The Forbidden City

by Deborah A. Wolf

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map of The Dragon’s Legacy

  Dramatis Personae

  THE FORBIDDEN CITY

  Hunted

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Fifty-Three

  Fifty-Four

  Fifty-Five

  Fifty-Six

  Fifty-Seven

  Fifty-Eight

  Fifty-Nine

  Sixty

  Sixty-One

  Sixty-Two

  Damned

  APPENDICES

  The Lands of the People

  The People

  Terms, Phrases, and Places of Interest

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  THE DRAGON’S LEGACY SAGA BY DEBORAH A. WOLF

  The Dragon’s Legacy Saga

  The Dragon’s Legacy

  The Forbidden City

  The Seared Lands (May 2019)

  Daughter of the Midnight Sun

  Split Feather

  Broken Feather (September 2019)

  TITAN BOOKS

  THE FORBIDDEN CITY

  Hardback edition ISBN: 9781785651106

  Electronic edition ISBN: 9781785651120

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark St, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: May 2018

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Deborah A. Wolf. All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  This book is dedicated with love to

  KRISTINE ALDEN,

  the sister of my heart.

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  Ani (Istaza Ani): Youthmistress of the Zeerani prides. Though she has no children of her own, she loves her young charges fiercely.

  Daru: A young Zeerani orphan, apprenticed to Hafsa Azeina. Born a weakling, Daru is keenly aware of the thin line that separates life from death.

  Hafsa Azeina: Queen Consort of Atualon and foremost dreamshifter of the Zeeranim.

  Hannei: Young warrior and best friend to Sulema, Hannei is everything a Ja’Akari should be: bold, beautiful, and honorable to the marrow of her bones.

  Ismai: A Zeerani youth, Ismai wishes to break tradition and become Ja’Akari, though warrior status is reserved for females. Last surviving son of Nurati, First Mother among the Zeeranim.

  Jian: A Daechen prince and Sen-Baradam of Sindan.

  Leviathus: Son of Ka Atu, the Dragon King, Leviathus was born surdus, deaf to the magic of Atualon and thus unable to inherit his father’s throne. Leviathus is dedicated to his family, his people, and his king, and works tirelessly to maintain the stability of Atualon.

  Sulema Ja’Akari: Ja’Akari warrior, daughter of Zeerani dreamshifter Hafsa Azeina and Ka Atu, the Dragon King of Atualon.

  SUNDERED

  The wind was born of a twilight lord, playing a seashell flute. Webbed fingers, strong and sure, danced across a smooth shell as they had once danced across the skin of a human girl. She had been delicate and sweet and all things good.

  That girl was gone, just as the meat was gone from the shell, leaving only the memory of beauty and faint notes in the wind. But the sea was still the same, and the song was still the same, curling around his heart thick and slow as the magical fog that shrouded the Sorrowful Isles.

  Born of sea and sand and the cries of a wounded heart, the wind danced in rage and longing across Nar Kabdaan, the waves of the Sundered Sea rousing to wrath and ruin as they cast themselves, again and again, upon the heartless shores at Bizhan. The waves were born, they struggled, and they died unmourned, one after another like soldiers caught in a dream of war.

  The wind was heavy with salt, and the dreams of sea witches, and the tears of lost souls. It struck at the jagged rocks, tore at the sharp grasses like a madman tearing at his own hair. It howled like the voices of a thousand ice wolves buried in fear, forgotten to legend, lost, lost, lost.

  The howling woke the half-kin child, because the song of wolves can never truly be forgotten by the offspring of man. The child rose, slipped from his bed, left his mother’s hearth behind, and stumbled down the rocky path to the sea.

  The moons were faded, half empty.

  Because he, too, could hear the howling of the wolves, could feel them singing in the shadows of his heart, the twilight lord put down his flute and swam to shore. He had broken so many laws already that one more could hardly matter.

  And besides, he told himself as he slipped through the water, I wrote those laws. The things that dwell beneath fled from his shadow, and the Two Sisters veiled their faces as he lifted his sleek head above the waves. Eyes wide, the child had nearly reached the water, was so close that the fat little footprints filled with water as he passed, and glittered like abalone shells in the thin light. The wind tore at the veil, at weft and warp of land and magic. It howled and raged as did the storm in his heart, but the moons were thin and weak, and laws older than his held the barrier in place.

  He could not pass. He could not…

  But the child could.

  Just as his dimpled little feet paused at the water’s edge, graceful as a mist-dancer poised on the edge of the world, a cry arose. The woman came striding down the path, calling for her child. The mist bowed and kissed her feet, clung to her thin robe in supplication, and gave way before her. Her eyes shone deep and dark as the pools of the dead, and the stars lit her brow like a crown. Slight and sharp as the sea-willow, she was his song of beauty, the very dream of majesty. Her hair was blacker than the shadows, and she ruled the dark wishes of his heart.

  The child hesitated, looked back the way he had come, and fell on his fat little rump. His wide round eyes opened wider, and the fat baby mouth pursed into a fierce frown. Before he could make up his mind to cry,
the woman scooped him up in her strong brown arms and held him close to her breast.

  The twilight lord swam closer, drawn to her as the tide to the moons. Even as his feet touched the sandy shore, even as he shed the sea and his Issuq skin to stand naked in the starslight, yearning for her, hands and face pressed hard against the veil despite the pain, she turned. The waves broke over her feet. The wind sighed through the veil. Wind and water could pass through, but never his living flesh, nor hers, not till the end of Sundering.

  The child of both worlds might pass, but his fat little fist was tangled in his mother’s hair, and in her heart, as well. The twilight lord looked into his son’s eyes—Issuq eyes, eyes of the sea. The boy stared back at him, quiet and solemn and brave as the sky.

  Thou shalt not, he thought, and these laws were older than blood, deeper than bone. His heart bled through the veil easy as wind, quick as water, and left the flesh behind.

  The woman looked down at the child and cried out, clutching him closer still as she stared blindly into the veil.

  She cannot see me, he thought as he pressed harder. They cannot give her even that much. Her mouth moved. A blessing for him, or a curse? Perhaps a warning that he should never seek to steal the child. He could not say. Human mouths were such a mystery, and the words, being of the flesh, could not pass to him.

  “I will not hurt you,” the twilight lord promised. “I will not seek to make him mine.” He lied, of course, but she would expect lies from one of the lords of twilight. Even from him.

  Especially from him.

  She turned her back to the sea and he cried out as grief pierced his heart. Then she paused. He saw the curve of her soft cheek and in that moment it seemed as if she had heard him. There was a quick flash of cold steel. Cradling the child in one arm, she held the other high. In her hand she held a short knife, and a lock of her midnight hair. The wind slapped at her, plastering the fabric to her lithe form. The child laughed with delight. She let the lock of hair fly from her fingers, and paused for another long moment.

  Another heartbeat.

  Another lifetime.

  The wind wept sorrowfully through the veil, bearing the lock. He reached up and plucked it from the sky, the greatest treasure of two worlds. Then the woman walked away. Her steps were slow and seemed painful, as if she walked upon a knife’s edge. Yet she never faltered.

  Soon she was gone.

  He brought the tuft of hair to his face. Sunlight and moonslight and laughter beneath the stars. Webbed fingers closed, tight and trembling, around this last wisp of sky silk.

  When the shell flute fell from his other hand, it hardly made a splash.

  HUNTED

  Cold rain fell from the leaves in fat droplets, chasing the rivulets of hot sweat as it trickled down her back.

  Akari Sun Dragon rose screaming in the east, but try as he might those hot eyes would never penetrate this emerald gloom. The air was heavy—“thick as fish soup,” their father might have said—and Holuikhan fought the urge to suck air in through her mouth. Such would have meant her certain death. She flared her nostrils instead, taking her breath in delicately, lest the shadows she carried rise up and choke her.

  The mouth of her bone pipe was close enough to kiss, if she were of an age to be thinking of such things. The leaves ahead whispered, and moved, then parted to reveal the face of her older sister. Anmei was the finest huntress in their village. She wore the forest as another woman might wear a dress. Her bright eyes flashed through the rain, and she pressed her three remaining fingers to her lips.

  ’Ware, she signaled. ’Ware poison.

  Holuikhan clamped her teeth together, again minding her breathing.

  Pig tracks, her sister signed, hand movements as graceful as a dance. Sow. Four young. Come. She turned away, becoming the forest again. Cupping her hands before her face, she puffed out her cheeks and blew. Air shrieked through the holes where her third fingers had been. A long, loud trill caused the world to go silent.

  The forest shuddered as a clutch of chinmong burst from the undergrowth, heads bobbing and clawed hands held tight to their breasts. The alpha female tilted her head at Holuikhan. Red streaks like bloody handprints ran along the sides of its face, and its teeth were yellow-white as it hissed, crest rising and preparing to charge.

  Another whistle came from the undergrowth. The raptor shook water from its feathers in protest, but stood down, and the clutch flowed around Holuikhan like deadly water as they brushed past her to range on ahead. Her lips parted in awe as they passed, so close she could hear their claws scrape against the tree roots, smell the strange spiced-meat musk of their feathers…

  “Sssst!” Anmei hissed out loud. Her face was furious as it peered from her cloak of leaves. Holuikhan clamped her lips together again, shamed and a little frightened by her lapse. This might be her first real hunt, but the shadows she carried would not be forgiving.

  Her sister signaled and the raptors spread out, trilling to one another as they searched for prey. Holuikhan’s fingers tightened on the bone pipe, a pretty thing with a belly full of death. Today, for the first time, she held the shadows in her hand. Today in the village a clutch of chinmong eggs was being tended by her younger sister. Some day…

  The alpha female screamed, sighting prey. Anmei whistled through her beautiful, maimed hands, calling her raptors to the hunt.

  Some day, Holuikhan promised herself for the millionth time, this would all be hers.

  * * *

  The chinmong had pinned a boar—a big boar, the biggest Holuikhan had ever seen—and her hands trembled to the beating of her heart as she raised the pipe to her lips. Bare toes dug into the thick tree roots as she leaned against the hoary trunk of a baobing, the better to steady her shot.

  Though she made no sound, and though the thick black sap she had rubbed under her pits and upon her pulse-points should mask her scent, the sooty giant paused in his threats to the raptors and lifted his long, flat head. The oddly pink end of his snout twitched, round nostrils opening and closing like hungry little mouths as they tasted the air. Little red-rimmed eyes flashed in the rising mist and rolled toward her. He had caught her scent. The boar wheeled in her direction, ignoring the calls and feints of the big chinmong.

  Time slowed, sloooowed. It seemed to Holuikhan that she could count every bristling black hair on the boar’s body, and could see the air shimmer around his heavy face as he gnashed his teeth.

  I am death, he told her, quite plainly. I am coming for you.

  I am ready, she answered from her heart. Her hands steadied. She drew in breath through her nostrils, exactly as she had practiced, and crossed her eyes a little bit as she sighted down the length of the pipe. Even as the boar charged, squealing, and the ground shuddered beneath his dagger feet, her lips almost—almost!—touched the knob end of her deadly little weapon, and she blew.

  The dart made scarcely a whisper as it left her pipe, the shadow of a shadow of a sound, but it was thunder in her heart as the world stopped.

  With its fluff of red down the dart hovered, just at the end of her pipe. The boar floated mid-charge, head down, all four feet suspended above the dark earth like those of an oulo dancer. The forest held its breath.

  Suddenly her dart buried itself in the pig’s shoulder. He skidded to a stop a hare’s jump from where Holuikhan stood, and screamed. He squealed like a man who had taken a spear to the gut, or like a woman who had found her only child drowned in the river. The sound pierced her heart, and tears welled in her eyes even as the boar staggered to one side.

  “I am sorry,” she whispered, and she was.

  The black giant turned heavily around, and in one final gesture of contempt he lowered his head and charged off in the one direction she wished he would not take. Though the pig should have fallen already—she had used the poison from a blue dart frog—Holuikhan could only stand and stare open-mouthed as he disappeared up the old mountain path.

  The raptors, tempted beyond their trai
ning, screamed in unison and gave chase.

  A heavy hand clapped over her shoulder. Holuikhan jumped and squeaked, a very unhunterlike sound. But Anmei just laughed.

  Anmei was the prettiest girl in the village, in all the villages around Peichan. When she laughed like this, strong white teeth flashing in her dark face, a crown of ti leaves and her hunter’s cloak making her seem as if the forest itself had birthed her, Holuikhan thought she might rival the Huntress herself in beauty.

  “Come,” she said out loud, the need for stealth long past. “Let us go collect your pig, little huntress.”

  “If the clutch leaves anything but bones and hair.” Holuikhan sighed as she hopped down from the tree root. “Why did he run off like that? That poison was good. I tested it.”

  Anmei shrugged. “He did not wish to die yet. A fine strong pig. His heart will give you courage.” She tapped at her own chest. Anmei’s first kill had been a young wyvern. She possessed the heart of a dragon.

  “Yes, but did he have to choose that path?” Holuikhan shivered as she looked up the mountain. Even now the mists were rising with the day’s heat, mocking her.

  “Surely you do not fear Cold Spirit Stream?” White teeth flashed, gentle mockery. Holuikhan shifted her weight from one foot to the other. She slid her pipe into its carrier at her belt, avoiding her sister’s gaze.

  “The hunters never come this way, do they?”

  “Of course not. Everyone knows there are ghosts up there. And you cannot eat a ghost, now, can you?”

  Startled, Holuikhan met her sister’s eyes, and they both burst out laughing. The sound surprised her, and frightened the forest. When hunters laugh, blood has been spilled. All creatures know this. Then the fit passed.

  “Fortunately,” Anmei went on, wiping tears of mirth from her eyes, “ghosts cannot eat you, either. Come, come, we cannot just leave him there all alone. It is bad luck to be so… disrespectful.” She turned, the leaves of her cloak swirling about her, and disappeared after the pig.

  There was nothing for it, then. Holuikhan sighed, steeled her heart, and started up the path to her doom.

  * * *

  The pig had fallen much further away than they had expected. They found him after Akari Sun Dragon had bid them farewell and the moons appeared to light their way. He had run through Cold Spirit Stream, up the mountain trail, down a wide and ancient cobblestone path that reeked of wyvern-mint as they trod upon it, and through the ugly ruins of a pair of mossy gateposts that sat like stone trolls in the children’s stories, guarding either side of the road and wickedly determined not to allow them to pass.