Across the Long Sea (21 page)

Mal curled his fingers into his palms. The Rani took his silence as acquiescence, and turned away. Mal limped after. She led him away from the narrow entrance and into the wardrobe itself. Mal followed, twisting to avoid the broom and bucket. He thought she would reveal a hidden door at the back of the cupboard. Instead the Rani pulled the wardrobe doors shut, twisting a loop of rope to hold them in place. Mal conjured a mage-­light to banish the darkness. The Rani eyed the glowing sphere without expression, then picked up the broom and knocked the wooden handle firmly against the cupboard ceiling.

An answering thump sounded from above. The wardrobe lurched. Mal flung out one hand to steady himself, narrowly missing the Rani, and only then realized that his vocent's ring had gone dark. He heard a distinctive squeak and squeal through the wood, and then the wooden cupboard began to rise up along black glass walls, leaving latched doors behind. A lift, Mal realized, not unlike Selkirk's smaller mechanical one.

“Stand away from the edge,” the Rani warned. “The shaft is cut very precisely, but it's easier on the engines if we stay to the middle.”

“The engines.” Mal scowled at his companion, thinking of the gray-­faced men and women chained to the gut of Baldebert's ship. “Slaves, you mean.” He sent his light drifting closer to the ceiling. “How does it work?”

“A system of weights and pulleys and
willing
prisoners.” She avoided his scowl, staring instead at the mage-­light. “Be still, necromancer. It's a long way up.”

He quenched the mage-­light and closed his eyes and sent his magic questing away from the lift and through the golden tower. The fingers of his sorcery flexed cautiously. The madness of shipboard was gone, but the taste of life lingered still, of Baldebert's essence sweet and light as honey, and Liam like boiled sugar, and the sharper, dusty corpse-­spirits unspooled to bolster his power. He could feel the dead here, thronging the golden edifice, walking the mountain, legions of forgotten ghosts tethered to
B
ūṛ
h
ē
Adam
Ä«
.

Mal pulled the
basarati
snug about his shoulders for warmth, even as he wondered if the Rani would taste as honey-­sweet as her brother, whether the tiny life she carried would taste of anything at all.

The lift jerked. Mal opened his eyes. A narrow crack of light fell across the back of the cupboard and over his sandaled feet; a second set of wooden doors, secured with a second loop of rope, but not quite flush. Golden sunlight fell through the divide. Mal blinked at tiny motes of dust or soil set to glittering and dancing in the air. The Rani untwisted the rope latch, and used both palms to push the wooden doors outward and open.

“Khorit's Eye,” she said, stepping out into a dazzle of gold. Mal didn't miss the lilt of dark amusement on her tongue. “Once called
Úântikç Bindu
, the ‘Point of Peace,' until my uncle took it as his own.”

There was a wind, but not the hot spring gust Mal was used to. This wind plucked at his cape with icy fingers, whipped around the tip of the golden tower with a sound like laughter, and shook broadleafed trees where they grew in giant black pots. The wind snuck under Mal's matted hair and lifted it from his neck with a cold kiss and the promise of flying.

“Steady.” The Rani held out one hand, enameled nails flashing in the sunlight. “So high up, sometimes there is vertigo.”

“Nay.” Mal remembered vertigo from
The Cutlass Wind.
He craned his neck much as Liam had earlier. “We're at the top of the world. Your ancestors had great sorcery indeed to build so high.”

The Rani was eloquent in her silence.

A pennant flapped overhead, yellow crescent on green, and now that Mal stood near, as large as a man. The narrow balcony circled the tower's apex, a crow's nest in blue sky. Instead of rigging, a golden wall as high as Mal's shoulder kept a man from falling into thin air. Tajit stood against the closest curve, directly across from the lift's open doors, and his ugly face was expectant.

He crooked a finger. Curiosity sent Mal to the man's side. He stood at the wall and blinked against the wind and looked out onto Roue. From so high the ground below appeared as nothing so much as a patchwork quilt, green and yellow and shades of brown, cut into near-­perfect rectangles by the blue of irrigation trenches. Mal knew from his journey in the oxen cart that Roue was far from flat, but standing at the top of the world he could barely see the swell of the land, and the forests were only a strip of deeper green against the
oryza
fields, and Old Man Mountain a knife pinning Roue flat.

“Look south,” Tajit suggested. “There is the sea.”

It was a haze of white fog bordering green. Mal imagined he could smell the salt.

“Beautiful,” Mal admitted. “My own land is not so verdant, nor so rich.”

The wind ruffled the Rani's dark hair, tangling strands in the sharp edges of her crown. She brushed them away, impatient. “Tajit.”

Tajit pushed himself off the wall. “This way,” he said, and disappeared around the tower's narrow circumference, ducking once to avoid the flapping pennant. Mal followed more slowly, the Rani's stare a weight between his shoulders.

“There,” Tajit pointed southeast. “The tarnish in the shine.”

A spreading patch of black, fallow fields, like spilled ink on the green parchment. Mal squinted, put his hands on the wall, leaned forward. Not barren fields, he saw, but a great mass of men, an army in the fields. He could just make out the flicker of their fires, and the glint of sunlight on metal. Carrion birds circled overhead, black-­winged specks that made Mal think of Jacob.

“The Lord of the Poppies,” Mal guessed. “Come to retake his mountain?”

“It was never his to claim,” the Rani said. She folded her hands atop the golden wall, gazed down at the army. “Roue belonged always to my mother, and Khorit Dard content to stand in the shadows at her side. Until he wasn't, and he put the oil of the purging nut in her tea and left her to die in the baths.”

“Purging nut.” Mal frowned at the distant army. “
Curcas
? Brown seed, and a messy death?”

Tajit snorted. “We use it to poison the
oryza
rats.”

“He's gathered an impressive following.” Wind snuck beneath Mal's
barasati.
His wrists stung. He rubbed the pain away. “All of Roue must lie beneath his banner.”

“Not Roue,” the Rani said. “We are a peaceful ­people. Farmers. Craftsmen. Those are my father's folk, yellow-­eyed men from the eastern desert. They've traveled for a season over the sands to wear his colors. He's promised them great wealth when he retakes the towers.”

“So much gold would drive even a modest soldier to desperate measures,” said Mal.

Tajit laughed. “Gold.” His damaged face worked in amusement. “Gold is nothing. You've heard of our purging nut, necromancer, our rat poison. Do you also know the flesh of the poppy, the
opion
?”

“It's my fields he wants,” the Rani explained. “The fertile land and the knowledge of my ­people.” She turned at last away from the distant army. “My mother ordered his dangerous flowers ripped from the earth, the fields flooded. So he killed her.”

Tajit moved to stand at the Rani's side, chest puffed with pride.

“Khorit Dard didn't count on the wrath of his children,” the man said. “But fifteen summers old, Isa took her mother's spear and plunged it through Khorit's breast plate, even as young Baldebert took him in the side with his practice sword.”

The Rani set a hand on Tajit's shoulder. “I missed. The Heart deflected my blow, broke Mother's spear. But my brother's toy sword took Khorit through the shoulder, and my mother's serving women dragged him through the bailey, rolled him off the mountain. Two winters later, he returned with a mongrel army five times the size of our own. He tried to take the mountain again and failed. He's been camped in our eastern fields ever since, making trouble for the villagers, ruining the
oryza
where he can, raiding farmsteads, sending furtive packs of his yellow-­eyed sell-­swords again and again at the mountain.”

“More fool he.” Tajit shook his head.

Mal studied the Rani, noted the few strands of silver in her dark hair, remembered the babe in her womb.

“How long have you been waging war? Three summers? Five?”

“Ten,” the Rani touched fingers to her crown. “Father and I, we've been facing each other across mother's flooded fields for a very long time.”

T
HEY
TOOK
M
AL
back down the lift, and across the black glass foyer. Men and women lingering between potted trees or rushing about on private business watched Mal with interest, a few with palpable disapproval. Mal didn't miss Tajit's sword loosened in its sheath, or the Rani's defiant stride.

A decade at war meant peace was a distant memory. Mal wondered if it had been forgotten.

A second, much larger lift waited at the far side of the foyer. Mal stepped in without encouragement; he wanted nothing more than food and time to think. Two dangerous-­looking soldiers followed Tajit and the Rani into the lift, and pulled the doors shut. Mal braced himself for ascent, but instead the lift dropped, falling steadily. Mal could feel the bones of the mountain pressing close. He suppressed a shudder, disliking the image.

The lift shuddered and stopped. Neither the Rani nor her men evidenced any alarm. A moment passed, and then the lift dropped again, more slowly. The air in the cupboard became noticeably cooler. Mal shivered convulsively, chilled first from the tower heights, and now in the depths of the earth. He swallowed a curse, and chafed again at his wrists in search of distraction.

Their descent slowed and then stopped. Tajit hauled a new pair of doors open. Baldebert and Liam waited on the other side of the threshold. Baldebert held a torch. Liam chewed an apple core, at ease and dressed in a clean clothes and new boots.

“They've made us a room in the dungeons, my lord.” Liam explained. “It's not so bad. Hot food and warm bedding, and Admiral Baldebert says tomorrow we can kill the Flower Lord and then he'll ship us home again.”

Mal didn't miss Tajit's subtle step between Liam and the Rani, or the wry twist of Baldebert's mouth.

“Mayhap my lord could be convinced to wait a few weeks, until the weather clears,” Baldebert said, his attention on Mal's freed wrists. “Sister?”

“Brother,” the Rani replied. She bowed once in Mal's direction. “I'll leave you and my admiral to your hot meal and gossip. Rest easy; you're well protected in the mountain. Tomorrow we'll speak again.”

The soldiers edged Mal out of the lift and into the mountain. He was too cold and weary to put up a fuss, too distracted to enjoy their start of surprise when he sent mage-­light spinning ahead down the hall, snuffing Baldebert's torch as it passed.

Baldebert grimaced good-­naturedly.

“Hubris,” he said. “Come and eat. Your page has laid out a lovely supper.”

“In the dungeons,” Mal said. The cells on either side of the passage were long empty, stone floors covered with a fine layer of undisturbed dust.

“What prisoners we take are causalties of war,” Baldebert said. “And prefer indentured life to entombment. Still and all, we've no guarantee my father hasn't managed to place a spy or three about the towers. You're safest down here for the nonce.”

The room was wide and clean and well appointed. Someone had laid a rug and hung tapestries on the wall for warmth. There were two stools and a table set with fruit and wine, and cheese, and bread, and a pitcher of clear water. Two thick bedrolls and an assortment of cushions, and fresh tunic and trows and a warm silk robe for Mal.

A dead man stood in the far corner, clad only in a few rags, near bony as a skeleton. The ghost paid no attention to the living, his burning stare kept entirely for the supper set out on the table.

Baldebert closed the cell door behind Mal and Liam, then settled himself on a low bench in the hall.

“For your safety,” he said, cheerful. “Dress, eat. Then we'll talk. I'm sure you've plenty of questions. I've a few myself.”

“Do you?” Mal shed his
basarati
and took the tunic Liam held out in offering.

“Oh, aye,” Baldebert replied. “How are you feeling? Without the ivories?” He tucked his feet up off the stone floor and under his thighs. Washed and dressed in fresh clothes, his curls clean about his face, the man looked much younger than Mal had first assumed. “More or less likely to boil my bones, or turn me to salt.”

“That was the seawater.” Mal stripped quickly, then pulled the clean tunic over his head. It was cut of good silk, and warmed against his skin. The trousers were a heavier fabric, not as warm, but comfortable. He washed his face with water from the pitcher, using the abandoned
basarati
as a rag, then chose a wedge of cheese from the table and took it with him to the cell door. He considered Baldebert through the bars.

“Your sister is with child,” he said. “Is it the heir?”

“Tajit's doing,” Baldebert shrugged. “Their first. Isa has heirs aplenty, and the mountain's blessings be upon them.”

“Not you, then.”

The other man appeared honestly surprised. “I'm not royal blood. Desert blood, yes?” He widened his yellow eyes as if to make the point. “And farm stock. Khorit Dard's only son, a blessing or a curse, and prince in name only.”

“Khorit's son.” The cheese was lumpy and not well cured. Mal devoured it in four bites. “I'm told you tried to kill him with a nursery sword.”

Liam paused in rucking about the bedding. “With a wooden blade?” he asked. “That's daring.”