The Tangled Lands

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  “Oh?” Amina laughed. “You want your sister?” She swept her arm. “Pick any one you like, and she’ll be your sister. She’ll love you as you’ve always dreamed she would, and she will no longer fight you.”

  “No! I don’t want her like that! That’s not what I mean.”

  “You have no need of protest here.” Amina wagged a sly finger. “Borzai does not see us and does not judge our hungers. This is Naia’s abode. This is a place for desire, not for judgment.” She captured his hand again, leading him amongst the piled bodies. “Come. Look close.” She lifted another girl by the hair, turning her limp head for Mop’s evaluation. When Mop failed to respond, she dropped the girl with a thump and went on to another.

  “We’ll find your sister for you,” she said. “Is she slender like this one? Or do her breasts sway lush, like this one here? Tell me her look, and we’ll find her likeness.” She propelled Mop to look. “Inspect to your pleasure. Some men love to simply look and imagine their pleasure, but you, when we’ve found your perfect match, imagine how you’ll kiss her warm lips and thrust between her parted thighs.” She pointed at the sprawled girls. Silk shifts, leather bramble jerkins, nude splayed limbs. “Any of these dolls would be happy to play your sister. But don’t worry if none of these match your desire. We have more.”

  She went to a curtain and drew it aside, revealing another doorway. Beyond it, men turned, startled like cockroaches exposed to light, all of them caught in their hunt through more bodies that lay in piles and drifts beyond.

  “There are many choices,” Amina said.

  The warren of rooms went on and on, each one full of bramble-sleeping bodies and the soft-eyed men who sought to gorge on them. The living men who fed with Kpala’s appetites. All of them feverish to gorge on a pliancy that they could not beg or steal or cajole from their daily lives.

  Mop turned back the way he had come, breaking into a run.

  “Don’t run, little lord!” Amina’s voice pursued him. “I can find your sister! I can give you a harem of sisters if you tell me the look and shape! I will find them all for you! Your soft eyes are welcome here!”

  Mop fled, slamming into patrons, bumping past whores. Rain was in here somewhere. He needed to stop the soft-eyed men from taking her.

  He began yanking curtains aside. Men floundered and grunted atop yielding bodies. Men brandished ropes. Men lifted curved blades, steel dripping black under orange lantern light. Men fed like Kpala’s children. But none of them threatened Rain. More curtains. More chambers. Fluid-smeared and broken dolls lay in corners, trash to be thrown into the Sulong before dawn.

  There are always more. Amina’s words whispered in his mind, telling him how little anyone cared for bramble bodies.

  More and more rooms, and more and more bodies, and more and more of the soft-eyed men—

  “Rain!”

  His sister lay beneath a thrusting man. Mop dragged him away, only to discover that it was not Rain who was abused, but some boy with soft features. The wrong hair and the wrong face, and a history he did not know. But now the soft-eyed man was shouting outrage and reaching for a knife. Mop fled again.

  In the hall, he slammed into another man hauling a naked girl slung over his shoulder. They all three fell in a tangle, the man shouting, the girl’s limbs tangling them both in perverse embrace.

  “You broke her head!” the man shouted. “You broke her head! I don’t want one with a broken head!”

  Rixus loomed, joined by other bouncers. They dragged Mop easily. “Rain!” Mop shouted as they dragged him out. “Rain!” Knowing she couldn’t hear, and yet calling anyway.

  The bouncers hurled him into the alley. Their fists rained down and their sandals stamped his ribs. They beat him bloody on the cobbles. His lips split and his teeth shattered and still they beat him until all that issued from his mouth was a whisper.

  Rain.

  He lay still. From the shadows, rats and blood beetles and gutter dogs watched, waiting to see if he would survive, or if he would become like all the other sleeping ones who were piled in the darkest alleys, the ones who lay warm and pliant even as their blood gushed hot into the mouths of Kpala’s children.

  6

  MOP WOKE TO RATS CHEWING at his toes. With a cry, he kicked them away.

  The sky overhead was turning pink with dawn. Majister Scacz’s castle gleamed with the kiss of the sun, a diamond floating against the sky, shining.

  Mop dragged himself upright. The rats watched with interest, seemingly trying to decide if they still might rush him and make a meal. He staggered to his feet, leaned against a rough stone wall. The rats gave up and scuttled away, leaving him alone in the alley.

  Mop spat out a shard of tooth.

  Rain.

  He retched dry, feeling the bruise of his ribs.

  Rain.

  She deserved better than whatever his selfish mercy had doomed her to. He had a duty to cut her throat with honor, to make offerings to Borzai on her behalf so that she could go quickly into the safe and happy halls of Kemaz. And yet she was lost to him.

  Mop stared up at Majister Scacz’s castle, gleaming high. The palace of a man who held power to himself, and kept it jealously.

  There is a way. A voice whispered in his mind. There are ways of finding needles in haystacks.

  Mop remembered his father casting simple spells, quick and furtive. The sulphur whiff of magic cast, filling a room and disbursing. He remembered his father spelling a writing quill. Remembered how the point had turned slowly, as if imbued with a life of its own.

  His father had spelled the quill to seek, and it had divined a true path to a lost contract, finding where it had been tucked away with papers regarding a shipment from Turis. A small thing, a quick thing.

  Tiny, useful, inconsequential magic.

  Mop didn’t know the spells; his father had told him that it wasn’t something to be done casually, or to be assumed that it didn’t have its costs. A majister’s tutelage was frowned upon by the time Mop came of age. And so he hadn’t been taught. But his father had grown in a different time, before Alacan was threatened so greatly by bramble. He’d had the knowledge, and with a small spelling—very nearly a child’s trick—he had built friendship between quill and contract.

  A small thing, a simple thing—if one had the spine to face the executioner’s axe.

  Mop limped slowly out of the silent alley to join the city’s morning bustle. He wandered, seeking, stumbling through Khaim-Across-the-River’s broken jumble of tent cities and newly rebuilt houses, through horse markets and manure, pushing between men who beaded their mustaches in the style of Mpais, and widowed Alacan women who still wore rings on three fingers, Man-Woman-Child, for the faces of Mara.

  It was an odd thing to walk amongst his own people once again, to smell Alacan-style peppers on a griddle, frying, stuffed with potato, to remember how Cook had made similar concoctions, to smell the spices and see his people huddled low.

  If not for Teoz’s kindness, Mop would have lived among them too. Another Alacaner refugee, shoved from his home when bramble came crashing over the Spring City’s walls.

  Mop wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but he thought he would know it when he saw it. There were whispers of such places. Much like the doll houses, there were other whispered places, and Khaim-Across-the-River was the place to hunt. He wandered through marketplaces: the travel market where copper goods came in on caravans from the west, now that Kesh was lost to bramble; the covered markets of cotton and silk; the bulk vegetable markets with bitter melon and spine fruit and chiles laying in drifts.

  At last he found a simple stall, tangled amongst all the others, dried Sulong ripple fish on one side, reeking of salt and rot, smoked cats on the other, all the stalls sweltering under the market’s sagging shading cattle hides. The heat under the hides was overwhelming, the scents of dry fish and sweat and mint tea pressing and mingling, adding to Mop’s misery from the night’s beatings and lack of food or water
for breakfast.

  The stall sold apothecary supplies. Tiger penises and kestrel wood shavings. Bat skins, rat tails. Serpent bile in jewel jars of yellow and green. Chests of tiny drawers lined each side of the man’s carpet, draped with the skulls of rats on strings, polished white. Dung beetles in jars, climbing and falling back. Casis flies.

  Mop lingered.

  The apothecary eyed him.

  “What do you want, boy?” His accent was Alacan, but his contempt might as well have come down from the top of Malvia Hill.

  Mop stared at the man, thinking how he would have bowed and begged for Mop’s business in earlier times, then shoved down the thought. “I’m looking for necessities,” Mop said, then hesitated. “And instructions.”

  “Necessities?”

  Mop leaned close. “I want magic,” he murmured.

  The man flinched and made a warding sign. “I sell trinkets and medicines. I traffic not in the thing you want.”

  “I have money.”

  The apothecary laughed. “Yes? So you’ll buy my head and sew it back atop my shoulders after Scacz’s executioner is done with me?”

  “Is there no way of convincing you differently?” Mop whispered soothingly. “No payment? No favor? Nothing?”

  The man’s eyes went to the crowds jostling past. “What if it’s true?” he said. “What if I told you it was possible still? That with the right words and right necessities, it is possible to summon the powers of lost Jhandpara.” His gaze fell upon Mop, all attention now, predatory. “How much would you pay, if I told you so?”

  Mop goggled. He didn’t know the proper price or proper barter. “I trust you to name your fair price.”

  “I want three in silver, three in gold, three in copper Kesh.”

  “That’s all I have,” Mop protested, “and all I want is a simple spelling. It’s nothing but a child’s spell.”

  “A simple spell, or a spell as black and convoluted as the heart of Takaz, it makes no difference me, for it will make no difference to our dear Majister Scacz. Magic is magic, and the cost is your head if he finds out. Three and three and three,” he said, “or nothing is what you get.”

  Reluctantly, Mop cut the cash from his string, and handed across the coins. The man weighed the money in his hand.

  “Come in back.”

  The apothecary pushed aside a curtain and led Mop deeper into his tent, crowding into a niche claustrophobic with a desk and ledgers and loose papers, and overhung by clacking garlands of children’s backbones. He squeezed behind the desk and dug under his business ledgers, eventually drew out a cracked and broken tome, pages spilling from within.

  “What is the power you desire?”

  “I’m seeking my sister.”

  “Finding, then.”

  He started turning the crackling pages of the tome, each one a brown fragile leaf. “Finding. Hunting. Seeking. Desiring. Pining. Hungering. Missing. Finding. Finding, finding, finding.”

  He lifted a page and examined it in the light of his oil lamp. “Majisters were always losing things. Losing friends and losing lives. Losing apprentices and familiars and floating castles. And of course, losing their empire. Hmmm. Finding.”

  He looked up from the page. “I don’t have all the spells of Jhandpara. Just one book. Just one hand. Majistra Kalaia’s, and not her largest tome, by far.”

  “How does this matter?”

  “You know Kalaia? You know the histories?”

  Mop shrugged. “My father thought it best not to teach such things.”

  “Kalaia was a terrifying majistra. One of the most powerful, from a bloodline that stretched back to Jhandpara’s founding. Janakgur first, and the gods, of course, before them. So she had that history in her blood. The rise of Jhandpara from the blessings of Mara, with all three faces. A lot of power, there.

  “Kalaia wielded Jhandpara’s armies in the north, and helped crush the forest clans. It’s said she wore the skin of the rala that she hunted, and ate with her troops when they were cut off from aid in the kestrel forests for more than a year. Her soldiers were so loyal to her that the emperor feared her, and eventually had her put to death by Halizak. But even then she lived on.” The apothecary shrugged. “She was powerful.”

  “How does this help or hinder me?” Mop asked.

  The apothecary tapped the tome. “This is one of her books. Not by her hand direct, but a copy by her apprentice Torizi, and a good one. But it is but one, and it is but a sliver off the cheese of the knowledge she kept for herself in her floating villa by the sea.

  “When she died, her villa crashed to rubble, and now only a slice of a portion of a bit of a crumb of her knowledge remains. It’s just as it is for all the majisters and their many books and their many spellings that are lost to us. We have lost the variations, the pianissimo and the adagio, the pacings and the volume of their spellings.

  “We are children where they were gods, and so we pick through their spellings and toy with the primers of their least apprentices who managed to flee from Jhandpara’s Fall and the bramble onslaught.

  “There is power in the surviving books, but the truth is that the majisters that survive today are nothing in comparison to the gods who ruled in Jhandpara and spread empire across sea and desert and mountain and plain.”

  “Except Majister Scacz,” Mop said. “Scacz is different.”

  “Scacz?” the man laughed. “You think Scacz is powerful? Because he creates a castle that floats in the air, and stitches the pieces and parts of his enemies into loyal followers? No. Scacz is nothing in comparison to what was lost. Scacz is but a child.”

  He continued paging through the tome.

  “The finest majisters of Jhandpara cast spelling with no effort in the least. Without book, or ingredients. They simply pressed their will upon the world. Scacz is not so much when compared to that.”

  He frowned as he continued examining pages. “Kalaia liked her battle magics. She burned men from within, and froze them brittle so that they shattered when her troops struck them with their swords. She turned iron swords to sheaves of wheat. She changed the nature of things. Hot to cold. Stone to water. Her power was great, but from her hand, I have but this tome, and it is a trove, but it is not the ideal—Ah.” He paused. “This will do.”

  The apothecary took down a quill and began scratching. “It is a spell to see the things which may be hidden. Kalaia used it for detecting ambush, but with modification, it will do. Even better, this one was much concerned with finding people.”

  “Is it different for things?”

  “Is a dog different from a cat different from your sister?” The man was scratching more notes. He studied his writings. Then pushed it across. “Can you read?”

  “Of course I can.”

  “Some can’t. I only ask. These are Kalaia’s instructions.”

  Mop studied the words. “Why are you giving this to me?”

  The man smiled. “You think I’ll risk the censori? You think I wish to see myself lit up like a casis fly? You think I most desire to become another head on a spike on the wharves, with my body floating down under the Mayor’s Bridge? I have no desire to visit the sea, most surely not without my head attached.

  “If you wish to play at Halizak squares with Majister Scacz, that is your business. I give instructions. I sell necessities. I do not ply the majister’s trade. It’s dangerous enough to simply share the memories of Jhandpara’s fallen names. Dangerous enough to simply admit that some of us still touch the hand of our ancestors.

  “Majister Scacz is jealous for memories like the one you hold in your hand. He is desirous of every majister’s power. See how many majisters he has sent to Borzai’s judgment. But”—he wagged a finger—“always our Majister is careful to keep his victim’s hands. Their heads go on the gates, their bodies float down the river Sulong, but their fine quill hands, those he traces with his own, and he learns from all the dead. So even if one does not turn a tongue to the curse of Jhandpara, our
Majister is watching, and he his hungry for whatever traces of a majistra’s hand that still remain.”

  He gave Mop a small leather bag, filled with ingredients.

  “These will do the thing that you desire. But do your spelling far from me, and know that if you invoke the lost glories of Jhandpara, that you invoke also its great curse.”

  7

  MOP CAST THE SEEKING SPELL from hiding, burrowed deep amongst sacks of Teoz’s dried spices.

  The instructions of the dead hand of Majistra Kalaia lay before him. Her gestures, her invocations, her words upon his lips. As if the long-dead woman blossomed and rose up within him, animating him with her power.

  Mop began whispering words of magic, feeling the majistra’s influence from ages past.

  In its own way, the thing he did now was every bit as dark and shameful as the acts of the soft-eyed men from whom he sought to save Rain. This was the business of secrecy and shame, and fear. This looking over one’s shoulder, this terror of discovery, this rot of transgression . . .

  Mop traced his fingertips from a black strand of Rain’s hair, to a comb that was one of her last personal belongings. The comb was a treasured thing. A memento of her own private obsessions and desires, bejeweled and made of bone, sharp tines carefully carved by a woman who specialized in such things back when Alacan’s walls hadn’t been overcome by bramble growth. Rain’s last treasured luxury from a time when their lives had been soft and comfortable, held to her, even as their lives fell to rags.

  Mop could feel power building as he traced a hand from the hair to the comb and back. A gathering of something greater than himself.

  Humming quietly, holding Kalaia’s words inside his head, Mop dipped his fingers in water, and carried it to turmeric he had scooped from Teoz’s sacks. The water dripped, tiny gleaming jewels in candlelight. He rubbed his fingertips into the spice, turning the water and spice into a staining paste. He plucked up Rain’s hair and ran it through. Dipped the comb in the paste, as well, coating its tines.

  The majistra’s words bubbled within him; he barely had to look at the parchment where the apothecary had written them. His lips knew the vowels and consonants, his tongue felt thick with the need to speak them. The words had their own urgency. Kalaia’s voice, filling his chest, his lungs, turning his tongue, spilling from his lips. Words issued forth, sibilant. Building. Exultant. Rising. A spelling. A true spelling, full of ancient power.