The Book of Swords

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Whether the retreating sailors heard her or not, she could not tell. The only one she could spot on deck was Second Mate, and he seemed busy with the sail.

  “This was a terrible idea,” the Dead Man said, as he found his stability in the sandy bottom. Water pumped from the top of his boots with every stride. He didn’t dignify their marooners with a backwards glance. Lzi supposed from the stiffness of his shoulders that the stiffness of his neck was quite intentional.

  “At least you’ll dry out fast in the heat,” the Gage said, conversationally.

  “Crusted in such salt as will rub one raw in every crevice.”

  “You should strip down,” said Lzi. “I don’t know how you stand it.” She wrung out her own bright gauze skirt between her hands.

  The Dead Man ignored her and thrust his sword through the sash binding his coat closed.

  “I’ll be crusted in salt, too, very shortly,” the Gage said. Lzi wondered if it would flake and freckle off his metal hide. He didn’t seem to have corroded yet. He pointed with a glittering hand to the dark blue water the Auspicious Voyage was already slicing through. “How does a coral atoll form in such deep water?”

  The Dead Man swept a hand around. “Ah, my friend. You see, this island is unlike the others. It is volcanic. The black sand reveals its nature. That’s not a coral ring. It’s the caldera.”

  “You aren’t as ill educated as you look,” Lzi said. She kept her face neutral, hoping the mercenaries would know she meant to include herself in their bantering. “That’s the reason the King from this island chose the name King Fire Mountain Dynasty.”

  “Is it extinct?” the Gage asked.

  Lzi shook out her orange-patterned wrapped skirt so it would dry in the breeze. “It hasn’t erupted since about 1600, I think.”

  The Gage paused—she supposed he was doing a date conversion to his weird Western system of dating by Years After the Frost—and came up with what Lzi hoped was a comforting thousand-year cushion. “That could just mean that it’s biding its time.”

  “I’ve heard volcanos are so wont.” The Dead Man tugged his veil more evenly across his face. According to the books, such soldiers revealed their faces only when they were about to kill. “Do you not care to discover if your magical, impervious hide is magically impervious to molten stone, my brother?”

  “Oh,” said the Gage. “I think I’ll pass on being smelted.”

  “Anyway,” Lzi interrupted, pretending to be impervious to the smirk showing at the corners of the Dead Man’s eyes, “there’s plenty of fresh water on the island for you to rinse yourself in. There’s a stream right there.”

  A braid of clear water trickled over steel-colored sand. When she stepped toward it, her bare feet left prints like pearls had been pressed into the wet, packed beach beside their parent oyster shells.

  The Gage called her attention to the answering marks on the far side of the freshwater rill at the same moment that she noticed them herself—and just an instant after the Dead Man invoked his Prophet and her Goddess. A furrow, as if a boat had been dragged up the beach to be hidden in the greenery, with the divots of striving feet beside it.

  Fresh.

  “Isn’t it a strange thing,” the Dead Man said conversationally, “that we should not be the only visitors to such an out-of-the-way, shunned, supposed cursed and abandoned island on the very same day?”

  Lzi stopped, staring at the furrow. “Strange indeed.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s any significance to this particular date on the calendar?”

  After a day’s acquaintance, Lzi had already learned that the more casually curious the Dead Man sounded, the more likely he was to have his hand on his wheel lock. She checked. Yes, there it was, resting on the ornately elaborate pistol butt.

  She slapped at a mosquito that was insufficiently discouraged by the sea breeze and the brightness of the sun burning white in the rich blue sky.

  “Well,” she said resignedly. “Now that you mention it. But before we talk about that, I’m going to wash the salt off.”

  —

  The outrigger was inside the jungle’s canopy, screened and shaded by ferns and vines. Lzi and the Gage stood over it, touching nothing, counting the seats, estimating the provisions cached under canvas for when the paddlers returned. Four seats, and they seemed to have all been filled. Leaving not much room for spoils…

  Lzi slapped another mosquito and bent down to peer. She found that what was under the canvas was not food, but blown-glass fishing floats. Perhaps they too were here to steal the dead King Fire Mountain Dynasty’s treasure, and they intended to float the treasure back? Or sink it and mark its location? But then anyone could come along and claim it.

  “So it’s possible,” Lzi said, “and perhaps even likely, that His Majesty King Pale Empire was overheard making preparations to rescind the old King’s curse on his island, and perhaps they decided to try to beat us to the treasure. If this interloper should succeed, of course, it would be disastrous for the poor, as King Pale Empire means to use these resources to provide for the needy.”

  “That is a thing that still confounds my understanding. How is it that such treasure has come to be left in a tomb?”

  “It’s not a tomb,” Lzi said, for what felt like the five hundredth time. “It’s a palace.”

  “A tomb,” said the Dead Man patiently, “is perforce where a corpse is maintained…”

  “Look at the bright side,” the Gage interrupted, coming back. “We just got significantly less marooned.”

  “You design to steal their canoe and abandon them to the haunted island?” The Dead Man slapped at a mosquito as well, less patiently.

  “Well,” the Gage said, “I’d still have to walk back. That won’t carry me. But I was thinking that they could take a message to the Auspicious Voyage for us, if they turn out to be polite. And maybe they’d let you straddle the outrigger.”

  “Much to the amusement of the sharks,” the Dead Man said, slapping. “Doctor Lady Lzi. You’re a natural philosopher. Can’t you do anything about these mosquitoes?”

  “Welcome to the tropics,” the Gage said lightly. “Tell him about the parasites, Doctor Lady Lzi.”

  —

  Lzi paused within the canopy and found long-leaved zodia plants. They had a pungent, fecund scent, and a handful of leaves stuffed into a pocket or waistband did a fairly good job of keeping the mosquitoes at bay.

  “The fact is,” she said a few moments later while holding a tangle of vines aside for the Dead Man, “having all this gold tied up in mausoleums is murder on the economy.” Her knife was still sheathed in her sash. Whoever had come before them had done a good job cutting a path. While it was regrowing already, it would be useful for a few days more.

  “So the current King wants to rob his ancestor’s tomb to put a little cash back into the system?” It was hard to tell when the Gage was being sarcastic. Unless he was always being sarcastic. He was a wicked and tireless hand with the machete, however.

  “Not so much rob the tomb as…put the treasure back into circulation. To use as relief for the poor. And, King Fire Mountain Dynasty was not King Pale Empire’s Ancestor,” said Lzi. “Our Kings are not hereditary. Only their Voices are, and that’s because of magic. A retired King can only speak through his female relatives.”

  “It would be less hassle if your Kings all came from the same lineage,” the Gage suggested. “Then at least the money would still be in the family, and the new King could use it, instead of its all going to sustain a relic. And the current Kings would keep siring Voices for their Ancestors.”

  “Sure,” said Lzi. “There are absolutely no problems with hereditary dynasties. And everybody wants to spend all eternity being bossed around personally by their Ancestors. Smooth sailing all the way.”

  “Well,” said the Gage. “When you put it like that…”

  The Dead Man looked at Lzi shrewdly over his veil. “Will you be an interlocutor for the current Ki
ng, when he is gone?”

  “Not gone, exactly, either,” Lzi said. “The Kings drink certain sacred potions, which are derived by natural philosophers such as myself. Abstain from most foods, and many physical pleasures. If they have the discipline to stay the course, the flesh hardens and becomes incorruptible. The processes of life stop, but…the life remains. They may continue for a long time in such a state, far beyond a mortal life span. But eventually the flesh hardens to the point where they cannot move or speak on their own. And then they need interlocutors. Voices.”

  “Interlocutors like you.”

  “King Pale Empire has successfully attained the blessed state,” she said, aware her voice was stiff. “But he does not yet require a Voice. Once he does, a new King will rule, and he will retire to the position of honored antecedent. In the meantime, I am merely his servant, and a scientist. I am not of his blood, though in his kindness he adopted me into the royal family, and only women of the royal line may serve as Voices to the Ancestors.”

  “How can you be sure the Kings are actually saying anything through their Voices that the Voices did not think up themselves? It seems like one of the few ways a woman could get a little power around here.”

  Lzi had wondered that herself, on occasion. She chose to answer obliquely. “There are stories of Voices who did not do the will of their Kings.”

  “Let me guess,” the Gage said. “They all end in tragedy and fire.”

  “Stacks of corpses. As must always the ambitions of women.”

  “So. This old dead King is not dead, but has no living female descendants willing to serve as his interlocutors,” the Dead Man said. “He’s a King with no Voice. What we are embarked upon, well, sounds like robbery to me, begging your pardon.”

  Lzi shrugged. “Politics as usual. The voiceless are always powerless.”

  The Gage said, “And is that the future you desire for yourself?”

  Lzi opened her mouth to temporize, and wasn’t sure what it was about the Gage’s eyeless gaze that paralyzed her voice inside her. Maybe it was simply the necessity of regarding her own face, stretched and strangely disordered, in the flawless mirror of his face. She shut her mouth, swallowed, and tried again, but what came out was the truth. “I have no people beyond the King.”

  “What became of the family of your birth?” the Dead Man asked, so formally she could not take offense. It was prying in the extreme…but the Dead Man was a foreigner, and probably didn’t know any better.

  “My parents and brother were killed,” Lzi said, which was both the truth and devoid of useful information.

  “I’m sorry,” the Dead Man said. He paused to allow that heavy throbbing sound to rise and fade again, then added, as a small kindness, “I lost my family too.”

  “Do you miss them?” Lzi asked, surprising herself with her own rudeness in turn. She had, at best, jumbled memories of her kinfolk: warmth, a boy who teased her and took her sweets but also comforted her when she fell and hurt herself. Two large figures with large calloused hands. Sweet rice gruel served in a wooden bowl.

  “The first family, I was too young to remember,” the Dead Man said without breaking stride. Nimbly, he leaped a branch. “The second family—yes, I miss them very much.”

  Lzi looked away, wondering how to get out of this one. The Dead Man’s voice had been so matter-of-fact…

  The Gage sank up to the knees in the compost underfoot. Lzi thought it was a good thing brass didn’t seem to feel tiredness the way bone and muscle did, or he’d have worn himself out just walking on anything except a paved road.

  The Dead Man, kindly, took the opportunity to change the subject. “It’s amazing you ever get anywhere.” The Dead Man crouched on a long low branch, his soft boots still leaving squelching footprints. The wetness of the soles did not seem to impede his footing.

  “I may not get there quickly,” the Gage replied, his voice as level as if he sat on cushions in a parlor. “But I have yet to fail to wind up where I intended, and when I pass through a place, few fail to remember where I have been.”

  Lzi hid a shiver by shrugging her pack off her shoulder. She drank young coconut water. As she capped the canteen, she shrugged to herself. What else had she to spend her life on? More musty, if fascinating, research? More monographs that no one but other naturalists would ever even care about, much less read? More theory on the function of the body and deriving the essential principles from certain plants? More service to an ideal because she had no ambition of her own to work toward?

  Perversely, ironic fatalism made her feel a little less empty inside. If she had nothing of her own to live for, it was surely better to find a purpose in life in serving others, rather than increasing suffering and chaos. If you were alone, wasn’t it the choice of the Superior Woman to serve those who were not?

  The Dead Man shrugged. He stood up on his bough, pivoted on the balls of his feet, and ran lightly along the rubbery gray bark while the branch dipped and swayed under him until he reached a point where another limb crossed the first at midthigh. He stepped up onto the other without seeming to break stride and ran along it in turn, toward some presumed trunk invisible through the foliage ahead. The sound of his footsteps faded into the jungle noise before he vanished from view.

  He had the sort of physique that grew veins instead of muscles, and it made his strength seem feral and weightless. In so many ways, the opposite of the Gage.

  And yet Lzi could not shake the feeling that in every essential way the two were identical. Except that one wore his armor on the outside, and the other beneath his skin.

  —

  She did not desert the Gage. She couldn’t have kept up with the Dead Man’s branch-running, and it seemed a poor idea to allow their little party to become strung out. She wasn’t sure if the Gage noticed, because he labored along without comment.

  She was relieved, though, when the Dead Man dropped through the canopy above and ran down a broad bough, his tight-wrapped veil fluttering at the edges. He skidded sideways on his insteps until he was just a foot or two above eye level, far enough away that Lzi didn’t need to crane her head back to see him.

  “I found the tomb,” he announced.

  “Palace,” she corrected, automatically.

  He shrugged. “It resembles a tomb to my eye.”

  —

  Lzi insisted they pause to eat before pushing any further into unknown dangers—which was easy, in the rich lands of the Banner Islands. They had not even packed supplies: Lzi and the Dead Man simply scanned the earth under the enormous canopy of a breadfruit tree to find ripe, scaly globes, pulled them open, and dined on the mild, custard-like innards. She expected complaints—raw, fresh breadfruit was generally regarded as a bland staple at best—but the foreigner spread a linen cloth that was clean but no longer white across his lap and ate without comment, raising his veil with one hand while scooping morsels from the fruit with the other. Maybe there was no way to eat a ripe breadfruit daintily, but that did not stop him from trying. Lzi wondered what exquisite manners looked like where he came from. Something like this, she imagined.

  The Gage didn’t seem to care about food.

  The Dead Man finished and wiped his fingers daintily on the cloth. He was rolling the cloth so that the soiled portion would not smirch the clean when that searching drone rose once again.

  The Dead Man glanced around, cupping a hand behind his veil to better localize the sound. “What is that?”

  Doctor Lady Lzi had a hypothesis, but she didn’t like it very much, and anyway she wasn’t confident enough yet to advance it for discussion. One did not become a Lady Doctor by making assertions in public of which one was not confident, and which one could not back up with facts. “Insects?” she asked.

  “Well, no maggot curse yet,” the Gage said as lightly as a seven-foot-tall brazen bass could be expected to say anything.

  The Dead Man shook his jacket clean of nonexistent crumbs. “Mayhap we’ve not yet gone far enough
in.”

  Lzi followed him through the forest. He stayed on the ground this time, and paused at one point to show her four sets of footprints in a marshy place. They were fresh, filling with water but still sharp-edged. One set was smaller than the others.

  The Gage looked at the swampy bit and took the long way around. By the time he rejoined them, Lzi and the Dead Man were already paused behind a screen of greenery, staring across a yard of crushed seashells toward a temple, or a palace, or—she had to admit—a mausoleum. The whole was constructed of pillars—pillars upon pillars upon pillars—stacked in tiers with black basalt in the middle, white coral at the center, and red coral at the top with intermediate shades between so the effect, rather than stripes or bands, was as of the fade from black night to crimson sunrise, only in reverse.

  Lzi had expected the palace to be overrun with verdancy, the pillars stumpy and jagged. But it was at least somewhat intact and, if not manicured, she could see where the long knives had recently been at work.

  “Maybe King Fire Mountain Dynasty is still aware,” she said. “Someone is tending this place.”

  “Not the people from the canoe?” the Gage asked.

  She shrugged. “They probably had machetes.”

  Something burst into the clearing from the jungle to their left without warning, with such speed and force that Lzi stifled a cry of surprise. It was high up, oil-iridescent, as big and darkly barbed as a bluefin tuna and as sleekly shaped for speed. A blur of glistening wings surrounded it, and Lzi had a confused momentary perception of faceted sapphires glittering as big as her two fists before she realized they were eyes.

  She hated being right.

  “Well,” said the Gage complacently, “that’ll be the thing, then, that’s been making your buzzing sounds.”

  —

  “Well, it’s better than a maggot curse, right?” the Gage offered, when they had withdrawn a hundred yards or so and were considering their options. Crossing that crushed-shell barren seemed much, much less appealing than it had previously.

  “Giant wasps?” The Dead Man shook his head emphatically. “I think not.”