Authors: Elizabeth Bear
“Not until Tsarepheth has fallen to the plague, in any case.” The ghosts could not directly attack the Rasan city, protected as it was by great beds of rock salt layered through the mountains. The wizards had chosen the site of their Citadel with more than earthly defense in mind. “And by then, perhaps the wars will be raging without our direct assistance. Then we can lie in wait, collecting power, ready to step in when all these self-styled kings and princelings have their reckonings.”
Saadet nodded; al-Sepehr could still tell her gestures from Shahruz’s, even when they used the same flesh.
He sighed. The twins were right.
“Go to Re Qori Buqa,” he said. “Ride the wind. He is a heathen Qersnyk, and will not care that you wear a woman’s sacred shape. And when you are there, counsel him to war. Lead him against the Uthman Caliphate. Tell him … tell him that Re Temur is in Asitaneh, and that the caliph will no doubt lend him arms and men in exchange for a promise of allegiance and quiet borders—and that even if the caliph would not, the caliph’s war-band will press the issue. Tell Qori Buqa that if he wishes to maintain his grandfather’s empire, he must do as a Khagan does—and conquer anew.”
Saadet bowed like a man—not to al-Sepehr, but to the will of the Scholar-God. She did not ask how he knew where Re Temur had escaped to. When she spoke it was in her own voice. “And if he wishes to consolidate our allegiance, al-Sepehr? If he wishes arms and men and more sorcery and science?”
Al-Sepehr shrugged. “Offer him a marriage,” he said. “That should satisfy him for a while.”
“And if I must go through with it?”
“Then that makes you his queen, does it not?” Al-Sepehr paused, and smiled suddenly. “It’s not as if you shall be married long.”
Shahruz—or perhaps Saadet—must have caught his change of mood. They flinched, and one of them said, unhappily, “Master?”
“Actually,” he said, savoring the simple elegance of the idea that had come to him so suddenly, inspiration a gift of the Scholar-God, “you can run an errand for me along the way.”
“Shall we speak to the rukh, Master?”
“Yes,” said he. “Let us speak with the rukh, my Shahruz.”
* * *
After the first death and … hatching, others followed. At first a few, scattered, like the plink of mustard seeds popping in a covered pan. But then, like those seeds, more followed—drifts and spates, crescendos and finales. And Hong-la could do nothing.
He and Yongten-la both immediately, hopelessly thought of killing the victims, to spare them—at least—the suffering of the spawn’s emergence. But then the third victim, a city whore with two fingers amputated for thieving, survived the hatching—horribly, Hong-la thought, more horribly than if she had died—and the wizards realized that if the emergence was survivable, granting mercy to the infected was untenable.
Hong-la thought perhaps they could poison the demons in the lungs, and started those most recently infected on a course of inhaled caustic vapors. Not kind, and he wondered if—even if it worked—he was merely condemning any possible survivors to a death by sepsis as the spawn rotted inside their lungs. He was certainly condemning them to scarred lungs and invalidity.
To other victims, the Wizard Hong fed poisons, as he would to treat any parasite. Arsenic, quicksilver—in limited quantities, that might poison the spawn and preserve the host. Cinnabar powdered and blown into the lungs of those who could still manage to inhale. He tried tracheotomy, opening a gap in the victim’s throat for the demons to squeeze through in the hopes that it would be more likely to preserve life if they did not have to force their way up through the base of the skull and the jaw. He instructed wizards and lay surgeons both to save the doses of poppy and whiskey to the very end, so at least the sufferers need not be wholly sensible when the beasts were ripping their way free.
It was Anil-la who came up with the idea of channeling fire into the spawn while they still lay within the lungs of their victims. But these subjects died as well: delicate lung tissue could not stand exposure to the controlled heat that the wizards brought to bear on the monsters gestating within them. Those who endured a day or two, coughing up burned husks and shreds of twisted demon flesh, eventually drowned in the fluids of their own insulted lungs.
Yongten-la devised a means for trapping the demons as they emerged: an apparatus strapped over the patients’ face, giving the spawn no route of escape except to crawl through a narrow tube into a glass jar, which could then be corked—the demons died of suffocation, just like any beast—or filled with boiling water or spirits of wine.
Some of the trapped ones pissed fire, which ran back down the apparatus and peeled the flesh from the face of one—Hong-la thanked his ancestors—already-dead sufferer. After that, he rigged up a flexible tube that could be forced into a U-bend once the demon has passed the halfway point.
Days passed, nights, sharping to nightmare. As one horror piled upon another, Hong-la kept expecting to awaken. The plague—or infestation—was too precise a hideousness to seem credible, even when he stood in the reek of unburned bodies and suppurating wounds and the burned-hair acridness that was the smell—alive or dead—of the demonspawn.
Hong-la and Yongten-la kept a few demonspawn alive for research. The hunched, gaunt little things sat balefully in their jade cages, wings twisted, the mottled, membranous skin over their torsos stretching to tautness and collapsing in hollows between starveling ribs with every desperate, air-thirsty breath.
“They’re starving for air,” Yongten-la said as he sealed a particularly bruise-colored yellow-and-purple one into the carved stone cage. Originally intended for songbirds, they were a snug fit around the demonspawn. Hong-la did not feel too bad for them.
In his blood-and-phlegm-crusted smock, Hong-la kept working to stem the flow of blood from this latest victim. He thought this one might live—speechless, tongue torn and voice box crushed, jaw unhinged by the fury of the spawn’s emergence.
Hong-la’s hands moved as if of their own will. He had not slept in days. The energy he drew from the Citadel was a constant blurry buzz in his veins, in his head. He could feel his heart skipping beats occasionally, or accelerating beyond any safe level. His own breath came pained and sore, as if somebody had been scrubbing
his
lungs out. It was secondhand exposure to the caustics, despite the mask he now wore habitually—but it was also exhaustion, and the price for wearing his body and soul down to the warp and relying on the Citadel to keep him on his feet.
It would kill him if he continued. But where were the choices?
He sent Anil-la and several of the others—full-collared wizards, including the redoubtable Wizard Tsering, who had never manifested powers but who had a mind for theory the match of any wizard in the Citadel—out among the city with heralds to cry the protocols. Since the victims—so long as speech did not desert them—reported awakening with the cough and fever, Hong-la hypothesized that whatever infected them came at night. He and Yongten-la recommended that everyone sleep indoors, windows barred, faces masked. Chimneys must be stuffed with rags and sealed as best as possible. Everyone who had the resources must sleep under netting and signs of ward.
Hong-la tried not to think too much of the slaves and indigents of Tsarepheth, who might be lucky to sleep under a scrap of wood and hide angled to keep off the rain.
No one of the Citadel and no one in the Black Palace had sickened yet, which made Hong-la fairly certain that the wards and prayer flags and incised stones, the ancient blessings and geomantic protections upon those strongholds held. Yongten-la freed himself and some of the elder wizards, ones who
had
found their power, from the duty of nursemaiding the sick. It did not take a wizard to blow cinnabar dust into a dying man’s lungs through a quill.
These wizards would pick their way among the sigil-incised boulders through which the Tsarethi crashed and tossed as it passed beneath the Citadel, renewing blessings. Some of them would finish and dedicate a new wardstone, a great jade boulder housed in the depths of the Citadel, and—eventually—roll it into the water as well, where its blessings could be tumbled downstream through the plague-wracked city and to the suffering lands of Rasa and Song and the Hundred-Times-Hundred Kingdoms of the Lotus below. That would take months, though, perhaps longer.
Yongten-la sent regular missives to the Bstangpo—the Emperor—recommending that a shaman and a wizard bless every dwelling under imperial edict and that sheltered housing be provided for the indigent. Emperor Songtsan issued commands, and inasmuch as possible these things were carried out … but so many were ill, and a wizard caring for the dying was not carving protective sigils upon doors and over windows.
In the meantime, mostly, the contagion raged. And mostly, Hong-la toiled, and waited for word from the emperor.
* * *
Though acolytes and women cleaned the rock shelf where the rukhs nested, the taint of ammonia still reached the heights of Ala-Din’s five towers. The twins and their master stood atop the nearest, the thumb of the fortress that had once been called the Hand on the Rock.
Centuries had truncated the name, though not the towers.
Ala-Din
meant only
the Rock.
The twins had folded their hands in the sleeves of their coat. A hot, rustling wind scarfed their veils in long banners; below, the rukhs huddled in their nest. The female had just returned with a meal for her mate and offspring: two camels with necks broken, which she carried as a hawk might carry a shrew, served whole—along with whatever awful chunks the giant bird could regurgitate from her own breakfast. Of what creature those bits might be the mortal remains, the twins did not inquire.
Smaller birds swarmed the pile. They were eagle-sized or slightly larger, miniatures of the great rukhs with their white and scarlet crests and long necks: the grayer female and her brassier mate. The male’s chain rattled as he stretched for the first camel. As with most birds of prey, the female was larger. Her body partially blocked his from view, but as he fanned his wings and gulped the camel down whole, tossing his head—again like a hawk with a shrew—the twins saw the rule-straight edge of brassy pinions, the flash of a creamy belly. Steel scraped on stone when he moved—though he was chained and his wings were clipped, he fluttered vigorously, exercising.
The female fluffed and settled herself. While her family dined, she busied herself rearranging the stones and twigs of her nest: boulders and uprooted trees as thick as the twins’ thigh. She turned a rock as large as a sofa dreamily, with the edge of her recurved beak.
When al-Sepehr clucked, she lifted her head slowly and shot him an unmistakable glare.
“Come, my lovely,” said al-Sepehr, while the gray-gold wall of her hatred broke against him like the sea around a pillar. “As you love your family, it is time for you to fly for me again.”
* * *
When the summons came, it did not come from the Bstangpo. Hong-la in his exhaustion, hands dripping brown streamers of blood into the bowl of water he washed with, blinked in surprise at the messenger clad in imperial blues who had just prostrated himself before the wizard.
Exquisitely aware of his state of crusted filth and exhaustion, Hong-la nevertheless tried to attain—and project—the serene peace expected of a wizard. “Say that again?”
The messenger raised his head, eyes downcast. “The empress, Yangchen-tsa, commands your attendance, Wizard Hong.”
* * *
Yangchen paced. The babe would not stop crying. She gave it her breast, but though it mumbled and fussed with the nipple it would not latch. She jiggled and coddled it. She gave it to the nurse to be burped and diapered and reswaddled and returned.
All this, and the babe, Namri—her son, her husband Songtsan’s heir, the child whose birth had made her first wife to the Bstangpo and the Empress of Rasa—would not stop crying. It wailed like a peacock. It shrieked like a tiger. It threw fits in circles and spirals and explosive vortexes of noise.
There is something about the sound of a crying baby—a truly inconsolable crying baby, not a merely fussy one—that brings a form of madness to otherwise calm and settled adults. Yangchen-tsa, at nineteen, considered herself very adult indeed: an empress, and one whose mastery of the viperous politics of the Rasan court had put her husband on the throne in advance of his majority.
It was she who had removed her husband’s dowager mother from the center of the web where she had sat like a bloated spider so long, controlling Songtsan and Yangchen both. It was she who had managed to cast the blame for that removal on the doorstep of her husband’s brother, thus requiring the new—and premature—emperor to condemn his sibling to death. Unkind, and ruthless—but Yangchen-tsa’s father had cautioned her when he sent her to marry Songtsan and Tsansong that if she wished to survive the imperial court, she must be subtle and unrestrained by compassion. What she did, she told herself, was for her son.
It was she who had ascertained that the child she would bear would be a son, and that
her
son would be born first among all the children of her sister-wives. She was not the empress by blood or birth; Yangchen had been born to a minor wife of a noble family of Song, the third living daughter and fourteenth child of her father. She had been traded away to Rasa because her father was notable, not because she was.
And yet it was by her own hand that Yangchen-tsa was Empress of Rasa, and though history and her husband would never know it, still the victory should have been sweet, so sweet, as secret and sweet as stolen honey on her tongue. So her father had assured her—that the sweetness of power paid for everything.
But the execution of Prince Tsansong would be carried out by burning this very day. And a plague as horrific as anything out of the bad old tales that Yangchen loved so dearly and so desperately raged across her empire. And as she gave the babe back to his nurse again so that her women could dress her for the arrival of the surgeon-wizard Hong-la, Yangchen entertained a momentary fantasy that the bitterness of her own acts had soured her milk and her son would
never
stop crying now.