The Tangleroot Palace

by Marjorie Liu

  Xīng had no skill for water, having never been able to stand its weight against her body. The men had to drag her along, blind, like a child. One of them, only moments after slinging lead hooks through her harness and tugging her unbearably deep, guided her hand to her nose. He forced her to pinch her nostrils shut, and then held a tube against her mouth. Bubbles tickled her lips. She opened, just enough, choking—swallowing ocean and air as her mouth clamped tight around the tube. The ache in her lungs eased, but little else.

  After an interminable length of time—during which she suffered a slow-burning hysteria—the men holding her arms stopped swimming and the top of her head brushed a hard surface. The hooks were removed from her harness, and the air tube pulled from her grasping lips. The men shoved her up a long, metal column, and she kicked and clawed toward the light that burned through her closed eyelids. Strong hands grabbed the harness knotted around her body. She was hauled upward. Dragged from the ocean onto a warm steel floor.

  A thick blanket was spread immediately over her body, tucked against her legs with immeasurable care. The cold had never bothered her, but nevertheless, Xīng lay for a long moment, shuddering—focused on nothing but the air in her lungs, and the pleasure of no longer enduring that unspeakable pressure. Aware, even with her eyes closed, of all the men packed into that small space around her. Every sound was amplified: the rasp of their breathing, the shuffle of boots, the hum of the crystals and the coal furnaces burning, somewhere beneath her.

  “Lady Marshal,” said a quiet voice. “You, MacNamara.”

  Xīng exhaled, going still. Suffocating again, but in a different way. Until, with all the grace and strength she could muster, she pushed herself to her knees. Her strong quick fingers tugged the blanket higher upon her shoulders so that it would not slip, and she tried to sit straight and strong. The crew would talk. Best to make a good impression, what little was left.

  But it was difficult. When she looked into the faces of those silent staring boys who were crammed around the hatch—hardly a man with real years among them—she was unprepared for the awe and fear in their eyes.

  She did not feel fearsome. Just wet and cold, and tired. A woman old enough to be their mother, black silvered braids dripping seawater against skin the color of sun-dried loam. She had been pretty once, or so others had said, but she had not looked at herself in a reflecting glass for more than ten years. Xīng could only guess that she had aged like her mother.

  The sealskin parcels strapped to her body were heavy, as was her soaked clothing: rough cotton shirt and a man’s trousers, clinging to her, perhaps indecently. Gold glinted above her left breast, hammered in the shape of a star. A new badge. The envoys from the fledgling American government had given it to her, right before she left the warm Pacifica coast of New China. She had almost tossed the badge into the sea, but at the last, decided to wear it. It meant nothing to her—but to the aircrew, it had been legend. Part of a costume. A mask.

  A sinewy, brown hand appeared. Xīng stared, taking in the thick cuff of scar tissue around that muscled wrist, and then allowed herself to be pulled onto her feet. She glimpsed a dizzying blur of navy wool and gold stars, before anchoring her gaze on handsome cheekbones, a shaved head. The man had a Chinese look about him—in his eyes, mostly—but something else, too. Mixed blood, like her. Xīng searched his face with great care, finding wrinkles about his weathered eyes, and a touch of silver in the bristle around his jaw. She had been finding white in her own hair for five years, but had not thought much of it until now.

  “Captain Shao.” Xīng tightened her grip on his hand, as he did hers, before letting go.

  He inclined his head. “I apologize for our late arrival. The British have dropped mines throughout the Pacific. We had to alter course almost a dozen times before we found a safe route.”

  “The air ship that brought me here,” she began, and then stopped, unable to continue. Gone soft, when she could not even speak of the dead.

  Captain Shao rubbed his scarred wrist. “My swimmers witnessed the attack. They’re searching for jumpers who might have survived the explosion.”

  Xīng thought again of that aircrew, young as this one, all earnest and red-blooded, most of them too nervous to look her in the eyes. “Beijing,” she said hoarsely. “The Emperor.”

  Captain Shao hesitated. “Best if you come with me.”

  Xīng gave him a sharp look. He issued a command. Boys scattered, returning to their duties—many with lingering, backward glances. She had not realized how many had come to see her until they dispersed. All of them, bursting with rumors and the damnable old stories. As she followed the captain down the corridor, every boy she passed—every single one—pressed his knuckles to his brow. None could have been older than sixteen.

  “They’ve talked of nothing else since learning you’d be coming aboard,” Captain Shao told her, gently touching one of those genuflecting boys on the shoulder. The teen blushed, tearing his gaze from Xīng, and stooped to pick up a brush and pot of night paint. He began streaking a fresh layer into the grooves set along the iron wall, and the immediate glow was cool as winter light.

  She almost reached for the captain, but pressed her fist against her thigh. “They should know better. You’re all in danger now. When I discovered who they had sent to meet me—”

  “We’re always in danger,” Captain Shao interrupted, glancing at her over his shoulder with eyes that were far harder than the soft, pleasant tone of his voice. “But I do believe they think you’re worth it.”

  “They’re only children.”

  “My men,” he corrected sternly. “Don’t belittle them, Marshal MacNamara. Not when you know why there’s no one else left to fight. Not when they admire you so.”

  The admonishment cut deeper than it should have. “Call me Xīng. I stopped being a marshal after the war.”

  “Did you?” Captain Shao gave her a faintly mocking smile, glancing down at the gold star pinned to her shirt. “I don’t think the world has quite caught up with your resignation.”

  He turned before she could think of an appropriate response—though there was none. Stories had been spun for years, becoming larger and more fantastic, turning her into a woman, a creature, that she could never hope to be. Legends were not flesh and blood. And she was no hero.

  The corridor twisted. Steam exhaled from small valves, and when Captain Shao led Xīng past a narrow iron stairwell, she felt a wave of suffocating heat rush upward over her body. Engine room. Voices shouted below, accompanied by the mournful wail of a fiddle, and then, in counter-melody, the lilt of a penny whistle. Some Gaelic tune, the likes of which she had often heard in Albany.

  Xīng raised her brow. “You play music in the core?”

  “It increases engine efficiency,” Captain Shao replied, peering down. She followed his gaze, and glimpsed fragments of immense crystal shards, part of a whole crown embedded in an iron cradle that left its roots exposed to the ocean itself: a natural, necessary, coolant. “The more complex the tune, the better. Musicians have become quite sought-after by the military, though each core seems to respond differently. Mine prefers strings, but I know one commander who can only make fifty knots accompanied by a harmonica.”

  Captain Shao opened another narrow iron door, revealing a small cabin: bed crisply made, papers stacked neatly on a narrow desk bolted to the floor. Fresh night paint had been spread over grooves in the wall, casting a cool, luminous glow throughout the crunched space. Not much decoration: just a round ink painting of a sparrow hidden among cherry blossoms, and a golden locket that hung from a hook. Xīng felt like stooping when she entered, and straightened with caution—half-expecting her head to brush against the ceiling. The air smelled humid, metallic, like blood mixed with gear grease and sweat.

  Captain Shao squeezed inside, shutting the door securely behind him. He set the lock, and she was glad. For the first time i
n weeks she felt safe, though it was strange being together, in such a tight space. Reminded her of things she wanted to forget.

  Xīng stared at the locket. “This is your cabin.”

  “I won’t have you bunking with the crew,” he replied, and then hesitated, studying her. Xīng met his gaze, remaining steady, unruffled. She might have spent the past decade lost in the mountains, but she remembered what it felt like to be judged.

  “You have something unpleasant in your eyes,” she said.

  “This is a suicide mission,” he replied bluntly. “Your suicide.”

  “Such a pessimist.” Xīng turned from him, and began removing the sealskin packages strapped to her body. At least ten, of varying sizes. Beneath her bare feet the floor was warm and unsteady. When she stood in one place for too long, vibrations from the crystal core rattled her bones. She unwrapped her boots—still dry—and sat on the edge of the hard bed, turning them upside down, one after the other. She carefully shook out other small parcels, which made faint sloshing sounds when she held them up to her ear. Satisfied that the contents were still whole, she set them aside, and tugged on her boots.

  “How long have you been captain?” she asked quietly, not looking at him as she smoothed her hands over the tall, worn leather shafts, poking her fingers through a bullet hole, or two.

  He was silent a moment. “Several years. After the Brits were rousted from the Colonies, we were ordered into the South Pacific to work with the Chinese and their fleet. I received my command at the beginning of the opium conflict.”

  “You would die for your men,” she said, unfolding another parcel.

  Captain Shao pushed away from the door. “Who are you dying for?”

  Xīng smiled bitterly, pulling free her gun. “I believe that would be your sister, Tom.”

  There was no such thing as one truth, but so far as the witnesses were concerned—and those who wrote down their stories, and couriered them across the sea to the East Americas and the Pacifica regions of New China—it seemed that some years back, British sailors had vandalized a temple in Kowloon, killing a monk, and then—after getting drunk—raged through a local village with guns blazing, taking turns with the young women, and murdering men in cold blood. It was not the first time such violence had occurred, but unlike previous encounters—resulting, with one exception, in quick beheadings—Qing authorities were summarily denied access to the sailors. Who, with a great deal of sobriety, were set immediately to sea by their superior officers, and ferried to India on a fast ship. Given that one of the criminals happened to be the bastard son of a duke, this was not entirely surprising.

  Ties, however, had long been strained between China and Britain. Not that anyone should have been surprised about that, either. Xīng might have been living in the mountains, but she still heard from the trappers, Cheyenne, and Chinese gold miners who occasionally visited her home. The English, she had been told, had finally found a way to take revenge on the Chinese for trading with the colonists during the war for independence, and it was a wickedness that had taken even her breath away.

  Using the exclusive trade rights of the British East India Company, England had saturated Chinese markets with opium. So slowly, so insidiously, the Imperial trade authorities had not realized the danger. Not until two million were turned into addicts. And then two million had become ten million.

  Efforts to halt the import of drugs would have eventually led to war—but it was said by some that the Kowloon murders were the final straw. The Emperor ordered all British sea ships seized, and their cargoes burned. Dirigibles were shot down, torpedoed with cunning gunpowder kites, and blazing missiles.

  And the British, in turn, declared war.

  But even the risk of China falling to England would not have been enough to bring Xīng down from the mountain. No matter how much the fledgling American government—and the Chinese officials from the Pacifica court—begged.

  Until the rumors changed everything.

  It took three days for the submersible to reach the southern China coast. Twice they encountered mines, and both times swimmers—Scots-Irish colony lads and former Chinese pearl divers—had to be sent out to cut the nets with their bare hands and weight the explosives with iron balls to sink them to the bottom of the sea. No other way around. The British war machine was thorough.

  “The Emperor has already relocated his children and most of his wives to the Chinese colonies on the Pacifica coast,” Captain Shao said on their last evening together, drinking oolong tea and snacking on dumplings that the cook had made special for Xīng. For the most part, Shao had avoided her until now; and she had obliged by keeping her own distance, mingling with him only at meals, or the few concerts she had attended in the engine room, sitting quietly in the corner while the boys played twisty jigs to the humming crystal core.

  “South, in the gold country,” he went on, “though I’ve heard rumors that his oldest sons will be journeying deeper inland to live with the Navajo. The Brits never could keep up with the natives, and the Emperor wants his heirs to learn about survival in case they must return to fight for their kingdom. He thinks his family has gone soft.”

  “Everyone saying yes to you all the time will do that,” Xīng told him absently, studying the last of the Imperial military reports that he had saved for her, some of the complicated characters scribbled in obvious haste on rough sheets of raw silk. “The Iron Maiden that destroyed my transport could have hit, in three days, any part of New China territory. It might be there now. Our air defense is strong, but all it would take is one good strike.”

  He looked at her as he did only when they were alone, with thoughtfulness, a glimmer of warmth, and a sadness that Xīng could hardly tolerate. “Fears of air attacks aren’t why you were called back. Or why you agreed.”

  “The envoys told me stories,” she admitted, touching the revolver holstered to her hip. No need for a weapon on the submersible, but its weight helped her think. That, and the crew enjoyed seeing it. She had used a rifle during the war, and it was her firearm of choice, but the revolver was a recent invention and Xīng found that she liked having the ability to shoot rounds in quick succession. Not that she had been aiming at much of anything but fir trees for the last decade; though occasionally, some men had thought to visit her mountain home in the hopes of murder and reputation.

  “Stories,” Captain Shao echoed flatly.

  She gave him a hard look. “They told me things that no one could have made up.”

  “A trap, then.”

  “No.” Xīng stroked the revolver, and then her thigh, feeling the puckered scars beneath the clothing she had borrowed from one of the crew. “Not this time. They know I’m alone and not a threat. Not anymore.”

  Captain Shao made a small sound. Xīng looked at him sharply, but he made no effort to hide the faint amusement darting against his mouth.

  “Queen of the Starlight Six,” he said quietly. “Most feared band of riders on the continent. I heard once from a captured British sailor that mothers still tell children stories about you, to scare them into being good.”

  Xīng shrugged. “They also say I’m ten feet tall, a Chinese princess who can change into a dragon. And that my eyes are capable of looking into a man’s soul and burning it free of his bones. Which, apparently, is what I did to an entire army of Brits off the Atlantica coast, leaving corpses that were little more than ash.”

  “Well,” Captain Shao replied, “you always terrified me.”

  “It was your sister who scared you,” Xīng shot back, looking again at the golden locket hanging on his wall, and then him, searching for Maude in his face. “I was the quiet one.”

  He rubbed his face, and leaned back in the chair with his eyes closed. Their knees brushed, and for a moment she was a child again, sitting on the swing her father had built, and that all the children fought and made bets over, simply because
it could go higher and faster than any other. A swing built for a child who possessed similar strengths of speed and power.

  “Quiet, but savage,” he murmured. “That’s what Maude would say.”

  Xīng shuffled his papers into a neat pile, unwilling to remember. “We arrive tonight?”

  “You know we do.”

  “Your orders are to wait for a day, and then go.”

  “With or without you.”

  “It will be without me.” Xīng finally looked him in the eye. “You’ll wait for a messenger who will tell you whether or not I succeeded.”

  Captain Shao stared for a moment, and then leaned forward—so quickly, with such menace, her hand flew to her gun. She moved faster than he did, and suffered a vision before he stilled: her weapon raised at his head, trigger pulled, with blood and brain and bone—and the aching silence, the terrible silence, suffocating the roar of the shot. She could taste the gunpowder on her tongue, and feel the burn of the recoil in her shoulder.

  But it was not real. Not yet. Not ever. Xīng forced herself to relax, even as Captain Shao stared from her eyes to her hand, still pressed to the revolver at her hip.

  “They all said you were dead,” he murmured stiffly, as though he could hardly force the words past his lips. “And if not dead, then ruined. No one could imagine another reason for you abandoning your responsibilities. Not when you had so much power. Not when someone like you was needed in the rebuilding.”

  “Someone like me,” she whispered, unable to move her hand. “I was a killer.”

  Captain Shao shook his head, but that was instinct, in the same way she had reached for her gun—and she listened for reassurance and heard none—watched his eyes and imagined his memories of her: covered in blood and fragments of bone, sour with the stench of decay after days of hot sun; walking away from the screams of the dying while her riders celebrated with toasts and laughter. She’d never once admonished them—always too relieved they’d survived another battle. They were only human, after all.