Apocalypto (Omnibus Edition)

by L. K. Rigel

  She had taught him with such enthusiasm that he suspected she had come to love the city. If so, she’d never admit to it. As for intrigue, something was up. “What’s going on with the Drahans? Why would you knowingly provoke them?”

  “I don’t know what you mean. I like the Drahans as much as I like anybody.”

  “High praise. But if we acknowledge the Emissary’s settlement girl with gifts, we’d better give some to Claire or the Drahans will feel insulted. And rightly.”

  “It’s not the Drahans.” The dog licked her face, and she clucked at it and kissed it again. That’s what chalices loved. Their dogs. “It’s Garrick,” she said. “It’s no coincidence they’ve come at the same moment as Jordana. I can’t tell if Garrick’s spies are in Allel or on the Blackbird.”

  “I’ll wager they’ve come about the dagger. The appeal is coming up, and they’re going to ask you to drop it.”

  Before Allel, Celia had been chalice to Garrick. The future counselor she delivered there had died during childhood, and against all tradition Garrick had refused to return the girl’s dagger to Celia.

  “I’m told the prince wears it.” Celia’s flat tone didn’t mean a lack of feeling. It came from the effort to suppress her emotions. She’d complained to a tribunal and lost. The matter was now on appeal.

  “If he wears it tonight, I’ll challenge him.”

  “You will not. Don’t give them the satisfaction. Of course I’m furious, but if it were up to me I never would have made the claim in the first place. They’re going to win, Edmund. The law is on their side.”

  “Your sister chalices would disagree.”

  “They would be wrong. A counselor’s dagger stays with her city when she dies. Would Allel return Faina’s lotus dagger?”

  “That’s different. Our counselors didn’t die before taking their positions. They lived full lives. And we display their daggers with honor, not as ornamental trinkets.”

  “It would have been better if Garrick had kept to tradition and returned it. But as much as our sacred traditions sustain us, they aren’t the law.”

  “Tradition should mean something.” Edmund inwardly laughed at himself. It made him feel old, championing tradition. “And the counselors, I think they’re more livid than the chalices.”

  “The counselors identify with their daggers in ways even we chalices don’t understand. Your sister is of the dragon, and she’s profoundly offended by Garrick’s refusal to break the blade. I only filed the complaint for her sake; she never asks for anything.”

  It was true. Counselor was the most selfless person Edmund knew. But then, she was bred to be selfless. The very essence of counselorhood was to reject all embodiments of self. It’s why they didn’t take names.

  “But we won’t win,” Celia said. “This is a chance to remind Red City its power is not limitless. The tribunal won’t miss it. I must be getting old. I seem to care more about Counselor’s feelings than what’s good for my sisters.”

  Celia pushed the dog off her lap and stood up. “About the gifts. I’ve had Mallory’s sent to your library. Be a good prince and make sure they’re in order. I’ll take care of Claire Drahan.”

  “Mallory’s gifts.”

  “The settlement girl. Her name is Mallory.”

  “Ah. That explains the fuss.”

  “The fuss is mere courtesy among chalices.”

  “She’s not a chalice yet,” Edmund said. “And if the real Mallory ever came to light – and just happened to be a bleeder – she wouldn’t choose Allel over Garrick for a few pots of honey. You of all people know that.”

  “This one isn’t the real Mallory. Jordana contacted me on the gridcom. The girl is settlement trash. Ignorant and apparently filthy. But she’s a bleeder. If Asherah has chosen her, who are we to judge? We’ll have a proper reception and presents and welcome her to civilization.”

  Edmund kissed Celia’s forehead, and she pretended not to like it. Even retired, chalices didn’t exchange signs of affection with outsiders. He would always be an outsider to her, though he was a child of her body. Maybe because of it.

  “It doesn’t hurt to make a good impression,” she said. “If Lady Drahan continues with her delusions of grandeur, Claire might decide she’s above Allel. Jordana’s settlement trash may be all we can get.”

  All we can get. She used to say you. Every day, Celia identified more with Allel and less with Red City. “Before you go the library, Edmund, find Counselor and send her to me, would you? Marla is out on an errand.”

  Find Counselor was exactly what he wanted to do.

  While he waited for Celia’s private lift, the old portrait of Queen Char stared at him. His great-grandfather, Allel’s first king, had ordered it painted shortly after their marriage. Her hair was an odd red, the color of blood when it hits the air. Asherah’s hair, it was called.

  The painter had the color right. Edmund had seen the lock Queen Char had bestowed on Allel’s first master of hydroponics, Hamish Drahan. The Drahans swore the hair had mystical protective powers and kept it in a mourning brooch.

  Considering Lady Drahan’s pride, it would be interesting to see whether she or Claire wore the family heirloom tonight.

  Poor Queen Char. Legend had it that she’d eventually gone mad. She never got over losing her sister in the cataclysm. She spent her life searching for the ironically named Sky, supposedly held captive by Asherah in a mythical vault in the bowels of the earth.

  That’s what the dig team was looking for.

  In reading Queen Char’s journals, Counselor had come to doubt the madness theory and enlisted Edmund in a quest to find the vault. He went along just to indulge his sister. He was quite aware that the whole dig project was a plot to make him have more fun.

  Then they found the tunnel, and he caught vault fever too.

  Celia’s lift went as far as the first floor mezzanine. Too many people were waiting for the public lift, so Edmund took the servants’ stairs down to the basement kitchen.

  “My lord!” Cook called out over the chopping and washing and stirring, preparations for tonight’s reception. It was an announcement more than a greeting, and all activity came to a halt.

  “Carry on, everyone.” Edmund made eye contact first with Cook, and then the pastry chef, as Celia had trained him to do. Always acknowledge inferiors in order of precedence, their place on the Great Chain. “Don’t mind me.”

  The staff went back to their work and their chatter. They were used to seeing him in their domain. The pastry chef was putting together baklava, Edmund’s favorite desert. Allel didn’t have much, but they did have an ample supply of one luxury – honey. A kitchen maid was halfway through a basket of fat, red, perfectly fine strawberries, slicing off their tops.

  Contraband strawberries. He scoffed to himself. The Aztlán strawberry charter was ridiculous. If Red City gave someone a walnut charter, he didn’t know how he’d hide the grove of five trees they’d started at the ashram.

  “What’s this amazing stuff?” He stuck his finger in the pan Cook held above the stove flame.

  “Stop that.” She pretended to slap his hand as he tasted the tangy sauce.

  He leaned in quietly. “Did you hear? Garrick will be here tonight.”

  Cook’s face fell.

  “King and prince, a few guards at most. By the way, the regent does want to impress the Emissary, but keep the strawberries in the kitchen, eh? Give them out to the staff as you see fit.”

  “Yes, my lord. That’s very kind.”

  “We don’t want to end up with a shibbing Team of Inquiry breathing down our necks asking why we didn't order from Aztlán.”

  “I do wish you were on the throne, my lord. It makes me nervous when Garrick comes poking around.”

  Garrick had had designs on Allel from the time of King Jake. Early on, when bees were discovered in Allel, Garrick had tried to steal the hives. They gave up only because the bees couldn’t survive Garrick’s filthy air.

&nbs
p; “Beesboom bad, eh?” No one knew where the saying came from, but it was Allelspeak for we shibbing hate Garrick.

  “Beesboom bad, my lord.”

  One reason the Allels were so grateful to Celia was that Garrick would be unlikely to try anything with a chalice from Red City in the regency. Still, no one would relax until their proper king was on the throne.

  “The regent is clever,” Edmund said, “but not even she has mastered the space-time continuum.”

  Cook tilted her head. “You’ve gone beyond me now, my lord.”

  “I mean I can’t be crowned before I’ve finished my guest-host tour.”

  This wasn’t idle chit-chat. Cook didn’t question the team constantly “checking the wine cellar.” In return, Edmund’s attention and confidential banter raised her up in her staff’s esteem.

  “Actually, I’m looking for Counselor. Is she down below?”

  “She is, my lord.” Cook raised an eyebrow. “Again.”

  He went through the larder down to the wine cellar, the air cooling as he descended below ground. Cook made a good point. These visits were becoming conspicuous. They were going to have to devise a secret way in that was actually secret.

  At the far end of the cellar, he engaged the slider mechanism built into the floor-to-ceiling wine rack. All the bottles in the rack were secured by bracketed sleeves. He tipped out three bottles mounted on different shelves, one at a thirty-degree angle, one at forty-five, and one at sixty. The entire rack rolled aside to reveal a door. He went through and flipped a lever on the wall, and the rack slid back into place.

  “Counselor! Steve! Dix!” They must be down in the tunnel.

  He lit a torch with the wall sconce flame and headed into the tunnel, not nearly as claustrophobic as when they’d first found it months ago. They’d widened the passage and shored up the walls and ceiling and cleared out air holes. The extra oxygen made it easier to breathe and keep the torches lit.

  There were four on the dig team: Edmund and Counselor, Steve, the engineer who had designed the slider mechanism, and his friend Dix. They hadn’t found any sign of the vault, but it felt so close.

  Edmund well understood Queen Char’s obsession, if not madness. He constantly fought the irrational desire to spend all his time down here. He was committed to finding the vault, but not with a morbid wish to find Sky’s remains.

  The grail he sought was the Tesla technology.

  Queen Char had written about Sky’s work on ever-renewing energy from solar waves. Power like that could run every Concord City hospital and farm, not to mention their airships and sea-going vessels. With a solar-powered Blackbird, Red City could tell Garrick what they really thought of their filthy air.

  Tesla would change everything.

  The team was about twenty yards up the tunnel from where they’d been this morning. Their torches were held in sconces they’d plunged into the dirt walls. “Edmund.” Counselor handed him a shovel. “Glad you could join us.”

  “It kills me to say this, but we have to cut it short.” He set the shovel aside with the other dig tools. “King Garrick and the prince are coming to the reception. Celia wants to talk to you, Counselor.”

  “Garrick.” She spat the word. In the torchlight her eyes glittered with anger. Celia was going to have a job convincing her to keep quiet tonight.

  They walked back to the wine cellar in silence until Dix said, “Garrick better keep their grabby paws off Claire.”

  “They can have the settlement girl,” Steve said.

  They laughed at the idea of Garrick bidding on a settlement girl, even a Garrick settlement.

  “I doubt Claire will forsake us,” Counselor said. “Sting me, she’s half in love with Edmund.”

  Edmund rolled his eyes and pulled the lever to open the wine rack. “Red City will knock that out of her.”

  “Anyway,” Counselor said, “Garrick won’t be after Claire. I hear they’re watching a bleeder from Muskova who just went to Red City. She’s natural born and blood-related to royalty. Prince Garrick will wait for her to make the queue.”

  There must be a secret counselor gossip network enabled by old world technology known only to the world’s first-borns. Otherwise, there was no accounting for some of the things Counselor knew.

  Steve whistled. “Garrick. Is there anything they want they can’t have?”

  Allel. Garrick would never have Allel. And the way to make certain was to find Tesla.

  Curses

  As soon as the Blackbird was in flight, Harriet and the Emissary extended their seats. Within seconds, they were asleep, their breathing deep and regular.

  The Blackbird crossed the continent at a high altitude, well above raptor flight paths, and Mal practiced using the slider on her shades. At one point they flew over a muddy lake, as brown as wet dirt. They were over the middle of the lake when the water parted. She zoomed in to see that it wasn’t a lake of dirty water at all but a massive herd of buffalo. The “parting” was the herd separating, stampeding away from an eagle attack.

  Mal had heard of buffalo, great beasts whose meat fed whole tribes of wildlings in old world times. Why was all that protein left for raptors?

  Later they flew over a real lake. She trained the shades on some caves near its shore to look for wildlings but didn’t see anything interesting. An attendant brought her something to eat, a plate of flat bread and cheese and some small round purple fruits she called grapes. The Emissary and Harriet slept through it all.

  After a while everything looked the same, and the thrum, thrum, thrum of the airship’s engines worked like a lullaby. Mal put the shades in her pocket and closed her eyes.

  When the Blackbird dipped and woke her up, Harriet was gone. Mal had no sense of how long she’d been asleep, but she felt rested. She absently kicked her heels against the seat and again looked out the window. They were flying over mountains.

  They might have crossed over the homeland of the woman with the cradleboard. Had she been Mal’s mother? A child stealer? It was thirteen years too late, and Mal had no idea how to pray for her. Was she Asheran or Samaeli? Had she had a soul? Mal touched the god in her pocket and tried to come up with something to fit all the possibilities.

  Whatever her place on the Great Chain, may she be at peace.

  The attendant came by to collect Mal’s empty plate. Like the other attendants, she wore a light green jumpsuit and had a pink tattoo on her forehead.

  “What does your rosebud mean?”

  “I am proof of service.”

  No help, but it felt impolite to press further.

  The mountains below became foothills, then forest, and the Blackbird sank further into its descent. The jet engines kicked off, and the airship slowed to a silent crawl. The trees ended abruptly near a settlement wall.

  No. A city wall.

  A real city. Its wall was three times taller than the settlement’s. Wide enough for ten people to walk side by side. The city itself must be ten times the size of the settlement. Bigger.

  A boulevard lined by colored tents led to the citadel stairs. Horse-drawn carts and carriages and people on foot moved casually through the streets. Many of the citadellers looked up and waved at the Blackbird.

  Fog spilled over the west wall like it was sneaking into the city, a gray blanket that spread over everything low to the ground. Like an enchanted castle from one of Palama’s tales, the citadel stood against the curling mist. It had turrets. If an old world dragon had circled the uppermost tower, it wouldn’t seem out of order.

  All those people and horses on the ground moved free and fearless. Not a raptor in sight. Nothing winged but seagulls and one elegant white heron, still and stern, watching over the city from the highest turret.

  The Blackbird made a tacking turn, and for a moment the eastern forest came into view. A pastel light shimmered among the trees. Mal pressed her face against the glass for a better look, but the airship turned again and they were over water.

  The ocean, sh
e was sure of it. They moved on at a creep for another ten minutes. When the Blackbird stopped, the Emissary opened her eyes.

  Hovering over the water, mechanical extensions telescoped out from the transport’s belly like a spider’s legs with inflated pontoons attached at the ends. When the pontoons hit the ocean surface, the airship lurched and Mal thought she was going to be sick.

  The Emissary rose to her feet and stretched, so tall she could touch the cabin ceiling. She pushed a button on the arm of her outstretched seat, and it reconfigured into an upright position.

  The door to the other cabin opened and closed again on the guards’ raucous laughter. Harriet was back, juggling three pieces of orange-red fruit. She tossed one to the Emissary and one to Mal. The third she held to her nose, inhaled its scent, and wiggled her eyebrows at Mal. “Blood oranges.”

  A guard who had followed Harriet said to the Emissary, “The Golden Wasp is sending the captain’s yacht. How many of us will you want?”

  “A minimal detail is sufficient. Your discretion.”

  Harriet slipped the blood orange into her pocket. Mal had already ripped into hers. It smelled of cold lilacs and tasted like sweet blackberries mixed with a tart orange.

  “We’ve come to see another potential,” Harriet told Mal. “Two in one trip is unprecedented.”

  “One from Garrick and one from Allel.” The Emissary looked less scary licking juice off her fingers. “Rivals as ever.”

  “Nobody beats Garrick,” Mal said. All the settlers complained among themselves about Garrick. It was their favorite pastime. But they tolerated no slurs from outsiders. Everybody knew Garrick was the greatest city – and therefore the greatest province – in the world.

  The Emissary smiled as if indulging a child. Was that wrong about Garrick? What else was Mal wrong about? Questions that had been bubbling up during the flight started to spill out.