“I’m less than I used to be, but I’m surprised you didn’t make sure I was burned to the bone; that you didn’t stay to see my carcass turn to ashes. Did sentiment stay your hand? I’ve followed your rise.”
Lussadh evaluates her response, her exits. She can’t shoot at a target which is not entirely corporeal: not the right gun, not the right ammunition. Any help she summons will come too late. Even the queen will not be in time. “I am what I am.”
There is hesitation, a ripple in Ytoba’s silhouette. “You upended everything. Why did you choose as you did?”
“Framing it as a choice surely misses the point. Think back to where we were, Ytoba. Could Kemiraj have triumphed as the very land turned against us and the sky froze over; as our children and elderly fell? Could you have struck down the Winter Queen?”
“You ask these questions to serve and justify yourself, my prince.”
“Some questions must be asked, some decisions made, some actions taken. Chastise me,” Lussadh says quietly, “but you didn’t make those decisions then. And you were not able to take down the queen. Your one duty and you could not fulfill it. It fell to me to do what had to be done, while sparing as many lives as I could.”
No response. But there is a gradual fading, a change in air pressure. It becomes easier, turn by marginal turn, to breathe.
When ey is gone—it is not over but it is a night survived, an encounter circumvented—she shuts the window and for a time presses her brow to the pane, eyes shut, thinking of nothing. Listening to her heartbeat.
The furs have cooled in her absence; it’s been close to a year since she last had someone to keep a bed warm. The lack is not difficult to rectify, but she misses decent pillow talk, interesting companionship, something that extends past the act. Courtiers are too naked in their ambition and flattery, courtesans too simplistic in their transaction, and other glass-bearers too jealous of the queen’s favor.
Which brings her to her find. Lussadh has never been so sure, so absolute, that she’s located another glass-bearer. In Ziya’s shop it was a thin intuition; at the university library, it was a confirmation beyond doubt. More strongly than she’s ever felt, even with other active glass-bearers already sworn to winter. She could well forego the formality of the tournament and bring Nuawa Dasaret directly to the queen. But first, a background check.
Despite the hour, Ulamat is prompt. He reports to her in the suite’s parlor disheveled but alert, as if he’d gone to bed just minutes past. She points to the sideboard, which she’s filled with her own liquor and teas. “Make yourself something warm. This will take a while. Do you have anyone on the ground here?”
He sets the water to boil and unlocks the sideboard; everything edible she’s brought is well secured, short of breaking the cabinet open. Foodstuff is easy to tamper with, an old lesson from royal life. “The place was a seedbed of strife and radicals. I would fire myself if I had nobody there. What will you require?”
The problem of Ytoba, she decides, will need to wait or at least will require a different instrument. She does not want to risk him until she has a better handle on the old assassin. Ytoba represents all the wrongs that Kemiraj inflicted on the children of the enamel, on Ulamat’s people. He would be reckless. Safer, then: “A gladiator named Nuawa Dasaret.”
“Ah. Nuawa of the Lightning Flash? Career duelist, my lord. Quite successful, actually; she’s been doing this since she was seventeen, a prodigy.” He reaches for scrap paper and a pencil, makes a quick sketch. From memory; his is eidetic. “This is what she usually looks like on advertising boards, though the actual person is quite different.”
The figure is tall, full-bosomed and wasp-waisted, nose sharp and face upturned to the sky while her hair flares radiant as a sable sun. Her blade, apparently carved from obsidian and impractically enormous, is thrust into a foe’s mangled corpse. Lussadh compares the advertisement to the real thing, the woman whose lips taste faintly of salt. Plain, if anything, though those are very soft lips. She imagines them elsewhere. “Slighter of breasts, for one. More muscle, certainly. The illustration does her no justice.”
“You’ve met the Lightning?” Ulamat sets down the cup he’s sanitizing, eyes slightly wide.
“You’re a fan?” Lussadh laughs. “I know you follow gladiator broadcasts, but isn’t Sirapirat a little too backwater? Their duelists can’t be that noteworthy.”
“They might surprise you. Well—she might surprise you. I’ve got the name of her manager and should be able to get you information on her family, associates, and history by tomorrow.”
Dependable, as ever. “Do check in with Ziya Jiang, an old tutor of hers.”
After he is gone, she leans back and wishes he could have produced a dossier on command, that it was already at her desk. Routine work occupies her mind, insulates her from the past. She considers sending out personnel to comb the city for Ytoba, but that is panic speaking: a Kemiraj assassin who doesn’t want to be found is like a grain of sand in the desert. There are ways to flush em out and she will think of them once fear recedes and the twisting in her chest stops.
It’s been a long time since terror seized her in its jaws with such appetite, so voracious it manifests as physical pressure. The mirror fragments shield each bearer from the excess of human weakness, slowing down fear, fury, grief. Liberating the intellect. It is one of the reasons she accepted the bargain, that first kiss.
Still it does not do away with passion and emotion entirely. It does not negate all injury.
Lussadh dresses and arms herself. Her guard, the newest glass-bearer, starts to attention as she leaves her suite. She waves him aside, not chiding him for failing to notice that there was an assassin in her room: her history is hers alone, at most shared with Ulamat, and in any case Ytoba is not the kind of infiltrator most will detect.
Once the Sirapirat palace was house to a complicated government, part monkhood and part elected officials, a latticework of bureaus and divisions. Like most buildings in Sirapirat it was never constructed for cold; one of the first things they had to do was overhaul infrastructure and architecture to accommodate the ghosts. Transport, power, heating. The native ones functioned poorly under winter, as the systems of most annexed constituents tend to. Made for the wrong climate, under the wrong school of thought. Even Kemiraj was like that.
The hallway lamps are dimmed for the night, their radiance slicing shadows into isosceles and trapezoids. She makes a game of evading the sentries. No real challenge since she knows their routes after the inspection, but it’s a good test of the local officers. One comes close to spotting her as she nears the engine-shrine. She will need to have another word with their commander.
The further she goes into the old wing, the more of the palace’s original self she finds. Colored glass, pieced into tableaus of myth and hunts, catch the light: women with golden wings and crowns of fire, hunting dwarfed humans in a forest. Many-armed gods whose hands end in weapons and mandibles climb fully formed from red lotuses. Ancient style and shadow conspire to make the faces seem hostile to Lussadh, their alien eyes tracking her as she passes.
The door to Vahatma is guarded by viper locks, serpent curlicues whose fangs drip venom in slow, clear beads. Lussadh clicks her tongue and makes staccato claps, timed to a specific rhyme; the serpents unlatch, falling into limp hibernation.
Within is the core of former Sirapirat, captured in the shape of a dualist god. Vahatma. One of its faces is beatific and unpainted, eyes shut in saintly calm. The other is burnished bronze, cheeks stark crimson, mouth an open gash full of filed teeth. A leopard rears in its lap. Two aspects, as Lussadh understands it: peace and war, serenity and wrath, a number of other opposites. Of all the systems native to Sirapirat, this alone functioned until the end. Would have continued to function if the queen’s mathematicians had not disabled it.
She runs her hand down its cool, wood-metal waist. A singularly exquisite work of art and, once, the beating heart of Sirapirat’s defense. Wh
en active, it drew a wall around the city, a high circle of impenetrable shell and concentric lashing teeth. The queen lost a fifth of her army that day, battalions shredded to ribbons of flesh and smears of gore, regiments trapped inside Sirapirat and slaughtered. A fearsome defense: Lussadh has spoken to the handful of retired veterans who survived that fight, and they described Sirapirat’s shield as more monster—or a force of nature—than a simple wall, a simple artifice.
Perversely, she would have liked to see it in action for herself. But all she has are portraits, descriptions, memoirs of trauma and terror. The victory afterward did not erase the nightmares of those who survived. The queen ordered an immediate retreat after Vahatma’s deployment. In any normal skirmish, the shield would have been decisive. But the queen was patient and her weapon was the land itself, the sky, the winds. If the climate around Sirapirat taxed even her, if the heat and monsoons resisted her, it succumbed in the end. She alone sufficed for a siege, and Sirapirat needed to eat. Its people required heat—their first winter, at war, was a lethal one. Once the wall fell at last, Her Majesty had the god-engine eviscerated, its innards ripped out and preserved in one of her secret vaults. Even Lussadh has no idea where those parts are held. All that remains is this beautiful shell.
But Sirapirat’s citizens live well now, granted access to greater comforts and conveniences than they ever had before. “And my grandaunt’s subjects live under fairer terms,” she says to a dark corner where Ytoba might inhabit. “They live more justly. There are no more inheritances of power, of wealth born into. Before winter, all are equal, whether scions of the dynasty or of the enamel. The least laborer’s child is given the same education as the most opulent landlord’s scion. If you think the queen cruel, still she does not pursue petty power. She will not execute a servant’s clan because they spilled milk on her or broke her favorite vase. Do you understand, Ytoba? Life under the Kemiraj throne was fine enough for you, for me. For most of the country, it was a charnel house.”
The shadow does not answer. Were Ytoba here, ey would have refuted the argument in any case: that the unnatural frost slaughtered and starved many in the first few years, as it has done in most constituents. That the queen is not the rightful ruler. Any number of retorts and then, finally, a knife in her throat. Ey would be quick about it, grant her an end as painless as can be had.
“The creation of a more just government, a better distribution of mercy, requires a sacrifice.” Lussadh steps away from the two-sided god. “That is the eternal truth, the currency of all existence. No threat will sway me from this, old friend, and my death will not undo history nor alter the course of Kemiraj’s future.”
Even a peerless killer, an impossible phantom, can be captured. That which lives can be bled, and this time she will make certain it is final. A relic of her past, a landmark of her home. The last standing reminder that she was a traitor to her empire.
Chapter 5
On the morning of the tournament preliminaries, Nuawa leaves her mother’s house at dawn. Before she departs, she pays her respects to an icon of Vahatma. Keeping one is not outlawed, but it is not looked favorably upon, a clear signal for suspicion. The shrine is well hidden in her mother’s room in the crook of a cabinet: an ignominious place for a god, but needs must. She says a short prayer and leaves a coin.
“I won’t be coming back again any time soon,” she says to Indrahi, half-apologetic. “Until the tournament ends, and even after that I’m not sure.”
“You shouldn’t.” Her mother kisses her on the cheek, runs one hand quickly over her hair. “Better play it safe, though I’ll miss you. I would ask your brother to say a blessing for you, but he is as he is.”
Not formally family anymore, and not just because his ordainment requires a severance of ties with the material world. She puts her arms around Indrahi, whose smallness always comes as a shock, slender bones and delicate frame. Her mother has a trick of occupying more space than her body commands, for all that Nuawa’s been taller and broader since late puberty. “Your blessing will more than suffice, Mother. Whenever I can, I’ll send couriers.”
“I don’t need to tell you to be careful. Nevertheless.”
“I will be,” Nuawa says, “and I will succeed.”
She boards a carriage full of students and laborers from nearby farms and orchards. The ride back to the city, an hour and some fifteen minutes, is fragrant with soil and greenhouse.
On her way to the Marrow, she passes an execution. A plaza where, at weekends, pavilions and stalls are raised for a market. Today it is empty and colorless save for this spectacle. The crowd watching is small, mostly gawking foreigners from the occident or the southern islands. One pallid, orange-headed man is furiously sketching the scene, his tongue lolling like a dog’s in concentration. No doubt the tableau will be titled something provocative—or at least faux-profound—back in his country.
It doesn’t happen often these days, though she supposes Lussadh’s arrival has stirred up the embers of old dissidents, the ones who could not resist. There are some twenty, thirty prisoners in all, lined up two by two, flanked and herded by soldiers in frost-iron uniforms. From the outside, the ghost-kiln looks innocuous: the shape of a large, windowless carriage. Plainly made—it flies no banner, bears no sigil, though its ownership and purpose can never be mistaken.
The condemned wear little: thin shirts, shapeless trousers, sarongs that snap in the wind. Their feet are bare too, as though the clothing and boots been set aside for the living, handed over to kith and kin. Where they are going, they won’t need it, warmth and wool being expensive. Imported all, sold by traders who can name their prices, less precious only than the treated wax and incenses that feed the ghosts. Nuawa has known neighbors who volunteered to be fed so their family could afford a few more ghosts, eat slightly better, attend the university. Volunteers get a fair recompense, insofar as a life can be measured by ledgers. Young or old, healthy or sick, the variables don’t matter. In the kiln, all are equal.
She idly speculates what these convicts have committed or at least been accused of. Distributed seditious literature, spat in the general’s food, or perhaps nothing at all. Working at the palace at the moment must be walking a tightrope for any but the most complacent, the most powerful. Governor Imnesh, an administrator sent from the capital, may be the sole person there who needs fear nothing.
Machine-maw clicks and blooms wide. It admits no light. However bright the day, from the outside its innards are always occluded, veiled in buffalo black. Each time she witnesses this, she braces for a jolt, a frisson of terror. Each time her nerves disappoint her with their strength, their indifference: no tear wells, no nausea clogs her throat. As though her time inside the kiln, those icy hours in her dying mother’s arms, had been a dream. Vivid, but harmless.
The convicts are consigned one by one. There are greater kilns that can admit a dozen bodies at a time, and she hears of bigger ones still, the size of a factory. Entire landscapes devoted to converting the mortal coil into machine animus.
Nuawa does not linger, does not search the faces for any she might recognize or vice versa. She’s built high, meticulous walls between her and sedition, refined her avoidance of dissidence into a scripture that she adheres to with the single-mindedness of a fanatic. Nothing to do with her. A stranger’s misfortune.
Hands in the pockets of her coat, she moves on.
* * *
The tournament has been set up differently from the Marrow’s seasons. Nuawa expected to be ushered into a crowded vestibule; instead there is an orderly line, each contestant taken aside one at a time. When her turn comes, the attendant puts a glass bead on her ear and a blindfold over her head. The fabric is light as chiffon but opaque as mortar, blotting out her vision entirely.
She is led through a corridor of kaleidoscope acoustics and obtuse light; the air anesthetizes, deadening her skin. Her head grows heavy. Each inhalation brings a rush of smoke, cloying and viscous.
When the
blindfold falls away, she stirs to a golden warmth and a glassy day. Clear entirely, no clouds, the sky the color of poisonous frogs. Under her feet, sand moves like restless serpents, honeyed and hot. She breathes in salt. Heat pricks at her skin. A voice speaks in her ear. It is leeched of inflection, accent, even timbre; how a wooden puppet might sound like. “The labyrinth will test your strength, fortitude, and wit. To claim victory, find your way to its heart.”
Nuawa turns around. The walls before her go on, carving up the sky, the scale and breadth of a giant’s limbs. Made of pomegranate stone, gravid inside with thorn-knotted bones. Like a mass grave, a battlefield. And not real, that much her intellect can reason: The Marrow is large but not this large, the colors are too saturated to be nature. This is the world of her mother’s painting. Her body must be shrouded in an enchantment of censors and intoxicants, prone and strapped down. It makes sense—with this, any sort of arena can be had, constructed to tournament specifications and mooting logistic issues. Phantasmagoria drugs are illicit, except evidently when used in a state capacity. It raises the question of whether injury sustained here will be real; whether damage here will manifest in physicality.
She touches the wall. Solid and lukewarm, a texture almost without friction. It gives and swings inward; once she is inside, it slides shut, seamless.
The harsh cries of birds fill her ears, a prayer tempo. Most likely, getting to the labyrinth’s center is not the point—as ever, fighting is. Without a few shreds of flesh torn off, a few rivers-worth of gore, it would not be the Marrow. So she listens for human noises. Feet that must, of necessity, scuff against sand. A rustle of fabric, a murmur of voices. She takes off her boots—less sound to give her away. The rush of heat is euphoric, and for a moment she’s half-tempted to sit and burrow into the sand; what could be the harm, after all.
Instead she draws her gun. Considers, briefly, the particulars of ammunition and firearms within this controlled hallucination. Whether they obey the same rules of wraith ricochet and ether gravity she knows, whether they produce recoil or require reloading.
Winterglass Page 4