The Tangled Lands

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  I glanced at the forge. It was not big enough to accept a whole body. I would have to chop it up piece by piece to feed it to the fire. The smoke would discolor, and the smell would betray me to any passersby. It would take too long to do it correctly, and I wasn’t even sure if I had enough wood to finish the suit as well as burn a body.

  So I needed to hide the body quickly, finish my work, and then don the armor to execute my plan.

  I grabbed a firepit shovel and approached the coals for ashes and debris to spread around the floor.

  I stopped when I reached Savar’s body and looked down at his hands. They lay unmoving on either side of his body. A good soul would put that jeweled dagger of his in his palm. That way Savar could offer one of Borzai’s godlings a fine price to whisper sweet praises to the judging god’s ear before he weighed Savar’s soul.

  Well shit on that, I thought, and raised the shovel. Savar and his father had destroyed our lives. Beaten us. Tried to kill us. May yet kill us. Why let his soul be judged with coin on the other side of the scales for Borzai? I slammed the point of the shovel down into his left wrist, twisting until the blade of the shovel separated the hand from his forearm.

  I repeated the act of butchery on the other arm.

  Now Savar would be unable to press valuables into any godling’s hands on the other side. When they buried the little lordly rat, he would be unable to help his soul weigh anything other than true. He would be no different from any of the lowborn criminals hanging without their hands along the Avenue of Justice.

  I threw open the windows to the noon sun as if I had nothing to hide. As if there weren’t the body of an actual lord limp behind the woodpile.

  And then I threw myself into the last day of work before me. The last of the plates needed to be shaped and connected. The armor’s springs needed to be hooked together, and the pump latches on the forearms installed. After that, the cart in the shed would need to be packed up.

  I moved as if I were possessed. I did not think about the future as I saw the guard return to the palanquin: I hammered metal.

  “Girl!”

  I turned, throwing sweat from my forehead to the ground with my hand. “What? What are you interrupting me for?”

  The guardsman looked puzzled at my anger. “Where is the duke’s son?”

  “I don’t know.” I turned back to my work.

  “He was in here this morning when I left.”

  “He was.” I turned to show him the bruises on my face. Then I peeled my sleeves up to show him the cuts and marks on my arms. “He did what he came to do. And now I must get to my work, or when tomorrow dawns worse will happen.”

  The man swallowed. “Where did he go?”

  “I assume he left to go beat someone else,” I hissed. “Sir, I must finish my work. Look around the forge. He is not here.”

  The sweat that dripped from my brow was no longer just from the heat.

  I returned to my work as the guardsman searched, even poking around the edges of the wood pile. But he saw nothing, Savar was at the very bottom of all the cut wood.

  As he left, I pointed my hammer at the man in the ragged robes waiting near the palanquin. “Ask him. He’ll know.”

  The guard ran off to consult with Savar’s pet spy while I continued my work.

  Throughout the midday they continued to come and go, their search expanding until two men dressed in house color strode angrily down the street to hassle the bodyguard. They hauled him away as he protested, off to go explain where the missing boy was.

  “The duke will deal roughly with him,” the informant so very obsessed with truth said casually to me from the edge of the forge, seeing my interest.

  “It’s never smart to take up with the velvet ones,” I said.

  “The boy has seemingly disappeared into thin air.”

  “I wouldn’t be killing myself to finish this armor if that were true,” I replied. “Now come in and search, like the guard, or leave me to my work.”

  The ragged robes shifted in the wind as he considered my offer. “No, I have other haunts to investigate. But if you hide the truth from me, know it will come out.”

  “By morning I’m sure the mystery will be solved,” I said, with absolute certainty. Then I turned my back to him and picked up the hammer.

  When the light paled, calmly, as if it were any other night, I closed the windows, doors, and banked the fires. I cleaned up my tools, setting them all in a neat row on the main bench. Water to douse the last embers was drawn from the trough. Water to wash my face in the second bucket.

  It felt like any other night in the forge.

  Until I faced the armor and stared into its glassy, blank eye-slits covered in glass. The dark, demonic eyes of something that had pulled us all into its fold.

  “You’ve taken so much from us,” I told the unmoving statue that silently watched everything in the forge. I reached forward and pulled the helmet with its carved serpents off its shoulders. “Now please give me something back.”

  I’d need to pull the armor on now, because who knew what time I would have once out on the open fields. I had to leave the forge in full armor, and hope the night hid me enough from curious eyes and guards who would challenge me.

  I pulled each segment on one at a time. It was a difficult thing to seal it properly, but I’d worked hard on that as well. There were buckles and catches all around the outer pieces that pulled each piece into place. But it was slow, sweaty work, with a lot of fumbling.

  When I finished I stood still for a moment. I’d never put all the pieces on, just tried different parts. It felt strange to stand here, dressed like a fully blooded lord in armor. It shifted slightly as I walked, the leather and plated armor skirts over my steel-cased legs swinging with me as I swayed from side to side, getting used to the restricted movement.

  I could walk around well enough. Even hop. The weight wasn’t that much worse than carrying a shouldered piece of plank and seven or so full buckets of water for the trough. My back held up easily.

  With care, I took the helmet up with my gloved hands and pulled it on.

  I breathed with relief as it settled over my neck.

  Now, for the first time, I could actually begin my plan. The heavy weight I’d been carrying melted from my shoulders.

  There was nothing left to do but go out to the burned fields and ash where my parents were buried alive.

  The night had cooled, thankfully. The moon hid somewhere out of sight, leaving me to navigate down the dirt roads of Lesser Khaim by the occasional flicker of the night torches. But my feet knew the roads, even without light.

  I still had to take the helmet off right where the road turned to cobblestones, as my hot breath fogged the glass slits near my eyes and I did not want to stumble over the stones.

  Not a soul challenged me. By the banks of the Sulong only the occasional drunken worker passed by, on their way to a late collapse into their home. If they had one. Some stared at me. But the heraldic symbols and obvious wealth of the armor kept all at bay. Some shook their heads and fled, sure they were seeing a demon walking the night streets.

  This was what it felt like to be one of the people from higher up the hill, I thought. People avoiding my eyes, looking to the ground. Giving me a wide berth.

  Only the cart I pulled behind me made one tavern keeper throwing a bucket of slop onto the street frown and stare after me, trying to work out what I was about.

  But then he shook himself and continued on.

  I reached the fields soon enough, bumping my cart along in the dark. I stopped again, this time to prime a shop lantern and hang it from a pole I fixed to the handles of the cart so it could swing above me and light the path. With the day’s bramble burning done, there was nothing but me and the ash my feet stirred up. It swirled like gray snow flurries in the orange light of the swinging lantern.

  It took several passes of the field to find the spear Malabaz had thrust into the ground.

  I put my
helmet on and tightened the buckles holding it to my neck. The spear quivered slightly in the wind as I approached and touched my helm, my heart, and offered a prayer.

  Then I took out a shovel from the cart and dug.

  The bramble Majister Scacz had summoned appeared after I cleared away the dirt, like the ribs of a skeleton appearing from under a shallow grave. I cleared the brown clumps away, then stepped down onto it with a shudder. My copper and steel-shod feet crunched against the fuzzy tendrils, and the thicker, bonelike netting of bramble under that did not give as I stomped on it.

  I took a deep breath and reached my gauntleted hands in.

  For as long as I’d known anything, I’d been taught to be scared of bramble. Do not touch it. Destroy it with fire. Chip it off the nooks and crannies of a building with long-handled tools and thick leather gloves.

  The burn teams destroyed it with fire, and then axes.

  But if I lit a fire in the night, people would come running. It would sear my mother and father with sap or burn them up.

  So I had to break through it myself.

  My metal fingers gripped bramble, my arms shoved deep into the killing branches. And then I triggered the gloves and ripped bramble apart by the fist-full, careful to keep hold of the pieces and toss them to the side so they didn’t fall down. Bramble pods burst and filled the air around me. Sap hissed and burned at my forearms and gloves. But it didn’t burn through the metal, or through the leathered joints underneath.

  With each ripped-out handful, I had to stop to crank the levers on my forearms to prime the gauntlets. It was slow work, but handful by handful, a sizzling pile of curled bramble grew next to me.

  I clawed until my fingers felt like they would crack. Sweat spilled from my pores, soaking the armor’s padding. But I’d become a badger-dog, digging and clawing with a single-minded ferocity that took me over.

  The acrid, oily smell of bramble sap filled my helmet, choking me. Even in my armor, I wasn’t fully protected from everything the bramble could do to me.

  A loud snap startled me, and my right forearm blazed with pain as blood trickled down toward my fingers.

  “No,” I hissed. The clockwork Milaka and I had built, broken and no longer able to help drive ten times my own strength to my hands, dug into the skin of my arm.

  I looked up at the stars and swore at whatever watching gods looked at me. “I do not know if I am on the right path, but I will not stop!”

  I ignored the pain and began to dig with only my left arm, pumping the lever as fast I could to make up for the lost time. I ripped out more desperate handfuls and threw them out onto the field.

  “Mother!” I screamed down at the bone-white bramble. “Father! Hear me!”

  The left arm’s clockwork snapped and I screamed as blood trickled down my arm. I leaned back on my legs, eyes closed.

  I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t go back to try to fix it. There was no time, Savar might be discovered. I couldn’t fix the suit here.

  I screamed at the bramble and raised my hands high in the air and struck the bramble hard, then pulled. Without clockwork, my forearms strained and my back tore as I yanked with everything I had in me. Every muscle that had been built over the long years of working metal. And I was rewarded by the satisfying sound of ripping bramble.

  I kicked, pulled, sobbed, and ripped the bramble out, inch by inch, until a small hole grew in front of me. Wide enough to put a ladder through, and just wide enough for me to shove and kick my way down through with a lantern.

  The moment my feet touched dirt I spun around and removed my helmet. “Father? Mother? It’s me. I’ve come for you.”

  I raised the lantern with my other hand.

  They lay together, not having stirred despite all the noise I’d made screaming my way through the bramble. My hand shook, the light twisting about because of it, as I approached them.

  My father had his strong hands wrapped around my mother’s waist as they curled together on the dirt. The last of their bread lay close next to an empty water skin. At first I thought the water had spilled around them. Then I realized why the dirt looked a different color.

  They’d given each other the mercy cut. I could see the knife held in both their hands, clasped together. The small, precise wounds on the forearms. Their ashy faces. Their closed eyes.

  They’d seen no other option. Their food had run out. They were trapped in bramble.

  I lay down, bereft. In the soft flicker I crawled over, rested my head carefully against my mother’s side, and cried.

  6

  AFTER MY TEARS MINGLED WITH the blood on my parents’ tunics, and once I could no longer find the energy for another single sob, I used a water skin to carefully wash their bodies. I wrapped them in fresh linen sheets, sweating inside my armor as I moved their still forms up the ladder and to the cart.

  I took my mother up first, her thin body no heavier than a sack of yams. My father still weighed more like a barrel of ingots. Bramble scratched at their skin on the way up through the sheets, but it didn’t matter anymore. I brushed the deadly threads away from my father’s death wrappings with my dirty gauntlets.

  After digging in the ground, weeping, then preparing my mother’s and father’s bodies, the world above the pit had started to lighten. A rosy line of light glinted behind Khaim’s buildings. Smoke rose from markets where vendors would be skewering meat and baking bread for morning workers. Lesser Khaim awoke.

  “Identify yourself!” a voice laced with cruel authority snapped. One of the city guard, heavy and sweaty, his boots covered in mud and ash, pointed a poorly fashioned bronze spear at me.

  He flinched when I turned to look directly at him. The fearsome helmet’s demonic faces unnerved him. I considered taking it off, but then that glinting spearpoint was only a foot away from my head. “I am . . . ,” I said, and faltered. What would I say next? Would I say I was Sofija, the daughter to Cedomill, the blacksmith, and Natazia, his wife?

  And what would he say then?

  What could he see through the glass-plated slits in my helmet? Was he even looking that closely?

  I lowered my voice and filled it with the same authority I would use on anyone at market trying to cheat me out of the true weight of a copper ingot. “I am Savar, son of the Duke Malabaz. What I do is my business. Get out of my way.”

  “My l-lord,” the guard stammered. “I, uh, need you to come with me. There are many looking for you.”

  I grunted and moved my father’s body up onto the cart, ignoring the city guardsman.

  “Lord, you at least need to explain what is happening here.”

  “I need explain nothing to you,” I growled at the man. “But if you insist . . .” I was thinking furiously, sweating and nervous. He was going to figure out something was wrong. He was going to realize my voice was cracking inside the helmet. Surely he could hear that my accent was not velvet, even though I tried to imitate Savar’s wheedling voice.

  But what could scare him off any more than a duke’s son?

  A majister.

  “Maybe,” I said, my voice dropping, “you’re interested in finding out more of what Majister Scacz does in those rooms with blood-grooves in the floor? Will you be coming with me?” I pointed at the bodies.

  The guard swallowed and looked at the bundles under my parents’ bodies. “No.”

  “Then leave me while I wait for the majister. Better yet, run from here before I decide to tell him you have asked too many questions. Or do you want just your headless body to show up in the Sulong tomorrow?”

  He fled, his feet kicking up ash.

  I waited until his figure disappeared between the farm shacks at the edge of the field, then picked up the cart and pulled it with me. Exhausted from digging, my head swirling with exhaustion, I stumbled more than ran.

  But no one bothered a noble in armor stumbling away from Lesser Khaim along Junpavati Road, pulling a small cart behind.

  Out on the road, only a few refugees appro
ached the city from the hazy distance. I stopped, ignoring the bramble-choked trees that crept toward the road’s edges, and quickly pulled a ragged, patchwork cloak on over my armor. I hid the helmet under my parents’ bodies. I didn’t have time to pull the armor off, not with all the buckles and layers. The cloak would have to do. I used a butchering knife to cut my hair short, nastily and quickly. My cut hair drifted down to the dirt.

  I flung a small tarp over the cart and hung a few cups and spoons off the edge to clank against one another, I looked like any other refugee, or tinker, wandering the roads.

  Only this tinker kept glancing over a shoulder every ten steps and walked away from Khaim.

  I walked the entire day. I pulled the cart through mud and ruts. I struggled over grass knolls, swearing when my feet broke through small burrows in the ground. But in time, Khaim fell farther away. At the midday, as the sun hung high overhead and beat down on me, I trudged wearily through a tiny huddle of abandoned buildings that had once been a post station.

  I left the road for a hill far behind the stone tower, reasoning that I could use it as a landmark to find my way back to the road. Bramble covered the land, growing thicker on the ground as I left the cleared road behind me. The gnarled trees here succumbed to the gray, ropey fingers of it.

  Since man had fled here, bramble didn’t grow as strongly as it did near the towns where it was fed by constant magic use. Out here in the wastes, only the distant effluvia of magic blowing in on the winds from afar gave it continuing sustenance.

  At the top of the hill, several miles from the tower, I found an open space of soft dirt. This would be a good place. A fine hill that my parents could see from the afterlife, a grave they would be proud of.

  I dug deep and laid my parents out in the broken dirt. In an hour the sun would set. I would spend the night here, watching vigil over them. When morning broke, I would kiss the ground they lay in, weep one last time, and then leave all this behind me.