The Tangled Lands

by Paolo Bacigalupi

“You!” Cojzia, the linemaster, waved at Mop. “Get that body moved!”

  Mop ignored him. Rain wasn’t a body. She was his sister. Rain. Razica. Razica d’Almedai. A merchant’s daughter out of Alacan. Famous for their exclusive contracts to distribute Mpais glasswares. They’d been rich. The d’Almedai had been a name respected, and Razica had been a girl with prospects. But they never told anyone here. Not here. Not in the city of Khaim.

  Mop and Rain never named themselves here. It did no good and made no friends to brag that their courtyard had been surrounded by thirty-three arches, or that they had paid to build a temple to Kemaz out of their own pocket, and given the orphans of Alacan a place to shelter. Razica was Rain. Mapeoz was Mop. And they were safe and anonymous and no more despised than any other Alacaner who had fled to Khaim.

  “Put the body over there!” Cojzia said again. “I don’t want to smell it roasting when the burnmasters light these stumps.”

  Mop struggled to lift his sister. Limp and paralyzed, she seemed smaller. Less significant than when she’d demanded to join his work and earn. And yet now, paralyzed by bramble, she felt heavier than she’d ever been.

  She’d said she was old enough, that they were past this silliness of what a man could earn and a woman could not. The d’Almedai had built themselves up from nothing, and would again, with work, she said. But only if they both labored and let go of silly illusions that she was some sort of iridescent lora flower, waiting to be opened. Those myths were for a time when they’d had courtyards and servants and marbled halls and scent gardens, and they were all gone.

  Mop dragged Rain’s body through the ash drifts, his feet whispering in the blackness. His arms weakened and he dropped her. He fell to his knees beside her, exhausted.

  Kissed and gone. Just like Mother and Father. Just like all the rest of the d’Almedai.

  “How you could you be so stupid?” he panted. “I told you.”

  As if in response, Rain’s eyes fluttered. Mop leaned close, heart thudding wildly. “Rain?” He pinched her cheeks, trying to stir her. “Wake up!”

  She’d taken less poison than he’d first thought.

  With luck . . .

  Her eyes closed again. Her body let out a soft sigh. She sagged, falling into deeper slumber as the bramble kiss took her completely.

  Some people said it was possible to wake from bramble’s deep slumber, but Mop had never seen it. It was just a lie people told themselves as they stored their family members on ornate marble slabs. They told themselves that eventually the poison would retreat and friends and family would rise again.

  They said it had happened to a woman in Mpais. That a cousin’s cousin-brother kissed in Kesh had wakened all in a start. They said it over and over again. Even as young boy, Mop had known it for a lie, but still they told the stories, holding on to hope the way a child holds a bit of patchwork quilt for comfort.

  He remembered a dinner party his family had attended when d’Almedai was still a name that received invitations. The Falizi family, giving them honor. Mop remembered the patriarch presiding, artfully tied to his chair so the old man didn’t flop face first into each course as it was set before him.

  Topaz-jeweled straps had circled the patriarch’s forehead. More clasped his wrists. Another strap, barely glimpsed, around his chest and under his arms, threaded through carefully tailored holes in the back of his dinner jacket where the servants could secure him to the chair. And all around him, Falizi guests ate and drank and toasted the patriarch, everyone pretending that he was one of the living.

  Mop remembered the family’s embarrassment when a butterfly emerged, fluttering, from his ear.

  “What are they supposed to do?” Mop’s father had asked on the coach ride home.

  “Accept that he is no more,” Mother replied. “Accept that he is gone, even if his body slumbers here. Let him go to Borzai.”

  “Stick him like a pig and bleed him out?” his father asked. “Who would hold the knife?”

  His mother had shrugged, as stymied as the Falizi.

  The simple course was obvious, and yet the Falizi had kept their patriarch for years, kissed by bramble, asleep and gone, servants dressing him like a doll every day, plucking flies and blood beetles from nose and ears, all of them pretending that he would someday wake because no one could muster the callousness to kill him true.

  Mistress Falizi conducted business in the Master’s name and everyone bowed to the sleeping man and murmured to one another that he looked well.

  Of course it was a failed effort. Eventually nature found its way into every bramble body’s guts, Kpala’s many children burrowing into defenseless flesh. Moths and maggots, centipedes and beetles eventually burst from mouth and ears and soft, soft stomach. But still, the denial ran strong. After all, the flesh was warm, even if the spirit had gone missing.

  And now, Mop faced the same conundrum—but with none of the wealth or servants or security that the Falizi had enjoyed.

  She’s gone, Mop told himself. It’s not sleep. It’s death.

  It didn’t matter that Rain’s body would last another dozen years. She was dead. You can’t care for her, he thought. It can’t be done. Best to finish it now, before dogs or men come sniffing for her.

  His eyes blurred with tears as he fumbled for his knife. Clumsy leather-glove fingers. He opened her protective hood wide, revealing her dark smooth skin. Her peaceful face. He set his blade against her throat. Gleaming steel against perfect skin. Her flesh gave under the edge. He tried to press.

  Do it fast. Don’t think about it.

  And yet he found himself imagining the blood welling out, her throat gaping open, a new grinning mouth wet and wide, her windpipe a sucking hole in red . . .

  “You do yourself no favors by drawing it out.”

  Mop startled. Lizli had come across the ash-drifted fields to watch. “Make the mercy cut and be done,” she said. “You just make it worse by waiting.”

  “Then you do it,” Mop snapped.

  Lizli laughed and shook her head. “Not me. I won’t have a body strung round my neck when I go to Borzai.”

  “Then don’t call it a mercy cut.”

  “Dead is dead. Mercy is mercy. Borzai judges as he will. Now hurry up and cut, and get yourself back to work. Or else go find a soft-eyed man, and profit from the girl’s warmth. See if Borzai judges you any better that way. The girl’s pretty enough without the soot. You’d find a buyer for a young body like that.”

  Mop gave her a look of disgust. “I would never do such a thing!”

  “Too honorable to sell the sleeping, and too stupid to get back to work. No wonder you Alacaners are refugees. You can’t see the thorns even when they’re all around you.”

  “Mara counsels mercy,” Mop said.

  He put his knife away and stooped to slide his hands beneath his sister’s still form. With a groan, he hefted her up and slung her over his shoulders. He staggered under the weight but managed to stand tall. “She’s not dead.”

  A bark of surprised laughter escaped Lizli’s lips. “What’s this? You think to keep her? You think to keep the rats from her toes and the moths from her nose?”

  Mop ignored the taunt. He started across the fields, stumbling under the weight.

  Lizli called after him. “Shall I tell Cojzia and the burnmasters that you no longer need their coppers?”

  “Tell them whatever you like.”

  Behind him, he heard footsteps. Lizli pursuing, catching up.

  “Are you addle-brained?” she asked. “You’re acting like the velvet ones. You have no servants to clean and protect her through the days. You have no way to save her. She’s nothing but feed for Kpala’s children. Send her on to Borzai. She’s but a child. He will pass her innocence on to Kemaz’s halls, and there she will play and be happy with the dog-headed one.”

  Mop didn’t answer. He kept on, grimly trudging over the blackened fields. When he stumbled in a furrow, Lizli hooted laughter. “You’ll break a
n ankle before you reach Khaim’s gates,” she said. “I’m sure your sister will thank you for that.”

  “She’s my sister,” he grunted as he resettled her over his shoulders.

  “She’s a body!”

  Unexpectedly, Lizli reached up and yanked Rain from his shoulders. Mop spun, crying out, but it was too late. Rain hit the ground with a thump, her limbs spilling loose and awkward. Ash puffed gray around her.

  “What are you doing?” He lunged at Lizli, but the crabbed woman slipped out of reach, no laughter or taunt in her face.

  “I’m helping you think sense, boy.”

  Mop glared at the old woman. He crouched beside his sister, trying to see if she’d been wounded in her fall. She lay strangely, her face plowed deep into bramble ash. A doll discarded, blackened and sooty.

  A living person would have fought to clear her mouth and nose. Rain did nothing.

  Mop dug the ash away from her face and made to lift her again. Lizli put a staying hand on his shoulder. Her voice was gentle. “At least keep your place with the burnmasters, boy. Don’t give Cojzia a reason to cut you from the work. He hates Alacaners enough as it is. Wait until the sun falls, then find a cart or barrow for the dragging, if you’re so determined.”

  She looked down at Rain. “The girl won’t mind the waiting. Of that you can be sure.”

  3

  THE PEOPLE OF KHAIM CALLED their home the Blue City. They said it with pride, but Mop thought it was half a curse, no matter how they smiled and bragged about their city’s wonders.

  The pride was true enough, of course: Khaim stood tall and flourished while other cities fell beneath crashing waves of bramble. Khaim’s city walls still stood strong. Her people didn’t spend their every waking hour burning bramble off the granite of their wharves, or prying it from between their cobbles and roof beams the way other cities did.

  So, pride. Of course. For survival.

  And, of a certainty, the Blue City was beautiful.

  It wasn’t just the wonder of a castle floating in the air, high above the highest villas on Malvia Hill. It was the copper braziers burning as blue as casis flies where they lined the thoroughfares and marked the city gates and stood sentinel on the river Sulong’s docks. It was the scent of neem smoke, sweet and spicy, issuing from those braziers and winding through the city.

  Khaim was arches and fountains and public squares and alleys and lanes, all of it sweating and bursting with summer trade while up on Malvia Hill, Khaim’s great marble villas looked down on the clatter and roil of the city, enjoying cool breezes.

  It was the majestic flow of the river Sulong running rich and wide and full of fish, connecting Khaim to the sea trade south and the land trade north. It was the bustle of markets. Mop’s family had done business in the glass market, but there was so much more: spice lanes and copper squares, diamond merchants tugging at their long mustaches and muttering deals between sips of thick-leafed tea from blown-glass bargaining bulbs from fallen Turis.

  In Khaim, the Mayor commissioned fountains recalling Jhandpara, and the Majister launched fireworks from the ramparts of his floating castle on Planting Day as an offering to Mara and her Three Faces: Woman, Man, and Child.

  Khaim was alive, and beautiful.

  But the Blue City was other things as well.

  Even as its inhabitants bragged about their city’s splendors, they had the look of dogs well beaten. They sniffed the air for the scent of neem smoke that would tell them danger was approaching. People cowered from black-robed men who stalked the lanes, lazily swinging their censors.

  “The smoke likes magics,” Teoz had told Rain and Mop when he first took them in. “Clings to them like a lover. Lights them up like casis flies in the summer. Turns them blue and bright as a torch.”

  He’d pressed his finger to each of their foreheads in turn, admonishing. “You might have been able to make some small secret spellings in Alacan, but don’t think you can do that sort of thing here. Majister Scacz and his censori will sniff you out, and he will chop off your heads and you’ll be food for cuttle fish. Scacz has the sniff for spelling, and he has a mind as dark and sharp as Takaz the Demon King, so don’t think that he can be fooled.”

  Mop and Rain had both nodded obediently, but whatever Teoz saw in their expressions wasn’t sufficient, for he seized them and dragged them close.

  “Scacz will take my family too,” he whispered fiercely. “If the stink of your magic clings to us in any way, we’re all bobbing in the river Sulong by nightfall. So I say again, if you spell, you will be caught. Your father did me a good favor years ago, but I will not have my family die for your foolishness, and if I catch you glowing blue, I swear by Takaz and Mara both I’ll take your severed heads to Scacz myself.”

  After that they’d nodded more vigorously, and Teoz had been satisfied.

  Wherever a visitor went in the city, whether up to the villas on Malvia Hill, or down and across the river Sulong to the sometimes raided slums of Lesser Khaim, the brazier smoke of neem and mint followed. A hungry smoke. A determined smoke. A sneaking, suspicious smoke, always sniffing for signs of magics, turning the air blue when it found the residue of spells cast, announcing it for all the world to see.

  The people of Khaim stood tall with pride, and crouched in terror all in the same instant. Every inhabitant sniffed the air for neem smoke and every inhabitant lived in fear of the day when he or she would be forced to fumble at the crumbled pages of some long-dead majister’s tome and attempt a spelling of their own, knowing that they baited the executioner’s axe, and their chances of survival were slim.

  Majister Scacz was a jealous lord. The many markets of Khaim might be open to all, but its magics were a monopoly held tight in the fist of the man who lived far above them all. In Alacan, people had been able to cast a simple spell and not fear their head would roll into the river. Trafficking in Jhandpara’s Curse was against the edicts of the city, but still, there were small magics that were justifiable. Mop had been born clubfooted. Without his mother’s spelling, he would never have been able to walk. Mercy dictated that sometimes spelling was needed. But in Khaim, people begged Majister Scacz for mercy, and he flipped coins like a drunken Borzai, choosing at random those he would save with his magics and those he would leave to suffering.

  Mop passed under the great burning sentinel braziers and the watchful eyes of black-robed censori at the city gates. He was exhausted from the bramble work and dead with grief at the loss of Rain, but he strode with determination. If he could convince Teoz to loan him the handcart the spice man used for deliveries up to Malvia Hill, he could return to Rain and bring her back to the city, install her safely in Teoz’s warehouse. It was possible.

  Down Copper Lane and through the Crooked Square. It was late. The vegetable sellers were packing up the last of their day’s produce. Dogs roamed the cobbles, alert to kicks and opportunities as they darted to steal rotten carrots and bits of cauliflower, slinking around fountains depicting children protected by the alertness of the Mayor.

  On the far side of the Crooked Square, Mop’s path wound down to the river Sulong and cut north toward Malvia Hill, slipping along the waterway that split the city into Khaim and Lesser.

  Ahead, the blue arc of the Mayor’s Bridge glowed bright, leaping the river like a tiger, an impossible arc of gossamer and blazing color, glowing brighter than the moon at its fullest. Magic there. Vast magics that the city’s Majister had worked upon the bridge to build it, and hold it aloft, and make it last. So much magic there.

  The Mayor claimed it was so that he could defend Lesser Khaim from raiding clans who came across the rolling hills to the west, but the Alacaner refugees who sheltered in Lesser Khaim all agreed that it was so he could move his soldiers and censori among them, sniffing out their needful small magics so that he and the Majister could wallow in the luxuries of the large magics.

  Ahead, the river turned again, revealing the doors of the spice merchants. Lanterns hung over the doorwa
ys, giving view into dark confines where hempen sacks of chilies and turmeric and cloves were piled high.

  Teoz stood impatient at this warehouse door.

  “You’re late.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mop said.

  “Where is Razica?” But Teoz must have seen the answer on Mop’s face for his lips pursed and his hand went to his mustaches, grown long with children, as if he were trying to make a ward against the loss of them at the sight of Mop’s bad luck.

  “I’m sorry, Mapeoz.”

  Mop shook his head. “I want to use your handcart. I can fetch her and bring her back.”

  “Bring her back?” Teoz looked surprised. “She’s bramble kissed, no?”

  Mop hesitated.

  “You haven’t given her the mercy cut, yet?”

  “She’s my sister.”

  “She’s bramble kissed,” Teoz insisted. “You can’t be thinking that we’ll keep her here? In the warehouse?”

  “She wouldn’t make a sound.”

  Teoz gave him a sharp look. “I have enough trouble with pests without a bramble body. What will people say?”

  “They don’t have to know.”

  “Tongues wag, boy. They have no way of knowing, and yet still they wag. And when the velvet ones up on Malvia Hill hear that Teoz keeps bramble bodies with his spices? What will they do? They’ll tell their house managers to order cardamom from Zalati House or Mistress Charas, and then where am I? A warehouse full of spices and a bramble body that attracts rats, and my own children starving.”

  “I’ll keep her clean.”

  “Talk sense boy. I let you and your sister live here because d’Almedai did me good turns when Alacan was still a city. I do you good turns, even when my wife tells me to shove you across the river to live with the rest of the Alacaner refugees. I let you stay, and I feed you because I remember what your family once was.

  “But I’m not so rich that I can simply make trouble for myself. If you and your sister can keep an eye on my warehouse and ensure that my cinnamon and lora flower don’t whisper out the door, then we all benefit. But bring a bramble body home and invite the wagging tongues that go with that?” Teoz shook his head. “You ask too much.”