THE MANSION HUSSACHT
No one south of Vultjag knew how high the Wintercrests might climb. On some days the snowy peaks could be seen from the harbor at Treatymont, in spite of the vast northward distance, which should have put them over the horizon: some said this was an illusion of optics, and others said the Wintercrests just climbed up and up and up, fourteen or seventeen or twenty miles tall at their crest, and that this was why white mountains loomed over seaside Treatymont on certain days. Though the Incrastic geologists called them mad.
But the King of the Mansions knew his Amustakhi Mountains. He knew the cracking cold and the taste of lichen; the dead air of the mines and the dead soil of the overworked terraces; the dysentery and cholera that swept downslope settlements who drank water tainted by sewage from above. He knew the pink flamingos in their high lakes, and the pink sunburnt faces that smiled at him when he came out in his shining armor plate. He knew the silent old women who swept the babies off the exposure shelf and down the crevasse.
When he imagined the way his mountains rose from Aurdwynn he saw a great ramp. And he was like a bale of grass on that ramp, trying desperately not to roll downhill. His crown burnt with the cold, but he could not take it off.
“Ziscjaditzcionursz,” he said, zish-jaditshionursh, softer than the wind; it meant, more or less, may a rusty nail be driven into my bloody flank by a traitor, though really it meant, oh, fuck me. Very few lowcomers ever learned Mansion Stakhi, which could not easily be pried apart. Would only that the same could be said of the Stakhi mansions themselves.
His name was Atakaszir, of the Mansion Hussacht. From the peak of his mountain, Karakys, he could see more than a hundred miles down over Aurdwynn, when weather permitted. He could see the great green forests of Vultjag, and the high stony fells of Lyxaxu (he clicked his right incisors together, thoughtlessly, by tradition, at the enemy name, the Maia name) and the bright river that carried their food and wealth away from him, to the sea.
But closer beneath him was the crest of the col, a strip of naked wind-raked rock that crossed the saddle between Camich Swiet and Karakys. His Mansion stood high above the green line where the last trees grew. There were no forests, no rivers, no checkered pastures where horses could breed. The flanks of Karakys stepped upward in huge terraces buttressed by walls of interlocked mortarless rock. On those stone terraces the Mansion would soon lay out fields of potatoes to freeze-dry, sheafs of winterwheat, sorghum, and sour red pitahaya. When the wet air shoveled up off the Ashen Sea in summer crashed and fell as snow, Hussacht would live or die by its stores. Yaks wandered the upper terraces in herds of fifty or a hundred, females mostly, producing the milk that would go into the salt-and-coca tea which all the Stakhi drank. Atakaszir had yak butter on his lips right now, to stop the cracking, and a wad of coca in his cheek, to keep him strong. Down in the lowlands they called coca mason leaf and used it for fun and sex. Here it was as vital as water.
He had promised his people the lowlands, to ease their straining numbers. He had promised an end to the tax on second children, who went out on the naked rock. For one short season his promises had been honorable, for his man Dziransi had found him a bride who could deliver Aurdwynn.
But the bride was a traitor, a bait set out to entrap him, and the first great act of his Necessary Kingship came tumbling down on him like a keyless arch. And now the army he had raised was camped outside his Mansion with nowhere to invade and no confidence at all in their king. When autumn came they would seize Hussacht’s stores for the winter, and Hussacht would rot away in the wet karst caves of Karakys until the pits and stairways were slimed with corpse. He himself would not live that long. The Uczenith men in particular were agitating in the camp for a dethroning, and traditionally this was done by peeling off the King’s crown and the scalp beneath.
Fucking Uczenith. Fucking shortsighted stone-licking inbred curs. In spite of their overweening insecurity (their old lord Kubarycz the Iron-Browed had tried to marry an Aurdwynni duchess, leading to his exile: the Uczenith lived in terror that someone would come up the mountains to say, Hello, I killed your Lord and his heirs in combat and so I am now the rightful ruler of your Mansion) Ataka had brought them and all the other mansions together. He had been this close to breaking the Stakhi out of the prison of their history.
And Baru Cormorant had ruined it all.
Atakaszir thought: I have started an avalanche and now I cannot get out of the way.
He turned to face the woman.
“How,” he said, in the Iolynic that came so hard to him, “will you dowry me?” He knew he’d gotten it wrong but the creole seemed to fight his very tongue. “How will you open the way that was shut?”
She was dark and clean of face, without one pimple or scar. She wore her coat and furs open and the wind blew her dress back against a body of sinful fullness. She looked as if she had never been hungry; Atakaszir’s eyes betrayed him by seeking out her hips, her full stomach, her breasts. Her sister, Atakaszir understood, had been some kind of whore-duchess, who sealed her alliances in her bed. Ordinarily this would make her and all her sisters unthinkable as consorts to a king. But lately Atakaszir had learned that the Stakhieczi measure of a woman was not always reliable.
“I offer you what you most desire,” Nayauru Aia said, in perfect Stakhi. “A wife from the lands of milk and grain. A key to the door that bars you.”
“You are an exile.” Aia had arrived in the company of a beautiful horseman named Ihuake Ro, each of them carrying their ducal banners as they fled the Masquerade. “You have no land.”
“If my sister’s children die then I have the claim to the Duchy Nayauru,” the woman said, through dark and fulsome lips. The most infuriating thing about her was her utter indifference to his eye. She held herself with poise and confidence, but without the cave whore’s desperate invitation. Atakaszir knew better than most Stakhi that desperation was the keen whistle of death. “What other option have you, Your Majesty the King? What else can you show your brave men and your engineers to sustain the necessity of your existence? You must have a prize out of this winter’s debacle. You must show them a little piece of sun and fertile soil.”
She was right. He had no alternative. Failing revenge on Baru, which would save his honor, he would need a token of hope: which would not honor him, but at least give him something to bargain with, the merchant’s craven power.
“Is it true you need a hundred men to satisfy you?” he asked her, for she was so obviously Maia.
She laughed. He liked the laugh. It reminded him of his bannermen, joyful and unconsidered. Not like the terrified girls the other Mansions had tried to bride to him when they thought he was ascendant. “I don’t need any men to satisfy me,” she said. “My heart is set on a return to the land I love, Majesty, with the steel avalanche at my back. Give me that and you will have my faith.”
The steel avalanche. The avalanche camped out in the dry lake bed called the erbajaste, waiting, waiting, for word to march. He could turn around now and see them, their spears wavering in the hot dry air.
If he wanted to survive that army he would need an Aurdwynni bride and he would need to invade. Now.
But the masks were still out there. The Falcresti who had taken his brother and bottled up the eastern sea, blockading the Stakhi from their fish. And Atakaszir knew the appalling treachery of those people, for Baru Cormorant had taught him.
When he invaded, when the steel avalanche crashed down into Aurdwynn’s northern duchies of Lyxaxu and Vultjag and Erebog, the Masquerade would use Aurdwynn as an enormous firebreak. Plagues would spread. Forests would burn. Millions would drown in a mud cauldron of pus and shit as the laughing Falcresti bet on who would die last.
If only he had some way to guarantee they would not interfere—
A low horn blew from the slot pass that opened onto the col. Atakaszir’s heart seized a moment, for he remembered the day the news of disaster had come from Sieroch. And just as on that day, a kite rose up in signal.
“What’s that?” Nayauru Aia asked.
“A man is coming up the pass. A stranger.” The second kite caught the air. “A foreigner . . .”
Right now Uczenith’s spies would be rushing to their masters to warn them that another moment had come. Another summit that might see Atakaszir toppled down the col to shatter in the valley below. Would the foreigner bring news of further disaster? Masquerade plagues in the lowlands? An end to the pitiful, vital salt trade in Duchy Erebog?
A woman in a poncho climbed up to the signal post and began to wave her flags. Atakaszir translated the dips and flourishes as swiftly as they came. Then he peeled his lips back and grinned a death’s-head grin, the skull-joy of a man in battle.
“What is it?”
“Someone has come to offer me a gift.” Atakaszir touched the steel peak of his crown. “A gift he claims will make me a king of honor and revenge, whose enemies cannot escape him even if they flee to distant underlands. A king to be feared and obeyed.”
“How tantalizing,” Nayauru Aia said, smoothly. “What gift can that be?”
Revenge, Atakaszir thought. Revenge on the woman who betrayed me. A corpse to show my courtiers, and bone to stuff down the Uczenith craw, and blood to water my hopes.
But the pale man who approached his throne between the great ranked pillars brought different tidings. “King of Mansions,” he began, as Atakaszir’s allies and enemies alike leaned forward like salary workers waiting for their crystals of the Brine. “I bring word of your missing brother, of his life and deeds, and of how he may be restored to you. . . .”
“Svir?” Ataka whispered, but a king cannot whisper, it stinks of procht, the sick-thought of schemers, so he cried it aloud instead. “My brother, Svir, is alive?”
And he saw the Uczenith men whisper in consternation that the King they hated might restore the stolen glory of the stolen Prince. He saw distant Nayauru Aia, leaning against her pillar, quirk her lips in thought, for here was another eligible man.
All Atakaszir wanted in that moment was to call his army and march to his brother’s aid. But he was King, and a king must be wise.
“Come forward,” he said. “What is your name? And who sent you?”