The Stone in the Skull
Page 37
Akhimah stood up again, looking lost. “I don’t know,” she said. “How did it get past you? And while we’re at it, how does an entire army disappear out of its footsteps?”
Hnarisha crumpled. “This is a phantasm. A delusion.”
Mrithuri stood beside her chair, her arms wrapped across her chest. The flimsy fabric of her drape bunched and snagged between her fingerstalls. But her voice was steady, even chill. “The illusions of a sorcerer.”
The Godmade, seeming contented with the Dead Man’s progress, floated effortlessly erect on legs thinner than stilts. The Dead Man probed the wound over his breastbone with a finger and felt nothing there but new, sore skin and some bruising. He sat up as the Godmade stalked toward Ata Akhimah. Any shakiness, any coltishness was gone; now the revenant moved like some enormous wading bird with iridescent ebony feathers.
It reached out—like a wading bird—and with thick, horny, overlong fingernails plucked something from the sleeve of Akhimah’s coat. The hand moved back, pulling, and something near-invisible stretched between sleeve and pinch. “Here’s your problem,” it said.
They all leaned in and looked. It was a thread. No, a hair. Gray and long, slightly wavy. An old person’s hair. “Sewn into the cuff,” the Godmade said. “To make even you, Wizard, see what you were intended to see. I would guess it was the woman this hair was plucked from.”
“Someone is holding the real Ümmühan captive?” the Dead Man said, stunned. It was a blasphemy he could hardly imagine, to so constrain a poetess.
The Godmade shrugged bony shoulders. “That is one theory, yes.”
Yavashuri said, quietly, “Someone prepared the way for the assassin.”
“Someone,” Hnarisha said, face thunderous, “stitched that into the Wizard’s seam unobserved.”
“Someone within the household,” Mrithuri said calmly, before the Dead Man could make the accusation.
“Some such person, aye.”
Mrithuri asked, “Do you think the news they imparted was the truth?”
“Something evil under the eastern sea,” Ata Akhimah said.
The Dead Man forced himself to stop poking his finger into the hole in his shirt, and the new hole in his red coat. Servants arrived to carry the general’s body out on a stretcher. He still could not look at the uncanny form of the Godmade without a shudder, but gratitude leavened the horror of the undead priest a little. “If the assassin’s purpose was to get close to you, Rajni, then would they have risked a lie we might have known for such? They can’t know what information you had.”
The silence stretched.
“Poor Sayeh,” Mrithuri said.
They might have stared at each other all night, the Dead Man thought, but a sudden thudding in the hallway roused them all—all the living, anyway, and those of the dead that were mobile. Including himself, rubbing at the sore spot beneath the new hole in his coat with his left hand.
The Godmade dropped a warm object into his hand. He glanced down, and found the lead ball that had been dug from his now-vanished wound seconds before. He dropped it into his pocket to contemplate later.
Syama roused and hackled. But the Dead Man didn’t bother drawing one of his own pistols. Though the even thudding sounded like the blows of the Scholar-God’s own pile driver, the Dead Man knew what it was, and felt bad for the floor.
Instants later, the Gage appeared in the doorway, thundering to a halt. “Gunfire,” he said.
“Resolved,” the Dead Man replied. He gestured to the silvery thread that the Godmade still dangled aloft. “In favor of a more complicated problem.”
The Godmade turned to the Gage in obvious disapproval—or as obvious as an emotion could be, when mounted upon the frozen features of a mummified cadaver.
“You were to go,” it said.
Which was when the Dead Man realized that the Godmade had returned to the throne room without the Gage.
“I heard gunfire,” the Gage replied.
“Wait,” said the Dead Man. “Where were you going?”
The Gage looked guiltily at the Godmade. Then, not at the Dead Man, but at Mrithuri. “To the Singing Towers, Your Abundance. As we had discussed.”
The queen snapped her elongating fingerstalls off her hands in disgust. They scattered to the dais, pealing like tiny bells, for they were true silver. She dragged the fox muzzle off her face and tore a half-dozen combs from her elaborate coiffure while pulling the straps clear. She cast that down too, though Hnarisha caught it where she tossed it and set it down more gently. She appeared not to notice. “I thought that was my decision,” she said dryly.
The Gage stepped forward into the audience chamber, walking softly. Bits of cracked tile from the corridor scattered from his feet anyway. He said, “One too many prophecies.”
The Dead Man felt his face curling into a snarl. “You were going without me?”
The Gage rocked back slightly—a flinch, and a significant one. “The war. One of us has to stay. And you can’t go where I need to go, to find the Carbuncle. Dragon-poison is nothing to me, little friend.”
He shrugged, like a mountain shrugging.
“Rajni,” the Dead Man said in appeal. He was proud of himself that he remembered not to use her name in public. Even when his heart felt it was swollen with some unclean life within, something that was slitting it open with razored claws merely to escape. “You must not permit—”
She silenced him with a gesture of her naked hand. It wasn’t a cruel gesture, and she caught his eye as she made it, but it was final.
She was not the first queen who had broken his heart.
She looked down from her chair of estate and said, “So we’re sending him to the land of the dragons.”
“Long-dead dragons,” the Dead Man argued. “Alone?”
“One of my vultures will accompany him. So we will be able to reach him.”
He started to protest again.
She shushed him with a raised finger. “The thing you must understand is that there are no nouns in the language of dragons. There are only verbs. Things do not exist. Only forces. Only actions.”
This time, her pause seemed to indicate that she wanted an answer. But nothing could ever be plain. The Dead Man pursed his lips and said, “Is that true?”
She shrugged. “It sounds pretty. Prettiness is a kind of truth. But I must be a force now, you see? And not a person. There will be time afterwards, if we survive, for simply being. Ruthlessness is not so much an option as a means of survival now.”
He did see.
He looked away.
His attention was drawn by a heavy scraping. He turned almost slowly enough to make it seem that it was that sound that had made him drop his gaze.
Chaeri, cursing mildly, was somewhat ineffectually dragging the chair the false Ümmühan had sat upon over to a bemused Gage. She was a little clumsy, perhaps with the poppy she’d been taking to sleep since she killed Mahadijia.
“I could help you with that,” said the Gage.
She snorted and set it down beside him. A lock of her hair had escaped. She pushed it away with the back of her hand and then laid that hand upon the Gage’s arm to steady herself. He did not move as she hopped nimbly onto the chair. She stood on tiptoe, and planted a firm, generous kiss upon the polished ovoid of his head.
She left the perfect smudge of her mouth on his flawless mirror.
The Dead Man did not think the Gage minded it there. He tilted his head and seemed to be looking at her, more directly than anything the Dead Man was used to seeing. Whatever he might have said, though, was silenced by a loud, sizzling hiss and a streak of light across the sky behind the glass vault overhead. And then another, and another, until all the starry river of the night seemed to rain fire down on them.
For all their brilliance, for all that some of them left weird billows of smoke behind them, not one touched the ground.
“Falling stars,” the Dead Man whispered, awed.
“A portent,”
the Godmade replied. It glanced from Ata Akhimah to the queen. “The Heavenly River is raining. The Good Daughter speaks to us. A warning.”
“The army,” Mrithuri said. Not a shocked cry, but a weary statement of infinite resignation.
Everyone looked at her. She had one hand knuckled against her eyes. The other fingers curled sharply into the arm of the chair of estate. The Dead Man longed to go and take those hands and cradle them between his own.
“How the hell did they get here so fast?” Mrithuri asked, her voice not so much afraid as offended. “And without anyone noticing?”
“Phantasm,” Hnarisha said, tiredly. “Illusion.”
Ata Akhimah nodded. “That is extremely powerful sorcery.”
“What?” Chaeri squeaked, face blank and eyes wide. “Rajni. Your birds?”
“We see clearly,” Mrithuri answered. She lowered that hand and opened her eyes. “The enemy is here. At the gate, very nearly. Fortunately we already sent the guards and soldiers to man the defenses. They will not merely walk in.”
She looked at Ata Akhimah. The Dead Man saw epiphany on her face before she spoke it. “The dragonglass jewel,” she said. “You have it?”
“Preserve us,” Ata Akhimah murmured. She produced the thing from her pocket, unwrapped the silk that bound it. It rested on her hand, shimmering, reflecting the streaking light of the showering stars above.
Mrithuri straightened until her height, assisted by the dais, dominated the room. “The Stone in the Skull.”
Ata Akhimah’s face went slack, then she smiled suddenly, brilliantly. “Of course,” she said. “And I call myself a Wizard. Of course!”
She held the dragonglass sphere out to the Godmade.
The Godmade cocked its head from one to the other, curiously. “Oh yes,” it said. “I see.”
Mummified claws plucked the stone up and held it aloft. A light kindled within, a dim green glow. The Dead Man watched, fascinated, expecting the Godmade to reach into its socket and prise out the false golden orb.
But the left hand rose up, and with a swift and savage movement, the Godmade insinuated its claws into the socket of its remaining eye and tore the wet orb free. The Dead Man recoiled from a pop like a cork coming loose from a bottle. Around him, others did the same—even the queen turned her face aside, she who was trained to never give away the slightest facet of her thoughts.
The Godmade dropped the squashed-looking thing into Ata Akhimah’s still-outstretched palm with surprising accuracy for a creature that should have just blinded itself, and pressed the dragonglass orb into the empty socket with an equally sickening sound. It stretched the lids, seeming to settle the foreign object into place, and stood for a moment blinking while the dim light flared and flared, dazzling, pouring from eye socket and nostrils, before fading back to a striking glow.
The Godmade blinked like a shutter over the sun. Something thick and dark, not blood, trickled over the desiccated cheek.
It spoke with satisfaction. “Yes. I believe that will be helpful. Let their sorcerer bring illusions before me now!”
Ata Akhimah, unable to look away from the terrible thing in her palm, gulped. “I suppose I’ll just go burn this then.”
Chaeri, watching stricken from atop her perch on the chair, fainted without further ado. The Gage caught her and lowered her to the tiles very gently.
“Holy writ,” the Dead Man breathed.
Mrithuri made no time for prayer. She stood. “Gage,” she said, “it is time for you to leave us now. The postern gate, before it is sealed. On your errand, quickly. The rest of us, make ready for war. We will not surrender.”
“We know they have a sorcerer,” Ata Akhimah said. “Perhaps several. Powerful ones.”
The queen smiled starkly. “We know a few tricks of our own. Now to arms, my loves.” She made a sweeping gesture.
The Dead Man reached for his gun.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my agent, Jenn Jackson, her assistant, Michael Curry, and my editor, Beth Meacham, without each of whom this book would not exist. Thank you as well to the entire production team at Tor Books, from my copyeditor, Deanna Hoak, to all the production managers and proofreaders and designers and artists and everybody else involved, and to the publicity team that gets the word out.
Thank you to Shveta Thakrar, Nazia Khatun, Ritu Chaudry, and Asha Srinivasan Shipman, who helped vet the manuscript and provide cultural context.
Additionally, thank you to my Patreon patrons, especially those contributing at a Help Feed The Dog level: Alexis Elder, Graeme Wiliams, Clare Gmur, Brad Roberts, S. P., Hisham El-Far, Noah Richards, Cathy B Lannom, Brooks Moses, Kelly Brennan, Emily Gladstone Cole, Jason Teakle, Dave Pooser, Mary Kay Kare, D Franklin, RiverVox, Heather K, Besha Grey, Jordan Colby, Tiff, Jen Warren, Jenna Kass, Jack Gulick, Sigrid Ellis, and Mur Lafferty.
Thank you to my family, who put up with me.
And thank you to my beloved Scott, who makes it worthwhile.
Massachusetts, August 2016
TOR BOOKS BY ELIZABETH BEAR
A Companion to Wolves (with Sarah Monette)
The Tempering of Men (with Sarah Monette)
An Apprentice to Elves (with Sarah Monette)
All the Windwracked Stars
By the Mountain Bound
The Sea Thy Mistress
Range of Ghosts
Shattered Pillars
Steles of the Sky
Karen Memory
The Stone in the Skull
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ELIZABETH BEAR was the recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2005. She has won two Hugo Awards for her short fiction, a Sturgeon Award, and the Locus Award for Best First Novel. Bear lives in South Hadley, Massachusetts, with her husband, novelist Scott Lynch. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Map
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Acknowledgments
Tor Books by Elizabeth Bear
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE STONE IN THE SKULL
Copyright © 2017 by Sarah Wishnevsky Lynch
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Richard Anderson
A Tor Book Published by Tom Doherty Associates 175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-7653-8013-5 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4668-7207-3 (ebook)
eISBN 9781466872073
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First Edition: October 2017
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