The Tangleroot Palace

by Marjorie Liu

  But there was no denying the truth. No denying how much pain she had caused in service to her country, and herself. How many families still grieved the losses, even though it had been war? Memories were long.

  “It was not your fault your crew died,” he said. “Maude betrayed you all.”

  “And you,” Xīng replied tersely. “But it wasn’t just that. My time was over. What people love in war, they hate in peace.”

  And I hated my power, she wanted to say. I hated what people expected of my power.

  Captain Shao gave her a grim, skeptical look—so much like his sister—and the old, unbearable sadness rose again in her throat. She wished he would understand without her saying more, ashamed that she needed his compassion. She hadn’t allowed herself to be honest with anyone in years. But what was the harm in a little truth between childhood friends, when there was no one else left in the world who remembered Xīng as she’d been, before the war?

  There was no opportunity to say more. A bell chimed, and a sharp whine cut through the hull. The engine quieted, signaling the beginning of a steady drift. Three days, and now they were done.

  “Well,” Captain Shao said softly.

  “I know,” Xīng replied, and finally forced her hand away from the gun.

  A boat was waiting for her when she broke through the surface of the ocean. A small craft, little more than a slab of wood laden down with fishing nets, and fat cormorants squatting inside bamboo cages, a boat so flimsy, a two-mast junk would have sunk it with merely a swipe. Xīng said nothing, though. It was night, and she could see the stars. She had almost forgotten what they looked like.

  Captain Shao joined the swimmers who guided her from the submersible. It was against protocol for him to leave his vessel, but none of the boys who saw her off made mention of their commanding officer abandoning them, if only temporarily. They said good-bye in the same way they had said hello—with silence, and respect, and fear.

  Her belongings were strapped to her body, wrapped again in sealskin, along with a set of dry clothes. Captain Shao, who had stripped down to a special suit made of shark hide, pushed her out of the water into the boat, helped, from within, by its sole occupant: a young Chinese woman. Her hair was shorn so close to her scalp that even in the darkness Xīng could see the cuts and bruises on her skin, and a deep red welt, nearly a scar, covered her throat. Her movements were slow, and pained. Captain Shao frowned, giving the newcomer a hard, thoughtful, look.

  Xīng leaned over the edge of the boat, gripping his forearm, tight as she could. He tore his gaze from the other woman, and did the same—his knuckles white, seawater streaming down his face. Beyond the harsh rasp of their breathing, and the lap of waves against the boat, she heard distant booms, one after the other, raining down into her bones.

  She tried to release his arm, but he held on, pulling himself so close the boat tipped dangerously sideways.

  “No mercy,” he whispered. “Don’t you dare.”

  Xīng forced herself to smile, though it was faint, grim, and felt like death. “Stay safe, Tom.”

  His jaw tightened with displeasure, and something else: too much like desperation for comfort. Xīng jammed her hip against the edge of the boat and reached down, ready to pry his fingers off her arm. His grip was beginning to hurt, and his men were staring.

  But he let go before she touched him. Let go, as though burned, and pushed away from the boat—and her. He treaded water, holding her gaze, and she did not look away, or blink. Just held on, in the only way she knew how: with memory, and heart, and the certain knowledge that distance was always safer.

  The Chinese woman began rowing. Xīng raised her hand. Captain Shao did not. He stared a moment longer, and then dove. His men followed him in silence. Swallowed, as though their flesh was made of sea and shadow. She knew better than to watch for them, but found herself doing so anyway.

  “Are you ready?” asked the other woman softly. She sounded as though she was from the Mainland south, perhaps even Kowloon, which spoke a different Chinese dialect entirely, though her tone was educated, even refined. Xīng was accustomed to Mandarin, having been born to a Chinese mother in the territory of New China, but she had spent much of her adult life out east in the Colonial Americas, speaking English. Sometimes she still had trouble with the various accents of the native Chinese (and the Europeans, as well), though enough gold miners had come around the mountain over the past ten years to give her practice.

  The woman’s breathing turned ragged, accompanied by a faint whistling grunt every time she pulled at the oars. Her movements were awkward. Blood seeped from the deep welt in her neck. Xīng scooted forward, and without asking, placed her hands on the slender wooden grips. Cormorants clucked, shifting their wings, and in the distance, the low, crashing booms of cannons still rumbled.

  “You’re injured,” Xīng said, as the other woman leaned slowly away from the oars. “The Emperor should not have sent you.”

  The woman touched her throat, and then her shaved, nicked scalp; a flick of a delicate wrist, a turn of her arm so that her frayed black sleeve fell down a fine-boned arm. Xīng would have thought her a Buddhist nun, had it not been for the fine weave of her dark clothing, as well as the look in her eyes, wild and hard. “I was uninjured in the beginning. Nor was I meant to meet you here. Everyone . . . everyone else . . . was captured. I was the only one who escaped.” She swallowed heavily, looking at the birds, the ocean, anywhere but at Xīng. “You are not what I expected.”

  “I am Xīng MacNamara,” she replied, because she had never found a better answer to that statement, not even after hearing it for most of her life. No one was ever who he or she was supposed to be; not even Xīng could say for certain that she knew herself completely. Truth rested only in action; the rest was mystery.

  “I am Xiao Shen Cheng,” said the woman, after a brief hesitation.

  Xīng was focused on the horizon, where a faint orange glow had appeared. As such, it took longer than it should have to recognize the name. But when she did, everything stopped—everything—and the boat began to drift. She stared at the woman, letting it sink in, and suffered disbelief, and dread.

  “You came too late,” whispered the Empress, rubbing her pale hand against bloodshot eyes. “My husband is dead.”

  Xīng forced herself to breathe. “How?”

  Shen Cheng gave her a disdainful look. “It was a sustained effort. We fought well. But the emperor had sent our crystal skull away with the children, and the remaining core was not powerful enough to feed the lines. When the Jugranaughts came, we could only slow them.”

  Xīng sat back, struck with a chill. Jugranaughts. She had heard that name from the envoys—heard it for the first time in a decade—and then again in the Imperial court on the Pacifica coast; from the mouths of the silver bullet aircrew, and on the submersible, whispered when the boys would see her coming. No one ever thought she could hear them, but that was the curse and the gift of being who she was. Only Captain Shao had refrained from speaking of those skull-enhanced men and women—but that was because he was also Tom, and shared the pain of his sister’s betrayal.

  Behind them, below, in her bones, Xīng heard a low, oppressive groan, a rumble that rose from the sea through the bottom of the boat. A despairing sound, and the answering swell that lifted them was unnatural and stomach-roiling. Something brewing in the water. More than one submersible. A battle.

  Xīng tightened her grip on the oars, prepared to row again—and found herself staring down the barrel of a ruby-studded revolver. British design, new and gleaming.

  Shen Cheng closed her eyes and pulled the trigger. Xīng had already begun to move, reaching out to knock aside the weapon—but the deafening blast skimmed her left arm, and sent the empress recoiling backward over the edge of the boat. She bobbed to the surface immediately, gasping for air, arms thrashing the water. Not much of a swimmer, e
ither.

  Xīng did not jump in after the drowning empress. She took a deep breath, rolling through the pain and rush of blood to her head. Ten years on the mountain. Quiet, peaceful. She could have died an old woman, with no one the wiser. A good meal for the scavengers.

  She picked up the British revolver, testing its weight in her hand. “Where are the Jugranaughts?”

  Xīng was not entirely certain the woman would hear—or care—but that bruised, battered face turned toward her, and a skinny hand managed to latch on to the edge of the boat. Below them, the waters swelled again, as though from the passage of a large body. Xīng thought of Shao, and Maude, and the rest of her old crew—slaughtered, ripped to pieces—and balanced the revolver across her forearm, aiming it at the woman’s head.

  “Tell me where they are,” she said again.

  Shen Cheng shook her head, though the corner of her gaze lingered on the glittering gold star pinned to Xīng’s chest. Despair flickered through her face.

  “I know the stories,” she whispered. “You will kill me if I tell you.”

  “I’ve killed for less,” Xīng agreed, and slammed the revolver butt on the woman’s fingers. She howled, flailing. Xīng placed the weapon on the floor of the boat, and picked up the oars. She started rowing. The empress, sobbing, tried to follow; but it was like watching a log thrash.

  “They tortured me!” she screamed at Xīng, her voice choking on seawater. “I had no choice!”

  Xīng did not stop.

  It was an accident, or so her father had always said.

  He was a Scottish engineer, an adventurer, who had studied with the skull masters in China, before traveling across the Pacific to the Imperial colonies—a vast network of villages and cities that had been thriving for almost a century before England sent its first ships of men to hack a new civilization on the frontier of the far eastern continental tip.

  By the time her father had arrived in New China, the Pacifica court and its alliance with the western native tribes was well known, but only by accident; the Chinese Empire had done its best to keep its colonies secret. Too many precious resources at stake: not just gold, but rich and verdant farmland, the likes of which did not exist in Asia.

  Xīng’s mother had been a skull master in her own right—the emperor’s most valued musician, an operatic soprano whose voice was uniquely favored by the crystal skull that powered the Pacifica Court, and that formed the root strain of its crystalline harvests. She’d had a way with skulls—not just that one.

  “I hear them . . . a hum made of light, right in the center of my head,” she told Xīng, pushing her finger between her child’s eyes. “And that light entered my womb and made you.”

  But Xīng had never heard that light, even if she was made from it. No skull had ever spoken to her.

  But that was how her mother met the Scottish engineer, who quickly became a favorite of the old emperor (mostly likely because he hated the British even more than the Chinese did). A notoriously private woman, she’d never told Xīng much about that early courtship, only that her voice changed after giving birth and the Pacifica Court skull took a liking to a young Mongolian throat singer on loan from Beijing.

  All for the best, as Xīng’s father had decided to move his family out east to help manage the crystalline harvests of the new American colonies. A terrible decision for them all, Xīng had always thought. It might have been a different life, growing up inside the Imperial Court: a child with crystal-born powers, where she might have been protected, and seen as something more than a potential weapon.

  But she knew that was wishful thinking. Power was always a weapon.

  Then, and now, it was a rare honor to be allowed access to a crystal skull. Only fifteen had been found throughout the world—four of which were in Chinese possession—though rumor had it that many were yet to be discovered in the jungles of the far south. Expeditions were regularly sent—usually ending in bloody conflicts—but only one had thus far been found, and that by the new Americans themselves, raising their current possession to two—the other having been given to the colonies when they were still under British rule.

  No one knew quite for certain how the skulls worked, only that some Mohammedan king of the Holy Lands had discovered three in the sands of an oasis: blocks of perfect crystal carved in the shape of human skulls, the likes of which no artisan had ever yet been able to duplicate.

  Rather than declare the skulls a simple curiosity, the king had devoted himself to hours spent staring into those translucent eyes—one after the other, in patient succession. This, according to legend, went on for several years—until, quite abruptly, the king suffered a massive stroke that left him blind and speech impaired, but functional enough to declare that he had discovered the secrets to the skulls.

  An overly ambitious statement. Two hundred years later, engineers were still learning what powers the skulls possessed—though it was widely known that an electrical current flowing through a skull into a special mineral bed was enough to instigate the growth of crystals that could be used to power the armadas, towns, even entire cities. Beyond that particular commonality, however, each skull was different. Some provided visions. Some made others go insane.

  And some, as her father had discovered, changed the very essence of a human being.

  Xīng found the shore far sooner than expected. She dragged the boat onto the beach, but did not bother hiding it. Just stood in rock and sand, staring at the ocean as she stripped off her wet clothes, and dressed in dry trousers and a shirt. The rest of her belongings were unwrapped quickly: revolver, two knives, her special bullets, and last, the vials of chemicals her father had prepared during the colonial war, and left to her upon his murder.

  She loaded her gun very carefully. Then, with equal care, re-pinned the gold badge to her shirt, tracing her fingers along the points of the star. Warmth filled her, and then cold—sensations accompanied by memories of the old, tired arguments—when she’d still had a chance for a different life.

  We need you. No one else but you. We will die if you cannot turn back the British. All of us, our freedom, lost. Shut your heart to the blood, shut your ears to the screams. You were born to no other purpose. You are exceptional only in death.

  Xīng began walking to the rhythm of those old words, spoken in many different ways, from many different people, though the message had always been the same. Even her Chinese mother had told her future in blood, only that was to be admired, and not feared. Xīng had been touched by some great power, which her mother claimed to be from the stars, and so the stars were in her name, and as an adult, she had worn a star upon her breast in the service and protection of others: first in peace, and then in war.

  The terrain was not far different from the estuaries and tangled forests that could be found on the coastlines of New China and the Colonial Americas. She smelled the sea and the spice of firs growing tangled on rocky outcrops. Listened to the booms and thunder of some not-so-distant battle. If the Chinese military realized the emperor was dead, then they might have already surrendered. She hoped not. She hoped that the fire staining the horizon was the British burning, and had a feeling she would be finding out for herself, soon enough. Shen Cheng had not been a strong rower. She had been sent from someplace near—and someone would be waiting for her to return. She could take a fine guess who.

  But not long after Xīng abandoned the boat, she heard sounds that did not belong: shouts, the clunk of steel and wood. Familiar noises that sent her running. She was careful, and kept the revolver in her hand. Felt herself slipping back into the old days, except now she was alone, and the burden was only hers. Hers, knowing that it was the others in her crew who had always been the real heroes. So very human, with no power to protect themselves; driven only by courage and grit, and honor.

  She missed them.

  Shouts grew louder, frantic, cut with hoarse cries. Xīng
burst onto a rocky beach and found herself facing boys, boys crawling from the sea, boys wearing air-filled ties made of sheep gut. She recognized all those faces, but there were so few, less than a quarter of their former numbers dragging free of the waves.

  Xīng ran to them. Several cried her name, pointing. The rest let out a ragged cheer, and their smiles—those smiles of relief when they saw her—cut and burned, and twisted her heart. As if now, those smiles said, everything will be all right.

  She grabbed the arm of the nearest boy, who was limping heavily across the rocks. Blood ran down his leg. He was pale, blond, just a scrap of a lad, but he was dragging a sealskin pouch behind him in a white-knuckled grip.

  “Captain Shao?” she asked, running her hand over his face to push his sea-soaked hair out of his eyes.

  The boy coughed raggedly into his palm. “Left ’fore him. He gave me ’is papers, he did, f’ safekeepin’.”

  “Bastards cracked the crystal core,” added another boy, drawing near. “Had to jump before we sank too deep. Cap’n promised he’d follow.”

  Xīng gritted her teeth, briefly searching the faces around her. No sign of her friend. He was out of her hands. She holstered her weapon, and slung her arm around the waist of another child who was close to falling on his knees. Coughs wracked his chest.

  “Come on,” she said, and caught the eye of a sturdy red-haired lad, who seemed to be doing better than the others. “Go, pass on the word. Everyone needs to hurry. Something worse than Redcoats might be close.”

  His reaction was an infinitesimal flinch, but he gave her a sharp nod and ran down the beach, grabbing the boys who were already out of the water, and steering them back to the waves to help the ones still struggling. Xīng dragged the child in her arms as far as the brush, and then left him to go back for others. She kept count, as best she could, still searching for their captain.