In the Palace of Shadow and Joy

by D. J. Butler

  “Shadow and Joy.”

  “There’s only the one opera house, anyway. You knew what I meant.”

  They bought two coffees in two wooden cups and then climbed to the second story. They sat at a round table on a balcony looking across at the Palace, which was four or five stories tall, though it was hard to tell exactly, since the front was occupied by a single pillared facade that made the Palace look like a temple. Over the top of the building rose an immense dome shaped like an onion and gleaming like copper. Through three open doors, a desultory stream of theatergoers trickled into the Palace. They wore the impractical togas and gowns of the great families and their near allies.

  To the immediate left of the Palace, almost out of Indrajit’s sight, stood the nearly featureless stone block that was the Auction House. At a mere two stories tall, with zero decoration, it might be the smallest building in the Crown, and it sat in the center of a plaza with no statue or other monument to mark the building or its importance.

  “I guess we’ll have to buy a ticket,” Fix said. “What if they’re sold out?”

  “We can always bribe a doorman to be allowed to stand in back. We don’t need to sit, anyway. After the show it will get more complicated.”

  “We could introduce ourselves.”

  Indrajit shook his head. “I don’t think so. I don’t think she knows we exist. I don’t think she even knows about the whole…about the underlying…about all the risk-merchanting going on over her.”

  “In that case, we’ll have to tail Ilsa back to her apartment and watch her there.”

  Indrajit nodded. “Sit across the street and watch through the windows. Take shifts.”

  Fix sipped his coffee. “So, do your people have fish gods?”

  “A fish god. Goddess, actually.”

  “Named Blotto or Bluto or something similar, I imagine.”

  “Blaat.” Indrajit’s eyes narrowed. “Why do you ask?”

  “Well, you know. Sometimes in the old stories, gods…and goddesses…mate with some of their followers, and so you get the blood of gods flowing in the veins of men.”

  “I’m not a fish, Fix. I’m not even a little bit fish.”

  Fix shrugged. “So there are no stories among your people about…weddings with the goddess? Or rituals of marrying the sea?”

  “As it happens, I know all the stories of my people. They are contained in the roughly thirty thousand lines of the Blaatshi Epic, which I can perform in its entirety at any moment. I learned it from my master, I perform it, and one day I will pass it to my apprentice, who will be the four hundred twenty-eighth Recital Thane of the Epic.”

  “Recital Thane? Isn’t a thane a kind of warrior?”

  “It’s a warrior of high status. Or in my case, a person with the status of a high-status warrior, though my role is to perform and pass on the Epic, rather than to fight. I am a warrior of poetry.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to write the Epic down?”

  “Then it would be susceptible to wrong performance. Wrong intonation, wrong emphasis. Many of the scenes are incomprehensible except in the light of the accompanying gestures, which I have also committed to memory and perform.”

  “I think I would still write it down.”

  “That would also be impious.”

  “And no marriages with the goddess?”

  “The goddess does not marry her children. She blesses them with fish, and favorable weather, and good health.”

  “Her children?”

  “That is figurative.”

  “Huh.” Fix sipped his coffee. “So you swam to town to find people to hear your epic.”

  “I walked. I am here to recite, as I am sworn to do, to any willing audience. And also to gain experience of life, which shall inform the additional narrative that I must one day add to the Epic, and also to make a living.”

  “Your mother-goddess couldn’t just send you fish?”

  “I grew bored of fishing, as it happens, and I don’t particularly like the taste. What about you?”

  “I like fish.”

  “Indeed, I would say you’re obsessed with them. But where are you from? How does such a well-armed man come to be a reader? Where did you get your fascicle?”

  “Nothing to say about me. I was born in Kish, and unless I catch a lucky break, I’ll probably die here.”

  “Xiba’albi? Free Cities? Bonean?”

  Fix shrugged. “I don’t know. Just a man, I guess. I never knew my parents, and I was raised in an ashrama of Salish-Bozar the White.”

  “Wait, I know this one. His followers are called the Useless.”

  “His initiates are called Trivials. His priests are called Selfless.”

  “I was close.”

  “To qualify as a Selfless, an adept must demonstrate that she retains in her memory ten thousand pieces of information that are completely useless. That is the great commandment of Salish-Bozar, that no knowledge shall perish, no matter how impractical, and his adepts seek to fulfill the commandment.”

  “And with your feeble memory, weakened by the pernicious habit of reading fascicles, you were unable to remember the necessary number of things.”

  “No, I have a pretty good memory. But I could never be persuaded to waste my time on anything that was genuinely without practical application. I would spend all my money on scrolls, borrow codices, and even stand for hours to read the pamphlets being sold by street sellers; they couldn’t stop me from reading, but I wanted to know things that mattered.”

  “Like what?” Indrajit pointed at Fix’s spear and then his falchion. “Fighting skills?”

  “Of course. And crafts.”

  “Ah ha, so you can fix things!”

  Fix ignored him. “And trades, and geography, and politics, and history.”

  Indrajit finished his coffee, pleased that the last sips were still warm. “Really, what kind of knowledge is totally useless?”

  Fix raised his eyebrows and cocked his head to one side. “Well, if I’d known of the existence of the Blaatshi Epic, I might have memorized that.”

  “I am immune to your japes. The Epic contains history, politics, and geography, as well as liturgy, leadership advice, meditative techniques, tools for consoling the bereft, and, some say, hints to the location of a great treasure, buried in the earth in the days when we fled our first homeland.”

  “You don’t look like a man in possession of a great treasure.”

  “It would be impious to dig it up.”

  “The Selfless at whose feet I served had memorized the entire contents of ten large codices.”

  “Yes, but of what? That’s the question.”

  Fix shrugged. “No one knows. The codices are written in a script no one can decipher. My master could reproduce it perfectly, every line, scoop, and dot on every page, and could order all the pages correctly if shuffled, and could point out recurring patterns and correspondences not only across multiple pages, but across all ten volumes.”

  “But he had no idea what any of it meant.”

  “Not a clue.”

  Indrajit Twang laughed. “That’s genius. So they threw you out, for not wanting to memorize patterns of blots and squiggles. That’s what you get for learning how to read.”

  “They asked me to stay. They said that I should give up other hopes, that I’d grow accustomed to the idea in time, and that I would one day do great work, preserving the heritage of the thousand races of man. But I couldn’t do it, so I left.”

  “Admit it,” Indrajit said. “This is all about women.”

  Fix blinked. “The Selfless of Salish-Bozar are not required to be celibate,” he said slowly.

  “No, but what woman worth having says, ‘Hey, that guy over there who can vomit up ten volumes of writing no one can read, not even him, that’s the guy for me’?”

  “Not very many say that.”

  “None. None is the answer.”

  “I take your point. But are you saying you learned the Blaatshi Ep
ic to impress women?”

  “I’m not saying it’s the only reason.” Indrajit grinned. “But it doesn’t hurt.”

  Fix finished his coffee and looked at the sun, a hand’s span over the western horizon. “Time for us to go buy tickets.”

  Chapter Four

  There were no tickets to be had, but Indrajit was proved right—for six bits from the purse Holy-Pot Diaphernes had given him, he bought his entrance and Fix’s.

  “Technically, we’ve sold all the footling tickets.” The ticket-taker, a squat woman with faceted eyes like those of a fly crowning her lime-green head, looked left and right as she spoke to them. “But you can squeeze in at the foot of the stage anyway, if you don’t like the view from the back. There’s always room.”

  The six bits didn’t go into the cash box, but into the ticket-taker’s pocket.

  She insisted that Fix check his spear. She didn’t try to take his other weapons; this was Kish, and a man went armed. The spear disappeared into a closet of polearms and missile weapons.

  Fix took a chit in exchange.

  The two jobbers waited in the back, trying to look inconspicuous as the lamps were dimmed, and then crept up along the side of the theater. Above and behind them, the seats rose in five tiers, the chairs of each tier more deeply cushioned than the one below. The floor was of a pinkish marble; Indrajit didn’t know where it came from, but it wasn’t quarried at Kish, or anywhere especially close. Maybe Ildarion? The Epic contained an epithet, a formulaic repeated line, about red stone of Ildarion. In any case, the marble of the floors and walls and columns and the polished tamarind wood of the seats suggested serious wealth.

  “They don’t use jobbers to sell tickets, or guard the Palace of Shadow and Joy, do they?” he whispered.

  “No, they have their own staff, like the temples and the great families and the Hall of Guesses and the library. It’s the city functions that get farmed out to jobbers. Well, or any other job regular employees and servants aren’t dumb enough to do.”

  “Everyone knows that. That’s what the Auction House is for. Half an hour to sunset. Once the play starts, I’ll talk my way backstage, to watch Ilsa from there.”

  “How will you recognize her?”

  “She has no peer, right? It should be easy. If in doubt, I’ll ask. You watch from the space below the stage.”

  The curtain swept open, revealing a stage lit by oil lamp and a painted backdrop of blossoming rose-apple trees.

  “Look.” Fix pointed with a shoulder. “There are some of the Handlers.”

  For a moment, Indrajit thought the other man was pointing at the theater’s own guards, four men who stood, two at each side of the stage, in front of the curtain. They wore red silk from head to toe, including red masks, and the handles of the yetz-wood swords were lacquered red, so that in front of the curtains they were nearly invisible.

  But then he saw the jobbers. There were four of them, spread among the footlings. They wore matching gray tunics with a circular glyph on the breast, and they stood with their backs to the stage, staring at the crowd.

  The uniforms gave them an air of professionalism. One more thing Indrajit had to think about, if he and Fix were to organize.

  On the far side of the footling mob was a Luzzazza, tall, with slate-blue skin and long ears that drooped downward. In the middle stood a broad-shouldered man with the fair skin of an Ukeling or a Karthing from the north, hair red as a pepper from Thûl, and a confident, wide stance that looked as if he were prepared to fight hand to hand that very instant. At the near end stood a pair of people who looked like dull yellow frogs standing on their hind legs, one a cubit shorter than Indrajit and thin, the other two cubits taller, and built like an ox.

  “Look at the way that Karthing is standing,” Indrajit said. “He’s a fighter.”

  Fix nodded. “A Sword Brother, maybe?”

  The skinny frog leaned toward the big one and whispered something.

  “We’ve been noticed.” Indrajit smiled and nodded at the froglike jobbers. “That makes me uncomfortable. I’m not sure why.”

  “Because the Handlers might take us for kidnappers if we’re not careful, and attack. Or if Holy-Pot’s suspicions are well-founded and the original risk-seller plans to cheat, they might intend to kidnap Ilsa without Peer, and they might decide they should kill us first, just in case.”

  “Yeah,” Indrajit said. “Those are good reasons.”

  “But they don’t necessarily know who we are, they just see us looking at them. Pretend to watch the play.”

  They slowed their pace and Indrajit pretended. The worst thing about Kishite high opera was its traditionalist insistence on using just the one instrument, the Imperial harp. The Imperial harp had five strings, which meant it played extremely simple melodies in a pentatonic scale.

  The music of high opera was dull.

  “Be careful around the big Grokonk,” Fix said. The two men stopped walking. The chorus came onstage and began to shout together over the pentatonic crash of the unseen harps, a prologue about the twenty-year-long war between two kingdoms that preceded the moment the audience was about to see onstage. “That’s the female. Does your epic tell you much about Grokonk?”

  “It’s not my epic, it’s the Blaatshi Epic. And yes, the standard short epithet for the Grokonk in the Epic is fierce-fighting Grokonk, who smell attackers coming, and the long one is Grokonks the dreamers, who fight all battles twice, once in their dreams and the second time more deadly. Both epithets refer to their inborn psychic gift that warns them of approaching danger. They are much prized as sentinels and bodyguards, as a result.”

  “What do you mean by a psychic gift?”

  “A magical power they all possess. Like the third eyes of the Yifft, for instance.”

  “That’s nonsense,” Fix said.

  “Not so. The Grokonk are indeed prized as sentinels, as the Luzzazza are often committed to mystical pursuits, and the Blaatshi are irresistibly attractive.”

  “Yes, the female Grokonk is highly valued as a guard. But that’s because her mates warn her of approaching danger.”

  Indrajit wanted to scoff, but Fix had shown himself to be surprisingly knowledgeable. “The skinny one is the big one’s mate, is that what you’re saying? And he watches for her?”

  “Not quite. The skinny one is a Third.”

  “So where is the mate, then? Somewhere else, exercising his psychic gift?”

  Indrajit caught himself scanning the audience, looking for more Grokonk. The chorus shouted a final warning, and then three women in old Imperial-style armor of lacquered wood and bronze disks strode purposefully onto the stage. Their faces were hidden by masks, so he couldn’t tell which of the three, if any, deserved the appellation peerless.

  “They’re on her back.”

  Indrajit snapped his attention back to the Grokonk. The big one—the female—was looking right at him with domed, bulbous eyes, a big yellow hand resting casually on her leaf-bladed sword.

  “If so, they’re tiny. I think your fascicle is tricking you, Fix.”

  “I didn’t read this in the fascicle. I sneaked into a lecture at the Hall of Guesses and saw it there.”

  “There’s a reason they call it that, you know. Scholars know nothing. They just guess, and there’s not even a penalty for guessing wrong.”

  “This was an anatomy lecture. Before the Vin Dalu cut the pickled female Grokonk open, the lecturer and her assistant pried off the male Grokonk one by one.”

  “The Vin Dalu…Rao?”

  Fix hesitated. “It might have been one of the other ones. The Vin Dalu Diesa or the Vin Dalu Nikhi.”

  The Vin Dalu were the city’s three priests of a god whose name was so sacred it was never spoken aloud, and consequently unknown. Instead, the deity was called simply the Dismembered One, and his priests, the Dismemberers, presided over torture, dismemberment, dissections, and, if rumors could be trusted, even darker scenes. The Dismembered One was not one of the city
’s five gods.

  “One by one?” Indrajit asked. “How many male Grokonk can fit on a female’s back?” He felt as if he was reciting a bad joke, and possibly a dirty one.

  “The one I saw had twelve. Apparently, that’s not an extraordinary number.”

  Indrajit swallowed, finding his mouth dry. “I’m going to leave aside, for the moment, the question as to why you were sneaking into a lecture on Grokonk anatomy. You’re saying that if I looked at that female Grokonk’s back, I’d see—”

  “You’d see a jellied, mucus-like mass, easily mistaken for a slime-covered, hunched back. In fact, it is a swarm of male Grokonk, who are much smaller than the females, each attached by his mouth to a sort of nipple on her back. Through that nipple he receives nourishment from her, and he also fertilizes her eggs.”

  “His…fertilizer…is in his…mouth.”

  “Yes. Or rather, deeper back in his throat. The slime on her back is generated by her, and it protects him. In turn, he protects her. His eyes are open under the mucus—if you look very closely in good light, you might see them—and when he spots a threat, he trembles.”

  “I feel ill.”

  They both pretended to be watching the action on stage.

  “To be fair, she’d probably feel ill if she knew how you…fertilized.”

  “Well, then I won’t tell her. What’s the skinny one, the…Third? Not male or female?”

  “Well, that was the real subject of the lecture at the Hall of Guesses.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “I’ve seen a race of man that was all ears. It wasn’t pretty.”

  “But I bet it had good hearing.”

  “Here’s the lecturer’s hypothesis: When the males fail to find a female to mate with, or fall off their mate sufficiently early and can’t reattach—”

  “Because of the slime?”

  “I guess so. Those males grow bigger. And their…fertilizing apparatus…dries out and becomes hollow, and they learn to speak with it.”

  “Uh…”

  “So the males can’t speak at all, because they’re attached, feeding and fertilizing. The females can only speak Grokonk, which is unintelligible to you and me, because it just sounds like croaking. But the Thirds develop something like vocal cords, and learn to use them to speak the other languages of man. So they are sexless, and you always see them in the company of a female. She acts as his…or its…protector, because she’s bigger than the Third, and it acts as her translator.”