The Stone in the Skull

by Elizabeth Bear

  The harvest was sweet.

  The water at the top of the Bitter Sea of Sahal-Sarat was saline, warm, stagnant. Wizards said it had been trapped there for ages of the world, and as the sea shrank and shrank, the water became more salty and sterile. But the water at the deeper layers, rising from underground springs, was cold and sweet and pure. The water-divers were how Sayeh’s people got to that water, and between the rains, it was what sustained them—along with what they drew from cisterns holding saved rain, and such deep wells as they could manage to chisel into the unforgiving rock.

  Sayeh threw her hands up in victory. A good omen. A great omen, if all the water-divers came back safe today, this last dive of the season, before the rains came.

  As she began to walk back to the clifftop and her son, the sea wind freshened and shifted, becoming a cold, landward breeze. A lowering cloud that she had not noticed while watching the divers had slid across the face of the Heavenly Sahal, racing from the east, a blessing from the Sea of Storms.

  The first drops of rain spattered on the shoulders of her robe, and she smiled. Another dry season survived; her first as a widow. Perhaps she would hold her throne as regent long enough to see her son come of age and be crowned.

  * * *

  Before she could hold her throne, though, Sayeh would have to hold her position on this rain-swept, windswept stone so dizzyingly outreached above an increasingly violent sea. The storm did not slip up gently, after those first tentative drops. Instead, the rain came down like a thundering chain of glass beads hurled from a height, pounding on her head with stinging force. The air tugged at her white robes as if they were sails; the falling water blinded her. The footing grew increasingly slick and treacherous. She could not leave, however, until all the water-divers had surfaced and been hauled into the tenders. Every single one. Including that final, insolent girl.

  The tenders could not go back in until they had recovered the divers. So neither could the rajni. Especially not a widowed rajni, whose power needed the support of every grain of respect she could eke from her people.

  Sayeh glimpsed black fluttering through the driving veils of rain. She turned her head to center the motion, blinking droplets from her lashes like stinging tears. That shadowy darkness was the coat of her Citadel-educated Rasan Wizard, the estimable Tsering-la. The petaled skirts of his close-seamed black coat were sodden, but the wind was so violent that they streamed out straight as planks. He was a small, round man, with angled Rasan features, and the tight-seamed coat did not flatter him. He seemed more like a plump little blackbird hopping along the pier than a carrion crow on the wings of the storm.

  Still, he came toward her, seemingly much more anchored to the pier than she, and when he touched her arm she felt as if her feet sank through the slick of treacherous water and founded themselves strongly to the stone. Wizardry, of course.

  That was what she kept him around for.

  She turned and felt her hair stream out on the rising wind. It whipped across her face. “The divers!” she called.

  Tsering-la shook his head. “The waves are rising!”

  Sayeh bit back a curse. No: not fair. It had been a good omen! That the storms should come in a little too early and turn that into a portent of doom …

  She drew herself up, shivering in the cold rain. She was a rajni; there was no place in her vocabulary for fair or not-fair. There was only what was true, and what must be done.

  “You will aid them,” Sayeh commanded, and never knew if Tsering-la nodded his agreement because she was rajni, or because he would have done so anyway.

  A narrow, rail-less stair led down the stony cliff face from near the base of the pier. Tsering-la brought her to it, her guard surrounding them as they stepped off the stone pier so far above the angry water. Someone tried to hand Sayeh her son, who was screaming for her and wailing. She glared and snapped, “Take him back to the palanquin,” angry that it had not been done already.

  Vidhya stepped in and Sayeh gripped his arm. “Take him home. Keep him safe.”

  The guard captain did not argue. He regarded her, nodded, and took four of his men aside to briefly issue them orders. She watched her son carried away, over his violent protests, and hoped it would not be her last sight of him. She thought of her earlier promise to be with him until he was old, and hoped even more fervently that it would not be his last sight of her.

  One of the guards tried to argue her away from her course, but she simply pushed past him. He didn’t have the moral fortitude to lay hands on his rajni.

  Then somehow she and Tsering-la were on the stairs, led and followed by her men. The wind whipped past them, curled by the cliff edge, howling and trying to pluck her feet from the rain-slick stones. She hugged the wall, one hand on it, as if she could clutch the vertical rocks and somehow hold herself in place against all the savage weather could do to her.

  This, she thought, would be a wonderful time for one of the earth-tremors to which Ansh-Sahal was so disposed.

  Another step or two, though, and she realized she could see. The water in her eyes was that which dripped from her headdress and hair; the wetness on her body was from her robes plastered close to her skin. The air around them was warm and dry, the cloth of her sleeves faintly steaming. She turned her head to glance back at Tsering-la, and saw a frown of concentration and a faraway expression. He was using his Wizard’s will to bend the raging elements around them, keep them in a bubble of relative safety and comfort.

  It might have saved her life. It might have saved the lives of her guardsmen.

  Sayeh, Tsering-la, and the four guards stopped abruptly roughly twice a man’s height above the sea. The waves shattered against the stone below them so violently that Sayeh felt the impact through the stone under her soles. They could descend no farther. She turned her head; the storm still raged no more than an arm’s length away. She could put out her hand and drench her fingertips in the pummeling rain. Superstitiously, she clutched her fingers in the cloth of her robe to keep from doing so, as if her touch could somehow shatter the witchery of peace that Tsering had laid around them.

  “There’s a walkway,” Tsering-la said, gesturing. “It leads over to the dock. It’s still above the water.”

  Sayeh squinted through the falling rain. It was like trying to see through a hail of jewels; the heavy fall of water obliterated and obscured. The dock was where the tending-boats were launched from. It was accessible by a steep road cut through the cliff from above. It was long, and stone, and protected by breakwaters. And Sayeh could see that it still stood above the raging waves. Indeed, some of the tenders had tied up to it, sheltered by the breakwaters, and women and bags of water were being unloaded from them, though it was hard to tell one huddled shape from another in the rain.

  “If the waves rise, though,” the Wizard continued, “I and all the Six Thousand cannot promise to keep us from being swept off.”

  “Then we will go quickly,” Sayeh said, and urged her vanguard forward.

  The walkway was better than the stairs. As narrow, but the level surface made a world of difference. They achieved the end of the dock without trouble.

  There they found a bustle of evacuation and activity. People were hauling the tenders out of the sea, tipping them on their sides and covering them, and more people were leading protesting draft animals up the steep road, which had become the next best thing to a river. They dragged carts laden with the water sacks, and with water-divers huddled under blankets and oiled hide roofs that were doing little to keep off the rain.

  Sayeh’s guardsmen found one of the foremen of the dock. Even in the driving rain, he was identifiable by his orange hood. She pushed her way forward, Tsering-la at her flank, and demanded, “Are all my divers safe?”

  “That’s the last tender being hauled out now,” the foreman said. “We’ve found all but one of the divers.”

  “Where’s the last? Why are you hauling the boat out if one’s still out there?” Outraged, she wav
ed a hand at the bucking sea.

  He shook his head. “The sea’s too rough, Your Abundance. Even if we found her, the tender couldn’t come up to her. She’d be dashed against the side!”

  Sayeh pushed past him, waving her Wizard along as she stalked the length of the dock. The guardsmen rushed after. Sailors and water-divers ineffectually tried to prevent her march into what they must have perceived as increasing danger.

  When she reached the end of the dock, the howl of the wind and the crash of the waves was deafening even within her Wizard’s battered bubble of calm. “Tsering-la,” she shouted. “Make a light! If she’s still swimming she needs to know which way to go!”

  He raised one hand in a familiar gesture. She expected the baroque-styled, warm yellow crescents of his witch-lamps to flock and spiral above them, but instead what went up was a tower of light, a great hissing flare of lemon-white that speared up level with the clifftop and cast shadows stark as chasms before Sayeh and everyone.

  And there—sliding down the slope of a wave towering beyond the breakwater—gleamed a little pale face, visible for a bare moment in the spear of light.

  “There!” Sayeh shouted, but Tsering-la had already seen her. The gasps and cries from the onlookers had not faded when the Wizard reached out, grunting with effort, and made a gesture with his hand as if he were pressing down hard on something that struggled against him.

  Warm monsoon rains thundered on Sayeh’s head once again. They stung her eyes and plastered her lashes. She squinted under a raised hand to see; the shelter barely helped at all.

  The sea did not calm, exactly. But a patch around the valiantly swimming girl smoothed a bit, and she struggled less and stroked more easily. Tsering-la crooked his fingers and scooped, drawing toward him, and a golden glow seemed to seep and settle into the water’s surface around the diver, pulling her and the patch of smoother water in.

  She kicked forward, angling to pass behind the breakwater a good distance from its tip, in order to keep from being dashed against it. She reached the calmer waters near the dock, and now Tsering-la seemed able to assist her. She drew close fast, faster than she should have been able to swim by herself, and when she clutched the ladder up to the dock and hauled herself over the edge, Sayeh’s guards were there to help her.

  Sayeh saw that the water belt was still fastened at her waist, the long lines behind it taut with the weight of the bag she had been dragging.

  Good Daughter, Sayeh thought in awe. Here is one of your own children.

  Then the girl raised her face, and Sayeh saw it was the insolent girl, the one who had challenged her and dove last. She must have gone deep, too, to be so long returning.

  She collapsed to her hands and knees as the guards went to haul her water to the surface. Sayeh wanted to tell them to slash the damn lines, cut the silly thing loose—but the girl had almost died for her duty to return it. Sayeh would not abrogate that sacrifice.

  The wind whistled around their eerie bubble of calm as Tsering-la resumed his local protection. He bent over the girl, working her belt free, checking her for injuries. The Rasan Wizarding tradition, like the Aezin one, trained its practitioners as physicians.

  Her spine, Sayeh could not help but see, was a bony string of beads along her back. The rajni stepped forward as Tsering-la guided her into a sitting position and wrapped her in a woolen blanket some sailor had handed over.

  The girl looked up and frowned at Sayeh. She opened her mouth, then closed it, swallowed, and seemed about to speak again. Whatever she might have said, though, was interrupted by one of the guardsmen gasping “Phaugh!” as they got the water bag open and a mighty stench rolled through the little isle of calm.

  It reeked of rotten eggs, sulfur and sourness. Sayeh involuntarily took a step back herself and covered her nose with her hand. The girl turned, too, but she didn’t seem startled—and Sayeh thought there was a tiny smirk of self-satisfaction flickering about the corners of her mouth for a moment before she smoothed it into neutrality.

  Sayeh strode toward the guards and the water bag, her feet slapping on wet stone. The stench increased as she drew closer. She paused, then closed the final distance in two quick paces. Holding her breath, she plunged her hands into the sacred water and lifted it up to her lips.

  It was too rank. Like rotten soup. And warm, when the water from the deep springs should be cold and sweet. She gagged, and could not force herself to drink, or even touch it to her lips. She straightened her arms abruptly, throwing the tainted palmful away, and held her hands out far from her body to let the rain wash her fingers clean.

  When she brought them back into Tsering-la’s bubble of dryness, she saw that the skin was red and rough where the water had touched them, even from such scanting contact.

  “What is this?” she asked the water-diver, who huddled in her damp blanket and shook.

  The girl raised bottomless brown eyes. “An omen, my rajni.”

  5

  The plunge downriver became too steep for the ice-boats eventually, and in any case to follow the meandering path of the Sarathai would have taken them very far out of their way: back into the Empire and eventually all the way to Rasa itself, on the great rippled plateau where the major tributaries of the Tsarethi—as the river was called to the north, and farther east—converged. Instead, they turned right, and headed overland and through passes deeper into the Lotus Kingdoms.

  As the caravan wended south, the roads became wider and far more heavily traveled. They entered the territory of Himadra the Boneless, prince of Chandranath, with little fanfare. There was a border, and there were guards. The Dead Man lurked genially in the background while Druja the caravan master was interrogated by them.

  “Where are you going?” the one with the most gold on his uniform asked Druja.

  “Through the Lotus Kingdoms down to Sarathai-lae,” Druja answered.

  “Not to Ansh-Sahal?”

  Druja shook his head. “We’ve no cargo nor passengers for the east.”

  “Just as well,” the man said. “You wouldn’t want to get too close to that creature Sayeh’s territory. You might get buggered. Or worse.” He made a leering gesture.

  Druja scowled but spoke gently as he moved the conversation along.

  A tariff was extracted from Druja, and the various passengers were shaken down in their turns and according to their means—or slightly beyond them. The caravan’s guards weren’t particularly hassled—perhaps out of professional fellowship, perhaps because they seemed perfectly content not to start anything with these ostensibly legal highway robbers—and the Gage was hassled least of all. The Dead Man came in for a little provocation, but he had been raised to be a stone-faced, elite imperial guard with no personality and even less in the way of opinions. He was only subject to being visibly provoked when he so chose. So he simply answered the sallies about his religion, his ethnicity, his fallen nation, and his presumed sexuality with pleasantries, and he did his seething internally and imperceptibly.

  It was hot, and it was sticky, and it was boring as hell. After a half-day of overly elaborate paperwork-checking and unpredictably accruing fees and subfees, the border guards seemed to decide that they had squeezed this stone dry. Or perhaps the larger and potentially richer caravan appearing on the horizon had something to do with it. It would be sad to have all one’s berths filled when a better candidate for extortion rolled through.

  As this radical change of heart swept through the border guards, they shifted from impeding the caravan’s progress to chivvying Druja and his people to move on as quickly as possible. As the caravan swung out again, the Dead Man took advantage of the safer roads—at least, safer from politically nonconnected brigands—to move up to the front of the column and walk beside the Gage. There were plenty of guards at the rear, and he found his old friend’s presence calming. Even when they argued.

  Perhaps especially when they argued.

  “You know,” the Gage said, not disappointing the Dead Man
, “you cause a lot of your own trouble.”

  Beside him, the Gage stank of heated brass. The Dead Man’s veil gave welcome shade. Clouds were piling on the eastern horizon, sliding up across the vivid Lotus sky. The Dead Man leaned his head back and gazed up at it. It was very interesting to be able to look to the east and watch the new season coming.

  “It appears the monsoon is upon us,” he said to no one in particular.

  The Gage didn’t need to turn his head to see, so the Dead Man couldn’t be sure if he’d registered the Dead Man’s comments. Or if he’d noticed long before the Dead Man did, and hadn’t troubled himself to say anything.

  But at last he said, “Have you noticed that the wind is from the west, and yet the weather is coming from the east?”

  “Does it portend magic?” asked the Dead Man.

  The Gage shrugged. “They do call that big gulf there the Sea of Storms. And the one to the west they call Arid, though it is to all appearances full of water.”

  The Dead Man sighed meditatively. “I am no Wizard nor yet a sailor, to understand the nuances of meteorology. Do you require grease in your joints when we stop tonight?”

  The Gage gestured to his coat. “If you’d take off that ragged old thing, and your veil, you’d find yourself in a lot less trouble than otherwise.”

  “If I removed my veil, however, I should have to murder everyone I met,” the Dead Man said mildly.

  “You wear that thing around like a child flaunting a scraped knee.”

  That stung. But it probably stung because it was fair.

  The Dead Man shrugged. “Will you not tend your own fire, Gage? You carry your own hurts close to the surface.” The Dead Man’s finger hovered just before its mirrored reflection in the Gage’s head. “You’ve collected your vengeance. Your service is ended. Why don’t you lie down?”

  “I’m not suggesting you die.”

  The Dead Man pressed a raveling thread of embroidery back against his cuff. “Aren’t you?”