“Is…” She pressed her lips together, and he saw her draw her dignity on for the courage it loaned. “… is there … more? That we could do? Without…”
“A little,” he said.
“Will you show me?”
“I would adore to, my queen.”
Her belly was soft under his lips, a carpet of silk so much finer than the woven carpet of silk beneath his knees. He turned his face to rub his cheek above the beard against her, touched the inside of her thigh with the back of his wrist, where his own skin was still soft and sensitive. She sighed, settled, then roused again. He found her little bud, soft now and relaxed, and blew a tender stream of air across it until she pushed toward him, seeking.
She heated so quickly that it seemed he barely had time to savor her changing scents, the aroma of the sea’s edge thickening to honey. The sound she made when he brushed his lips against her petals was a guttural cry of need, a salty animal sound without logic or reason, only longing. His hardness had slacked; now again it tightened.
When at last he ceased to tease and instead licked and nibbled, she pulled a pillow across her face and cried into it as if her heart were breaking, cried out through clenched teeth until she wept, but she did not beg him to stop. And so he kept on until she knotted her fingers near his scalp and pulled him away, drew him up beside her, kissed his salty beard and stroked his hair back from his temples while she panted and leaned close.
She shrugged out of her robe to be closer to him, and he drew it over them like a quilt. He held her, and felt the simple pleasure of her warmth and her sweat and something beyond words. In the sensation of her skin against his skin, her body beside his, lay an ineffable connection with the godhead.
The Dead Man became, for a few moments, human again. It happened easily and it felt safe. He knew it was not safe.
The feeling frightened him.
Their breathing calmed. He stroked her hair. They must have dozed a little, because when he noticed that they were breathing in rhythm with one another it was raining again, and he could not have said when it started.
Perhaps his awakening wakened her. Perhaps she had not, herself, drifted. She looked up at him, twisting her neck around as she lay in his embrace. She looked away. She looked down at her hands, cuddled against her breasts in her half-curled position. She shrugged her shoulders back against him, warm and suddenly confident in his presence, his attention.
She said, “Is there something I can do for you?”
* * *
They were dressed again, drinking cooled tea and studying Mrithuri’s dust-collector tactical maps, when the door suddenly rattled with the guard’s pounding. A cry carried through the wood, muffled but clear: “Rajni! Rajni! The enemy is on the move!”
The Dead Man reached without thinking to draw his veil across his face. Mrithuri stayed his hand and kissed his cheek, then released him as she hurried to the door. She opened it with her own hands, revealing a guard—not the same one the Dead Man had come in past, so the first one must have been relieved at some point—Lieutenant General Pranaj, the handmaiden Chaeri, the Gage, and the Wizard Akhimah.
The Dead Man had combed the queen’s hair for her, and braided it as well, so she looked tidy and calm and not in the least dissipated or gorgeously disarrayed, as she had been so little time before. He kept that memory to himself, tucked up into a warm corner of his heart, and knew that if he smiled inappropriately to the circumstances, the veil would keep anyone from seeing it.
The queen stood aside to allow her staff into the room. They filed in except for the Gage, who looked dubiously at the wooden floor.
“I believe I will wait in the hallway, Your Abundance,” he said in resonant, courteous tones.
She laughed. The Dead Man wondered if anyone else would notice how merry she seemed, or the sidelong glances she offered him now and again. The Gage would, probably. But he had long ago given up worrying about what the Gage knew or did not know.
Chaeri, though—she gave him a knowing smirk through lowered lashes as she came into the room. She carried an inlaid box with both hands. Something slid heavily inside it, and through the filigree sides the Dead Man could see a scaled and muscled curve.
“Your pets,” Chaeri said to the queen. “I brought them.”
The queen looked stark, but nodded. “I have not slept,” she admitted. She rubbed her arm as if it troubled her. “Will you aid me?”
While Chaeri opened the box—cautiously, judiciously, wearing a heavy pair of gloves—the lieutenant general and Ata Akhimah began to fill the queen and the Dead Man in on events they had missed.
A series of scouts and sentries who had gone on ahead of the armies of Sarathai-tia had vanished. Then the disappearances had ceased, and the most recent wave of reconnaissance had revealed that Anuraja’s army was gone. Just gone: not at all where they were supposed to be. They had left the sort of wide, churned trail an army leaves, and that too had simply stopped, dead-ending.
“As if a rukh carried them off,” the Dead Man said.
“I thought those were mythical,” Pranaj said, tilting his head.
The Dead Man sighed hard enough that his veil puffed.
“Somebody would have noticed a bird the size of a whale,” Mrithuri said. “We have to find Anuraja’s men. We can’t just have an army wandering around unescorted.”
Yavashuri glanced significantly at the Dead Man.
“You may be plain,” said the rajni. The Dead Man appreciated the trust, though he would have counseled her against it—she could not know he could be trusted, and making it look like a foreigner was her favorite would poison the politics of her court.
Yavashuri’s frown told him she knew all these things as well. “At least we know where Himadra’s men are. They’re in Ansh-Sahal.”
Her tone indicated that there was worse to come. She didn’t hesitate.
“Himadra’s men may have captured Sayeh and her son.”
“The prince is captive? We’re not sure?”
Yavashuri shrugged. Her shoulders were mutinous. She didn’t trust the Dead Man, even if the queen did.
Chaeri, both hands in the piercework box, seemed about to say something, but looked down again as if she thought better of it.
“The royal bearded vultures,” Pranaj said.
Mrithuri nodded. If she were about to say anything, it was interrupted by Chaeri, who approached her now with a thick-bodied serpent as long and broad as the Dead Man’s arm gripped tightly in her two hands. She grasped it behind the head, disarming the terrible fangs that it gaped to show. Its heavy body wound in loops around her forearm, writhing slowly. It seemed to the Dead Man that she struggled slightly under the weight.
The viper was sandy-colored, with a blunt, jowly, triangular head. Pale irregular pits ran in rows along its upper lip. The Dead Man thought the black patterns on its back scales looked like some foreign calligraphy, but if they were words, they unsettled him to gaze upon.
Mrithuri glanced around the room, and seemed to come to a decision. She brushed the collar of her robe aside, baring the speckled skin, and lifted her braid to allow Chaeri to apply the viper below her collarbone. The snake, seeming to sense prey, lunged against Chaeri’s grasp as she brought it close, but Chaeri had the skill of experience, and controlled it until she could herself, gently, press the fangs into Mrithuri’s skin.
Mrithuri closed her eyes. She let her head fall back and shuddered in a way he found, suddenly, unnervingly familiar.
The Dead Man looked away, wincing. He found himself staring into the Gage’s mirror and had to look away from that, as well: even with his expression veiled, he found he could not bear his own reflection.
He looked back as Chaeri was returning the serpent to its box, and Mrithuri was accepting a clean square of cotton from Pranaj. She pressed it over the slightly bleeding wounds on her chest and held it there with some pressure, though the crimson dots that soaked it did not grow beyond their first blossoming. She bl
inked, shaking her head until her eyes seemed to focus, and said, “Well, I suppose we should move this to the map room. Chaeri, would you have the austringers ready my birds?”
“What can the bearded vultures do?” the Gage asked, his voice so low that the Dead Man knew it was meant for his ears only.
The Dead Man shrugged. “We’ll find out before long.”
Chaeri—the box of serpents in her hands—was already stepping around the Gage on her way out. The Dead Man did not miss the way she let her shoulder brush the metal man as she edged past him. Then she was gone, her small feet a gentle patter down the hall.
“Gage,” Mrithuri said. “Teacher. Lieutenant General Pranaj. Would you go on ahead to the map room? I have a private word for this mercenary, and then I will join you.”
They exited, leaving the queen standing beside him beside the door, ankle-deep in jewel-colored carpets. The red tones had dropped out of her complexion, leaving her face waxy and faintly sheened with sweat. Her eyes glittered, the pupils tight. She floated in an air of suppressed energy. Can this be good for her?
But it didn’t seem to make her slow or impede her thoughts.
Mrithuri rested her fingertips on his arm. Her hands were chill. She met his gaze. She said in a low tone. “Forgive me for asking—”
“You may ask me anything, my queen.”
Her head tipped to the side. “Do you have a name?”
Oh, that. Yes, he realized. He probably should have told her. “My caliph named me Serhan,” he said formally. “All things a Dead Man has and is come from the caliph. If I had another name before that, before I was orphaned and adopted into the caliph’s service—that, I do not know.”
She looked up at him. “Serhan,” she said, tasting it. Then, “Would you mind if I used that name? Sometimes? In privacy?”
His mouth dried so it was hard to speak, but somehow he managed to say, “I think I would like that very much.”
* * *
The council of war was over very quickly, because they had so little information. Mostly, the time was spent assigning roles. The one distraction was the bearded vultures, of which—it turned out—there were a dozen or so. The Dead Man had known about the one in the throne room. Now he realized that there was a whole family of the gargantuan things, stained red with ochre and hungry for bones.
After the council broke up, he stayed with the queen while she walked the line of them, perched on the gauntleted fists of her austringers, and fed each one a piece of bone from her own hand, that she had dotted with her own blood. He didn’t ask the meaning of the ritual: it was plain some royal magic was in play. He simply watched, and waited.
When the queen was done, she dismissed him. With a smile, but unmistakably. “There are things I must attend to in private,” she said.
And so he went to find the Gage.
The Gage was, again, on the palace wall. The sturdiest bit of it, standing very still so he could admire the view without cracking the footings. The river coiled smooth and milk-white below, and after the Dead Man came up on him they stood in silence for a little while together.
When the time felt right to talk, though—well, they had killed enough men together by now that the Dead Man did not bother with preamble.
“Have you seen Nizhvashiti recently?”
The Gage tilted his shining egg of a head. “The priest is missing?”
“Maybe,” the Dead Man said. “The priest is not immediately obvious, in any case. And has not been for some time. No sign of them at the meeting, though I know Mrithuri sent.”
“Run off to the enemy?”
“Do you think so?”
“You do,” the Gage said, which wasn’t precisely true and also wasn’t an answer.
The Dead Man didn’t think the Godmade was a traitor. It was more that the Dead Man worried what would happen if the Godmade was a traitor.
Something like an entire army vanishing, for example? Perhaps that sort of thing?
The Dead Man said, “What are we doing here anyway?”
The Gage shrugged. “You like the rajni.”
“Enough to die for?”
“So it would appear.”
It was the Dead Man’s turn to shrug. “You like the maid of the chamber.”
“The maid of the chamber likes me,” the Gage said. “I have not yet decided.”
He had, though. And the Dead Man knew it. The Gage was a metal man who weighed as much as the rajni’s white elephant. Whatever existed between him and Chaeri might not be romance as the Dead Man understood it, but there was a fashion by which all love of a woman served as worship of the Scholar-God. And while love might still be too strong a term, he thought his partner was feeling … stirrings … of affection and connection.
He sighed and said, “The years pass. Pride fails. You learn to take what is offered.”
The Gage turned his head—so the Dead Man would know the Gage regarded him, the Dead Man supposed.
“The years go by,” the Gage agreed. “And that pride was gilded ash when you bought it. All we have lost if we walk away now is a little money, and a chivalrous fantasy.”
“And a good story.”
“Sure,” the Gage said. “If we live long enough to tell it.”
The Dead Man jerked his chin to the horizon. “You see—sense—anything out there yet?”
“For once it’s not raining.” The Gage gave that little wobble of his head that meant he was snickering. “You know we’re missing something.”
“We’re always missing something.” The Dead Man shrugged. “We’re not the heroes of the story. Of any story. We’re those guys who wander in during the third act to pick up the dirty work.”
“That narrative thing that you call ‘the Scholar-God’s pen,’ you mean.”
The Dead Man smiled at a jolt of startled joy. “You have been paying attention after all. But there is another reason to stay here.”
“More pressing than nubile queenlings?”
“Yes,” said the Dead Man. “I’d stay for her anyway, I think. Though if you left it would be a hard deciding. But remember, old friend: we were sent here by a prophetic Wizard.”
The Gage made his gesture of sardonic laughter again. “We could have headed west instead of taking this job.” He sounded resigned. It had never been a possibility.
“West. Across the Poison Sea.”
“So there’s drawbacks.” The broad metal shoulders moved on a shrug beneath the rough-spun robes. They were clean. New, the Dead Man noticed. Either the Gage had purchased clothing, or drawn livery from the royal stores, or someone in Mrithuri’s household had taken pity on him. The Dead Man had an idea whose hand might be in it. “I don’t mind your little queen, you know.”
“You’re not a jealous Gage, at heart.”
“Pain is boring,” the Gage said. “And the most boring part about it is that you can’t even just decide to do something else instead.” He leaned gingerly on the thick stone castellation, folding his enormous cabled arms. “You’ve mourned your family since I’ve known you.”
“That doesn’t stop,” the Dead Man said.
“No,” the Gage said. “I know. But they wouldn’t think less of you, I imagine, for not making the mourning of them your whole life.”
The Dead Man snorted with laughter. He leaned beside his friend and said, “You never met my wife.”
“I know,” the Gage said. “And from the few times you have spoken of her, I think that saddens me.”
The skin on the Dead Man’s neck shuddered like the flank of a horse twitching off a fly. “We never would have met if she had lived.”
“This is true. Because she only could have lived if history had been different. It wasn’t your doing, what happened to Zillah.”
The Dead Man realized he was holding his breath. He picked at a loose thread in his coat’s embroidery and forced himself to stop. The damned thing was threadbare enough already.
He had been silent for a while, contempl
ating his cuffs, when the Gage said absently, “So we’re staying, then.”
The Dead Man nodded. “I suppose we are.”
* * *
They stayed to watch the sunset, the lowering of the Cauled Sun beneath the horizon and the lifting of the veil across the Heavenly River, and went inside finally only when Mrithuri Rajni sent for them. She didn’t send just anyone, either: it was Ata Akhimah who came out to fetch them.
And the first thing she said, after relaying her summons, was, “Have you seen the Godmade?”
The Dead Man glanced at the Gage, who had in turn inclined his shining ovoid down at the Dead Man. To one who knew him, the metal man’s body language gave the distinct impression of a frown. The Dead Man wasn’t honestly sure which of them, at that moment, was saying, “I told you so.”
“No,” the Gage said. “Not in several days.”
Ata Akhimah nodded. “We’ll look later. For now … the rajni wants all of us present for the Ritual of the Red-Stained Wings.”
The Dead Man almost asked. But the Gage didn’t, and he felt awkward exposing himself as ignorant when nobody else seemed to be, so he held his peace and followed.
The throne room looked as it had before, except it was all but empty of courtiers and there were now a dozen massive perches, their crossbars padded in quilted red leather, set in a pair of offset arcs before the queen’s chair of estate. She sat in it cross-legged, still in her plain ivory trousers and robe. Her hands rested on her knees, and her eyes were closed.
Someone had opened vents in the dragonglass vault overhead, long casements between the branches of the stone trees whose boughs made the ribs of the vault. When they were all assembled—the Gage stepping lightly in a gargantuan pair of padded shearling slippers to protect the tiles of the floor—the ropy-armed middle-aged man who seemed to be the head austringer took up the first of the birds, brought it to the center of the throne room, and unhooded it. He stroked its head with a feather, ruffling its roused crest, and held it in place while it settled itself and looked about curiously.
The Stone in the Skull Page 34
