by Anthony Ryan
“The secret is to keep it turning,” Alestine said, adjusting the haunch’s position over the fire before turning to her pack. “Would you care for an aperitif?” She extracted a metal flask and two tin cups, handing one to Lizanne before pouring a pinkish liquid into it. “A local vintage,” Alestine said, raising her own cup to her nose to sample the aroma. “I’m afraid the name is quite unpronounceable. I call it ‘Kilnahria’s Milk.’”
Lizanne sniffed the substance, finding it pleasantly fruity, before taking a sip. “Very nice,” she said. “If a little strong for my tastes.”
“I’m glad you like it. You didn’t in the vision.” She drained her own cup and poured some more. “So, how did you like the music? I assume you unlocked the solargraph; otherwise, you wouldn’t be here.”
“A highly accomplished tune, to be sure. The musician I employed to decipher it was suitably impressed, and he is something of an expert in the music of your era.”
“And you, Miss Lethridge? Did you like it?”
There was a weight to Alestine’s gaze that caused Lizanne to conclude her answer was important. A test of some kind? she wondered. Did my vision self hate the music or love it? “It was beautiful,” she said, deciding honesty would be the best course. “But sad. Your musical skills appear to match your flair for things mechanical.”
“I can assure you they do not. I didn’t write the music, you see. I merely captured it for posterity, although it’s nice to know my flair for the mechanical had some uses.”
“A great many uses. So many in fact, people have killed to possess the fruits of your labour, myself included.”
“Such was never my intention.” Alestine took another sip from her cup and turned to the meat, asking Lizanne to help as she adjusted the spit to revolve the haunch above the flames. “Approach every task with care and diligence and you won’t go far wrong,” she said. “Something my mother never tired of telling me.”
“If you didn’t write the music,” Lizanne said, stepping back to waft the thickening smoke away, “who did?”
She saw the sadness return to Alestine’s face, though this time it was not accompanied by any humour. “A lady of my prior acquaintance,” she said. “You remind me a little of her. So much passion and humanity bound up in a tight, controlled package. I think you two would have gotten on quite well. Although, in time she would probably have come to see you as a threat and had you executed. She was prone to such things in later life, so I’m told.”
“Had me executed?” Lizanne asked. “A woman of some influence, then?”
“You could say that. They made her empress eventually, well, Emperor to be strictly accurate. Apparently the title cannot accommodate a change in gender.”
A singular memory sprang to the fore of Lizanne’s mind: one of the many statues adorning the miniature temples that lay outside the Corvantine Imperial Sanctum, a hawk-nosed woman rendered in marble. “The Empress Azireh,” she said. “You knew her? She wrote the music?”
“She wrote a great many things, but music was her passion. And yes, I knew her, but she wasn’t an empress then.”
There was a rustle of disturbed vegetation as Alestine turned towards the far end of the clearing, Lizanne following her gaze to see the foliage twisting and merging to form a new tableau. A young woman sat at a pianola, playing the same tune the Artisan had captured in the solargraph. Although the surrounding jungle remained unchanged, the floor beneath the pianola was smooth chequered marble reflecting a grand, palatial interior. Despite her youth Lizanne saw clearly the resemblance to the stern, commanding woman who would later adorn the temple built in her honour.
“She was just a lonely girl then,” Alestine went on as the young future empress played her beautifully sad music. “Lost in a court of privileged, scheming idiots who would quite happily have seen her dead. I’ve often thought divine blood was more a curse than a blessing. So much promise, so much more music to give to the world, all swallowed up by the fate her blood made for her. But, the young are ever prone to the hope, perhaps the delusion, that their fate can be changed.”
Lizanne watched as a young woman emerged from the jungle and bowed to the woman at the pianola, who immediately straightened into a much more attentive posture. The younger Alestine was also easy to recognise, but in this memory she wore the white blouse, black waistcoat and skirt of a Corvantine court attendant, and a low-ranking one at that. “It’s the upper c minor again, I’m afraid,” Azireh said, tapping one of the pianola’s keys. “A little tinny, don’t you think?”
“My musical knowledge was only functional,” the older Alestine told Lizanne as her younger self opened the lid of the pianola. “I knew enough to repair instruments but not play them with any skill. My primary duty in the Sanctum was fixing the various toys and automata with which the noble children amused themselves. The ‘Fiddly Girl,’ they called me, amongst other things.” She gave a fond chuckle. “Awful brats the lot of them, apart from one.”
At the young Alestine’s bidding Azireh repeatedly tapped the key as she worked away at something in the pianola’s innards. Lizanne was no expert but couldn’t detect more than a fractional change in the pitch. “I found out later she used to loosen the strings herself,” the older Alestine said. “Just so she would have a reason to talk to me.”
“That seems perfect, my lady,” her younger self said, closing the pianola lid and dropping into a low curtsy. “If you’ll excuse me.”
“Wait a moment,” Azireh said. “I’ve been working on a little something and would so like your opinion. My lady attendants wouldn’t know a decent tune if I strangled them with it.”
She began to play without waiting for a response, the same composition as before but now executed with expert clarity and precision. Lizanne found it much more affecting than that recreated by the solargraph’s chimes, music that seemed to reach inside her, forcing her mind to explore the most vibrant memories, good and bad. It was both an unnerving and intoxicating experience, and, judging by the changing expression on the young Alestine’s face, one she shared in full measure. Up until now her face had maintained the same incurious, carefully neutral mode common to servants of long standing. Now she stared at the young woman before her with rapt fascination, a single tear tracing down her cheek.
“Love is always a surprise,” the older Alestine said. “Don’t you find? Whether it creeps up on you over the course of years or reaches out to snare you in an instant. The moment is always a revelation and it can happen in the space of a heart-beat, or the time it takes to play the most wondrous music a foolish young woman had ever heard.”
She looked away and the memory swiftly merged back into the jungle. “I do believe it’s time for another turn of the spit,” she said, moving back to the fire.
“You were lovers,” Lizanne said, finding the notion scarcely conceivable. A servant and a princess trysting in the Imperial Sanctum. “If you had been discovered . . .”
“Oh we were, make no mistake about that.” Alestine gestured for Lizanne to take the other end of the spit and together they turned the meat, the fire hissing and popping as grease flowed from the cuts. “We weren’t even particularly discreet. It wasn’t uncommon for nobles to indulge themselves with the servants. There was an unspoken tolerance for such things, life in the Sanctum being so monumentally dull. But not for us. For what we had was not mere indulgence, and that made it dangerous. For a time we were left in peace. Azireh had me assigned as her personal attendant and we lived in happy seclusion in our own little palace. She composed her music and I designed and constructed my toys, then came the Regency Wars.”
The sound of rustling plants came again and Lizanne looked round to see the entire clearing morphing into a grand ball-room. Huge chandeliers of glittering crystal hung from the ceiling above a dance floor streaked in blood from the many corpses that covered it. There were men and women, infants and elderly, all
dressed in the finery befitting the various ranks of Corvantine nobility. From the pattern of the blood spatter Lizanne deduced this massacre had been carried out with the blade rather than the gun.
“The Coronation Day Purge,” Alestine said, sprinkling a little salt on the roasting meat. “At least half of the upper tier of Imperial aristocracy wiped out in a single day. I won’t go into the tedium of what led up to it. Suffice to say a bunch of malcontent inbreds wanted to seize power from the ruling bunch of inbreds. The result was the Regency Wars, which began with all this. Azireh survived, thanks to me. I dressed her up in servant’s clothes and we managed to escape the Sanctum. We took refuge in my grandparents’ house, which could have been a costly mistake, it being an obvious place to look. Luckily, her uncle found her before anyone else did. He heaved her up onto a horse and off they went. We barely had time to say good-bye and I didn’t see her again for five years. When I did, this is what they had made of her.”
The ball-room shimmered and shifted into an even grander room of cathedralesque proportions. Tall windows rose on each side and huge pillars supported vaulted ceilings of such height they were wreathed in mist gathered from the thousand or more people below. They were all kneeling in abject supplication, heads pressed to the floor and arms outstretched as they paid obeisance to a figure seated on a dais. Lizanne was barely able to recognise Azireh under the mask of alabaster paint that covered her face, her features bunched by the weight of the bejewelled crown atop her head. More than that was the new hardness to her eyes. These were the eyes of her statue, the eyes of a woman who had seen and done terrible things, too many to remain that same young woman who had once sabotaged her pianola just for the chance to talk to someone she thought she might love.
“Emperor Azireh I,” Alestine said. “Quite impressive isn’t she?”
Lizanne saw that there was one figure amongst the multitude who was not kneeling. Alestine stood at the rear of the huge vaulted chamber, clad in a plain muslin dress as she stared at the newly crowned empress that official history would record as an emperor. “This was the last time you saw her,” Lizanne realised.
“Yes.” Alestine didn’t turn from her cookery, crouching to add some more wood to the fire. “I was surprised to receive a formal invitation to the coronation, somewhat frightened in fact. But I went, nevertheless. How could I not? And I didn’t kneel, which was noticed but by then she was already so feared none would dare voice an objection. After the ceremony a chamberlain gave me an envelope. Inside was a large amount of money and notification that I had been commanded by the Emperor to undertake a research expedition to the continent of Kilnahria. There was also a note in her own hand, just one line: ‘Find me treasure.’”
The coronation faded into the green wall of the jungle as Alestine took a knife and cut a portion of meat from the haunch. “I do believe this is close to done,” she said, biting off a morsel before offering it to Lizanne. “Don’t you think?”
Lizanne took the meat, putting the whole piece in her mouth and discovering Cerath meat to be both flavoursome and tender. “She exiled you,” she said, chewing and swallowing.
“She had little choice. And I believe she thought she was being kind. I had often spoken of this place, you see. Idle talk about its many mysteries as we lay together in the small hours. It was a surprise to find she was actually listening. Ah!” She turned as fresh rustling sounded from the jungle. “It seems our guests have arrived.”
“Guests?”
“I invited a few old friends. I hope you don’t mind.”
Lizanne’s polite response died as a figure stepped out of the jungle, a tall figure carrying a spear and a war-club. His face, adorned in a black-and-white mottling of war-paint, was the distorted, scaled and hostile visage of a tribal Spoiled. Lizanne lunged for Alestine, catching her by the wrist and tearing the knife from her grip. Lizanne whirled to face the Spoiled as he dropped into a fighting crouch and charged, teeth bared in a snarl.
She side-stepped the Spoiled, lashing out with her knife in an attempt to sever the veins in its neck. It was too swift, however, dancing out of reach and countering with a fast sweep of its spear, aiming for her legs. Lizanne leapt over the weapon, rolled and cast her knife at the Spoiled’s face, an expert throw that would have skewered it through the eye. Instead the knife shuddered to a halt in mid air, where it continued to hang.
“That’s hardly the way to greet an honoured guest,” Alestine reproached her, moving to pluck the knife from the air before turning to the Spoiled. “Tree Speaker,” she said. “Good of you to come.”
The Spoiled continued to glare in challenge at Lizanne for several seconds then abruptly straightened into a calmer posture, the hostility fading from its face. “Maker of Things,” it greeted Alestine, speaking with such calm affability that Lizanne realised it was conforming to a pre-set sequence of events. This trance had been crafted with such care it was easy to forget the entire thing was essentially a narrative dream.
“You made yourself a pet Spoiled,” Lizanne said, watching Alestine lead the tribal to the fire where she cut him a portion of meat.
“I didn’t make anything,” she said with a laugh. “I merely discovered some new friends.”
She inclined her head at the jungle where more Spoiled had begun to appear. There were about fifty of them, male and female, all of fighting age and carrying weapons. They were clad in a similar garb of soft dark leather, albeit with a few individual embellishments. Some wore face-paint of various hues whilst others didn’t. Some wore necklaces of bone or beads, whilst others were unadorned. She had had little opportunity to study the tribal Spoiled that attacked Carvenport but she did recall a rigid uniformity of appearance amongst the different tribal groups. Her experience during the final moments aboard the Profitable Venture had provided a partial explanation. They share minds. It’s how the White controls them.
“There was a Gathering,” Tree Speaker told Alestine with grave formality. “Your words were heard. Agreement was reached.” He pointed his spear at the temple above the trees. “We will go with you to end what must be ended.”
“And very decent of you it is too,” Alestine replied, handing him some meat. “Best eat up. From what I recall you’re going to need your strength.”
Lizanne spent some time in confused contemplation, gaze roaming the assembled Spoiled as they came forward to share in the feast. “Language,” she said finally, one particular realisation rising through the babble of thoughts. “Are they speaking yours or you theirs?”
“Does it matter?” Alestine asked and Lizanne realised that it didn’t, at least not here. In the trance, language was thought.
“But if this is a memory you must have found a way to communicate,” she persisted. “Did you . . . change them somehow?”
Alestine gave a full, hearty laugh that lasted long enough for Lizanne to find quite aggravating. “No,” Alestine said when she finally sobered, shaking her head and wiping a tear from the corner of her eye. “If anything, it was the opposite. They found me not far from here, a few years before all this. I’d had the misfortune to encounter some of their less friendly cousins and was in rather dire need of medical attention. Tree Speaker’s daughter found me, bleeding away and close to death.” She smiled fondly at the Spoiled, who was now busily gorging himself on Cerath flesh. “He’s a healer as well as a warrior. They have a remarkable knowledge of the healing properties of Green, and all manner of medicinal herbs to be found in this jungle. They usually kill our kind when they find us, the Sickened they call us. But for me they made an exception.” Her face took on a more serious aspect and she turned to regard the temple. “I think because somehow they knew we would share an important task one day.”
“What’s in there?” Lizanne said, moving to her side. “Your empress’s treasure?”
“I suppose you could call it that. The greatest treasure and the greatest danger.” She ra
ised her gaze to the sky as a rumble of thunder sounded. “It appears you’re running out of Blue, Miss Lethridge. Do be sure to call again soon. Tell your musician friend to take a look at the Follies of Cevokas.”
“Wait.” Lizanne winced as a pulse of confusion went through her, the sense of dislocation that indicated the end of a trance. “You locked your memories in Tinkerer’s head for a reason. You knew we would meet. I need to know why.”
“You already have what you need,” Alestine said, the jungle turning to mist around her as the trance neared its terminus. She gestured at the Spoiled as they transformed into vague, wisp-like ghosts. “For now, at least. I look forward to your next visit . . .”
CHAPTER 16
Clay
“They should call this place Bug-aria,” Loriabeth said, slapping a hand against her neck to squash yet another fly. They hung over the water in thick swarms and would plague the Lady Malynda at regular intervals as she ploughed her way north along the Quilam. Lieutenant Sigoral had the best map-reading skills amongst them and reckoned it had taken two days to cover some twenty miles of river. Skaggerhill blamed the current, which had a tendency to force random shifts in the boat’s course as well as impeding progress despite the efforts of her engine. As yet there had been no change in the green wall of reeds that covered both banks, if anything Clay thought they had grown taller as the miles wore on.
“Seer dammit, you little bastards!” Loriabeth cursed, slapping at her arms and neck as the Malynda carried them through another swarm.
“Cover up more,” Sigoral told her, pulling a duster from beneath his bench. He had donned a seaman’s jacket to ward off the flies, finding the sweat and discomfort caused by the humid atmosphere preferable to the attentions of the insects.
“In this heat?” Loriabeth said, more in resignation than protest, and she voiced no further objection as the lieutenant settled the heavy garment around her shoulders.
