The Forbidden City

by Deborah A. Wolf

In the end she was weak.

  * * *

  She felt heat first—the real, wholesome heat of a hearth fire in the deep of night. She smelled smoke next, the clean, sharp smoke of fruitwood and herbs. Sensations came back to her slowly—the rough rasp of cloth against skin, the redolence of hot tea and cold meat, the cough and scuffle and creak as whatever poor soul they had set to watch over her corpse tried to get comfortable.

  She tried to ignore these things, to send her soul back to the void. Eventually her body would tire of waiting for her to return, and it would die. There was no use. She was afraid—afraid to the marrow of her bones, and once fear has touched a dream it cannot be resumed.

  I will not wake, she insisted, every bit as stubborn as Basta had said. Eventually, though, her nose itched. One might endure the torment of a netherlord—for a while, at least—but not even she was made of stone.

  She sneezed.

  Her caretaker—a young boy to judge by the shrieks—fell out of his chair and went crashing around her room in a panic, breaking pottery and who-knows-what in his haste to escape the rising dead. There was no hope for it, then. Hafsa Azeina sighed and opened her eyes, squinting against the dim light.

  A pair of brown eyes wide as saucers and with white all around the edges peered at her from a bundle of shaking linen in one corner.

  “Boy…” she began.

  He shrieked again, his voice rising higher and higher till it was nothing more than a tea-kettle’s whistle, and then he collapsed, senseless.

  Well, she had tried.

  The doors burst open and a flood of humans poured in, stinking of meat and bone and fear, wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the sight of their queen struggling to sit up.

  “Water,” she demanded. Her voice was a thin croak. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Water. Bread.”

  Meat, Belzaleel mocked from his iron-chased sheath in the corner. Heart’s meat. Bones to gnaw. Blood to drink… Her mouth watered at the thought. She ignored it.

  “Bread,” she said firmly, “then a bath. And for the love of Akari, someone bring me a toothbrush. My mouth tastes as if I have been dead for a month.”

  The crowd at her doorway moved, not in response to her demands, but because a tall woman with fiery hair shoved them aside and shouted fit to wake the neverworld.

  “Let me through, you goat-fucking idiots! Let me through!” A hefty young man fell to one side, and Sulema pushed her way into the room. Eyes as bright and hot as the Zeerani sun found Hafsa Azeina’s face, and warmed the bitter shadows of her heart.

  “Mother,” she said, rushing to her side. She helped Hafsa sit up, then took the boy’s seat by her side. Those golden eyes held her own, pulling her the rest of the way home with their heat and hunger, with their love.

  Hafsa Azeina’s scalp itched and she stank, and her hands were crushed in her daughter’s grip—but her daughter was close, her daughter was safe.

  That was all that had ever mattered.

  FOUR

  Daru’s stomach was growling again.

  Hafsa Azeina’s apprentice tried to distract himself from the gnawing hunger, to count his breaths, to feel for a difference—any difference at all—in the smooth stone as he trailed his fingertips along the wall, to trick himself into thinking his eyes were open when they were closed, or closed when they were open.

  The utter dark, dark as a shadow’s laugh, dark as the inside of a lionsnake’s belly, filled the air around him so completely that it seemed to press against his skin and his eyes. Daru longed to reach up and tear it from his face, but the torn skin around his eyes reminded him that he could not.

  He longed, as well, to break away from the cold wall that seemed to him to mock his efforts. It was full of shadows, ancient shadows born of ancient malice, and they pressed against the stone like fish pressing against the river’s surface, longing to break free and gobble him up, bones, bruises, skin, and all. Yet he kept trailing his fingers along the wall as he walked, and took the smallest shuffling steps, testing the way with his toes just as he tested the air with his nose.

  The throb, throb, stab of his broken arm reminded him that to run was folly.

  For so long the wall was perfectly smooth, with no corners or doorways or seams, no change of any kind. When the break came, Daru let out a startled cry. He muffled the noise almost as soon as he had made it, but not before it drew unwanted attention. So he held his breath and waited, fingertips trembling against the uneven seam in the stone. Counted his long breaths one… two… threeeeee… fourrrrr… and his heartbeats one-two-three-four-seventy. He held his arm very, very still. The least movement hurt so much that sometimes it brought tears to his eyes, and pain attracted the worst sort of shadows.

  After a short time the oldest shadows forgot about him, being slow-minded things with long, long thoughts. Then only the smallest remained to pluck at the raggedy hem of his trousers. Those shadows he could deal with. They had been trying to kill him since he was a baby, and he knew their game well.

  “Let go,” he said to them softly. “Let go of me, or there will be no more music.” They let go, chittering in high, distressed echoes-of-voices. One of them patted his leg with its tiny clawed hand, as if in apology. That made him break out in chillflesh from scalp to ankle. If he was so close to the shadows’ world that he could feel them…

  Well, there was nothing to do for it, was there? Nothing but walking, as he had been since he woke in a crumpled and broken heap on the cold floors of what he had come to think of as the Downbelow. Nothing to do but cling stubbornly to life, and to hope, as he had been doing since the day he was born.

  The shadows subsided, and his heartbeat slowed. Daru pressed tentatively against the wall. There was a seam there, all right, and a slight depression in the wall beyond. No more than a hair’s-breadth change, and probably nothing he would have noticed had he not been clinging to this shadow-blasted wall for longer than he cared to imagine, but it was a change, and therefore the most interesting thing that had happened to him since he learned that boys could, indeed, eat spiders if they were hungry enough.

  Not that he intended to tell that part of his tale—not ever, not to anyone. Daru shuddered. Spiders’ eggs might be a rare treat, but the spiders themselves were just nasty.

  Even shuddering hurt.

  The seam ran up the wall to a point just over his head, and arched back down toward the floor. It was a door then, a door for children or very short adults, or perhaps a niche of some sort… Whatever it was, it had been long sealed shut, its secrets well—

  His fingers brushed over a depression next to the arch, and a sound like grinding teeth startled a shout from him. Daru stumbled backward, arms flying out to the side in panic. It was sheer dumb luck that made his head, and not his broken arm, strike the opposite wall of the passageway. Even so, the motion was excruciating.

  He shuffled back across the passageway, good arm held before his face, eyes open wide as if they could drink in the dark. It had been long, so long since he had seen the sun that he was thirsty for it.

  What I would give, he thought wistfully, to look up and see the stars. His splayed fingers found the wall and scrabbled across the unyielding stone as he tried to guess where the little door might have—

  Something bit him on the neck.

  Daru yelled and crumpled to the floor in fright. Of the seven deadliest spiders he knew, he had found six so far in the Downbelow. He flailed and yelled, and the shadows pressed in close at the sound of fear in his voice.

  Light flickered to life. It was a pale light and sickly, less full of stars and moonslight now than of dead things and the pale undersides of mushrooms, but it was a light nevertheless. Pakka waved her arms at him in remonstration and chirrrrrupped, “Pip-pip-preeeeeee-oh.”

  “Oh, it is you,” he managed with what little breath was left to him. “Crap and cat bones, sweetling, you scared me!” He rubbed at his neck. “Why did you bite me?”

  Pakka stood on the floor befor
e Daru’s feet, glowing with her own faint light. The mantid held up her forelegs in what was very nearly a human shrug, and he laughed. The sound was out of place and unwelcome in the Downbelow, and it startled the shadows, but it was good to laugh even as it hurt his lungs.

  “Rotten bug,” he grumbled, and he rocked forward onto his knees so that he might push himself upright with his good arm. Now that the fright was ebbing, his busted arm was reminding him that it was busted, and his stomach reminded him that he was hungry, and every remaining inch of his body reminded him that boys were not meant to wander lost and alone in the bowels of the earth.

  Yet I am no ordinary boy, he reminded the doubts and the hurts and the hungry shadows, lest they get the wrong idea and decide to devour him. I am stronger than you know. Still, it was a miserable—

  As he pushed to his feet, Daru’s fingers brushed against a small thing long forgotten, buried in the dust. He picked it up without thinking, and as he leaned against the stone wall, struggling to draw breath, he held it up in front of his face. It was a disc of cool metal, about as big around as the palm of his hand, and—oh, it was attached to a chain, a very fine, very thin chain. A medallion, then? He ran his fingertips across its surface. There were raised figures there, but he could not tell what they were.

  “Pakka, sweetling, can you give me more light?”

  “Peeeeoh,” she answered. Her sickly light flickered and nearly went out.

  “Never mind,” he whispered, looping the chain about his neck. The medallion was a curiosity, but until he could eat it or drink it or use the thing or find his way out of this place, it would be nothing more. He stooped and held his hand out so that Pakka could climb up to his shoulder. She flew less often now, and seemed more tired. Her carapace, which he knew should be hardening in the sun and taking on its own unique color, was pale as the moons and nearly as soft as leather. Still she scouted for him, and gave him light, and brought him such food as she could manage.

  “You are my girl,” he told her, stroking her back. “My fine, good girl. I will find our way home, I promise.”

  Promise, the shadows laughed, pressing close for a mouthful of his breath. Promise, promise. One of them, bolder than the others, thickened in the dim light. Daru imagined that he could see eyes, tiny pinpricks of fell light, and a tongue like dark flame darting forth like a snake’s. I promissse, it hissed at him.

  Daru closed his eyes and took a breath, the best he could manage, and held it for as long as he dared before letting it hiss out again between his teeth. He thought of Dreamshifter, of her fierce golden eyes, her strong hands and terrible scowl. How strong she was, and how she frightened the shadows.

  I am stronger than they know, he reminded himself. He opened his eyes, imagining as he did so that they shone with the fell light of the Dreaming Lands, and he scrunched his face up into the fiercest scowl he could manage.

  “I am no meat,” he reminded the shadows, “not for you.”

  The shadows fled.

  “Peeeeep-pip-pip,” Pakka said in an approving tone. She began to groom her antennae with her forelegs.

  Daru let his remaining breath out in a relieved little whoosh, and slumped against the wall. As he did so, his good hand brushed once more against the small doorway. He pushed and it gave way, until it gaped open in the dying light, daring him to enter.

  Daru pushed away from the wall, and stepped closer. He might walk through the arched door, if he chose, but Ismai would have found it a close fit, and someone as big as Tammas or Sulema’s brother Leviathus would have had to crouch.

  “A door for boys?” he asked aloud. Why would there be such a thing, deep in the Downbelow? And who might have made it?

  “Peeeee-oh,” Pakka squeaked, and she clung to his hair. “Pip-pip-pip.”

  “I know,” he told her, “but I think we have to.”

  He summoned his courage, held his breath, and stepped through the little stone door.

  FIVE

  Red skies at morning, Jian thought, divers take warning. Soldiers, too, I suppose. He shifted from foot to foot. Akari Sun Dragon rose in a fury of blood and gold, calling forth steams as rich and red as the bloodmyst. Everyone—from the sailor to the pearl diver to the midwife—knew that such a dawn was an omen of death. But for whom?

  The red steam rose, making ghosts of him and his dammati, and in the baneful light his banners hung heavy and still as corpse rags. Sweat rolled down his back and belly. He itched, he stank, and he had needed to piss for some time, but he did not move as the sky caught fire behind him.

  Let the light dazzle my enemies, he thought. Let the red mist give them pause, let the high ground give me the edge I will need to survive this day. Let the blood spilled be theirs, and not his.

  As the sky brightened further, burning the ghostly mist to tattered rags of nothing, it caught in the eyes of his enemies, waiting far below. It caught on the iron bardings and bindings of men dressed to kill, on the red and green and black lacquered armor of those who would bring him down. The red dawn cried for blood.

  Not mine, he promised. Not this day.

  From the northwest there came a flash of white. From the southwest, high in a thick tree, an answering flash of light. Jian raised the heavy wooden sword above his head, thrust it into the sky, and willed the enemy not to see how it shook. A roar came from behind him, and he knew his standard had been raised: a blue issuq against a field of silver, teeth and claws bared in defiance.

  The ache in his shoulder as he held his weapon aloft, the sweat stinging his eyes, the way his heart turned in his chest—these were things to which he could cling, reminders that this was no dream.

  Real, he thought, wondering. This is real. The hoarse screaming of a hundred angry men below him met the tidal roar of his force, and threw it back in his face like jagged rocks denying the sea. But the sea always wins, he thought.

  With that, he laughed.

  Below Jian, the banners of the red bull and the black hare unfurled, and his enemies raised row upon row of blunted pikes. Beside him, Perri lifted a horn to his lips and blew.

  Jian lowered his sword…

  …and they charged.

  * * *

  “War is a conversation,” wrote the great poet and general Zhao Quan, “a question posed by the sword and answered by the shield. Who will live this day, and who will die? Who will write himself into the history books as a hero, and who will be remembered as the villain?”

  * * *

  The skirmish was the decisive last battle of a seven-day mock war. As observed by the senior Sen-Baradam from the comfort of their lacquered chairs, war games were easy—quickly decided and played out upon the soil much as their war tables had suggested the night before.

  To those on the ground, burdened by the ill-fitting armor of the yellow Daechen, hampered further by heavy wooden swords and padded maces or spears, it was an eternity of sweat and pain.

  Jian lifted his wooden blade time and again, and time and again brought it thudding down onto the helm or shoulder of a red-armored foe, thrust it into the padded belly of a black-armored boy with whom he had once played a game of knives-and-cups. He tripped over the prone figure of a blue-clad ally who had taken one too many blows to the head.

  Block a blow from the side… his small shield was as heavy as a boat. Counter, and thrust… his sword weighed as much as a tree, and he could hardly see or hear from the ringing in his head. Someone fell into him from behind, and he pivoted gracelessly so that they might fall without taking him down, as well, neither seeing nor much caring whether it was an ally or an enemy.

  For a brief moment in time Jian found himself without an opponent, as his dammati formed a tight ring about him, swords and pikes held outward and screaming defiance. His lookout in the baobing tree signaled again, the little mirror flashing once, twice, thrice.

  Jian lifted the small conch shell, hung on a cord around his neck, and blew as his mother had taught him when he was small. It made a clear sound, sil
ver as sea-foam on a wind-lashed day. The call was answered, then answered again as the forces he had hidden away two nights ago threw back their mud-and reed covering and surged up into the fray, scattering Jian’s remaining enemies.

  The beating of the drums rolled over them all like thunder, signaling an end to the battle—and to the war. Swords were lowered, spears wavered, and though here and there a small knot of combatants still strove to pummel one another senseless, for the most part the combatants pulled away and bowed, or scowled, or shook their weapons and promised that next time, the outcome would be different. Next time.

  There would always be a next time, and another, and one after that. Jian slumped, weary to the marrow of his bones, and wanted nothing more than to drop his sword and walk into the river, that he might be washed back to the sea. Such a thought, however brief, was folly. Xienpei would read it upon his face, she always did. He shook it away, sheathed the wooden sword, and bowed to the man he had been fighting, Naruteo’s red-clad dammati named… Quing? Ping?

  It did not matter.

  The boy, who had once laughed with Jian over cups of sour tea, spat upon the ground at his feet and turned away with a grimace.

  That did not matter, either.

  At least we won, thought Jian. This time.

  But the day was young, and so was he.

  * * *

  Weariness set in as they trudged up the hill. Generations of war games had blasted it smooth and dead as old bone. Not a tree clung to the riven soil, not an insect buzzed. The only hint of color, of life, came from the war tents of the Sen-Baradam perched on high like a wreath of flowers upon a maiden’s head.

  Halfway up the hill, just as a blister on his heel burst and bled through his boots, Naruteo and his bannerman passed them at a steady jog. They jostled through the edges of Jian’s men, rousing shouts of anger from war-weary throats. Jian’s banner dipped as Perri stepped close.

  “Sen-Baradam?” He glanced pointedly at the red squad.

  Jian shrugged. “Let them pass. The living need not mind the dead.” He turned away as Perri laughed, knowing that his words would be carried to Naruteo’s ears, and that his rival would hate him all the more.