by Jay Lake
Nowhere to go. Nothing to use.
Whatever calculations he was making came to their end. His face was grim. “A valuable servant is dead. I now see that an extremely valuable possession has been mutilated and thus rendered worthless. I give you liberty to make a statement before I have you cast from the rim of the dome atop this building.”
I was wrong. His voice wasn’t ordinary. It was as dead as his eyes.
And I had nothing I could wield against him.
Yet I wasn’t bound. I wasn’t restrained in any way. Whichever guards had walked me through the halls to this place had vanished with the hood.
I was still me. I shifted my weight, testing the balls of my feet. The Duke was not here, but three of his dead-eyed servants were. More important, the Factor had ever been my enemy.
There was something I could do. Strike one of them down, any of them, and the rest might learn a little of the fear they’d beaten into me. I tensed my muscles, ready to spring and gain close purchase to pour my words in his ear. My cloak of belled silk jingled as I moved.
The Factor raised a hand, not toward me but at his two companions. “She may attempt an attack,” he said. “She will not succeed.”
“If you are certain, Your Grace,” one of them answered.
Your Grace! How many undying, dead-eyed dukes could there be in this city? I had found the Duke of Copper Downs after all! That he went abroad on his own streets under the name of the Factor surprised me, but I realized there was no reason it should. The people who ruled this city were like those sliding boxes brought in from the Hanchu ports that folded into themselves without ever reaching an end.
I relaxed. He would not bluff me. Why did he need to? He did not know I understood anything of the words of power. The Dancing Mistress had been uncertain of them. They were my hidden weapon. I did not know if their strength would hold now, but there was no way to find out except to put the question to the hardest of tests.
“You were wrong,” I told him.
“Wrong?” His smile flickered again. “A curious choice of exit lines. And no, I was not wrong. In what? Lifting a foreign guttersnipe from poverty? Raising you in privilege? Teaching you every skill of womanhood? Perhaps you would prefer picking rice in the tropics, bound in marriage to some laboring peasant. You were almost so much more than that.”
I’d had those same thoughts, but that did not make him right. The bells of my cloak jingled again.
Words, I told myself in the language of my birth. He tries to win once more through the power of his words.
What would my grandmother have done? What would Endurance have me do? I could hear the snorting breath of the ox as he sought to warn me back.
The only way was forward.
Flipping the cloak of bells away from me, I flung it at the Factor’s companions. I danced to my left, away from them.
He jumped to his feet and threw the table over, roaring words I did not-or could not-understand.
I leapt forward to balance on the edge of table. I had practiced this exact stance for so long. I spun into a kick from which the Factor ducked. Then I leapt to grab him around the neck.
“The life that is shared,” I whispered in his ear in the language of my birth, “goes on forever. The life that is hoarded is never lived at all.”
That was as close as Federo and I had been able to come to the Dancing Mistress’ words. Surely, though, inasmuch as she’d given them to me in the Petraean tongue of Copper Downs, their sense had come from whatever language her people spoke amongst themselves. I hoped and prayed that sense would carry forward into my own words.
The Factor bore me down under his far greater weight. His two companions grabbed me by the wrists. I feared suddenly the rape that Mistress Cherlise had warned me about. These men would tear my body for their pleasure before they tore my life out for their protection.
“You,” the Factor said. He couldn’t seem to find his next thought.
His hair began to twist. It jumped like snakes disturbed from their sleep. Ripples of gray, then white, shot through it. The other two loosed their grip on me, staggering back in their own sudden, shocked decay.
“You…”This time he looked surprised. Finally there was some gleam of light in those cold, dead eyes.
I pushed him away from me, sitting up as he fell. The Factor struggled with something mighty that was caught in his chest. The words worked. I leaned close, to be sure he could hear me even as he was dying.
“You may call me Green,” I said. “Green,” I repeated in my own language.
He gave me a look of utter despair, which gladdened my heart. Wind and dust erupted violently. The air stank of old bandages and rotten meat, while unvoiced shrieks echoed within my skull.
I held on tight, remembering who I was and what my purpose was here. I bore these noises and the fires in my head as I’d borne the years of beatings and abuses. My patience had been schooled by the very best this man could set against me.
A moment later, I was alone in the room, amid the splintered remains of his table and the shattered wood of his chair.
The motes floating in the sunlight from the high windows engaged my attention for a while. Were these the dust of immortality? Or perhaps just the room’s air stirred so much that every crack and crevice had surrendered its dirt.
Studying their texture awhile longer, I realized I was in the same shock that had possessed me after Mistress Tirelle’s death. Except I did not feel guilt this time. Or pain. I was not sure it even counted as a killing. All I had done was point the weapon of the Duke’s magic against him and those who served him closest. They had brewed their own poison and served it out in cups for generations. How could I regret these child-takers sipping their own bitters?
They were gone. The Duke and the Factor both. How was it no one in Copper Downs had noticed that the two of them had been the same man? Perhaps it had been one of those secrets that everyone understood but no one spoke of.
Everything about this Duke was difficult for me to fathom.
With them gone, I was free. The Factor was no longer in a position to pursue his complaint against me for the killing of Mistress Tirelle. The Duke was no longer in a position to offer a bounty for my head. I was free-free as any girl of twelve who stood out on these streets surely as a fire in the night.
Rarely had I thought to regret the color of my skin, for I found myself pretty enough to look at, but here and now among these maggot men, my fine brown tone made it impossible for me to hide.
What of it? I breathed deeply and searched for the courage that had driven me to face down the most powerful man on the Stone Coast, and indeed, in this quarter of the world. Resolve clutched within my throat, I stepped to the door and pressed my ear against the once-glossy panel. Now it was matted with dust and flecked with tiny pocks.
With that realization, I glanced at the backs of my hands. Dots of blood beaded them. I rubbed myself clean on my dark tights, then swiped fingers across my face. More blood, in faint smears, along with a sharp twinge of pain from the disturbed scabs.
Once more I tried to listen. No one walked or spoke immediately outside, though I heard distant shouting. I also realized there was a strange, faint roar, which I finally identified as a crowd of people giving voice outside the Ducal Palace.
I turned to gather my belled silk. It, too, had been damaged by the Duke’s demise, but was still essentially whole even with a forest of snags and tears. Handfuls of bells slid to the floor when I pulled it over myself. The cloth brought the grave-dust smell of him with me. I didn’t mind. That was the scent of triumph, after all. I might not live out the hour, but in this moment, I was free.
The hallway was empty. The wood of the threshold was scorched, likewise the carpet before it. The rug had abraded in a pattern of rays as if an explosion had taken place within my room. Papers were scattered loose against one wall, along with an empty slipper. People had fled in disarray. I shut the door and checked the gap at the bottom.<
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What had I survived?
We’d entered from what was now my left. The endless practice in the dark Below with the Dancing Mistress made it easy for me to find my way. Wiping my face and hands clean of bloody dust, I retraced my steps to the end of the hall, out into a wider gallery lined with bookshelves and decorated side tables.
This, too, was empty. The ceiling here was high, three or four storeys, with a long clerestory above serving to admit the light of the sky. Thin banners hung from the beams, descending about thirty feet to the height of a normal ceiling, a style I would eventually realize was typical of formal architecture in this city.
Farther from the explosion, people had also fled in panic. A dropped tray sat among a spray of shattered crystal and a pool of wine. Three leather folders were crumpled against the pedestal of a table supporting a statue of a wide-mouthed red god. Its eyes bugged like those of a frog, and seemed to follow me as I walked.
I could hear the roar much more clearly now, breaking into the separate sounds of people and horses and shattering glass. The noise of riot.
How had it happened so quickly? Unless all the Duke’s henchmen had also dissolved with him. I tried to imagine the officers of the court, the leaders of the Ducal guard, even a tax inspector at his counting table before a clutch of humbled sea captains newly in harbor. If they’d all cried out in surprise, then crumbled in a whirlwind as the Duke had before me, that would send an immediate shock throughout the city.
I began to wonder what I had truly done. A man could not rule through the passage of centuries without the habits of his power becoming the habits of everyone who served him or lived within his demesne. How much had the city been overset?
How much did I care?
A servant younger than myself ran screaming from the sight of me in the next gallery. I still followed my memory of being led in, passing now from carpet to stone. Ahead of me, down a short flight of stairs, a small group of Ducal guards huddled before the great oak-and-copper doors. The entrance-way was surmounted by stained-glass windows. Everything was shut and barred; some of the windowpanes were broken out by cobbles strewn upon the floor within. The crowd just outside was very loud.
I walked toward the guards with my bells ringing. There was no point in pretense. One of their number, with a gold knot on the shoulder of his dark green woolen coat, looked up at me.
“You, there-don’t go through this door!”
“Why not?” I asked, drawing myself up with dignity.
“Coz they’ll kill you out there.” He sounded more exasperated than afraid. “Everything’s gone wrong.”
All the Duke’s immortals must have indeed fallen to dust. It was my great fortune these guards had no idea who I was. I thanked all the gods for the cloth that had hidden my face on the way in.
“Thank you, sir. I was visiting. Is there an exit I can use?”
“Try the Navy Gallery. Off to your left there.”
One of the men spoke up. “If you’re up for it, girl, just drop out of one of them windows. You’ll be in the Box Elder Garden, but it lets out on Montane Street. Crowd out there hasn’t yet remembered how many doors there are to this palace besides the front.”
“Be off with you,” the corporal added. “No use hanging here.”
I took them at their word and turned into what I hoped was the Navy Gallery. No shouts corrected me.
In an instant, I knew I was right. The ceiling was painted with a smoke-wreathed battle scene showing long-hulled vessels from a much older time surrounding a burning, fat-bellied hulk. Ship’s wheels and bells hung on the walls, while models stood on small tables-their detail was something I would have loved to examine at a different time.
The windows here were casements, with little cranks to turn out the glass on a hinge up the long side. I picked one in the middle and looked out at some rhododendron bushes backed by a stand of box elder trees just beyond. The noise was less here. No one seemed to be throwing cobbles at the palace.
A moment later, I was out among the bushes. Reason had crept up on pride, so I stopped there and rolled my belled silk into a bundle. I slipped out of the trees and into the stream of people approaching the front of the palace from along Montane Street. They had the rumbling urgency of a mob, complete with torches, staves, and iron tools.
A man in a pale suit with the cut of a middle-ranked trader grabbed at me. My heart chilled, and I twisted, hoping to kick his knee.
“Is it still happening in there?” he shouted. He was not even looking at me. His eyes rolled red and wild.
“I… I don’t know.” I hated how small and frightened my voice sounded.
“The Duke is dead, long live the Duke!” He glanced around, then seemed to see me for the first time. “Go home, girl. This is no place for a foreigner now.”
“Green,” I whispered. Nodding my thanks, I took the first side street that was reachable across the streaming flow of the forming mob.
It was done. I was free, and out of the palace, and on a path of my own choosing. I was my own person, no one’s property for the first time since coming to this accursed city. And they would send no more Federos out to buy children. Not this gang that I had laid low.
Heading for the docks, I aimed to take the trader’s advice. Copper Downs held nothing more for me. Perhaps I could return to what I had been-not a girl under the belly of her father’s ox, certainly, but to what that girl might have become.
Since I hadn’t expected to survive, I’d given no thought to what came next. I had a direction now-the trader had the right of it, so far as his advice went-but I was surprised to regret what I was leaving behind.
I had no trouble at all leaving the Factor’s House behind. That was a well-upholstered slave pit, and nothing more. Some of my Mistresses had been kind. Mistress Danae, for example. And if I had friends in this life, they were Federo and the Dancing Mistress.
Once I took ship, I would never see them again. What had not even been a worry before was now a swell of regret. The Factor could be dust for all I cared, but Mistress Tirelle plucked my heart as well.
Loping toward the docks, I wiped tears from my eyes. There’d been no time to say good-bye before. Now it was too late.
I had no idea how to interpret the chaos of the waterfront when I finally arrived there. The crowding bordered on panic, everyone heedless and hurried. I needed a ship to Selistan. If I took passage aboard a vessel bound for the Sunward Sea, that would likely be a permanent error.
It all rested on how well I spoke. Certainly there had been stories aplenty in Mistress Danae’s books about stowaways and travelers working their passage. Somehow none of them were dark-skinned girls.
My color hadn’t mattered within the bluestone walls of the Pomegranate Court. Out here, it might hold the balance of my life. Along with my words. As I’d always known, these people lived and died by their words.
I continued to walk briskly, bound on an errand to nowhere. If I were to stand and gawk, I would mark myself as a potential victim. Instead I looked as closely as I could at each ship I passed, each wharf.
Some had signboards out to advertise their destination. Most of these were cities of the Stone Coast-Houghharrow, Dun Cranmoor, Lost Port. These I recognized from the stories and maps I’d studied. One was marked for the Saffron Tower. Much too far the wrong way for me.
A signboard loomed ahead. In shaky handwriting, it read, “South to sun countries. Calling in Kalim., Chitta and Spice Pt.s.”
I trotted up to that gangplank. The ship had three tall masts, and no sign of a boiler below, unlike the smokestack I recalled from Fortune’s Flight. A man stood there with skin as dark as mine, though he was fitted out in the duck and cotton of a sailor. He held a long board to which papers had been bound with sisal twine. He glanced at me once, then back at his board.
“Please, sir, I would have passage,” I said. He didn’t even glance up at me. Then, in Seliu: “I want to return home.”
That got his atte
ntion. “Go back to your mother,” he replied, then some words I didn’t know.
“She is there,” I told him. “I was stolen.”
“You are a slave.” He looked at me with suspicion. “Trouble rides your back.” That last was in Petraean.
“Trouble rides this entire city,” I answered him, also in Petraean. “If I do not go with you, I may never go at all.”
“What is being your fare for passage, should I recommend to the captain that we take you?”
I took a deep breath. Here was where my plan would founder. “I have no fare, sir. Just the goodwill of my countrymen. I can cook to please the table of a lordly house, and my skills with needle and thread are worthy as well.”
He snorted, and my heart fell. “Next you’ll tell me you play the music of angels and can dance the Seven Steps of Sisthra.”
“I sing, sir, but only in the fashion of the Stone Coast.”
Something stirred in his face. “You do not know the songs of Selistan.”
Switching back to our words, I said, “It has been a very long time.”
Close by, a bell began ringing. Everyone on the dock looked around with frantic haste. Many ran off. An alarm, then. Riot approached the docks.
“Come.” He started up the gangplank. “If we cast off with you aboard, much of this discussion will be lacking in point. Captain Shields is not likely to toss you overboard as a stowaway. Especially if you can grace his table in style.”
Someone on the masts called out. Sailors pounded the deck. The ship lurched slightly, then began to drift. I realized they had a line off the stern. A boat full of men pulled hard to tow this vessel away from shore.
I tugged at the man’s sleeve. “Please, sir, what is the name of this ship?”
He looked down at me and began to laugh. “Do not think me to be mocking you, little one, but this vessel is called Southern Escape.”
“Ah.” I looked quietly into his eyes. “But I am free.”
“Of course you are,” he answered. “At the moment.” He bent close. “I am Srini, the purser. I must go see to the captain. To be sitting with those bales over there, and for the love of all that is holy, get yourself in no one’s path.”