This is said in the same tone as There was a great deal of noise. Polite, factual. “My sense of propriety has survived much worse,” she says. “Make yourself comfortable. Wear those robes, or not.”
They clean themselves in the shower partition; Lussadh, out first, listens to the running water and puts on a robe. When she emerges, the duelist is wearing hers knotted around her waist, contemptuous of its capability to cover or contemptuous of the idea of modesty. Her hair is down, wet and sudsy. Two sets of scars on her belly, as of laceration made by claws, stopping just below her breasts.
“Where did you get those from?” Lussadh takes a pumice stone from its sconce.
The duelist presents her back. “When I was young, I used to hunt. Bears, wolves.”
Nuawa’s shoulders are narrower than Lussadh thought, her upper body slimmer, the structure of her bones built as though for someone more delicate. She lathers up the soap in her hands until it is a thick froth and sweeps the duelist’s hair out of the way. “A hobby? Somehow I don’t think you hunted them for the hide or the meat.”
“I did. But no, it wasn’t strictly necessary.”
Lussadh spreads the lather down, from Nuawa’s neck to the small of her back. Dense, hard muscles. A knot of scar tissue near her right shoulder blade but the duelist’s skin is supple otherwise, few blemishes. “Do you consider it a sport then, fighting? The act of it, the concept.” She studies Nuawa’s ear, the convoluted seashell of cartilage, the earlobe.
“To me, it’s work like any other. Hard labor. There’s no art to it, and I don’t think of it as a sport. I have a suitable disposition, that is all. Had I one more suited to carpentry, I would have pursued carpentry. Or painting, or pottery. It’s not a profession I took up out of love or passion.”
“And you take no pride.”
Nuawa leans forward, letting Lussadh scrub down the length of her spine. She is pale the way some of Sirapirat natives can be, a little like the queen but with a subtle undertone of warm gold rather than glacier blue. “Maybe I do a little. What about you, General? What do you take pleasure in?”
If this is suggestive, again there is no telltale sign. Lussadh inhales. The steam is thickening, heady. She pours water over Nuawa, rinsing away the soap. “In the same things as anyone else. Excellent food, a hot bath, the company of good friends. Since I’m enjoying two out of three, I would say this is a better day than most.”
The duelist meets Lussadh’s eyes over her shoulder. “I didn’t think you would consider me a friend.”
“For one, you haven’t tried to kill me; for another, you are intriguing. These are two of the qualities I prize. Make of that what you will.”
The duelist’s lips twitch, her eyes widening slightly. “You aren’t being very subtle.”
“Being a soldier, I prefer to be direct. Leave the rest to diplomats.”
Nuawa studies her, attention like a weight. It is not often Lussadh feels herself the subject of such, being considered, even judged. Something tips the scale. Nuawa reaches backward to untie Lussadh’s robe, pulling the sash off. A surprised laugh. “You’re hard already, General.” Nuawa’s fingers glide, touch.
“Let me see if that is mutual,” Lussadh says against the tender skin at the duelist’s throat. When she cups Nuawa’s breast in her hand, she finds the nipple stiff. She circles it slowly with her thumb. “Tell me what you like.”
“Use your teeth.” Nuawa lets out a sigh, soft, when Lussadh bites—tentative, then decisive. “Yes.”
Lussadh quickly learns the topography of Nuawa’s nerve-ends, where she is sensitive, where she responds. The duelist answers the pressure of teeth, the bite of nails, with small reflexive movements. She is a quiet partner, quiet as she takes Lussadh’s cock into her mouth. Her tongue is deft, firm. Lussadh shuts her eyes. Grips the sides of Nuawa’s head and says, “Wait.”
She lifts Nuawa onto her lap. The duelist’s legs curl around her waist. The rest is repetitious rhythm and pressure, Nuawa craning her head back—the cords in her throat compelling Lussadh to kiss them again, bite once more, hard enough to bruise—the duelist makes short, sharp sounds like prayer. Their bodies heave. Incredible heat, the floor cool beneath them.
In Lussadh’s coral bed, the duelist lies on her back, eyes wide open as though bemused at where she is and what she has been doing. Lussadh turns on the heating and listens to the ghosts murmur, a low purr that thrums through walls and ebony boards. Shamans—alchemists of the spirit—can hear and understand their chatter, it is said, the secrets of the dead. If that is so she expects it is mostly banal; some ghosts believing themselves alive, going through their daily matters the same as they did in life. Chores, routines. The afterlife through the queen’s kilns is an amnesiac’s dream, full of forgetting.
From the corner of her eye she glances at the duelist. “I thought you’d go to your own room,” she says. “Not that I’m complaining.”
“You said you had a bigger bed.” Nuawa holds up a fistful of green silk, turning it this way and that. She plucks at a length of ermine, experimentally draping it over her chest, running her hand over the fur. “The room smells of you. I like that you don’t use perfume.”
“I use some scented oils, but with a very light hand. I find most perfumes too obtrusive. Even colognes I can’t bear at all.” Warmth radiates—too high. She adjusts the dials, more self-conscious than she would like to admit. It has been a long time since she shared a private space with anyone, in this capacity. “Something to drink?”
“I’d rather be sober. Or get no drunker than I already am.”
The implied compliment—you intoxicate me—is somehow absent in the way Nuawa says it. Is it misgiving, Lussadh wonders, the decision to plunge into what was once safe to indulge at the Filament House. The actual thing after the play, and how it measures up. She tries to picture what that was like, whether this Kemiraj courtesan resembles her in any significant way. The face in profile. The shape and build of the body. A former dynastic subject, technically. Perhaps now a citizen registered to Sirapirat. “Regretting this already?”
The duelist rolls onto her stomach, propping her head in her hands. “Merely alarmed at myself. I suppose it’d ruin the mood to say that in the final tribute, if I lose I would be sent to the machines, like any other.”
The plea to intercede then, but Lussadh didn’t take Nuawa for that sort. Nor does it sound like one. “Are you afraid?”
Half a smile. “I’ve watched all the rounds. I’ve measured my competition. No, I’m not afraid. Nevertheless the fact is there, the possibility. I couldn’t have chosen a worse time. But you invited, and I was curious and couldn’t be sure you would repeat the invitation.”
Lussadh sits on the bed, the mattress bending under her. She draws a line from the back of Nuawa’s knee, up the curve of buttock. Firm, like the rest of the duelist. “You can pretend this never happened. I’m fastidious with contraceptives.”
“So am I. No, that was fine. Were the timing less portentous—” Nuawa splays her fingers on Lussadh’s thigh, stops short of touching. “Perhaps when all is done, you could reward me personally.”
“When all is done,” Lussadh agrees and takes Nuawa’s hand, brushing her lips across the duelist’s knuckles one by one.
Chapter 10
Nuawa does not spend the night in Lussadh’s bed. It seems faintly obscene to play at intimacy, unduly needy; she cannot imagine herself in the general’s arms, falling asleep to the general’s breathing, waking up to the same. She thinks back, inevitably compares. Somehow the make-believe at the Filament House was more. She had thought this, a culmination of danger and attraction, would overwhelm and annihilate. That it would leave her skin raw and her thoughts in disarray. She may have expected too much. She is still herself, contained and absolute.
She rinses her mouth and examines herself, touching where the general has touched, and finds to her satisfaction that nothing in her has altered. Not even inside, for if Kemiraj is as mad f
or heritage as the oneirologist claims, Lussadh would have every reason to keep herself infertile and make sure none of her seed goes to fruit however unlikely the soil. Fastidious use of contraceptives. The thought of conceiving, bearing that embryo. How mad, how bizarre.
At dawn, she takes her morning walk around the palace grounds. Palace sentries watch her, faceless behind their frost-and-iron masks, living statues in images of the queen. Once or twice she considers venturing near Vahatma’s shrine, those serpent-locked doors, but decides against it. Instead she loiters by the gate, waiting for it to open.
The directions Yifen gave her were derived partly from gossip—piecing together rumors from the Marrow as to the oneirologist’s identity and whereabouts—and partly from divination. Yifen does not admit to being a practitioner, but her work with the glass bead looked effortless and the result is pinpoint. The old observatory sits atop a hill that overlooks Wat Totsanee, belonging to an era where nighttime in Sirapirat was unlit, now four decades out of use. Some issue of land ownership has stopped it from being converted or demolished, so it sits derelict, a playground for children to venture at night on a dare.
In the morning glow it looks worn, unthreatening. A domed cylinder, formerly the tallest building in the city, that status since usurped by university buildings, the chedi at Wat Wansanoj, and the palace’s extensions. The façade was once burgundy or rust-red; the paint has peeled in patches, gone gray, some of it covered by graffiti. One is of a mermaid, scaled skin chartreuse and hair full of sea-serpents, limbs heavy with anglerfish.
Its closest neighbor is a store selling condiments in jars and cheap toiletries and carpentry tools. Nuawa makes her way from that, scaling the bitumen roof. There is no convenient balcony, this being one of the truly traditional houses, renovated for insulation and ghost pipes but retaining its native architecture. All Sirapirat, treated wood and obtuse angles. She makes the leap, lands lightly by the dome. For precarious seconds she hangs from the eave, tendons at war with gravity, muscles performing stunning alchemy. When she pulls herself up, clinging arachnid to a window, she paces her breathing. Exertion is its own ecstasy, the human engine rewarding itself.
She shuts the window behind her, the hinge wobbly from her entry. The observatory’s uppermost chamber smells of damp and dust, littered by the skeleton of astronomic equipment, the base of an absent telescope. The iron mezzanine is surprisingly solid and whole after all this time. There is no sign of habitation save a house shrine, new and painted white, housing several icons: a deer-hooved girl she doesn’t recognize, the garuda god Yuthram. But this may not be the oneirologist—who must be foreign in any case—so much as nearby residents. Every building needs its small gods, especially one as venerable and abandoned as this.
Not much to see otherwise, nor did she expect to. This is a person who treads lightly and displays few possessions, not even the paraphernalia of oneirology or alchemy. Perhaps they keep their atelier elsewhere, corkscrew glassware and wire-mesh orrery, bottled evanescence and fresh ghosts. Ghosts, the everything medium, multipurpose—engine fuel, dreams, specialized miracles. Most express utility in death that they never did in life. Easy to grasp and even embrace the queen’s logic, her mass conversion of bodies to ghost, the compost heaps of the afterlife. What are a few tragedies, next to that.
Nuawa settles by a rust-eaten worktable, out of the line of sight from either window or the stair leading up from the ground level, positioning herself so she’d see anyone entering through both. Contract work has endowed her with a certain expertise, a bounty of patience. Not beyond possibility that the oneirologist has spooked, but she has time.
Below, hinges creak. The corrugated door swings inward. She watches and knows at once this must be the oneirologist. They look no threat. Stringy meat on bent bone, stripped down as carrion picked clean, a burned face. Her mind leaps to a certain association—her own preoccupations of late, the courtesan—and at once recognizes the cast and glaze of them, the stem of their making. The Kemiraj look, to which she is hypervigilant. Normally such a look signifies nothing. At this moment, it signifies all.
Something gives her away, a disturbance in the air or a slant of light. The oneirologist looks up. Nuawa fires almost at once but they are already running, the door clanging shut. She swears, knowing as she does that it is wasted breath, and yanks the window open. Her descent is fast, reckless, and will be too late even so. She doesn’t climb—she makes calculated drops, and by the time her feet are on the ground she is out of breath, teeth and bones vibrating from impact.
When she dashes around to the observatory’s entrance, she finds the oneirologist down, at gunpoint. She stops short. The man holding the gun is vaguely familiar, in the way a face she’s seen in a crowd multiple times might be. From the palace. “I work for the general,” he says quickly, though his aim doesn’t waver.
In any other circumstances, she would not have taken him at his word. She approaches, slow, her own pistol out. The oneirologist is bleeding from their shin, a well-placed disabling shot. She wonders whether they were once a bureaucrat or courtier; her knowledge of the empire is thin. Two continents away after all, entirely deposed and carefully blotted. The Kemiraj of today bears little resemblance to its past and unlike in Sirapirat, she hears that its citizens are encouraged to forget. Most subjects of winter are. She imagines that this seared, stooped husk was a creature of politics, fostering schemes and game-pieces, every step ringing with ambition.
“Who were you?” she asks softly. The features she saw in the dream, now in the flesh and unmasked. One eye with thick lashes, the other not at all, consigned to the fire that took half their face and neck. It doesn’t look like an injury sustained in combat, rather something much more surgical. Punishment, revenge.
Their mouth stretches. It is a rictus. In a face so wracked it can be nothing else. “What I was bears no relevance. You’ll learn soon enough.” In the dream, their voice was as frictionless as quicksilver; in person it is as ruined as the rest of them, creaking with age and damage. “You’ve reneged on our bargain.”
“I never agreed to it, I fear.”
Their head twitches as they try to pull upright. But whatever they mean to do, they fall back, resigned perhaps. Their eyes clench shut. To the side, the general’s man is speaking rapidly into his calling-glass.
* * *
Nuawa has been waiting close to an hour in the indoor garden before Lussadh appears. In the meantime, she observes the diplomats and their staff with anthropological interest. She doesn’t come into frequent contact with foreigners, let alone this particular subset, those elevated in their own lands. A handful of women in dresses of varying eccentricity: occidental costumes with stiff hoop skirts, an islander’s saturated colors adapted for the cold. Bodyguards, though they aren’t allowed firearms on palace premises.
When the general comes they vacate the garden, though they have the presence of mind to pay respect first. It is fascinating to see the occidentals variously address Lussadh as a man or a woman when the general is neither; the islanders acquit themselves better, eliding the general’s gender entirely in their courtesy.
Lussadh’s sleeves are flecked with red, brown stains. At Nuawa’s look, the general rolls them back, an appearance of cleanness hiding what she must have just done: the needle and the tongs, the scalpels. “That got messy,” she says. “Ytoba isn’t an easy person to converse with. Ey used to serve as an assassin. A long time ago. When I was young, I would never have imagined em brought low in defeat. But I wasn’t able to imagine a lot of things.”
“You’re tired, General.” She takes Lussadh’s hand, drawing her down to sit at the fountain’s edge. The water is still for the moment, surface tension hardening to rime.
“Not exactly.” The general passes her hand over her eyes then shakes herself, as though to throw her fatigue off. “Ytoba’s changed a great deal. Taking up oneirology was as logical a choice as any, I suppose. There’s a person who lives for an idea of the pa
st, not even any specific person—my grandaunt—but the idea of the throne, the dynasty. The crown and scepter, the sword and the executioner’s axe. You’ve done me a considerable favor, a great service to winter.”
“The credit is more to your aide than anything. He was the one who followed me and made that shot.”
“Hah.” Lussadh tests the fountain; the rime crackles and breaks. Underneath the water is tinged silver, the rose-quartz bottom gleaming with coins. Most are foreign, triangular or seashell, cubic and cylindrical. Stamped with heads of state distant or centuries buried, or heraldic animals. “You would disdain a medal or two, I expect. Were this the country of my birth, the king would have given you a tract of land or a lucrative trade commission, and likely an aristocratic spouse of your choice.”
Nuawa raises an eyebrow. “Or the hand of her grandniece the prince?”
“Not quite that far. In retrospect it was all quite mad, our system, the arbitrariness of it. The way people raptly listened at doors to make sure this embodiment of one lineage is copulating—and reproducing—with one of another lineage. All that. I’m not sure how Kemiraj could run the way it was for that long, one generation after the next bowing its head and accepting … that as the rightful order.” A grimace. “My apologies. I ramble. Your last match is in what, two days?”
Her opponent being an ex-soldier, a veteran once in Lussadh’s service, though the general doesn’t appear to have taken notice, or particularly care. A nobody, Nuawa surmises. “So it is.”
“What bargain did Ytoba try to strike with you, anyway?”
“A plot that struck me as mad,” Nuawa says without missing a beat. “Ey wanted me to bear your child that ey would then, I was given to understand, utilize in some scheme. Ey didn’t specify what.”
Lussadh looks at her and makes an abortive laugh. “Is that why you slept with me?”
“That would make no sense. Both you and I use contraceptives, for one. Or perhaps you were so good in bed that I changed my mind and sought to bring down Ytoba rather than participate in a plot I don’t actually understand.”
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