Mrithuri thought of Anuraja’s record of wives abandoned and executed. Could such a one honor the Good Mother at all? It seemed to her the rankest sort of hypocrisy.
She wondered if she had won or lost a point by refusing to acknowledge Mahadijia this morning. “He didn’t want a private audience?”
“He may ask for that once he’s presented.”
She glanced about casually. No one was immediately close except her maid, who could be suffered to hear a few generalities. “Any messages from the north today?”
“No news you have not heard already.”
Her stomach twisted despite the sharp confidence imparted by the venom in her veins. Hnarisha was as much spymaster as secretary. His sources of information were second to none, and in Mrithuri’s court, only Yavashuri could rival them. And what he was telling her was that nothing had happened to contravene the previous reports that her northern neighbor Himadra was building armies. Nor was there any reply to the request for aid and counsel she’d sent to her great-aunt, who had long ago left the Kingdoms and her imperial heritage to become a Wizard in Messaline, supposed to be the greatest city west of the seacoast of Song.
Mrithuri was one of the very few remaining who knew that the so-called Eyeless One’s given name was Jharni. It was Jharni, as the Eyeless One, who had recommended Ata Akhimah into the family’s service, so many decades ago. Mrithuri only hoped the old Wizard was still inclined to be kindly disposed toward a granddaughter of her brother when a son of her sister was the problem at hand.
“All right.” She had long since lost the habit of nodding when she was accoutered as a rajni. It just sent chains and diadems sliding everywhere, no matter how many hairpins her maids stuck in. Very well then. Her grandfather would have urged her to have a plan, an understanding. And indeed, she would speak with Hnarisha, Yavashuri, and Ata Akhimah in a more private setting than this, and discover what information in detail their networks of informants could provide.
But that would have to wait until after she dealt with Mahadijia. And she was not sure what she was going to do about him.
She sighed and screwed her face into a caricature mask. “Maybe he could be induced to discuss the new taxes on salt and fish exports his lord is levying. And the tariffs on everything our Tian merchants would like to sell through or ship through the Laeish ports.”
Hnarisha made a face the equal of her own.
Mrithuri laughed—he could always make her giggle, rajni or no—and uncrossed her own eyes. “What else, then?”
“They’ve plans to debate taxes on rice, and the schedule of tariffs on imported water chestnuts and cinnabar. There is a murder inquest that requires your judiciary, though the counsels have more or less worked through the case and wish only to present it for your consideration. And the lord of South Pashirad has informed the clerk that he plans to introduce a motion—”
Mrithuri held up a languid hand, as if the weight of politics had rendered her debilitated. “Mother help us all. Let me be surprised. It might add some excitement to the day.”
Hnarisha subsided, but not without a censorious glance. Mrithuri was certain she’d regret the decision later, but right now silence seemed like the only option that would not drive her to insanity.
She accepted a richly decorated mask from Yavashuri. The maid of honor waited outside the throne-hall drapes. Today’s mask was a fantasia of orange and red stones set in a red gold filigree that covered her face from the eyes down with an animalistic sort of snout. It matched the stones in her long, glittering fingerstalls, and in addition to her nose and mouth it concealed several layers of fine-woven linen filters.
The maid helped her settle it, and thus, half-defaced, Mrithuri entered the Hall of the Empty Throne.
The throne was the only thing about the hall that could be considered empty. Her private entrance led her into an alcove behind the dais. She paused there a moment, gathering herself. She could not see her people from here—but she could hear them. Their murmurings and shufflings, both on the floor of the hall and in its many galleries. The rustle of cloth and the patter of bare feet.
Mrithuri raised her eyes and her masked face to the light that streamed from the lanterns raised high overhead. Beyond the skylights and the high windows, the grayness of a stormy night loomed. Within, though, the air swirled with countless tiny, sparkling motes, as if small breezes themselves glistened in the presence of the Empty Throne. Gold dust, scattered on the floors and so light and fine that any passage stirred it, left it hanging shimmering in air.
She checked the pleats of her new drape out of nerves more than need, laughing at herself as she realized only now that the clean one was midnight-blue patterned in stars and edged with gold, making today’s red and orange jewels stand out even more. It also spoke of the sacred river, and so recalled her power without making an obvious show. That would reassure her people.
It would reassure them more if you announced plans to marry.
Ata Akhimah had strong-armed her; that was no mistake. It had been perhaps the most positive interpretation of a bloody portent, and they had needed in that moment to put a beneficial spin on things. And the priestess had been encouraging Mrithuri to marry for the better part of a decade now. In part because until Mrithuri got an heir, her cousin Sayeh was next in line to the kingdom—though not the throne. Sayeh’s nation of Ansh-Sahal was small and poor; if she were stretched out across two nations, even the richer Tian landscape would not provide enough resources to defend both kingdoms from Anuraja in the south and Himadra in the north. Especially as a rajni could never truly rule any kingdom of Sarath-Sahal in the eyes of its people—and especially as Sayeh was shandha, a soul returned to a body that did not suit it.
The wisdom that Mrithuri had learned as a girl destined to become a priestess and the embodiment of a goddess held that most souls were not strongly gendered, any more than they were strongly associated with a particular physical form—bird, or person, or horse. That creatures served their lives and duties in the roles and bodies assigned to them, returned in the fullness of time to the Heavenly Mother, and eventually served in another role when they were recalled to the world.
But some souls were fiercely attached to an image of themselves, and in finding themselves returned to the world in a form that did not suit them, must seek and struggle until they made some accommodation. Less educated people were not always understanding of the shandha, thinking that their souls were too proud, insufficiently willing to serve the will of the gods. People would look for excuses to choose sides. The nuns who had trained Mrithuri in her priestesshood had differed on the issue, but most argued that the Mother did not make mistakes, and so the shandha served a purpose in her design.
So it was with cousin Sayeh, or so Mrithuri had been told. The rajni of Ansh-Sahal had been thought a prince when born, but demanded eventually to be recognized as princess, and had married and even—through the miraculous intercession of the Mother River—conceived and borne a healthy son. That she had survived the birth of the child, without the means a woman normally used in bearing, was due to the services of her foreign Wizard and his skills at surgery.
But being rajni and not raja meant Sayeh could not take their grandfather’s place any more than Mrithuri could. Only a rightful raja, by blood, could sit on the Peacock Throne of the Alchemical Emperor, on pain of death. A death enforced by the divine wrath of the over-elaborate chair—or perhaps more honestly, a curse left upon it by Mrithuri’s semi-divine ancestor—and not any fallible human law.
As long as there was only a rajni, and a rajni with no sons, Mrithuri’s claim was insecure. And Anuraja badly wanted the place, considering himself the rational heir, although his mother was the old emperor’s sister and the old emperor was Mrithuri’s father’s father.
Ata Akhimah wasn’t any more eager for the job to pass to Mrithuri’s middle-aged, heirless, gouty cousin than was Mrithuri. Not that Mrithuri had really wanted to rule or even reign in the first place
. She hadn’t even known what she wanted, precisely. She still didn’t; she had been nineteen then, and in the time since she had been busy with the business of governing her small, beleaguered nation. Not trying to decide what she wanted to be when she grew up.
She had to admit that as much as she disliked the job, she was growing into it. And she had Hathi still. And she was morally certain that word of the augury was flying in all eight directions even now, and that she would be rewarded for Ata Akhimah’s machinations with a renewed stream of suitors, despite the rain.
Just when she’d gotten them thinned out a bit. She’d meant everything she’d told Akhimah about the undesirability of every last one of them who had been deemed an appropriate match by her advisers and the Dharasaaba.
Mrithuri smoothed her indigo pleats once more, still needlessly—though if she kept poking at them, that would change—and shook out her hem without ducking her head, raising a cloud of gold dust that swirled around her but disarraying neither her headdress nor her hair. Behind her, the draperies moved aside as Syama edged through them. She came up beside her mistress as Mrithuri began walking, so that side by side, heads high, they stepped into view around the dais.
The babble of conversation fell away, leaving behind only the chiming of the rain on the dragoncrystal panels set into the spaces of the tree-branched stone vaults overhead. Mrithuri’s court needed no musicians when it rained.
The vault was old, and even impervious dragoncrystal had cracked or fallen in a few places. It had been replaced by rock crystal, or leaded crystal panes: those were easy to spot in the dimness because they did not shed the same faint glow of tourmaline light as the dragoncrystal. Some ancient artisan had arranged the small panes so that green-shining and violet-shining diamonds seemed to make the leaves and weeping blossoms on the great stone trees. The effect was as of fine, transparent grass-colored and lavender jade windows with a bright sky behind.
Mrithuri’s people made their courtesies as one, a smooth ripple of motion that revealed shining black hair and stirred drapes and wide-legged trousers like curtains riffling in the breeze. One voice—a woman’s—carried in the silence—“… the new butterfly fabrics from Song…”—and then trailed off in embarrassment.
Oh, Chaeri. Mrithuri held in a sigh, and managed not to roll her eyes. But Chaeri, at least, supplied Mrithuri’s needs and did not judge her. And for a rajni, not being judged for being human was a thing to be grateful for indeed.
“Rise,” she said.
Her maids came forward to help her up the steps to her chair of estate. It was a classic Sarathai style, large and square with turned rungs and a ladder back, wider than it was deep, with a rectangular red velvet cushion that alleviated only some of its discomforts. It stood on a smaller platform, before and to the left of the dais, and was carved of gilt mahogany inlaid with many precious things. There were few other places in the world where this chair would seem the moderate and unpretentious choice.
But in this place, the Peacock Throne of the Alchemical Emperor towered on the dais behind it like a sulky bird of prey with wet wings slumped to either side. Mrithuri’s legendary ancestor had earned his sobriquet, and he had made his throne of stones brought from every corner of his empire, melted together until they flowed like wax dripping down a massive candle’s stump, and converted to massy gold with a rainbow of hues—greeny-gold, red-gold, white-gold, violet-gold—all streaking its surface. The base resembled the corrugated footing of an old tree as much as it did the draping tail of the peacock it was named for. It was paved with tiny diamonds that glittered softly with every shift of the light. Despite its slumped, squatting appearance, it was so tall it could only be mounted by means of the broad, red-velvet carpeted stairs that climbed its base. That way was blocked with a rope of jet-black silk hung with tiny silver bells.
The throne was too heavy to be moved. So heavy, in fact, that if the dais beneath it had not been comprised of a pillar of black volcanic basalt witched up from the depths of the earth—and still rooted down there—by some ancient Wizard for the Alchemical Emperor, it would no doubt have cracked the very foundations of Mrithuri’s palace.
Alongside her own simpler chair stood a heavy branch mounted on a stand and wrapped with tooled red leather: a perch for the sacred bearded vulture. The great crested buzzard was black-winged, and the feathers of its body were a creamy white when the bird was clean, but now appeared to have soaked up the clotted red of old blood. Bearded vultures groomed red clay into their feathers, like some wild Qersnyk shaman anointing his barbarian features with ochre. The bird was unhooded, being accustomed to the fuss of the Dharasaaba, and it turned gleaming eyes on Mrithuri as she lowered herself into the chair it guarded.
She reached into a little basket of cracked, meaty bones beside her chair, picked one up between her fingerstalls, and offered it up to the bird. It accepted the morsel delicately, then—far less delicately—turned the bone in its beak, threw its head back, and choked the thing down whole and entire.
She handed him another, this one split to expose the marrow. He cheeped at her engagingly, fluffing his feathers. She stroked his crest with a fingertip encased in gold filigree. You could not touch the great birds often with a naked hand, or you would strip the oil from their feathers, rendering them ragged, unkempt, and unable to fly.
Mrithuri wiped her hand on the napkin provided by her maids. Again, the scent of lemon peel. The hooked tips of her fingerstalls snagged on the fabric and she carefully worked them free. The bearded vulture scraped his beak along the length of the split bone. He threw his head back and gulped, swallowing the knobby thing end first. Mrithuri wondered what furnace burned inside him, that could reduce even bone to greasy residue. Perhaps Ata Akhimah knew, or perhaps they could together devise an experiment to find out.
But she had to get through the rest of the day’s duties, first. And that meant this court, and those within it.
“Pray,” she said to those assembled, who had ceased their conversation and now all turned to watch her. “Let us begin.”
Hnarisha and his various heralds and functionaries organized and subdivided the courtiers and the petitioners. Mrithuri caught a glimpse of Mahadijia, who had traded his saffron coat for a long one in somber black, as if he fancied himself a Wizard or a priest. The ambassador glowered at the back of one group.
The drifting glimmer of the gold dust stirred up by Mahadijia’s feet gave the scene an otherworldly air. She watched it shine in the lanternlight, as if minute sparks drifted on the currents of the air. I am rajni here, she thought. I sit in the shadow of the Peacock Throne.
She did. Not Anuraja, and for damned sure not Mahadijia.
She lifted her face in the mask, careful for the sake of the hair ornaments not to move too abruptly. She did not look at Mahadijia, but rather off to the left, catching the eye of Hnarisha. The man’s eyes widened as Mrithuri made a slight, definite gesture with her left hand—a flicking-away.
Her secretary was not a big man, or one prone to strenuous activity. He wore round little spectacles balanced on his nose and he limped on a foot twisted since birth. But he hesitated only an instant before stepping into the ambassador’s path and bodily blocking his route to Mrithuri’s chair. “Your Grace has not been summoned.”
Mahadijia must have considered just plowing through the man like the bull he so resembled. Mrithuri would have sworn she even saw him lower his head and lift one sandal-clad foot as if to paw—or swing it forward to begin his charge. But he put the foot down again, sidestepped to the right, and would have slipped past Hnarisha except that the bear-dog Syama was suddenly beside the little clerk, her shoulders nearly on a level with his own, her rose-petal ears plastered back against her massive skull as she curled her lip in a snarl.
“Your Grace,” Hnarisha said, stepping to his left to bring his hip in contact with the bear-dog’s ribcage, “has not been summoned.”
Forcing the ambassador to back down was forcing him to lose face,
and in front of the entire court. Would he? Could he, in his pride and dignity? Or would he actually come to blows with Mrithuri’s people, and either be humiliated further or worse, be killed where he stood? That was a recipe for war. A war for which she and her people were woefully unprepared, and which would probably make Anuraja just as happy in the long run as if she came to him, begging for succor, of her own volition.
Worse, from Mrithuri’s high seat, she could see Mahadijia reaching for something under his coat. A concealed knife, perhaps, the possession of which was most assuredly illegal in the royal presence. If he drew it, and plunged it into her gallant, silly little secretary, then she would have to execute him. And that too would eventually mean war, no matter how she prosecuted her right to enforce the law for her own protection. And the only way she’d be able to protect her own moral high ground is by assembling and moving an army before Anuraja assembled and moved his own.
And it would cost her Hnarisha, which was a sacrifice she was ill-prepared to make. Her courtiers were drawing back from the face-off between the two men and the bear-dog, sweeping their robes up and shuffling aside as if she had parted the sea with a gesture. A sergeant at arms was hurrying forward with four men in a sharp-tipped wedge formation, but the press of the crowd impeded him.
Mrithuri was unique in her elevated position and unimpeded view of the situation. She would have to do something to at least buy him the moments he needed to close the gap.
She rose from her chair quite suddenly, casting her arms wide to make her jewelry jangle and flash. Beside her, the sacred bearded vulture bated upward on its perch, startled by her movement, flapping wildly against the tethers that held it in place.
Mrithuri boomed through her mask: “Gentlemen!”
They did not turn to her—another mortal affront to her court from the foreigner, and what exactly were Mahadijia and Anuraja playing at?—but both froze in place. Not so much like startled rabbits as like dogs eying one another before the fight. Syama turned slightly, to catch Mrithuri from the corner of her eye, and Mrithuri gave her a slight gesture.
The Stone in the Skull Page 13
