The Origin of Storms--The Lotus Kingdoms, Book Three, page 5
Her people were colluding against her. Or colluding in her favor. But colluding nonetheless. And there was nothing any ruler could do to prevent that.
She drank the tea and ate the biscuits. She had expected it to be a chore, the sort of thing one did because one had to. Tea had of late been cloying, and the traditional nibbles served with it had been so much sand and grit in her mouth. This tea tasted fresh and sweet, however, and the milk did not turn her stomach. The biscuits had a flavor of herbs and honey. She ate them all.
She paused with half of the last cracker still held in her fingers, her stomach rumbling with renewed appetite. “What did you put in these?”
Hnarisha smirked. “It’s not what’s in the crackers, Rajni. It’s what’s not poisoning you.”
She wrinkled her nose and considered throwing the cracker at him. Instead, she finished it.
* * *
Feeling considerably stronger, Mrithuri reached toward the awareness of the bearded vulture she had sent with the Gage. She stretched to reach the great bird, so far away. So distant, and not linked to her by a fresh taste of her blood. She felt herself weaker without the assistance of the venom, the bridge of her attention more frail. But there—it tickled the edge of her senses, elusive as a remembered scent …
Her fingertips stretched into the reaching feathers, grasping and being lifted by the wind. Her eyes saw far and in the most tremendous detail. Stitches on clothing; cowlicks in the pattern of hair. Lichen on stone. The flash of a leaf as a mouse brushed past it.
All from the height of mountains where she soared.
What she saw right now was the wooden palisade and hilltop fastness of Chandranath, and the starlight glittering off the brazen dome of the Gage’s head. She saw a tall, lean, dark-complected figure walking beside him, hair pale as the water of the Mother River. The old woman leaned on a staff. With the vulture’s vision, Mrithuri could see that her knuckles were knotty with age, the skin on her hands slack between the bones.
They were walking across the barren hilltop beside the keep, toward the open postern. It was far, so far. The wind brought her a scent of carrion, too fresh to be of interest to the lammergeyer. Mrithuri could feel herself falling out of the bird’s head.
Too soon, too soon. She needed its memories. She needed to stay with it, to recall. To see what it had already seen. Who was this old woman? Why had the Gage come to Chandranath? What possessed him to wander so far from where he should be, and why was he not coming back to her? Why was he not bringing her what she needed?
Anger unspooled within her, a sharp heat in her chest, a discomfort rising the length of her throat. A kind of pressure that wanted to push out furious words, curses and imprecations. She tried to flow with it, to ride it as if it were the Mother River. She tried to soothe her racing heart—
She tumbled out of the sky, out of the consciousness of the great vulture. She fell off the back of its wings, out of the grasp of its mind, and snapped with bruising force back into her own hungry, shivery shell with its scrawny arms and thin ribcage.
She was cold without the warmth of feathers. She was always cold.
She must have been shivering for real, because when the room stopped spinning enough for her to open her eyes, Hnarisha was draping a cashmere shawl over her arms and shoulders. Mrithuri drew it to her, plucking at the fringe with fingers that did not quite want to pinch and grip the way they ought to. He gave her tea—still hot—and steadied her while she drank.
He should not have been touching her without expressly requesting her permission. But since his hand was the only thing that kept her cup from rattling against her teeth and spilling its contents down her front, she felt not affront but gratitude.
Ata Akhimah, by the door, did not move from her position. Her expression did not change. She most certainly did not say I told you so.
She waited until Mrithuri had gotten some tea inside her and stopped feeling cold at the bone. Then, quietly, she asked, “What did you see?”
Mrithuri glanced around the room to confirm that there was no one present except Hnarisha and the Wizard. Reassured, she shared her discoveries.
“There are a lot of things that might have taken the Gage to Chandranath,” Hnarisha said, after a few moments.
Ata Akhimah rubbed the bridge of her nose where her reading glasses had left a dent. “It’s not exactly along the way!”
“He’d better not have betrayed us,” Mrithuri said. It was not a threat. She spoke in exhaustion, as one who had been betrayed recently a few times too often. For their sake, he had better not. “Get me Nizhvashiti, will you? And also get me the Dead Man. I hope he can explain.”
She was still keeping the court waiting.
Well, they would wait.
* * *
Mrithuri had consumed most of a plate of chickpea-flour wraps and the rest of the pot of tea before Ata Akhimah returned with the Godmade and the Dead Man. The Wizard closed the door behind them.
“Come sit.” Mrithuri gestured with her teacup to the cushions spread about near her chair. She did not have the energy—emotional or physical—to look up at them.
Mother, when had she become such an old woman that she needed to sit in a chair?
You’ve been ill, she reminded herself. It won’t be too long before you get stronger.
She could almost hear Hnarisha lecturing her that the harder she pushed herself, the longer the healing would take. He didn’t even have to look at her sidelong for her to imagine him reminding her that she, as rajni, had a duty to her people to care for herself.
She turned to the Dead Man. Contemplated him and decided to see if she could shock him. Trust between lovers was one thing … but she had trusted Chaeri, too. Perhaps her standards of who was trustworthy were not to be relied upon.
Mrithuri snapped, “What in all six thousand Rasan hells is your partner doing in Himadra’s house?”
The Dead Man rocked forward from the waist. He did not rise; it was a movement born of shock, Mrithuri judged.
He said, “He’s where?”
“I reached the familiar I sent with him. Both are well, or seem to be. Another person has joined them. An old woman. And they are all in Chandranath.”
“He hasn’t had time to get to Chandranath.”
“Not unless he went there straightaway,” said Ata Akhimah.
“No,” creaked Nizhvashiti. The Godmade’s voice sounded as if it worked by means of a stiff old bellows that could not move much air. “He went to Ansh-Sahal and through it. Of that I am certain. I was there, and I told you what we found there—the tower of bodies, the fallen temple. He could perhaps have reached Chandranath by now if he turned west immediately after we parted—”
Mrithuri sighed. “No, my familiar followed him as far as that poisoned desert. Nearly to the Singing Towers. So I suppose he must have gone there. I’m just—”
“We are all overwrought,” said Hnarisha.
“So how on God’s earth did he get to Chandranath?” the Dead Man asked. In a tone of wondering aloud, not as if he expected someone to tell him.
Mrithuri said, “Nizhvashiti, can you go and find out?”
The Godmade frowned and shook its head, a constrained and incremental gesture. “I wish the projection were something I could manage to control. But it … happens as it will. I am a vessel, Your Abundance. An ansha, not an architect.”
Mrithuri said, “All the things we leave to the will of the gods. The gods could be a little clearer.” She looked at the Dead Man. At Serhan, her Serhan. And saw him regarding her, clear-eyed from within the folds of his veil. “What do we do?”
“The vulture’s memories…?”
“I could not hold on long enough to reach them.” The admission tasted bitter. “I can try again—”
“When you are more rested,” Hnarisha interrupted.
“No one in this palace respects a rajni!”
“‘An empress,’ I think you mean,” said Ata Akhimah.
Against her will, Mrithuri laughed. It wasn’t much of a laugh, but it was something. “All right,” she said. “What do we do?”
“What we were going to do,” said Ata Akhimah. “Speak with the commanders. Sell jewels, mint coins. Levy taxes. Pay the troops.”
Mrithuri finished for her. “March on Sarathai-lae.”
“That is so.”
She closed her eyes. “I will try again to reach my familiar. Uh, uh—not immediately. I will rest first.”
“Your Abundance—” Ata Akhimah protested.
“I need to know,” Mrithuri said. “I need to know what the Gage knows, and I need to know it before I brave the damned Dharasaaba. It’s the only chance I have of getting them to back us. Let the court know they are dismissed, and we will reconvene this morning. Tell them … Oh, I don’t care what you tell them. Tell them I am still prostrated by grief, if you deem it politic. Or that an important message has come to me from afar, and my duties as the priestess of the Mother demand I address it.”
The room was silent for a moment. Her nobles would not be pleased at the delay. But if she was an empress, she had better act like it if she expected her nobles to respect her.
Nizhvashiti spoke.
“The empress is correct,” it said.
4
She’s getting better, the Dead Man told himself, as he went in search of Pranaj. She will recover.
And she would move on with her life, as was only proper. She was a queen after all—an empress now—and he was a mercenary.
It had all seemed much simpler when death or bondage was inevitable. When there is no future to speak of, there’s little point in planning for it. Little point in worrying about it.
Not for the first time, he was glad of his veil. Because, disciplined as he was, old soldier though he be—he was not old enough or disciplined enough to keep his emotions from twisting his expression uncomfortably. And he would not have cared to reveal his inner workings so plainly to anyone who might glance his way.
It was easier to believe in fate and destiny than to accept responsibility for one’s own actions and choices. It was so much more pleasant to leave responsibility in the hands of God. To read the book of one’s life as the words She had written. As if one’s destiny were fiat, passed down without consultation, and one’s duty were only to endure it.
It was not very adult, however, to blame God for the consequences of one’s own choices. Certainly, much was outside one’s control—from the circumstances into which birth or history rendered one, to the decisions others made that affected the course of one’s life, to the wild vagaries of fate that had nothing to do with the will of any man. But sometimes one’s own acts brought one to a place, and in that place one must for good or ill then stand.
The confluence of the two, like the confluence of rivers—that might be destiny.
Musing, the Dead Man barely noticed the clicks of his own bootheels as he strode along the corridors. The echoes broke strangely through the filigree panels that lined the corridors. Those panels gave into the parallel but separate palace inhabited by cloistered nuns, and the sounds that came back seemed layered over one another, as if they had bounced back from farther away than should have been possible. The cloister seemed empty: he did not glimpse any white robes or hear any plainsong.
It was just as well. He found himself cherishing the rare moment of solitude and quiet. Of uninterrupted thought. Which would continue until he found Pranaj.
Mrithuri’s general—summoned from without the walls—was in the war room, frowning over sand tables now stripped of their model armies and with their model terrain raked level. Tall windows composed one long wall of the room. Along the opposite wall were ranged shallow shelves, each tier a few fingerbreadths deep, and a few more fingerbreadths tall.
The shelves were full of tiny models of men, equipment, animals. Pranaj, turning to face the Dead Man as he entered, held a miniature elephant in his hand.
Ivory. O irony.
Pranaj’s shoulders relaxed when he saw whom the door framed. With a sigh he set the elephant down. Not in the empty space reserved for shelving her, but on the smooth brown sand.
The room seemed empty and echoing with just the two of them inside.
Pranaj met the Dead Man’s eyes. “How is she?”
“Better,” the Dead Man said. “Weak.”
Pranaj nodded. “She is tougher than most, to have survived.”
Those were true words, and not only in relation to the addiction, and the invasion, and the venom of the Eremite snakes. “Did you think she wouldn’t?”
The Dead Man phrased it as a friendly question, not a challenge. Pranaj had proved a thoughtful ally.
“I thought”—Pranaj lowered his voice—“that it was unlikely Anuraja would survive the wedding day. And that it was unlikely his men would take kindly to his new wife assassinating him. Now—”
He shrugged.
“Now,” said the Dead Man, “we have an advantage. Anuraja, it seems, preferred to keep the majority of his army taking orders directly from him. Or at least conveying those orders through a very few lieutenants and messengers, but he did not give them much latitude to make decisions. There isn’t much chain of command. He didn’t delegate much authority.”
“That’s a damn poor means of maintaining discipline … not that I judge.” The purse of Pranaj’s lips said he judged indeed.
“You’re not wrong. But it also means that now that Anuraja and Ravani are both gone, there’s not much authority in the army to give them cohesion and direction.”
“They’ll start pillaging, then.”
The Dead Man folded his arms. “Not if we can give them that cohesion.”
Pranaj frowned. He rubbed his nose with a knuckle. “It will take someone with some charisma to accomplish that.”
“We might have a few of those.”
Pranaj was not ready to commit to the plan. But the Dead Man could see that he was thinking. These people went around unveiled with all their emotions written on their faces. And it was still half-impossible to figure out which way they were going to jump.
Pranaj grunted, finally, decision still seemingly unmade. “Can we go and see her now?”
* * *
The walk back to the royal chambers was silent and might have remained uneventful. Except that in passing one of the side corridors, both men heard voices.
No one was visible down the hall, but of course there were alcoves and doorways throughout the palace. It was a sprawling, spiraling building with enough wings and connecting doors to seem a maze even without considering the strange, liminal spaces of the cloisters.
They exchanged a glance with one another. It was clear to both their ears: a woman and a man, speaking too low for their words to be made out. Ten nights before, and neither the Dead Man nor Pranaj would have thought much of it. Just a flirtation and nothing to concern serious men.
Ten nights before, despite suspicions, the rajni’s handmaiden had not yet been revealed as a spy.
The Dead Man gripped the hilt of his sword. Pranaj, who was technically there under flag of truce, was not carrying one. But he nodded, and led the Dead Man down the corridor, one hand extended to rip aside a curtain or shove back a door.
Nothing so dramatic was required. As they came closer, echoes fell away, and the voices were rendered recognizable. Golbahar, the woman. And the man … Ritu the acrobat’s son. Amruth, that was his name.
They were standing perhaps a half arm’s length apart but leaning toward each other with congenial flirtation. They did not jump apart when Pranaj and the Dead Man rounded the corner, but they did jump with surprise.
The Dead Man laughed. He had not noticed that he was sneaking. Apparently, he could do so even with bootheels on stone.
Golbahar stared at them and then sighed so hard, she blew her veil away from her face. “By God’s sand-shaker, you men! Did you think to find assassins in every corner?”
Amruth dissolved into nervous giggles. He was light-complected, and the Dead Man watched that complexion flush scarlet like the pale sky before sunrise.
“I am sorry, my lady,” the Dead Man said, as gallantly as he could manage, while behind him Pranaj retreated into a very uncomfortable-sounding coughing fit. “But I do, rather.”
The glare held out for a moment before she, too, succumbed to a giggle. “I suppose that’s fair.” She glanced over at her young man and winked at him encouragingly. “Run along. Everything will be fine.”
“Sorry,” he mumbled, and edged past the Dead Man. He strode down the hall, failing to look unhasty, trailing his dignity like tattered skirts. Golbahar watched him go, and the Dead Man watched Golbahar. Pranaj had stopped coughing.
“A bit of a naif for you, isn’t he?” the Dead Man asked, casually.
Golbahar said, “He’ll season, and he is smart enough and humble enough to listen and learn. Besides, in the absence of conquering armies, I do have to come up with something to tell my father about why I’m no longer suited for the dynastic liaison in Song he had in mind for me. A hasty marriage under threat of war seems plausible.”
“The war is over,” said Pranaj. “Or at the very least, it’s between acts.”
Golbahar flipped one hand prettily in the air. “Details.”
She fished in her sleeve and brought out a folded but unsealed letter, which she offered to the Dead Man. “Here, you should be able to read this. Does it pass the censors?”
It was addressed to the Lady Golbahar’s father, the Lord Omer. It was written in the Uthman language; the script of his mother tongue gave the Dead Man a pang under his heart. Between the flowery salutations and protestations of filial devotion and love (all formulaic) lay only a brief paragraph.
The meat of it, written in Golbahar’s own trained hand, read: It is my regret to inform you, dearest parents, that I have been taken in a siege in Sarathai-tia, and that as a result I am not suited for the marriage you had in mind for me. A kind man here has consented to marry me, and I am assured of a place as a handmaiden to the Rajni. Her Abundance looks kindly on me, and my fallen state will not impede my well-being.
