There was a body sprawled across the crib, blood still spilling from a savage head wound, though more slowly than it must at first have done. But it was not Drupada; it was his nurse Jagati, and under the arch of her corpse—it could not be other than a corpse, not with a wound like that and the blood already slowing—the boy huddled, seemingly safe and terrified. Jagati had covered her charge with her own body, and she had died for her pains.
Good Mother, preserve her. And preserve her children, too, as she sacrificed herself for mine. Sayeh would have to find them, and make sure they were raised well and provided for. It was the least a rajni could do in such a circumstance.
Sayeh looked at her child, and not at Jagati. She could not bear to regard the dead woman, even out of the corner of her eye. So she stared at Drupada through the settling masonry dust, glad of the grit that obscured her vision and blurred her eyes. Drupada’s eyes were huge, his hair slicked to his head with blood Sayeh told herself was not his own, could not be his own. Surely, Jagati in her great courage had taken on the hurt for both of them. Surely she had.
Sayeh walked toward the crib slowly, hand extended, and waited until he seemed to notice her. He was huddled small, his arms wrapped around himself, ducked down like a cub in a den. He flinched when he saw her, then opened his mouth and closed it again. The only sound that came out of him was a thin, high whine.
“Little king?” Sayeh asked him, when he finally seemed to recognize her and settle back into himself, so it seemed less like his spirit haunted an unrelated body and more like her little boy looked at her out of wide, frightened eyes.
“Mama?” he said.
She looked at the creaking beams, the crib, the dust sifting from the cracked stones overhead. Go if you’re going, she told herself.
She walked forward quickly, confidently, reaching out with both hands to pick Drupada up. His tiny hands were knotted in Jagati’s bloody tunic. Sayeh had to tuck the boy under her arm and pry them loose with the other hand, talking soothingly all the while. He squirmed and kicked. She kept one eye on the canted beams overhead and when she had him free turned back at once.
Voices were calling her from the corridor again. She wasn’t sure if they had paused, or if she had merely ceased to hear them for a time. She stepped quickly, remembering now that her feet were bare when splinters and broken stone chips pressed into them. Where she stepped, she left patches of blood behind. Drupada was heavy in her arms, face buried sticky with tears and blood against her throat where he’d burrowed through the scarf wrapping her face to get to skin. The witch-lantern was at least cold, though she still had to keep its jagged shards away from his tender flesh, and in the process she cut herself on them again.
Scratches stung on her bare arms and thighs. She almost sobbed as she saw lights moving beyond the door. All she had to do was pass Drupada through, into Vidhya’s arms, and squeeze there herself. All she had to do.
The floor pitched under her. Kicked up against her bare bloody soles and then dropped so far that she was left kicking in midair. She fell, clutching at Drupada reflexively, curling her body around his so when she landed badly on a sideways foot, she rolled and tumbled to the floor and could not break her fall. She grunted as the wind was knocked out of her, and then the air kept going in a rush. Her lungs cramped; she could not get a breath. The pain was stunning.
She clutched her boy as the witch-lantern tumbled away into the rubble, its dim light made dimmer by suspended dust. She could not see the door.
Sharp fragments lacerated her skin. She curled tight around Drupada as the ceiling hissed and settled overhead. Wood cracked; stone shattered. She felt herself begin to scream, and thought, A rajni would not do such a thing. It didn’t matter: she had no breath for more than a thin keening. A huge, breathless rumble shuddered through the room, a sound so low and deep she felt it through her bones and not her hearing. It jarred something loose in her belly, and suddenly she could get a breath. She gasped for air desperately, then coughed, retched, as the dust filled her lungs.
The earth rolled under her, huge unsettling waves as if she were tossed on a ship. She gagged, tried to push herself up. Drupada clung around her neck, choking her, screaming between his own desperate hacking coughs. She got an arm straight and pushed herself to her knees.
There came a tremendous, splintering thunder. A cascade of brown water dashed down on Sayeh’s hair. The pressure of the air in the room changed like a blow. She saw the suspended ceiling move, the great bowed crossbeam splintering, and hunched herself over her son. Nothing but her own frail soft bleeding body—
It fell with a landslide thunder. She cringed instinctively, awaiting the blow, without even time to wonder if she would feel anything.
She did not. For a long, timeless instant … no blow fell.
She was tucked, cramped into the protective position. It took long moments, two dozen racing heartbeats or more, before the calls of voices penetrated her stupor. Someone shouted her name, shouted urgently, “Rajni! Hurry! Hurry!”
She lifted her chin. Looked up. Saw a mauve light suffusing the room, or what remained of the room. Saw, through the swirling dust, the enormous blocks of stone and splintered tree trunks suspended a hand’s-breath above her, embedded in light. Saw the mass of it pulse like a breath.
She looked up, then, and saw the broken door hauled wide. Figures, silhouetted beyond it. Moving lights. A figure in a skirted swirl of black with violet flames licking his hands. A girl with a shaved head, slight to starving, running crouched into the nursery. Nazia, who grasped Sayeh’s wrist in her burned hands as if there were no difference in rank between them, and hauled the rajni up, supporting half her weight and the weight of her son, so they could slither and scramble under the heaving rubble to the door.
They were barely in the corridor, bloodied and dust-choked, when Tsering-la gave a great pained sigh like an ox heaving a plow through knotty turf, and let fall his light-wrapped hands.
Behind the wall, there was a terrible thunder, and more dust rolled forth through the shattered door. Sayeh hugged her son to her and crooned his name over and over while he clutched her and whimpered his wet-nurse’s name.
Sayeh met Nazia’s eyes over her child’s dark hair. They were wide and wild and deep as the Bitter Sea. This was the girl who had tried to bring down her reign through ill portents. This was the girl who might have succeeded.
This was the girl who had saved her life, and the life of her only child.
They stared at one another.
“I won’t forget that,” Sayeh said. She turned to Vidhya. “We need to get everyone out of the palace, out of every stone building, now.”
* * *
The rain fell thick and steadily outside as Sayeh staggered into the dark day, supported by Tsering at one elbow and Vidhya at the other. She clutched Drupada to her chest. The child was no longer howling, not even sniveling, and his silence scared her more than any noise could.
At least the rain was warm. At least it washed the blood and masonry dust from her face and limbs. Her feet hurt, now: Sayeh could not so much feel each individual cut or slice—except when the wet flagstones happened to sting in one of them—so much as just a scalded sensation over the entire surface of the soles. She limped; she still left blood behind, she was sure. One of her women tried to relieve her of Drupada, but she clutched him tighter to her, reassured when he suddenly gave a little squeak of protest.
The rain felt good. She turned her face up to it, letting it run unfettered through her hair and down the front of her nightdress. She knew it plastered the thin cloth to her and revealed her body without any art or artifice to cover her, and this once she did not care. She was alive, and her son was alive, and it might so easily have been otherwise.
“Feel the rain, little king?” she asked him. Relief and joy fizzed in her veins like alcohol. “That rain is the Good Mother’s benediction on us this day.”
She heard Vidhya ask Tsering how long until the veil se
t and the rain might taper off, how long until the night sky would brighten their prospect enough to search for survivors.
“I’ll make light,” Tsering replied. “If there are survivors, they cannot wait until sunset to be found.”
Sayeh sobered. She must be a rajni now—a mother to all her people—and not merely a mother to her son. She must see to it that such help as was possible came to those in the palace and to those as well in the city beyond as might need it.
She gritted her teeth and handed Drupada to her closest lady. “Find something woolen to wrap him in. And someplace to get him out of the rain.”
“Rajni,” the woman said, and vanished with one of Tsering-la’s witch-lanterns burning on her shoulder to light her way, and one of Vidhya’s guards at her elbow.
“What do we need?” Sayeh asked.
“Troops,” Tsering said. “Anyone who can listen for the voices of the trapped. Anyone who can dig to free them.”
“There may be more aftershocks.” The voice came from behind Sayeh. Momentarily, she startled, then flushed warm with relief to realize that the words came from the slight elderly frame of the poetess Ümmühan. “We must be careful about digging, yet, or allowing anyone to go within.”
Even more warmth filled Sayeh when she saw what the poetess held in her arms. A bundle of cloth, richly figured—Sayeh recognized a tapestry from the throne room—and emerging from it the bedraggled, broken-feathered head of a very sleepy, very sullen phoenix.
“Well, I couldn’t very well leave him,” Ümmühan said irritably, seeing the direction of Sayeh’s gaze.
Sayeh realized the poetess was fully dressed, with sandals on her feet. “You were awake?”
“I am old. The old don’t sleep much. I was wandering.” The brusqueness of the poetess’s voice was belied by the gentleness of her hand as she stroked the head of the unhappy phoenix.
Around them, the courtyard was filling up with a reassuring number of survivors. They clustered together, some who had thought to grab bedclothes or warm wraps sharing them with others. Somebody brought Sayeh a shawl of softest woven goathair, dyed with shades of blue in a coiling, teardrop pattern. It stank of wet goat, but she accepted it gratefully and pulled a corner up over her head to protect her from the continued downpour.
Tsering glanced at the poetess with what Sayeh recognized as respect. “Do you have recommendations, grandmother? Have you seen this sort of thing before?”
“I was there when Asitaneh burned,” she said. “But that was a different sort of disaster.”
“Different?” Sayeh asked.
Nazia had taken Vidhya aside. Their heads were bent together—over what, Sayeh currently had not the energy to wonder.
The poetess grimaced, folds rearranging in the topography of her weathered face as if she, too, underwent some sort of internal tremor. Sayeh could not tell how many of the droplets coursing through the creases of the old woman’s skin were tears, if in fact any were. Ümmühan said, “In that case, it was an act of war. There was a djinn.”
“Ah,” said Tsering, as if he had heard of such … weapons? Such creatures?
Sayeh gave him a curious look.
“A sort of spirit,” he said. “A spirit of fire.”
Ümmühan nodded. “One of the most powerful of the djinn, it was.” She shook her head as if shaking off water, or the memory. “This was not like that.”
“No,” Tsering agreed. “I think this was another sign that the volcano under the Bitter Sea is coming to life again. I think that we need to evacuate, to flee west into the hills. High ground, and quickly.”
Sayeh’s first reaction was to storm and swear, to insist she would never abandon Ansh-Sahal and flee. That not fire nor flood could move her.
She glanced after her woman, bearing Drupada away, but the mauve light had faded into distance. She hoped they had found someplace warm and dry that was not in immediate danger of collapsing. She might stay here in danger herself, as rajni of this place, knowing that if she surrendered the seat of the throne she placed the throne itself in danger. But she could not so risk her son, and right now, nor could she bear to be parted from him.
“All right,” she said. “We’ll make plans for evacuation. We can retreat into the foothills and find shelter there. Someone needs to find Jagati’s family and see that they are provided for, and given means to escape.”
“The whole city will have to take to their heels,” Ümmühan said. “If Tsering is right—”
“Anyone who stays is doomed,” Sayeh agreed. “I am abandoning my throne and my palace. I can give no stronger recommendation than that that they accompany me.”
* * *
Slowly, Vidhya organized his men, and with help from Nazia as a messenger—that must have been what they were talking over—he had search-and-rescue teams in place before the rain tapered off and the brightness of nightfall began to dust the horizon. At first they quickly brought out the dead—not too many of those, thank the Good Daughter and her Mother—and those who had been too injured to extricate themselves but who were not pinned or crushed or otherwise trapped within the collapsed portions of the structure.
Then the harder work began. Tsering-la was unrelentingly busy when it came to locating and extricating the victims of collapse. But so, it turned out, was Ümmühan, who had some surprising knowledge of architecture and engineering. Apparently she had in one place or another spent considerable time with an Aezin Wizard who was also an architect. And Nazia proved indispensable worming her way into confined spaces with little air or room to maneuver. She was fearless, and even when her acid-burned hands broke their blisters and bled through the bandages she did not hesitate or complain.
Sayeh tried to emulate her. Tsering had picked the broken shards from her soles. And someone had found her a pair of slippers—too large, but she wrapped her feet in rags and they stayed on—but it was all she could do to sit in a chair under a hastily erected fabric awning and try to direct her men and women in a series of fraught, exhausting, dangerous tasks for which she had no skill and little knowledge of how to proceed. Guang Bao roosted on the back of the chair, his feathers fluffing a little now that they were under shelter, offering an occasional low stream of nonsensical commentary that at least cheered Sayeh, if it accomplished nothing else. He preened her hair, too, and once bit her quite hard on the neck in jealousy when Vidhya leaned down too close.
And then the refugees from the city below began to trickle in. With them came reports of protests and disarray, and Vidhya, his face troubled, came and knelt at Sayeh’s feet and told her that the city watch had declared martial law without consulting her. She bit her lip: depending on the motivation, it was a vote of no-confidence in her abilities as rajni that was tantamount to treason. But deniable—if she had the strength to confront them on it, they could claim that messages had not gone through, and that they had done the best they could in the absence of instruction. In the meantime, Vidhya informed her, they were enforcing a curfew, and returning people to their damaged homes.
“There could be another tremor,” said Ümmühan, who happened to have returned to Sayeh’s side for a consultation. “There will be another tremor.”
Sayeh nodded, the knowledge cold in her throat, stark around her breast like a cooper’s bands. That was good, she thought—such bands bound the barrel staves tightly into a barrel, and at the moment she felt that she might fly apart at any provocation. So the pain served a purpose. It held her together.
“Do you or Tsering-la have any idea how long?”
The poetess shrugged. “Could be a heartbeat. Could be days.” She rubbed her forehead with the heel of her hand, pressed her eyes. For a moment, her lids closed, the light of cleverness and courage went out of her face, and all Sayeh could see was how tired Ümmühan was.
How brutally tired.
She looked like that herself, she was sure. Perhaps there was tea to be had somewhere in the ruin of the palace. She should call for some, for both of
them. No, she should make sure that there was a kitchen running under a tarpaulin somewhere, and hot tea and rice gruel—at the very least—for everyone.
She cupped her hand to summon one of the young recruits that Captain Vidhya had loaned her as pages, especially as she herself could move no faster than a hobble on her bandaged feet. But a hubbub from that quarter drew her attention, and she caught the swirl of some bright-colored commotion that she could not, quite, turn her head far enough to see. She pushed at the arms of her chair, and suddenly Ümmühan was there to support her—a strange role reversal, the old woman steadying the younger—while Sayeh struggled to her feet.
Those recruits—there were three of them, unarmed and clad only in tunics—were giving way quite sensibly before a rank, a wedge, of armed and mounted men. Hooves clopped on the flagstones, heads bobbed under still-damp plumes.
The horse’s caparisons were richly colored in shades of red, brown, and gold. Most striking among them was a mare gray as silver, her hide strewn with dapples like the marks where the mastersmith’s hammer had dimpled the thing he forged. On her back, with the grace of a master horseman, sat a crumpled figure with elegantly dressed black ringlets and a brow that made you imagine that grave and stately thoughts must exist behind it.
Himadra the Boneless, the prince of Chandranath. It could be no other.
Sayeh hastily resumed her chair. She would not stand to meet this foreign lord in her own courtyard, even if he came uninvited and found her bloodied, wounded, terrorized, and dressed more like a pauper than a rajni.
She still had a gilded chair and a phoenix to perch on the back of it, though—and a poetess to stand at her right hand. Sayeh glanced at Ümmühan and found the old woman regarding her steadily.
“The neighbors?” she said softly, in a savvy tone.
Sayeh nodded, the crisp nod of a rajni in public now. She did not deign to notice the armed men.
“Seems a little far to get here overnight. They must have been on their way already.”
“There is probably an army beyond the Razorback Mountains,” Sayeh replied through stiff lips—behind her hand because she did not have a fan. “I’ve been expecting this, or something like it. Where’s Vidhya? Tsering-la?”
The Stone in the Skull Page 29
