The Tangled Lands

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  I will be here, when they get back from the Southern Isles. I will be here for them, even if we might hardly recognize each other.

  The thinkers say it is the way of the world for things to change. That includes people, I gather.

  So even though we grow unrecognizable to each other, I am still their mother, and this is still their land.

  I hold back the bramble as best I know how. At first, I did not care to hunt people in the city. But those who did not follow the Way, my own people, began using magic, and bramble began to choke our streets.

  I fought the Paikans to get my children back. To stop the Culling. I had no wish to return to forcing the Way on people. And so I am forced to find the magic users, as I must, and hang them from the city’s walls. On my worst days, I think I have become no better than the Jolly Mayor and Majister Scacz, hunting for every user of petty spells and spiking their heads to the city walls. And to my chagrin, the Way’s priests point to the people I execute as proof that only the Way can save these lands.

  I do all these things because even though I am a mother, I am also now a new person. I am the Queen of Paika, the lady of the lands in its shadow.

  I am the Executioness.

  And I am waiting for my children to come home.

  1

  MOP KNELT IN THE ASH of bramble burn, seeking bramble pods and seeds. Smoking dirt sieved between his gloved fingers. Sweat stung his eyes. Ash leaves swirled through the air, black crows’ wings, tumbling and swooping, coming to rest on the scorched land.

  All along the bramble wall, fires blazed.

  Burnmasters sprayed flaming paste from bladder sacks while assistants worked their bellows. Poisonous tangling vines ignited and writhed. Thorny, woody trunks collapsed, crackling, hissing, and spitting sap.

  The stink of dying magic washed over Mop, rancid yellow smoke, obscuring his sight. He coughed and checked again for Rain. Once again, she was lagging, a crouched form trailing behind the rest of the pickers. Leather-stitch shadow of a girl, all alone.

  Mop sidled back to her. “Keep up,” he whispered. “You have to keep up or they’ll find someone else.”

  Rain peered up at him through the sewn holes of her leather cowl. Her eyes were dull and shadowed. “I’m tired,” she whispered.

  “You think we all aren’t?” Mop motioned at the other seed pickers, women and children kneeling in still-smoking ash, humped figures laboring, working the dirt like drab curling beetles. Trains and clots and clods of them. Women with rakes. Children crawling about their mothers’ skirts. All of them sifting blackened ground for bramble seeds and sprouts.

  “Don’t stand straight or pause,” he said. “Cojzia will find others.”

  “How much longer until we’re through?” Rain asked.

  Never, Mop thought. Never and never and never. Not until Borzai comes and gathers us into his arms for judgment.

  The burn had been going all day, and yet it seemed that their work had taken but the barest bite out of the leading edge of the bramble forest. A day’s tilling cleared, perhaps, along with some peasant’s stone hut that they were now fighting to disinter—a hovel of chinkstone and boulders, built generations ago, and then swallowed by bramble’s encroach.

  Children clambered up the hut’s stone walls, lighting ancient roof beams and thatch on fire. Flame licked about the base of the hut as well, blackening stone. Just clearing the hut would take hours. Tomorrow they would be back again, doing the same work, hacking away at the encroaching bramble.

  Duke Malabaz said he wanted land cleared east all the way to the old village of Kem.

  “If we’re lucky, we won’t be done for weeks,” Mop said. “Malabaz is paying, and we’ve got work, and that’s all that matters.”

  He said the words, and they were true in a way, but even as he said them the forest wall of poisonous vines seemed to mock him with its loom. The bramble would never be banished. They might slash and hack and torch the thorny woods, but in the end, they sought to shove back an ocean.

  No matter how much they labored, the waves of bramble would always be there, threatening to crash down upon them. Bramble reached north to green ice, and south to blue seas, and smothered all the East in thorns. It choked valleys and blanketed mountains all the way to the fabled city of Jhandpara, and yet here they pretended as if they could turn the tide.

  Orange flames scrambled up spiky trunks, licking at seedpods and charring pale thready spines. Vines writhed and twisted in the heat. Bark crackled. Sores of sap spat and oozed, bubbles hissing, flaring like oil.

  Leather-stitch shadows emerged and disappeared from the scabrous yellow smoke, misshapen in clothing that covered head and hair, face and limbs. Frightening dolls, stalking the bramble line, all stitched together like the legendary dog armies of Majister Calal.

  When will we be done?

  Never and never and never.

  Beside him, Rain reached for another seedpod.

  Mop smacked her hand. “Not like that!”

  Rain jerked away. “What did I do now?”

  “Scoop it up from under,” he said. “And don’t pinch it.” He gently cradled the bramble pod, letting ash and clodded dirt sift through his gloved fingers. “See?”

  He opened his hemp sack and held the pod over its mouth. He looked at Rain significantly, then squeezed. The pod burst like popcorn. Seeds sprayed into the bag. Dozens of obsidian orbs rattling and falling like poppy seeds.

  “Don’t break pods. Don’t scatter seeds. If you can’t learn that, we’ll both be off the burn and some other Alacaner will take our places—yours for stupidity, and mine for vouching you.” He glanced back to where Duke Malabaz’s linemaster stood, overseeing their work. “Cojzia doesn’t tolerate incompetence.”

  Rain shook her head tiredly and bent again to her task. “I wouldn’t have squeezed like that.”

  “That’s right, because you’ll lift them from beneath.”

  Rain stayed stubbornly silent. Mop pressed. “You want us to starve, sister? You want us to clear the same dirt tomorrow? We’re nothing, here, you understand? We have no friends. The people of Khaim despise us, and Alacaners, too, hate our name. We are alone, here.”

  Rain didn’t reply, but Mop was contented to see that when she scooped her next bramble pod, she did it with care.

  She’d break a few anyway, because she was young and she had once been very much loved by their parents and their servants and spoiled the way young, pretty, smiling girls were often spoiled. She would chafe against his warnings, but she could not say that he hadn’t warned her. He’d done what he could, and if Rain wanted to work the bramble line, she would learn its strictures.

  He only prayed that her mistakes wouldn’t cost his livelihood as well, if Cojzia noticed her incompetence.

  The sun began its slow hunt for the horizon. Bramble burned. The peasant’s home was finally freed of bramble, standing lonely in the blackened earth. Seeds and new green bramble sprouts filled pickers’ sacks to bulging, were piled high in mounds and burned again. Burnmasters cradled their sloshing pig-bladder sacks, working their way down the line, squirting flaming mash from the fat bladders’ brass snouts.

  Fire, flying.

  It splashed over vines and spines and stubborn stumps. Their assistants followed, working their bellows, encouraging the flames. Bramble sap whistled as it boiled up from deep within the wood. Seedpods burst wide in the heat. The work continued. Sweat soaked the interior of Mop’s hood and slicked his hands inside his leather gloves. His face itched with sweat. His eyelids dripped water, blurring his vision. He straightened, back aching, and started to reach into his hood to dry his brow.

  He froze on the verge of touching skin.

  Upon his glove, a cluster of pale bramble threads clung, thin and pale. Death on his fingertips. It was a shock to see them clinging there, infinitely skinny little worms, all of them eager to kiss him down to sleep.

  Mop cursed himself for old habits. It was the sort of easy, thoughtless m
otion that Rain might make, this touching of his skin, and here he was, about to do it. Picking seeds and bramble pods might pay better than catching rats, but there was danger, and it was too easy to let exhaustion fog him into complacency.

  He carefully plucked the pale threads from his gloves and let them fall to earth.

  “Malabaz don’t pay you to stand straight, boy, and our friend Cojzia is watching.”

  Mop bent again, trying to look busy. The owner of the voice came up beside him: a woman, sooty and stoop-backed, her face shrouded by the bramble worker’s leather cowl. Recognizable more by her crabbed searching movements than any physical feature.

  Lizli.

  She had worked the bramble all her life, and now she never stood straight. Always working, always crouching, always running her gloved hands through dirt. Mop thought she must stand like that in her hovel as well. Plucking and seeking along the flagstone edges, fingers never at rest as she sought signs of bramble’s sprout.

  “Don’t let the battle tire you,” Lizli said. “This is one we win.”

  “Not my battle,” Mop said, waving off toward where the duke’s manor stood in the far distance. “This will be Malabaz’s land, not mine.”

  She snorted. “If you’re so concerned over what is yours and what is not, you should go back to Alacan. I hear it is a lovely city.”

  Mop didn’t take the bait. It was what Khaim people always said when Alacaners complained. He knew the pattern, how it would go.

  Lizli pressed. “What? You don’t want your manicured grounds and hunting forests? You don’t enjoy the view from Alacan’s rose granite walls?”

  “Don’t mock our land,” Rain piped up. “It was a lovely place. Alacan was the Spring City, warm all year round, and beautiful.”

  “And Jhandpara’s hanging gardens reached all the way up to the roof of the sky.” Lizli laughed. “It’s all bramble tangle, now, girl.” She scooped seed pods from the ashy ground, and dropped them in her bag.

  “Why do you mock us?” Mop asked.

  “Mock you?” Lizli shook her head. “I wouldn’t dare mock the finest of the fine.”

  “Who says that we are fine?”

  “Your tongue has the roll. That little courtly trill. You mask it better than some, but I’ve seen so very many of your kind.” She snorted. “But really, even if your accent didn’t give you away, it’s only the fine ones who complain that the land they work is not their own.”

  She leaned close. “I’ll give you a free bit of advice, Alacaner. I don’t know who you once were in that dead city of yours, but here, you are less than pig shit between a farmer’s toes. Alacaner beggars. Alacaners selling their last pots and necklaces. Alacaner men in the market squares with the holes in their shoes and their mustaches cut off because they’ve lost their children. Alacaner women trying to sell themselves as if anyone would want their sort. All of you distilling jhalka root and smoking poppy sap and telling one another that Alacan was the Spring City, warm all year round and beautiful. Talking so big and wishing so long, and none of you worth a chicken’s claw, because all you truly want to do is start your spelling again and drag another city down to ruin.”

  “We aren’t that sort,” Mop said.

  “Not that sort?” Lizli glanced sidewise at him, skeptical. “It was someone else who choked your city down with bramble?”

  “It wasn’t us,” Mop insisted.

  Lizli hooted laughter. “Every Alacaner I have ever met tells me he cast no spell and dabbled not in the majister’s trade. And every one of you speaks with great sincerity. Not a liar amongst you, I’m certain. And yet here you all are, living in Khaim, instead of Alacan. And there Alacan lies, choked dead by bramble. The greatest victim of no one since Jhandpara.”

  “We don’t lie.” Mop yanked up a new green shoot of bramble where the hateful plant was already taking root in the burned earth.

  “Of course not!” Lizli held up her ash-coated gloves in mocking defense. “I meant no disrespect. I’m sure you’re both as honorable as the very best of Alacan.”

  Mop gave her a sour look. “Malabaz gets this fief because he handed up his family for spelling. You call that honorable?”

  “What do I care about those velvet intrigues? We have work and Malabaz pays, and we’ve pushed bramble farther back from Khaim’s walls than any time in living memory. If the rich see their heads rolling the same as the poor, what care I? This is Duke Malabaz’s land today. And then his head will bob in the river Sulong and Duke Halabaz will take his place, and then Balabaz, and Salabaz, all the way down the line until a pig called Palabaz roots this land for truffles. It makes no difference to me. The land is the land, and it’s not covered with bramble, and I call that a gift from all the gods combined.”

  “I heard Malabaz even handed up his wife,” Mop said.

  “Oh yes.” Lizli smiled eagerly. Her knotted teeth showed in the shadows of her leather hood. “He did her for land and favor and power and revenge. The velvet ones aren’t people like you and I. They have no human feelings.”

  They bent again to their work, leaving Mop to think on Lizli’s words.

  The velvet ones: people with servants and courtyard homes and glass blown from Turis. People with copper bramble wards from lost Kesh. People with all the cash strings they could ever wish for.

  People just the same as Mop and Rain had been.

  But here, the velvet ones jostled for power in ways that Mop had never known in Alacan. Khaim’s Mayor and the Majister Scacz had a genius for setting velvet ones upon one another. In the spice market, everyone talked about how Duke Malabaz had handed up his own blood.

  Teoz, who gave Mop and Rain a place to sleep in his warehouse and who dealt more spices than any merchant in the city, heard all the gossip, and shared it happily.

  As Teoz dipped his scales into red chili powder and yellow turmeric, his hands garish with flavor, he’d said, “Of course they were guilty. Small magics, but all of them guilty. Love potions for the uncle so he could mount a dozen girls and roar like a tiger. A whisper from crystal for the sister to clear her clouding eyes. Small spellings. Pockmarks erased from a shapely daughter, to make her marriage better.”

  He’d looked up toward Malvia Hill where the wealthy of Khaim all lived in cool marbled halls with fresh bright breezes while everyone else sweated through the summer.

  “They all do it, of course. All of them in their halls behind their walls where Majister Scacz can’t see. Send their servants out so no one knows how blue they show.”

  But the duke’s family had showed blue all right, all of them dragged out under torchlight in their nightclothes, screaming as the soldiers pulled them forth. Their house guards all standing by, watching coolly as masters and mistresses went before Majister Scacz.

  “They burned as blue as casis flies mating,” Teoz said. “Saw them, I did. Heads rolling, blood on the cobbles right in front of Mayor’s House, and all of them still afire with magic.”

  They’d been dumped into the river Sulong, high-born heads floating one way, high-born bodies floating the other, without last rites or a gift to Borzai or even a second glance. And the newly minted Duke Malabaz strode across puddles of blood, velvet and lace trailing red, to kneel before the Mayor and Majister Scacz and pledge his loyalty.

  And now, thanks to Malabaz’s betrayals, Mop and Rain had work.

  Malabaz had been given the right to clear the land. If he succeeded, Majister Scacz and the Mayor would defend it from new bramble intrusions, and it would belong to Malabaz so long as he swore loyalty and refrained from dabbling in the majister’s arts.

  A good bargain, all around: Malabaz had new land. Khaim had new taxes. Bramble fell back. Majister Scacz stamped out a few more competitors in the majister’s art. And Mop and Rain had money to eat for another day.

  Mop bent once again to his task, scooping up bramble pods, plucking seeds and sprouts. Joining all the other laborers in the clearing of land for Malabaz.

  Beside him,
Rain toppled over.

  2

  MOP LEAPED TO HIS SISTER and tore open her leather cowl. She stared up at Mop, eyes puzzled. A pale bramble tendril clung to her sooty cheek. Other threads tangled in her hair. Clung to her throat. Her hood wasn’t closed properly. From the look of it, hadn’t been for some time.

  Rain tried to get up, her arms flailing drunkenly, then fell back.

  Other workers began to gather round. First one. Then more, increasing to a dozen, all pressing close. None of them said anything.

  They all watched as the girl’s eyes closed.

  “She’s gone,” Lizli said.

  “She’s not!” Mop insisted. “She’s my sister.”

  “Sister or no, she’s gone. Didn’t you tell her to stop working if she caught the kiss?”

  “I told her! I told her straight.” He shook her. “Rain? Razica?”

  He shook her again, looked desperately to the others. All of them watched, but none of them spoke. Their faces were blank, without judgment or anger. No pleasure or fear. They simply watched. They’d seen this collapse before. There was nothing for it, and little point in weeping or wailing to Borzai for some other judgment.

  “If you told her, then it weren’t your fault.” Lizli turned away and motioned for the others to do the same. “Off with you. Give the boy his time. Seeds don’t pick themselves.”

  As quickly as they had gathered, the laborers disbursed, leaving Mop crouched beside his sister. He could guess how it happened. She’d gotten a few threads on her skin, and then kept working anyway, despite the poison. And each bramble kiss had made her weaker and more stupid so that the next kiss was more likely. And all the while, he’d been urging her on. Mop felt nauseous with guilt.

  It was easy to misjudge that first bramble kiss, to think it possible to press on. It was natural to fear starvation more than bramble sleep. And so people labored on through the welt and the burn, even as more and more poison coursed through their veins, and even as they brushed their sweating faces with bramble-laced hands and added to the kiss.