The Broken Kingdoms (22 page)

“Some of my what?”

“He’s a scrivener, Lady Oree, and you have magical abilities no one has ever seen. I imagine he wants to study you in depth.”

I clenched my fists, furious. “And if I don’t want to give a sample?”

“Lady Oree, you know full well the answer to that question.” There was no patience left in Hado now. I considered resisting, anyway, to see whether he and Erad were prepared to use physical force. That was stupid, though, because there were two of them and one of me, and there could easily be more of them if they just opened the door and called for help.

“Fine,” I said, and sat down.

After a moment—and probably a last warning look from Hado—Erad came over and took my left hand, turning it over. “Hold the bowl,” she said to Hado, and a moment later I gasped as something stabbed me in the wrist.

“Demons!” I cried, trying to jerk away. But Erad’s grip was firm, as if she’d been expecting my reaction.

Hado gripped my other shoulder. “This won’t take long,” he said, “but if you struggle, it will take longer.” I stopped fighting only because of that.

“What in the gods’ names are you doing?” I demanded, yelping as Erad did something else, and it felt like my wrist was stabbed again. I could hear liquid—my blood—splattering into some sort of container. She had jabbed something into me, opening the wound further to keep the blood flowing. It hurt like the infinite hells.

“Lord Dateh requested about two hundred drams,” muttered Erad. A moment passed, and then she sighed in satisfaction. “That should be enough.”

Hado let go of me and moved away, and Erad took the painful thing out of my arm. She bandaged my wrist with only marginally more gentleness. I snatched my arm away from her as soon as her grip lessened. She uttered a contemptuous snort but let me go.

“We’ll have someone bring you dinner shortly,” Hado said as they both went to the door. “Be sure to eat; it will prevent weakness. Rest well tonight, Lady Oree.” Then they closed the door behind them.

I sat where they’d left me, cradling my aching arm. The bleeding hadn’t quite stopped; a stray droplet had seeped through the bandage and begun to thread its way down my forearm. I followed the sensation of its passage, my thoughts meandering in a similar way. When the droplet fell off my arm to the floor, I imagined its splatter. Its warmth, cooling. Its smell.

Its color.

There was a way out of the House of the Risen Sun, I understood now. It would be dangerous. Possibly deadly. But was it any safer for me to stay and find out whatever they planned to do with me?

I lay down, my arm tucked against my chest. I was tired—too tired to make the attempt right then. It would take too much of my strength. In the morning, though, the Lights would be busy with their rituals and chores. There would be time before they came for me.

My thoughts as dark as blood, I slept.

SO, THERE WAS A GIRL.

What I’ve guessed, and what the history books imply, is that she was unlucky enough to have been sired by a cruel man. He beat both wife and daughter and abused them in other ways. Bright Itempas is called, among other things, the god of justice. Perhaps that was why He responded when she came into His temple, her heart full of unchildlike rage.

“I want him to die,” she said (or so I imagine). “Please, Great Lord, make him die.”

You know the truth now about Itempas. He is a god of warmth and light, which we think of as pleasant, gentle things. I once thought of Him that way, too. But warmth uncooled burns; light undimmed can hurt even my blind eyes. I should have realized. We should all have realized. He was never what we wanted Him to be.

So when the girl begged the Bright Lord to murder her father, He said, “Kill him yourself.” And He gifted her with a knife perfectly suited to her small, weak child’s hands.

She took the knife home and used it that very night. The next day, she came back to the Bright Lord, her hands and soul stained red, happy for the first time in her short life. “I will love you forever,” she declared. And He, for a rare once, found Himself impressed by mortal will.

Or so I imagine.

The child was mad, of course. Later events proved this. But it makes sense to me that this madness, not mere religious devotion, would appeal most to the Bright Lord. Her love was unconditional, her purpose undiluted by such paltry considerations as conscience or doubt. It seems like Him, I think, to value that kind of purity of purpose—even though, like warmth and light, too much love is never a good thing.

I woke an hour before dawn and immediately went to the door to listen for my captors. I could hear people moving about in the corridors beyond my door, and sometimes I caught snatches of the Lights’ wordless, soothing song. More morning rituals. If they followed the pattern of previous mornings, I had an hour, maybe more, before they came.

Quickly I set to work, pushing aside the room’s table as quietly as I could. Then I rolled aside the small rug to bare the wooden floor, which I inspected carefully. It was smoothly sanded, lightly finished. Dusty. It felt nothing like a canvas.

Neither had the bricks at the south promenade, though, the day I’d killed the Order-Keepers.

My heart pounded as I went through the room, collecting the items I’d marked or hidden as potentially useful. A piece of cheese and a nami-pepper from a previous meal. Chunks of melted fakefern wax from the candles. A bar of soap. I had nothing that felt or smelled like the color black, though, which was frustrating. I had a feeling I would need black.

I knelt on the floor and picked up the cheese, and took a deep breath.

Kitr and Paitya had called my drawing a doorway. If I drew a place I knew and opened that doorway again, would I be able to travel there? Or would I end up like the Order-Keepers, dead in two places at once?

I shook my head, angry at my own doubts.

Carefully, clumsily, I sketched Art Row. The cheese was more useful as texture than color, because it felt rough, like the cobbles I’d walked across for the past ten years. I yearned for black to outline the cobbles but forced myself to do without. The candlewax ran out first—too soft—but between it and the soap I managed to suggest a table, and beyond that another. The pepper ran out next, its juice stinging my fingers as I ground it to a nub trying to depict the Tree’s greenscent in the air. Finally, though I used my own saliva and blood to stretch it and properly color the cobbles, the cheese crumbled to bits in my fingers. (To get my blood, I’d had to scratch off the scab from the previous night’s bloodletting. Inconveniently, I was not menstruating.)

When it was done, I sat back to gaze at my work, grimacing at the ache in my back and shoulders and knees. It was a crude, small drawing, only two handspans across since there hadn’t been enough “paint” to do more. More impressionistic than I liked, though I had created such drawings before and seen the magic in them nevertheless. What mattered was what the depiction evoked in the mind and heart, not how it looked. And this one, however crude, had captured Art Row so well that I felt homesick just looking at it.

But how to make it real? And then, how to step through?

I put my fingers on the edge of the drawing, awkwardly. “Open?” No, that wasn’t right. At the south promenade I had been too terrified for words. I closed my eyes and said it with my thoughts. Open!

Nothing. I hadn’t really thought that would work.

Once, I had asked Madding how it felt for him, using magic. I’d had a bit of his blood in me at the time, making me restless and dreamy; that time, the only magic that had manifested in me was the sound of distant, atonal music. (I hadn’t forgotten the melody, but I’d never once hummed it aloud. All my instincts warned against doing that.) I’d been disappointed, wishing for something more grandiose, and that had gotten me wondering what it felt like to be magic, not just taste it in dribs and drops.

He’d shrugged, sounding bemused. “Like walking down the street feels for you. What do you think?”

“Walking down the street,” I had informed him archly, “is nothing like flying into stars, or crossing a thousand miles in one step, or turning into a big blue rock whenever you get mad.”

“Of course it’s the same,” he’d said. “When you decide to walk down a street, you flex the muscles in your legs. Right? You feel out the way with your stick. You listen, make sure there’s no one in the way. And then you will yourself to move, and your body moves. You believe it will happen, so it happens. That’s how magic is for us.”

Will the door open, and it will open. Believe, and it will be. Nibbling my bottom lip, I touched the drawing again.

This time, I tried imagining Art Row as I would one of my landscapes, cobbling together the memories of a thousand mornings. It would be busy now, the area thick with local merchants and laborers and farmers and smiths beginning their daily business. In some of the buildings just beyond my drawing, courtesans and restaurants would be opening their books for evening appointments. The pilgrims who’d prayed with the dawn would be giving way to minstrels singing for coins. I hummed a Yuuf tune that had been a favorite of mine. Sweating stonemasons, distracted accountants; I heard their hurrying feet and tense breath and felt their purposeful energy.

I was not aware of the change at first.

The Tree’s scent had been thick around me since I’d been brought to the House of the Risen Sun. Slowly, subtly, it changed—becoming the fainter, more distant scent I was used to. Then that scent mingled with the smells of the Promenade, horseshit and sewage and herbs and perfumes. I heard murmuring voices and dismissed them… but they were not coming from within the House.

I did not notice the change at all, really, until the drawing opened up beneath my hands and I nearly fell into it.

Startled, I yelped and stumbled back. Then I stared. Blinked. Leaned close and stared more.

The cloth on the nearest Row table: it moved. I could not see people—perhaps because I hadn’t drawn any figures—but I could hear the gabble of a crowd in the distance, moving feet, rattling wheels. A breeze blew, tossing a few fallen Tree leaves across the cobbles of the Promenade, and my hair lifted off my neck, just a little.

“Intriguing,” said the Nypri, behind me.

Yelping in shock, I tried to simultaneously jump to my feet and scoot away from the voice. Instead I tripped over the rolled-up rug and went sprawling. While I struggled upright, grabbing for the bed to get my bearings, I realized too late that I had heard him enter, and had dismissed it. He had been standing in the room, watching me, for quite some time.

He came over, taking my hand and helping me to my feet. I snatched my hand away as soon as I could. Beyond him, I realized in dismay, the drawing had not only stopped being real, but also it had faded from view entirely, its magic gone.

“It takes great concentration to wield magic in a controlled fashion,” he said. “Impressive given that you’ve had no training. And you did it with nothing but food and candlewax. Truly amazing. Of course, it means we’ll have to watch you eat from now on, and search your quarters regularly for anything bearing pigment.”

Damn! I clenched my fists before I thought to stop myself. “Why are you here?” I asked. It came out far more belligerent than it should have, but I couldn’t help it. I was too angry over my lost chance.

“I came, ironically enough, to ask you to demonstrate your magical abilities for me. I’m still a scrivener, even if I’ve left the Order. Unique manifestations of inherited magic were my particular field of study.” He sat down in one of the room’s chairs, oblivious to my seething fury. “I should note, however, that if you meant to escape through that portal, your efforts would’ve ultimately been futile. The House of the Risen Sun is surrounded by a barrier that prevents magic from entering or leaving. A variation on my Empty, actually.” He tapped the wooden floor with his foot. “If you had tried passing through it via that portal… Well, I’m not certain what would’ve happened. But you, or your remains, would not have gotten far.”

Broken bowel, voices screaming… I felt ill, and defeated. “It wasn’t big enough to pass through, anyway,” I muttered, slumping onto the bed.

“True. With practice, however—and more paint—no doubt you could pass through these portals.”

That got my attention. “What?”

“Your magic isn’t that different from my own,” he said, and abruptly I recalled the holes he’d used to capture me and Madding and the others. “Both are variants on the scrivening technique that permits instantaneous transport through matter and distance via a gate. Which is itself merely an approximation of the gods’ ability to traverse space and time at will. It seems that your gift expresses itself extraversively, however, while mine is introversive.”

I groaned. “Pretend I haven’t spent my life studying musty old scrolls full of made-up words.”

“Ah. My apologies. Let me try an analogy. Imagine that you hold a lump of gold in your hands. Gold is quite soft in its pure form; you can mold it with your fingers if you exert enough pressure. Then it can become many things: coins, a bracelet, a cup to hold water. Yet gold isn’t useful for every purpose. A sword made of gold would bend easily and be too heavy to wield. For that, a different metal—say, iron—is better.”

A rustle of cloth was my warning before Dateh took my hand. His fingers were dry, thick-skinned, callused at the tips. He turned over my hand, exposing my own calluses from carving wood and clipping linvin saplings, and also the stains from my makeshift paints. I did not pull away, though I wanted to. I did not like the feel of his hand.

“The magic in you is like gold,” he said. “You’ve learned to shape it in one way, but there are others. I imagine you’ll discover them with time and experimentation. The magic in me is more like iron: it can be shaped and used in similar ways, but its fundamental properties and uses are very different. And I, unlike you, have learned many ways to shape it. Now do you understand?”

I did. Dateh’s holes, or portals, or whatever he called them, were like my doorways. He created them at will, perhaps using his own method to invoke them as I used painting. But while his magic opened a dark, cold space devoid of—everything—my magic opened the way to existing spaces… or created new spaces out of nothingness.