The Stone in the Skull

by Elizabeth Bear

  “And where am I supposed to find another crewman between here and Sarathai-lae?” Druja complained. One man had been tossed overboard in the collision, and crushed between ice-boat and trap.

  The Gage didn’t even bother shrugging. Logistics, thank the gods, were not his department.

  “Examine the benefits,” said the Dead Man with intentional fatuousness. “Didn’t it work out well that you invested in a pair of caravan guards after all?”

  “Well,” said Druja. “I’d hate to have wanted you and not had you. I’ll go that far.”

  He turned his back and went to reboard the second boat. Nizhvashiti looked after him, looked at the Dead Man, and shrugged. “You’re getting paid for this?”

  “Nobody,” the Dead Man replied, “said anything about dragons.”

  “Ice-drake,” the Gage corrected.

  The Dead Man ignored him.

  “I’ll take the last boat,” Nizhvashiti said. “You two stick together for now.”

  * * *

  The river eventually vanished into an unnavigable gully while the road rose up the flank of the mountain above it, so they had to pull the ice-boats out again, affix axles and wheels in place of the runners, and replace the oxen with teams from another tiny supply depot, this one no more than a cluster of tents and corrals and a tax official or two. They also managed to replace the ruined ice-boat with a somewhat rickety wagon, and the caravan continued on toward the border with the first of the Lotus Kingdoms.

  They toiled until they crested the pass, and the Gage could set aside the harness with which he had been assisting the oxen. The Dead Man had come up beside him, leaving the Godmade to the back of the caravan. A shoulder of the mountain, sheer rock above and not much more than that below, divided them from the forward view.

  They came around the bend.

  The Dead Man stopped short as if struck. The Gage caught him by the elbow and kept them moving, so they were not trampled by the cattle hauling the ice-boat just behind. But if he had not been a machine, the Gage would have been pausing too, in wonder.

  They had stepped from daylight into a starry, brilliant night, with the sharp demarcation of a border crossing. But their journey from Messaline had been full of starry, brilliant nights. What the Dead Man now craned his head back to see was a thin pale braided slant of light across the indigo heavens, like an arch viewed from below—and against it, the stark circular silhouette of a blackness so utter it might have been a hole in the sky. It was ringed in a corona of whispery, transparent tongues of flame that shimmered like mother-of-pearl. These, and the stars, and the bright arch, all cast a phantasmal light across the snowy peaks behind, and the sloping valley before. It was as bright as a dim, overcast day—and like such a day, it cast no shadows. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it cast myriad shadows, each pale and overlapping, so the effect was still of a light quite directionless.

  “The Cauled Sun,” said the Dead Man, his words ruffling his veil. “And the Heavenly River. Well, we’re here.”

  The Gage knew the Dead Man’s deadpan sarcasm shrouded embarrassment at having been overcome. He had recovered himself enough to keep walking without the Gage leading him.

  The Gage’s voice rang even-toned, as if spoke a bell. “We’ve got a fair number of Lotus Kingdoms to get through before we take our boots off. But at least we’re under the right sky.”

  They walked a while longer, while the ice-boats and the wagon rattled and clattered behind them. The way grew steeper. The edge of the darkness lifted above the shoulders of the mountains behind them, revealing a brilliant edge of blue and vermilion to the north—at the edge of the world, a bright Lotus evening dawned. It was less like a sunrise as the Gage knew them and more like a beautiful woman lifting the gauzy edge of her veil, showing a soft and gold expanse of skin. The Cauled Sun set before them, dropping in the south, and the arch of stars overhead became a braided star-river of such brilliance that though no nightsun rose and the temperature dropped with evening, the light was several times brighter than it had been during the day.

  This was the Heavenly River, the glorious twist of light that made the peoples of the Lotus Kingdoms wake by night, in general, and sleep in the dimmer, warmer day.

  The caravan halted when the teamsters called a pause to hitch the draft animals behind the ice-boats, where they could brake them, and the Gage—who was impervious to the cold—watched the Dead Man stomp and blow and pace up and down, chilled again due to altitude and nightfall.

  He gestured to the sky. “This is bright enough to see by. To read by! We could be moving!”

  “We’ll be traveling through the Boneless’s territory,” the Gage observed. “There’ll be bandits there.”

  “Privateers, you mean.” The Lotus prince known as the Boneless was more of a bandit lord, when it came right down to it. He was notorious for encouraging rogues and reavers and outlaws, so long as they paid him tribute and didn’t hunt his own property or anyone who owed him fealty. And his kingdom’s position right on the border of the Rasan Empire and the Lotus Kingdoms, along one of the major trade routes, meant that he did better on that than he would have done on “legitimate” taxes and bribes—and that caravans coming from the west were hard-pressed to avoid his lands.

  The Dead Man turned his head and spat. “I have heard it said that he got his name as the Boneless because he’s cunning as a snake. I’ve heard it argued also that it’s because he’s impotent.”

  “They call him the Boneless because he’s Boneless, you daft twat.” The Gage would have been smiling when he said it, if he had the means to smile.

  “How could it be that a person was actually boneless—without bones—and live? Does he bear a curse? Did he anger a god?” The Dead Man shuddered. He took gods much more seriously than the Gage reckoned they deserved.

  “I heard he was born that way.” And wasn’t that horrid to think about? It seemed a good time for a change of subject.

  There was always the future. Both the Gage and the Dead Man had good reasons to prefer the prospect of the future to the prospect of the past. There was only one more pass between them and the descent into the flatlands of the western Lotus Kingdoms, the lands along the Sarathai. Maybe it was a good time to start planning.

  “Once we drop the package off,” the Gage asked, “have you given some thought to what we might do next?”

  The Dead Man scuffed his hands together in their mittens, then stuffed them back in the pockets of his coat. “Would you consider my answer?”

  “I assume we’re not settling down and digging a farm.”

  The Dead Man shrugged. A seam on the shoulder of his dull red coat was going. “I await the word of God to guide my choices. She will send a sign, perhaps. In some fashion.”

  The mountain wind whipped the Gage’s hood back from the smooth mirror of his mask. “Having any luck with that?”

  The Dead Man turned at the creak of traces, but the ice-boats were still being rehitched. He turned back and shook his head behind the veils. “Alas, not yet. My god is a stern god, and perhaps it is Her belief that I ought to be old enough to look it up by now.”

  * * *

  Perhaps God was in the air, the Gage thought, for in the dark of night—or perhaps it should be the dark of day, when the Cauled Sun floated in the starry sky above, and the brilliance of the Heavenly River that so strikingly illuminated the sunless hours was dimmed—when all the others should have been asleep, he followed a thin chiming strand of music through the camp and into the scant, piney forest clinging up the walls of steep-sided canyon. Frozen pine needles cracked and sank under the Gage’s mass, until his cleated brass feet rested on the bark of the hardscrabble roots clutching the slopes beneath them. The pines made their own soil, and held the mountainside together through force of will as much as anything.

  The snow was wind-scraped thin—frosted across the surface like sanding sugar, caught in the little rough chevrons made by the pine needles—so at least
the Gage did not have to wade through that.

  He climbed, thinking of a time when the sensation would have come with the welcome stretch and pull of working muscle. There was no effort in the activity now, and so, no joy. But the thread of music still tugged him, and as he raised himself tirelessly step by heavy step up the slope, it resolved itself into the peal of tiny silver bells.

  He made enough noise for a battalion, and so did not expect to surprise anyone. The chiming continued, though, and as the Gage paused at the edge of a clearing he was surprised in his own right to find that all his racket apparently had done nothing to disturb the musician.

  The Godmade sat cross-legged on the cold ground in the shadows of the sparse pines, narrow body robed only in a thin sheath of black-dyed linen, eye lowered to the floss stretched between spread and upraised fingers. The strand would have been crimson in better light, the Gage judged. Minuscule bells—silver, and seemingly tissue-walled—were knotted onto the silk at regular intervals, and they chimed with each calculated motion of Nizhvashiti’s hands.

  A low murmur of prayer rose and fell like the rhythmic babble of a brook. The Gage had found the Godmade at devotions.

  He waited politely, observing, certain that he could not have arrived unnoticed and therefore could not be eavesdropping. His kind were not built to pass unobserved. If Nizhvashiti wished privacy, the Godmade had only to turn and stare at him.

  Since no glare was forthcoming, the Gage assumed he was not unwelcome, and settled in to watch.

  It was a simple ritual, a counting and ringing of bells while the prayers were chanted. Some time passed, and Nizhvashiti at last bowed to the earth, raised the floss and the bells overhead, and then touched forehead once more to the earth. The Godmade seemed untroubled by the cold despite bare hands and feet, but as Nizhvashiti reached forward and raised a small brass cup from its place nested among the needles, the Gage’s senses prickled and he stepped forward.

  Nizhvashiti was about to press cup to lips when the Gage very gently insinuated a hand over the opening.

  Nizhvashiti frowned up at him. “Why do you interrupt the ritual?”

  “Godmade—”

  “I am no more so than you.”

  “Oh, I was made by a Wizard’s hand, not that of any deity.” The Gage shook his featureless mask. “You must not drink that. It is a deadly poison.”

  “I know,” Nizhvashiti said. “I brewed it.”

  The Gage kept his regard on the priest’s face. It was calm, and Nizhvashiti did not seem like somebody contemplating suicide. Why would you fight off an ice-drake and negotiate with a brigand if all you craved was death? Unless it was death in one’s own homeland, the Gage supposed: they had just gained the borders of the Lotus Kingdoms.

  Slowly, the Gage pulled back his hand. Just as slowly, Nizhvashiti finished the arc of the little figured cup, and drank—first the poison, and then what seemed to be pure water, poured from a little flask. The priest winced at the taste, and then grimaced as if in mild pain, but made no other sign of discomfiture.

  The Gage watched with renewed interest. It occurred to him that he had never seen the Godmade take nourishment—not even his own diet of mystically imbibed wine. When Nizhvashiti had taken a final mouthful of water, rinsed and spat into the snow, the Gage asked, “Are you like the Wizards of the Citadel, then, to transmute the poison in your veins into nutriment?”

  “Oh no.” Nizhvashiti settled back in a far more relaxed pose. The string of bells vanished up a dark sleeve and was silenced there. “It is poison. But I am … accustomed to it. And in its fashion it sustains me.”

  “Do you eat and drink nothing else?”

  A smile on the skull-spare face, squinting the good brown eye and leaving untouched the staring blank of the gilded one. “A bit here and there. I require very little. I learned the discipline in the Banner Islands, and I have pursued it for years now. It would be a pity to let all that practice and discomfort go to waste.”

  “Discomfort?”

  The Godmade winced again. “It is poison.”

  “But it serves a purpose.”

  The Godmade closed the seeing eye. The blind one gazed at nothing as Nizhvashiti reclined carefully on the frozen needles, moving as if burdened with limbs of some fragile substance like spun glass. “What do you know of the Good Daughter, metal man?”

  The Gage thought on it. She was one of the Lotus goddesses. He had seen icons of her. She seemed to him as if she might not be dissimilar to Kaalha, the Messaline goddess of death and mercy whose face was the half-scarred, half-pristine face of the moon. He had always been very fond of gentle Kaalha, in whose house there was an end to pain.

  But that was something he wondered, he decided, not something he knew.

  “Nothing,” he murmured.

  Nizhvashiti’s long body shuddered. “Awareness is the foundation of duty.”

  “Is that what the Good Daughter celebrates?”

  The priest smiled—a strained smile. “Duty. Filial devotion to the deserving parent, the Good Mother. Absolute honor and obedience to just commands. Faith to ideals and principles. She is a good and loving child.”

  The Gage thought about that. “She sounds terrifying.”

  “She is the most frightful god under any sun, metal man. Because how can absolute devotion be met other than by absolute devotion? She is ruthless in her dutifulness and even more ruthless in her compassion. She will see what must be done, and then she will do what must be done.”

  They were silent for a little while. Then the Gage said, “And this is how your people worship her?”

  Nizhvashiti laughed, a painful sound that bubbled. A little seizure shook the pine needles all around. “This is how I worship her. With a foreign rite, but one that celebrates the ruthlessness of my own duty to her. I borrowed it, and now it is mine. It does lead me to strength such as is not usually known in my order.”

  “Oh,” the Gage said.

  Slow coils of mist fingered between the black tree trunks. They were not thick enough to block the view of what scraps of starry sky could be seen between the boughs.

  “I was a foundling,” the Godmade said. “Left on the convent steps. I was raised to the Good Daughter’s service. But I was not meant to be immured in a cloister, you understand. So I chose to become a mendicant. There is an aspect of my goddess that reflects deception for the greater good, you understand. A trickster has a duty, too.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  The Godmade’s good eye opened. “Metal man. Do you think you are the only one who has wandered the world in search of a purpose? In search of answers? You think you have outlived your usefulness—”

  “I outlived my creator,” the Gage interrupted. “And I outlived my revenge.”

  Such a skin-lipped smile the drawn dry flesh almost seemed ready to crack over the bones. One corner of the thin mouth split, and the red blood that trickled free seemed thicker than it should have been, and stank heavily of metal. “There are always duties. We simply choose which ones we take up, when the ones we were born to are ended.”

  “You’re trying to convert me.”

  “I am,” the Godmade gasped, “a priest.”

  Then the jaw clicked shut on a moan, the body jerked, and Nizhvashiti’s eyes rolled back, showing a rim of white above dark lids. The priest thrashed hard, stiffened, then went completely and suddenly slack.

  The Gage bent over the stricken form, fearing this most violent convulsion had been the death throes, had done the worst. For a moment, the dimly starlit woods were silent. Some night bird (day bird?) piped and shrilled. The fog flowed down the forested slope like chilly, insubstantial water.

  A bubble rose and broke on Nizhvashiti’s lips, too desultory to have breath behind it.

  The Gage leaned closer and stroked the priest’s chill flesh with a chillier finger. Stillness, for a moment. Utter calm.

  And then a warm breath fogged the Gage’s cold mirror as Nizhvashiti coughed ou
t a rattling, stentorian exhalation and gasped back to life.

  One more shudder, another twitching spasm, and it seemed the worst had passed. Nizhvashiti lay quietly for a moment, panting. Breath slowed soon, and the priest raised one hand. “Help me up, metal man.”

  “Call me Gage,” the Gage said, and did as he was instructed.

  4

  The widowed Sayeh Rajni of Ansh-Sahal prepared herself to leave the shady, hanging gardens of her Orchid Court. It was the advent of the rains, and at dawn, she was to go out and watch the water-divers perform their annual propitiations. It was far from their only task over the course of the year, but it was the most ritually significant, and so the rajni must attend.

  Sayeh had been awakened long before nightfall by an earth tremor—the most recent of several—and so she was ready early and restless as she waited for the appointed time. She actually quite enjoyed the pomp, the circumstance, and the break from routine. She enjoyed the draping robes of fine white linen worked with silver bullion, and she enjoyed the jeweled silver sandals with their cords laced up her slender calves. She enjoyed the cosmetics and adornments and the fussing with her hair. The best thing about being rajni was the clothes.

  The second best thing was that somebody else had bathed and diapered and fed her young son Drupada, and now that Sayeh was ready to depart, the wet nurse Jagati brought him up and handed him to her, garbed in his own snow-white miniature tunic and trousers and sandals.

  “He tried to piss up my nose today,” the nurse said. “Watch it if he reaches into his nappies.”

  “He’s discovered he can aim,” Sayeh said, shaking her head. “Nothing’s safe now.”

  Sayeh balanced the toddler on her hip in the approved style, though he was getting heavy and he squirmed to get down. She bent down and pressed her nose into the crown of his head, amazed for the moment that something so big and fine had come out of her own body.

  “Hush, my little king,” she said. “We’re going to have an exciting day today.”