The Stone in the Skull

by Elizabeth Bear

  The other thing he noticed was that there were scratches through the mud on the undercarriage, into the paint. They were almost deep enough to be called gouges, and they looked fresh. And they were perpendicular to the rail and the keel, not parallel to it as you might expect if the hull had dragged against a bush or stone or something.

  The Gage thought about ducking down for a better angle, but if the guards hadn’t noticed the marks yet he wasn’t going to direct their attention to them. What did we pick up? And why the hell aren’t we doing a better job of hiding it?

  They could try to fight their way out, if they really had to. He and the Dead Man and Nizhvashiti were a formidable group. But they weren’t an army, and even if they were, the ice-boats, the cargo, and the passengers were all vulnerable—to the soldiers, to the ballistae, to something as simple as fire. Even if the exhausted oxen could be goaded to crash the improvised gate, they could not drag the mud-caked wagons faster than a shambling walk. The border guards could just drop them with crossbows, or fire flaming bolts into the ice-ships.

  The Gage’s brass hide itched with vulnerability.

  Druja was showing the officer some paperwork, a series of chits, a piece of parchment heavy with ribbons and seals. The officer nodded, then turned and waved the men who had been standing with him forward. They gave each other uneasy glances at approaching the quarantined caravan, but did not linger long enough over them to make their officer take notice. The Gage admired the discipline.

  “But I’ve paid the duties,” Druja said. “Here are the affidavits. And you can’t enter the ships—they were interdicted and sealed by Himadra’s own men!”

  “We too are Himadra’s own men,” the officer said. “And it wouldn’t go well with us if we took every traveler’s word for their good behavior. I’m sure you understand.”

  “It’s your risk,” Druja said. He rolled up his affidavits and his cargo manifest and stuffed them into a leather tube waterproofed with beeswax, then forced the tight lid on.

  The Gage kept himself calm and quiet as the men came up on him. They approached warily, but not as if in fear—it was just the reasonable caution of the professional. One stopped a cart length ahead of him and said, “Raise your head, foreigner.”

  The Gage did, and heard the soldier’s gasp as his own face was reflected, distorted, in the Gage’s curved metal mirror. “By the Good Daughter!” he cried, stepping back in haste.

  “What is it?” the officer called.

  “Some kind of automaton!”

  Instantly, the officer was at his side. “A Gage.”

  The Gage nodded.

  The officer jerked a thumb toward Druja. “There is no Wizard or sorcerer listed in this man’s passenger list.”

  “There is no Wizard nor sorcerer with the caravan.”

  “Where is your master, metal man?”

  “Buried,” the Gage answered truthfully. “In the desert south of Messaline.”

  “Who do you serve?”

  The Gage nodded to Druja. “I am masterless. This man hired me as a caravan guard. That is whom I serve.”

  The Gage caught a glimpse of muddy red wool and knew the Dead Man was slipping closer.

  “We do not wish a fight,” Druja said, his tone almost begging. “We wish only to leave. There are sick people here.”

  “Hey,” the second guard said, pointing to the scrapes on the bottom of the lead ice-boat. “What caused these?”

  Druja stepped forward, frowning as he moved to examine the gouges. “Well, you see—”

  “Exercise,” said a woman’s voice from above.

  They all looked up. Ritu was halfway up the sail-less mast, looking down on them. She clung with one hand and both feet, leaning far out, braced with the edge of her shoes.

  “Exercise?” the officer asked.

  “Sure.” She slid down the mast, landing lightly with bent knees, and walked across the deck to the rail. She hopped up on it without breaking stride—not the display of nimbleness most people would expect from a middle-aged matron, but the Gage had grown accustomed to the acrobats by now. “My family are performers. We need to stay in shape even while traveling. I was using the ice-boat as a scaffolding.”

  The guards looked at one another, confused.

  “The boat has juggling swords in the hold, too,” she continued. “Are you going to confiscate those as war materiel?”

  The officer bit his lip, looking as if he might argue. But at just that moment, the Godmade gasped theatrically on the far side of the ice-boat and doubled over, one hand on the hull. The black hood fell back, revealing a cavernously gaunt face, a single red-rimmed eye. Nizhvashiti retched, but nothing except a thin stream of stinking bile came up. The Godmade looked exactly like the Gage’s idea of someone in the throes of a fatal contagion.

  Apparently the picture matched the one in the officer’s head as well. All three guards stared horrified for a moment, then scrambled back, the senior one moving fastest. “All right,” he said, “Move on, move on. You, men! Get those sawhorses out of the way! And get some bleach on that.” He turned back to Druja. “Didn’t you hear me? Get rolling, or I’ll burn your whole caravan where it sits!”

  Druja had already turned to the teamsters and had them chivvying their oxen forward. The animals lowed and balked, but soon responded to their handlers’ urgency and leaned into the harnesses. The Dead Man moved to assist the Godmade up a boarding ladder and over the railing. The Gage got behind the lead ice-boat and pushed to get it rolling; then the next team of oxen pulled harder to catch up. Before long, they were creaking and slogging past the border post, heads bowed, not looking back until they were well clear indeed.

  The Gage walked in a little group with Ritu and Druja. They were all silent until the guard post was just a smudge against the muddy foothills.

  “You owe me one,” Ritu murmured to Druja, as soon as the guard post had dwindled behind them. “You risked us all. Who the fuck is that man that he’s that important?”

  Druja blinked at her. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

  Ritu nodded. “Of course you don’t. The man you waited for, at the last stop. The one who scrambled up under the ice-boat, and then climbed the hull to get inside. The one who’s huddling where the bilges would be if we were in the water, and who looks like he lost a wrestling match with a Cho-tse. That man.”

  Druja set his mouth stubbornly.

  Ritu shrugged. “He’s going to need food and water soon, you realize. And those wounds cleaned. Smuggling him out of Chandranath isn’t going to serve any good purpose if he dies of neglect.” She paused, and the Gage could almost see her calculating what she was going to say next. “A curious thing. He almost looks like he was tortured.”

  Druja turned his head and spat. The ice-boat wheels churned mud over the residue. “He’s an assassin,” he said.

  Then, more quietly, “He’s my brother.”

  8

  Later, when they were warm and dry in the harbormaster’s hut at the top of the cliff, Sayeh cupped a steaming bowl of tea between her scalded hands and inhaled over it—as if the milk and spices and sugar could erase the memory of that terrible stench of rot.

  Her son had been sent back to the palace before she even made it up the streaming road. Now they awaited the palanquin’s return so that Sayeh could venture home as well, and in the meantime huddled together against the storm—Wizard and rajni and commoners.

  She had the only padded chair in the place. Tsering-la stood against the wall, studying his own tea as if he could read the secrets of the future in its lees. The guards were divided—a pair stood one each on either side near the door, with the other two beside the shuttered windows. The harbormaster sat at her desk, working on some documents. And the water-diver was curled before the fire, her head nodding as if she struggled with sleep.

  When Sayeh had finished her tea—the harbormaster’s husband emerged from the kitchen to offer more, but only Tsering-la and the water-dive
r accepted—Sayeh straightened her shoulders. She would have stood, but that would have meant the harbormaster and the water-diver both would have needed to leap to their feet as well. And the water-diver was exhausted, and Sayeh happened to know that the harbormaster’s back pained her greatly.

  So instead she cleared her throat and said, “Honored diver, are you sleeping?”

  The girl’s head snapped up. She spilled her tea across her fingers, but did not seem to notice the heat. Sayeh saw that her hands too seemed burned.

  “No, Your Abundance.”

  “What is your name?”

  The girl glanced around the room as if seeking inspiration or escape. Only a few moments passed, however, before she sighed and said, “I am called Nazia, Rajni.”

  “Are your family water-divers?”

  The harbormaster looked up. She was old, but not yet frail. However, Sayeh knew that she too had once been a water-diver, and when she retired because of a serious injury, Sayeh and her husband Ashar had awarded her this post in thanks for her service.

  “I am Nazia Sandhya’s daughter,” the water-diver clarified. “My mother was of the line of Kamala.”

  They were traditional water-diver names, with their endings that sounded masculine to Sayeh’s ear. She had heard that the water-divers had originated with a different tribe than her own.

  In any case, Kamala’s was the oldest lineage of water-divers. Or one of the oldest, as there would always be conflicting claims, but Sayeh had always thought that Kamala’s daughters’ evidence for the antiquity of their ancestor was probably the most well-documented.

  “Your mother died this year,” Sayeh said. She had attended the funeral, to show respect for a woman killed providing for Sayeh’s people. The woman had been honored; she had claimed the right of the first dive, at the beginning of the season. But despite her experience, despite her family tradition, something had gone wrong in the deeps. She had not surfaced again.

  Her body had washed up days later—or what was left of it, after the beasts of the sea had had their fill.

  Sayeh felt a pang. If she were not what she was, she—a firstborn daughter—would have been trained to make the ritual dive herself. After a fashion, this child’s mother had died in Sayeh’s place.

  The girl nodded. That look of defiance flashed across her face again.

  Sayeh glanced at the shuttered window. Rain drummed on the roof like fists. Cisterns all over the city were filling to bursting with clean, pure rain.

  From desperation and drought, to this. Her kingdom was a strange place.

  “I am sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you, Rajni.”

  “You’re angry about her death?”

  Nazia looked down.

  “She dove in my place,” Sayeh said. “Because the Guild protects the profession. Because neither men nor women such as I are permitted to become water-divers.”

  “Rajni?”

  Tsering cleared his throat. “Did someone pay you for what you did tonight?”

  It was a perceptive question—and an accurate one, Sayeh saw, from the sidelong glance Nazia gave the Wizard.

  The Wizard shared a similar glance with his rajni, then turned back to the girl. “Tell the truth.”

  “A—there was a man. He said his name was Varjeet. He…” she shrugged. “Rajni, he and I agreed about many things. And after talking to him … I could not say if it was his idea or mine. But we agreed that you were … ill-omened. And that it was fitting that the water that burned my mother…”

  She twisted her hands together. She was very young.

  Sayeh saw what the girl was thinking, but that she was also too much a child to own her prejudices in the face of someone she thought she despised because of what they had been born. Sayeh saw the pretense of ignorance, and despite her gentle temperament, she was not in a mood tonight to be kind. “Say what you are thinking, then. Am I ill-omened because I am shandha? Is that why you polluted the water?”

  “Women such as you are not women,” the water-diver said viciously, glaring up from her hands, seeming taken aback by her own explosion. “You and your unnatural child have brought a curse upon us. I did not pollute that water: it is as I brought it from the deeps. The Sea itself rises up in revolt against your abomination.”

  Sayeh glanced at Tsering-la. The Wizard gently shook his head.

  You could not permit someone to speak to you so. Not and remain in power long. Especially as a widow. But she could not make a martyr of the girl either. Especially when her mother had been so important, and when her death had been seen as a portent of evil, especially as Sayeh’s husband died so soon after.

  “If the Guild of the water-divers would permit it, I would have trained. I would have made that dive.”

  The girl looked up. “You are too old.”

  “Am I older than your mother?”

  That silenced her. At least for a little. Sayeh sighed, and the girl thought. Then the girl shook her head and said, “You could have forced us. The Guild.”

  “Could I?”

  “You are rajni.”

  Sayeh closed her eyes, opened them, bit her tongue and looked to Tsering-la for support. He smiled a little, but that was all.

  “Oh,” said Sayeh. “I could. And how would the Guild feel about such an abrogation of its authority? And what would the other divers do to any shandha who joined? How much power would a rajni who spends it so profligately soon have?”

  The girl shrugged. She’d obviously never thought much about the limits of power. She was young enough to believe that when one had authority, that meant one could command. Without consideration or repercussions.

  Tsering was looking interested, though, so Sayeh continued her catechism, hoping to draw the girl out more. “Power may be made an investment, returning dividends, my child. Or it may be made an expense and a waste. Do you think that power so wasted would not result in the erosion of the foundation of government, in ill-will and revolt? In death for me and thirst, loss, privation, possibly death for my people, as well?”

  “I…” She glanced about the room. The harbormaster was writing as if she heard nothing. The guards’ eyes were stones, staring unfocused into space.

  Sayeh shook her head sadly. “There are limits, little girl, on what even a rajni may decree and do.”

  Tsering-la stepped forward. Sayeh recognized him, and he spoke. “Where did the bitter water come from?”

  The girl resisted, but his voice was so reasonable, she did not demur long. “There is a place where it wells high. Higher than ever before, this year. Still deeper than any of the others dive.” She shook her head. “I think—I think my mother dove into it by accident.”

  “So you found this … plume. Of bitter water. And decided to use it to create an ill omen.”

  Miserably, the girl nodded. “I was trying to duplicate my mother’s dive. To discover what happened to her. She was heavier than I. I used weights … I was fortunate that I only touched the bitter water with my hands. It was warm. They teach us … to fear the warm currents. For that reason.”

  “Some of them are bitter.” Tsering’s face was very grave. “Sometimes, the springs that arise near burning mountains are so.”

  “There are no burning mountains here,” Sayeh said. “The closest—”

  “Is in Tsarepheth,” Tsering-la agreed. It was the Wizards’ city, place of their fabled Red-and-White Citadel. It was in that place, Sayeh knew, where Tsering-la had learned his Wizardry.

  He was looking at the girl with something like interest. Sayeh imagined that a solution to their problems might lie there. She turned her attention back to the girl. Nazia, she thought. If you must condemn her, learn her name.

  She studied the young water-diver’s face. Her eyes were downcast. The worried lines of her frown made her seem far older than her years.

  “I cannot let your insolence go unremarked,” Sayeh said tiredly. “You spoke to me as you did in front of witnesses. And I know you hat
e me. It is not safe for me to leave people who hate me unchecked.”

  “I do not hate you!” the girl cried, jerking upright. Her expression crumpled from worry into despair. “I hated … I hated the person who hurt my mother.”

  Tsering-la had known Sayeh for a long time. He cleared his throat, and when she recognized him he said what she was relying upon him to say. “Your Abundance. This girl…”

  “Continue without fear, Wizard.”

  “She is clever.”

  Nazia stared down at her hands. Unaccustomed to praise, Sayeh saw. Too smart, too odd to fit in well with the other water-divers? Clever was not always the way to popularity.

  “She is,” Sayeh agreed.

  “She is fearless.” Tsering-la steepled his hands before him. He crossed to stand beside Nazia, seeming to tower over her despite his plumpness and slight stature. “She has the wit and will to”—he paused, one of his small plump hands disengaging from the other to dip sharply, plane, and wobble side to side like a gull adjusting its trim in an updraft—“craft a daring plan, research it, and carry it off.”

  Sayeh pursed her lips. Stagily, she supposed. But staginess was part of the business of being a rajni as much so as of being a Wizard.

  Tsering-la crouched, knees jutting between the panels of his petaled coat. He took Nazia’s hand and inspected it in the firelight. “These are not so badly burned as I would have expected. Did you use a salve to protect your skin?”

  The girl, unable to meet his eyes, nodded. He looked up at Sayeh, and she read it plainly in his expression: Do not waste this one. This one is worth something.

  Sayeh sighed. “She cannot go back to the water-divers.”

  “Let her come to me,” Tsering-la said, and smiled.

  Her eyes went wide. “Would I have to—” She pressed her fists to her middle. Rasan Wizards gained their power through a terrifying surgery, men and women both. They must consent to be neutered before they could wield their magics.