The Stone in the Skull

by Elizabeth Bear

  Below, the music was rising. Mrithuri’s people and the guests were drawing back around the central square of the middle terrace. She scanned the crowd, but couldn’t see the overdressed Song prince, Mi Ren. Stroke of luck if he’d sulked off, she supposed.

  She crossed the few steps and leaned against the railing, far enough from the Dead Man not to be encroaching on his space. He turned, taking her gesture for permission, and leaned again as well. The heavy, herbal scent of the marigolds rose between them.

  The acrobats were coming out. Now, there was one small comfort of the soon-to-be-invaders. At least the entertainment was trapped in here with them. Mrithuri leaned against the garden wall calmly and listened while the Dead Man spoke of the fall of the Caliphate, his own survival. His voice took on the rhythms almost of a poem. She heard the words between the lines, the things he did not so much keep secret as keep private.

  He, too, had lost what he had in the world.

  More so than she, who had still a palace and a kingdom, if she could hold them.

  And if she could not, well. She would hardly be the first monarch overthrown for a crown. Or even the first in her own family.

  “And the Gage?” she asked, when she realized he hadn’t spoken in a while.

  “The Gage is a Gage,” the Dead Man said, with a swirl of his cup more eloquent than his words. “He’s not much of a tactician, but he can level a wall with one punch.”

  She laughed. And then she waited. The snakebite made it easy, peaceful even, to wait.

  “You’re young to be a queen,” the Dead Man said finally. Conversationally.

  And the snakebite made that easy, peaceful, too. Or as easy and as peaceful as it might ever be.

  It was strange, she realized, even as the story unspooled from her lips. Strange that she could find this man, this stranger, so peaceable and so easy to talk to. Perhaps it was the sun-scarred skin around his eyes, or the facelessness of the veil—so that speaking to him was safe, like whispering to a nun through the screens of the cloister. Strange that she could tell him things she did not even tell her maids, who cleaned her teeth and hair and body and who tended her secrets and her snakes.

  Strange that she could tell him things she found it hard to tell herself. Even when the snakebite slipped softly through her veins.

  “My parents are dead,” she said. “My grandfather was raja before me.”

  Already she suspected she would tell him more. It was there inside her, pressing to get out.

  He stared out over the festivities below, the acrobats tumbling and tossing one another in ways that should have made Mrithuri’s hands tighten on the balustrade. But she was only half-aware of their skill, as they built towers of their bodies and threw their sisters and daughters between those towers, spinning in their bright silks through air. Her attention was on the sights behind her eyes, as she struggled to find the words to explain things she had never said, but merely known.

  If the Dead Man had spoken, it might have broken the spell. If she had seen his face, likewise. Even if he had looked at her.

  But as she turned to regard him, he kept his eyes trained below, and merely nodded once to show that he was listening.

  “My father would have been raja now, and I would have been his heir unless he got a son.” She picked a cuticle for a moment, made herself stop by an act of will. Chaeri would cluck over her hands, already. “But he is gone, and my mother also.”

  The Dead Man listened. That was all.

  Below, the tumblers and towers had given way to something else. Men and women came out, arrayed themselves in two rows. Each wore a long curved saber on either hip. As Mrithuri watched, gathering her breath for what she would say next, they drew their swords and faced each other. They raised sabers in salute then posed arms akimbo and blades cocked, like awkward illustrations of sword-dancers.

  A child came down the line, dressed in lilac, gilt, and rose. She held a panel of silk, so transparent as to be gossamer. One of the swordswomen came forward to meet her. She held her right-hand blade out parallel to the left-hand one, edges upward. The child stretched the silk over the blades and dropped it.

  It passed over the blades and fluttered lightly to the ground, in three pieces. It was not even slowed by its passage across the steel. You couldn’t even say that it was sliced; it merely … parted.

  “You could never fight with those edges,” the Dead Man said conversationally. “They’d shatter.”

  The woman returned to her place in line.

  Mrithuri expected, perhaps, a passage of arms, some fencing demonstration. What happened instead was that their arms snapped up in unison, they released the blades—and suddenly each pair in the two lines was juggling four whirling swords, so the whole of the line became a flashing tunnel of steel.

  “Mother!” Mrithuri said. All her life in Sarath-Sahal, and she had never seen a thing like it. The Dead Man tensed beside her, then slowly, carefully, she felt him force himself to relax. His coat shoulder had brushed hers. She felt a thrill and thought, Do not even think on it. You could never make him raja.

  He put his hand over hers. “I’m sure they know what they’re doing.”

  “I hope so,” she quipped. “We’d never get the blood out of the stones.”

  He glanced at her. Through his veil, she was not sure if the quirk at the corners of his eyes was amusement, or a question.

  If it was the latter, it so happened she had the answer. “In the reign of the Alchemical Emperor’s son, when the Imperium was collapsing, there was a massacre in this palace,” she explained. “Some of the stains are still there.”

  Amusement, definitely. “You were telling me about your father and mother.”

  She had been. And tried to change the subject. Perhaps even now it was not as easy as she had been telling herself, she supposed. Below, a man walked along the line of jugglers with a bundle of swords on his back. With exquisite timing, he added another blade to each fall, so each pair of jugglers was working now with five swords.

  He took his place at the end of one line, with no opposite number. And then, at a signal cried out loud, each juggler took a step to the left.

  The lines scissored. The additional man caught a flung sword and entered the dance. At the other end of the line, the woman who had been pushed out of sequence stepped to the back. She ran around to take up a surplus position at the head of the other line.

  The loud voice cried again—there, it was the big man at the center, the one with gray in his hair—and again the lines scissored.

  Mrithuri said, “They died badly. They were poisoned. It took a week and more.”

  The Dead Man nodded, waited, then said gently, “Not bad food? It happens more often, you know, than an actual poisoning.”

  “Two weeks after it happened, Anuraja of Sarathai-lae sued my grandfather to make him heir in my place, as I was a girl and a minor.”

  “Oh,” the Dead Man said.

  Mrithuri nodded. The fury was there, the sharp irrational pain that made her want to indulge in hasty errors. To whip up an army and ride down the river to crush Anuraja.

  Anuraja, with his rich farmlands and thriving seaport. Anuraja, with his wealth and trade and his professional standing army. With his alliance, so it seemed, with her northern mortal enemy.

  The snakebite chilled the seething in her blood. She breathed deep to steady herself. “I do not care to be his sixth wife, bedded and buried.”

  “Nor should you.”

  More children entered, sprites in their lilac-and-rose garments, sparkling with sequins. They ran down the middle of the flashing tunnel of steel, hands spread out and heads upraised, dark hair flowing. They were barefoot or in sandals. They were laughing, as razorblades flashed past their faces.

  “God preserve them,” the Dead Man whispered. He glanced sharply at Mrithuri. “I mean, I know they are well practiced. They will come to no harm.”

  “It is how we all live our lives,” Mrithuri observed, waving
languidly to the jugglers. “At least they have the advantage that in their case, someone they trust, who loves them, is throwing the fucking swords.”

  He snorted, but seemed a little comforted.

  “You have children,” she said. She felt a spike of disappointment. He is a heathen and a foreigner, her head told her body. Her body shivered anyway.

  “I had a daughter,” he said. “And I had two baby sons.” He shook his head and she was grateful for the veil. “That was long ago and in another land.”

  She was silent for a moment out of respect. Then, “Of course,” she said.

  The jugglers ended with a flourish, because what could follow the children amid the blades? Mrithuri allowed herself a sigh of relief. They were giving place to the dancers now as the musicians took up again.

  “Tell me about the caravan master’s invalid brother,” she said.

  “We picked him up along the road,” the Dead Man answered. “I believe he was tortured by Himadra.”

  She looked at him carefully. “Did you suspect Druja worked for my spymaster?”

  He made an amused noise. “I suspected he worked for someone. I will not ask who your spymaster is.”

  “You are a seasoned mercenary.” She raised a long arm and pointed beyond them, to the slow pale swell of the earthly river.

  “She is our god,” Mrithuri said, with a gesture she had practiced to make her black hair ripple over her shoulders as if it too were a sort of river. “She shows the path of existence. Each life, you see, is a droplet that flows into a rivulet, and the rivulet flows into a trickle, and the trickle flows into a runnel, and the runnel flows into a stream. The streams gather into lesser rivers, and eventually those lesser rivers come together into the great river, the Rich-Bosomed One. There are those in what you outsiders call the Lotus Kingdoms who follow another god, another Good Mother. They call their god Sahal, there. They call their dialect something similar.” She shrugged. “You outsiders think we are all the same.”

  “But that river herself flows into the sea, just as does this one.”

  “So She does,” said Mrithuri. She turned over her shoulder. Yavashuri was there—at the far edge of the terrace to give the rajni and the Dead Man privacy, but also to serve as a chaperone. Yavashuri seemed to understand from the glance what Mrithuri wanted and she brought the tools at once.

  Mrithuri snipped marigolds, one by one, with the silver scissors, and laid them in the basket. They made a tidy golden heap, and soon they would make an offering.

  “And you are right: God meets Her demise in the delta, where the tide flows in as the river flows out, in the heartbeat and pulse of the world.”

  She laid the scissors beside the blossoms. Their rank, vegetative scent was more medicinal than floral. She continued, “But She also becomes the ocean. And She rises again, from its far reaches, to cross the heavens in a shining twine, separate into newly admixed and measured droplets, and rain down again where She began.”

  “Our god is a woman, too,” the Dead Man said. “But we say She is a Scholar.”

  Mrithuri hummed softly behind her teeth. She wasn’t sure if there was anything in response that she should say.

  “That’s lovely,” the Dead Man said, trying again. Possibly because it was, or possibly because he felt a pressure in her silence to say … something.

  “Is it?” Mrithuri asked.

  “You don’t think so?”

  She turned from her garden and arched her eyebrows at him. Chaeri spent so much time at plucking and blackening them; Mrithuri might as well get some use out of the things.

  “Tell me, Dead Man. What happens when I prick my finger—so!” She slid the jeweled pin back into her hair, padparadschas and jacinths shimmering vermilion and madder, reminding her of stars in blacker skies, and walked to the far railing, the one overlooking the bluff and overshading the river. The Dead Man followed her.

  Mrithuri held her hand out over the railing. A slow milky red drop appeared, welled, and fell as she pressed the flesh with her thumbnail. Another followed, and another. Each dripped into the milky white water below and vanished, without seeming to offer so much as a splash.

  Slowly, consideringly, he offered: “It spreads out—through the rivulets and trickles and whatever else.”

  “All the way to the ocean,” she answered. “And then back to the place where all rivers start. Now. What if I had scattered a drop of poison?”

  “Oh,” he said. “Eventually … it is dissolved in the others? Diluted?”

  “Everything leaves a trace once it touches the river. And when the river spreads itself into droplets again, each carries some taint of that poison. Which must somehow be expunged, before the river can be sweet and pure again. If there is too much poison, the river itself might become tainted. Then … well. Nothing could drink.”

  She stared over the railing. She had forgotten herself in her thoughts, and she realized she had forgotten her queenliness too. She straightened her shoulders, but still raised her pricked finger to her lips, and stuck it between them like a child. The sting of her saliva in the tiny wound called her back to herself. She blinked, feeling her mascara brush her cheek. She tried to gather her thoughts before he tired of waiting, and just when he must have decided that this was a calm sort of dismissal and had squared his shoulders to turn away, she managed to clear the lump from her throat and say, “Souls are like the river, Dead Man. Exactly like. So what becomes of a poisoned soul?”

  “Is yours poisoned?”

  She shrugged. “Is yours?”

  He seemed to give it serious consideration. Then he sighed and said, “Honestly? I do not know. Time fixes a lot of things, young woman.”

  “But it doesn’t fix everything,” she answered, hiding a grin behind her hand. “Does it, old man?”

  * * *

  Perhaps they would have talked more, Mrithuri thought. Perhaps she would even have made the terrible error of bringing the Dead Man back to her rooms. But the tension between them was broken by hasty footsteps and the thump of a fast-moving Gage, and when Mrithuri turned she saw that Ata Akhimah, the Gage, and the gold-eyed priest were hurrying up the steps behind.

  Their urgency drew her back up, and from the edge of her vision she saw it send the Dead Man’s hand to a sword he was not wearing. She saw them glance at one another—or, at least, she saw Ata Akhimah glance from side to side, and the other two also slow their steps to match those of the Wizard of Aezin.

  “Speak, then,” Mrithuri commanded when she saw them hesitate. It was not easy to get words out with her heart stopping up against breath, but because she was the rajni Mrithuri forced them past the weight, like a stone. “There is news.”

  Ata Akhimah stopped quite sharply on her soft-soled shoes. She took a quick step closer, tunic swirling at her calves, bangles clink-jangling, and stopped again. “I thought of something.”

  Her gross discomfort unsettled Mrithuri more than anything Mrithuri could have imagined. This was Ata Akhimah, who could say anything to anyone.

  Mrithuri almost laughed at the thought, then, remembering where she had dug down to find her own voice of command, found a strange crumb of compassion and fellow feeling. Ata Akhimah was so much older, so much wiser, so much more worldly and more traveled. She was a Wizard from a foreign land, a teacher, a mentor for whom even a rajni still held some litle awe.

  And yet Mrithuri suddenly saw her as human, and as kind.

  “You thought of something to help us?” Mrithuri prompted.

  Ata Akhimah said. “I have had no luck with the dragonglass marble yet. But. I thought of something that explains the poem. Or the first little bit of the poem, anyway.” The Wizard turned and looked at the Gage. “I was talking to the brass man about it, and it occurred to me—so the Eyeless One entrusted this message to you. But she could not be sure you would bring it to Mrithuri and to me. She could not even be sure it would reach us, and so she had to write in this … cryptic sort of prophecy.”

&nbs
p; “A cipher,” Mrithuri said.

  The Dead Man said, “A code.”

  Ata Akhimah nodded, rubbing a hand across her close-cropped, blue roan curls. “She knew, however, that if the message did reach us, I would be here.”

  The Gage adjusted his gorget with two fingers. “This is getting complicated.”

  “Give her time,” the Dead Man said. “I think I know where she’s going.”

  Ata Akhimah opened a limp leather wallet, and from within it drew the scrap with the poem. “‘A child can come to a maiden;

  a bride can travel afar.

  A king ascends from a princess;

  a harvest arises from war.’”

  “Red harvest,” the Gage muttered darkly.

  But Nizhvashiti, who had not yet spoken, shifted softly. “A child can come from a maiden. Yes. Directly, or indirectly, as it happens. Through medical means, or ritual means, or simply because every person and every thing is maiden to begin with, at least for a little while.” They wheezed a little on each breath.

  Mrithuri licked her lips. “Well, if you mean that when something ceases being virginal, it is not that something is lost but that something is gained. A white dress dipped in crimson dye is still the same white dress, underneath. A river with silt in it is no less a thing of water, though it carries earth as well.”

  “Your theology is sound,” the one Mrithuri had heard the others calling Godmade said in hushed tones. The praise made her warm a little, as Ata Akhimah’s had when she was young. Ridiculous, but to be told her theology was good by someone blessed by the Good Daughter with the ability to command ice-wyrms and wield the elements was a pleasure she had not experienced before.

  “All true.” A grin burst through the tautness of Ata Akhimah’s expression. “All true. But not what I meant.”

  “The Carbuncle,” the Gage said.