by Sarah Remy
“Nay!” Mal lunged forward even as Liam shouted protest. The Rani sprang in the same instant. Mal found himself held in place by a long dagger, needle-thin point pressed firmly beneath his chin, tasting his blood. The Rani’s grip on the weapon steady, her weight against his back implacable. Mal cursed, pulling at the ivory shackles, watching helplessly as Liam and Baldebert tussled.
For all Liam’s limited experience, the lad and the man were evenly matched, Liam unnaturally quick as he ducked and dodged away, eluding capture. He managed to knock away Baldebert’s grasping hand, and kick the older man solidly in the gut, overturning the stool in his haste. But Baldebert had strength and maturity on his side; as Liam became more agitated Baldebert steadied, even as he limped, one hand pressed to his ribs.
They circled each other warily, Liam baring sharp teeth in a snarl. Baldebert huffed through his nose, exasperated.
“Come, lad,” he coaxed. “If I meant to kill you I’d have done so before now. Plenty of opportunities to toss you overboard, weren’t there?”
“I’ll not be separated from my lord.” Liam licked his lips nervously, and the flick of his red tongue between pointed incisors made the Rani draw a startled breath. The dagger at Mal’s throat bit deeper, stinging.
“Tell your apprentice to stand,” the woman warned, bending to speak into Mal’s ear. “Or I will have him destroyed, and happily. His kind have long been unwelcome on the mountain.”
Mal hesitated, but when Liam made an aborted move toward the crackling brazier, he put an end to the contest.
“Stay,” he ordered. “Now is not the time. Go and eat.”
“But, my lord—” Liam looked very much as if he hoped to scatter the hot coals over his opponent.
“Stay,” Mal insisted. “I’ve seen enough angry fire to last me. Step aside. Admiral, you’ll see my lad safe and returned to me, I’ll have your word as a seaman and a prince.”
“My word,” Baldebert promised, with a gentleness Mal hadn’t suspected. If Liam’s strangeness set the Rani on edge, Baldebert seemed oblivious. “You trusted me on deck, lad, do so again. Your master is safer inside the Broken Palace than anywhere else in the world. Think. I didn’t gamble my life on the Long Sea solely for Isa’s crooked entertainment.”
Liam looked at Mal. Mal quirked his brows in silent admonition.
“Fine,” the lad agreed. He shifted his glare up and over Mal’s right shoulder. “But, mistress, you damage Lord Malachi and my word I’ll slit you nose to tail with your own ugly little blade, and nothing stopping me.”
“BE CHARY OF that one,” the Rani warned Mal when they were alone in the cubby, the woman’s blade safely up her sleeve again. “In my grandfather’s time, armies of good men were spent to bone, chasing the Ishtipachas—demons—from our forests and rivers. Necromancer you may be, but the trickster lords are older than even the first of you.”
“If you want my help you’ll see him well cared for.” Mal could feel the trickle of drying blood on his throat, and longed to scratch. Instead he contented himself with studying the room once again. The dimensions were off, the space too narrow to match what he’d seen of the tapestry-clad walls beyond.
“Clever is as clever does,” he murmured, tilting his head at the wardrobe. “False wall, Rani?”
“The golden tower is riddled with false passageways,” the woman agreed. “But what you see is something different. I’m going to release you now.” Her fingers were cool on his wrists. “Remember where you are, please, and that my brother does indeed have your apprentice in hand.”
Mal gasped aloud when the ivory cuffs fell away. Blood that had tingled in the warmth of his wakened vocent’s jewel now rushed and burned through his veins as nerves remembered their place. He brought his hands protectively to his chest, biting the inside of his cheek to keep from groaning. The yellow jewel cast an ugly light over his barasati.
“Uncomfortable to be chained so long,” the Rani agreed, walking around to Mal’s front, old ivory dangling from her fingers. “Baldebert especially argued long against the necessity, but I couldn’t hope you’d come willingly, not after your king denied our request so many times.”
Mal’s magic came back on dry land with far more control than it had over deep water. A gentle swelling of strength and heat, it brought fleeting dizziness like an old wine consumed too quickly, and made the hair on his body stand in delight. He could feel the minute life in the soil beneath his feet, the greater force attached to the soldiers in the tower, the people in the bailey. The muted hum of ghosts in the mountain, and the breathing of Khorit’s Heart, an inhale and exhale on the other side of the wall, the Rani’s ruddy flame of desperation, and the delicate spark of life sheltered within her womb. She was pregnant and, Mal supposed, likely willing to risk much to protect her bloodlines.
“I should kill you now,” he said. “If only to make a point. I’m not a nursery toy at the mercy of the strongest kingdom. I am a man. I should turn your walls molten and make for you a new ‘memory keeper’ of gold and ruby, all skeleton and char.”
The Rani stood composed. “Another gamble I’m willing to take; you won’t strike me down. Whatever happened on the deep water convinced my brother you’re a good man, and Baldebert’s trust isn’t easily earned, and rarely so quickly. He’s not usually wrong.” The rubies on her crown and slippers flashed as she tied the old ivory to her waist with a piece of ribbon, securing the manacles. “And if he is, well. You’ll not return home without Baldebert’s aid. No flatlander captain will brave the Long Sea this time of year, no matter your king’s ransom.”
Mal rolled his wrists. His skin was chafed raw.
“Clothes,” he said, an order. “Proper clothes. And food.”
“All of those,” she promised. “And more. All of Roue, at your disposal. But first, walk with me, Malachi.” When he stood rigid, the Rani bowed her head in quiet supplication. “Please.”
“My city,” he said quietly, “is overrun with plague. My people are dying in the streets. I’m meant to be there. I’m needed in Wilhaiim. Children are dying. I’m needed.”
Whatever the Rani saw on Mal’s face made her reach again for the ivory cuffs. Her hand hovered at her waist, then stilled. Her jaw firmed. Mal, who recognized that stubborn set from his own monarch’s face, knew she had no room for empathy.
“Baldebert’s mercenaries found you a day’s ride from the flatlander capitol,” she pointed out, cold. “They followed you from the city’s very gates to the edge of the sea and there they struck the deal that brought you across the Long Sea to my mountain. You wandered far afield for a man concerned with the health of his city.”
Mal opened his mouth on a snarl, shut it again when he caught the green sparks cascading from his fingertips to the hard-packed floor. The ring on his finger burned from yellow to orange. The Rani startled as sparks rained across the edge of her slippers, yet still she didn’t flinch.
“Standing here,” she said. “We only waste time. I’ve none to spare. If you speak the truth, neither do you. Will you come?”
Mal curled his fingers into his palms. The Rani took his silence as acquiescence, and turned away. Mal limped after. She led him away from the narrow entrance and into the wardrobe itself. Mal followed, twisting to avoid the broom and bucket. He thought she would reveal a hidden door at the back of the cupboard. Instead the Rani pulled the wardrobe doors shut, twisting a loop of rope to hold them in place. Mal conjured a mage-light to banish the darkness. The Rani eyed the glowing sphere without expression, then picked up the broom and knocked the wooden handle firmly against the cupboard ceiling.
An answering thump sounded from above. The wardrobe lurched. Mal flung out one hand to steady himself, narrowly missing the Rani, and only then realized that his vocent’s ring had gone dark. He heard a distinctive squeak and squeal through the wood, and then the wooden cupboard began to rise
up along black glass walls, leaving latched doors behind. A lift, Mal realized, not unlike Selkirk’s smaller mechanical one.
“Stand away from the edge,” the Rani warned. “The shaft is cut very precisely, but it’s easier on the engines if we stay to the middle.”
“The engines.” Mal scowled at his companion, thinking of the gray-faced men and women chained to the gut of Baldebert’s ship. “Slaves, you mean.” He sent his light drifting closer to the ceiling. “How does it work?”
“A system of weights and pulleys and willing prisoners.” She avoided his scowl, staring instead at the mage-light. “Be still, necromancer. It’s a long way up.”
He quenched the mage-light and closed his eyes and sent his magic questing away from the lift and through the golden tower. The fingers of his sorcery flexed cautiously. The madness of shipboard was gone, but the taste of life lingered still, of Baldebert’s essence sweet and light as honey, and Liam like boiled sugar, and the sharper, dusty corpse-spirits unspooled to bolster his power. He could feel the dead here, thronging the golden edifice, walking the mountain, legions of forgotten ghosts tethered to Būṛhē Adamī.
Mal pulled the basarati snug about his shoulders for warmth, even as he wondered if the Rani would taste as honey-sweet as her brother, whether the tiny life she carried would taste of anything at all.
The lift jerked. Mal opened his eyes. A narrow crack of light fell across the back of the cupboard and over his sandaled feet; a second set of wooden doors, secured with a second loop of rope, but not quite flush. Golden sunlight fell through the divide. Mal blinked at tiny motes of dust or soil set to glittering and dancing in the air. The Rani untwisted the rope latch, and used both palms to push the wooden doors outward and open.
“Khorit’s Eye,” she said, stepping out into a dazzle of gold. Mal didn’t miss the lilt of dark amusement on her tongue. “Once called Úântikç Bindu, the ‘Point of Peace,’ until my uncle took it as his own.”
There was a wind, but not the hot spring gust Mal was used to. This wind plucked at his cape with icy fingers, whipped around the tip of the golden tower with a sound like laughter, and shook broadleafed trees where they grew in giant black pots. The wind snuck under Mal’s matted hair and lifted it from his neck with a cold kiss and the promise of flying.
“Steady.” The Rani held out one hand, enameled nails flashing in the sunlight. “So high up, sometimes there is vertigo.”
“Nay.” Mal remembered vertigo from The Cutlass Wind. He craned his neck much as Liam had earlier. “We’re at the top of the world. Your ancestors had great sorcery indeed to build so high.”
The Rani was eloquent in her silence.
A pennant flapped overhead, yellow crescent on green, and now that Mal stood near, as large as a man. The narrow balcony circled the tower’s apex, a crow’s nest in blue sky. Instead of rigging, a golden wall as high as Mal’s shoulder kept a man from falling into thin air. Tajit stood against the closest curve, directly across from the lift’s open doors, and his ugly face was expectant.
He crooked a finger. Curiosity sent Mal to the man’s side. He stood at the wall and blinked against the wind and looked out onto Roue. From so high the ground below appeared as nothing so much as a patchwork quilt, green and yellow and shades of brown, cut into near-perfect rectangles by the blue of irrigation trenches. Mal knew from his journey in the oxen cart that Roue was far from flat, but standing at the top of the world he could barely see the swell of the land, and the forests were only a strip of deeper green against the oryza fields, and Old Man Mountain a knife pinning Roue flat.
“Look south,” Tajit suggested. “There is the sea.”
It was a haze of white fog bordering green. Mal imagined he could smell the salt.
“Beautiful,” Mal admitted. “My own land is not so verdant, nor so rich.”
The wind ruffled the Rani’s dark hair, tangling strands in the sharp edges of her crown. She brushed them away, impatient. “Tajit.”
Tajit pushed himself off the wall. “This way,” he said, and disappeared around the tower’s narrow circumference, ducking once to avoid the flapping pennant. Mal followed more slowly, the Rani’s stare a weight between his shoulders.
“There,” Tajit pointed southeast. “The tarnish in the shine.”
A spreading patch of black, fallow fields, like spilled ink on the green parchment. Mal squinted, put his hands on the wall, leaned forward. Not barren fields, he saw, but a great mass of men, an army in the fields. He could just make out the flicker of their fires, and the glint of sunlight on metal. Carrion birds circled overhead, black-winged specks that made Mal think of Jacob.
“The Lord of the Poppies,” Mal guessed. “Come to retake his mountain?”
“It was never his to claim,” the Rani said. She folded her hands atop the golden wall, gazed down at the army. “Roue belonged always to my mother, and Khorit Dard content to stand in the shadows at her side. Until he wasn’t, and he put the oil of the purging nut in her tea and left her to die in the baths.”
“Purging nut.” Mal frowned at the distant army. “Curcas? Brown seed, and a messy death?”
Tajit snorted. “We use it to poison the oryza rats.”
“He’s gathered an impressive following.” Wind snuck beneath Mal’s barasati. His wrists stung. He rubbed the pain away. “All of Roue must lie beneath his banner.”
“Not Roue,” the Rani said. “We are a peaceful people. Farmers. Craftsmen. Those are my father’s folk, yellow-eyed men from the eastern desert. They’ve traveled for a season over the sands to wear his colors. He’s promised them great wealth when he retakes the towers.”
“So much gold would drive even a modest soldier to desperate measures,” said Mal.
Tajit laughed. “Gold.” His damaged face worked in amusement. “Gold is nothing. You’ve heard of our purging nut, necromancer, our rat poison. Do you also know the flesh of the poppy, the opion?”
“It’s my fields he wants,” the Rani explained. “The fertile land and the knowledge of my people.” She turned at last away from the distant army. “My mother ordered his dangerous flowers ripped from the earth, the fields flooded. So he killed her.”
Tajit moved to stand at the Rani’s side, chest puffed with pride.
“Khorit Dard didn’t count on the wrath of his children,” the man said. “But fifteen summers old, Isa took her mother’s spear and plunged it through Khorit’s breast plate, even as young Baldebert took him in the side with his practice sword.”
The Rani set a hand on Tajit’s shoulder. “I missed. The Heart deflected my blow, broke Mother’s spear. But my brother’s toy sword took Khorit through the shoulder, and my mother’s serving women dragged him through the bailey, rolled him off the mountain. Two winters later, he returned with a mongrel army five times the size of our own. He tried to take the mountain again and failed. He’s been camped in our eastern fields ever since, making trouble for the villagers, ruining the oryza where he can, raiding farmsteads, sending furtive packs of his yellow-eyed sell-swords again and again at the mountain.”
“More fool he.” Tajit shook his head.
Mal studied the Rani, noted the few strands of silver in her dark hair, remembered the babe in her womb.
“How long have you been waging war? Three summers? Five?”
“Ten,” the Rani touched fingers to her crown. “Father and I, we’ve been facing each other across mother’s flooded fields for a very long time.”
THEY TOOK MAL back down the lift, and across the black glass foyer. Men and women lingering between potted trees or rushing about on private business watched Mal with interest, a few with palpable disapproval. Mal didn’t miss Tajit’s sword loosened in its sheath, or the Rani’s defiant stride.
A decade at war meant peace was a distant memory. Mal wondered if it had been forgotten.
A second
, much larger lift waited at the far side of the foyer. Mal stepped in without encouragement; he wanted nothing more than food and time to think. Two dangerous-looking soldiers followed Tajit and the Rani into the lift, and pulled the doors shut. Mal braced himself for ascent, but instead the lift dropped, falling steadily. Mal could feel the bones of the mountain pressing close. He suppressed a shudder, disliking the image.
The lift shuddered and stopped. Neither the Rani nor her men evidenced any alarm. A moment passed, and then the lift dropped again, more slowly. The air in the cupboard became noticeably cooler. Mal shivered convulsively, chilled first from the tower heights, and now in the depths of the earth. He swallowed a curse, and chafed again at his wrists in search of distraction.
Their descent slowed and then stopped. Tajit hauled a new pair of doors open. Baldebert and Liam waited on the other side of the threshold. Baldebert held a torch. Liam chewed an apple core, at ease and dressed in a clean clothes and new boots.
“They’ve made us a room in the dungeons, my lord.” Liam explained. “It’s not so bad. Hot food and warm bedding, and Admiral Baldebert says tomorrow we can kill the Flower Lord and then he’ll ship us home again.”
Mal didn’t miss Tajit’s subtle step between Liam and the Rani, or the wry twist of Baldebert’s mouth.
“Mayhap my lord could be convinced to wait a few weeks, until the weather clears,” Baldebert said, his attention on Mal’s freed wrists. “Sister?”
“Brother,” the Rani replied. She bowed once in Mal’s direction. “I’ll leave you and my admiral to your hot meal and gossip. Rest easy; you’re well protected in the mountain. Tomorrow we’ll speak again.”
The soldiers edged Mal out of the lift and into the mountain. He was too cold and weary to put up a fuss, too distracted to enjoy their start of surprise when he sent mage-light spinning ahead down the hall, snuffing Baldebert’s torch as it passed.
