Behind her Luma spotted a coffin. Columned and ornamented, it resembled the palace she stood in.
"Who are you?" Luma asked the woman.
"Ask that about yourself," said the woman.
"No," said Luma, "I must know who you are."
"You already do."
"You are Magnimar," Luma said.
A golden ringlet dropped from the city's coiffure to swing elegantly over its pale forehead.
"I always pictured you as a man," Luma said.
The city smiled. "All the thrusting pillars?"
"Well, yes."
Magnimar shook its head. "All within my confines—all my children—they are born, they live, and they die ...taken from me. Yet the city goes on. It remains strong, and survives. No, I can only be a woman."
"I see," said Luma.
"Do you?"
Then Luma stood beside the coffin. "Whose is it?" she asked.
Magnimar stood beside her, skin fragrant with allspice and olives. "Who do you think?"
Luma frowned. When she spoke to the city in her usual way, through its song, she received better answers than this. She opened the coffin—or rather it was then open, because she had wanted it so.
Luma gazed on her own corpse, broken and doll-like. Though it had been cleaned and strewn with lilac petals, her injuries could not be hidden. "Am I dead, then?"
The city caressed her cheek. "Do you choose to be?"
"No. I have a task to perform. A series of tasks."
Magnimar peeled a fig. "What you seek to do, I require. Your blood is blood. My blood is order. To ensure order, one must be prepared to mete out punishment. Are you?"
Before Luma could answer, the dream ended. She came to, the mask gone from her face, her wrists no longer restrained. A single small candle illuminated the unadorned room, no more than a quarter the size of her bedchamber back home.
A woman approached her. For an instant, Luma mistook her for the figure from her dream. "Magnimar?" she asked.
"Where else?" the woman snorted. She held herself in a hunch and had bundled herself in layers of coat and blanket, all various shades of brown. A kerchief wrapped over her head hid her hair and shadowed her face. Wrinkled, liver-spotted hands held a bowl of soup. She thrust it, along with a wooden spoon, toward Luma. "Reckon you can scoop your own broth now," she said.
Luma took the soup and ate. Orange beads of fat swam its surface, tantalizing her senses. There was pork in it, and barley, and spices she could not quite place. She dropped the spoon on the bedsheets and slurped directly from the bowl.
"The worst of it is over," said the woman. "Reckon you'll still hurt bad for a good long while. Still, better than dead, hey?"
Luma tried to identify her accent. It was a quite good Rag's End lilt, but underneath it was another note, perhaps from outside the city. Or she'd come here as a child and lived in Rag's End for most of her life. "Who are you?"
The old woman shook her head. "Don't trouble yourself."
Luma lifted up the covers. Her legs were still there, all right, and intact, with bones straight as ever. Under a cross-hatching of scars, the muscles had atrophied. She had become a spindly replica of her former self. Luma inspected her arms: those too had lost their sinew.
"How long have I been here?"
"Long as you needed to be," the woman said, as if offended.
"Months?"
"Weeks." She studied Luma's expression. "You're wondering how you lost all your conditioning so quick. They gave me only so many healing draughts. The rest of your recovery your body has had to do on its own. Like I said, preferable to the alternative, hey?"
"I must refer to you somehow," Luma said.
The woman cocked her head. "Then call me Melune."
Luma swung her spavined legs out over the edge of the mattress. The effort dizzied her. She placed her bare feet on the stone floor. The woman moved to her side, her impassive expression undisturbed. Luma waved her off. "The divine philtres needed to restore me. They would be expensive."
"I wouldn't know about that," Melune said.
Luma wove to her feet. Numbness needled through her legs, her arms, and the area around her mouth. Melune offered her an elbow, which she refused. She took a step across the floor, then another, and another. Melune kicked a pair of slippers her way; she stepped uncertainly into them and went on. She made it to a wooden support beam in the middle of the room and leaned herself on it.
Melune threw open the wooden door, revealing a larger chamber beyond. Weapons covered the wall, among them a sickle of Luma's preferred weight and size. Mats lined the floor; a stuffed sparring figure cast a shadow across them. "We're reckoning you'll want a regimen."
"Who's we?"
"To get back to how you were before." Melune waddled into the room, taking down the sickle and handing it to her.
A different weapon drew Luma's attention. This, too, was a sickle, but like none she'd ever seen before. It was long and crescent-shaped, its blade almost like that of a scythe, but jagged and barbed. She took it from the wall and tested it by swiping it through the air. "I won't be who I was before," she said.
∗ ∗ ∗
Over the weeks that followed, Luma retrained, drilling herself with the new weapon, lifting weights to recover her strength. She persisted in her questions of Melune—for whom did she work? Why did they save her? How did they find her? Where were they, and when would she meet them? The woman clung to her silence like a barnacle to a hull. As her muscles blossomed and tightened, Luma began to suspect that she hadn't been asking the right questions.
She asked herself why she hadn't tried to escape the bounds of Melune's hideout. In principle, the existence of unidentified benefactors ought to give her pause. In Magnimar, apparently selfless acts were to be viewed with utmost skepticism. A favor granted was a debt incurred. Yet for reasons she couldn't divine, intuition told her she was safe here.
A greater unease attended the floor-to-ceiling mirror that hung at the far end of her sparring room. Luma hadn't examined her reflection since she was hurt. It wasn't only her legs that were scarred. Whenever she brushed her face with her fingertips she felt raised lines and depressions on her cheeks, chin, and neck. These had puzzled her at first, until she remembered how she'd been caught in a shower of wood splinters when the bottom steps exploded.
Finally she steeled herself. She would put fear behind her, along with so much else. Grabbing her new sickle, she ventured to the mirror and struck a pose.
A strange woman blinked back at her. Yes, scars broke the smooth lines of her face. But it was harder in other ways, too. The healing magic hadn't changed her; the alteration was all in the way she held herself. Her chin looked stronger. Retraining had sculpted away her old slumping posture. Most of all, there was the chill in her eyes.
She remembered the mental image she'd used to maintain focus and stay alive during her escape from the collapsed golem chamber. Into a mental replica of the chamber she'd sent all of her fury, and all of her questions about why her siblings had done what they had done, and who, if anyone, she was without them. Over the long weeks of retraining, the anger had leached back out again. So cut off was she from her own thoughts that it had gone elsewhere without her noticing. It had traveled to her face, and was now incised in the grim visage glaring back at her from the mirror.
Why had they done it?
That remained to be seen. She would gather the facts, and then she could say. To speculate without information was stupid.
Who was she now?
Another foolish question. She was an arm holding a blade, and a mind that heard the song of Magnimar. They had killed all the rest of her, all the parts of her that were useless—her doubts, her knack for shrinking away, her deference.
And yes, her way of thinking about her problems instead of solving them.
All of this was stupid. That Luma was dead. Emotions could stay in that dark chamber. Even the rage would be sheathed, a weapon drawn only when neede
d.
Luma was dead, and that was good. Any further moaning about it was idiocy, and that was that.
Melune shuffled in. From the citysong, Luma had determined that the woman's hideout rested below street level, and near a place of reverence. It was about time for her to discover precisely where, one way or another.
"You're strong enough now, hey?" Melune croaked.
"That's right. Who do I owe for this?"
"I've booked you passage on a ship to Absalom."
"Why would I want to go there?"
"From there you can go anywhere. Leave Varisia. Start life anew."
"I'm not going anywhere."
Melune's shoulders sank. "Reckoned you'd say that. Well, you can't stay here."
"I reckoned you'd say that," Luma replied.
Chapter Thirteen
The Celwynvian Charge
After one more futile attempt to coax the identity of her benefactors from the old woman, Luma asked to be led to the exit. She ascended a spiral staircase, which led to a ceiling and stopped. There she found a circular trapdoor. She popped it open and crawled up, finding herself near a familiar monument.
A gift to the city from its elven population, the branches of the Celwynvian Charge stretched nearly thirty feet into the air. White wood and crystal intertwined in imitation of a legendary tree. Through a trick of natural mathematics, the sculpture looked symmetrical from any angle. Only by closely studying it did the onlooker realize that this was at no point the case. Through a permanent glamor, the branches grew real leaves, which budded, unfolded, turned color, shriveled and died in cadence with the seasons. During her time in Melune's redoubt, Luma had missed the budding of the leaves, which were now full and green.
Luma replaced the trapdoor, seeing how tightly it fit: from this side, the door was invisible even to close scrutiny. She turned to drink in the sights of the city. The citysong, muted since the incident, rushed back in on her in all its tumult. In it she heard the wail of babes, the determination of weeds to seed themselves in gaps between stones, and the whetting of blades.
To the west stretched the stone cottages and creaking tenements of the quiet and the humble, the folk whose virtues the politicians extolled and whose needs they ignored. Smoke wafted from brick chimneys to be caught on the salt-damp winds and dispersed south over the city walls. To the east pulsed the excitement of Lowcleft: strolling hawkers touting their wares, minstrels banging tambourines and bawds hooting for business.
She navigated the citysong, pushing past all strains save for those generated by the city's thinking inhabitants. When only their hopes, fears and petty distractions hummed in her mind's ear, she further narrowed her attention, calling to her those notes associated with the Derexhi. Her family occupied a measurable territory of Magnimar's collective memory. They'd taken part in its founding. Today their retainers ranged throughout it, and lent its people an impression of order and protection. The Derexhi had, in short, become an idea, one that Luma could hear as a pulsation of brassy notes, underpinned by brisk reports on a snare drum.
Following these notes, she wove deeper into spiced and perfumed Lowcleft. Though the day was not yet old, foot traffic already swelled lanes. Foreign travelers prowled in search of early revels; locals estimated the weight of their purses. Luma forged through the assembled marks and sharpers, changing direction when the harmonies she homed in on grew louder and doubling back when they faded. They led her past stooped water-carriers, hollering teamsters, and stumbling drunks. Where before the betrayal she might have slipped in and around people on the street, now she walked a straight line, impelling those in her path to step aside. Her passing quelled a fight between prostitutes and turned a mugger on his heels.
On the Street of Strays, the Derexhi melody intensified, while at the same time acquiring an undertone of melancholy. Its brass gave way to strings of faded nostalgia, leading her into a musty tavern. The design swinging on a sign over its doorway announced it as the Old Sword, or maybe the Rusty or Notched Sword.
It was a place for old men. They sat along a counter nursing cups of brandy, backs bent, knuckles arthritic, faces sagging. Broken noses, missing fingers, and rivers of scars testified to lives spent in the fighting professions. A face from the past glanced at Luma as she entered. Its owner sat alone at a table, listening halfheartedly to the well-polished war stories and hoary grudges emanating from the bar. A flowing yellow-white beard, tied near the end with a ribbon, countered the baldness of his wrinkled pate. On his doublet he still wore the Derexhi emblem, though with the violet border that indicated retired status.
He squinted in thwarted recognition as Luma took the seat opposite him. "Garatz," she said.
The old man leaned back, blinking. "Luma? That isn't you, is it?"
"It is," she said. Only after signaling the taverner, pointing at Garatz's near-empty brandy cup, did she pause to check her purse. A fistful of spotless silvers clinked inside it. "Though my face is perhaps not as rosy as it was when you taught me to throw a knife."
He drained the remnants of his cup and set it down with a plunk. "Much rosier than expected, given the event I attended not weeks ago."
"Event?"
"Your funeral, milady. Haven't you heard? You're supposed to be dead."
The barman brought a second brandy for Luma, though she had not meant to ask for one. She let him withdraw before speaking further. "For the moment, at least, may I ask you to keep my survival between the two of us? Certain persons may be surprised to learn otherwise, and I wouldn't want to see them discomfited."
Garatz raised his cup in a toast to her. "As you wish." He took note of her intimidating new sickle. "If you've come hoping for help in killing, I'm sorry to say I'm willing but unable." He held out his sword-arm to show her that the hand had withered into a frozen claw.
"I've been away a while, and seek only an account of the time I missed. How did I die?"
"Gloriously, ending the menace of the golem rebels. It was an iron golem that got you."
"As good a way to go as any. Mourners filed past a closed coffin, I presume."
"Your injuries were terrible, they said."
"And the tears—did they flow?"
"Yours was a stoic affair, rich in dignity, if naught else. As I said to old Daillidh, it was a poor thing to see so few invited, with the deceased a Derexhi by blood. They said it was out of concern for the health of your poor father." With his good hand Garatz suddenly clutched her wrist. "You must go to him quick, milady. If it is not already too late. Lord Randred has gone to his deathbed. Everyone knows."
Luma him quickly and left the Old Sword, making her way up the sloping road called the Ascent and onto the precipice of the great cliff that bisected the city. She cut through the fine shops of the Vista district, and, as the sun slipped toward the horizon, through the Capital.
Sprinting around the corner of a drab-faced counting house, she nearly collided with a contingent of city guards who leaned against its wall, munching hardtack as they leered at passing serving girls. Luma corrected her pace, heading away from them on a diagonal.
The burliest of them handed off his biscuit and followed her. "You there!"
Consulting her mental map of the city, Luma found scant avenues of escape. She stopped and waited. "Yes, guardsman?"
"That's some weapon you have there."
"Thank you."
A wee triangle of facial hair atop the guardsman's fat chin quivered in annoyance. "That's not what I meant. I meant, where are you going with that?"
"Are blades now prohibited in Magnimar?" Luma watched the other guardsmen as they crowded in to join their comrade.
"What I meant is, I don't like the way you have about you."
"I have done nothing to warrant your attention, constable."
Another of the guardsmen, this one skinny and spotted with pimples, peered at her. "Ain't you the Derexhi girl?"
So much for keeping her survival a secret.
"She's dead, ai
n't she?" asked a third guardsman.
Luma readied herself.
The pimpled guardsman pointed at her. "That's her right there. The one who killed Khonderian."
Luma spun, whirling her sickle in a wide arc, intended not to strike but to put them off balance. She darted for the nearest side street, then turned again. Pressing herself against a wall, she reached into her trickbag, her fingers finding the telltale ridges of her spider vial. As she did so, she remembered that it had been weeks since she last attended to it. She needed a live creature to conjure the magic around, and expected to find a black, dried-up ball. Instead, a brown spider twitched inside. Melune had replenished the vial with a fresh specimen.
The city granted Luma's muttered request for aid, animating her limbs with insect-like motion. She skittered up the side of the building and onto its slate roof. There she dropped prone, observing the guardsmen as they milled about, wondering where she'd hidden herself. She waited till they broke away, then jumped to the roof of an adjacent building, whose stonework offered an easier way down. Luma climbed to the lip of a first-floor balcony and jumped the rest of the way, landing with ease. Seeking out quiet streets, she made speed past the Avenue of Hours, through the statue-dotted manor lawns of Naos, and into the Marble District.
Under a moonless sky she crept onto the grounds of the estate adjoining theirs. She hugged the outer contours of its hedge, then made a dash for a vine-strewn border wall. Though the family had never bothered with guards before, deeming their own presence safeguard against attack, Luma paused to ensure that Iskola hadn't changed the policy now. Seeing no one, she vaulted the wall and, with long, quick strides, made it to the house. As she'd done without a second thought since the age of six, she scaled her way up to her father's balcony.
Through its windowed double door, Luma saw her father unconscious in his bed. He seemed to have aged two decades since she had seen him last. Loose, yellow skin drooped from his bones. His hair had thinned and his beard grown patchy.
Blood of the City Page 13
