Silk & Steel

by Ellen Kushner

  As a cook bundles the child away towards hot drinks and soothing words, Élan leans in. “Is that—” she asks quietly, staring.

  The mage doesn’t even glance up from examining the mass of plantlife. “Oh, no, no,” she says, voice sweet. “Of course it couldn’t be anything to do with the strange growths I was investigating when a gendarme so diligently took it upon herself to escort me from the back corridors without so much as a sample.”

  The flower has thorns, it seems. Flustered, Élan swallows a strange burst of guilt. “I—” she starts. And stops.

  The crown duchess has dropped her pointedly vacant smile and is carefully pinching a segment near the vine’s tip. The fibrous mass from inside Simo’s lungs is largely without leaves, but near the top, where it would have reached the open space of the boy’s mouth and nestled in behind his teeth, several sharp green teardrops unfurl.

  Damn it. Élan recognizes those leaves. The forsaken woman had been holding a plant with identical ones down in the crypts. A plant Élan had knocked to the ground, and presumably trampled, when she’d seized, cuffed, and dragged her prisoner before the captain. A plant Élan had assumed the woman smuggled in to use as a pretext for her infiltration.

  “Is it... a curse?” Élan asks. Her voice isn’t quite low enough, and a prep chef fumbles a chop on a nearby bench, knocks an onion to the floor. They’re being watched.

  If something evil is taking root in Ghiarelle, gossip and panic will only spread it faster. Élan shifts closer to the noble.

  “Maybe.” The crown duchess frowns over her sample. Up close, Élan notes golden flecks in her brown eyes, like the speckled feathers of a falcon. Her olive skin is very smooth. “I don’t know yet. But either way, it’s bad.”

  Élan is a professional. She is a highly trained, highly disciplined member of an elite armed force of guardsmen and women who have protected salt-wreathed Ghiarelle for generations, against enemies foreign and domestic and suboceanic alike. She needs to report this. Immediately. It’s beyond suspicious—why would a foreign mage, unfamiliar with the palace, be the one to catch a disharmony this severe? There’s an undeniable chance Nikolia’s behind it, or at least familiar with its origins.

  But how would the home-grown priests and secular brine mages have noticed? Those who survived the attack which took Their Majesties have exhausted themselves on the repairs; Élan can’t say she’s seen robe nor scepter inside the palace for a week or more. All their fears are turned out to the sea, to the things which lurk beneath the waves. There’s no attention left for trouble within salt-carved Ghiarelle.

  The crown duchess’s robes are speckled with blood—she’s ruined them to save a servant boy. And even now, with Élan kneeling before her in full armor, spear close at hand, her attention is on the vine, not the threat.

  Élan’s struggling to keep her gendarmerie-trained paranoia pointed where it should be.

  Besides, if she takes this to the captain, like she should, he’s going to think she’s holding a grudge. He’s more likely to take back her tunic and put her out to pasture, no matter how little he can afford to lose another spear these days.

  No. She’s alone in this. She needs to figure it out herself.

  * * *

  The first rule stabbed crudely into the lintel over the gendarmerie’s barracks is very simple: if there’s a threat in the palace, odds are it’s aimed at the royals.

  So Élan watches every step of the preparation for the prince’s lunch, then carries it up herself instead of appointing a replacement for Simo. It’s as clean as can be hoped. Even so, as the door creaks open beneath her cautious knuckles, Guilhan glaring from the side, Élan’s palms sweat.

  “Your Highness?” she calls into the dim, silent chambers.

  There’s a slithering rustle of cloth on cloth. “Simo?” It’s a little hoarse.

  “No, Your Highness,” Élan says softly, and, praying she hasn’t caught him crying, crosses to the table by what once had been crystal-clear salt-paned windows facing out across the depths. The paysans had been called to crosshatch them first thing, and when that had proved insufficient for her prince, the staff had depleted half the wing of carpets to keep away the light. It’s cursed effective: the room’s sepulchral. She can see shapes, but nothing small or detailed.

  “Simo had a bit of an... accident, but I’ve brought your lunch, Highness. I’m Gendarme Sentienne.”

  “Ah.” There’s no recognition in his voice as the prince shuffles out from behind the bed curtains. “Thank you, Gendarme.”

  It’s a dismissal.

  Sink it, she still can’t see. She will not leave without confirming he’s safe.

  Clumsy, Élan bows, and contrives to knock the window hangings askew. A blade of light slices through groggy darkness, and Élan scans the chairs, the floor, even the carpets, looking for any sign of the curse. White vines against milk-white salt—there’s nothing, and nothing, and nothing.

  “Drowning depths, Gendarme,” the prince swears, one hand thrown up to shield his eyes, and Élan, guilty, flicks the curtain closed.

  “Sorry, sir,” she says, unthinking and terrified, and backs away, because:

  There’s a tiny twist of teardrop leaves curling amongst the lace of her prince’s embroidered cuff.

  * * *

  “Well?”

  All in all, the crown duchess has dealt gracefully with getting dragged wrist-first out of a lazy afternoon cocktail reception. She’d smiled and bowed and made excuses; she’d left her wine and her circle of enraptured fellow diplomats with a flutter of cloth and perfume. She’d let Élan pull her through servants’ passages and narrow archways until they’d emerged in the chill dim crypts beneath. Even now, her question is composed as much of worry as irritation.

  The effort of keeping upright and silent through the rest of her interminable shift has turned Élan’s voice to salt. Her neck muscles feel like iron from clenching her teeth. She can barely swallow, let alone answer.

  Even in the heart of the palace, despite the brinecraft purifications and the rituals of cleansing after death, her prince is under attack.

  She should have gone to her captain, but this isn’t his kind of battle. A half-seen glimpse of a leaf clinging to her grief-stricken liege? The captain would never impose on His Highness’s privacy at such slight evidence from a currently disgraced junior guardswoman. A servant child afflicted by some strange infection? All too common, this close to the malevolent deep. He’d think her saltstruck, afflicted with battlefear. Jumping at shadows.

  Which is why she has to cast her lot here. With the only other person who has noticed the trouble. And known enough to cure the page boy, besides.

  “This one wants a wedding, not a war.” The captain’s words hadn’t been meant as an endorsement, but they will have to be approval enough.

  Élan licks her lips. Draws a breath. Tries again.

  “I saw...” No. Not that. “My prince, he had...” Or that. Sink it, where are the words? Her heart is pounding, palms sweating.

  “You came down here,” she manages. To the crypts. “Before. Is it...?”

  The crown duchess looks around, lips firming as she registers where Élan has brought them. “The origin? Possibly. There’s only one way to find out.”

  Élan swallows again. “This isn’t your duty, Your Highness,” she says, staring fixedly at the noble’s left ear. “I’d understand if you didn’t—that is, I can’t ask you to—”

  “Oh, stop that,” the crown duchess says, and grasps Élan’s arm until she’s forced to meet the noble’s eyes. They’re deadly serious. “There’ll be time enough for diplomacy later. I don’t want to see this spread any more than you do.” She waits until Élan nods, then pushes away and starts down into the darkness. “And don’t call me ‘Your Highness’,” she says, voice echoing against the naked stone. “Surely by this point, you can use my name.”

  Élan’s not sure she dares.

  It’s odd how much she wants to.
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  There’s no chance to dwell on it. In the days since Élan last patrolled here, the vines have grown past hiding.

  The deeper the pair of them walk, the less inclined they are to speak, stepping carefully around the spots where falling light has coaxed leaves from the embedded growth.

  Nikolia crouches by the largest patch, tracing her fingers along the walls. “Here,” she says, and hums. The tips of her fingers glow, and the rock turns just translucent enough to follow the bundle of vines down into the floor. It vanishes beneath the carved lintel of a locked crypt entrance.

  “This matches what I pulled from the boy.” She grimaces like a child reminded they had to eat the hated seagrass they’d prayed the parent had forgotten, and says, “So much for hoping I was wrong.”

  It’s wry and inclusive and utterly human. All at once, Élan is struck by how much she likes the woman. She laughs, unintended, and it feels a little like choking.

  Nikolia stands, concerned, and Élan waves her off. “Nothing, nothing,” Élan tells her. “Are you certain?”

  The mage clicks her tongue. “I’ve forgotten more about horticulture than your entire salt-blighted nation has ever conceived of,” she says, drier than Piegny’s admittedly drought-prone soil, “and this is no kind of gods-given plantlife, to grow so fiercely here without the sun. Who knows what it’s feeding on.”

  “I... might have some idea,” Élan says, much as she hates to give her morbid suspicions a voice. She busies herself with the keys at her belt, unhooking them and fumbling through the ring. “This is where I caught you, last time.” Her fingers are clumsy in her armor, and it takes three tries to recover the key for the door in front of them. “That’s Queen Marielle’s crypt.”

  * * *

  This is almost definitely treason. No foreigner should so much as breathe into the royal tombs, let alone set foot there.

  But a choice between honoring the dead and preserving the living is no real choice at all, or so Élan tells herself, leading them down towards the light.

  Salt-pale vegetation dips in and out of the walls as they walk. It means one of two things: either the barrier spell didn’t take, and the crypt’s been open to sky and sea for a month, allowing this thing entry, or the curse was seeded when the depth-spawn ripped Queen Marielle’s head from her body and tore the king consort’s chest open from navel to neck. She’s honestly not sure which option’s worse.

  The stink of rot rises with the sunlight as they round the last corner into the open burial cavern.

  Élan has never seen one in person. They’re sacred, secret places, meant for priests and family. It’s smaller than she’d imagined. Calmer. More picturesque, with the twin crystal biers and the blue of sky and sea not ten yards from their feet.

  Chill afternoon air blows in through a silver-flecked filtering barrier, carrying the cries of sea birds and the crash of waves. Beautiful it might be, but one step too far, and it’s a long, tumbling death onto the rocks below.

  Nikolia trails her fingers over the encasing crystal as she walks, vines crunching under her sandals. “Ugh,” she says, one sleeve pressed over her face. “Should it smell like that?”

  The vines underfoot flinch from Élan’s armored feet as she reaches the crown duchess’s side. Élan draws a breath, as shallowly as she knows how.

  The smell nearly chokes her. Boiling swamps and tide pools long abandoned by the sea; something like iron, but sweeter. It clogs her throat like crematory smoke.

  “No,” she manages, swallowing against a sudden rush of nausea. “The salt, it... preserves. It’s meant to, anyway.” Seal a body in a chunk of salt three times its size, and very little disintegrates.

  Nikolia rounds the end of the biers and drops to a crouch, one sleeve held as a mask. Her fingers trace the strange, brown-flecked symbols painted onto the smooth chalk floor.

  “Gendarme...”

  “Élan,” she corrects. She’s either coming out of this one a hero or unemployed; hearing the title right now is a little too pointed a reminder.

  That earns her a quick, bright glance back over Nikolia’s shoulder. “Élan, then. Can you clear these?”

  “These” meaning the vines covering the floor. Élan turns her spear blade-down, gets it under the matted plantlife and starts flipping clumps of vines towards the heaped mass of the things piled near the open edge of the cliff. She turns her head back towards the biers whenever her burning lungs force her to inhale. She’s taking no chances of picking up a parasite; Simo’s blood-flecked tangle is prominent in her memory.

  Is the cliff the answer? Did some creature of the depths manage to send its tendrils up the rockface? The way the vines flinch and shrivel from her blade’s salt-blessed metal suggests something otherworldly. The smell grows worse.

  The uncovered symbols Nikolia is tracing are too detailed to be depth-spawn work. She makes a low, worried noise.

  “Well?” Élan asks, planting the butt of her spear. “Is it a curse?”

  “Not... quite.” Her voice is tight. “Dear gendarme, perhaps you could... step towards me. Slowly.”

  She’s looking past Élan.

  Élan turns.

  At first, she can’t tell what the crown duchess is staring at. There’s nothing standing or moving behind her; no threat that she can see. The floor below her feet is mostly clear of vegetation, and flaking glyphs spread in a circle no wider than the haft of her spear. She’s a foot from the biggest lump of plant matter, and her scraping has nudged up the edge of it. Long white strands are writhing slowly back towards the drop, unveiling even thicker roots below.

  Sundering seas, this smell. It crawls down the back of her throat, meaty and sweet. Like something’s died and been abandoned to rot.

  “Gendarme. Élan.”

  Élan bends, creaking, at the knees. Twitches back one more knot of weed from the pile.

  Ah. Not roots. Not roots at all.

  Fingers.

  Hadn’t she just seen this lace cuff, those rings? The hands have swollen in death; the flesh is distended with weeks of rot, soft to bursting, wrapped and wreathed in vines.

  Élan stumbles back, gorge rising, as the shape becomes clear—there a leg, a foot, here the torso, vines dipping in and out of flesh like a needle through cloth.

  “Be careful!” Nikolia cries, but Élan can’t; her feet scuff against the floor and something in the air comes suddenly taut. There’s an unheard noise, a plucked string so deep she feels it in her bones, and the shapes below her feet turn as hot as coals.

  “Élan!” There’s a burst of sound—a song?—and a gust of air flings her back. Élan loses grip on her spear, on the floor; she hits Her Majesty’s bier with a sound like a horse kicking over a smithy and clatters to a heap on the ground.

  Get up. She has to get up. Her head is ringing.

  The vines are moving.

  Where is Nikolia?

  One hand to the floor. Roll onto her side. The stone is shuddering. Glowing red, too, which is deeply fucking problematic, but if she stretches—Élan gets her fingers against the butt of her spear, grabs, fails. Curses as it clatters away. Scrabbles a little farther. Succeeds. Gets the spear in her hand, plants it against the floor. Shoves. Makes it upright.

  Across the crypt, the silver-thin glinting barrier shudders once, twice, then shatters into a thousand sharp-edged fragments. Tendrils of green-leafed vine appear around the cliff-edge, weaving like snakes tasting the air.

  Nikolia’s by her side, safe, steadying Élan when she stumbles. “What...” Élan tries to ask, but there’s blood in her mouth. She spits. “What is it?”

  “A resurrection array, as far as I can tell,” the mage says, stepping in close against Élan’s non-dominant side as the vines surge closer. She’s gained a lightness to her tone again, but it’s clearly taking her some effort. “An attempt, anyway. It never works.” Her eyes are more whites than iris. “That’s your prince? He’s a few weeks dead, I’d say. He must have really loved them to try.”


  It hits like a stave to the ribs, the sixth or seventh in a day, when your body is burning and it takes a second to even realize you’ve been hit.

  He’s dead.

  Prince Arin is dead.

  That pile of flesh and torn-apart fabric, the smell, the black smears on the floor—it’s her prince. Her liege. Her duty.

  “Stay close,” Nikolia says, low-voiced and sharp. The trickle of vines has become a wave, a waterfall of sharp-leafed greenery cascading in from the ledge. Élan puts her back to the mage’s, raises her spear. Adjusts her grip. Braces herself, as Nikolia begins to hum, eerie and double-layered.

  Air whips in from the sky beyond, tearing through the vines and making them writhe. Élan narrows her eyes against the gale as the mage wraps them in loop after loop of wind. Nikolia’s silks billow and surge like edged weapons themselves, and the rush of vines hesitates, slows, and coils to a stop.

  It can’t get to them, is Élan’s first thought.

  And then:

  It doesn’t want to.

  The vines have stopped in the center of the circle, coiling in and in. The sun-warmed greenery is joined by white tunneling vines from the walls and floor, by brown flesh-stained strands which tug free of Prince Arin’s remains with wet, slurping noises. The mass presses together like baby rats in a nest, pushing into and somehow through one another, growing fatter and taller inch by inch.

  Élan swallows. The sigils’ red glow is rising.

  “Nikolia...” she says slowly. “I think maybe we should. Leave. Now. Quickly.”

  The mage’s shoulders shift against Élan’s armor when Nikolia pauses to draw breath. The ribbons of air slow, but don’t stop.

  It’s too late, though. Much too late.

  Prince Arin steps from the circle, pale and nude and flawlessly human from crown to sole. He brushes a leaf from the corner of his mouth, and it flutters to the ground.

  “Ah,” he says, tilting his head. His voice is hoarse. “The guard. How unfortunate.” On the ground behind him, unearthed by the transformation, the corpse’s distended face lolls. Its cheek, pressed against the ground, has darkened with pooling blood. The crypts’ preservative barrier has kept insects from her prince, at least. His eyes are whole, grey-filmed and blank as they stare into hers across the magic he wasted his life to buy.