The Stone in the Skull

by Elizabeth Bear

  Madhukasa growled, “Where are my men, Your Abundance?”

  Waiting for Mi Ren to correct himself was probably pointless, and would only complicate his existing insolence with more. Mrithuri said, “I dismissed them.”

  “They’re my men.” The handsome features were spoiled by an expression as obdurate and uncomprehending as that of the proverbial ox receiving instruction in higher mathematics.

  “And this is my house. So perhaps you would care to explain the problem to me instead of bellowing at this poor fellow?” Gently, she insinuated herself between Mi Ren and Druja. She pushed into Mi Ren’s space to do it, so he took an involuntary step back.

  He was bigger than she was, broader and more tall, and he wore shoes that increased the advantage. He tried to loom over her, aided by his broad-shouldered robe that must be beyond stifling in this heat. She stiffened her spine, thinking with all her might that she was rajni, a daughter of the line of the Alchemical Emperor, and that his wit and courage must run in her veins as surely as his blood.

  She knew it was nonsense. Anuraja was a scion of the same line, after all. And—well, he had wit and courage. It was simply honor and self-discipline he lacked. But if quality of heart could be inherited, the world would be a very different place. Still, thinking of her grandfather and her great-grandfathers gave her courage, and fool’s courage was as effective as the well-founded sort in accomplishing acts of bravery—though the eventual result might be quite different.

  Mrithuri stepped forward, crowding Mi Ren. Syama’s hackles brushed her fingertips, though the bear-dog made no sound of threat. Silent support, unflinching loyalty. The Song prince was self-aware now, and would not give her more ground, but Druja was taking advantage of her distraction and had withdrawn to crouch beside his brother’s bed.

  “This weasel,” Mi Ren said icily, “refuses to take me on to Sarathai-lae as contracted. I appeal to Your Abundance as the legate of this land to force him to abide by the letter of our agreement.”

  “I see,” Mrithuri said. She curled her fingers in Syama’s warm ruff. The bhaluukutta leaned against her hip. “There is a problem, Your Highness. The honest Druja cannot travel to the Laen port, as he arranged with you, because his caravan is under interdict. We are at war with Sarathai-lae. A war that has come upon us unsought, but you see, I cannot allow anyone who might bring news of my court to travel to the enemy.”

  “This is ridiculous!” Mi Ren didn’t quite explode, but he did huff savagely and stomp his foot like a child. “I have business interests at home that suffer in my absence. I am losing money and prestige with every day I remain in—”

  Whatever pejorative he was about to level at what Mrithuri considered her own perfectly lovely little kingdom, the jewel in the Mother River’s parted hair, Mrithuri had no interest in hearing it. She reached across the gap between herself and Mi Ren and shocked him into silence by laying the very tips of her golden fingerstalls against his cheek.

  “Hush,” she said.

  He hushed.

  A thrill rang her. A realization. She had no intention of marrying this man. Of binding her fate and her kingdom to him. But there was no reason at all that she could not make him think he had a chance of winning her. In fact, to do so would be statecraft at the highest. Yavashuri and Hnarisha would be pleased with her cleverness, and if she seemed to be courting, some of the pressure to marry might, for a little while, ease.

  She might even manage to wrangle an alliance with this odious twit’s father or his elder brother, both of whom she had heard were not so bad as this one.

  She smiled at him through false, lowered lashes, and purred, “Isn’t there any reason, dear prince, that you might wish to stay in my fair kingdom for just slightly longer? I’m sure we can divert you for the duration of such a little war.”

  11

  It wouldn’t matter in the long run. The world would wind on; the world would wind down. Kingdoms would rise and sink again. Cities would be founded and cities also would fall. Races of beings would come to prominence and wear away again, like mountains thrust up and then ground to dust. Where there had been djinn would come ghulim. Where there had been ghulim would come dragons. Where there had been dragons would follow men.

  The Gage wondered briefly what would follow after men. The Cho-tse? The Bear-Men of the high plateaus? Something he had never heard of? Something like himself?

  He, himself, might even possibly be around to see it, having traded living heart and living bone for a carapace of brass and a flawless mirror. He was already feeling the pressure of his age, though, and he had not yet truly outlived one long Wizard’s lifetime, though he would be impossibly old by the standards of people who were not Wizards, if he wore his own flesh still.

  The Dead Man aged, though. And the Gage himself did not.

  It wouldn’t matter in the long run.

  But it would matter to these people. And he cared about some of these people, and was coming to care about them more.

  He knew he should be better. He knew he should care about them for their own sakes. Because they were people. Because they had feelings and were alive.

  Perhaps the Gage had known too many people already. Perhaps, not enough. He found he could not care about them very well at all in the abstract. But he could care hard when he thought of a specific face, a way of moving, the fall of someone’s hair.

  He moved through the rajni’s palace in the dark daytime hours when almost everyone was sleeping, and he thought, and considered, and planned. He needed to be two Gages: one for erranding and one for war. Two tasks only he could undertake: enter the dragon’s ruined city, and be an army unto himself. Two tasks that were mutually exclusive, as well.

  For all his weight and size, a well-oiled Gage could be surprisingly silent when he chose. And he wore on his brass feet an enormous pair of carpet slippers that muffled their clatter and clunk, and served to protect the rajni’s mosaic-tiled floor.

  The nuns in their cloisters moved through the day-that-would-elsewhere-have-been-nighttime with him. Or not with him, precisely: he never felt followed, or even escorted. But he was aware of the rustle of robes, the curve of draped heads. The soft singsong of prayers.

  How would it be, he wondered, to be mewed up like a songbird all one’s life? Did they choose it themselves? Was it an escape for some, a refuge? Or was it a dumping ground for unwanted daughters? They had their prayers—did they have books and scholarship and arguments late into the night in places where they were not observed, untouchable, through the pierced and folded palace walls?

  They were human, he supposed. They must. They must have their secrets and their arguments and their politics, their love affairs. It was only that the cowled identical heads and robed identical bodies were designed to make you forget that they had identity. Individuality.

  With a metal knuckle, the Gage stroked the side of his own perfect mask.

  Were they chained, or had they fled there?

  What was it like, to live within walls, between grilles, moving in circuits and murmuring. Flowing in a constrained course like a river. Going not where one chose but as one was habituated and directed?

  Then he paused, and thought, But isn’t that every life? Every existence? Or almost every: some lives burst the banks, as had his own. As had the Dead Man’s. But neither of them had chosen that leap across unmarked territory. Both of them had been thrust.

  The idea disturbed him so that he had to find the doors and go outside, where he could not watch their owl-like whispered migrations anymore. He told the guards his destination—just a walk around the grounds—and they told him what the landmarks were for stopping before he reached the outer walls. Finally, with their blessing and permission as a guest of the rajni, the Gage was turned loose in the dimness of day.

  His footsteps led him out into the palace gardens, and a softly falling rain. The early torrents of the besieging season had mellowed to something gentler over time. And the Gage, in earnest, was glad o
f the rain. He and the Dead Man had discussed their gratitude more than once between here and the border.

  It was hard—damned hard—to move an army in this weather.

  Thank the god of your choosing—the Gage was out of gods of his own, as it happened—it was hard to move an army in this weather.

  Something vast and pale caught his attention among the dripping violet and orange blossoms of so many wet, weeping trees, and he moved toward it to investigate. He stepped out of the sodden carpet slippers—they dragged and were doing worse to the grass than his feet would, anyway—and picked his way across the garden, avoiding stone borders and hedgerows for the sake of the gardeners.

  The great white curve was moving, sliding, reminding the Gage of the breathless silent progress of some foreign moon. He followed it with what silence was in his power, half-expecting to find Nizhvashiti again, engaged in some species of sorcery.

  The gardens were enormous. It probably couldn’t have gotten away from him, if he’d been willing to crash through flowerbeds and crush brick paths under running metal feet. But it moved fast enough that in maintaining silence, he stretched himself slightly to close the distance.

  And then he came out of the trees and saw two figures standing in the rain-dimmed light. An enormous beast—and beside it, the small, curvy outline of a woman dressed in flowing, sodden trousers and a tunic that was plastered to her body by the rain.

  The beast was great, as he had seen, and pale, as he had seen also. Its head was like an enormous knobby boulder with a flapping sail affixed on either side. The snake of its trunk reached out before it, prospecting among the leaves of a hedgerow for something either tasty or interesting. The curve of its back was like the hull of a barge.

  “An elephant,” said the Gage. But not such an elephant as he knew from the lands south of the mighty desert men called the Abandoned Lands. This one was smaller, with smaller ears, a higher-domed head and steeper back, and it was much lighter in color.

  The woman heard his voice and turned. Her curled hair had frizzled tight in the rain, her pointed chin lifting as she peered through the gloom at him.

  “Who is it?” she said.

  It was Chaeri, the rajni’s handmaiden. She reminded him of someone not herself, and he put the thought away.

  “It is the Gage,” he said, and stepped out of the shadows. His robes draggled with rain, swinging heavily as he raised his hands to show he had no weapons. As if that mattered when he was so much a weapon himself.

  She did not seem, however, frightened.

  “Is this a private rainstorm,” he asked, “or can anyone walk in it?”

  “Only the gardens are private,” she replied. “And you are, after all, a guest. The rain is anyone’s who can catch it.”

  She tipped her head in a way that seemed like an invitation, so he crossed the open grass to stand before her and her elephant. Or more likely the rajni’s elephant, since he did not think that handmaidens often kept them.

  “I shouldn’t be out in the rain,” Chaeri said matter-of-factly. “I’ll get ill. But I couldn’t resist.”

  The beast raised its snakelike trunk and sniffed him curiously, then did something with its ears that seemed almost a shrug and made a similar and more thorough investigation of Chaeri. Then it came back and sniffed him again, fogging his mirrors where the brass was cold between beaded raindrops.

  The Gage waited until it seemed to have made up its mind. “Does it have a name?”

  “Hathi,” Chaeri said. “She is a friend of the rajni’s.” A curious way to put it, but he had to admit, he had never known an elephant well enough to determine how thoughtful an acquaintance one might be.

  “So are we all,” the Gage said, and was bemused by the curious frown that creased the woman’s visage. “Are you tired, Chaeri?”

  “I could not sleep.” She turned once again to fall into step beside the elephant. “I killed a man the other day. And I’ve been sick, of course. I slept too much, and then not enough. I did not want to take the poppy today.”

  She looked at him searchingly. He nodded. He would not ask, but his impassive shell made him an excellent listener. She would elaborate if she wished.

  She changed the subject, instead. “Hathi has the run of the gardens; she is very sacred to the river because of her color. And she is very well mannered: it’s been ten years or more since she uprooted a tree.”

  The Gage laughed, even though he could tell she was serious. Serious, but also clever and funny. And brave enough to be out alone in the dark, in the garden, in the rain.

  She did, in fact, remind him of someone. Someone of whom he did not usually choose to be reminded.

  Someone who had been taken from his life a very, very long time ago.

  “I could not sleep either,” the Gage admitted, dry and—as always—deadpan.

  Chaeri shot him a look, brow wrinkling in another thinking frown, as if to see if his sober tone was mockery. Of course, to glance at his face would teach her nothing but the curve of her own cheek inverted, the rain-taut spiral of her curl.

  “Do you sleep often?”

  He shook his head. “Not in the better part of a century,” he admitted. He was curious about her, and curious about the lightly admitted murder. “Do you want to talk more about what’s keeping you up? I haven’t so much as a mouth to spill your secrets with.”

  “Maybe later,” she said, after a hesitation. Then: “Hathi likes you.”

  “How can you tell?”

  The woman giggled. It was a sharp, musical sound. “She didn’t rub mud on your hair.”

  The Gage rather wished he could give her an arch look at that moment. He had to settle for turning his mirrored egg inside the puddle of his cowl and angling it at her.

  She grinned at him wickedly, pleased with her own cleverness. She reached up herself—standing on tiptoe to do it, as she was not tall—and slid her palm over the rain-glazed brass of his carapace. She flicked her fingers like a cat that has stepped in a puddle and said, “I could do it for her.”

  Metal hide and metal heart or not, the Gage felt a tremulous shiver. Was she flirting with him?

  Was she flirting with him?

  He wasn’t sure. He couldn’t remember, exactly, what flirting had been like. People did not flirt with an enormous brazen, mirrored man.

  It was like his playful banter with the Dead Man, he supposed. But a little sexier. A little more enticing.

  Now his body ached with a remembered thrill, and his metal mitts ached with emptiness. Longing; it was longing, this sensation that crowded the empty spaces within him where nerves and muscles would have been had he such things as nerves and muscles.

  It was a terrible thing, longing. He wished it away. It made him think of how useless his strength was, how his hands were empty, and had uselessly closed on emptiness again, and again. There are so many stories about those who lose almost everything, then sacrifice what remains for revenge. There are so few stories about what happens to those people afterward. Their metal shells. Their metal hearts.

  How they learned to do something else again. Did they learn to do something else again?

  The Gage was glad he had no face.

  He would have had to turn it away, otherwise.

  They walked in silence a little—woman and monster and beast—and the Gage found himself easing, somewhat, just walking himself and listening to the heavy tread of the elephant and the light step of the girl.

  “Where are we going?”

  Chaeri splashed through a saturated patch of grass that was not quite yet a puddle, almost decorously, lifting the hems of her trousers with her hands. The Gage noticed she was barefoot, and watched, fascinated, the way the muddy water, with every step, seeped between her toes.

  They curled, those toes, reminding him of the delicate fronds of some young fern, the sticky ephemeral pistils of a night-blooming flower. His own feet had no such delicate olive-brown appurtenances, being more after the fashion of hobnai
led boots. The Wizard who had built them had harbored no designs to echo anything transitory, natural, or lovely. They had been built to hold him up, he thought.

  And yet, did not her little curling feet, bright with rings and anklets, do the same job far more daintily and just as well?

  “Is it safe to walk in the rain alone?” he asked.

  Chaeri’s laugh, this time, was strained. “You mean, for a woman? Is it safe to go out in the dark of day unescorted except for a monstrous beast, almost as large as, say, a giant metal man? Is it safe for her to wander through her own garden without a man to defend her? Is that what you ask?”

  She raked a rain-slick curl from her face with small fingers tipped with pointed oval nails. “What is there for a man to make me feel safe from, brass man, except for another man? It is a most excellent piece of flummery your sex has cooked up.”

  “You do not seem frightened of the dark, or men, to me.”

  She snorted. “Oh, how can you know what it is like, for a woman?”

  The Gage raised his mirrored head, making the rain ping against it with shifting tones. When Chaeri was silent and he had her attention, he said softly, “I was a woman once.”

  She stopped, stared at him, hands half-upraised and stopped there. “You were a woman.”

  “Before I was a Gage.”

  She smiled in bitter triumph. “And instead, you chose to become that … thing.”

  I had my reasons, the Gage could have said. But he held his peace, and wondered now what they had been. Surprising him, eyes steady in his mirror, she reached out once more and stroked the metal of his wrist. Most people flinched away, looked away. Chaeri’s touch lingered. He couldn’t feel it, not exactly. But it made him shiver anyway.

  He said, “Do you rail against the frailty of flesh, then?”

  “I have loved frail flesh,” she answered. “Frail flesh hasn’t always returned the favor in what I would term a gentlemanly fashion.”

  “Loved,” he said, savoring the word. Thinking of someone of whom she reminded him. It came welling up in him—not pain, after so long. Not pain, but not the absence of pain either, exactly. Perhaps it was grief, when grief had burned hollow, consumed everything it could touch. He found himself speaking, and he didn’t mean it as a flirtation, now. It came out instead as if it were the hollow truth he had been forged to echo, as the shell is forged to echo the sea.