The Stone in the Skull

by Elizabeth Bear

Yavashuri smiled coyly. “A woman has her wiles.”

  Yes, the Gage thought. And the wiliest woman is the one who is the queen’s spymistress and will not admit it. Prasana, he guessed. She had been to interview Druja’s injured brother. And probably other sources as well. Or possibly she was the face drawn over the true spymaster, who might be elsewhere among the queen’s close courtiers.

  The generals unselfconsciously asked Yavashuri questions about unit strengths and compositions. She knew rather a number of the answers, and had a good idea of her confidence level in the information, too. Like many of the better professionals that the Gage had known, she did not seem to invent information where she honestly had no clue.

  “All right,” the Dead Man said. “We know where they are and their relative strengths. That’s something. Now what do we do about it?”

  The queen, it turned out, was a brilliant tactician. And her handmaiden kept revealing new and intricate depths of knowledge, as did the generals. Maybe we have a fighting chance after all, the Gage thought, and tried not to think it again in case some god should overhear him. He was standing right next to a Godmade, after all, and while the Good Daughter might be dutiful, she was also known to be ruthless and to have a terrible sense of humor.

  The Gage was almost equally impressed with the sand-table map. Ata Akhimah could animate the little figures and the terrain, make it simulate weather and troop condition, have them fight their miniature battles again and again with minor—or major—variations in tactics and conditions.

  It was at first fascinating—the tiny figurines scaling sandy rises under withering hails of arrows, being crushed under death-or-glory charges, vanishing into trapped approaches and never emerging again—and became rapidly stultifying. Even for a metal man, there were only so many iterations of the same set of starting conditions through various possibilities that a mind could bear.

  Or perhaps it was just that the Gage was not, and never had been, a particularly military-minded creature. When he had been human, she had been a potter, making useful and beautiful objects with the stroke of a fingertip and the turn of a wheel. He could fight—of course he could fight—but that was more a function of his monstrous metal armature than any skill or training.

  Everybody else in the room seemed fascinated.

  The generals and the Dead Man were head-bent over the eastern corner of the map, discussing the uses, dangers, and nuances of some bit of rough terrain. Nizhvashiti, the Wizard, the queen, and the spymistress were at the other corner, talking about chains of supply and if they could prevent, somehow, the Boneless’s men from foraging.

  “Not that there’s much to forage from, there,” Ata Akhimah said with some grim satisfaction. She had something small in her hand and was rolling it like a worry-stone: that damned dragonglass marble. “It’s why the border at that point is so poorly defended. Rough terrain and not many people.”

  Mrithuri shook her head. Her brow folded between the eyes in thought; the Gage could already tell that in five or ten years, that would be the site of her first line. Her face was so smooth now that it seemed out of place with her wit.

  She said, “That just means that he’ll have to move faster. We need to be moving troops within a day and a night.”

  The Gage did not have to turn his head to see that the Dead Man was regarding her with fond respect. The Gage felt a welling of grief and protectiveness, some of it for his foolish-hearted partner, but more—most—for women of tender ages everywhere. He can’t have her, and his wanting her is only going to get all of us killed. Women like that marry princes; they don’t do more than dally with mercenaries.

  Not if they know what’s good for them.

  The general looked like he was only constrained from spitting by respect for the inlaid floors. “Who starts a war in the rainy season?”

  “A genius.” The Dead Man shrugged when everybody looked at him. “Either that, or an imbecile.”

  The spymistress disguised as a handmaiden found some point in that she wanted to argue, and the Gage sighed inwardly and drifted away to look at the rain, which had begun once more falling. The windows of the map room overlooked the river, and he watched raindrops planish the milky surface and did not turn even when he heard Chaeri’s voice behind him. The maid of the bedchamber was bringing in refreshments—strong sweet tea and spicy vegetables wrapped in thin, crackling pancakes—for those whose strength depended on rations. His own urge to speak with her would be transparent if he made some excuse to go over. Besides, he didn’t need eyes on the back of his head to see her as she moved around the room, light-footed and full of energy.

  So he stood and observed the rain and the river, and a single fishing boat sliding between those two things, and after a short time she came over to him.

  They stood side by side, not so much shoulder to shoulder as shoulder to elbow, because he topped her by a third of his height. Her breathing was slow and relaxed. Her hands smelled of cardamom and curry, strongly enough that the Gage reflected on how his altered senses had become natural to him over the decades. Once he would have remarked on how the scent, like his vision, seemed carried on the air around him, saturating, rather than focused at a point or cluster in a nose he did not have. Now, he realized, he was remarking on the absence of that nexus of sensing—something he had also, generally speaking, ceased to do tens of years before.

  Proximity to this odd little creature with the tousled curls was making him aware of the limitations of his carapace in ways he had not experienced since he first became it.

  “What is a Gage?” Chaeri asked. Her skin moved against his metal every time she breathed, where her shoulder brushed his arm.

  “That is a complicated question,” he replied. “In what sense do you mean?”

  “You were a woman with a woman’s heart, a woman’s hand. What is this thing that you have become, that you chose to become? I want to understand.”

  Who hurt you? The Gage thought. He did not think to wonder at the how or the why. Women were all different, but each of them was wounded in the same way by the world. The details of that wounding didn’t signify much in the long run. They were, eventually, only a matter of discussion for purposes of bonding and comparison.

  He decided that he would answer her question literally, truthfully, and see where it led them.

  “A Gage is a pledge or a troth,” he said. “Specifically one given in battle—a security, guarantee, or parole in the sense of one’s word-of-honor. The word may also be used to mean something given as security on a loan—a pawned object, basically. A gage is also an object used to take a measurement.

  “And last but not least, it’s an object thrown on the ground in knightly challenge, such as a cap or gauntlet.”

  “So it’s a pun,” she said promptly.

  He paused to consider. “When you put it that way, yes, I suppose it is. The Gage is one who is engaged—sworn—to the Wizard, and is also the Wizard’s defender, and has also given themselves—their physical body—as a sort of security against the loan of strength, and Wizards being Wizards I’m sure there’s a joke in there about ‘taking the measure’ of somebody, and also of challenging them. Or being the object by which another is challenged.”

  She said, “Also, it seems from what you are explaining that the Gage is owned, more or less, by the Wizard, so there’s that.”

  “Yes,” he simply said.

  They stood and watched the rain a little. He thought she might be considering his words, working through the implications. At last the unease within him grew so great that he had to speak it.

  He made sure his tone was low, intimate. He held out one brass hand between the girl and the window, and said, “What do you think I can do for you, exactly?”

  “Everything,” she said, and made a rude gesture. “But that.” She looked at him speculatively. “Though you do appear to have hands.…”

  The Gage shifted restlessly, glad that mirrors could not flame with embarrassment. The impe
rviousness of his carapace was a blessing yet again.

  “And with no risk of pregnancy,” she pronounced, with a sly smile. Then she looked him up and down, speculatively. “Unless…”

  “Unless?” he whispered, too aware of the men and women and the Godmade discussing tactics around the sand table. The Gage could see them all clearly, though his back was turned, and they appeared to be paying him and Chaeri no mind.

  She rapped lightly on his upper arm. “What’s under that skin? Is there still a person sealed in there?”

  “I…” He paused and thought about the process of replacement, how one bit of his body at a time had been converted from fragile meat and bone to eternal metal and gears. Until at last in the final outcome, the armor was the Gage; the Gage was the armor. The Wizard’s cat’s-paw; the glove thrown down in challenge, unworn by any hand.

  “I am the skin,” he said.

  “There’s nothing underneath?”

  He slowly shook his mirrored head, sending watery sparkles flashing around the room. Now the strategists glanced up, but seeing nothing amiss, quickly turned their attention back to war.

  “No heart?” she asked. “No brain?”

  “Nothing you could touch, and feel that you were touching me,” the Gage replied. “Metal is what I am.”

  “And can metal feel?”

  That, he knew the answer to. “Metal is alive,” he said. “It bends to pressure; it stretches under blows. Work hardens it, and if you place it under too much stress it shatters. Yes. Metal can feel.”

  Feel too much, in fact. Feel so much more than it should.

  She reached out with her soft, fragile hand and squeezed his unyielding fingers then.

  12

  Sayeh awoke to the sensation of her bed falling out from under her, and the baby’s sudden baffled howl. Muffled by intervening walls, still Drupada’s cry carried.

  She struck the bed hard enough that it knocked the air out of her lungs and her jaw snapped together. It seemed to smack into her, shoving her upward, and then dropped again.

  By the time she was trying to struggle into a sitting position upright in the bed, sheets tangling her legs like heavy, wet tentacles, the wooden platform buckled and pitched beneath her batten mattress like the deck of a ship. The baby’s screaming was now echoed by the startled shrieks and yelps of adults, both in Sayeh’s bedchamber and outside.

  A tremor, it’s just a tremor, she told herself. She rolled to the edge of the bed, trying to find her balance and get her feet under her. She wore only a plain, short shift—the rajni had decided years before that she had nothing to prove in her own bedchamber, and comfort for sleeping was preferable to ostentation—but when she tried to swing her legs away from the clutch of the sheets and get them under her, the bed pitched so violently against the floor that attempting to bridge the gap between them with her body seemed sure to get her crushed, battered, or slammed between.

  The room was dark, dim daylight seeping in at the edges of the blackout drapes, and there were no lanterns. Tsering-la had made some undying witch-lanterns with which to illuminate the royal chamber. But they were shrouded and thus did Sayeh no good if neither she nor any of her maids couldn’t manage to stand up to unhood one, let alone find it in the pitching dark.

  She heard heavy creaking in the dark and imagined the heavy canopy poles that held mosquito netting crashing down upon her body. She couldn’t stand—she couldn’t even sit or kneel without being pitched over again immediately. The initial hard bucking and rolling was dropping off now—how long had it been? Minutes? Merely moments? She could not guess—the world had always been shaking.

  Finally, with a last residual shudder like the hide of a horse flinching from a fly, the trembling stopped. Sayeh dragged herself to her feet, coughing. The air was thick with dust. Someone appeared beside her in the dark, a white-clad reverse shadow, and threw something warm over her shoulders. “Rajni”—a woman’s voice—“we must leave the palace, Rajni. There may be another tremor.”

  “Drupada,” Sayeh said. She could not hear the baby crying anymore. “Take me to the nursery at once.”

  “Rajni!”

  Sayeh would hear no protests, and her people would not lay hands on her to stop her, which is what would have been required. She pushed through them, found one of the shrouded witch-lanterns on its side on the floor, and picked it up. Shards of glass spilled from the frame as she lifted it, cutting her fingers somewhat. The cloth slipped away and light poured out, revealing billows of pale dust in the air: powdered mortar or stone. Sayeh hoped that the dragonglass in some of the palace windows had not cracked. If there was dust from that mixed in, and she or her people breathed it, it would poison them as surely as would tea of aconite.

  One of her women handed Sayeh a scarf, which the rajni wrapped over her face. Her breath still came in chalky, and even more restricted, and her eyes clogged with grit the tears that streaked her powdery face could not wash free. They were all coughing and wiping their faces, and suddenly Captain Vidhya was with them, choking and struggling, clutching a piece of muslin to his face.

  “Rajni,” he said urgently. “We must get out of the palace at once. There will be aftershocks.”

  “Drupada!” she insisted, pushing past him toward the nursery. He could have stopped her easily, but Sayeh was certain that he would never lay hands on her either.

  Nor did he, whether out of habit or out of respect.

  Sayeh charged down the hallway toward the nursery. The dust was thicker here, her eyes now streaming so hard she could barely blink them clear enough to see even vague shapes, despite the caged witch-lantern she thrust out before her. Something wet slid down her arm and dripped from her elbow as she raised the lantern. Blood, from where she had cut herself on the shattered glass.

  At least it wasn’t dragonglass, she thought, then put the thought away. Because ahead of her she saw the cracked doorframe and twisted door of the nursery, the arch slumping over it, the keystone cracked clean in two. The halves had slid, and the weight of the wall above and the second story of the palace now rested entirely on the wooden uprights of the door. They had splintered and bent but not quite buckled, and the door was sprung in its hinges.

  A knife of ice had slipped into Sayeh’s chest. Her heart felt as if it slashed itself with every beat, as if the insides of her ribs had become a cage of knives. “Drupada,” she whispered. “Jagati.” She tried to shout the nurse’s name: it came out a breathless moan, as when she tried to scream in a nightmare.

  She went to the door. The gap was slight—a thin woman’s width and no more. Splinters of wood and jagged blocks of stone rendered it sharp-edged and unstable to entry.

  More blood dripped as Sayeh studied it, sickly sticky streaks through the white dust on her skin. She wanted to hurl herself at the narrow passage, to tear at the kindling and stone chips, but that would be her own death as well as Drupada’s. And perhaps—she could see within, a narrow slice of floor. There was rubble and dust, but no great boulders or heavy lengths of beam strewn on the tile.

  The earth pitched beneath Sayeh then. She heard her women shriek, Vidhya swear. The doorway groaned. Her captain reached to take her arm and draw her back. He got as far as laying his fingertips on her shift before his courage failed him—but when the rajni would not be moved, he desisted. She would have fought with everything she had if he had tried to move her now.

  For within the nursery, she had heard a small, terrified whimper, a young animal’s fearful cry.

  Her women were plump, middle-aged. Vidhya was a broad-shouldered, deep-chested, barrel-stomached man past his first youth—and his second youth, too, if Sayeh was honest about it. There was one person here who could go into the room, and Sayeh knew if she gave them the slightest indication of what she intended, they would do anything—even commit the treason of laying rough, restraining hands on her person—to stop her.

  “Captain,” she said to Vidhya, struggling to keep her voice calm. “Where are
your men?”

  “Overseeing the evacuation,” he answered promptly. “I came for you myself.”

  She nodded. “Have you seen Tsering-la? Or his new apprentice Nazia, the little slight strong one?”

  “Tsering was shoring up the main gates when I left him.”

  “Send one of my women for his apprentice,” Sayeh said, with a little gesture to the door.

  Vidhya stepped back away from her, and as he turned to speak to the closest maid of the bedchamber, Sayeh darted forward, turning sideways and slipping like a dancer between the splintered upright and the edge of the cracked door. She was within with her caged witch-lantern before Vidhya could even respond to her woman’s startled cry.

  And once inside, she froze.

  The real damage in the room had not been visible through the angle of the door crevice, in that restricted light. Now that she was inside, the witch-lantern and the shafts of dim daylight filtering through the rents in the ceiling revealed the terrible truth.

  The ceiling had not collapsed, not totally, but thick beams had slipped from their divots in the wall tops and leaned crazily together, supported by one solitary undamaged crossbeam. That beam bowed crazily under the load. And in the corner of the room farthest from the exterior wall, a beam had come all the way down, and blocks of stone and all the stuff of construction that Sayeh had not the engineering skills to name were scattered on the floor by Drupada’s crib.

  There was a hue outside, Vidhya and the women yelling after her, but Sayeh could not consider it now. She could barely even hear it over the roar of panic in her ears.

  Good Mother, Sayeh thought. Save my child, and I will make you any sacrifice you ask with glad heart, up to and including that heart’s own blood.

  She stepped forward. There was blood, red and sticky, and more horrible things than that scattered on the floor. She caught her breath and made herself take another step and another, until she was close enough to the crib to raise the witch-lantern and take a better look.

  She hated herself that her small cry was as much relief as despair.