“A bear-dog,” the Gage said softly, a little bit in awe.
The Dead Man looked over at him. “Did you learn that from your Wizard, also?”
The Gage shrugged, metal shoulders rolling silently under the rough-spun robe. “They say that the Alchemical Emperor’s true-born daughters have a gift with animals. That it’s the magic of the royal line as expressed in the women.”
The bear-dog paced toward the Dead Man and the Gage. And toward the herald who led them, but other than a slight squaring of the shoulders, the boy seemed to pay it no notice. It circled them, snuffling softly. The Dead Man tried not to glance down as it came up to his flank. When he failed to restrain himself, he tried not to notice the faint tension in its flews, as if it barely mustered the self-possession not to reveal enormous canines in a warning snarl.
He forced himself to look up and away, and study the silent figure who sat below the throne.
She was arrayed so magnificently that he almost missed how slender and young she was beneath the draperies. Her face was concealed, except for the heavily kohled and brooding eyes, by a golden mask wrought in the shape of a snarling leopard’s muzzle. Her head was unbowed under a heavy and begauded tower of hair, jewels, dangles, and intricately woven golden diadem. Her hands rested calmly on the arms of her chair, her fingers lost beneath ornate fingerstalls that turned them into a falcon’s grasping talons. Her brooches and necklaces shimmered faintly with each breath as her bosom rose and fell.
There seemed to be no one else in the audience chamber, although it was quite possible that the queen had her advisors concealed behind the draperies at the back of her dais. There were not even musicians, but the silence as the Gage and the Dead Man walked forward was more disconcerting than any plucking and drumming might have been.
Ten steps from the dais, the herald bent a knee and lowered his forehead gracefully to the floor. The Dead Man did the same, half a beat behind, and he heard the tiles groan under the Gage’s weight as the brass man mimicked them.
“Your Abundance,” the herald said. “Messengers from the Eyeless One, in Messaline, as you anticipated.”
The Dead Man heard a rustling within the walls. When he glanced up involuntarily, his lifetime of training in protecting his caliph overriding his sense of protocol, he saw that the wall to the left of the throne was actually a series of filigree-carved stone-and-bone screens backed with more heavy silk draperies. One of those had been drawn aside by an elegant dark-fingered hand, as bare and plain as the queen’s hands were jeweled. He remembered something about the Lotus religion, that there were nuns who lived cloistered in separate corridors within public buildings, and by their prayers protected the state and the royalty.
Maybe this was such a one.
He averted his eyes out of respect. The Lotus women did not as a rule go veiled, but it was a man’s duty to honor a woman’s privacy. Especially so the privacy of a holy woman.
When he glanced back at the queen—more comfortable, because her mask concealed her face as well as any veil—she had not moved at all. And yet the Dead Man could not help his distinct impression that she was both worried, and nervously smiling.
She raised one bedecked hand and clicked her clawed fingerstalls in a rippling, beckoning gesture. “Rise,” she said. “And approach me. I’d rather not have to shout across half an empty throne room.”
Her voice was light, pleasant. She spoke so slowly and clearly that the Dead Man had no difficulty in understanding her Saratahi. The accent was strange, and he was far more accustomed to Druja’s dialect and inflections, but the languages were close enough to one another that he thought he would not struggle.
The Gage seemed to learn languages as easily as he wiped water from his metal skin. The Dead Man wasn’t worried about him following the conversation.
As one, the two strangers and the herald rose and approached the queen in her chair. As they came up to the dais, the bear-dog paced away from them, turned in a slow circle, and lay down across the feet of her mistress with a heavy sigh.
“You have a message for me,” the rajni said. There was eagerness in her voice, and fear. She wanted desperately to know what they had for her, and she was terribly afraid that she would not like the news. The eagle-like bird roused and shook out its wings, perhaps responding to the air of tension that rolled through the room like a heavy perfume.
Gently, the Gage slid open the front of his robe. A tiny hatch that had been invisible in his seamed metal hide popped open and a drawer slid out, smooth and oiled, releasing a scent of frangipani.
The Gage reached a fingertip within.
The queen leaned forward, lifting her chin to keep her heavy headdress centered.
The Gage extracted a tiny packet from the secret drawer and extended it to the queen on the open flat of his dented brass hand. “Your Abundance,” he said. “You are Mrithuri Rajni?”
She said, “I am.”
“I have been charged to place this into no hands but yours, great queen.” Ceremoniously, he offered it.
She took it with hands that trembled, and made her wire-fine glass bangles ring like birdsong on her arms.
10
The package was wrapped in eggshell-yellow silk paper, the surface patterned with fibers so fine that they snagged even on Mrithuri’s uncallused skin. She balanced it carefully so as not to tear the silk with the hooked points of her fingerstalls.
It was light, balsa-light, dragonfly-light, but it felt rigid nonetheless. She pressed it lightly, and the boxy shape beneath the wrapping did not flex or indent. What could be both so delicate and so strong that it would not have smashed in transit? Or were the inner crevices of the Gage’s metal body lined in felted wool against just such an eventuality?
She had sent for armies, war magic, wisdom. Anything that might save her kingdom and her life. She had paid in crimson rubies and the orange sapphires for that help, and when her messenger had not returned with an answer, she had feared that despite her trust, he might have absconded with the treasure; or that he had never made it to Messaline, and to the Uncourt of the Eyeless One who dwelled there.
Half the year later, she cupped what she was terribly afraid would be a completely useless answer between her palms.
She bit her lip, aware that the two foreign messengers were staring at her. Well, one was staring—and, by the lines at the corners of his eyes, above his veil, frowning. The other’s head was an impassive oval of metal, so it was hard to rightly say what expression it might have been intended to convey. It reflected her, unsettling, and she refused to look down.
She let her hands rest upturned on her lap. “Do you know what became of my messenger?”
The Dead Man shook his head. “We have a reputation, Your Abundance, for getting where we are going through difficult circumstances. That is why the Eyeless One entrusted us with her reply. We were informed that you had sent a messenger and that he had returned to your court, to tell you to expect a reply once the Eyeless One could construct such a thing for you.”
“And this is it.”
The Dead Man bowed—impressively low for a man who seemed well past the first flush of youth. “That is what she sent with us. She is not.…” The Dead Man glanced over at the Gage, as if seeking support.
“She is not accustomed to explaining herself,” the Gage finished.
“And you, automaton,” Mrithuri said.
“We prefer to be called Gages, Your Abundance,” he replied, in tones so deferential she could not take offense.
“Gage,” she corrected herself. “Are you a servant of the Eyeless One? That is the source of your kind, is it not?”
The Gage said, “I was constructed by a Wizard, yes. But the Wizard who constructed me is dead. The Eyeless One is merely … well, no one would ever refer to the Eyeless One as merely anything.” The Gage shrugged, powerful machine shoulders rising and falling almost silently.
“The Eyeless One hired us,” the Dead Man explained. “We are mere
ly employees, is what my partner is trying to say.” He glanced at the featureless oval of his uncanny partner, as if something went unsaid.
Perhaps they owed the Eyeless One a debt. So many did, these days. Herself among them now, she supposed. If she lived long enough to be collected on.
Mrithuri reminded herself to have a care for her paint, and successfully resisted the desire to lick her lips. She wished she had a serpent near, that Chaeri would come with the sandalwood box and she could lay the fangs against her vein. She could have used that clarity now, that sense of certainty and focus.
Instead, Chaeri was alternately working on gaining entrance to Mahadijia’s locked and sealed quarters, and having the vapors, and Mrithuri’s head was splitting with lack of the venom. She should send these two away, take her poison, find her strength. It would be better—all this petty business of running the government of her probably doomed kingdom—if she were not hungover and needing the snakebite so very badly now.
The tiny package on her palm nauseated her with hope and worry. What could be in there that would be useful? What could help her win a war, or account for a murdered ambassador, or—well—get out of this alive and unmarried to a man her father’s age, who had buried his own weight in wives?
What good could this scrap be? She wished it away, back into anticipation. She couldn’t bear to pluck off her fingerstalls and go to work on the ribbons and seal.
She sighed and glanced over her shoulder.
A footstep paused on the tile as her head turned. It was not Chaeri, alas—or perhaps just as well, as Mrithuri was not sure she could have resisted temptation and remained elegant and regal if the opportunity to do otherwise were to abruptly present itself. It was, rather, the spare and elegantly robed figure of Ata Akhimah. The Wizard was looking down, distracted, weighing a chased and decorated but obviously functional pistol across her palm.
The Dead Man stiffened, by which Mrithuri knew the gun was his. Her Wizard glanced around and seemed to come to the same conclusion. “This pistol.”
“Yes?” the Dead Man drawled.
“I could make it better,” Ata Akhimah replied. “If you will permit me?”
Mrithuri thought the mercenary would choose to argue, but that didn’t happen. Instead, his eyes narrowed, but after some consideration he nodded thoughtfully. Perhaps he realized that if Mrithuri wanted him dead, the easiest way to manage it would be to have already spoken to Syama about the issue.
“Better?” the Dead Man asked. He glanced at the tiny package in Mrithuri’s hand, frowning. As if he were as avid to find out what it contained as she was.
Ata Akhimah sighted down the barrel. Her bangles slid along her wrists, making a duller sound than Mrithuri’s. “Increase the accuracy, range, and rate of fire. There would be small cosmetic differences.”
“This is my court Wizard,” Mrithuri said, with the feeling of someone wading into the middle of a tense standoff. “Her name is Ata Akhimah. I suppose you already know who these two are, Ata?”
“An Aezin Wizard?” the Gage said.
Ata’s face unseamed itself into a smile. “We are supposed to be the best doctors, you know.”
“That is your legend.” The Gage rumbled when he spoke, a voice that seemed to come up from a great and hollow depth.
The Dead Man’s voice was lighter, with a pleasant accent. “The Eyeless One said there was a Wizard here she was acquainted with. Would that be you?”
Mrithuri looked at his hands because she could not see his face. They were callused, the cuticles rough and peeled. He’d hooked a thumb through his sash as if uncomfortable without a sword-hilt to rest it on, but the gesture did not seem threatening.
Ata Akhimah bounced the weapon up and down lightly, not quite tossing it but weighing it across her palm. She looked at the Dead Man and smiled. “We have met.”
Mrithuri felt a ridiculous spike of jealousy. She swallowed it and said, “Ata, come and open this message for me.”
The lammergeyer stretched his neck out as Ata Akhimah crossed in front of him. At first he meant to solicit petting, but when she ignored him he opened his maul-hooked beak and croaked at her disparagingly. She continued to ignore him, shoved the pistol into her belt, and reached out to lift the tiny yellow package from the rajni’s hand.
She weighed it, and might have given it a shake had not the rajni looked at her in warning. She sniffed the red wax seal, and said, thoughtfully, “Frankincense.”
“It was frangipani a moment ago,” Mrithuri said.
The Gage said, “I have it from the hand of the Eyeless One herself. That, I can attest to you. And none have touched it since.”
“How long after my messenger came to Messaline did she entrust it to you?” Perhaps if Mrithuri called Julaba her messenger in the cold tones her grandfather would have used, she could keep her eyes from pricking tears at his likely fate. He had trained her in dagger work and bow, and played at the tea ceremony with her when she was so small her cups were flower petals, the tea milky river water.
“Ten days,” the Dead Man said. “It is possible he could have been delayed on the road. Injured. Ill. Or some mishap. We made the best time we could, and even our passage was complicated.”
“It is possible,” Mrithuri agreed. She was a rajni, and her voice would not shake for an old friend missing somewhere in thousands of miles of travel. She felt like a dreadful person for fearing he might have betrayed her—but who could a rajni really trust? If they had come sooner, would Mahadijia be alive? She felt very young, in all the ways a rajni could not afford to be young. She addressed her next remark to Ata Akhimah. “Wizard, what has your mentor sent us? Torture us no more.”
The Dead Man glanced quickly at the Wizard. His veil mostly hid his expression, but Mrithuri thought she detected startled respect in the slant of his brows.
“All right,” said Ata Akhimah, and began picking the narrow ribbon apart with the tips of her own short fingernails.
Mrithuri almost didn’t want her to open it. Her hands trembled as if she herself unknotted and unsealed.
After a few careful moments, the Wizard’s nimble fingers picked open and unfolded the precisely creased flaps of a stiffly corrugated paper box. Within was more silk, just vibrantly colored scraps of crepe and chiffon. And, as the Wizard delved inside, a sphere. A sphere of dragonglass, softly radiant, hued in shaded overlapping petals of cobalt and emerald.
It was no bigger than a large marble, and it seemed to be hollow at the center. Something chimed softly within it when Ata Akhimah turned it gently in her hand.
Blown, then, like a miniature fisherman’s float.
Could you blow dragonglass? What art would that require, what risks entail? Who could survive it?
But the Messaline Wizards had arts that not even the Wizards of Song or Rasa comprehended, when it came to construction and artificing. Why, look to that metal man standing calmly on the tiles of Mrithuri’s very court at this very instant, if you needed more proof than a legend.
Mrithuri realized that the Asitaneh mercenary was watching her avidly. As her eye caught his, he blushed and dropped his gaze at once. Was it attraction, she wondered? Or was he just hoping she’d know what the mysterious gift was for?
And this—this scrap of a thing—this was the answer to her begging the fabled Wizard-Prince of Messaline for assistance from across the half of the world?
The only answer?
“Did the Eyeless One send … anything else? Any hope of a relief?”
The Gage bowed his shining pate. Mrithuri supposed it was answer enough.
She looked to her Wizard. “Do you know what it is?” she asked in a low tone.
“A dragonglass marble,” Ata Akhimah said softly. And before Mrithuri could take offense, continued, “As Your Abundance can no doubt discern. But I suspect that you are asking me what it is good for, and that … well, I have no idea.”
“There’s something written on the inside of the wrapper,” the Dead Man
said.
Ata Akhimah set the sphere back into its nest of scraps and lifted the tiny paper box from the wrapping that still lay slack across her hand. She turned her palm and bent close, squinting, to get a better look at letters so spider-fine that Mrithuri could barely make out the color of the ink from where she was sitting. It was a browny red, like …
“It’s henna,” Ata Akhimah said. “It looks like it was scratched on with a pin, it’s so delicate. Oh, by the jealousy of the Good Daughter…”
“What?”
“It’s another damned oracle. May the Eyeless One’s own basement flood, come the spring.” She laughed, though, and read it over again before reciting, “‘A child can come to a maiden; a bride can travel afar. In a stone in a skull lies great wisdom; healing grows strong from a scar. A king ascends from a princess; a harvest arises from war.’ Well, I can’t say much for the old bat’s poetry. But she always did love her riddles. Some days I used to have to solve a riddle to learn the spell I needed to unlock the breakfast cupboards.”
“Read it again,” Mrithuri said.
“It’s terrible doggerel.”
“Read it,” Mrithuri said, “again.”
Ata Akhimah cleared her throat and declaimed in much grander style: “‘A child can come to a maiden;
a bride can travel afar.
In a stone in a skull lies great wisdom;
healing grows strong from a scar.
A king ascends from a princess;
a harvest arises from war.’”
“Plain enough,” Mrithuri said. “It’s just another marriage prophecy, it seems. Even more specific than yours, Ata Akhimah. This one expects me to travel to some other kingdom to marry, and raise my lord a raja.” She glanced over her shoulder and up. The Peacock Throne glittered with shreds of refracted light. “That’s the only way a king’s getting up that thing.”
“What about the child?” the Dead Man asked.
Mrithuri sighed and put the back of her hand to her forehead, successfully avoiding a catastrophic tangle of headdress, fingerstalls, and forehead jewel only due to years of practice. Her head hurt more and more. She wanted her serpent. Chaeri had been nearly useless since she’d killed the ambassador, and Mrithuri knew she ought to be kinder. But …
The Stone in the Skull Page 22
