

  She leaned heavily on him until he had helped her down. He glanced nervously at Syama, half-expecting the bear-dog to rise from her place when he laid hands on her mistress, but the animal regarded him with preternaturally intelligent eyes.

  Mrithuri set herself back from him. With a visible effort of will she made herself stand on her own.

  “My queen,” the Dead Man said. “Perhaps you should rest now.”

  Tiredly, she shook her head.

  Hnarisha walked up the steps. “Your Abundance,” he said. “You must take a loan of my strength.”

  He held out a hand. She took it, and the Dead Man thought she was trying not to seem eager, or was both eager and ashamed. Hnarisha lifted his chin, gazing into Mrithuri’s eyes, and for a moment a current flowed between them. The Dead Man might have identified it as attraction, except at the end of it Hnarisha sagged to sit on the steps and Mrithuri stood taller.

  “What strange verse is this?” the Dead Man asked.

  “The Sun Within gives us strength,” said the odd little man. When he looked up at the Dead Man, his eyes shimmered as if with tears.

  Mrithuri, in any case, descended the steps more easily.

  Chaeri and Yavashuri had come in, either in response to Mrithuri’s called summons or to someone running out to fetch them. There was a hurried consultation as Mrithuri ordered them to have the gardens searched, and Yavashuri went to make sure it happened. Then she turned to General Madhukasa. “I know it is not your duty,” she told the general formally. “But will you tell my chief of staff to make refreshments for guests available as quickly as possible? Those riders will be at the gate by the time Pranaj gets there. Ata Akhimah, go down as well. There is a Wizard with them, and perhaps despite your different traditions he will find your presence collegial. Gage, Dead Man, I would ask you to join those in the gardens, in case there is an enemy or some other such trouble there.”

  General Madhukasa bowed, more formal and stern than most of Mrithuri’s court. He was an older man, and the Dead Man judged he might be a holdover from her grandfather’s day, when he would have been one of the young radicals, no doubt.

  “Chaeri,” Mrithuri said. “Bring me my serpents once more.”

  “Your Abundance—” the Dead Man said, Ata Akhimah in chorus with him.

  The queen straightened herself. The Dead Man pretended he did not feel how hard she leaned on his arm, despite whatever help Hnarisha had offered her. It had apparently been his best effort, as he was crouched, head in hands, like a man who had drunk so much the room was spinning. Mrithuri had burned through reserves he could not easily replenish.

  “I am the Good Daughter,” Mrithuri said. “I will do my duty to my people, even though it be terrible. Even though it be hard. I will rest when there is time to rest, my good guardians.” She said the last in a lowered tone, as if to soften the blow. “For now, see to it that my word is done.”

  She turned away at once to issue new commands.

  * * *

  The Dead Man would have moved faster through the gardens than the Gage. Faster too than the small army of servants behind them. But the Gage seemed to have a sixth sense—or perhaps, in the Gage’s case, it would be more accurate to call it his twenty-sixth sense. And so it was the Dead Man following the metal man’s ponderous tread through rain-softened flower beds.

  “Do you hear the Godmade breathing?” the Dead Man asked once.

  The Gage, sunk to his ankles in rich bla
ck mud, shook his head. The Heavenly River shone above them, a winding light that crowned the Gage’s gleaming with a brilliant diadem.

  “It’s more like a … like a smell,” he said.

  They proceeded more quickly. Spots of river-light filtered through leaves and blossoms, flickered over them like intangible fireflies. Under the shade of a weeping tree whose cascade of scarlet-orange blooms called to mind some firefall of a candelabra, they found a crumpled shape.

  The Godmade had grown so thin that at first the Dead Man could not see the shape within the robe, and thought he was looking at a length of black cloth dropped carelessly, crumpled and sodden with the rain. He was still moving when the Gage stopped short, and he ran right into the metal man’s immovable arm. The Gage did not rock or tremble: it was as if the blow had not fallen at all.

  The Dead Man realized what he was looking at as his eyes resolved wet, dark olive skin from wet, black cloth. The Godmade’s hand was a curved claw beside the knife-edge of skin drawn tight over the bone of the jaw. The lips were pulled back from a rictus grin. The gold orb of the artificial eye gleamed richly, as did an array of jewels that the Dead Man had never seen before. Golden rings were set with garnets and emeralds. A diadem of twisted ruddy gold that glittered with diamonds and more emeralds pressed into the shaved skin of the head. A spill of heavy chains slumped about the twiglike neck. A clatter of faceted bangles on the visible wrist, gold and glass intermingled like the ones Mrithuri wore.

  The Dead Man made the sign of the pen, not even realizing what he had been doing until his hand returned, slack, to his side.

  “Go look,” the Gage said quietly, holding out his massive, powerful, useless hands. “See if there is breath within.”

  The Dead Man gathered himself and stepped forward, the wet grass dragging at his feet. Though it hadn’t rained in quite some time (by the standards of the wet season), the ground was still sodden, especially beneath the tree. And the Godmade was sodden too. The body—if it was a body—had lain here since before the storm.