The Dead Man crouched, reaching out before he could think about it too much, and touched the Godmade’s wrist.
It was like touching chilled leather. The only moisture was from the rain, which had beaded as if on wax. There was no pulse. There was not even any sense of flesh or vein between the hide and bone.
The Dead Man shook his head. He picked up a slender crystalline vial that seemed to have fallen with its stopper from the Godmade’s fingers. It smelled of something medicinal, resinous, acrid. It made his eyes tear up even through the veil, and he hastily put both pieces down again and scrubbed his fingers on the grass. “It’s been too late for a while.”
“Shit,” said the Gage.
“Where in the word of God do you suppose all this jewelry came from? Has Nizhvashiti been carrying it with them all along?”
“They told Druja they had gold.”
Others were finding them. Members of Mrithuri’s household were drawing up at the edge of the tree’s canopy, a little behind the invisible frontier between life and death, observer and participant, marked by the Gage’s bulk.
The Dead Man reached to adjust the Godmade’s robe, thinking to draw an edge across the frozen face and offer the cadaver some courteous illusion of privacy.
The cadaver raised its jeweled head.
The Dead Man scrambled back so fast that he wasn’t even sure how he came to be crouched beside the Gage, a pistol in one hand, the other plunged deep into wet grass and earth, holding on as if the world were trying to buck him off and he had clenched his fingers in its mane. Later, he would be unable to remember his flight except in the nightmares that sometimes attended him, where he was dragging himself with terrible slowness through cloying air and clinging grass. But by the time he was stationary and focused again, the Godmade was sitting upright. Just sitting: not gathered, not seeming ready to lunge.
The Dead Man held his ground and his fire. His racing heart was steadying, his own pulse becoming something he could hear around.
The Godmade’s dead eye swerved, rolled wildly, then fixed on the Gage and the Dead Man. Its teeth flashed through dry lips in a permanent smile. Its movements were alien, sticklike, as if operated by an unskilled puppeteer.
“I have been beyond and seen the true world,” it whispered, a voice without breath, without resonance. “Seek the Carbuncle. Seek the Mother of Exiles, blind and in her singing catacomb. Time is short, and more is at stake than kingdoms. Something stirs. Something vast and cruel stirs, to the east, beneath the sea. Your destiny lies with the Origin of Storms.”
* * *
The Godmade needed assistance to stand, and the Gage did not trust himself to be delicate enough to handle it. So the Dead Man holstered his pistol and stepped forward again. He shuddered, skin crawling, but he held out his hand. What sort of Dead Man couldn’t handle a dead saint, after all?
The thing was light as a husk: the rain-sodden robes weighed more, as did the jewelry. He wondered why the regalia was important, but he could not find the courage to ask.
Once it was upright, though, the Godmade—the Dead Man did not think he could bring himself to call the revenant Nizhvashiti anymore—walked easily enough, if haltingly. It was coltish in learning to use its body again, as if the limbs were new but the instinct was there. Once inside, there was a hurried consultation, as nobody was exactly willing to release the thing on its own recognizance to return to its rooms for dry clothes. The Gage agreed to go with it, which the Dead Man thought safest—if any creature in the palace were fit to handle a revenant cleric, it was either the Gage or Ata Akhimah—while the Dead Man returned to the queen to bring her the news.
Staring and whispers followed the revenant away, and the Dead Man noticed people leaned away from him as well, as if he carried some contagion from his contact with the Godmade now.
Mrithuri was on her chair of estate again, breathing easier, it seemed, and now dressed regally again, though the courtiers had not been re-admitted. Someone had brought her a glass of wine, and she turned it with surprising dexterity between fingers elongated monstrously with filigree fingerstalls. She sipped with the air of one downing medicine because they know it will make a loved one happy. Syama raised her head, ears pricked in a friendly fashion, as he came toward the queen’s chair. The aroma that reached the Dead Man as he approached the queen was spicy and enticing.
His stomach growled, and she grinned at him wearily. The mask that would have covered the bottom part of her face with a vixen’s snarl was lowered on relaxed strings to rest over her bosom. “When was the last time you ate something?”
He tried to remember. It took him long enough that she had already waved Hnarisha over and seen him provided with a wine cup of his own, less elaborate than the fluted crystal of hers. But easier to hold, and of larger capacity.
The wine was redolent of apricots, and the first sip told him it was strong. It had the velvet texture and soft heat of something that had once been sweet, and was now rich in alcohol. The Dead Man drank cautiously, but it still heated his empty belly and went to his head.
The color was amber in the transparent crystal. The bouquet, as he warmed it in his mouth, developed notes of nutmeg and lemon peel. The body was full and the aroma complex. He had heard of the stone-fruit wines of the Lotus Kingdoms but never tasted one before, as they were fragile and did not survive shipment either through the wild and sea-monster infested passages of the Arid Sea, or through the equally wild and still more wintry passage that the Dead Man himself had just endured. A frozen wine pleased no one.
This one pleased him greatly. It steadied him, and he could see concentric ripples lapping the walls of the glass, where the wine clung and left syrupy traces. But he paused after a single savoring sip to give Mrithuri his report on the fate of the Godmade. He reported, too, about the cryptic prophecy: the Godmade’s mention of the Carbuncle, the Mother of Exiles, and something stirring beneath the sea to the east.
The queen accepted the news of the Godmade’s resurrection with lifted brows. The placid expression above her mask led him to remark, “This event gives you no pause?”
Mrithuri frowned thoughtfully. “It is a miracle of duty,” she said finally. “The Godmade’s service is stronger than the lure of the afterlife, and so they remain. The Good Daughter does what must be done to help her family.”
“Even if it is terrible?”
“Especially if it is terrible,” Mrithuri said. “That’s what makes her the Good Daughter. She serves her duty above all. She is … she is the actions she takes, the marks she leaves behind. She exists in the results of her acts. I would think you’d understand.”
He did. Duty above anything else. And then the lifetime regret for choices untaken. “The Gage told me there’s a word like that, in the Dragon-tongue. Which is not quite the killing speech of Erem.”
“I was told that it is truer to think of one’s self as a verb, rather than a noun.”
He sighed and looked at his hands. “It’s best if one’s duty lies where one’s heart does also.”
“This is so.” She smiled, and added archly, “And think: how ironic that a Dead Man should fear the dead.”
He laughed and admitted it was true, and felt … not lighter, precisely. But more settled.
She drank more wine—it seemed to steady her, to take the edge off the nervy intelligence loaned her by the snakebite—and frowned. “The Bitter Sea?” she asked. “Or the Sea of Storms?”
“The revenant did not say,” the Dead Man admitted. “But it did mention the ‘Origin of Storms.’”
Mrithuri held out her glass for more wine. It didn’t seem to be addling her wits. “Well, whatever it has become, unless it rampages through the castle tearing out throats, it’s a problem for a different day. We should bring our wits to bear on the issues at hand: the riders at the gates, and the disappearing army.”
Hnarisha leaned in and said, “I’ve had a page from Ata Akhimah and General Pranaj, Your Abundance. The riders at th
e gates have been received. They are the court Wizard of your cousin Sayeh Rajni, her captain of the guard, and an Asitaneh poetess who is quite elderly, I am told, and unwell with hard riding.”
Mrithuri’s relaxed demeanor tightened slightly, though she did not shift in her chair. Rapidly, she drank the rest of the wine, and handed the glass to Hnarisha. “Send me my maid.”
A woman came in. It was not Chaeri, the one who was pursuing the Gage, but the older and steadier-seeming one, Yavashuri. She helped the queen with her mask, which would have been impossible for the queen alone to negotiate without first removing all of her fingerstalls. It changed her face in ways the Dead Man found disturbing—the bright curves of a young woman’s jaw and chin lost behind the face of a snarling vixen—and he looked away. Nobody had ever said that being the lover of a ruler was going to be easy.
He drew aside, but kept the wine.
Still no courtiers. There was no one present except the queen, her personal secretary-slash-castellan, the Dead Man, the maid, and the bear-dog. The long hall rang empty with his footsteps as he stepped to the side, a guard’s position near the dais. He still had his pistols, though, and he knew that General Madhukasa and Ata Akhimah would be coming in with the visitors. Perhaps with some of the palace guards as well, if they were all lucky.
The Dead Man realized that he didn’t have a lot of trust in any of Mrithuri’s multitude of cousins. Even this one. Although if she was sending messengers of such dignity, the news must be vital indeed.
The tall doors cracked, and the visitors came into the throne room in a swirl of trail dust as much as gold dust. They were indeed flanked by the general, and by Ata Akhimah. The foreign Wizard’s black petaled coat flared about his thighs as he strode forward briskly. The ripple of the skirts showed themselves frayed and in places torn with hard travel, but he was holding himself proudly. Two of Mrithuri’s guards carried the elderly woman, her clothes also tattered and worn. The foreign guard captain limped, his whiskers bristling from inattention, but kept up with the others.
When they reached the spot before the throne, the two men knelt—the guard captain somewhat painfully. Mrithuri gazed down at them, her expression disguised behind the vixen’s snarl. She did not waste time demanding further obeisance, and directed Hnarisha to bring the old woman a chair. Madhukasa crossed without being told to take up a place on the opposite side of the chair of estate from the Dead Man, giving him an approving eye-flicker as he did so.
The bear-dog stirred behind the throne, but did not rise. While that was happening, Ata Akhimah said, “Rajni, Tsering-la, Wizard; Vidhya, captain of the guard of Ansh-Sahal; and Ümmühan, a poetess”—the Wizard glanced at the poetess as if to be sure she was getting the information right—“formerly of Asitaneh, now an itinerant.”
The poetess smiled toothlessly and dipped her chin in acknowledgment. If she was not strong enough to walk after a hard ride of—apparently—many days, she was at least apparently more than strong enough to sit proudly upright. Strictly speaking, introducing the guests would have been Hnarisha’s job, but under the current chaotic conditions it was probably better not to stand on ceremony.
Syama raised her massive, heavily striped head and stared fixedly at the poetess.
“Your Abundance,” the Wizard said. “We come as emissaries from your royal cousin Sayeh Rajni of Ansh-Sahal, on the shores of the Bitter Sea. She asks us to beg your indulgence. There has been a tremendous tragedy in Ansh-Sahal: a terrible shaking of the earth, and a poisonous fumarole has erupted beneath the sea. We need your help, Great Rajni, as the guardian of the Peacock Throne.”
Syama levered herself to her feet, a play in muscularity. She stepped down the dais risers with such fluidity that it seemed she poured herself. Mrithuri, in the middle of a word, stopped herself and watched as the bear-dog padded past the Rasan Wizard and the captain of the guard. They both seemed too stunned to react. The bear-dog advanced on the poetess. Ümmühan flinched back in her chair, but did not seem capable of rising.
The bear-dog opened her enormous maw and closed it over the poetess’s upper arm in a motion that was both controlled—if not gentle—and so fast that the Dead Man’s battle-trained eye almost did not see it happen. The animal growled.
He rested his fingers on the stock of his pistol, but did not draw. All his courage was turned to restraining himself, stopping the reflexive clutch of his hand. This was not his decision to make, any more than it had been—
Any more than it had been in Asitaneh. If he admitted it to himself.
What was worse than being culpable for destruction? He knew the answer to that, and that answer was: being helpless before it. Being robbed of even having a choice. He’d seen grown men and women destroy comfortable lives because they felt trapped.
He himself, he thought, had never had such choices in his youth. And never really wanted one. And yet here he was making them. Again and again and again.
“Syama,” Mrithuri said past his shoulder. “Release her.”
Slowly, Syama opened her jaws. She stepped back—just a single pace—and did not sit down, but regarded her new enemy with a chary eye.
“Poetess,” the queen said, with a show of elaborate gestures indicating remorse, “please accept our profound apologies for the behavior of our subject.”
Syama curled a lip.
Mrithuri said, “Syama, down.”
The bear-dog gave the queen a dubious look. The queen tilted her head and stared at the animal over the top of her mask. The dog lay down.
The poetess put a hand on the arm of her chair and began to lever herself shakily to her feet. She stepped forward, trembling.
The bear-dog watched her unhappily. Bereft that her judgment had been questioned.
Choices, the Dead Man thought. They make asses of the best of us.
“Your Abundance,” the old woman said, in a voice that carried with the power of a trained bard despite her years and her obvious infirmity. “I am not one of your people. I am not Sahal. I am not Sarath. But I come in concert with one of your people, and with another alien who serves your royal cousin”—she gestured to the kneeling two, who had not budged—“to beg your assistance for her shattered people. Tell me only, Mrithuri Rajni—your cousin Sayeh Rajni would ask only—is it possible?”
Mrithuri seemed to deliberate. Her eyes grew creases behind the mask as if she frowned. She said, “I and my kingdom will do whatever we can to be of aid to her and her kingdom in their time of need. What is most important now? Shelter, food?”
Ümmühan—and the Dead Man could barely believe that this was the legendary poetess, that she was even still alive, no matter that he was in her presence—stepped to the base of the dais. She bowed over her knees again and said, “My rajni, that lies in the future.” The Dead Man was already moving as she straightened, aware that something terrible was wrong. Moving—moving, too slow, not fast enough—
As the old woman leveled her pistol at Mrithuri and cried out, “Tonight, the queen dies!” the Dead Man threw himself between the firearm and the woman. He strained as if in a dream—
There was a terrible noise. He would have expected the shattering of windows, but the vaults above were dragonglass, and they did not rain shards on everyone. All to the best, given that dragonglass had poison in it. It was all he had time to expect, because something struck him on the chest with the force of a mule’s kick, and when he next knew where he was, he was slumped on the steps of the dais with Madhukasa sprawled across his legs and a ringing in his ears.
The acrid scent of powder filled the air. He tried to drag himself upright, levering himself out from under the dead weight pinning his shins and feet, and the stab of pain made his senses contract to a tunnel and gray. An indeterminate time passed—not too long, because when he regained his thoughts again he could still hear Syama snarling over her prey. He didn’t think the poetess would be firing a weapon again.
He looked down and saw his red coat stained, in patches, re
dder.
When his head stopped spinning this time, he saw the shaved head of the Godmade bent over him. No jewelry now: just a black tunic and simple black trousers and bony, horny bare feet loosely harbored in knotted-twine sandals. There was a faint scent of decay, and a stronger one of incense.
He recoiled from the revenant instinctively, then braced himself with the memory of Mrithuri’s words. How ironic …
“Hold still,” the Godmade said. “You’re alive because the ball passed through Madhukasa before it got to you, but it still cracked your sternum.”
“The general?”
The Godmade shook its head. “A great loss to the nation.”
The Dead Man struggled to see the throne room. Yavashuri had come into the room, and was vainly trying to set the general’s corpse in order. What the bear-dog had done to the poetess didn’t bear description, except the body she was standing over, snarling, didn’t look like that of an eighty-year-old woman any more. She mantled the remains of a lean man, young probably, though it was hard to be more accurate with his face and his throat both torn away.
It was also only one of two bodies in the audience chamber, the other being that of the noble general. This seemed wrong to the Dead Man, though he could not say exactly why. He struggled to sit farther upright, and the icy hand of a revenant on his shoulder restrained him.
“Wait,” the terrible thing said. “A moment more.”
“Where are the foreigners?” the Dead Man asked. And then, as if someone might not know who he meant, said, “The Wizard and the guard captain?”
“Vanished,” Hnarisha said from beside him. “When Syama murdered the poetess.”
“It was an illusion,” Ata Akhimah said. She crouched beside the body. She lifted what looked like an amulet in her hand, then the drape of a length of cloth in deepest indigo. “What we saw wasn’t real. Only one of those people even existed, and he wasn’t a famous poet and historian. Someone gave the young man this amulet, with a spell of deception on it.”
“How in all the hells did that get past you?” Hnarisha snarled, starting forward. The Godmade restrained him with an upraised hand, though—not touching, just barring—and he stopped short and did not challenge it. The Dead Man didn’t blame the confidential secretary for that decision.
The Stone in the Skull Page 36