Authors: Elizabeth Bear
Hard like bits of bone. And shaped like bits of bone, moreover—the bones of a mouse or sparrow.
Tsering called a novice over to attend to Ashra and change the dressings on her surgical wounds. “Save all her sputum,” she said.
She went to the pump, and there washed her hands and the bits of demon bone three times in lye soap and water. They never came white; they were black and nearly transparent like obsidian. Then she gathered them up in a twist of clean handkerchief and went to look for Hong-la, or for Anil.
Tsering found Anil-la resting after a shift in one of the workrooms where wizards were taking it in turns to restrain the wrath of the mountain. He was slumped against a wall, head on forearms on bent knees. Someone had brought him warmed and honeyed wine. His hands folded around the wooden cup so that it dangled by his shins. He seemed too tired to drink. From the trembling of his hands, even so supported, tiny concentric ripples chased themselves to the walls of the cup and back, seeking a standing pattern.
“That will do you more good on the inside,” Tsering said, crouching beside him. She put a hand on the young man’s forehead and tilted it up, tugged the cup from his fingers, and brought it to his mouth. He covered her hand with his but let her guide him. The scent of nutmeg rose as he drank, leaving Tsering to wonder how long the stocks would last.
She held it there until he finished and pulled her hand away to set the cup aside. He lifted his head and blinked.
“Ashra?” he asked. Every wizard in the Citadel was aware of the experiment.
Silently, she pulled the handkerchief from her pocket. He opened it with hands that shook a little less now and stirred the damp bones with a fingertip, even as Tsering wanted to catch his hand and jerk it back.
He paused, considering, while Tsering held her breath. Then said, “She might have a chance. If the poison stays out of the blood.”
Tsering could tell from the pinch of his forehead that he didn’t believe there was that much luck in the world.
* * *
“Come with me to council,” Qori Buqa had said. “That way you may tell your father that his ally conceals nothing from him.”
That his ally has instructed his war-band on what to speak of before me, you mean.
But Saadet smiled and raised her veil and went—only to find herself the first, un-agendaed item of business as Hulegu took offense to her covered face.
“She sits there,” he said to Qori Buqa, as if she were not in fact sitting there at all, “with no more expression than a serpent! And I must offer counsel in front of her?”
“She is her father’s ambassador,” Gansukh put in. “Shall we not respect the customs of her tribe?”
But Qori Buqa was regarding her with pursed lips. “Saadet,” he said.
She met his gaze—not hard to do, when he stared directly at her with no shame—and saw the command on his face.
Shahruz
—
He would not answer her. She felt his disgust, as she did so often now. Surely he understood that what she did, she did for the Nameless? That she did what he could not?
No. He did not understand. And would not allow himself to.
Saadet steeled herself and lowered her veil. Gansukh set a cup by her hand. She raised it to her lips for something to drink, aware of the unwelcome caress of curious gazes. Gansukh patted her wrist in an avuncular fashion, the tails of his beard snagging on glittering embroidery as he leaned close enough to speak in her ear. She almost snatched her hand back—how dare he offend her sacred modesty so?—but reminded herself that he was a barbarian with no manners and kept her twitching fingers on the arm of her chair.
Saadet knew men thought young women naive, unworldly. Easily swayed. And many of them were.
Whether Gansukh meant her well or not, it would do him no harm if she played to that expectation. So while he explained, she pressed her lips thin and bent them in simulation of a smile.
* * *
News from outside the summer capital had dried up as the usual flow of messengers became a stuttering trickle. The roads, the empire’s pride and prestige—the roads through which flowed the empire’s blood of commerce and communication—were under siege by outlaws, and banditry was the rule of the land. The empire itself was staggering under the weight of plague and the fear engendered by the burning mountain.
Yangchen moved through a nightmare that was nothing like her dreams of royalty. Her house was secure; her child thrived. But outside the palace walls, the world was dying, rotting from the inside. And she knew the truth: it was the chancre, the evil at her own center reflected in the center of the land she ruled.
Were not the lungs the seat of the emotions? Was it not a tightness in the chest that betrayed love or fear? Did they not squeeze in terror, flutter in passion or rage?
Were those not the emotions in which Yangchen-tsa had acted?
She had opened her own body to poison. And because she was empress, and because she was the land, the series of acts that had created her reign had created the weakness in the world’s defenses. She did not know the source—although with the awakening of the Cold Fire, she had a sickening suspicion—but she knew the path by which it had oozed into Tsarepheth.
And yet she was empress; and yet she could not betray that knowledge. She could not even betray the haze of horror and self-repugnance in which she moved. She must seem bright—no, more than seem. She must be bright, focused, a bastion of authority, resourcefulness, and calm. Her people needed her. All Rasa needed her. She must be seen to be brave, indomitable. She must by her very spirit and presence inspire courage in the hearts of beggars and soldiers alike. She herself was a display intended to encourage morale, a sort of brave banner snapping in the wind, never permitted to sag for an instant.
An empress had no privacy. An empress was never alone. Her ladies were with her always, her husband often, her courtiers and sycophants interminably. And if Yangchen wept at night under her fine linens, soft to the hand as a baby’s skin … she did so silently.
While she, brisk and efficient, was fully engaged in arranging logistics that would be necessary should her husband ever accede to the evacuation, the pattering feet of a page heralded the news that Hong-la, the elaborately tall, requested an audience.
At last,
she thought, with a kind of sickening relief.
But all she said was, “I shall meet with him in the Elephant Room.”
* * *
As before, the empress met Hong-la from behind an ancient screen of time-browned ivory. This time, however, she wore mourning white, and her hands were bound with thin ribbons woven in a crisscross pattern to remind her of the dead. She kept them folded before her sash. Hong-la felt a flash of rage at the peculiar peace in her expression, even as the trained political animal that lived in his head recognized the mask any statesman—or stateswoman, for that matter—wore to disguise the strong and vulnerable emotions.
He prostrated himself. Her voice gave him permission to rise. He kept his head lowered and stayed on his knees, a posture of submission still, if not so abject as the belly crawling proper respect demanded. At least the Rasan forms were less elaborate than those of Song and did not vary from principality to principality.
The advantages of a strong central government,
he thought sardonically, and bit his lip against what could easily have become a hysterical giggle.
He said, “Your serene and exalted majestrix, it pains me to approach you on this topic, but as you know from observing my conversations with your royal spouse, my research suggests that there is some imperial…”—
don’t say negligence—
“… the possibility that some slight oversight of a member of the imperial household may have provided the chink in our protections that has allowed the demons to enter Rasa and Tsarepheth and prey so terribly on our people. And now the Cold Fire threatens this city…”
“My husband fears that if we return to Rasa, we will bring the demons with us.” She angled her head back. Although her porcelain mask did not change, Hong-la recognized the gesture of a person fighting back tears. “He fears also to be without the shelter of this fortress. There have been no demons within the walls of the Black Palace yet. Should we leave, who is to say what might pursue us?”
“Should you stay, no palace wall will restrain the wrath of the Cold Fire, should it truly awaken.”
She had no answer, and she had no expression, though her eyes glistened.
“The infected will stay here,” said Hong-la. “And the wizards with them.”
“What you said to my husband … it spoke to my heart,” she said softly. “If there were aught in my power—”
She shook her head.
“You are the empress. What is not in your power? Speak to Songtsan-tsa. Plead with him, on behalf of your people, majestrix.”
“I
have
pled!”
There was a pause. Then, “Tell me how I may help the afflicted,” she said.
“Your husband forbids it.”
“So he does,” she replied. “Tell me anyway.”
* * *
After leaving Anil-la, Tsering climbed the battlements. No one seemed to know where Hong-la had gone, and though she knew it was selfish, she could not—at least not yet—face the hospital again. Clouds wrapped the heights, catching and reflecting and amplifying the light of the torches and witch-globes of the Citadel into a pervasive rose-colored glow. They stank of sulfur. Through them the fat flakes of ash fell not quite soundlessly, rasping like feathers brushing feathers when they touched one another, or Tsering’s cheek, or the white battlements. Now and then, a crack of vivid violet-orange lightning snaked through the smoke belching up from the Cold Fire. She could not see the snaking fork-paths through fog and smoke, but each flash lit the whole world to blind intensity, and each was followed a few heartbeats later by a heart-grinding rumble.
The old stones of the Citadel were worn smooth underfoot, invisible through the fog. Tsering’s toes groped over them, careful of their slickness and the occasional lips where they had been laid unevenly. She could not have said what she was doing—looking for Hong-la? Looking for peace?
Neither were to be found here. But there was an eerie dream beauty, alien and strange, in the way the white battlements and the lights loomed from and vanished into the strawberry fog, and there was a certain otherworldly sense to the harsh and sudden shatters of brilliance and noise, as if Tsering had walked from the hard familiar realities of everyday life into a ghost realm unlike any afterlife she’d been raised to anticipate.
Her footsteps stayed hard and plain, boot soles echoing over stone. Yongten-la wouldn’t leave the battlements undefended in such a time, and she passed a sentry who had turned at the sound; a full wizard she knew a little, the black skirts of his six-petal coat settling from his sudden movement. He stood well away from the lights, but the radiance trapped by the mist hazily illuminated him. She nodded; he returned it. Neither spoke.
Tsering imagined him watching after her, listening to her footfalls dying. The mist closed between them, so she couldn’t turn to see if she was right.
Finally, the dark wall of the Cold Fire, a sheer basalt escarpment that plunged from vanishingly far above, loomed before her. Her path was at an end, and the dying awaited her. Tsering stood for a moment, trying to breathe serenity in, or at least the strength to continue. For that moment, she closed her eyes.
When she opened them, it was not merely the mountain looming over.
Where the mist left off and the beast began, she could not have told. A long neck, heavy with swelling breath; a horned and tendriled head something like a catfish’s and something like a horse’s, as large as the body of that horse; the whole fog-silver and swirling pearlescent beneath the scales, as if someone had trapped a cloud in a decanter of etched crystal. The nostrils curved like shells and were the faintest blush of shell pink within. The eyes that ran down each side of the beast along its midline would have seemed white and blind, had not moonstone coruscations of lightning blue passed over them with every turn and tip of the long, fanged face.
Tsering froze where she stood. Every nerve, every muscle ached with her body’s refusal to move. Mouse before an eagle’s stare; rabbit before a wolf. She could not have squeaked, twitched, if her life depended on it.
Maybe it does.
The mist-dragon’s slick, skimmed-milk tongue forked out and brushed her face.
“Tsering-la,” it said. “Wizard, woman. You have seen in the world a task; you have taken it up with a will. But it is good you take this time to pause. A dragon defends her territory, but recall: she looks to her own life and nest as well.”
“I—” Tsering stammered. “That is to say, this humble one is honored by the speech of your magnificence.”
The mist-dragon angled its skull like a raven eyeing a bug, pinning her on the gaze of its forwardmost pair of eyes. “Humility ill becomes a warrior, Tsering-la. Where is the dragon in you?”
She tried to find the flowery speech of stories again, but it deserted her under the great cool pressure of the dragon’s attention. She spread her hands in resignation.
“I am weary,” she said.
“That is when you need the dragon most. And remember, Tsering-la, the greatest dragon of all is the Mother Dragon. She who has guarded Tsarepheth for all time and freely given her sacred waters to sustain. Is she not just yonder? Do you not think if the Cold Fire awakes, so will she?”
Tsering turned to look over her shoulder, following the dragon’s gaze—though tearing her eyes from it was the hardest thing she had ever done. Harder than losing her family; harder than lying down under the knife.
She could not see the Island-in-the-Mists, but she knew it was there—the brooding presence of the mountain lost behind the veils of cloud that gave it its name. “What you say is true.”
“Of course it is,” the dragon snorted. “I am a dragon and I know it. Mind, little wizard, that you know your dragon, too.”
She could not think of a retort, or even an answer. And while she was trying …