“Not until after she made sure mine exploded first.”
“What did you expect? You married a dragon.”
“Doria, I’m sorry I didn’t wake you up. By the time I thought of it, it was too late.”
“Oh, it’s nothing that I can’t forgive after a little blackmail.”
“What are you hoping to extort from me? A large estate? A position on the league’s council?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of five to six handsome young men to cook for me, carry me about on a palanquin, give the occasional foot massage.” She shrugged.
Nicodemus laughed. Of all the envoys and personal advisors he had known, Doria was the one he liked and trusted most. Likely that was because she had been twenty-five years in his service; the other envoys had had the bad habit of getting killed.
“Five to six handsome servants sounds a bit much. How about two?”
The water mage smiled at him. “Didn’t you have a ‘First rule of fighting a water goddess’ or something to that effect?”
“The River Thief had requisites for equitable theft; you know how useful she could have been to us.”
“But you didn’t know that when you got into the God-of-god’s damned water, did you?”
“Three handsome young servants,” Nicodemus replied. “Final offer.” Just then a cry from the barge turned their eyes to the repairs. Something had gone wrong and the two boats nudged each other and began rocking. With a yawp, Rory dove off the bow and splashed into the river.
Doria sighed. “At least you managed to keep your druid and highsmith envoys alive this time around. Maybe these two will last longer than a season.”
“They both did rather well.”
“Which brings me to why I sought you out on this oh-so-lonely perch of yours.” She paused and then nodded aft where Sir Claude was leaning on the gunnel and studying Rory. The druid now swam alongside the barge and periodically reached up to touch its hull to edit the druidic text written within its wood.
“Sir Iron Pants over there,” Doria said, “just told me how the River Thief claimed one of the divinities in her goddess complex might have come from the Old Continent. Sir Steel also reports that the neodemon wore your daughter’s face.”
“It’s not a tall tale. I asked Sir Claude to inform you when no one would overhear.”
“So he did.”
“Can you think of any way we might find out if the River Thief was from the Old Continent?”
“Given that Freckles down there”—she gestured to Rory’s red head bobbing in the river—“killed all of the River Thief’s crew before we could question them … no, nothing comes to mind.”
“It’s my fault. I should have ordered Rory to restrain them if possible.”
“You should have. And you should have woken me.”
“Agreed.”
“As for why the neodemon should be wearing Leandra’s face … other than the fact that it’s a young and lovely face … no, I can’t think of any earthly reason the goddess would do such a thing.”
Nicodemus nodded and changed the subject. “What’s your opinion of Sir Claude? Can we trust him?”
Doria looked the knight up and down. “Well, he’s sarcastic enough to fit in with our crew. I think we can trust him to do his duty, especially if that duty involves picking a fight with Freckles. Those two have it out for each other in a way that I can’t figure out. Did they know each other before?”
“No.”
“Did one of them kill the other’s brother or something during one of the skirmishes between Lorn and Dral?”
“They deny it and there was no mention of such in the reports I read. In fact, Sir Claude was a veteran of the Goldensward War in the north of Lorn, and Rory a veteran of the Whiteforest Wars in southern Dral. I don’t think they’ve come within a hundred miles of each other until they joined my service.”
Doria made a thoughtful sound. “I wonder what it is then. Maybe just personal dislike. Anyway, my Lord Warden, what are we to do about preventing the River Thief from reincarnating?”
“Magistra, you are my advisor. Aren’t you supposed to be advising me?”
“I’m too old to do my own work. That’s why I went into politics.”
“Very well, given the River Thief’s requisites, I am wagering her cult will be mostly in the river villages.”
“Because of the requisite for equability?”
“The urban deities of theft are a more ruthless lot.”
Doria waggled her head from side to side as she did when weighing evidence. “That she was a complex of three makes it harder to say. Could be a city thief goddess fused with an ancient river goddess of the poor.”
Nicodemus raised an eyebrow. “Five thousand thieves praying near a single ark? Only place that could happen would be Chandralu. Lea might be having some trouble bringing down these rural neodemons; she hasn’t had any trouble in the city. If there had been a newly incarnated goddess of theft she would have known.”
Doria chewed her lip. “So, you’d argue that it’s more likely that five thousand souls along this river began to pray to steal a bit of the wealth that flows between Matrupor and Chandralu? It isn’t the worst idea I ever heard.”
“High praise from you, Magistra.”
“So we float back to Chandralu and tell the prince regent he’s got to find a way to let the villages in on the trade wealth? Let them charge tolls maybe? Or maybe have the crown build temples and schools to share the wealth?”
“Fiery heaven, I’m not suggesting a thing. Leandra is Warden of Ixos. Keeping the discontents from reincarnating the River Thief is her problem.”
Doria sniffed. “Typical. That’s just typical of the father.”
“What? I would be respecting the sovereignty of her office.”
“Look, you know she’s doing something wrong. You know things are out of hand in rural Ixos. So she’s going to have to change; would you agree?”
“I have this feeling that if I agree, you’re going to find some way of making me feel like an ass.”
“You don’t have to do anything in particular for me to make you feel like an ass.”
“Such a comfort you are, Magistra. All right, so, yes, I know Lea will have to change.”
“So you can’t just solve the problems and tell her she has to change.”
“I can’t?” Nicodemus asked. He had thought Doria was going to applaud his respect for his daughter’s independence.
“Of course not. You have to help her to change.”
“Oh, yes, of course,” Nicodemus muttered, though he had no idea how exactly he was supposed to do such a thing.
“You would have done better with a son.”
“I would?”
“There’s a saying among the Cloud People—”
“You never quoted Cloud People sayings when we were in the South.”
“Being home makes me nostalgic. Now, do you want a gem of invaluable wisdom from my people or not?”
“I do.”
“So the saying is ‘to be a good father to a son, a man merely has to be kind, wise, or clever.’”
“I don’t get it. What does a man need to be a good father to a daughter?”
“But that’s the point! There’s nothing specific that can make you good at it. It’s just a”—she waved one hand in the air—“you know, a certain”—more vigorous hand waving, perhaps indicating the complexity of the sought-after attributes—“a certain combination.”
“Truly, a gem of invaluable wisdom.”
“Stop. You’re ruining the effect.”
“Doria, you’ve never had a daughter. You’ve never even had children.”
“But I’ve been a daughter. And that, don’t you think, better qualifies me to know what a daughter needs than would, oh I don’t know, screwing up the raising of one, hmm?”
“Lea is thirty-three years old now, the Warden of a whole kingdom. It’s hardly like I’m still raising her.”
&nb
sp; “A son is a son until he finds a wife; a daughter is a daughter for life.”
“Another saying of the Cloud People?”
“Oh, please, no. You think we’d rhyme so sentimentally like that? The Cloud People are nothing if not practical. I heard that in Dral.”
“It sounds Dralish, but that doesn’t mean it’s not stupid,” Nicodemus replied. “And while I appreciate that raising daughters is a difficult task, I don’t know if your generalities apply to Lea. She is after all half-human and half-textual, the daughter of a dragon, too damn clever by half, fond of getting into trouble, and continuously fighting a disease that will—everyone agrees—kill her far too soon.” An unintended note of hurt had entered Nicodemus’s voice.
Doria waited a moment before saying, “Yes. Yes, you’re right. Leandra’s situation is unique.” She waited another moment. “So, raising a daughter is difficult. But for your daughter, that’s especially so.”
Nicodemus took a long breath. He needed to hurry back to his daughter. Away to the east, one of the big-bellied clouds was dropping a curtain of rain onto the jungle.
CHAPTER TEN
Beneath cloud-dappled skies, the catamaran caught the wind with a bulging expanse of white sail and seemed to fly over the bay water. Even Leandra’s limited nautical sensibilities appreciated a rightness to the ship’s angles of wind to sail and water to hull. The resulting speed exhilarated.
The sailors shared her sensation or perhaps generated it as they hurried to their tasks, hollering to one another. Even Dhrun was content enough that he did not balk when Holokai bellowed orders.
Standing on the forward deck, Leandra smiled as she thought about what she and Holokai had done back on Keyway Island. Her reminiscence was disturbed only when a strong wind required that she readjust her headdress and veil. Her disease made her painfully sensitive to sunlight: a few moments of exposure induced a rash, prolonged exposure, the full horror of a flare.
Just then the catamaran passed under a cloud’s shadow and the blue water lost its dazzle. The change turned Leandra’s thoughts to Chandralu and what lay before them. She wondered when Francesca would arrive in the city.
A sailor let out a laughing yawp. Leandra turned and saw a man leaning over the catamaran’s starboard hull. A dribbling between his legs gained force to become an arc of urine into the ocean. His mates, Dhrun among them, called approval or criticism.
Leandra tried to be charitable as she considered the sailor. He was, after all, subject to several of the sea’s intoxicants: impending payment, fine sailing, a port where he could exchange his rupees for kava or women. Leandra had spent her childhood on expeditions to take down neodemons: long caravans snaking across Lornish plains, wild mounted hunts dashing through Dralish forests, sea canoes voyaging across Ixonian waves. In her experience, men who dedicated their lives to going elsewhere—despite their colorful diversities of appearance—were cut from similarly rough but gaudy cloth. She appreciated the joy they took from risks and reward. And yet the sailor’s arc of urine aggravated her present dissatisfaction with humanity and its abortive sorrows.
So she turned to stare dispassionately at the showboating sailor. It wasn’t very impressive, his piss or penis. Another crewman was making for the starboard hull, lifting up his lungi and boasting that he could do better. Then he noticed Leandra’s stare.
The crewman dropped his lungi and turned back to some detail of the rigging. Noticing the silence, the rest of the crew turned to look at him, then at her. In a few moments, all hands were tending to ropes or sails.
Leandra looked to the bow and the lush, rolling hills of the Chandralu peninsula. About four miles ahead stood Mount Jalavata, the extinct volcano on which Chandralu was built.
Mount Jalavata rose to a great height until its tip touched the underbelly of a cloud that, more days than not, hung above the mountain and churned in the sea winds. Presently hidden among the clouds was the Pavilion of the Sky, where her father cast his metaspell to spread out across the archipelago.
Inside the volcano, the crater was filled with chill lake water that sank to depths known only to the gods—for on those placid waters was the Floating City, the home of the Ixonian pantheon.
At various points along the eastern slope, tunnels had been carved into the volcano. Through a series of baffles and floodgates, the crater’s water flowed out and down the volcano’s slope, which had been cut into terraces for the cultivation of taro and rice.
Amid these paddy fields, enclosed by twenty-foot-high walls, was bright Chandralu. The city, like the mountainside, was cut into terraces; sixteen terraces, to be precise, each nearly twenty feet tall and eighty deep. Lying as they did between two tall ridges, most of the terraces ran a convex course and so appeared like the rows of a giant amphitheater.
Nearly all of the architecture was that of the Cloud Culture: cylindrical pavilions surrounded by close-packed, two-story rectangular houses with slanted roofs and verdigris copper gutters. Nearly every wall was whitewashed. At noon the city became almost painfully bright.
As Holokai brought them into the harbor, Leandra could make out the city’s detail. Not all the whitewashed houses were the same white: Some were drab, some dirty, some faintly hued with tan or brown, a few so white they seemed solar. In the finer districts the buildings sported doors, shutters, railings painted in competitively vivid color: violet, crimson, yellow. On the higher and wealthier terraces, beautiful trees—palm, jacaranda, plumeria, banyan—lined the streets, and the shady green of gardens interrupted the white buildings.
The only architectural exceptions were the three limestone temple-mountains, built in the intricate Lotus style, standing dark and cool over the rest of the blazing city.
After they docked, Holokai reported to the port authorities while Leandra talked with Dhrun. The divinity complex had stowed his swords and stood on the deck wearing only a short lungi. Bare-chested, he cut a conspicuous picture. Several dockworkers stared at the young god of wrestling. Dhrun smiled at them, enjoying the attention and anticipating their future prayers at the next wrestling tournament.
“You’re such a peacock,” Leandra casually accused.
“The male or the female of the species? They’re very different.”
“Don’t be difficult. Whenever someone refers to peacocks they’re talking about the males with their fancy plumage.” She gestured to his bare chest.
He smiled. “Maybe they shouldn’t.”
“You’re not going to carry a sword in the city?”
He gave her a four-shouldered shrug. “Everyone knows I’m deadlier with my bare hands. It’s only outside the city when the weapons stop fools from attacking me.”
“There are fools in the city too, you know.”
Just then Holokai returned and began to pay the crew.
Leandra had noticed with relief that there was no sign of her mother’s ship in the harbor. A few minutes later, flanked by Holokai and Dhrun, she left the docks to find a way through the bustling Bay Market Plaza. It was a chaotic, beautiful market day. All around her fishmongers hawked every type of food from the ocean: seaweed, tuna, dolphinfish, amberjack, grouper, snapper—all neatly decapitated, gutted, and arranged in circular displays. Octopus tentacles were hung to dry in the sun like laundry on a clothesline.
Atop some of the stalls and nearby roofs peered troops of Chandralu’s infamous macaque monkeys, who could be as merciless as the city’s thugs. The long-tailed, wide-faced, furry little brutes had learned every conceivable ploy to steal food. The larger troops would execute brutal smash-and-grab-style raids on food stalls left guarded by children or the elderly. Or a monkey might play a Wounded Bird game or a mother might offer her adorable babies to be petted by a softhearted human while other members of the troop quick-fingered any morsel left inadequately guarded.
On the Bay Market’s western edge stood a tiny open-air temple, no more than twenty feet in diameter. Inside, a four-man gamelan ensemble struck small hammers upon their ma
ny brass instruments in a style of gamelan unique to Chandralu. Each musician played through a cycle upon his instruments, and the different musical cycles went into and fell out of sync with the other. It produced a bright, clanging, circular music, at times almost cacophonous.
As a child, Leandra had thought gamelan music exotic, harsh. Now it was a small pleasure, an example of Lotus Culture, a reminder that she was home. A priest, dressed in multicolored robes, was accompanying the gamelan music in song that exhorted the crowd to pray to the Trimuril and the other official deities of the Ixonian pantheon.
Past the pavilion stood the bottom of the Jacaranda Steps, which climbed the mountainside to the Water Temple at the city’s upper limit.
The Jacaranda Steps themselves were built of gray stone, broad and long enough to allow for the tread of elephants, which were used to carry goods and materials across the city. Starting about a third of the way to the city’s top, the Jacaranda Steps were lined with shops and stalls that grew more opulent as the steps rose higher until they were replaced by the largest and most beautiful family compounds. The jacaranda trees that gave the stairway its name flanked the steps every ten feet. At this time of year their branches were in full purple bloom.
The Jacaranda Steps would have been a charming scene except for the lower terraces. Here they were lined by the poor—some selling brass baubles spread out on blankets, others rattling beggar’s bowls or calling out pleading songs. Here was the vast and horrible variety of suffering. Here were men who had lost an arm or a leg. Here were starving mothers with hollow eyes. They cradled their infants, who wailed or lay slack as flies buzzed around their faces.
Leandra, like all denizens of the Chandralu, had learned to look at such commonplace misery without reaction. It was only when she thought of the fact that there were no spellwrights among the miserable that Leandra could feel anything. Then the emotion that came was anger. Throughout history, spellwrights were exempt from destitution. The longer she thought about it, the hotter Leandra’s anger burned.
Whether a child would become a spellwright or not was a chance event; however, the chances were improved by education. In the empire, where Leandra’s aunt had invested in grammar schools and printing presses, a larger number of children were become spellwrights and more of them from the poorer classes. That was an admirable improvement, certainly, but it still didn’t change the fact those born magically illiterate were vulnerable.
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