She turned the key, struggled with the weight of the door before prevailing, and led them into another space, shadowy and echoing from its depths.
Nuggets of glass turned under Lzi’s feet. She was distracted keeping her balance and watching the Gage pick his way carefully until she realized that if the glass did not crush into powder under his feet, then it was not glass at all, but gemstones. Rubies and sapphires in every color of the rainbow littered the floor: a priceless trip hazard.
Lzi thought with frustration of kingdoms where such riches would not be left uselessly to molder as symbols of the bygone might of dead Emperors, but used to support trade, to buy medicines, to feed the poor. How much had her island home suffered through the centuries because of waste such as this? This…all this treasure…How much linen could it buy from the mainland for sails? How much hemp for ropes? The Sea of Storms protected the Banner Islands from any raiders more significant than the occasional pirate. But the Banner Islands, though rich in foodstuffs and spices and hardwood, were otherwise natural-resource poor. Trade was their lifeline. This would pay for trade.
As they reached the center point of the hall, lights flared in sconces along both sides. They looked like torch flames but burned strikingly violet and blue, and there were no torches beneath them. Their light stained the Gage’s bronze hide a most unearthly color and sent thick, watery, reflected bands of radiance rippling across everything in the hall.
More wealth gleamed on every side, and before them, another fifty steps or so along the enormous hall, was a throne whose golden seat hung suspended between two mammoth ivory tusks that crossed at the top in barbaric splendor.
The throne stood empty.
The Dead Man’s step checked. Lady Ptashne, though, seemed to have anticipated it. Without turning her head, she said, “His Majesty is in the Presence Chamber.”
She turned them to the right and brought them to a small door, much more human in scale than the one she had struggled with, recessed between two pillars in the side wall. This one was unlocked, apparently, for she simply manipulated the handle and opened it.
It revealed a small, comfortably furnished room that was lit with the same eerie blue flames, but did not need them. At the far end, two multipaned windows big as doors framed a Song-style ox-yoke armchair of carved wood and cracking leather, fragile with age but still strong enough to support the slight weight of the corpse who slouched in it. He was little more than a collection of brown sticks wrapped in moldering silken brocades, decorated with ropes of jewels. Over the robes, the corpse wore a dust-coated cloak. There were places where the heavy, feathery dust had been disturbed—brushed or blown off—and beneath them Lzi glimpsed the iridescent, translucent wings of insects, sewn together in tiers like the feathers of a bird.
The corpse was mummified, the skin glossy brown as lacquered leather. White bits of bone showed through where the fingers had crumpled or been gnawed by rats.
Following Ptashne, Lzi and the others approached. The Gage’s footsteps made a heavy careful sound on the flagstones. The dead King smelled of moths and attics, dry fluttery things.
:I never could stand that throne room,: said King Fire Mountain Dynasty, and Lzi swallowed and tried not to think too much about the fact that she was in a close little room with his thousand-year-old body. :Drafty old pile. This is a much better place to wait for eternity.:
Lzi bowed low before the chair. After a confused glance, the Gage and the Dead Man did as well.
“King Fire Mountain Dynasty bids you welcome, and rise.”
Lzi hadn’t heard him say any such thing. But perhaps he just hadn’t spoken to her.
Lzi turned to the Lady Voice, and said, “Your friend is dead.”
Ptashne frowned at her in mild distaste. “My husband?” She shrugged.
How had Ptashne known which of her companions they had encountered? The Gage made his chiming chuckle, and Lzi thought of King Fire Mountain Dynasty’s warning about talismans.
Ptashne twisted a hand in the folds of her white skirt. “His majesty commands your assistance. He wishes to be carried from this place, and to the beach.”
Lzi held her breath for a moment, gathering her courage. “What are the floats for?”
“Floats?”
“The fishing buoys. In your canoe.”
“Oh,” Ptashne said. “For floating King Fire Mountain Dynasty back to the big island, of course.”
“Back to the big island?”
“Of course,” she repeated. “You don’t think he wants me to stay here forever, do you? With his treasure and my status as his granddaughter…” Ptashne smiled. “We will have a good life. Of course, if you help me, I will share some of my wealth with you. Now, please have your soldier and your”—she waved a hand vaguely at the Gage—“lift him, and carry him down to the lagoon.”
:That is not what I require of you, Granddaughter.:
And in a flash of comprehension, as if he had shown her a map, Lzi understood what the dead King did require of her. It came on a tremendous warmth, a sense of belonging. Of being part of something.
She rebelled against his request.
I have only found you!
:And would you, too, use me for power and wealth?:
She felt deep shame. Wealth is why I came here. But not for me. For the current King.
:And will he not reward you?:
He has…she stopped. Thought. Given me service. Given me a place.
:Well,: the old King answered. :If that is all you want, Granddaughter.:
I want you, she answered. I have only just found you. Do not make me give you up so soon.
:I am tired. And you see what I’ve had to contend with in certain branches of the family.:
He didn’t move, of course. He couldn’t. He hadn’t moved in a thousand years. But she still had a sense of a dismissive flick of his fingers in the direction of the Lady Ptashne.
“Pick him up!” Ptashne demanded, increasingly shrill.
“Is that what you require us to do?” the Dead Man asked. “It is you who holds our contracts, Doctor Lady.”
You are my only family. She stopped herself from saying it—thinking it—out loud. Whatever she was or was not, she would not guilt-trip a man who had been alone for six hundred years because she was lonely.
“Well, no, actually,” Lzi said. She closed her eyes. She liked this long-undead ancestor whom she had so swiftly become acquainted with. She felt a great, tearing sense of loss as she took a deep breath and said, “I want you to destroy him.”
If she expected an outraged outburst, she didn’t get it. The Dead Man just said, curiously, “So there is in truth no curse?”
“Of course there’s a curse,” she scoffed. “Do you think any of this stuff would still be in there if there wasn’t a curse? But he wanted to be left alone, not protected. And now, he has been alone a very long time, and what he wants is to be gone.”
“How can you know that?” Ptashne said. “You can’t talk to him. I am his Voice!”
“She’s got the contracts,” the Gage said tiredly. “Or rather, her King does. Please stand aside, Lady Ptashne.”
The Brass Man took a step forward. The lady in the white skirt did not step aside. She wheeled and fell to her knees, clutching the mummified legs of the ancient King. They flaked and crumbled at her touch.
“Let me serve you, ancestor!” Ptashne cried.
Lzi felt her mouth shape words, her throat stretch to allow a voice of foreign timbre to pass. :The only service I require is destruction, child,: she said aloud. :What service you offer is for yourself, and not for the kingdom.:
Ptashne’s sobs dried as if her throat had closed on them. She rose gracefully, the cultivated daintiness of a lady. Lzi wondered where she had come from, and what had brought her here. It itched in her conscience and her curiosity that she would probably never know.
Ptashne turned to face the Gage. He towered over her, and she seemed frail and small. Her hands twisted
in the waistband of her skirt, clutching at the amulets sewn there.
Her mouth pressed together until no red was left, and Lzi thought if there hadn’t been flesh and teeth in the margin, bone would have rasped on bone. It was the expression of an unwanted child who is reminded that there are children for whom parents make sacrifices.
Lzi felt it in her bones, and knew the interior shape of it intimately.
There are children for whom parents make sacrifices. It’s a thing some take a long while to understand in their hearts even if they see it with their eyes.
Experience is a more potent teacher than observation. And Lzi had never had a sacrifice made for her sake either. A terrible pity took her.
Ptashne looked Lzi in the eyes, forward as a lover, and spoke to her as if to King Fire Mountain Dynasty. “Let me serve you, Grandfather. You are my family. I need you. You are my ancestor, Grandfather. I honor you. I have honored you, and all my ancestors, all my life. With my sorcery and with my search. You owe me this small thing.”
Lzi’s lips moved around that voice that came not from her lungs, but somewhere else. :I am tired, Granddaughter. Take half my jewels. Make a life with that.:
Why do you speak through me? Lzi asked. Why not her?
:She has protections in place for that, as well. I can speak to her, but not through her, and these words need to be spoken aloud.:
“I do not want your jewels, Grandfather.” Ptashne straightened up, her muddy feet in their laced sandals set stubbornly on carpet that was more moth-hole than knot and warp. “I want to be your Voice.” The hard line of her mouth softened. She looked up at the Gage, who had stopped just out of his own ability to reach her, like a man trying not to frighten a cornered kitten.
She said to the giant metal man, “I’ve come all this way for him and it’s not fair, women are only allowed to hold power through men, why won’t he help me?”
It was a child’s voice. It cut Lzi like a knife. The ridges of wound, gummed cloth on the hilt of her machete were rough against her palm.
And then Ptashne steeled herself, and said, “Then I shall help myself.”
She twisted her hands in her skirts. She shouted, a shrill and wavering scream. One of the amulets at her waistband swelled with a green glow like light through young leaves. It streamed between her fingers in rays like the sun parting clouds. The Gage took a step forward, ornate tiles powdering under his foot. The Dead Man reached for his gun.
They were both too late.
The sidelight windows flanking the dead King’s chair of estate shattered in a hail of glass and buzzing. Two infected, flailing men stumbled into the room, followed by a half dozen corpse-wasps. The men both waved machetes haphazardly. The wasps brandished daggerlike stingers damp at the tip with droplets of paralytic poison.
Lzi, with her hand on her sheathed knife, froze. She made one startled sound—a yelp of surprise rather than a moan of terror—and then her body locked in place as surely as if the wasps had already had their way with her. She watched her reflection grow in a gargantuan, glossy green-black thorax. The part of the brain that screams run, run in those dreams where your body seems immured in glass was informing her calmly that this was the last instant of her life.
The Dead Man stepped in front of her and shot the corpse-wasp between the eyes.
Dust sifted from between the stones overhead. The shot wasp tumbled to the floor and buzzed, legs juddering, the spasms of its wings trembling the stones under Lzi’s feet. The sound…the sound of the gun was enormous. It filled Lzi’s ears and head and left room for nothing else. No other sound, no thought—and not even the paralyzing fear.
She fumbled her machete into her hand. She hacked at the nearest threatening thing—the convulsing wasp’s stinger. She severed it in two sharp whacks and looked up to see the Dead Man still standing before her, parrying wild swings by one of the parasitized men. The Gage was fending off two wasps, their stingers leaving venom-smeared dents in his carapace. Ptashne, her hair escaping its thick braid, had fallen back to stand before the chair of estate of the corpse she would have be her King. She had her own long knife drawn from its sling at the small of her back, but was holding it low and tentatively, as if she did not know how she would fight with it.
And between Lzi and Ptashne were five angry hornets and two pathetically disgusting not-quite-corpses. So that wasn’t really a solution.
A wasp came in from the left, furiously intent on the Dead Man as he drove Ptashne’s parasitized companion back, step by step. Its wings and the back of its thorax struck the ceiling as it curved, bringing its stinger to bear.
Lzi stepped forward and brought the machete down hard and sharp, as if she were trying to cut a poison-sap vine with one blow. It struck the underside of the heavy chitinous abdomen and stuck there with a sound like an axe buried in wood. Splinters of the insect’s carapace and splatters of pulpy interior flew, and the machete stuck fast.
With an angry buzz and a clatter of its mandibles, the sapphire-eyed insect tried to turn on her. Its feet scratched at her face and hair. She ducked to shield her eyes and held frantically to the long knife’s handle, locking her elbow and pushing the pulsing, seeking stinger away. The Dead Man was too busy with his maggot man and another of the wasps to come to her aid.
Lzi screamed with all her might and twisted the blade sharply.
The wasp’s carapace shattered with a crack, and the stinger twisted and went slack. The thing made a horrible buzz and tried to bite. She hammered at the jeweled eye with the pommel of the long knife, as it was too close to use the blade. Now she screamed, or at least yelled vigorously.
There was a revolting crunch, and the enormous wasp—which was terribly light, she realized, for its size, as if it were mostly hollow inside—scrabbled at her once more and fell away. She looked up into the featureless face of the Gage, smeared with ichor and more nameless things.
“The wasps are protecting the larvae,” Lzi said, as sure of the truth behind the inspiration as if she had learned it at her father’s knee. “Ptashne doesn’t control the adults. Just the larvae in the corpses.”
“Destroy the King.” The Gage’s head did not turn as his left hand flashed out to snatch at the wing of another wasp as it darted toward the Dead Man. He used its own momentum to slam it into the ceiling, his metal body pivoting inhumanly, like a turret, at the waist. He continued in a level tone—or maybe it was just that all its nuances were flattened by her deafness. “If Ptashne has nothing to fight for, she’ll stop.”
Dragon’s breath, I hope so. Lzi thought she might be desperate enough to keep fighting anyway, having nothing else to live for. “Get me through.”
The Gage did not respond in words. Instead it turned again, seamlessly, and lurched forward, flailing with its enormous arms. It didn’t attempt to prevent the enemies from striking it, and it didn’t seem to care if it struck them. It just created a flurry of motion that surrounded Lzi and fended the enemies away. It walked sideways, crabwise, toward the dead King and his Voice.
He turned, still keeping her in the shelter of his parries, and Lzi was next to the place where King Fire Mountain Dynasty slumped in his finery. She could smell him: not rot, but salt and natron and harsh acetone.
Ptashne seemed to realize what they were about and whirled on them. “No,” she shouted. She would have rushed at Lzi, but the Gage caught her effortlessly around the waist and held her tight. She hammered at him with the pommel of her long knife, and the room might have rung like a bell if Lzi’s ears had not still felt stuffed with wool. Holding on to Ptashne limited the Gage’s effectiveness in fending the wasps away from Lzi, but the Dead Man was between her and the enemy, a whirl of blades and faded crimson coat-skirts.
It was hard, so hard, to turn her back on the fight, on the slashing stingers and whirling blades, the clang of machete on scimitar, the screaming and flailing of the would-be Voice. But she did, ran two steps through the chaos, hefting her long knife, and stopped by the chai
r of the King.
:That will not do the job, Granddaughter. For this, you need fire.:
“Fire,” she said aloud. She didn’t look, but somehow there was a powder horn in her hand, and a flint and steel.
The Dead Man’s powder horn.
Fire. Black powder would burn nearly anything.
She poured it over the dead King, his rotting robes, his ropes of gold and jewels, his crooked slipping crown. His face drawn tight to the skull, the nose a caved-in hole. His eye sockets empty with the withered lids sagging into them.
She poured the contents of the horn over him, into his lap, into the tired wisps of his staring hair. She dropped the horn. She clutched the flint and iron and raised them over the corpse of the King.
Behind her, all the sounds of battle ceased. The buzzing continued, but when Lzi risked a glance, she saw that the one remaining parasite host had staggered back and was leaning against the wall by the door, and the two adult wasps that were still alive and mobile crouched in front of him, one on the ceiling and one on the floor, protecting the young of the hive but not, themselves, immediately attacking.
“Please,” Ptashne said. She had stopped struggling as well, and now just hung in the Gage’s grasp, bedraggled and bruised, her long knife on the floor where it had fallen from her hand.
“All this for a family,” Ptashne said, tiredly.
:My family is gone,: King Fire Mountain Dynasty said, through Lzi. :And you gave yours to the wasps in exchange for a weapon, Grandchild.:
The Dead Man looked at him, head sideways. At the mummy, Lzi noticed, and not at the Voice. Used to marvels, this mercenary. “You have family in this room.”
I would have given you my life.
:Keep it for yourself,: he counseled. :End this.:
Lzi struck a spark. She had been too cautious and kept her hand too far away. It fell and fizzled. Ptashne screamed.
The Book of Swords Page 45