by Jay Lake
I was not sure of the distance, having spent my life behind walls or on night runs, where everything was only a step or two in front of me, but it did not seem I had so far to go to just walk right through His Grace’s front door. As I approached the palace, the street grew emptier. Quieter. My bells rang louder.
What might have been my wedding if my life had been different would instead be my funeral. I wished I could have ridden Endurance toward this end, much as my grandmother had.
From one moment to the next, I was surrounded by angry-faced guardsmen with swords drawn. They came upon me in a sudden swirl of rushing feet and shouting. My captors forced me to my knees, then down on the pavement. Someone kicked me twice, setting my bells to shivering all over my body. A blade’s point was leaned against my neck. I bit back my cry of pain at that, just as I bit back my anger at the rough treatment.
Save your passion for the Duke, I told myself. You will be lucky to have even a single chance. Do not spend it needlessly here.
A runner sprinted away. His sandals slapped the street. The man with the sword knelt close behind me, though I could only see his knee and part of the ringmail of his skirt. “May’s well be comfy, chit,” he whispered. His hot breath was prickly on the scabbed-over notch of my ear. “You ain’t got much left to live for.”
“Conspiracy,” I said to the cobbles. My mouth was half-pressed shut against stone that tasted mostly of shoeleather. “Against the Duke.” That was my tale, meant to be told and carried to the place bearing me on its shoulders.
“Sun rose in the east, dinn’t’t?” He laughed. “Course there’s conspiracy.”
After that, they acted almost like normal people. Some told jokes about the wife of an officer. Others asked after one’s sick horse, and complained of the food in their mess hall. Except for the sword pressing in my neck, I might have been nothing more than a street-corner idler listening to the chatter of men at their work.
No one was interested in me. I was just their capture. Meat, a thing, knocked down to be kept against possible future use, like a venison haunch in an ice room.
My anger began to boil again. These men were brutal and thoughtless in a way that Mistress Tirelle had never managed. Her cruelty was the calculated personal abuse of years. For the Duke’s guards, I was only the trouble of a moment.
They didn’t even care. At least she had.
It all flowed from the Duke. Everything wrong, poorly done, every hurt and hatred emanated from the way he bent the fate of Copper Downs. I kept the words in my head, waiting for my chance to use them against him.
In time, the runner returned. The men gathered in a whispered conference, speaking in awed terms of the bounty. They knew who I was now. I was dragged to my feet by a hard hand clawing into my shoulder. A man with a mild face and watery eyes threw a maroon duty cloak over my head. He laughed as he did it, then cinched a rope around my neck. I was tossed over an armored shoulder and hauled away.
We were heading to the Ducal Palace. Thus far, this was according to plan.
Or so I fervently hoped.
The gait of the guardsman rocked me with a bumping irregularity that jangled my bells out of all time and tune. The men’s chatter was gone, so I caught no further clues from them. We soon ascended a broad, shallow flight of stairs. I could hear other people moving, muttering, gathered around.
Whatever my humiliation was to be, it was beginning in a very public way. I decided to be encouraged by this. Their treatment of me seemed less likely to be a quick walk to a slit throat.
When they set me down, my captors were almost gentle. My feet slipped slightly on what felt like stone through my soft leather boots. Someone took my hand and led me stumbling through more hallways of stone. My training Below with the Dancing Mistress prepared me to recall my path, should that happen to matter sometime later.
As I walked, I could hear the echoes of the walls around me, and how they altered every dozen steps as we passed a recessed doorway. My bells still rang, but now they swung in time to my own movements.
The sounds were too discordant to ever be truly pleasing. It still gladdened my heart to hear them. I felt so close to my grandmother, except that she had not walked alive to her own funeral.
In time, my feet were on carpet. My boots crackled slightly, and slid in a new way. I smelled more now, not just dust and old stone, but also furniture oil and incense and the not-so-distant scent of baking. Doors opened and closed nearby as we walked.
No one said a word. We were among people who would not bother to question why a hoodwinked girl was being led past them. Later, I would come to understand the sadness of a city that had surrendered itself to the terror of a jealous and immortal master. Then, all I knew was that I was alone among strangers.
As always.
Finally I was stopped. A door creaked open. I smelled more incense and something musty. With a muttered “hup-hup,” I was propelled through, as if I were a horse to be driven to market. Hands released me as I stepped within. After another pace, I stopped. I feared barking a shin or tripping over something on the floor.
Someone behind me loosened the rope about my neck and whipped the guard’s cloak off. The door banged shut immediately thereafter.
I blinked away dust and the confusion of close confinement. There was no sign of the Duke here. Only a wide wooden table with the Factor seated behind it. My heart twisted in a cold stab of anger and regret. Two other dead-eyed men stood to his left. All three watched me blankly as my shoulders slumped and the breath left me.
Our plan was lost. The game was blown.
“Emerald.” The Factor’s voice was calm, quiet, as ordinary as his face except for those eyes.
“Green. You may call me Green.”
A smile flickered across his mouth. “Emerald.” He tapped his fingers against his thumb a moment, as if tallying. I let my eyes rove around the room. Three high, narrow windows on one wall, a ceiling far above me, shelves lined with large and heavy books behind the Factor’s men and on the other walls. A door amid the shelves, a door behind me, and him in the only chair.
Nowhere to go. Nothing to use.
Whatever calculations he was making came to their end. His face was grim. “A valuable servant is dead. I now see that an extremely valuable possession has been mutilated and thus rendered worthless. I give you liberty to make a statement before I have you cast from the rim of the dome atop this building.”
I was wrong. His voice wasn’t ordinary. It was as dead as his eyes.
And I had nothing I could wield against him.
Yet I wasn’t bound. I wasn’t restrained in any way. Whichever guards had walked me through the halls to this place had vanished with the hood.
I was still me. I shifted my weight, testing the balls of my feet. The Duke was not here, but three of his dead-eyed servants were. More important, the Factor had ever been my enemy.
There was something I could do. Strike one of them down, any of them, and the rest might learn a little of the fear they’d beaten into me. I tensed my muscles, ready to spring and gain close purchase to pour my words in his ear. My cloak of belled silk jingled as I moved.
The Factor raised a hand, not toward me but at his two companions. “She may attempt an attack,” he said. “She will not succeed.”
“If you are certain, Your Grace,” one of them answered.
Your Grace! How many undying, dead-eyed dukes could there be in this city? I had found the Duke of Copper Downs after all! That he went abroad on his own streets under the name of the Factor surprised me, but I realized there was no reason it should. The people who ruled this city were like those sliding boxes brought in from the Hanchu ports that folded into themselves without ever reaching an end.
I relaxed. He would not bluff me. Why did he need to? He did not know I understood anything of the words of power. The Dancing Mistress had been uncertain of them. They were my hidden weapon. I did not know if their strength would hold now, but there was no way to f
ind out except to put the question to the hardest of tests.
“You were wrong,” I told him.
“Wrong?” His smile flickered again. “A curious choice of exit lines. And no, I was not wrong. In what? Lifting a foreign guttersnipe from poverty? Raising you in privilege? Teaching you every skill of womanhood? Perhaps you would prefer picking rice in the tropics, bound in marriage to some laboring peasant. You were almost so much more than that.”
I’d had those same thoughts, but that did not make him right. The bells of my cloak jingled again.
Words, I told myself in the language of my birth. He tries to win once more through the power of his words.
What would my grandmother have done? What would Endurance have me do? I could hear the snorting breath of the ox as he sought to warn me back.
The only way was forward.
Flipping the cloak of bells away from me, I flung it at the Factor’s companions. I danced to my left, away from them.
He jumped to his feet and threw the table over, roaring words I did not—or could not—understand.
I leapt forward to balance on the edge of table. I had practiced this exact stance for so long. I spun into a kick from which the Factor ducked. Then I leapt to grab him around the neck.
“The life that is shared,” I whispered in his ear in the language of my birth, “goes on forever. The life that is hoarded is never lived at all.”
That was as close as Federo and I had been able to come to the Dancing Mistress’ words. Surely, though, inasmuch as she’d given them to me in the Petraean tongue of Copper Downs, their sense had come from whatever language her people spoke amongst themselves. I hoped and prayed that sense would carry forward into my own words.
The Factor bore me down under his far greater weight. His two companions grabbed me by the wrists. I feared suddenly the rape that Mistress Cherlise had warned me about. These men would tear my body for their pleasure before they tore my life out for their protection.
“You,” the Factor said. He couldn’t seem to find his next thought.
His hair began to twist. It jumped like snakes disturbed from their sleep. Ripples of gray, then white, shot through it. The other two loosed their grip on me, staggering back in their own sudden, shocked decay.
“You . . .”This time he looked surprised. Finally there was some gleam of light in those cold, dead eyes.
I pushed him away from me, sitting up as he fell. The Factor struggled with something mighty that was caught in his chest. The words worked. I leaned close, to be sure he could hear me even as he was dying.
“You may call me Green,” I said. “Green,” I repeated in my own language.
He gave me a look of utter despair, which gladdened my heart. Wind and dust erupted violently. The air stank of old bandages and rotten meat, while unvoiced shrieks echoed within my skull.
I held on tight, remembering who I was and what my purpose was here. I bore these noises and the fires in my head as I’d borne the years of beatings and abuses. My patience had been schooled by the very best this man could set against me.
A moment later, I was alone in the room, amid the splintered remains of his table and the shattered wood of his chair.
______
The motes floating in the sunlight from the high windows engaged my attention for a while. Were these the dust of immortality? Or perhaps just the room’s air stirred so much that every crack and crevice had surrendered its dirt.
Studying their texture awhile longer, I realized I was in the same shock that had possessed me after Mistress Tirelle’s death. Except I did not feel guilt this time. Or pain. I was not sure it even counted as a killing. All I had done was point the weapon of the Duke’s magic against him and those who served him closest. They had brewed their own poison and served it out in cups for generations. How could I regret these child-takers sipping their own bitters?
They were gone. The Duke and the Factor both. How was it no one in Copper Downs had noticed that the two of them had been the same man? Perhaps it had been one of those secrets that everyone understood but no one spoke of.
Everything about this Duke was difficult for me to fathom.
With them gone, I was free. The Factor was no longer in a position to pursue his complaint against me for the killing of Mistress Tirelle. The Duke was no longer in a position to offer a bounty for my head. I was free—free as any girl of twelve who stood out on these streets surely as a fire in the night.
Rarely had I thought to regret the color of my skin, for I found myself pretty enough to look at, but here and now among these maggot men, my fine brown tone made it impossible for me to hide.
What of it? I breathed deeply and searched for the courage that had driven me to face down the most powerful man on the Stone Coast, and indeed, in this quarter of the world. Resolve clutched within my throat, I stepped to the door and pressed my ear against the once-glossy panel. Now it was matted with dust and flecked with tiny pocks.
With that realization, I glanced at the backs of my hands. Dots of blood beaded them. I rubbed myself clean on my dark tights, then swiped fingers across my face. More blood, in faint smears, along with a sharp twinge of pain from the disturbed scabs.
Once more I tried to listen. No one walked or spoke immediately outside, though I heard distant shouting. I also realized there was a strange, faint roar, which I finally identified as a crowd of people giving voice outside the Ducal Palace.
I turned to gather my belled silk. It, too, had been damaged by the Duke’s demise, but was still essentially whole even with a forest of snags and tears. Handfuls of bells slid to the floor when I pulled it over myself. The cloth brought the grave-dust smell of him with me. I didn’t mind. That was the scent of triumph, after all. I might not live out the hour, but in this moment, I was free.
The hallway was empty. The wood of the threshold was scorched, likewise the carpet before it. The rug had abraded in a pattern of rays as if an explosion had taken place within my room. Papers were scattered loose against one wall, along with an empty slipper. People had fled in disarray. I shut the door and checked the gap at the bottom.
What had I survived?
We’d entered from what was now my left. The endless practice in the dark Below with the Dancing Mistress made it easy for me to find my way. Wiping my face and hands clean of bloody dust, I retraced my steps to the end of the hall, out into a wider gallery lined with bookshelves and decorated side tables.
This, too, was empty. The ceiling here was high, three or four storeys, with a long clerestory above serving to admit the light of the sky. Thin banners hung from the beams, descending about thirty feet to the height of a normal ceiling, a style I would eventually realize was typical of formal architecture in this city.
Farther from the explosion, people had also fled in panic. A dropped tray sat among a spray of shattered crystal and a pool of wine. Three leather folders were crumpled against the pedestal of a table supporting a statue of a wide-mouthed red god. Its eyes bugged like those of a frog, and seemed to follow me as I walked.
I could hear the roar much more clearly now, breaking into the separate sounds of people and horses and shattering glass. The noise of riot.
How had it happened so quickly? Unless all the Duke’s henchmen had also dissolved with him. I tried to imagine the officers of the court, the leaders of the Ducal guard, even a tax inspector at his counting table before a clutch of humbled sea captains newly in harbor. If they’d all cried out in surprise, then crumbled in a whirlwind as the Duke had before me, that would send an immediate shock throughout the city.
I began to wonder what I had truly done. A man could not rule through the passage of centuries without the habits of his power becoming the habits of everyone who served him or lived within his demesne. How much had the city been overset?
How much did I care?
A servant younger than myself ran screaming from the sight of me in the next gallery. I still followed my memory of being led in, pas
sing now from carpet to stone. Ahead of me, down a short flight of stairs, a small group of Ducal guards huddled before the great oak-and-copper doors. The entrance-way was surmounted by stained-glass windows. Everything was shut and barred; some of the windowpanes were broken out by cobbles strewn upon the floor within. The crowd just outside was very loud.
I walked toward the guards with my bells ringing. There was no point in pretense. One of their number, with a gold knot on the shoulder of his dark green woolen coat, looked up at me.
“You, there—don’t go through this door!”
“Why not?” I asked, drawing myself up with dignity.
“Coz they’ll kill you out there.” He sounded more exasperated than afraid. “Everything’s gone wrong.”
All the Duke’s immortals must have indeed fallen to dust. It was my great fortune these guards had no idea who I was. I thanked all the gods for the cloth that had hidden my face on the way in.
“Thank you, sir. I was visiting. Is there an exit I can use?”
“Try the Navy Gallery. Off to your left there.”
One of the men spoke up. “If you’re up for it, girl, just drop out of one of them windows. You’ll be in the Box Elder Garden, but it lets out on Montane Street. Crowd out there hasn’t yet remembered how many doors there are to this palace besides the front.”
“Be off with you,” the corporal added. “No use hanging here.”
I took them at their word and turned into what I hoped was the Navy Gallery. No shouts corrected me.
In an instant, I knew I was right. The ceiling was painted with a smoke-wreathed battle scene showing long-hulled vessels from a much older time surrounding a burning, fat-bellied hulk. Ship’s wheels and bells hung on the walls, while models stood on small tables—their detail was something I would have loved to examine at a different time.
The windows here were casements, with little cranks to turn out the glass on a hinge up the long side. I picked one in the middle and looked out at some rhododendron bushes backed by a stand of box elder trees just beyond. The noise was less here. No one seemed to be throwing cobbles at the palace.
