by Jay Lake
The sound of the bells brought me back to the memory of my grandmother’s funeral procession. I was hers, through my nameless father and his nameless hut in a nameless place on some road in Selistan. I did not know his name, or the name he called me. Federo had not bothered to ask, for to him I was just a girl.
In all the years within the Factor’s house, I had forgotten too much. If I lived through these days before me, I resolved, I would return to Selistan and reclaim my life.
We were done with the silk in the middle of the evening two days later. This time they’d both stayed with me. All of us sewed, talking quietly from time to time, working to be ready. The silk was flecked with droplets of blood from stabbed fingers, and my own hands were most unpleasantly stiff, but we were done.
“If you still agree with the plan,” Federo said, “we will guide you out of the warehouse before dawn. You can walk the streets once it is full light and the life of the city resumes. If the Ducal guards take you then, there will be witnesses.”
“Being arrested in front of witnesses tends to be healthier,” the Dancing Mistress observed.
I folded my silk close, letting the bells wash over me. We did not know the true number, and so we had settled on four thousand four hundred-twelve years. They jingled like the pouring of water on a metal roof. My past held me close in that moment.
“Show me what I must know.”
The Dancing Mistress drew certain words in the dust of the floor. I studied them as my bells shivered in time to my breathing. In their way, the words were simple enough. A conversation with the powers of the land. I did not know if their might stemmed from the intention of the speaker, or if there was something inherent in the arrangement of sound and meaning. In any case, these words were-or should be-the ravel that would unweave the spells binding the Duke to his life and his throne.
Federo looked at them with me, then nodded. The Dancing Mistress erased the words. “Do you have any questions?”
I looked at him. “ ‘Shared’?” I asked. “I do not know that word, nor the term for ‘hoarded’ in my tongue. Otherwise, I can say this easily enough.”
“Share,” he said in the Selistani language. Seliu, I had learned that it was called. “It carries the sense of something freely given, without taking.”
“That will do,” said the Dancing Mistress.
“As for hoarded…” He thought for a while, then suggested a word in Selin. “It means gathering too much. As in, well, overharvesting. More foolish than greedy, I think.”
“The sense seems good to me,” I said seriously.
The Dancing Mistress nodded. “You have the words in your head?”
“I do.”
“Good.” Federo’s voice quavered. He looked nervous to the point of being ill.
I knew how he felt. My anger would carry me through, when I found it once more. Right now, I mostly felt sick myself. “I am ready,” I lied.
I needed to attend to one last bit of business before we set out. My fears and worries had stalked me all through the night and into the early morning hours as we prepared ourselves. Most of them were beyond my reach. One was not.
“Federo,” I said as he packed away the last of our supplies.
“Mmm?”
“I want to mark Mistress Tirelle’s passing. Do you have any notion what she might have believed about her soul? Is there some prayer or sacrifice I can offer her?”
He gave me one of those long looks. In the shadows beyond him, I saw the Dancing Mistress nod almost imperceptibly. She had done the same when I had performed well in a difficult exercise but we were not free to communicate.
“I don’t know, Green,” Federo said after a little while. “Not many people in Copper Downs are openly observant. Especially not the locally born.”
“Deaths must be marked in some manner. The passing of a soul is not simple.” We did not have oxen, bells, or sky burials here; that much I knew. I was uneasy at the duck woman’s fate-I had sent her from this life, after all. That fear and guilt belonged to me. My hope was to ease her passing.
“There is a common offering for the dead,” he said. “Two candles are lit. One is black for their sins and sorrows. The other is white, for their hopes and dreams. Sometimes a picture of the dead is burned, if such a thing is to be had. Otherwise, a folded prayer or a banknote. That usually depends on the intentions of the person making the offering. You speak a kindness, spread the ash to the wind, and let them go.”
“Then when we set out, I will have two candles, and some of that paper you just packed away.”
We departed just before dawn, prior to the warehouse opening for the day. My belled silk was stuffed away in a sack along with the last of our tools and equipment from the attic. We couldn’t really hide the fact that someone had been there for a while, but we could certainly take our evidence with us.
The cobbles were slick with morning dewfall. A three-quarter moon was veiled by dripping clouds. This sort of wet would burn off with the rising sun, but the east was still barely a glower. The Dancing Mistress led us to a mercantile at the end of a row of warehouses, which, judging by its stock, catered to the laboring trades. Nonetheless, among the spools of rope and chain, the racks of iron tools and heavy canvas coveralls, and all the other gear pertaining to those who build and repair the stuff of cities, we found candles.
The black was a narrow cylinder, while the white was a fat little votive barrel. I was not bothered that they were dissimilar. Mistress Tirelle and I surely had not been similar in life. Federo purchased the candles, and he bought a new packet of lucifer matches as well, before we stepped back out into the damp.
“A park will have to serve.” Federo was grumpy. The risk of extra movement bothered him.
“I am sorry,” I told him. “I must do this last thing. Then we can shake out my bells and I will find the Ducal Palace and whatever follows from that.” The Dancing Mistress’ words were firm enough in my head.
“Federo,” she said. Her voice caught at him, and his nervous fear subsided into a muttering calm.
A bit later, we slipped between two marble gateposts. Winding paths led through lindens and birches beyond. Dew dripped from their branches as the eastern sky continued to lighten. The musty scent of night was infused with the opening of the earliest flowers, though something also rotted nearby. We trotted along a weed-infested gravel path following direction from the Dancing Mistress, until she brought us to a little folly.
Like the gateposts, this was marble as well. Six pillars in the classical Smagadine style mounted by architraves with carvings I could not quite make out in the early blooming light. This was topped by a pointed dome curved much like a breast. A little statue of an armed woman stood at the tip.
That seemed fitting to me.
Within, the floor was tiled in a mosaic of birds circling a stylized sun. The Dancing Mistress and Federo hung back. I knelt, though the cold tile hurt my knees even through the sweep of Federo’s borrowed cloak. I set the black candle down against the sun’s lidded left eye, and the white candle against his wide-open right, which seemed to be on the verge of surprise.
I truly did not know what was needful here. What I did know was that this part of my life had begun with a funeral-my grandmother’s-and ended with a death-Mistress Tirelle’s. I sought a balance, and a show of respect.
As I’d already realized, in her strange way, this harshest of my Mistresses had in fact loved me.
The match struck on the first try in a spitting flare of sulfur. That seemed lucky. Lighting the black candle, I rocked back and forth as I hugged myself against the cold.
“You treated me with a harder hand than I would raise against a cur from the streets,” I told the flame-and her soul if somehow she yet listened to me. “Your sin was to hew too close to the word of the Factor. But who are we, if we cannot tell wrong from right no matter what mouth it comes out of?”
I put the second match into the flame of the black candle. The flare made
me blink away bright spots. I then set it to the wick of the white candle.
“You fed me, and clothed me, and taught me more than most people ever learn,” I told her. “You gave my life a direction, whether I wished it or no.”
Unfolding the paper I’d taken from Federo back in the attic, I smoothed it flat as I could against the mosaic floor. With the burnt stubs of my two matches, I drew an ox. Endurance, though no one but me would ever have seen that in the picture. The image was simple enough: the tilted horns of the aleph glyph, humped shoulders, a sweep of the hocks, and the forelegs to balance the composition.
Rolling the paper up, I set it to the white candle’s flame. Let the offering burn in the light of hopes and dreams. “May Endurance bear you onward as he once did my grandmother. His patience abides more deeply than mine.” With a shuddering breath, I added, “I am sorry that I took from you that which was not for me to claim.”
When the burning paper grew so short that my fingers began to sting, I dropped it to the tiles. It curled a moment longer, wisping to ash, before the dawn breeze hurried through the folly to snuff both my candles and carry the charred paper away.
Her shade did not answer. I had not expected anything. I had made this most unfortunate farewell.
Rising, I threw down Federo’s cloak. “Where is my silk?” I asked in my own words. He and the Dancing Mistress stepped forward to array me as carefully as any squires in a courtly tale of olden tourneys.
I walked along Coronation Avenue between the two rows of peach trees gone bare in the autumn damp. My cloak of bells wrapped me close. Beneath it, I wore dark tights and a calf-length shirt, as if I were prepared to dance in some mummer’s play. I carried no weapon and held my head high.
Look at me, I thought. Here is your bounty. The Factor’s emerald comes.
People aplenty were on the street. Wagons and carriages clattered by. Even a few of the great cog-carts, balanced with flywheels and driven by strange logics patiently punched into the endless loops of goatleather rolls stored within their guts. Tradesmen and servants passed, on the business of the great houses that lined the approach to the Ducal Palace.
It was almost too much. I had not seen so many people at once since my arrival at the docks nine years earlier. Too many faces, all of them half-familiar, all of them strange as statues in the dark. I saw them through the eyes of my training. Virtually everyone could be marked out by their clothing, their stance, the tools or equipment they carried, their headgear.
In ordinary times, I might have fled to a quiet alley, but my purpose guided my steps. I was glad as the crowding thinned as the street grew wealthier.
A pair of mounted guardsmen rode by without even glancing at me. The gentlemen and ladies on their business took no notice, either. I enjoyed a strange species of invisibility, difficult to understand or describe. I wondered whether these people would have looked at me had I been naked and armed with a flaming sword.
Where was the hue and cry that Federo and the Dancing Mistress had promised? Three days ago, patrols had been going through the warehouse district building by building. Now their attention had moved to some other urgency.
Everything worn was a badge, a signal, a symbol of what role the wearer played in life and how they intended to be treated. My attire signaled that I did not belong, that I was a strange person in a stranger land. My bells told my story to anyone with the ears that knew how to hear it.
No one on Coronation Avenue had those ears, it seemed.
The Ducal Palace loomed ahead. The building’s face was a vast sweep of marble in the Firthian style, with more windows than I would have imagined any structure having. I was accustomed to the blank walls of the Factor’s house. It seemed as if this building stared across the city with a hundred eyes. A great copper dome towered above the center. Smaller domes of the same metal topped each wing.
I was not sure of the distance, having spent my life behind walls or on night runs, where everything was only a step or two in front of me, but it did not seem I had so far to go to just walk right through His Grace’s front door. As I approached the palace, the street grew emptier. Quieter. My bells rang louder.
What might have been my wedding if my life had been different would instead be my funeral. I wished I could have ridden Endurance toward this end, much as my grandmother had.
From one moment to the next, I was surrounded by angry-faced guardsmen with swords drawn. They came upon me in a sudden swirl of rushing feet and shouting. My captors forced me to my knees, then down on the pavement. Someone kicked me twice, setting my bells to shivering all over my body. A blade’s point was leaned against my neck. I bit back my cry of pain at that, just as I bit back my anger at the rough treatment.
Save your passion for the Duke, I told myself. You will be lucky to have even a single chance. Do not spend it needlessly here.
A runner sprinted away. His sandals slapped the street. The man with the sword knelt close behind me, though I could only see his knee and part of the ringmail of his skirt. “May’s well be comfy, chit,” he whispered. His hot breath was prickly on the scabbed-over notch of my ear. “You ain’t got much left to live for.”
“Conspiracy,” I said to the cobbles. My mouth was half-pressed shut against stone that tasted mostly of shoeleather. “Against the Duke.” That was my tale, meant to be told and carried to the place bearing me on its shoulders.
“Sun rose in the east, dinn’t’t?” He laughed. “Course there’s conspiracy.”
After that, they acted almost like normal people. Some told jokes about the wife of an officer. Others asked after one’s sick horse, and complained of the food in their mess hall. Except for the sword pressing in my neck, I might have been nothing more than a street-corner idler listening to the chatter of men at their work.
No one was interested in me. I was just their capture. Meat, a thing, knocked down to be kept against possible future use, like a venison haunch in an ice room.
My anger began to boil again. These men were brutal and thoughtless in a way that Mistress Tirelle had never managed. Her cruelty was the calculated personal abuse of years. For the Duke’s guards, I was only the trouble of a moment.
They didn’t even care. At least she had.
It all flowed from the Duke. Everything wrong, poorly done, every hurt and hatred emanated from the way he bent the fate of Copper Downs. I kept the words in my head, waiting for my chance to use them against him.
In time, the runner returned. The men gathered in a whispered conference, speaking in awed terms of the bounty. They knew who I was now. I was dragged to my feet by a hard hand clawing into my shoulder. A man with a mild face and watery eyes threw a maroon duty cloak over my head. He laughed as he did it, then cinched a rope around my neck. I was tossed over an armored shoulder and hauled away.
We were heading to the Ducal Palace. Thus far, this was according to plan.
Or so I fervently hoped.
The gait of the guardsman rocked me with a bumping irregularity that jangled my bells out of all time and tune. The men’s chatter was gone, so I caught no further clues from them. We soon ascended a broad, shallow flight of stairs. I could hear other people moving, muttering, gathered around.
Whatever my humiliation was to be, it was beginning in a very public way. I decided to be encouraged by this. Their treatment of me seemed less likely to be a quick walk to a slit throat.
When they set me down, my captors were almost gentle. My feet slipped slightly on what felt like stone through my soft leather boots. Someone took my hand and led me stumbling through more hallways of stone. My training Below with the Dancing Mistress prepared me to recall my path, should that happen to matter sometime later.
As I walked, I could hear the echoes of the walls around me, and how they altered every dozen steps as we passed a recessed doorway. My bells still rang, but now they swung in time to my own movements.
The sounds were too discordant to ever be truly pleasing. It still gladdened
my heart to hear them. I felt so close to my grandmother, except that she had not walked alive to her own funeral.
In time, my feet were on carpet. My boots crackled slightly, and slid in a new way. I smelled more now, not just dust and old stone, but also furniture oil and incense and the not-so-distant scent of baking. Doors opened and closed nearby as we walked.
No one said a word. We were among people who would not bother to question why a hoodwinked girl was being led past them. Later, I would come to understand the sadness of a city that had surrendered itself to the terror of a jealous and immortal master. Then, all I knew was that I was alone among strangers.
As always.
Finally I was stopped. A door creaked open. I smelled more incense and something musty. With a muttered “hup-hup,” I was propelled through, as if I were a horse to be driven to market. Hands released me as I stepped within. After another pace, I stopped. I feared barking a shin or tripping over something on the floor.
Someone behind me loosened the rope about my neck and whipped the guard’s cloak off. The door banged shut immediately thereafter.
I blinked away dust and the confusion of close confinement. There was no sign of the Duke here. Only a wide wooden table with the Factor seated behind it. My heart twisted in a cold stab of anger and regret. Two other dead-eyed men stood to his left. All three watched me blankly as my shoulders slumped and the breath left me.
Our plan was lost. The game was blown.
“Emerald.” The Factor’s voice was calm, quiet, as ordinary as his face except for those eyes.
“Green. You may call me Green.”
A smile flickered across his mouth. “Emerald.” He tapped his fingers against his thumb a moment, as if tallying. I let my eyes rove around the room. Three high, narrow windows on one wall, a ceiling far above me, shelves lined with large and heavy books behind the Factor’s men and on the other walls. A door amid the shelves, a door behind me, and him in the only chair.