She was not sure how much time passed, then.
* * *
“You have to eat, Rajni. Rajni, you have to take food. A little wine, at least, Rajni.”
The smell of the food, the wine, sickened her. She turned her face away.
I want to die. I want to die. I want to die, I want to die, I want to die.
But Sayeh could not die. Though she could feel the emptiness in her gut, worse than when Tsering-la had cut Drupada from her belly. Though she could feel her heart like a hot stone in her chest that still somehow beat and beat again. She could not rest. She could not even flee the pain.
Not for herself.
But for her son.
I want to die. I want to die.
Sayeh opened her eyes. The lashes gummed, sticky. She blinked them, but a hand was there with a cool cloth, wet and warm. She recognized Nazia’s tendons and tidy nails. Another hand cupped her head, lifting it.
“Rajni?” Nazia said.
“Wine,” Sayeh agreed.
The cup came to her lips. Smooth horn, light, easy to drink from. From somewhere nearby rose the plink of the thumb harp and the soft, cracked sound of an old woman’s perfect voice.
I want to die. The wine was watered, barely wine at all. The scent made her want to gag, even so. Her stomach twisted with acid and despair.
She was Sayeh Rajni, daughter of Ajeet Raja. Widow of Ashar. Mother of Drupada. Rajni of Ansh-Sahal, whatever remained. She took a mouthful of the watered wine and waited while the gentle hand took the cup away.
She could not swallow it. It did not taste to her like anything that might sustain life, but like … dry tar. A mouthful of feathers. She held it behind her tongue and thought of something else, listened to the lullaby an old woman sang in a foreign language, until her throat relaxed and it slowly, slowly trickled down.
I will not die.
She gasped for air but did not cough, and did not resist the hands that supported her. She breathed deep, got some air inside her. “More, please, sweet Nazia,” she asked, and marveled at the gentleness of Nazia’s scarred hands.
I will not die.
I will make them burn.
13
The Dead Man and the Gage were seated on one of the terraces overlooking the wall when Ata Akhimah found them. She carried a tray of tea on her palms, which made the Dead Man realize that he had never seen a Wizard so burdened before. And yet this one took on the labor of servants as if it were as much her due as the silken robes and embroidered slippers she wore.
She set the tray on the railing. It held a curious carafe that, to the Dead Man, resembled the sort of alchemical glassware the Hasitaneh used. It consisted of two large bubbles, one inside the other, joined at the top. The external one was transparent, and the light of the Heavenly River gilded it with a satiny sheen. The interior one was a swirl of teals and blues. Both bubbles stretched into nested teardrop shapes at the top, forming the neck, and there was a spout where they merged. Three fluted, gold-rimmed porcelain bowls sat beside it.
“I didn’t know if you took sustenance from tea,” the Wizard said to the Gage. “So I brought you a bowl just to be sure.”
“I would enjoy some tea.” The Gage held out his enormous brass paw, already curved to hold the cup. He held his fingers still and let Ata Akhimah balance the fragile thing between them. They did not shift at all once it was settled in.
The Dead Man hid a smile behind his veil. He’d seen this before, though more usually with wine. The Gage would merely touch the outside of the cup. He would never lift it to his shining visage. And yet, in a little while, the contents of the vessel would be gone as if they had evaporated, but leaving no residue.
He too accepted a cup. The porcelain felt smooth and hot in his fingers, a strange combination of fragility and hardness, or delicacy—for the cup was so fine the light shone through it—and strength. The tea was a yellowy green, like a peridot. It smelled of drying grass at the end of summertime.
He passed his free hand under his veil, lifting it away from his face so that the cup could pass behind it cleanly. He’d worn the veil for so long, and in so many situations, that he normally performed this action without thinking. Now, though, he found himself self-conscious.
Ata Akhimah was watching him. Not salaciously, but with the focused curiosity of a child bent over an interesting bug crawling up some stem.
Wizards, the Dead Man thought resignedly, and tilted up the cup of tea.
“Any luck with the marble?” the Gage asked.
The Wizard sighed and shook her head. “I have something for the Dead Man, though.” She, having sipped from her cup—or perhaps only sniffed it appreciatively—set it down again. Her face creased elaborately to frame a smile. “Here.”
She held a little teakwood box out to the Dead Man. It was heavy. When he opened it, he found his pistol. His pistol, the one he had given her just a few days before, and a second one that matched it almost perfectly. The chasing on the butt and barrel were slightly different: a design with a more Sarathani flavor. And something about—
The hammer had been modified, and the powder pan for the primer was gone. Instead, the tip of the hammer rested forward, against … there was no striking rasp. Nothing to make a spark. Just a smooth little nub like the head of a pin.
He lifted one of the pistols. He did not cock it, nor aim it anywhere except at the terrace at his feet. The Dead Man had enough experience with Wizards to be sure that just because he couldn’t immediately see how the damned thing worked, didn’t mean it didn’t.
“No pan?” he asked, inspecting it.
She held out her hand, fingers pinched like the beak of a bird. He put his own palm under it, and when she opened the fingers, a shiny metal pebble fell into it.
He felt the Gage watching him. He lifted the thing and examined it under bright starlight. It was a little concave disk, fat, like a tiny dumpling somebody had poked a tinier finger into from one side only. He could see immediately that it would fit over the little peg the hammer rested against.
“What is this?”
“When you fit it over the peg,” she said, “assuming the gun is loaded, then the pistol is armed. It’s like … a portable firing pan. Once that does not have to be filled each time the weapon is used. You simply load the pistol as you normally would—you do carry premeasured loads?”
He nodded.
“Then you place the portable primer over the pin and cock the hammer. When you pull the trigger—the weapon fires.”
“And you’ve tested this?”
She smiled. “Extensively. And you don’t have to keep the pan primed—just prime it for firing—so the danger of it going off when you won’t want it to is actually reduced. And the firing time reduced as well.”
The Dead Man carefully aimed the pistol at nothing in particular—out in the middle of the white swell of the river—and sighted down the barrel. The balance was the same as it had been. He tried the second one. It was functionally indistinguishable. “How do I get more primers?”
She fumbled in her pocket and produced a bag as big as the Gage’s fist, that clinked as if it were full of tiny stones. “There are a few thousand in here. And here’s a schematic on how to make them. Any Wizard who can work with black powder should be able to make you more—or a good gunsmith, for that matter.”
The Gage watched, unmoving. Or perhaps he simply stood stolidly, far away in his thoughts.
The Dead Man said, “There are two pistols here.”
The Wizard grinned wider. Her teeth were very broad and very white, unusually so given the cheerful attention she was providing to her tea. “They’re often effective to carry in pairs. Or so I’ve read.
“Which reminds me, Dead Man. There is quite a library here. And many books in your native language, some of which have not been translated. You could make yourself useful.”
The Dead Man rather thought he was already making himself more than useful, what with the drilling of soldie
rs and the reviewing of defenses. But he also supposed, now that he thought about it, that a Wizard’s standards would be different.
He said, “If I stay—if—I stay—I believe they expect me to fight the war, not scribble out books.”
She leaned her head to one side, a gesture that would have been coyly fetching in a young girl and was now, in her middle age, soft and charming. He wouldn’t have expected such an unselfconsciously feminine gesture from such a pragmatic creature, and it softened him toward her. Always these reminders that people were layered and complex and had a thousand unexplored crannies. Every man, every woman, was like a vast system of caverns that stretched unimaginably in secret places underground. You could explore somebody for years—decades—and yet you might not even know there was a passage in a particular place, let alone where it led or what it revealed. And when you found something unexpected, it might lead you to a place where you could get dismembered or killed.
No wonder so many people never strayed from the smooth-floored, brightly lit chambers well-worn by their presence, in themselves as well as in their knowledge of another person. But for a moment, just for a moment, the Dead Man felt the itch to get to know this woman better. It reminded him of his feelings for the Gage. No matter how hard you looked, there was always something else hidden down there.
Ata Akhimah was looking at the Gage as well. She pursed her lips and said, “Does that armor still suit you?”
The Gage looked down at his gauntlet, carefully cradling the diminished cup of tea. “It is what it is,” he said. “Do you propose to repair and improve my carapace as well as the Dead Man’s guns?”
Ata Akhimah laughed, appealingly musical. She said. “I could do that, certainly. Or possibly I could take you out of that shell, Gage. Give you back the person you were.”
The Gage said, “They take one bit at a time, entire. And leave it until the new bit becomes a part of the person who is becoming a Wizard’s servitor. Once the transfer of identity is complete, they take another bit, and another. Until finally the whole thing has been replaced—head, breath, heart, and will—and what remains is a Gage.”
“A Gage that remembers being a man.”
“But without a single original part remaining. Unless you count the will that animates it.”
The Wizard leaned back against the railing, careful of the tray—no one on the terraces below would thank them for a shower of hot tea, glass, and porcelain—and folded her long fingers into the crooks of her elbows as she crossed her arms. “My tradition teaches that every body is replaced, bit by bit, in just the same way. Except what is put in place of the old is meat, rather than metal. You can see this process in a broken bone, say, or in the skin of a man’s face when he is old. It isn’t the same skin he had as a child. But it’s still him.”
The Gage glanced down at a shiny metal arm. “Is that possible?”
“What one Wizard can make, dear automaton, another can break.” She shrugged. “It would hurt. Probably rather a lot. And you wouldn’t look like you did.”
“Thank you. I find this shape is suited.” The Gage bowed a little, an inclination of his head that made the pate sparkle.
“If you change your mind,” Ata Akhimah said, “let me know. By the way, Dead Man, the rajni said she’d like to see you at your convenience. And before you get all Asitaneh about timeliness, she really does mean at your convenience. Not ‘conveniently half a day ago.’”
She winked. She left the tea. They watched her go. The Dead Man picked up the carafe and examined it. The tea within still steamed and he poured another cup. He refilled the Gage’s cup as well, since that had gone bone-dry.
The Gage wished to sigh.
The Dead Man did sigh. “I don’t know why you can’t have conceived of a tenderness for her,” he said crossly, “and not that doe-eyed chambermaid.”
* * *
The Dead Man found the queen alone.
Her maids ushered him into her presence, then closed the door behind him. He thought the older one—Yavashuri—gave him a warning glance as she took his new and newly returned pistols from him before she stepped aside. He had never broken the politeness of refraining from staring at the uncovered faces of women, though, and so he was not sure exactly what her expression held.
He heard the rustle of armor as a guard took up a post beyond. He wouldn’t be leaving, he supposed, if Her Abundance was not pleased.
The room surprised him. It was small, snug, not stately at all. The windows were covered in layers of sheer gauze—silk, he thought, from the sheen and drape—in peacock shades of teal, violet, copper, green. Light fell through them, stained in soft colors, but they rendered the world beyond into an appealing haze.
The floor was wooden, wide springy boards with patterned rugs of knotted wool and woven hemp laid over them. These colors too were jeweled, and something was twisted in with the wool in some of the knotted rugs that glistened in the light. Cushions abounded, great tufted things for sprawling on, and they were peacock-shaded too. The queen’s enormous bear-dog, her constant companion, lay among a pile of them against the far wall, watchful and calm.
Above it all hung a great brass chandelier, its candles—or lamps, the Dead Man could not tell which from below—casting their satiny glow through cut-crystal prisms.
The light was being put to good use. The queen reclined in a nest of the cushions, her feet tucked under a woven shawl. Beside her was a black enamel tray picked out in copper that had been set up on a stand to serve as a tea table. Fruit, small sweets, cups, and a pot of tea on a warmer littered it. All around her was a scatter of papers and maps and books of various designs left open here or there for quick repeated reference. Some of the bound variety, with leaves, had been weighted down at one page or another with small pretty objects such as those that also decorated little shelves here and there on the walls—a jade elephant, a cinnabar box, an antique key, a strange little nubbin of a statuette or game piece that showed a heavily bearded man on horseback, wearing the clothes of the traders who came from the far north. How on earth had that gotten here?
There were too many tiny art objects in the room for them to all be Mrithuri’s. And they came from too many foreign places, in the styles of too many centuries. This was a repository, then, of the sorts of things that had been presented as gifts to various emperors of Sarath-Sahal in the past. This was the stuff they had liked enough to keep, to put someplace where they could fondle it once in a while and be reminded of the reach of empire.
It was a royal retiring room. And in the process, it had become an accidental museum.
For a moment, the Dead Man thought sadly that the Gage would love this room, all the little arty pieces of various gifts presented to Mrithuri’s family—but that he could never step inside. He’d go right through those wonderful wide floorboards.
The queen was looking at the Dead Man, so he looked back. Not at her face or form—she was clad in a loose winter robe and trousers, and her heavy dark hair was dressed in a simple braid—but politely past her. Still, even from the corner of his vision, he could not stop himself from noticing the great dark eyes made wider by a light touch of kohl, the way her heavy hair framed and shadowed the bones of her cheeks, the thoughtful pursing of her lips. He stared at the wall behind her so he would not stare at the softness of the ivory wool that clung to the curve of her hip like a caress.
She had no such compunctions and gazed upon him plainly. The boldness—which should have seemed like rudeness—made him uncomfortable, but not in the way he expected. Instead of embarrassment, he felt a sharp erotic chill.
She was so comfortable, so at her ease, so ungilded and unbejeweled, so unpainted and unpinned, that she seemed like a different woman to him entirely. He knew it was an honor that she had let him see her so.
One of the books she seemed to be using was a scroll, rolled open along most of the left-hand wall, various spots along its length marked out with still more pretty knickknacks. She’d also cl
eared out a space in the middle of the floor by rolling up a gold and purple rug into a bolster, and she had used various dust collectors to set up ranks like a child playing at armies. He dragged his gaze away from her and turned aside, grateful for the excuse.
“Tired of the sand table, Your Abundance?”
She laughed at him. “Tired of the squabbles in the war room, Sir Dead Man,” she said, with a quirk of her brows. “I wanted to talk to you about tactics and also perhaps strategy in a quieter environment than we have had. We have to assume that this feint is the prelude to a longer and larger war.”
He glanced over at the scroll. It was a series of battle maps—the evolution of a fight from many years ago that had taken place in the same terrain that Himadra and Anuraja’s men now occupied.
“This is a good thought,” he said, gesturing at the scroll. “But this battle seems to predate cannon.”
She rose. The ivory wool spilled between her breasts and across her belly, showing every surprising small curve that rich clothes usually concealed on her narrow form. There was a term for that, when they cut the garment so the fabric clung. It was expensive, he remembered, because it wasted cloth.
She was lovely. So lovely. So like home.
It had been decades since he lost his Zillah, but for a moment the Dead Man felt a stunning pain in his bosom. He missed his darling with an intensity so great it seemed for long seconds as if the grief were new. As if he were watching her die, unable even to go to her and hold her in his arms, and knowing that he was alone in the world now and would never feel her warmth against his back in the cool of night again.
He blinked hard, glad of his veil. How did people bear it, walking around with their whole souls and faces naked to the world all the while, letting anyone see their pain and fear?
At that moment, he realized what surprised him most about this snug little room. It was silent. Not utterly silent—there were sounds from elsewhere in the palace, the twitter of small drab birds made glorious by song in the courtyard, among the weeping cascades of lavender and white that were the flowering trees. But there were no—he looked.
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