The Skyfall Era Trilogy: Books 1-3

by Matt Larkin

  The silence-struck captain backed away behind him, but Landi held her ground, daring him to attack. Sun Brand aside, he was stronger and more skilled, but beating her would only prove her right. The rain fell harder, but none of them moved for shelter.

  “Ibu Ratna has assured us there has been a misunderstanding. Someone acted alone, she says. His Radiance has agreed to accept a Lunar envoy if they send one immediately.”

  “I didn’t misunderstand the bodies of initiates floating in the sea,” Bendurana said from the ship behind them. “And I believe the reports from the witness I picked up.”

  Naresh found himself in agreement with Bendurana for once. After all of this, all they had done, still the emperor would allow them to come here. Still he would think they could have peace, and allow Empu Baradah to go unavenged.

  But he could not defy the emperor. He pushed past Landi and left her standing with the Serendibian.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Chandi hadn’t seen Naresh for the week since her confrontation with him, had remained in her quarters though the emperor hadn’t declared her confined the way he had his wife. Instead, she kept her cousin company, subjected herself to Ratna’s mood swings as if to punish herself.

  “Sometimes,” Ratna said, “I fear I’ll lose myself here among the Solars. Three years, and we become more like them. The things we loved as children are gone, even the prayers beneath the moon are rare. I haven’t worshipped as I should. Maybe that’s why Chandra abandoned me here. And Revati, she’s almost a Solar herself.”

  “Half Solar.” Chandi paced about the small chamber, her jewelry box clutched in her hands. “I can’t do this anymore,” she said after a few moments. With the dark skies and the closed window, the room felt dreary, even in the early morning. “I’d rather just be a real handmaid.”

  Ratna tried to put her arms around her, but Chandi shrugged them off. Her cousin had dressed in one of her nicest songket-worked sarongs and a fine baju, as though pretending she weren’t confined. “You have to. You serve our family, cousin. Something has gone wrong. A mistake. My father would never, never have done this.” Her voice shook, like she knew she was trying to convince herself and failing. “You need to continue in case the Solars turn this against us. We need a weapon against the remaining Arun Guard. The information you’ve been gathering—”

  “Is enough. Too much.” Not that she didn’t like sneaking around, and she had grown good at it. She liked being privy to the secrets. Overhearing whispered conversations, prying free hidden information, it filled her with a rush like drawing her Blessings. But she hadn’t meant to hurt anyone. Or … maybe she had when this started. But she didn’t want that anymore. “I’m tired of lying. I’m tired of betraying.”

  Ratna’s slap caught her off guard. “Betraying? Betraying the Solars? So you’d rather betray your own people? Whatever we’ve done here, they still killed our mothers. And still we came, tried to live among them. And look at me—I’m locked in my chambers like a prisoner.”

  Chandi scoffed and rubbed her cheek. “Would you prefer an interrogation chamber in the Ministry of Law? Exile on the sea? Maybe they’ll burn us at sunset.”

  “Yes, they might, cousin. And that is exactly why you need a way to stop them.”

  Chandi sunk down on the bed with her back turned to Ratna. Weren’t the Lunars the ones breaking faith? Malin’s attack—it must have been Malin, after all—had betrayed the truce. “Revati could change it, you know.” The child changed everything about the imperial marriage. When Rahu had first proposed it, Chandi had never thought the Solar emperor would accept a Lunar bride. When had it stopped sounding like madness? When had the possibility of enduring peace started to seem real? Was it when Naresh returned?

  Ratna sat beside Chandi and pulled her around by the shoulders to look at her. For a moment her cousin just stared into her eyes, her mouth cracked open. “Maybe. But what if she can’t? It’s time we went home, and we cannot do that unless we have a way to win this war.”

  She tried to speak, but something caught in her throat. Isn’t that what she’d wanted all along? “Think about your husband. Your child.”

  “If there’s war, Revati will be raised a proper Lunar. So she’ll lose the Solar throne—she’ll regain the Lunar throne that should have been her true birthright.”

  Chandi couldn’t keep the tremor from her voice as she rose and backed away from her cousin. “You want to see war come again, don’t you? For all you played at diplomacy, for all you thought to bring peace, when it turns dark, you run for shelter. You took his bed, gave him a child, but it meant nothing.”

  Ratna looked like she might slap her again. Ratna didn’t have strong Blessings, despite her father, and Chandi was in no mood to allow herself to be struck again. She ran her fingers over the jewelry box that had held her betrayals. The box that had cost her Naresh.

  Ratna rose. “You will do your duty.”

  “No!” Chandi hurled the box at the wall beside her cousin. Ratna screeched as the box shattered behind her head, splinters of wood flying about the shadowed room. “I’m done with it, Ratna. I was a fool to agree to this in the first place. But now I’m finished.” She’d fix this. Because peace was better for everyone. Because she owed it to Naresh. Because she had to find a way to keep him from hating her.

  After catching her breath, Chandi saw the pearl rhino, scattered on the floor. She knelt beside it. When had she forgotten it in that box? Had she betrayed Anusapati?

  “You will do your duty,” Ratna repeated, her voice trembling. “As I have done mine.”

  Chandi scoffed as she rose. “On your back.” She rushed to the door and flung it open, not waiting for her cousin’s answer.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Naresh wound his way through the Igni District. All his life he’d lived in Kasusthali, wandered its streets, but he had seen this district only a handful of times. It smelled of garbage and unwashed bodies. Their wooden homes and apartments seemed a poor imitation of the masterful stonework throughout the rest of Kasusthali. And yet, the Ignis themselves had helped create that stonework.

  Chandi had once said the Solars treated the Ignis like slaves. She was wrong, of course. But after the splendor of the city, the near destitution here was striking. His passing met with cold looks. They all seemed to know who, or at least what, he was. Of course, the hints of his sunburst tattoo would peek out from beneath his baju, and his uniform’s cerulean color made it obvious to anyone familiar with Solar society.

  Rumors said the keeper of the fire shrine was quite the historian. Would what he learned here match his lessons from the Academy? Three times Naresh had stopped to ask the local Ignis for directions. Twice the Ignis had dispersed with nothing but shrugs, and he had begun to suspect the last had misled him.

  Growing up, he had heard that Lunars were violent monsters, addicted to sugar, in love with bloodshed, and lacking any honor. And then he met Chandi. Perhaps her sense of honor needed work. Perhaps he should have turned her in. But she wasn’t violent, wasn’t a monster. He had heard the Ignis were docile workers who preferred their simple life to the burdens of politics and government. He wondered if those rumors were as accurate as the ones about the Lunars.

  The Lunar envoy would arrive in the morning. Perhaps the empress convinced Kakudmi to allow it. Or perhaps the emperor’s new fair-skinned confidant had done so. Naresh couldn’t guess what faraway land a man with sun-colored hair and green eyes might come from. No one seemed to know who the foreigner was, even his name. The Guard had taken to calling him the Stranger.

  Bendurana had brought him to the palace. A witness, he said. Next they knew, Kakudmi had taken the man on as an advisor. Except he gave no advice, at least not where any of the Guard saw it. Kakudmi made no retaliation against the Lunars. When his own father was murdered, Kakudmi made peace. And now Empu Baradah was dead, the Astral Temple fallen. Empu Baradah’s warnings about Kakudmi remained. “A man of peace,” he’d said.

/>   The emperor and his advisor would decide their actions, but Naresh would find his own answers. He had to know how this really began. Only then could he guess its end.

  A burning brazier outside a windowless stone building among a block of windowless stone buildings identified the Shrine of Sacred Flame, as the Ignis called it.

  Ignis whispered to themselves as Naresh stepped through the entranceway. Unlike Solar architecture, the fire shrine featured no atrium. The place was cast in oppressive darkness. Naresh had to fight to keep walking forward and not hunch against the shadows. He could see men moving off to the sides on the edge of his vision, but couldn’t make them out. He kept his fists clenched at his sides to keep his hand from wandering to his newly wedded keris sword.

  “Welcome, Guardsman,” the priest at the back of the shrine called. The man sat on a pillow some distance beyond the fire pit. Even while he sat, his surprising height was apparent. “Come and sit for a while.”

  Naresh inclined his head and then sat across from the Igni priest. “You are Semar?”

  “Yes, Pak Naresh, I am.”

  The seat Semar had offered him positioned him between the fire pit and the priest, so it became even harder to read the man’s face. “How do you know my name?”

  “I’ve followed your career, Guardsman. Son of the Radiant Queen. Asked to join the Arun Guard at a younger age than anyone in memory. Some say the finest swordsman in the Skyfall Isles, perhaps all of the South Sea.”

  “You have a reputation yourself. They say you’ve studied the ancient histories. The four wars, even before, in the times of myth. Before the breaking of the Pact.”

  “Why not ask your mother? She would surely have the answers you seek.”

  Naresh hesitated, yet he could not ask for honest answers if he would not give them. “The Children of the Sun would tell me the history they recorded, the history they believe. The Ministry of Information would tell me what they want me to know. I wanted an unbiased account.”

  “And you believe such a thing exists? An objective history, free from influence by the teller?”

  Naresh spread his hands. If not, if no one could tell them the unbiased truth, there was nothing he could do. Maybe that was the point, maybe they should all have let the past lie in the past. “Who started the war?”

  “The Pact broke when the Lunars murdered the Solar high priestess. In retaliation the Solars drove the Lunars and Ignis from the Astral Temple.”

  Naresh nodded. That was how the Children of the Sun told it. Of course, the Ignis were their allies, so perhaps their histories would agree. The Lunars claimed the Solars driving them from the Temple was an unprovoked attack. Maybe they even believed it now.

  “But don’t you think the Lunars must have had a reason for such a heinous act?” Semar asked. “After so many years, holding the Astral Temple in trust with the other two dynasties, why take action certain to ignite a war?”

  “What do you mean?” Never once had the Solar histories questioned the Lunars’ reasons. They had taken it as a given that Lunars were just violent, dangerous. “Are you saying you know why they did it?”

  Semar leaned closer, held him with an intense gaze that seemed to bore into him. “The Solar high priestess learned something, something the Lunars wanted to keep secret at any cost.”

  “Tell me.” Whatever had started all this, he needed to know. It was the gulf that separated him and Chandi.

  Semar watched him without wavering, but Naresh found himself glancing around to make sure no one would overhear. “Some say,” the fire priest said, “the high priestess learned the secret of the Moon Scions. According to those rumors, she may have uncovered the source of their bloodline, and thus their power.”

  Naresh rocked back on his heels. And that secret, the secret to wielding the god-like power of the Moon Scions, would be worth killing for.

  “And you, son of the Radiant Queen, what will you do with this knowledge? Try to find the beginning, reach back through the ages to find the place to lay the blame for all that has gone wrong?”

  If the emperor had seen all this before him, perhaps Naresh had underestimated him. Easy for him to say they had to let go of the distant past.

  “I know where the blame lies. Malin.” Chandi might not be a monster. But the Macan Gadungan were.

  “And if Malin has done what you think? Why would he do so? Have you ever wondered how he got to where he is?”

  No. Naresh had always assumed the Macan Gadungan were born monsters. Was Malin once a man? But Semar meant that the distant past had guided Malin’s path. Which meant to let go of ancient history, he’d have to let go of recent history.

  Kakudmi never avenged Ken Arok. Naresh couldn’t avenge Empu Baradah.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  The Lunar envoy had arrived, but it had brought Chandi little relief. Rahu’s presence here only made her situation with Naresh more complicated. The Solars had confined the Lunars to their chambers on the fourth floor. Naresh had informed Chandi that Malin was banned from the city, and gave the weretiger’s infrequently-used room to her father. Rahu they gave a more elaborate room around the corner.

  The Solars had agreed to allow the Lunars to meet in a conference room nearby, under guard. And they might have, if Chandi hadn’t long ago learned the room’s secret. The careful acoustics of the room allowed sound to travel one-way, to the opposite wing. If they met in the conference room, Kakudmi could overhear every conversation.

  Chandi huddled in the corner of Ratna’s room. Rahu and Ketu had used their Glamour Blessings to disguise themselves as servants, then snuck past the guards to her cousin’s room. They whispered nearby, while Malin watched the door. The weretiger had swum from Yawadvipa across the sea to the palace and climbed in the window. Marvelous in its audacity. Impossible for a human, so the Solars never guarded against it.

  If they caught him, they’d burn him. And he’d deserve it for what he’d done. She tried to keep from glaring at him. But whatever he’d done, Malin had raised her. When she was seven, playing on the rocks with Ratna, she had slipped and fallen into the sea. It had been Malin to dive in and save her while her father was off serving as a priest. Funny, but it was one of her earliest memories. When her mother died, Malin taught her the stick fighting techniques he’d brought from Mait, as well as Silat.

  And when Anusapati might have killed her? Malin saved her life. Since she’d come to Kasusthali, he’d been her closest friend and confidant, the one person she could count on and be honest about her mission with. She wanted to hate him for costing her Naresh. But could she hate him for avenging her mother or Calon?

  From the look on her uncle’s face, his talks with Kakudmi and Aji Bidara had not gone well. Rahu wore a carefully trimmed goatee, darker in color than his sun-bleached brown hair. Elaborate songket embroidered his black baju, a symbol the Lunar Empire had come to associate with the greatest Moon Scion of their time.

  Rahu poured himself a cup of tea before sitting in front of Chandi. Ketu sat beside him, sharing a plate of coconut slices. Ratna remained on her bed. “Assuming we can trust the tiger’s sense—”

  “It’s never failed you before,” Malin said.

  Rahu did not turn at the interruption, but his back stiffened, and his dark eyes grew wider, his mouth tighter. “Assuming he has not failed us,” he began again, “the Solars cannot spy on us now.”

  Chandi shook her head. They didn’t build personal chambers with acoustic technology, only semi-public places. Dishonorable, they’d say. And Naresh would never accept dishonor.

  “We must get my daughter before we escape the palace,” Ratna said.

  “Silence, child,” Rahu said.

  “We cannot abandon her here,” Ratna said, fire in her eyes. “She’s our family.”

  Rahu tapped a finger to his lips. “Lower your voice.”

  “Let them come,” Malin said from the door.

  Chandi scowled. “Naresh knows you were responsible. If he learns
you’re here—”

  She could hear Malin stalk closer. “Does he?”

  “I wouldn’t want to be you if Naresh finds you.” Malin must be growing even more furious that she didn’t turn to face him. She suppressed a snicker.

  “I’ll rip out his heart and eat it before his eyes!” The weretiger smacked a bedpost, snapping it.

  Ratna shrieked, and Rahu was on his feet in an instant. The War King held Malin aloft by the throat before Chandi had turned. “If your noise brings him here, I’ll let him have you, Macan Gadungan.” He glanced at Ratna cowering on the bed. “And if that had struck my daughter, I’d make you wish the Arun Guard found you.”

  Rahu dropped Malin, who fell to his knees, gasping. The War King sat and resumed his tea, adding more milk from a small vial. He always insisted on bringing his own milk for his tea.

  Chandi shivered at the image Malin had conjured. She couldn’t bring herself to pity the tiger for how Rahu had treated him. Malin rose and returned to the door, never taking his eyes from Rahu.

  “Well, that was colorful, Malin,” Chandi’s father said. “You look pale, Chandi. Are you well?”

  Chandi nodded. Her father’s short hair had a bit more grey than when she’d last seen him. Indeed, it almost looked like he was the elder brother, rather than Rahu. Still muscular, though. Probably practiced his Silat every day. He’d done so since her mother had died.

  “We’re not leaving,” Ketu told Ratna.

  “But—”

  “Be silent, Ratna,” Rahu said, his voice low and emotionless. She wilted under his gaze, and he turned back to Chandi. “The Solars are willing to negotiate. Kakudmi fears us too much to make war now. He is not his father. So we will wait until the moment is right before we strike. If they fail to prepare, they deserve their fate.”