Authors: Elizabeth Bear
“Anil-la,” she said, holding it up. “Could you make something like this from obsidian?”
He pushed the magnifying lenses from his eyes with the back of his hand. “Well, the demon-ichor wouldn’t corrode it, then … you’re thinking of something else, aren’t you?”
“I’m thinking that a fresh obsidian blade makes wounds that heal cleanly and rarely putrefy. And I’m thinking that Hong-la, at least, has the skill to sink a steel pin into a living heart.”
It was the last-resort test of death, rarely used. If the pin moved … the heart was beating.
Anil-la followed her line of reason as if she’d explained it in detail. “You can’t cut open
both
lungs and pull the spawn out. A person might live with one deflated lung.
One.
”
“We don’t have to remove the spawn surgically,” she said. “Just kill them when they’re still small enough that the patient might survive them mortifying in her lungs. With the support of the blue mold, and Ashra’s millet brew…”
“They’ll leak this mess if you puncture them,” he reminded, raising a scalpel with its blade already etched by ichor. “Inside the patient.”
“Not if one used the process of fire intrinsic in volcanically forged glass to cauterize them. From the inside, so we do not burn the patient, too—which has been the problem with our other attempts.”
He stopped, a sharp squint creasing the corners of his eyes. “You know … you may be on to something there. And at least we’ll be working toward something, rather than sitting on our gold-plated thumbs alongside the blasted emperor.”
Men had been burned for saying less condemning things of a ruler. Tsering saw the realization pass Anil’s face an instant after his outburst ceased. She held his eye for a moment, and then just nodded and went back to her work.
* * *
The strangest thing was watching the people of Tsarepheth pack what they could onto mules and into pony drags—and onto their own backs—while Tsering herself crammed down hasty meals and toiled endlessly over the sick.
There were those who would not leave stricken family members, and most of these found themselves turning their hands to such tasks as were necessary in the field hospital. They replaced Citadel servants who took advantage of the permission they were given to evacuate with
their
families—although a perhaps unsurprising number of the latter chose to put their faith in wizards over princes, and stayed. The spawn still had not managed to penetrate the wards on the Citadel. New infections seemed to be dropping as the populace followed Yongten-la’s advice to sleep by day, and in shifts, so that someone was always awake to keep watch.
Now Tsering sat at a makeshift table under the shelter of a makeshift pavilion, eating noodles dressed with ginger and toasted sesame oil so good they made her think somebody’s grandmother must be volunteering in the kitchen. It wasn’t
her
grandmother: most wizards had been driven to it by some personal tragedy, and Tsering hadn’t come to the Citadel because she had any family left to mourn her. But for a moment, in this quiet pocket among the pavilions housing the dead and dying, she felt the warmth of her grandmother’s hearth. She wrapped it around herself, mining the memory for peace and strength. The wizardly disciplines of quiet mind were well enough—but they didn’t always help remind you what you were fighting for.
When she opened her eyes, Ashra was standing across the trestle, holding a blood-spotted cloth to her lips. The dark tone of her skin was faded to ash. Swollen veins crept through the whites of her eyes like clawing rose-canes. As Tsering’s attention settled on her, she wiped her dripping nose on the handkerchief and said, “Hong-la says you are going to be looking for volunteers.”
Tsering pushed the bowl of noodles to the side. “Ashra, no. You’ll die of gangrene without the beer, and it won’t be ready—”
“Until after I am dead.” The Aezin woman drew herself up to her small height. “I die either way. This way, maybe you learn something.”
This way, I killed you,
Tsering thought.
“All right,” she said.
* * *
They dosed the patient with poppy wine to numb the pain, and they bound her to an operating table to help her stay still. Tsering, whose magic had never manifested, could not perform the procedure—but she was there to assist. The surgeon would be Hong-la. There was none better, and it wasn’t the surgery that worried Tsering.
It was the aftermath.
In the blue-and-yellow anteroom to the surgery suite, Tsering fluffed Ashra’s pillows and held the cup for her to drink between shallow, dry coughs. The opiated wine was bitter no matter how much honey and what spices were steeped in it, but Ashra drank it with barely a grimace, teeth gritted against the evident pain of swallowing. After the first few swallows, that seemed to ease—along with her sad, shallow coughing.
She slipped into a drowsy semiconsciousness. Tsering stood back to allow the novices to disrobe her and carry her into the surgical theater.
It was a chamber chiseled from the warm basalt of the Cold Fire, and Tsering’s brow dewed with sweat as she followed the litter bearers in. Hong-la was already there in all of his breadth and height, robed in physician’s crimson. The heat was better for the patients, though hard on the surgeons.
Tsering helped fasten Ashra to the stone table with leather restraints—soft, with the buckles turned beneath where she could not cut herself pulling against them—and then stood back to observe.
Hong-la’s expertise as a surgeon was in no small part due to his speed. The faster an amputation or a neutering could be performed, the faster the bleeding could be ended, leaving less opportunity for catastrophe. As Tsering watched now, he lifted one of his unorthodox surgical implements from the stone basin where they reposed.
The long obsidian blade glinted from chipped facets. It was more a smoky deep brown than the bottomless black its name would suggest, but even from across the room Tsering could see the vanishing sharpness of the point.
Gently, Hong-la pressed Ashra’s breast aside. He measured the small hollows between her ribs with his fingertips and set the point of the blade against her skin. Ashra’s eyes were closed, her breathing quick and shallow. Tsering did not think the sweat that dewed Ashra’s skin was from the warmth of the room.
“Now, my dear,” he said, and pushed down smooth and fast.
She made no outcry, though she tensed against the straps and the long muscles in her legs shivered. The blade slid in as if it found no more resistance in her body than in a ripe fruit. Only a thin line of blood welled around the puncture; Hong-la had chosen his point of entry with skill.
When half the blade was lost within Ashra’s chest, Hong-la placed both hands upon the haft. His eyes closed. Tsering felt the sting of her lack of
otherwise
senses as she rarely would acknowledge, because while she knew Hong-la summoned his concentration and directed the process of fire intrinsic in the volcanic glass, she could not
see
it happening.
A small frustration,
she told herself.
A small cost for all the recompense.
She silenced the voice. Her focus needed to be on Ashra now.
Not even a faint curl of steam rose from the wound on Ashra’s chest. The heat was all internal. But something heaved within her nonetheless, a sharp and sudden outward push that flexed her rib cage as if her heart were trying to snap itself free.
Now Ashra might have screamed, but there wasn’t any air behind it. Her back arched—even the restraints could not hold her against the stone, she flexed so mightily—and the tendons in her throat stood plain as if sculpted there.
Hong-la was already reaching for the second blade. Two novices came forward to hold Ashra in place. Tsering peeled her nails from her palms. If anything, this placement was accomplished more quickly. It was as if his patient’s struggles converted Hong-la into a perfectly calibrated engine. With no wasted motion, he slid the other blade into Ashra’s body and focused his will within her even as she twisted. It wasn’t the surgery hurting her. It was the thrashing of the demonspawn within.
A moment, no longer, and Hong-la slid the blades free again. He laid them carefully in the basin—they were glass, and could chip or shatter—and reached for pine gum and a trimmed section of calf’s bladder that he would use to seal the external wounds, so Ashra’s lungs would not fail.
Tsering breathed out a sigh. This was routine.
Now it only remained to be seen if Ashra could hold out against the infection long enough for them to produce the cure.
When Ashra awoke from the poppy, she was no worse than when she had been placed under. That was a relief; it suggested that the demonspawn, in dying, had done no further damage to her lungs. Tsering guessed they would have half a day, perhaps a day and a half, before the heat from the decomposing spawn would begin to poison Ashra’s body.
In that time, she set out to learn everything she could about the brewing and application of the Aezin beer.
12
Several days passed while Samarkar and Temur waited for the caliph to return the countersigned treaty. Temur and Samarkar both thought it best not to wander about Asitaneh unescorted, but that did not mean they were idle.
Samarkar took on logistics and provisioning, poring over maps with Ato Tesefahun and Brother Hsiung. The best route to Ala-Din was by ship to Asmaracanda—well, the best route to Ala-Din was by ship directly across the White Sea, but no ship’s master would gamble enough to accept the future regard of a would-be Khan and a defrocked princess as payment for carrying them to a coast bereft of major ports and infested with pirates and Rahazeen—and no amount of coin was likely to suffice.
And so by ship to Asmaracanda they would go. They would find some way to enter the holy city—taxes were prohibitive to anyone not there on a pilgrimage, and Hrahima had uncovered intelligence suggesting that now that the city rejoiced under Uthman skies again, foreigners had been lynched in the streets.
“Charming,” said Samarkar, when the Cho-tse related that particular fact.
But Asmaracanda was where they could purchase supplies and mounts for the trip through the Shattered Pillars. And so to Asmaracanda they must.
Temur’s bay mare Bansh would be coming with them—after their attempts to leave her in safety on the trip
to
Asitaneh, Samarkar suspected that even if they abandoned her with Ato Tesefahun, she’d just be waiting for them, flicking her ears impatiently, upon the far shore. So there was the issue of what they would do with the mare while they entered the city—or perhaps they wouldn’t enter the city at all, but merely visit the caravanserai.
Samarkar had just decided that, yes, that was precisely what they would do, when Ato Tesefahun appeared beside the bench upon which she was drawing up lists of supplies. The Aezin wizard was disheveled, out of breath, a dew of sweat across his forehead.
“Grandfather,” she said. “It must be dire news that brings you at a run … with a tiger behind you.”
For Hrahima had just materialized through the door, her tail lashing.
“There’s a skinned corpse in the Convent Marketplace,” Ato Tesefahun said. “It fell from a clear sky, they say.”
“Skinned?” Samarkar felt like an idiot with her jaw hanging open, and her inability to say anything cleverer than a repetition of Tesefahun’s words did not relieve the sensation.
She knew the legends as well as anybody, the stories told to chill one’s blood—pleasurably, or to frighten the gullible into obedience to whatever church you preferred. She knew that at least one history of the Citadel claimed it had been erected to keep watch on the Cold Fire and that the Cold Fire had been erected by no less an architect than the Goddess-Mother-of-the-Universe, over the pit that had been left when she hurled the (undying, unkillable) Carrion King from the broken heavens for his arrogance.
She knew that the Carrion King was said to have been able to raise the dead—in a variety of forms—and to have dressed his own raw body in the skins of his victims after an unspeakable accident with the ancient powers of Erem left him flensed alive.
“You don’t actually think…”
“The Joy-of-Ravens is back?” Ato Tesefahun shrugged. He glanced at Hrahima.
Hrahima steepled her dagger-tipped fingers. “Would it comfort you,” she asked, “if I stated categorically that he was not? Someone drove a nail through the bloodstain, however.”
Samarkar realized she was still twisting her brush between her fingers, and a haze of ink droplets had spattered her paper. She set it on the pen rest and stopped herself just before pushing her inky fingers against her eyelids as if that could relieve the pressure behind them.
“I don’t know my Falzeen folklore that well.”
Tesefahun’s eyes focused in the distance, the look—Samarkar knew it well—of the scholarly lecturer. He said, “Some hold that the djinn are born from the blood of a murder victim. Driving a new nail through the spilled blood is supposed to stop their manifestation. And there’s another tradition, specific to the Joy-of-Ravens, that if you nail the blood to the earth, the Joy-of-Ravens will not be able to walk in that one’s skin.”
“So someone believes he’s back.”
“So it would seem,” said Ato Tesefahun.
“I’d say the corpse was dropped from rukh-back,” said Samarkar. “But on a clear day, you would notice a rukh.”
* * *
They ate, because that was what you did in times of trouble. Samarkar was amused to notice that that was no different from Song to Rasa to the Uthman Caliphate. Everywhere in the world, worry could be soothed by food. As the plates were cleared and tea served, she turned to Hrahima and cleared her throat.
Samarkar did the Cho-tse the honor of not pretending she asked an idle question. “I do not know what your tasks have been as you come and go, Hrahima. And I do know it’s none of my business. But I also know you hear all, and I must ask—is there any news of my brothers?”
The rings in the tiger’s ragged ears jingled. “I have not heard,” she said, whiskers flat. Samarkar thought it was irritation at being questioned at all, but who could tell with a cat. Dismissive and very tigery indeed, the Cho-tse continued. “You will forgive me, that that is not the news I have been seeking.”