Svahta scowled at him. She wasn’t going anywhere.
The second she and Nori-Rin had entered the palace’s grievance hall with the eleven-pointed star of the Council brandished on their breastplates and weapons held tight in their hands, the palace guards in their flashy mustard yellow robes had rushed to clear out the staff, peasants, and noblemen who had been lingering around the massive room for a chance to appeal with the Empreja for the day. Now, the chamber was like a mausoleum. Heartbeats, footsteps, chittering birdcalls, the occasional cough—they all echoed off the jewel-encrusted walls, whispering about in the mosaicked rotunda high above. A miniature river babbled through the room, bisecting it from west to east, separating the dais of thrones from the rest of the grievance hall.
Prince Ali al-Khajalis stood on the bridge over the river, his arms folded behind his back, his feet firmly planted. Heeling at his side was a horse-sized creature that looked like a mix between a jaguar and a capybara. Its stilted legs ended in a rodent’s paws, and its whiskered snout rumpled to reveal a mouthful of sharp teeth. Behind it, a small militia of black-clad bodyguards flocked the prince, their hands on blocky automatic rifles that hung from their shoulders. The guns were pointed downward.
Alert, but respectful—soldiers in the face of their gods.
Nori-Rin held out the letter and flapped it unnecessarily. “Will you at least read it? You can read, can’t you? Your rich pap has to have paid some shit-gilder to teach you. Or maybe he didn’t. I don’t know. I don’t exactly know your family dynamic, now do I? Not that I want to, of course. Not with that many squallers. Jyan-Po’s blesséd arse, that’s a lot of children. You’ve got to have a family the size of the multiverse. Nieces. Nephews. Grandchildren. Do you know all your siblings’ names? And how does your pap have that much time to fu—”
Svahta elbowed Nori-Rin in the breastplate. “Not the time or place.”
Dozens of feet away, Prince al-Khajalis scowled. At the snap of his fingers, his guards and pet followed him as he crossed the bridge, glided across the polished floors, and came to stand in front of Nori-Rin and Svahta. Wordless, he held out his hand for the letter and ripped it from Nori-Rin the second she offered it.
As he read, Svahta eyed him over more closely. At a second glance, Prince al-Khajalis easily looked like a young woman, though Svahta knew he wasn’t. There was just enough softness to his face to give the impression. He was tall and bony, like a gnarled tree, with skin the colour of honeyed mud. Tight black curls spilled over his left eye in a long fringe. The rest of his hair was shorn closer to his head. His strong, hawkish nose was pierced through with a loop like a bull’s.
He wore an intricate floor-length skirt, which left his scrawny chest naked, but the skirt’s fabric was sheer enough not to leave a scrap of brown flesh to the imagination. Svahta was mildly surprised to find the man had both a cock between his legs and the subtle curve of breasts to his pectorals, nipples wide and dark.
Morphus.
She recognized her own kind. The smooth, even tone of the prince’s skin and the perfect symmetry of his face only confirmed it for her. Morphii always looked a bit too perfect, like manufactured wax dolls. It was unavoidable. Svahta had to fight hard to avoid tailoring herself subconsciously. The prince’s tailoring, though, was very conscious. She could tell. That level of perfection was never an accident.
“I told you,” Prince al-Khajalis said, thrusting the letter back like a dead rat into Nori-Rin’s hands. His pet let out a hissing mrow and began stalking a circle around them. “My father did not send this letter. I oversee his affairs. I know. Now leave. You draw unnecessary attention.”
As soon as he said it, Svahta noticed a few servants cowering behind the hall’s colonnades. Even if they were removed now, they had ample gossip to spread around the palace, gossip that would eventually make its way into the city of Khajal. There was no stopping it, not even if the palace guards pressed their guns to the servants’ heads now and threatened them to keep silent. Tongues wagged in fear of bullets. They would wag in spite of them, too.
So for Svahta, it was a foregone conclusion that people would know about her and Nori-Rin’s arrival here—and that they would know very soon. Rumours were sparks, and kingdoms were fields of dry grasses. Those snooping servants would unleash a small flame sure to raze Bal-Hakur in a flash of heat before the day was out. The only thing that wasn’t certain to Svahta was when the Council would catch wind of the blaze.
But in for an inch, she’d decided earlier, in for a mile.
“With all due respect,” Svahta openly challenged Prince al-Khajalis, “we can arrest ya right now for connection to that note. But we’re givin’ ya a chance to explain it. Answer our questions, an’ if we decide you’re innocent, then we’ll leave. We ain’t part a’ your rabble, High Prince. Ya bow to our authority.”
“Do I?” he growled.
“Ya do. So I’m gonna ask again, an’ you’re gonna answer: if ya didn’t send this letter”—Svahta raised her flail from the floor with a menacing glare—“then why’s it smell exactly like ya?”
The guards snapped their rifles up, barrels aimed at Svahta, but Prince al-Khajalis held up a hand and they froze. The tension in the room crackled as the prince took a step forward. He crowded against Svahta until his collarbone was inches from her nose. She refused to take a step back and instead lifted her head. The prince glared down at her with emerald eyes lit deep from within, then laid his hand on the top of her flail, forcing it down into decommission with an echoing clack-pow of its shaft off the floor.
“Tell me,” Prince al-Khajalis said, “how I smell.”
“Like a traitor,” she drawled. Neither of them blinked.
“Which smells like vanilla, in case you were wondering,” Nori-Rin singsonged from the sidelines when the prince leaned down into Svahta’s face. Svahta could hear the warning in her partner’s playful tone that the prince seemed oblivious to. His breath was hot like sun-baked earth against her face. Underneath it all, he reeked of ammonia. Svahta deadened her nose against it. “Sand, too,” Nori-Rin said. “Musk. Piss. Even lye.”
“Bal-Hakur is a desert, Miss Baakutunde,” the prince said without removing his eyes from Svahta’s, “and my palace is overrun with my father’s playthings. It is hard not to smell like a zoo. Now: apprehend me or I will make you leave.”
“We could if we wanted to. Apprehend you, that is,” Nori-Rin said. “You know that threatening a Guardian like you’re doing now is treason against the multiverse and punishable by the Council itself, right? I’m going to guess that you didn’t, though. Because if you did, that would make you very stupid.”
Svahta knew all too well how the Council handled those who threatened the Order, and she knew nothing good was waiting for whoever had killed her comrades. She knew it firsthand.
That memory flooded her.
“Suffering is justice,” Councilman Lallen said to Svahta, flames trailing each word as it left his mouth. He levelled a hard stare at her. Only yards away, seven members of Clan Faobháin were shackled to standing pyres, burning, no longer people, only piles of flesh and bone heaped over in chains. Their screams still rang in Svahta’s ears, though the weedy field was silent now. The sun beat down on them. “Watch. Death is not cruel where it is fair.”
Three hundred years. That was how long it had been since she’d heard him say those words, but they walked with her through life like her own shadow.
What would they do to you, Svahta wondered, staring at the prince, if you’ve committed worse crimes than those seven did to me?
“My, my,” echoed a cheerful voice through the cavernous hall, ripping through the tension in the room and dispelling it at once. The prince stiffened and took a step back, eyes fixated on the ground. Each of his bodyguards went down on one knee and dipped their heads. Even the jaguar beast pressed itself to the floor on its belly, flattening its ears.
Over all of their heads, Svahta could now see a man, who crossed the bridge
with a wide smile plastered on his face, a host of black-clad bodyguards keeping close behind. His white skirt fluttered and billowed around him, embroidered with gold thread and beaded with silver, fastened at his left hip with a large turtle brooch that was crusted with emeralds. A band of gold was wrapped around his forehead.
The man was as flawless as the prince was—but he was dark-skinned and willowy, and there was muscle to him. His waist-length onyx hair was tightly curled, braided to only the right side of his scalp. The most striking thing about him, though, was his slender, haunting grey eyes. They glowed with their own light.
Handsome wasn’t the word for him. Beautiful was. Svahta couldn’t keep herself from staring—from tracing the alluring features of his face with her eyes again and again.
“Your Excellency,” the prince’s bowing guards greeted, but it was Prince al-Khajalis who muttered a quiet, “Father.”
Svahta blinked. So this is High King Nelo al-Loriaris.
As the prince’s bodyguards split to each side to allow for the High King’s and his own guards’ approach, Svahta noticed something about the High King’s bare skin, thinking it a trick of her eyes at first, but no—there was a rose tattooed along the High King’s pectoral in white ink that disintegrated, blowing across his skin like grains of sand caught by the wind. The grains travelled down his arms, swirled around the backs of his fingers, and settled in a mottle of pinprick dots.
Enchanted ink.
Her own tattoos would have told a much more immersive story of her Clan’s history had they been spelled to move. She steeled all her fascination, though. Locked it away.
“Your Excellency,” she greeted. Nori-Rin kept uncharacteristically silent at her side. “It’s a pleasure to meet ya.”
With a genuine smile, the High King came to a stop a respectable distance away. “Guardian Muiraighaille, if I’m not mistaken.” Svahta nodded. “I do try to keep up with the current Order members, and if I remember correctly, you’ve been current for quite some millennia. This must be your newest su-lanah, the illustrious Guardian Baakutunde. You’re rather novel to the Order, but you’ve made quite an impression from what I know of you.” He spread his hands in a welcoming gesture. “What seems to be the matter here, Your Guardianships? What warrants the appearance of not one but two esteemed Guardians in my palace, and in battle dress no less? Should I submit myself for arrest, or have I been blessed by your company?”
“Depends,” Nori-Rin said, finally speaking up.
“On?”
“Why ya sent that letter,” Svahta finished for her, giving a pointed look to the papyrus still clutched in Nori-Rin’s free hand, her other hand hefting a slender, curved sword against her shoulder. It had been a risk to enter the palace so openly antagonistic—in armour, weapons drawn—but it had been necessary.
“May I read it?” the High King asked politely, and Nori-Rin passed the letter over to him. He read it with a bemused smile and two raised eyebrows. “Well, well. What do we have here?”
“I told them the letter—” Prince al-Khajalis started, but the High King cut him off with nothing more than a dagger-sharp glare. He finished reading, then handed the letter to Svahta.
“I can assure you I didn’t write this,” he said. “That’s not my signature, nor is it my handwriting. The message does carry my official seal, however, and information it should not possess. Someone has gone to great lengths to impersonate me.”
“Impersonate ya?” Svahta asked. This entire situation was only confirming for her that they’d been right to come here to Khajal. The letter wasn’t their suspicions getting ahead of them. It was a lead—but a lead to what, Svahta didn’t know.
“I can introduce you to the creature mentioned in the letter,” the High King offered. “If you would follow me further into the palace, I’d be grateful to acquaint you. While I may not understand why an odd little letter has caught the eye of the Order, I would like the opportunity to show you at the very least that the information contained within the letter is false. Linanu’thos is not ailing. And even if she were, I have never revealed her existence to anyone outside of these walls. I never would. Under any circumstances.”
Svahta’s and Nori-Rin’s eyes met in silent deliberation, and then they nodded, hands tight on their weapons.
We didn’t come this far to turn back now.
They were led into a heavily guarded section of the palace—past airy courtyards and gardens full of cacti and flowering winter plants—through several sets of gold- and pearl-inlayed doors. Chandeliers lit with lightbulbs were steadily exchanged for rings of candles and mounted torches. The palace grew darker the deeper into its halls they ventured, encumbered with the desert evening.
Svahta had never seen so many animals in her life as she saw here. Some had the run of the palace—wispy rabbits that melted through the walls and floors, tortoise-badger hybrids so massive they blocked the traffic of several corridors and had to be ducked underneath, long-beaked birds whose drooping tail feathers refracted light like crystal and whose twittering songs forced visions of summer behind Svahta’s eyes that she had to shake away.
Other animals were locked away.
As they passed through labyrinthine sets of halls, Svahta felt a pang of sympathy for the animals chained into alcoves and caged in barred cells along the walls. Some cells were small. Some had bars that reached up to the arched ceiling, several storeys above. Svahta couldn’t identify any of the creatures. In one cage, there was a beast the size of a moose. It was bald, its skin so paper-white its veins lightninged across it. It looked like a dog, but it had no eyes, its face instead fitted with rows upon rows of nostrils. It slavered as she drew near. Chained to another wall was a robust beast, short and stocky with trunks for legs. Horns wreathed its neck, and its mouth split like a blooming rose. Another creature looked like it was decaying into the floor. It smelled so strongly of rotting waste that Svahta had to fight the violent urge to vomit. There was another animal yet, which looked like an anaconda-sized ferret with feathers. Its snout was muzzled, but the muted, hissing growl that seeped past the metal made Svahta’s vision blacken at the edges and her head go fuzzy.
“Come along,” High King al-Loriaris called back at her, Nori-Rin at his side. A brief jog brought Svahta back to them, her flail clacking along the floor once she slowed. She caught the horrified expression on Nori-Rin’s face as her partner surveyed the hall. Shiftirii always had an affinity for animals. Sympathizing, Svahta reached over to squeeze her hand, and Nori-Rin smiled down at her weakly. Her palm was warm.
The next door, opened by two attendants, was the last they passed through. The High King’s personal guards were left behind with their guns and silenced protests, and then the door was shut, closing Svahta and Nori-Rin in with the High King and a blanket of near darkness. It was only once the door was sealed that Svahta realized the room was soundproofed. She could no longer hear the animals hissing and growling back in the hall, and she doubted the guards could hear anything inside this room, either. She wondered if that was why they’d seemed so anxious.
The darkened room they now stood in was massive. Taking over most of it was a glass tank as tall and wide as the chamber was. The tank was filled to the brim with black water, and only a slender walkway of floor was left around its edges for the High King to lead them around the room. As Svahta followed behind him, she could see a hint of curvature to the chamber, but only after they’d continued farther down the path did she realize the room was cylindrical.
The curved wall at her right was polished and mosaicked with waves and shadowy seascapes, dim torches ringing it at even intervals all the way up to the rotunda above, where a wide oculus gaped. It let in the scant, umber sunlight of the desert’s late evening. Svahta knew the room must have bathed in sunlight at noon, but now, it flickered with only a hundred small fires that flashed off the glass of the tank at their sides.
When a silver glint and a shadow whipped through the tank, Svahta jumped back
from it. The room roared cathedral with the thunderous churn of water.
“What was that?” Nori-Rin asked, her voice echoing up the chamber of the room like a song. “Why are we here? Where’s this lee-naw-new-toss or whoever you were talking about?”
“Linanu’thos,” the High King said, halting his tour around the tank and turning back to them. “It’s a Lu’van name.”
He removed one of the metal sconces from the wall and brought its flame closer to the tank. The fire lit up the glass and the water, reflecting his own image back at him, but then the flame guttered out. Queerly, a new light was born deep in the belly of the tank. It flared—and flashed out in a sudden, blinding gleam that swallowed the room in white. Svahta flinched against it, shutting her eyes. She didn’t open them again until a gentle grey glow settled on the other side of her eyelids. When she finally did look, it took her a full second to realize what she was seeing.
There, inside the tank, was a whale of a fish, its scales pure untarnished silver that blazed with their own light. As the fish swam closer, thick whiskers from its koi-like head brushed up against the glass. Its jet-black fins held rigid in the water while it floated. Like the sun—Svahta decided with a hitch in her breath—its huge eyes glowed like the sun, the light trickling through the water in distorted beams. As Svahta and the fish locked gazes, she stumbled forward toward the tank, palming the cold glass. The fish didn’t break eye contact, and neither did she. She felt full to the brim with sunlight—all of her weight falling away and her eyes pricking with tears—like she was witnessing something holy she would never understand.
“This,” the High King said, “is Linanu’thos.”
The fish finally broke Svahta’s gaze and lumbered away into the shadows of the dark tank, but Svahta kept her hand on the glass, her chest now cold and empty.
“Her name means heir to the sea in the language of light,” the High King said, stepping up next to Svahta, his upper arm brushing her shoulder. “Rare creature. A light-eating silver fish. Unfortunately barren and the last of her line,” he said. “I was given a few breeding pairs of her kind, almost a hundred and twenty eight thousand years ago it must be now, by Tialu Penthoseren himself.”
A Shard of Sea and Bone (Death of the Multiverse Book 1) Page 22
