Empire of Bones

by Liz Williams

  You are ill, the raksasa said, as though this was some moral failing of which she disapproved. Can your people not cure you?

  “They are trying. But they don’t even know what’s the matter with me. They think it’s probably genetic, or that it’s a variation on a disease my caste has been suffering from.”

  The raksasa’s face seemed sharper than before, the bones arching underneath the papery skin. Within the gilded eyes, Jaya could see the filaments of crimson veins. She felt something flex and stir inside her mind, and felt suddenly sick. She groped for the jug by the bed and spat into it.

  A pity, the raksasa mused. Perhaps the fragility of the Tekhein gene strand should have been taken into consideration when the regeneratives were first released.

  “What? I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

  That does not matter. Now that you are activated, we will see if you can be made into a more integrated component. It is to be hoped that fracture will not occur, the raksasa said inside Jaya’s head, then spoke her name. Listen.

  Jaya could hear others. They whispered inside her head; she could see through their eyes.

  What/who? someone thought, and looked up sharply. Jaya felt the sun on a face.

  “I’m Jaya,” she said—but the distinction no longer made sense; they were becoming fluid, and there were more of them, waking.

  This will be real, the raksasa said briskly. I am showing it to you so that you may recognize it when it happens. Now, I must consider the best manner in which to process your integration.

  Jaya blinked. The raksasa was abruptly gone. She could hear other sounds out in the hallway: anxious, startled voices. Dr. Fraser, and someone else—a male voice, speaking in Hindi. Jaya listened idly, and then froze. The voice was a cultured one, and horribly familiar. Jaya’s throat grew cold and dry. Holding the tube that attached her arm to the drip, Jaya got out of bed and walked as quietly as she could to the door.

  Dr. Fraser was standing in the hallway, talking to someone: a tall man in a military uniform. Memories swam through Jaya’s mind: a room filled with fire, her father’s body lying motionless against a wall, the white plaster speckled with blood. A man was standing over her, lowering an automatic rifle. Then it was years later, with moonlight over a river, and her husband, Kamal, down in the cold rushing water where she couldn’t reach him. She had not seen the man who now stood in the hallway for over three years, not since the night when he murdered Kamal and made Jaya even more of a fugitive than she already was. His name is Amir Anand. He’s a colonel in the provincial militia, but his family are aristocrats. People call him the butcher-prince. Among other things.

  There was a sudden sting in Jaya’s hand. She had pulled out the drip with the clench of her fist. A thin smear of blood glazed her skin and the air felt cold, as if the blood was beginning to freeze. Jaya gazed down at it, stupidly, then instinct took over. Slipping off the hospital gown, she reached for the blouse and sari in which she had been admitted. They were cleaner than they’d been for some time. It seemed to take hours to dress, and her hands were shaking. She tried to blame the sickness, but she knew it was simply fear. She put her eye to the door again. Erica Fraser was saying in bad Hindi, “Are you sure?”

  “She’s calling herself Nihalani?”

  “I told you. I—” Dr. Fraser seemed uncertain whether she was doing the right thing by telling him the truth. As well she might, Jaya thought.

  “An assumed name,” Anand said with disdain. “In the hills they called her Jaya Devi, after the Bandit Queen of the last century. ‘Jaya’ means ‘victory.’ Ironic, really.” His head half turned, and Jaya caught the glitter of a golden tooth as he smiled at the doctor. His face was fleshier now, the elegant bones beginning to be blurred, but the pale blue eyes were as cold as ever. “You’ve been tricked, I’m afraid. She’s wanted for trafficking in black market medicine, arms dealing, offenses against the State… she’s a criminal, a terrorist. You’ll be well rid of her.”

  But Jaya had heard enough. Jaya Devi might have died that day in the Himalayan foothills, but Jaya Nihalani suddenly found that she had every intention of living on. She snatched the accumulated tranquilizers from the mattress, then quietly opened the door. No one else was in sight, apart from the duty nurse at her desk. Jaya could see the back of the nurse’s head bent over a screen. She slipped past, scavenger senses alert to danger, moving barefoot and silently even though the pain was screaming through her joints.

  The nurse did not look up, and Jaya slid through the doors and down the corridor, then found the stairwell and stumbled into the depths of the hospital. She knew from her familiarity with the boneyards at the back of the building that somewhere there was a door that led out into them. Pausing for a moment, she smelled the air, catching faint traces of antiseptic, chemicals, and death. Her joints blazed with arthritic pain.

  Another door and then the basements, filled with the humming of the hospital incinerators. She wondered how long it would be before they found out that she was gone. Not long, she suspected, but the thought was still exhilarating. She had stopped being observed, the object of inquiry and expectation. She had taken control of her life once more.

  The smell of machine oil was overpowering. She slipped between the incinerators, and there was the door before her. It was bolted, but she tugged hard and the bolt slid back. The door opened onto evening, and Jaya hobbled through.

  The boneyard was silent. The familiar rows of bins were locked against scavengers—easy enough to open if you had the codes, but tonight she resisted the temptation of scavenging for any valuables that might be lingering amid the rubbish. Instead she headed between the bins for the sewer hatch. Gritting her teeth against the pain, she dropped through into the warm stinking darkness below and tugged the hatch closed above her.

  Dim light filtered down through the cracks, and as she made her halting way along the reeking edges of the sewer she saw that there was another dalit jackal waiting, a boy of no more than nine or ten. Jaya knew him. His name was Halil, and when he was not raiding the hospital waste bins, he caught rats to feed his family. His face was carved with the silvery striations of Selenge, and already one hand had become crabbed into a claw. She wondered with a pang how much longer he had left to live. Usually, Selenge gave its sufferers only a few months of miserable life once the striations broke out, wasting away muscle and eroding flesh until the arrival of the cramps and contractions that signaled the end.

  Halil broke into a great smile when he saw her. “Jaya! They told me you were dead.”

  “They lied.” She smiled down at him in return, and reached out to touch his face. “How are you, Halil?”

  He shrugged. “The same. Did they cure you?”

  “No, they didn’t.”

  “Where are you going now?”

  “To the river,” she told him, and as soon as the words were out of her mouth she realized it was true. It was where the sewers led, after all. “I’m going to the river. Halil, I’d ask you to come with me, but it might be dangerous. There are people after me.”

  He accepted this with a nod. “Good luck,” he said. A filthy hand clasped her own, and reluctantly she left him there in the dim light and stinking air and headed on her way.

  When at last Jaya surfaced, Varanasi was lost beneath a haze of heat, and the iron roofs of Jalna Street were baking in the dying day. She could feel the warmth beating up from the road. The air smelled of cooking and smoke, familiar and pleasant after the antiseptic smell of the hospital. She headed into the maze of streets that made up the oldest part of Varanasi: Goudalia. Anand’s men would be lucky to find her here; the place was like a warren. Goudalia had no electricity, only a few private generators, and in twenty minutes or so, darkness would fall.

  Families and friends were gathering in the tiny shops, settling down on cushioned floors and lighting candles for the evening. Jaya hurried past vendors of curds, rows of tin buckets, silks and charms and garlands. Schoolchildren roared by, balance
d on the handlebars of their brothers’ motorbikes, and she even saw a Western boy: one of the few backpackers who remained undeterred by the threat of disease. She knew that they would see only an old woman in a tattered, stained sari; just another of the thousands of widows who still came to Varanasi to die by the river. The illness that had so aged and debilitated her was also her weapon, her cloak of invisibility.

  The narrow strips of sky above her head turned the color of cinnamon in the polluted haze. Night was coming fast, and the Ganges drew her like a magnet. She hastened down a narrow lane toward the woodyards at the edge of the river: Malikarnika, the Burning Ghat. An ironmonger’s, a shrine to elephant-headed Ganesh—Jaya smiled at this, for he was the God of Overcoming Impossible Obstacles—then a hole-in-the-wall cybercafe and out between the high stacks of timber.

  Jaya drew aside into the fragrant sandalwood shadows to let a funeral procession go past, the corpse on its bier neatly wrapped in tinseled cloth, the shaven-headed mourners following. Faces peered from the shadows, and in the firelight she saw the silvery markings of Selenge. She was among her own kind here: the dalit workers who tended the fires. Ever since Selenge had fallen upon her caste like a bolt from Hell, the numbers of those who congregated around the ghats had increased. She could see them in the upper stories of the ruined palaces above the river, hovering like ghosts.

  Jaya slipped through the timber yard, around the side of one of the great ruined palaces that still graced the riverfront, and down onto the ghat. Behind her, a corpse on its pyre sparked and smoldered into the evening air.

  It was marginally cooler by the water, although the stones breathed heat into the evening air. She found a place in the shadows beneath the bulk of the ghat. It was good to sit down. From here she could see the whole curve of the river, golden in the last of the sun: a great sheet of light. At the edge of the ghat a group of women stepped, one by one, into the purifying waters of the Ganges, and after a while Jaya joined them when she could no longer bear the stink of the sewer. But she kept well out their way, staying downstream. She ducked beneath the gleaming water. When she rose, there was a soldier standing on the ghat, looking around.

  Jaya froze. It wasn’t Anand; it was a younger man, in a crisp khaki uniform. An automatic hung from his shoulder holster. Four years ago, she’d had weapons of her own, and a good eye, but now she’d barely be able to pull the trigger. She swallowed fury, took a deep breath, and sank beneath the water. When at last she dared to raise her head, her lungs bursting, the soldier was gone.

  She stayed in the river for another twenty minutes, until she was reasonably sure that the soldier wasn’t coming back. Then, cautiously, she climbed back up onto the warm stone of the ghat. The evening puja had begun, each woman lighting the tiny candle in its nest of marigold petals and setting the papier-mâché bowl so that it bobbed on the water for a moment before being taken by the lazy current.

  Shrinking back into the concealing shadows, Jaya watched each little light drift down the river, and her thoughts followed. Without understanding how this might be, she knew more than she did yesterday—a day older, five times more wise. Fragments of information swam up from her unconscious mind: long skeins of encoding, jigsaw images. They came from nowhere and vanished into nothing; information without context was also without meaning. Jaya sat with her back to the warm stone and waited for it to make sense.

  Slowly, fragments began to cohere, though not in words. It was more than a dream. It was like the old days of oracle, and rather than shutting it out, as she had become used to doing, Jaya simply listened. The war in Sri Lanka was escalating: a JNLR guerrilla faction had broken away. American gunships had surrounded Taiwan in a protective cordon and the U.S. was threatening further action against the Chinese government, the last engagement in thirty years of chilly relations and intermittent conflict.

  The scraps of data were as clear and perfect as pearls, embedded in the oyster casing of her neocortex. She watched them pass with a sudden guilty sense of exhilaration, like a child who wakes in the night when everyone else is asleep. She opened her eyes and sat up. The sun was gone; the women in their ochre saris dipped and swayed along the edge of the water.

  Someone was suddenly sitting beside her.

  Jaya turned to see a pallid, plump face and golden eyes. The raksasa’s lotus mouth curled open in what might have been a smile, then graciously, she inclined her head. Jaya blinked, and the raksasa was gone.

  Night fell. Jaya considered moving up into the ruins, already filled with widows and the homeless, but she knew that the men up there would demand money or sex. So she drew closer into the cremation ground, creeping into the darkness behind the woodpiles. Even if the soldiers came back, the priests would not allow them here; some places were still sacred. And the people who tended the pyres were themselves untouchables, with no love of the military. She was as safe here as anywhere else.

  The skeins of data continued to unravel through her mind, running like mercury. Now, it was beginning to weave together. It seemed to relate to the satellite communications systems woven above the continent: information from the military colonies, troop movements, weather reports. And then she heard a note through the mesh of information; something utterly strange, like the voice of a god, and wholly familiar. It lasted no more than a split second, and then was gone.

  It was the voice that she had heard from childhood, but now it was much clearer and closer. It brought her upright, backed panting against the woodpile. She listened for it with all the concentration that she could muster, but she did not hear it again.

  At last she slid into real sleep, waking only when the dawn began to come up over the river. The ghat came back to life, holy men splashing noisily about in the shallows. She could hear voices raised in prayer and a bell tolling out; the funeral ceremonies were beginning again. Restlessly, she left the ghat and the smoldering pyres and wandered back into the maze of Goudalia. The pain was still there but it felt muted, as though someone had turned down the volume of a radio.

  Life began early in Varanasi, in the cool of the morning, and the lanes were filled with people. Jaya passed a boy on a bike with a basketful of watermelons, an office worker in a suit and high heels, a group of ancient women in ochre saris. Their faces were silvered with Selenge and their hands were clawed. They huddled together as if for protection. The office worker gave them a wide berth, and the boy on the bike veered away as he saw them and made a sign against evil. The old women drew back into a filthy alley and hastened away.

  Jaya followed them into the shadows, and it seemed to her that she saw the blood-colored word of plague written on the doors and death in the air. Jaya’s caste passed reviled or unseen, but now she was invisible even to herself. She did not know what she had become. She flattened herself against the wall to let one of the sacred cattle go by, and saw with a shock that it looked at her with golden eyes.

  Toward noon, Jaya found herself crouched against the wall of the Temple of Durga. The stone was red like desiccated flesh. Within, the great bell tolled. Although she knew where she was, the town was becoming increasingly insubstantial, as though she were watching a film. She was no longer concerned about the soldiers, about Anand, and somewhere deep within she felt dimly surprised that this should be so.

  The sweat and heat on her skin seemed separate from herself; she had become no more than a shell, a carrier for another consciousness. It seemed to Jaya now that she was traveling farther and farther beyond the net of satellite communications, far from Earth to the edge of the system. She opened her eyes and saw with a start that the raksasa’s insubstantial form was once more sitting by her side, watching her. She could hear the voice more clearly now, calling to her in opaque symbols across the void. And now, after all these years, the voice told her at last what it was: not a god, or a vision produced by sickness, but a ship.

  “What are you?” Jaya whispered, fighting panic, but the raksasa only smiled her curled smile. “Where have you come from?”<
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  Watch, the raksasa said blandly. Integration has commenced.

  And Jaya looked through the raksasa’s eyes as the ship slowly turned, out beyond the warmth of the sun, and began to move into the boundaries of the solar system—ice frosting its ancient sides, its organic systems resurrected into life, viral nexi filamenting within its cores. And she listened to it singing as she summoned it in, singing of what she did not yet understand: the progenitor of plagues, made by our Makers, sailing down to Earth.

  RASASATRA

  1.

  Khaikurriyë, Rasasatran system

  The immense expanse of the city was rosy with sunset light, causing the arches of the caste-domes to glow, as if lit from within. The ribbed walls of Rasasatra’s huge living buildings flexed and stirred as the light faded, releasing pollen into the evening air. The crimson sun was balanced on the horizon like an eye, highlighting distant pylons, and a red wind was blowing up from the desert parks of the Zher, stirring a singing vine into agitated life and rattling the quills at the back of Sirru’s head.

  The walls of the little domed house, however, remained as closed as a disapproving mouth. Sirru leaned forward and whispered impatiently to the house, “But I’ve already explained it to you half a dozen times. I have an appointment with your mistress. At least let me send her a message.”

  He had tried any number of verbal modes, none of which had been successful. It seemed that the house was not open to persuasion. Despite the protection of the nanoscale that filmed Sirru’s skin beneath his robe, the house seemed to sense both his insecurities and his hopes, which were already becoming more than a little forlorn. His quills drooped. The palm of his hand still tingled with the message that Anarres had pressed into it the previous night at the Making celebration: her locative address and a time, elegantly inscribed in pheromonal signature across his tingling skin. It was only the third time they had been out together, but Sirru was already incapable of thinking about anyone else.