“I’m Her Majesty’s second.” The general’s voice is dry. “I do what I like, duelist. Were you able to walk without assistance, I would leave you well enough alone.”
Lussadh lets her down once they have reached Nuawa’s suite. “Rest,” the general says. “It’d be a shame for you to falter in the single combat segment after having survived this much.”
Nuawa locks the door behind her. Despite her objections, she doubts she would have been able to make it here on her own. She falls into her bed, chilled by her own sweat, the oneiric glass bead still at her earlobe. She expects she will wake up weak and famished, mouth dry and joints aching.
She shuts her eyes and slips into the honeycomb underground, katabasis inevitable as the grave. The jagged rocks, the subtle indigo undercurrent in the black, the pallid quartz. Odors of soil and rot. Water drips, its thumping impact loud as footsteps. She is in command, fully conscious; she remembers that those she fought never woke up. This is the same arena and she hears them, wandering, lost. Perhaps still fighting even as their bodies are gathered for processing, believing that they’ve been given a second chance. Nuawa draws her gun, though her hand is sluggish, moving as if through sludge. The gold brooch is pinned over her heart, jostling for space against the silver.
Nuawa can almost feel the flow of antidote through her arteries, but though it sufficed to bring her to consciousness it hasn’t—as it did the first time—purged her system of the dream-drug. She listens for noises, hears the slap of flesh on stone, and thinks back to her conversation with Lussadh. What awaits them doesn’t trouble you?
It might have been her answer. It might have been something else, a thread of information plucked from the weave of her carefully curated background: whose daughter she truly is, what her mothers have done, tried to do. It could have been neither, merely a whim and impersonal cruelty. Either way, nearly nothing she does in here will change her immediate future. Or her future at all. Habit impels. She advances, footing cautious on wet stone. The air feels heavier, somehow, as though pressed down by the weight of the earth. If she must kill them all over again, she will. It will be menial, but it is a language in which her fluency is total.
“Absolute winter,” she murmurs. The acoustics in this place do not obey physics and her voice comes back, too loud and too high. Like a voice about to crack, has cracked and rolled past into shrieking hysteria. Even now she might already be hauled out from her bed, unceremonious, deposited into a carriage that would bear her to a kiln.
She marches on.
Light ahead, jaundiced and unlovely. But humans are built to seek warmth and, in the absence of any other signal, she follows. It brightens, is soon no longer so dim, no longer a single ray into an oubliette. Forward into this annihilating bright until there is no more cavern. Not behind her, not above her, only the glare of a sun in zenith. It is incandescent, her skin feeling as though it will crisp and curl, paper in fire. Under her feet is sand and, in the distance, ruins leaning precarious on dunes the way old teeth cling—slanted, unsteady—to gums. This is a landscape which has never known the queen’s touch, never come under her conquering gaze. The sky is cloudless and the horizons haze, warping into mirage.
“Nuawa Dasaret.”
The faceless duelist is indistinct, even now, standing before her in all this light. Her hand twitches but she suppresses the urge to lift her gun and take aim. Their outline smudges and their mask is a perfect canvas, without features or contours.
“I believe I know what you are. This makes your placement interesting.” Their voice is flat and toneless, without accent or indication of mood. When she doesn’t answer the shape glides closer, the hem of its swaddling not quite touching the ground. Levitating. “You’ll want to know who I am, but appreciate that such an answer is premature. I’ll say that by approaching you at all, I have exposed myself. You are not in danger—your mortal coil is safe. This is only a passing fantasy.”
Nuawa rubs at her skin. She imagines she can feel the fabric of the sheet, the comfort of the bed, her mind pushing its way up from hallucinogenic depths. “What do you think I am?”
“A weapon.”
“Everyone is a weapon,” she says. “Against an ideology; against themselves; against conditions that chew at existence. Even monks are weapons against earthly desire, honed to flense off lust and filed to puncture material need.”
The mask flexes minutely. “Do you know what a mosquito is? No? They probably survive in the occident, but not in winter territories—too cold. Tiny insects with a taste for human blood. Their bites anesthetize; you don’t feel it until long after they are sated and gone. They can infect you with a fatal fever that grinds apart your mind, unravels your body. As a species, we are mightier than any other animal, yet we fall to this, to pests and small terrors, the indignity of a single insect bite or stomach parasites.”
A test, a game, something arbitrary. “You will have to be more specific.”
“I know the Winter Queen’s most essential desire, one she keeps secret even from her general, and I am in need of a weapon. If that is how you wish to spend yourself, then our goals may align. You have been receiving my messages. I can give you the resurrection of Vahatma, the god-engine that protected this city.”
“Why would that be of interest to me?”
As though she has said nothing, the faceless creature goes on, “Where I came from we have living architecture, born from a seed of will and history. The core of your god-engine is not so different, and such seeds have been made with war in mind. Not easy to acquire—there are few left, the making of them now prohibited—but easier than plundering the queen’s vaults to restore your god. What I ask of you will be little.”
She doesn’t push. They are loquacious, ready to persuade and coax, presenting what they have like a merchant coming to market. The longer she gazes at them, the more detail she can make out, impossibly superimposed onto the blank mask. Features in isolation: an eye heavily fringed with lashes, a nose marginally crooked. Each appears briefly and separately, does not come together to create an entire face.
“Lussadh al-Kattan left unfinished business, which falls to me to attend. The al-Kattans were purged thoroughly, the least branches and the most distant fruits. Kemiraj itself is a country of tradition. It respects lineage, and I have use for a scion of that dynasty.”
Nuawa tightens her hand on the grip of her gun, for all that she realizes it would be pointless. They control the dream, not she. “Really.”
The stranger cants their head. “To you it may seem outlandish, but it’s a game I’ve been playing a long time. I know its board, its moves. All I need is a certain piece.”
“And I have the compatible anatomy, I suppose.” It is astonishing, the idea. Several occidental countries are similarly monarchic, similarly obsessed with heritage, but even so. “You expect me to seduce the general, conceive her child, and what—raise it to be a Kemiraj heir for you to use?”
A mouth moves beneath the mask, stretching impossibly. “You will not have to rear the child. It is merely a matter of transferring the unborn babe to a womb of resin or stone, or cold iron if you prefer. That would be the extent of our transaction.”
“What if I develop maternal fondness and refuse to be extricated?”
The smile widens. “That seems unlikely.”
She doesn’t press the point; she can’t picture herself seized by tenderness either, a spontaneous fever, a madness of the spirit. At any stage of pregnancy, should she ever fall into it the way one falls into a sinkhole. “You claim to know the queen’s secret.”
“Hard-won. I would be amenable to sharing it with allies, in due time.”
“Suppose I agree to it.” She has no intention of doing so. “How do you propose to track my progress? Have someone press their ear to the general’s wall?”
“You sneer, but that is how it was done in a time when machine-wombs were a dream and children were born from the flesh alone. Primitive, but it did work for its time. I’m
not interested in the sordid particulars. Let’s say a deadline. In one month, the tournament will have finished and you’ll have won—consider your victory a fringe benefit of my friendship—and by then you should have what I want. I will know of whose blood it is.”
A knot of seed and ovum, embryonic, incubated within her and then drawn out like pus. “And that would be all.”
“That would be all.”
Simple, tidy. Nothing to it—That would be all. She imagines saying that to Lussadh. A convoluted delusion, as delusional as the thought of resurrecting the god-engine Vahatma.
The desert dissolves, and Nuawa is back in the bed, thick furs and pastel sheets on her like snowdrift. Her mouth is parched and after-images of the pitiless sky linger, igniting the edge of her vision. The room is otherwise dark; outside it must be past sunset.
Delicately, she takes off the glass bead. Considers crushing it underfoot or throwing it out the window. In the end, she seals it inside a pouch. When she falls into natural sleep, it is to the desert that she returns, as long and wide as a tundra, endless, washed out in gold.
Chapter 9
The hard percussion of hail on roof is loud in the engine-shrine, the palace’s highest point. Lussadh waits for the viper locks to reknit themselves, barring the door once more, before she calls on the queen. Not the most auspicious of places to contact Her Majesty, but it is the most insulated and best protected. When the queen answers, she says, “My apologies for calling you from here. It was the most private place I could think of.” She doesn’t say that her own suite no longer feels so after another failed attempt to locate and bring Ytoba to heel. She is standing by the shuttered window, facing away from the engine’s shell, but even so the image of it is inescapable. In this shrine Vahatma is written everywhere, its name into the floor tiles, its images etched into the walls and painted on the ceiling.
“It is nothing.” The queen manifests at quarter-self, her substance transparent, the fabrics on her all gossamer. Her eyes are leeched gray in this light. She looks over her shoulder at what remains of Vahatma, its empty elegant husk. “Had it offended me, I’d have had it destroyed when I took this city. I allow it to remain, for this is a symbol of Sirapirat’s defeat. They used to pray to it for vengeance, for my destruction, but not anymore. You’re distracted. Are the games not going to your liking?”
“No, my queen. Rather the opposite. I have a candidate—I’m almost certain she is a glass-bearer, and she’s winning. No others have presented themselves, and I’ve made certain to meet every contestant at least once.”
Her Majesty’s smile is quick. “I shall be there for the finals, and much look forward to seeing this person who has so captivated you. No, I know you well, my own heart. And I know my mirror. It compels pieces of itself to one another. Like beckons to like, in lust and otherwise.”
Lussadh studies the mural of Vahatma’s tranquil aspect descending upon a stormy sea. Done in deep colors with the god a lone spot of brilliance, platinum corona against the black of roiling tides. “That’s not what preoccupies me, no. It’s a personal matter, my queen. Beneath your attention.”
“When it concerns you, it is never beneath my attention.”
“Minor trouble from Kemiraj.” The balance between forthrightness and showing no fear. What would she be if she cannot resolve this on her own and must run to her queen like a cringing child. “Nothing I cannot handle, Your Majesty. I’m in no danger.”
“You’ve served me with faith and tireless diligence, and ruthless efficiency,” the queen murmurs. “If you require my aid, I’ll never think less of you. This you must know, my treasure. My best treasure.”
She kisses the queen’s hand; it is as soft and white as a new lily. “I will count the minutes until I see you again in the flesh.”
Leaving the shrine, she wonders whether the queen could crush Ytoba, just like that. The queen has explained once that winter is part of her; wherever the chill penetrates, she is present in some measure. Not omniscient, but close. The mirror would have been her eyes, when it was whole. As you must be my eyes and ears, said of her glass-bearers and her general especially. But even Lussadh does not know the full extent of the queen’s reach.
Ulamat is waiting for her in the indoor garden, an area of rose-quartz fountains and pots of water lilies. Shadow-curtains pendulate from the ceiling, their shades chasing sunrise colors, peach-gold and copper. Low, flat benches and round tables that bear game-boards: chance and strategy, pawns and tokens and cards. Her aide is dressed blandly, between a clerk and a menial, and kneels among the faceted pots. At first glance he could easily be mistaken for a gardener. Part practice, part natural chameleon.
“This will be sudden, but I need you on another task,” she says briskly. “The duelist I have a handle on. This other matter—you are to find a Kemiraj person in their sixties.” Ytoba’s gift for obfuscating eir appearance is not total, and must obey the limits of their natural physique. And it is a wasted, ruined physique, unless ey has found a miracle. Nor can ey assume more than one guise in a month. “Likely frail, certainly scarred, if not on the face then the body. The scars could appear as the result of a burn, blade, or even port-wine stain. Ten centimeters shorter than I am, much slighter.”
“My lord.”
“Not an easy person to find,” she grants. “But if anyone can, it would be you.”
He pulls at a blade of grass, wincing when it comes free. “How dangerous is this person, lord?”
“Extremely. You are to never engage them. Use what agent you can, always at a remove. Eir name is Ytoba, and ey used to serve my family as an assassin. Back then there were no walls ey could not penetrate, no defense ey could not bypass. Ey is much diminished today, though still incredibly lethal.” And should not be alive at all.
Ulamat’s mouth tightens. Remembering, perhaps, what life was like in Kemiraj for his people. “If my lord says she has the duelist well in hand, then she does. I’ll do my utmost.”
“Without endangering yourself.”
“Of course not, my lord.” He dips his head. “I’m glad to be of use.”
Lussadh watches him go and wonders whether she’s misjudged—whether he might make a reckless play for Ytoba after all, whether she will send him to his death. But of her people he is the one to whom this can be entrusted, the one suited to the hunt. The one with a vendetta against a representative of Kemiraj-that-was. He knows better than to spend his life, she must trust that. He knows the worth of that particular currency more precisely than any other.
Once he is out of sight, she says, “I know you are there. Why not come out and get it over with?”
The assassin is not there—though she has heard their breathing—and then is, materializing as though out of nothing but fountain spray and rose-quartz gleam. Their head is hidden behind a mesh of moth wings and pulsating tendons, eyes and nose and mouth invisible entirely. A belt of shark-blades. Not Ytoba; different stance, different style, and too obvious. Ytoba would have been a thin shadow, one she wouldn’t have seen or heard coming.
A blur of limbs and shark-knives. Her gun is in her hand, already vibrating with the pressure of ammunition. It requires no aiming; she pulls the trigger.
The frost-bees block out the sound of hailstones, their droning almost physical in force, the chill they radiate a fraction of the queen’s—but it is enough to, momentarily, turn the room arctic. She sees the assassin slow; sees the assassin fling their hands up to shield their face, to little success. The bees blanket them in white, a burial sheet. Even the mask of moth and sinew is scant protection. Death by venom or suffocation is death all the same.
The swarm subsides, some of them falling apart to component icicles, others drifting sluggish and sated back into the muzzle. It is not an easy ammunition to control and she is pleasantly surprised to discover the assassin alive. The dead cannot be interrogated, after all. She removes the helm, moth wings tickling her fingers. An eye dangles loosely on its stem, excavated from i
ts socket by a particularly inquisitive bee. The nose and mouth are red, swollen, but they are breathing. She sends for the lieutenant.
She hears the shark-blades susurrate behind her. Then a single, ringing shot. Conventional bullet meeting metal animus. The glassy ligament that holds the belt together breaks and the blades fall to the quartz floor, clanking.
Nuawa advances through the door, gun pointed at the belt. “General,” she says mildly. “You are unharmed?”
“Quite.” Lussadh glances at the inert shark-blades. “My thanks. You’re timely.”
“There was a great deal of noise, mostly the bees.” The duelist is fresh from the Marrow, the musk of exertion still on her. Drenched head to foot, dripping from rain and melted hail. She slowly holsters her gun.
The lieutenant arrives. “Have them interrogated,” Lussadh murmurs. “Report to me by evening.” To Nuawa she says, “Let us get you warm and dry before you catch your death.”
* * *
In the bath, as in her suite, she has strung up more of the frost-spiders until the ceiling glitters white. They don’t do well here; close to heat, none of the queen’s tools or gifts do, but they are not entirely useless.
Nuawa stands apart from her as she turns the valves and waits for the ghosts to cook the pipes. “You don’t have to, General, and your personnel won’t be happy. Even I could be a security risk.”
“Fear is the assassin’s first weapon.” Lussadh pulls two robes from the rack, holding one out to the duelist. “Destabilize the target and much of the battle is already won. I’d make mistakes, scared of my own shadow. In any case that wasn’t the most adept of killers, badly armed and I knew they were there well in advance. You pose a greater threat than they, certainly.”
The duelist does not quite smile. Hers is not an expression that lends itself to mirth, Lussadh suspects. “In a fight against you, I wouldn’t bet on myself.” She undoes her hair, starts to unbutton her jacket. “We’ve got a public bath at the Marrow, but I worry for your sense of propriety.”
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