The Grass King’s Concubine

by Kari Sperring

  Every part of the place looked neglected. Here and there amid the woody tangle crystals glittered, as if a careless child had rolled handfuls of jewels and prisms willy-nilly. Lengths of silk brocade hung, bannerlike, from the knots of vines or fell in streamers from the top of the arcade. Aude rose and stood, looking around, arms hugging her sides. It was very quiet. The air felt thick. When she inhaled, it filled her mouth and nose with richness, with the heady notes of vanilla and fresh bread. Slimy from head to foot, clothes ripped and dirty, she felt conspicuous, for all there was no one here to see her. A faint breeze wound around her, tugging at sleeves and hair, setting the earring in her left ear to swaying. She raised a hand to touch it and found it warm under her fingers. Slowly, as if in a dream, she picked her way across the mosaic, stepping over vines. Crystals sighed as she passed, threw rainbows under her feet. She had seen nothing like them before; these were not the cut and faceted stones of high-class jewelers nor yet the polished glass lenses of chemists and navigators. Some were long and thin and curving, some ragged-edged and smaller than her thumbnail, some thick as curtain poles, some even, some tapering, and all in shimmering, changing colors. They lay everywhere, tumbling from vines as she passed. Trying to avoid one, she put her foot down on another and felt it crack beneath her. She froze in place, afraid to look down, afraid to step forward. A thin film of sticky warmth spread out under her foot. She bit her lip and lifted it. A gash across the arch of her foot left a thin smear of her blood, rimming the snapped end of crystal. The latter looked almost like part of a rib, now that she saw it more closely, and the smaller bones beside it might be vertebrae. She could not bear to think about that. What kind of creature spun its bones from crystal? Tears welled. To have damaged such a thing…She rubbed them away with the back of her grubby hand and moved on. Whatever it had been, it was dead. It could not suffer from her carelessness now. She would do better to be concerned over the cut in her foot, coated as she was in the muck of the cistern. She picked her way to the edge of the arcade and halted, leaning against a vine-wrapped pillar. Bark prickled through her shirt. The rich air surrounded her, warm and sticky; beads of perspiration trickled down her spine. She needed a bath and a change of clothes.

  Well, those must wait until she made her way back to her rooms. Under the arcade, the light was ocher, tricked out in the winding shadows of vines. Fewer of their tendrils reached here, though the floor was awash in their discarded leaves, elliptical and rust colored. Crystals glinted through them here and there. Aude pushed her hair back and stepped into the shadows. Leaves crunched beneath her; if anything else also broke with them, she took care not to think about it. Among the leaves were further heaps of cloth, lying coiled and crumpled. The arcade led her away from the cistern house, curving her toward a pair of huge doors. To either side of those, backs to the plastered walls, stone warriors stood, their blind eyes staring out into the courtyard. A vine shoot, bolder than its kin, had reached out to one of them, curling its smothering way up his arm toward his throat.

  It would choke him. Without thinking, Aude caught hold of it and tugged, pulling it free. It was dry as the dust on the great steppe, splintering in her grasp. She flung its shards away, as far from the guard as she could. These, at least had been human—or humanlike—once. She would leave them clear, if she could. Better that than to vanish under that chaos of old foliage.

  The doors shone in the low light, blackened brass. She caught sight of herself in one of their huge dimples. Not even Jehan would know her, ragged and disheveled as she was. The doors had neither lock nor handle, and when she set a hand to them, they swung open readily before her.

  It was an antechamber, tall and wide, its walls tricked out in green and gold, the plasterwork pierced into a breathtaking filigree of huge, intricate, intertwining trees. From their fragile branches hung clusters of fruit, grapes and peaches and pomegranates and the occasional, incongruous cogwheel, carved from jade and amber and warm quartz, surrounded by painted plaster leaves. The carved branches swept up to make a ceiling of interlocked bright green foliage. The floor was smooth, cool stone. The vines and their debris had not penetrated the chamber, but Aude’s feet left dirty marks where she stepped. The air sparkled, as if filled with hundreds of tiny motes of light. Long marble benches flanked the room’s two longer sides, each piled with puddles of cloth. Musk and ambergris and yeast scented the air. Opposite where she had entered stood another pair of doors, as tall and wide as the first. They were dark, dark wood, inlaid with silver, each adorned with the image of a sweeping fruit tree. Their handles were carved out of crystal; in the dancing light it seemed their leaves stirred in some secret wind, revealing what looked like letters scattered here and there among them. Aude rubbed her hands once again down her flanks and found they still came up grimy and befouled. She pulled the edges of her overtunic close to her, to keep her dirt as restricted as possible in this jeweled room. When she put her hand to the next doors, she averted her eyes, not wanting to see the mark it must surely leave. Was this how Sujien saw her all the time, a mote of pollution in this ornate place? Was this how the inhabitants of the Brass City felt, faced with the luxuries of the Silver City above them? It was, she realized, how many of her peers would want them to think. It was not what Jehan believed. She did not want to think he believed that.

  Her chin snapped up. If she was filthy, it was because she had had to crawl through filth to make her way here. It did not define her. It should not shame her. She gripped the handle firmly and turned it.

  The next room was as ornate as the first, although here the trees were blossoming, rather than in fruit, and their colors were paler: fresh greens and yellows, cream and peach and pink, or speckled with dark letter marks. She crossed this room too and opened its inner doors on another, patterned with new leaves and winter-blooming flowers. Room followed upon room, and she found herself in a winter landscape, white décor on white walls hinting at snow-laden trees, their boles patterned with curls and lines like a memory of writing. The handles of the doors were shaped like icicles—she half expected them to sear her hands with cold when she touched them.

  The room beyond it was completely unlike its predecessors. A smooth oval, it swept away from her to either side, its floor made of some sparkling green stone and cut with many intertwining channels. Slender pillars rose up at regular intervals, spreading out at their tops to form delicate fan vaulting, painted in all the shades known to water. In the center of the room stood a great alabaster basin, cupped within a fine net of worked gold. At each of its compass points hung scoops, like those the river priests of the twin cities used to lave their hands before the great and lesser rituals. Aude’s hand rose to touch the earring once again. Everywhere around her—in the shapes of the channels, the painted pillars, in the tracing on the great gold net—its pattern of flower and leaf was reiterated. But the channels were dry, their curves disturbed by the hooks and dashes of clerk’s script, or blocked by odd crystalline growths mimicking the shape of cogs or chains. The sense of imbalance vibrated under her fingertips, as if she heard some note just outside the reach of her ears. She hesitated in the doorway. Amid the notes of yeast and musk was the heady touch of oil and water. The air thrummed with it, even brighter here than in the preceding rooms. It ran through her veins and fizzed through her flesh until she felt as if she might float away. Dreamily, dizzily, she stripped off her spoiled garments and dropped them on the threshold. Naked, she padded to the basin and knelt beside it. It was full to its brim with water, shimmering blue-black. She bent over it, and its scent reached her, drowning the yeast smell of the air. It slipped over her fingers like silk, and her grime dissolved into it, leaving no trace. She poured it over herself in slow scoopfuls, eyes half closed, body swaying under that fragile touch. She tipped a double scoop over her head and watched the dirt rinse away. Her hair swung around her in diamond-scattered waves, hanging to her waist. In the same dream, she rehung the scoop and reached for one of the piles of cloth—no,
of clothing—that lay pooled on the floor here as in the earlier rooms. Crystals clinked as she touched it. She crouched down to remove them, one by one, from within the folds. Here a leg bone, and there the curve of a rib; here the narrow finger bones and there the plates of the skull. She laid each down in careful order, and they whispered under her touch. Lord of the harvests, grant me peace…the corn is drying in its husks, and my flesh fades with it… Her hands lingered over them, tasting memories that had never been her own. She walked amid fields of tall maize, and the stalks bowed in toward her, gilding her green skin with their fragments. The wings with which she reached out to them were fine and iridescent, covered not in feathers but in soft leather. She bowed her head and saw, behind her eyes, all the myriad colors of darkness weave their unending braids. She threw back her head, and her hair was warm and sweet as a stolen kiss. Her fingers gathered up the clothing almost mechanically, stepping into silk trousers, tying the long strings of undergarments around her torso, wrapping over them first a cinnamon-colored underrobe, then one in rust, and over them both a heavy brocade garment in green and gold and black, hanging in swaying folds to trail across the floor behind her. A long amber sash bound her waist, its ties worked with chiming golden beads. Around her neck, she hung chains of metal and gems; she weighted her wrists in silky bangles. The mass of her hair was already, somehow, dry, and she twisted it into a rope as thick as her arm, winding it into place with pearl-headed pins. All around her, the bright air hung, caressing and approving. The surface of the water in the great basin showed her a dainty creature garbed in the fullest blush of spring, skin glowing where the shining waters had kissed it, her hair swinging about her in great cascades of blue-green. She had forgotten that she owned such beauty. A creamy smile spread over her lips with the delight of it all as she turned her head from side to side to watch the bright air play over her hair, listening to the music of her bangles. Around her ankles, sparks of light dawned in the curves of the crystal bones. She rose up onto her toes and spun for the pure joy of it, felt the soft breeze slide around her in counterpoint. It slipped long fingers under the skirts of the robe and set them dancing. Words she could almost read shimmered across them, elusive as a half-known language, making her laugh and laugh. When she offered her hands, the breeze dropped its admiring kisses on her palms. She laughed with it and let it draw her away from her basin, along the room toward the great golden door that stood at its opposite end.

  A sigh washed across the floor, shaking bones from their beds of fabric. One by one they slipped and rolled and dropped free; one after another they tripped and rattled and pitter-pattered their way in her wake. Their rainbow lights made for her a carpet, a garden through which she waded ankle deep. The water had rinsed her clean of the detritus of the cistern, but still with every other step she left a trail of blood, and the bones cleaved to it.

  She reached the door and halted before it. It was featureless and smooth, its dull surface casting a faint honey glow back into the room. When she placed her hand upon it, it was warm. She could almost believe it breathed; as she touched it, a faint thrum shivered up through her fingers, into her wrists and arms and shoulders. Her head tipped back; her eyelids sagged, and she slid to the ground in a whisper of brocade.

  Her arm cracked on a bone, hard, and sent a shock back up through her. She gasped, and her eyes snapped open. Against her side, the metal of the door seared her, and she jerked away.

  She was blockaded by bones. They set themselves around her, each crowding up against its neighbor. Their shining sides were sharp as a barber’s blade. And where she had trod…One by one, the bones drew her blood to them, winding it around them in sticky threads that bound one to the next. Aude swallowed. They were rebuilding themselves and using her blood to do it. And where the shimmering water had touched her…Everywhere she looked, droplets of blood were forming, welling up through her pores, sinking into her borrowed clothes, running down her spine and forearms and brow. She tried to rise and found that the fabric held her fast, weighing her down to the floor. She tugged at its fastenings, and they knotted themselves tighter, slicing into her fingers. Against her naked ankles, crystal brushed, smooth and chill and deadly.

  A sound—a whimper—rose in her throat. She clamped it down, put a hand over her mouth to hold it. She must not be afraid. She could not afford it. She must rise—somehow—she must free herself of whatever power this place and its creatures had cast over her. She must live. She had to live. If she died, how could Jehan ever find her? The silky touch of bone rolled its way up over her calf, and she shuddered.

  The earring jerked in her lobe, a quick clean pain amid all this slithering horror. She gasped again and remembered the knife. Liyan’s knife. When she stripped and changed, she had tucked it into her sash. She could feel it there still, solid against her ribs. She clutched at it, and the hilt soothed the ache in her palm. She leaned into the door, fighting to ignore its heat, and pushed upward, forcing limbs to uncurl from beneath the robes. They resisted her. Even as she pulled, strands of black embroidery uncoiled themselves and stretched out long suckers to the ground. The words from her garments…They were alive, these things…She reached over and slashed at them with the knife. Strands snapped before it, springing back, and she tugged upward again. There was a ripping sound, a sheet of hot pain, and then she was standing. Droplets of blood fanned out about her, misting the air. All around, bones clicked and chimed as they climbed onto one another, weaving themselves upright in their red, bloody web. From somewhere came a deep, dusky thrumming.

  A knife might draw blood. She did not know if it could also cut it. Well, she was about to find out. She longed for the carbine, to blow the crystal into shards. It was lost to her, along with Jehan. She must make do with what she had and waste no more time in regret. With her dagger, she cut through the sash and the strings of the robes, sliced them from her shoulders. Better naked than garbed in treachery. The long hair still swung around her, and she shook it back. It doesn’t seem to want to hurt me. She would think about that later. She set her teeth and swung out at the nearest pile of bones.

  They rumbled, moving toward her with a stumbling, halting gait. Blood—could she really have bled that much?—dripped from them, staining the floor. The blade slid from the smooth surface of something, caught in the crevice of another. Hanging on to it with both hands, she tugged, then twisted with all the weight she could muster. There was a sharp, sour crack, and a cloud of tiny biting shards flew up around her. She ducked her head, cringed backward, felt the fragments bite into her arms and flank. More blood… That could only help her enemy. She pulled back, considered. If instead she cut through the web…A whip of bones reached out for her, and she ducked, slashing at it. The bloody strands were tough as animal sinew, resisting her. She forced her arm downward. The tendril snapped with a sudden twang, and she threw her arms up to protect herself. Bones dropped, sprang back in a shower of shards. Sticky strands of blood latched onto her forearms, tugging. She twisted, trying to break free, and the threads bound themselves to her all the more tightly. She could not get the knife to them; her wrists could not bend like that. She stepped back and collided with the door. It, too, laid hold of her, clinging to the wounds in her flank. She threw herself forward, cried out as her skin tore. Bones flew up around her, grazing, binding, biting.

  The floor rippled. At first, she thought her eyes betrayed her, confused by the swirling net of blood and crystal fragments. She was bound by them, trapped and trammeled on all sides, and their hunger set needle teeth into her everywhere. In front of her, the flat stone of the floor rose, stirred like troubled waters. Another danger… She could move no farther, held as she was in the trap of her own blood. Stone flowed outward, and a figure broke upward broad and dark, its hands filled, it seemed, with some deep shadowed light. Sickles… Wicked crescents of obsidian struck, and several bloody strings fell about in a moist shower. Aude gasped, shivered, anticipating the slash of those blades against her body. The f
igure spun, scythes dancing around it, breaking through more strands. She coughed, nose and mouth filling with salt and iron. A wind roared around her, drawn in the wake of those sickle blades. More threads snapped, and she squeezed her eyes shut as bones shattered on every side. The door let her go with a slow, sucking pop. Rocked, buffeted, whirled into confusion, she dropped to her knees and coiled herself tight against the onslaught. Her skin prickled and started, flinched and quivered under the rain of tiny crystal spikes and soft damp droplets. She knotted her arms beneath her thighs, the haft of her dagger cold against her flesh.

  The wind stilled. She stayed unmoving. What next? She could not bear to imagine. She did not want to move. She was chilled, her skin slick now and burning with the stinging of many tiny cuts. She was bleeding all over, a gift to the ravenous bones that haunted this room. It could be a matter of minutes, nothing more. She would be ripped to pieces; she would be spun apart and devoured…

  Hands settled on her shoulders, heavy as iron. She shrieked, coiling tighter. A thread of wind slipped its way around her and spread its fingers on her flesh. She could not fold tight enough to prevent it. It pushed at her, pried her fingers apart. She fought it and cried out again as her muscles and tendons were forced into submission and the iron hands lent their strength to her tormenter. She came to her knees, weeping and struggling and shaking and found herself eye to eye with Sujien.