The Stone in the Skull

by Elizabeth Bear

  “I have very little.” Druja’s mouth twisted. He wiped rain from the tip of his nose. “Go and fetch the city guard.”

  * * *

  “… two of my passengers have taken very ill,” Druja pleaded to the sergeant at arms. “Please, if you will allow us to stay in the city for only a few more days. They cannot travel as they are.”

  The Gage loomed behind the caravan master, just in case something went wrong. But it didn’t look as if the sergeant was likely to take one single step past the hatchway. Behind it, in a room lit by oil lamps, the noblewoman and the Godmade each lay on pallets sour with sweat. Their faces were shiny with droplets, their eyes sunken, their cheeks slack as they labored to breathe. The Dead Man crouched beside the noblewoman’s pallet, murmuring, “Oh, my bright Golbahar. My intended, my beloved. Your flesh is so hot.…”

  The Godmade turned a fevered face to the door. The single eye blinked blindly, and a racking cough shook the skeletal form.

  “Absolutely not,” the sergeant said. “You’ll have to move on. If you’d said at the gate that you were carrying sickness we never would have let you in.”

  “It’s the lung-sickness!” the noblewoman cried in a thready tone. “I know it is. The Spawning Sickness! Do not lie to me, my love. You must leave me here and flee!”

  The Gage thought she might be overacting slightly, but the sergeant took a hasty step away from the door. The Godmade began to cough, a monotonous hacking that the Gage found extremely convincing. The noblewoman hacked too, covering her mouth with a trembling hand. When she drew it away, her fingers were smeared with lumpy crimson.

  “You cannot stay here!” the sergeant said. “You must move on at once! All of you!”

  “You son of a bitch,” the Dead Man snarled. He lurched to his feet, though the noblewoman clawed at his arm weakly and tried to drag him back. “Can’t you see this girl is sick? You’ll put us out in the rain?!”

  He shook the noblewoman’s hand free of his arm and charged the door. The Gage stepped forward to “intercept” him, catching the Dead Man as gently as he could so as not to bruise. The Godmade coughed louder—a deep, rending hack with a bubble in it, the sort of thing the Gage would have sworn could not be faked. Red seeped down a dark cheek. The Gage tried to recall the frailties of the flesh, and hoped they weren’t overselling it.

  He shouldn’t have worried so much. The sergeant gasped, “Good Mother, it is the Black Spawning.” Then hasty footsteps echoed down the corridor at a brisk stagger. The man paused halfway up the ladder to the deck and shouted down. “If you’re not gone by the tolling of the midnight bell, I’ll have every one of you put to the sword!”

  The Gage listened until he was sure the sergeant was gone, then released the Dead Man’s arm. From long practice, he could tell that the Dead Man was grinning at him behind the veil.

  “Lady Golbahar,” the Dead Man said, “yours was truly a most excellent plan!”

  Sitting up, she drew her veil across her face once more. “It wasn’t so bad.”

  The Gage wished he felt as confident. “That’s one,” he said. “There’s still any number of toll points and closed borders between us and Sarathai-tia.”

  “Oh, celebrate a little, you old turd in the sand,” the Dead Man answered. “How bad can the rest of it be?”

  * * *

  Under the starry skies of Sarath-Sahal, there was no cover of darkness: there was only the twilight day and the brighter night. So the caravan rolled out the gates of Chandranath in shadowless light, under red-slashed gray plague flags that ruffled listlessly from the standards. They had strung the rails with atonal rattles made of bits of tin strung on knotted leather. The procession moved in a clattering disharmony that etched even the Gage’s nerves of bronze.

  Wariness etched his nerves as well. He moved at the head of the column, bearing a plague flag as a banner, ready to shoo aside such as did not give way of their own volition and confront anyone who would not be shooed. These were few: not many were abroad in these unsettled times, and for those unlucky or stubborn travelers they did encounter, the plague tokens were a powerful argument.

  The Cauled Sun cast braided strands of light over the Gage and the surroundings, like the bright refracted bands cast through ripples moving across a sandy pool. They made the road ahead all the more treacherous, because what seemed merely imagination might instead be a dangerous edge, and what seemed a rut might be only some trick of the light. The Gage found himself using the butt of his pennant as a guide, probing ahead, not trusting the mountain road until the solid thump of the stick told him what was real and what was shadow.

  The Dead Man walked at the back, as had become his wont, and the Gage found he missed him. The Lotus day with its blackened sun and Heavenly River was spooky; the calls of birds through the changeable twilight too like the signals of bandits; the stars above strange and attenuated. A brass automaton might be impervious to most physical threats, but even a brass automaton could get the creeps.

  The sensation wasn’t eased when Druja climbed down from the forecastle of the leading ice-ship to poke along beside the Gage. In part because he did it without haranguing the Gage to move faster, which the Gage had been braced for. He just picked up a pole of his own and peered and poked and inspected the opposite side of the trail—which did a better job of moving them incrementally faster than a dressing down would have—and grumbled under his breath while intermittently glaring at the horizon as if searching for some landmark or a sign.

  Wheels creaked in the thick mud, and the oxen slipped and struggled. Men used shovels and levers to keep the heavy ice-boats moving, their wheels turning, when they wanted to bog down in the road. The Cauled Sun ground its weary path against the Heavenly River. No pursuit materialized, though Druja kept glancing skeptically back over his shoulder. The road began to drop off again, and they finally found themselves gaining some momentum when Druja glanced around, peered again at the sky, and seemed to measure the distance between the Cauled Sun and the top of a striking upthrust tower of rock on the horizon against the width of his hand.

  “Call a halt here,” Druja said to the Gage.

  The Gage would have stared at Druja, if the Gage had eyes. He tilted his featureless head to one side and said, “We just got the wheels running freely.”

  “Call a halt here,” Druja repeated, with a slightly edged tone.

  The Gage would have sighed if that were an option open to him. Since it wasn’t, he said, “You pay the bills,” and turned back toward the others to irritate the oxen and their drovers. The longer they sat in the mud, the deeper the wheels would mire. At least the road was somewhat stony here—that gave them a better chance of succeeding in getting moving again.

  Other than that, though, this was a bad place for a halt. A good-sized cliff bracketed the left side of the road, and anyone could sneak up on them along the top of it, to push rocks down or hurl fire. On the right side, there was less dropoff and less mud than there had been—granite crumbled from the cliff overhead and pushed aside to clear the road scattered a steep slope. Below the boulder field, an open forest of conifers bent wet branches heavy under the weight of the rain.

  Druja walked away, vanishing between wagons. The Dead Man came up to meet the Gage, his red coat so thicked with red mud that it resembled wet leather. He walked beside the ice-boats on the narrow verge, one hand stretched out to steady himself against their sides in case his foot slipped. Despite his caution, his stride seemed confident, secure.

  His hood was up, the whites of his eyes in its shadows showing red and irritated from the rain. “This would be a most providential place for an ambush.”

  “You noticed,” said the Gage.

  “Does Druja want to wait for better light?” The Dead Man stood on tiptoe and craned forward and down, contemplating the road below. It didn’t look any worse than what they’d come over already, the Gage thought. Or, for that matter, a whole hell of a lot better.

  The Gage grunted soft
ly, the low verbal equivalent of a shrug. “He didn’t say. But I can hear pots clattering: we obviously mean to stay here long enough to heat up some soup. You should get some.”

  The Dead Man chafed his shoulders to warm himself, stopped when his gloves came back freshly muddied from the clay-caked coat. “May happen I will,” he agreed cheerfully. “No telling when there’ll be hot food again.”

  * * *

  Unfortunately, the Dead Man had to come back running through the muck from the soup line with his tin mug unfilled when the Gage bellowed for him. The snotty Song princeling had awakened with a nasty hangover, and was determined to take the lapse in his drunken stupor out on everyone around him.

  The prince had staggered out the hatch of the crimson ice-boat and promptly tripped and fallen over the railing into the sloppy mud below. Somehow, he’d managed to land more or less upright, and now he was sitting on his jeweled ass in the mud haranguing the Gage and anybody else who would come close enough to listen.

  “What the hell is this? Why have we stopped here? Why aren’t we in the town?” The prince scooped up a slimy handful of mud and yak dung and flung it sidearmed. His aim was better than the Gage had anticipated. Filth spattered his wet brass carapace, clung and slid down. He sighed inwardly: the rain would wash it away soon enough.

  The Gage considered going over to the prince and picking him up by the wrists, but the odds seemed pretty good that he would slide and fall over on the little bastard, crushing him to death. There wasn’t a real downside there, except that the family would probably want some kind of revenge on Druja, and Druja wasn’t awful enough to deserve that.

  Fortunately, that was when the Dead Man arrived. He glanced around, assessed the situation with a sigh, and hooked his mug onto his belt. “Are you all right, sir?” he said to the Song prince. “You seem to have suffered a fall.”

  The prince was drawing breath to give the Dead Man a piece of his mind when he happened to turn his head and spot the plague flags. His upbraidment turned into a shriek and he scrambled to his feet, not even wincing. “What in the thirty-seven orthodox hells is that?”

  “A plague flag,” the Dead Man observed mildly. “Maybe you couldn’t tell because it’s pretty wet.”

  The Gage stepped forward to cover the Dead Man’s flank. He knew this mood; his partner was angry enough to have started baiting the prince. This could now come to drawn blades very quickly.

  “There’s plague in the caravan? I can’t be here! I’m the heir; I can’t be exposed to plague!”

  “You haven’t been,” the Dead Man said in his reasonable voice. “And if you’ll return to your cabin, you won’t be. The caravan is under quarantine, Prince Mi Ren. You’ll be safest inside.”

  “I’m leaving,” said the prince. Wincing a bit—perhaps the fall had affected him slightly—he turned and bellowed over his shoulder. “Footman! Pack up our things. We’re leaving the caravan.”

  “You can’t leave the caravan.” The Gage stepped forward, letting his size be his argument. It was a facet of his automaton self that he had never quite gotten over taking joy in, even when he knew it was petty to do so.

  The prince’s jeweled slippers squelched in the mud. One of his tall wooden pattens dangled on its laces through the railing above him. Perhaps trying to walk in them on the rain-slimy deck had contributed to his slip and fall.

  He bellowed again. Above the dangling patten, the face of a young Song man appeared, dressed in a tremulous frown. “Lord?”

  “Pack!” the prince bellowed. “We’re leaving the caravan.”

  The Dead Man sighed heavily. “You’re not leaving the caravan,” he called up to the worried servant. “The caravan is under interdict. Nobody leaves. We’re quarantined.”

  The prince drew himself up to his full, squelching height. “Is that the case?”

  The Dead Man set his hand on the hilt of his sword.

  The prince sniffed haughtily. He wasn’t wearing a blade. He didn’t seem to think he needed one, because he stepped forward with his chin high. “And you and what army are going to try and stop me, Dead Man?”

  * * *

  The Song prince did not give them any more trouble after that, because the Gage nailed him into a cabin. He didn’t use a hammer, just the heavy tap of a bent forefinger. And he only used four nails, carefully placed so as not to damage the woodwork. They were really just there for reinforcement: Druja had locked the door and then pocketed the palm-long iron key.

  “How are you planning on feeding him?” the Dead Man asked, as the two guards and the caravan master were walking away. Muffled yelps of outrage faded behind them.

  “There’s a porthole,” Druja said carelessly. “I’m sure his servants can stuff sausages through it if they care to.”

  The Gage said, “I’m not carrying the corpse out if they don’t.”

  He thought that Druja’s forced casualness was an overlay on continued anxiety. Still, he checked the sky, and looked around anxiously as they walked along the rutted road. At the horizon, at that finger of sky-pointing stone, at the cliff above.

  The day was lightening as night brightened the horizon, the dark line of the veil sliding up to reveal the true, scintillating glory of the Heavenly River in all its threads and washes of stars. The clouds must be retreating.

  As they passed the lead ice-boat, the Gage heard a scrabbling rustle. He started to turn, to go and investigate, but Druja lay a restraining hand on his arm. The rain was increasing, tiny hard cold pellets falling fast and striking the Gage’s mirrored skull with sharp musical pings.

  “Rats,” Druja said. “I’ll put out traps for them.”

  It wasn’t rats, but the Gage wasn’t paid to argue with the caravan master. “What now?”

  Druja glanced once more at the finger of rock, at the leavening sky. “Let’s get these wheels out of the mud and these oxen moving before another caravan comes along and somebody has to back down a mountain to a cutout, shall we? Maybe we can make the border before the night’s out.”

  The Gage decided that it would be completely pointless to ask why they had paused here for half a day after scrambling out of town as fast as possible, and now it was so important that they leave at once. So he went to fetch a lever, and a rope.

  * * *

  The final curtains of rain fell sparkling through the brilliance of sunset, the gleam of the Heavenly River revealed as the veil swept away and the clouds thinned and tore into wisps, then blew scudding toward the east. At last, they rolled. The caravan, creaking and wallowing, proceeded down the mountain road and toward the borders of Himadra’s stony country.

  They made better time now. Once they reached the bottom of the slope, the road was in better repair, the ruts less deep. No one had passed this way recently—they were the only refugees foolish enough to brave the rains, apparently—and the mud was only a thin slick layer over packed clay. The mud dried on the wheels and cracked off in long, curved chunks with interiors polished smooth as bowls.

  By morning, when the first glimpse of the veil was dimming the horizon, they had found their way to the toll booth at the boundary.

  The caravan drew up before a row of sawhorses dragged across the road. There might have been a gate here once: now there were a pair of stone gatehouses with crumbling mortar, smeared with orange rust stains to mark where steel hinges and pins had melted away.

  It was guarded, of course. Four men stood in front of it, and there were wagons to either side, under whose tarpaulin roofs more rested. There had been a barracks built here at some point. The stones of its toppled walls were in the process of being cleaned of mortar, sorted, and stacked.

  What was intact, however, were the twinned ballistae atop the gatehouses, pointing down at the road below and between. That was a weapon that even the Gage thought worth treating with respect.

  The Gage estimated that there were another twenty men divided between the two wagons. He couldn’t guess how many might be inside the gatehouses. He s
tayed back beside the blue-and-copper ice-boat, the hood of his robe pulled up, his arms folded inside the loose sleeves of his rough-spun robe. It swung wetly from his chassis, steaming faintly in the rising warmth.

  Some ranking guard came forward, flanked by two colleagues, and Druja walked up to deal with him. He had a cargo manifest in his hand, and his wet boots slapped against the paving stones that had re-emerged from the sucking mud as the caravan approached the border. He stopped well away from the guards, and with the rolled manifest he pointed up to the plague flags still snapping overhead.

  He called out, “I’d recommend you not come any closer, sirs! Pardon me for the inconvenience!”

  The guards did stop. The officer looked at his men, then shrugged. “We still need to see your paperwork. Hold it up, so I can examine it.”

  The man came forward a little more but still stopped arm’s length from Druja. His guards followed restively, looking from side to side as if the threat of plague were an ambush.

  The Gage tried to be unobtrusive. It would be counterproductive to intimidate the border guards: they would then feel the need to prove their manhood, and that sort of thing had a tendency to end very badly.

  Along the far side of the ice-boats, the Godmade’s robe swished softly as Nizhvashiti paced forward, moving as if idly wandering. The Gage would have scowled if he’d had a face to do it with. He’d learned to trust the priest; now he worried that the priest might be having a premonition of violence—or be about to provoke it.

  The Gage studied the undercarriage of the red-gold ice-boat just ahead of the one he stood beside. He couldn’t shut his eyes to what was happening between Druja and the guards, not having any eyes. But he could at least turn his attention away, and perhaps that would serve to make his presence seem less threatening.

  The struts that currently held the wheels—and which had previously held the sled runners—were attached to a sort of cradle in which the curved hull could be slung. He’d never really examined the structure of it before. Now he noticed two interesting things: one was that the hull had hook-shaped metal fittings bolted to it. In the water, they would project like the tail fins of a swift fish, and the Gage imagined that they might serve to stabilize the craft somehow. When the ice-boat was traveling over land, however, they locked into the chassis that held the runners or the wheels and held the hull there, secure.