THE AERIAL VAULT was a needle-shaped obelisk that hung in the middle atmosphere above the Citadel. Like all the Empress’ buildings, it was made from petrified wood and vitrified sand, black fossil and black glass, layered together in coils. Up close, its masonry looked less like worked stone and more like the shell of some unimaginable creature. The rough grain of petrified wood, laid alongside the gleaming smoothness of volcanic glass. The two together seemed to make figures: serpents, lichen, waves, maps.
Shuthmili landed the cutter on the ledge at the base of the vault, and she and Keleiros disembarked. The ledge ran all the way round the base of the vault, but each face of the vault was a blank expanse of fossil-stone. As Shuthmili had anticipated, there was nothing resembling a door.
This was nothing new. In the Lignite Citadel were many rooms without doors: cisterns of dark water large enough for the drowning of thousands, still and silent hothouses, colossal statues in darkness. This was why she had taken the risk of speaking with Vigil, back in the interrogation chamber. She needed their knowledge. She would have to fold space to get inside.
She pressed her hands against the wall. She sent a brief, weak pulse of energy into the stone, listening for its echo, searching for the next door. There were hollow vaults above and many stairwells syringing up into them.
The stone was thickly warded. There were weapons inside the walls, half alive and sleeping. Luckily, the careful breaking of mechanisms was a specialty for Zinandour. Shuthmili rested a hand on the smooth surface of the door and began to feel her way through them.
Once the weapons were disarmed, it was time to open the door. She had not had much liberty to practice the discipline of folding, so it took a few attempts, but at last it did work.
There was—not a sound, but a feeling, as if a key had turned in the lock of the world. The tower opened. There was no slithering of stone on stone, no creaking of ancient hinges. It was like the opening of a flower, the beating of a bird’s wing, either too slow or too fast to witness with mortal eyes. There was a way in where none had been before.
If Keleiros was surprised by any of this, he didn’t show it. He had lived most of his life in the Citadel, after all, and knew its ways. At twenty-three, he might remember the years before the God-Empress’ accession, but Shuthmili wouldn’t have bet he thought about them often. He was a creature of the times. He didn’t question what she was doing here, either, in what was clearly a forbidden area: probably storing it up to report back to Cherenthisse.
A passage opened into a high-vaulted hall, lined with dozens of doors. The black stone was ribboned with moon-coloured wardlights, which gave the room a faint warmth and an uneasy, quivering illumination. Keleiros followed her inside, his bright eyes darting here and there. He was smart enough to know that Cherenthisse would pay well for this information, and not smart enough to wonder why Shuthmili was letting him see it all.
Certainly not smart enough to keep Shuthmili within view. She pretended to move from door to door, drifting out of his sphere of vision. The spell she had prepared required only the faintest touch at the base of his skull. He dropped as though his strings had been cut.
She checked his vitals—healthy, but sound asleep; good, that spell could take people the wrong way—and carefully moved him to a corner.
NEXT TIME I WILL KILL FOR YOU, said Zinandour. YOUR HESITANCE TIRES ME.
I don’t want him dead, my lady.
YOU KNOW AS I DO THE PUNISHMENT OF A TURNCOAT.
I still have use for him, said Shuthmili, although she wouldn’t need him, if she needed him—she wasn’t going to think about that just yet—until later.
The door she wanted was on the far side of the room. It had no keyhole or handle. It would open in the presence of one only. Shuthmili set the lead-lined casket on the ground before the door and, with the care of one removing a crucible of molten metal from the furnace, severed the wards and seals holding it closed.
The wood of the casket smouldered and began to char, and fell away to ash. Within, in a scorched shell of lead, was a pale little crescent of green stone, as small and sharp as a clipped fingernail. It was an inert shard of the throne of Iriskavaal, perhaps one of the last remaining. For thousands of years, it had slept in a ruined watchtower in some forgotten world, overlooked even by Belthandros and Atharaisse.
The door slid open, revealing a narrow stairway rising into darkness.
Shuthmili secured the fragment in a circle of black ash from the casket and went on up the stairs, leaving Keleiros safe in his corner.
Beyond the door were an exhausting number of floors, stairs, and corridors. The aerial vault held every artefact of power that the Thousand Eyes had looted in the past fifteen years. A younger Shuthmili would have been wild to catalogue everything here. Today she had only one thing in mind.
She had spent a whole year gaining access to the Empress’ secret libraries, and months afterward scrutinising the maps and blueprints she had stolen. She had run through this expedition in her head a hundred times: up four floors, then turn left, then take the third right, then on up, and up, until you reached the final door.
As it came into view—a plain iron door, unornamented, one among many others—Shuthmili had to stop. Her breath seized in her throat, and she leant back against the wall.
After working so long and sacrificing so much, she hadn’t let herself believe it would really happen. She had failed so many times. Fifteen years of schemes, most of which had died in their cradles, and this was her last resort. If there had been any other hope, she would not have come to this.
There was still so far to go. So much to do. No guarantee of success. She had done things that had made her glad Csorwe was not there to see what she was becoming.
She saw Csorwe’s face almost every day, and she thought it was still the same: the sharp cheekbones, the angular nose, the eyebrows like two dark brushstrokes, the soft mouth slightly roughened by the elements. In daylight the eyes were the colour of clear topaz. The scar that curved from brow to lip had been smoothed out by the years, but Shuthmili ought to know its line. She had traced it often enough with her fingertip. And yet, if something was different, would she really know it? Time took so much from her, always. All she could do was stand and endure as the only person she had truly loved was made alien to her.
ALWAYS DWELLING UPON PAST REGRETS, said Zinandour. If it were possible for an ancient goddess of fire and dissolution to sound like a mother hen, she would have done. I WAS TORN DOWN AND CAST INTO THE VOID BY THE HERETICS OF QARSAZH. I DO NOT DWELL IN REGRET BUT NOURISH MY VENGEANCE. YOU MUST DO THE SAME. TAKE YOUR MOMENT OF VICTORY. THEY ARE FEW ENOUGH.
Apologies, my grim Corruptor, you know it is a terrible struggle for me having to operate this primate, said Shuthmili, grateful for the chance to squabble with the goddess as a distraction.
Zinandour laughed, a rattlesnake noise.
Very well, said Shuthmili, and returned to the iron door. If she was right, this door would open on the vault itself.
The last fifteen years had been, if nothing else, a lesson in her own fallibility. She was wrong. She stepped through the final gate and fell straight into the void.
The void beyond all worlds is a place of neither form nor substance. No light survives there, nothing lives, and it knows no limit in time or space. Its only properties are vastness, darkness, and terror.
Vastness, darkness, and terror surged around Shuthmili as she fell. Worse than the dark was Zinandour’s panic, breaking and crashing within her.
Zinandour screamed, and all Shuthmili understood of the screaming was DEATH BEFORE THE VOID! I WILL END THIS WORLD IN FIRE BEFORE I RETURN! IT WILL NOT TAKE ME AGAIN!
Shuthmili could keep herself breathing by magic for a while, but eventually she would suffocate faster than she could fix herself. She was one of the most powerful mages who had ever lived, she was the living vessel of a goddess, but she needed air or she was going to die.
Shuthmili had never been very good at despair. Despair was another kind of acceptance, and she had burnt through her whole stock of acceptance early in life. She could not die. Nobody else knew or cared what had become of Csorwe. She was the only one who could help her.
She gathered herself as best she could. This couldn’t just be a trap, it had to be another security measure. Zinandour had been imprisoned in the void for good reason: it made an excellent prison. But a prison needed a door.
Yes, there was a light—some kind of structure—not far. Another door, with faint light shining through it.
She kicked out at the dark and managed to flail her way to the doorway, and collapsed on the threshold, gasping for fresh air.
Buried in her brain stem, Zinandour howled like an animal in a trap. For the past fifteen years, Shuthmili’s dreams had been haunted by an emptiness, a dark and cold without surcease. Shuthmili felt the pressure of the memory, swelling like a blood clot. Shuthmili knew isolation—she had fed on it and nursed it all these years alone in the Citadel—and she knew how it ate away your sanity like waves lapping at a sandcastle. Those thousands of years of loneliness were torture to a divinity, annihilation to a mortal mind.
IT WILL NEVER LEAVE ME. IT IS HERE ALWAYS. AT YOUR FINGERTIPS. WITHIN YOU FOREVER.
I know, said Shuthmili. I was there with you, was I not? You were my goddess in imprisonment. We called to one another. You are still here with me now. We are both alone, but one of these days we will both be free.
At least calming Zinandour down left her no room to panic on her own terms. She did her best to be stern.
Next time let us not forget that you need my body alive. Recall that I need to breathe.
Her limbs were numb and aching. Her clothes felt as if they were woven from lead. Inside the gauntlets her fingers were stiff, the shooting pains in the joints ever more difficult to ignore.
Maybe we’re just getting old, she said to herself. She was forty years old. She had never imagined she would live this long.
INFANT, said Zinandour, sounding more like herself at last. LARVA. HATCHLING. YOU LIVE THIS LONG AT MY SUFFERANCE AND FOR NO OTHER REASON.
Shuthmili smiled with weak relief and hauled herself to her feet.
She had emerged onto a flat-topped turret, open to the elements. Above them, a cupola was supported by eight narrow pillars, and apart from these there was nothing to stop anyone falling over the sheer edge.
An expanse of night-blue sky spread from horizon to horizon. It was piercingly cold, and the air was thin here. There was no land below, only clouds that billowed like clean washing.
She reached for the comfort of Zinandour’s presence and found her very distant. The gods loved the earth, the great, cold mineral mass of the seas, the yolk of hidden fire. In the high air their powers began to fail.
When you considered who was imprisoned in the vault, it made sense that the God-Empress had put him up here.
Under the highest point of the cupola was a table of white stone, shaped like a sarcophagus, but Shuthmili knew without checking that there would be no body inside it.
Surrounding the table were nine concentric grooves in the stone, warded with brine, myrrh, and bone, and puddled on its surface was a dark shape. As she approached, it coalesced upward into an arch, its hooked tail wavering over its head like that of a scorpion.
It was a dead cat. Unkindly dead, and mummified as if in hot sand, without care. Its dry skin was hairless, clinging stickily to its ribs, drawn back from its mouth to reveal a jagged row of little black teeth.
It stretched each limb languorously before bothering to notice her.
Ah, it said. Company. How wonderful. Why don’t you come closer so I can talk to you? said the cat. Its ears had withered into perfunctory little flaps, flat against the back of its skull. The notches in its spine moved like gear teeth.
Well, well. You, again?
“Hello, Belthandros,” said Shuthmili.
The desiccated cat gave an eyeless impression of staring.
I suppose you’re here to ask me for something, he said.
It had been hard to believe that the creature was really Belthandros Sethennai until it spoke. The voice was exactly as Shuthmili remembered it. His tail swished like a dry reed.
So these days you’re—remind me?—that’s right. The Hand of the Empress.
“Correct,” said Shuthmili. “What do they call you these days? The Pretender?”
So I hear. Although really, if anything, the God-Empress is the Pretender to the Throne.
“And now you’re a cat,” said Shuthmili.
I’m sure the God-Empress thought it was a funny joke to imprison me in this vessel. How long has it been? Ten years?
“Fifteen,” said Shuthmili.
The cat stopped pacing and perched on the edge of the sarcophagus, and Shuthmili realised she didn’t quite know what to say. She didn’t trust any iteration of the snake goddess; she’d hated Belthandros on first sight, and he’d never done anything to improve her opinion.
You’re not Shuthmili at all, are you? he said. Or if you are, there is something very strange about you. What are you?
Shuthmili shrugged. “You told me the gauntlets were created to prepare you for incarnation. It turns out they still work.”
Ah, the Devouring Fire, said Belthandros, with the kind of knowing drawl that meant this was in fact a surprise to him. Yes, I see it now, your incarnation is true, if strange. Welcome to the club. Oranna will be unhappy you got there first.
“Oranna is dead,” said Shuthmili.
A pause, akin to an intake of breath. My mistake. Of course.
Did he sound thrown? Shuthmili didn’t read into it. Csorwe had wasted an extraordinary amount of time and energy trying to invent a softer side to Belthandros Sethennai. Even years after leaving him behind, she would occasionally turn to Shuthmili with a frown and say something like but what if he really did like her? Privately, Shuthmili had wished she would stop torturing herself with it. Tal was even worse. When they got together they had been like two dogs chewing over the same old bone.
It is a pity what happened to Csorwe, he said, so now it was Shuthmili’s turn to steady herself, although the absolute calculation of the manoeuvre blunted its effect a little. Curious that you’re still prepared to serve the so-called God-Empress. Given that she stole your lover’s body, I am startled to find you so loyal.
“Do you find me loyal?” said Shuthmili.
As a matter of fact, I do not, he said. I don’t think you’d be here if you were, since the God-Empress has taken pains to shut you out. What is it that you want?
“Why don’t you take three guesses,” said Shuthmili.
If you were Zinandour alone, I would say you wanted to rule in place of the God-Empress. That has ever been her motive, since the days of High Qarsazh. She is a byword for usurpation, so reliably unreliable as a second-in-command that I become almost nostalgic for Olthaaros Charossa. He paused midturn, tail held high like a feather. But I know better than most that a true incarnation is not as simple as that. Form shapes function. You are not solely the Dragon of Qarsazh but also a renegade Qarsazhi Adept, an archaeologist, and a murderer of aunts.
“I have murdered so many more since then. And I think I’ve changed my mind: you can have one guess.”
I am, as they say, just kidding, he said. You’re much more transparent than you think. It’s perfectly obvious that you’re here because you think I can help Csorwe.
It was almost a relief to hear it. The years had made their slow progress and dragged Shuthmili after them, and with every ditch and furrow, she worried that she’d lost her purpose, as if it hung on a chain that could break. Maybe, she thought, it was just the excuse she clung to, justifying her continued existence. Maybe it was what she had to tell herself, to endure bowing to the God-Empress. A daydream of rebellion.
“Yes,” she said. “Of course.”
Touching fidelity, he said. But I don’t know that it can be done. For all intents and purposes, Csorwe is dead, and the God-Empress haunts her corpse.
“Perhaps you’re right,” said Shuthmili. “That said … consider that, between you and me, one of us is the greatest magician of the age.”
The cat paused and looked up at her. She felt the click of satisfaction at having guessed right: however old and however brilliant, some people responded to challenge like sunflowers turning toward the light.
Bold claim, he said.
She smiled. “If it can be done, we can do it. If it can’t be done, I will die killing the Empress and leave a clear path for you to reclaim your throne.”
You think you can kill her? Interesting.
“You know so much. Do you know about the Empress’ great work?”
The cat put its head on one side.
“She means to undo the withering of Echentyr. To bring back the world that was.”
Hah! said Belthandros. Necromancy on a grand scale?
“No,” said Shuthmili. “Not necromancy. Real new life. Regenerating the Echentyri homeworld, making it habitable again, bringing back its people. She has promised the Thousand Eyes a return to their true aspects.”
The dead cat’s tail flicked thoughtfully back and forth. If Belthandros was startled, he didn’t show it. Ambitious, he murmured. But it might be done—it might perhaps be done—I wonder …
“I’ve been assisting her with some of her experiments,” said Shuthmili. She did not go into detail: months in the Citadel’s laboratories, up to her elbows in formaldehyde as the God-Empress attempted to restore life to her specimens. The results had been more or less grotesque, but the Empress’ mastery of her craft was undeniable. “I think it could be done, if you had the right source of power.”
Perhaps, said Belthandros, doubtfully.
“She’s a long way from pulling it off,” said Shuthmili. “But the nearest source of power she has is the population of Tlaanthothe, as was.”
The dead cat fixed its eyeless sockets on her. Do you think so?
“She’ll do it if she can. She will drain this whole world if she thinks she can get back what was lost.”
Belthandros averted his eyes discreetly.
“Yes, thank you, I know, I’m in no position to judge her,” said Shuthmili. “But I need your help, and I think our interests are aligned. You want her out of your city, and I want Csorwe back.”
Well, then. I suppose we have a deal.
Shuthmili responded by neatly breaking the three wards around the sarcophagus. The cat Belthandros hopped down from the sarcophagus and, without hesitation, crossed the broken circles. He moved almost as quietly as a real cat, but his claws clicked on the stone like dice.
Pleasant to stretch my legs, he said. You know about the void-trap?
Shuthmili nodded, unwilling to admit it had taken her by surprise the first time. She told the door firmly to send them back to the stairs of the isolation vault, and it obeyed.
Belthandros followed her down the stairs, almost invisible in the half dark.
YOU FOUND HIM, THEN, said Zinandour, deeply suspicious, when she resurfaced and caught sight of him. A FOOLHARDY PLAN, AS I HAVE TOLD YOU. ONE HEAD OF THE SNAKE IS NO BETTER THAN THE OTHER.
No going back now, my lady, said Shuthmili. If there had been any other way—if any of her other ideas had worked at all—she would have left Belthandros to rot. But it was done now, and she would just have to make sure she saw the inevitable double-cross coming.
They were almost at the bottom of the stairs, descending into the eerie gleam of the central hall, when he spoke again.
You must have thought about how you’re getting me out of here, he said. I cannot leave in this vessel, and with respect, I don’t much like the idea of playing house with you and Zinandour.
The ward keeping Belthandros’ cat-vessel inside the prison was beyond Shuthmili’s ability to unpick without being detected. So she needed to give him a new vessel. She had seen this coming. After all, Belthandros’ original body was still in its jar in the throne room, even as his essence was trapped inside the cat.
She held out the jewellery box containing the diadem. It was green with verdigris, pitted and mottled by the years, gleaming with the gold tracery of magic.
Impressive work, he said.
Shuthmili squashed the fleeting sense of gratification at having her work admired. Belthandros was altogether too good at that.
“It’s based on the Mantle,” said Shuthmili. “And the gauntlets, actually. Can you use it?”
I imagine so, said Belthandros. Do you have a vessel in mind? Oh. I see. Yes, that will do.
Keleiros lay where she had left him, his delicate features picked out in the light from the door.
“Can you do it without killing him?” said Shuthmili.
If he doesn’t fight me, said Belthandros.
There was always a moment, in Shuthmili’s experience, where you stood on the brink of a sudden drop and some internal voice said, Is this really going to happen? Is this what I’m capable of doing?
With real effort, she reached for the old memories, trying to remember exactly how Csorwe had looked on the day they’d run from Qarsazh—tired and resolute and young, just impossibly young, the hair blowing into her eyes as they stood on the deck of the ship that carried them away.
Every time she returned to this memory, she tarnished it a little more. Every time she used it to steel herself against what she was going to do, it became a little more hollow. She’d become a carrion bird, picking over her old life for whatever might nourish her another day.
As the years passed, the teetering moment of doubt got shorter and shorter, and the answer was always yes.
Shuthmili lifted Keleiros Lenarai in her arms with an awful tenderness and placed the diadem on his head.
Again the lurch of recollection—Csorwe’s face, Csorwe’s eyes bright with Iriskavaal’s malice. Again the mocking voice which started up in the back of her head: After all this time, aren’t you over it? Trying so hard to convince yourself that you still feel what you’ve forgotten? You are a broken thing, and she would despise what you’ve become.
HUSH, said Zinandour, and Shuthmili had a feeling as if someone was stroking her hair, although nobody had touched her for a very long time.
She laid Keleiros down again and rose, pacing, trying to calm herself, counting out the seconds. The claws of the cat clicked on the tiles.
When she could bring herself to look again, Keleiros Lenarai was sitting up, idly scratching behind the ear of the undead cat, which nuzzled against him as if it appreciated the thought. The diadem suited him. He looked like a prince.
“Well,” said Belthandros, looking up at her through Keleiros’ eyes. “It’ll be good to get out of here.”
Shuthmili had to fight the palace all the way to get back to the Turret of the Hand. The Empress must be fretful tonight.
Belthandros took Keleiros’ body back to his usual quarters for the night. This was for the best—it wouldn’t do for anyone to notice that the Hand’s secretary was acting differently—but it still left Shuthmili with the unease of one who has seen a large spider disappear under a bookcase.
On her desk was a half-finished report and an abandoned cup of coffee. Shuthmili didn’t have the energy to heat it, even by magic, so she drank the whole lot cold. It hardly affected her, since Zinandour purged poisons from her system with obsessive vigour, but sometimes it was nice to pretend.
It had been strange to discover that the worst could happen, and the world as you knew it could end, and you would still take your coffee the same way. You still had to eat. You still got dressed. You still brushed and braided your hair. And if you were very lucky or very unlucky—Shuthmili was certainly one of those two things—you still had a job.
She also had a tin of biscuits in her desk for emergencies. She sat mechanically eating one after another until her hunger was beaten into submission. She could send to the kitchens for a proper dinner, but the idea of thinking of something she’d like to eat and describing it to someone else was just too much.
The problem with committing to something when you were young was that you had no idea how long time was capable of taking. When she was twenty-five, the years had felt like an infinite resource, and she’d had so little idea what would be involved in selling herself in service for all of eternity that it had felt essentially meaningless. The fifteen years that had passed felt like stones on which she had blunted herself.
AGREED. I AM AGELESS AND IMMUTABLE, AND YET THESE YEARS HAVE BEEN THE LONGEST OF MY EXISTENCE.
You’re unhappy? said Shuthmili.
JOY AND GRIEF DIMINISH BEFORE ME. I AM GLORY AND CARNAGE. YOU ARE UNHAPPY.
Shuthmili ignored her and got on with the report, until her wrist ached and her eyes blurred with tiredness. She yawned, and tried to spike her own adrenal glands, and felt Zinandour’s opposition as a fog of stubbornness.
YOU HAVE NOT SLEPT FOR THREE DAYS.
Well, if I don’t sleep for another three, that’ll be a new record for me.
IN ANCIENT QARSAZH I DRANK HONEY FROM THE SKULLS OF QUEENS. DO YOU THINK IT AMUSES ME TO PLAY HANDMAIDEN TO YOUR BLIGHTED CARCASS?
I didn’t ask you to, said Shuthmili.
BELTHANDROS IS A DANGEROUS ALLY. WILL YOU MEET HIM HALF SHARP? HE WILL NOT PITY YOUR INCAPACITY.
Shuthmili had to admit this was true. She took herself to bed, an absurdly huge four-poster draped in brocade.
Csorwe’s coat was still hidden folded under one of the pillows. She brushed aside Zinandour’s pitying disdain and reached for it, at first just to touch the sleeve. It was lamb’s leather, warm grey like a pigeon’s wing, patched at the elbows, with deep pockets inside and out. Csorwe had owned the coat longer than she’d known Shuthmili, and it was one of only two things Shuthmili had managed to retrieve from her body.
Shut up. It’s cold.
AGAIN YOU ATTEMPT TO JUSTIFY YOURSELF TO ME. NEEDLESS, FRUITLESS.
The lining of the coat had once had some kind of print, and was now faded to a dull, soft dust colour. The collar no longer smelled like her hair. Shuthmili lay in bed with her knees drawn up to her chest and the coat pressed to her cheek and felt the old impulse to scream, lodged in her throat like a fishbone.
Instead, she returned to the safe at the back of her wardrobe and reached for the last of her treasures.
It was a small drawstring bag of kid leather, bound with a cord braided from Shuthmili’s own hair and laced with the worst curses she knew.
She loosed the cord and tipped the bag out into her palm. It contained a single object, slightly hooked, smaller than her little finger, white and gold.
One of the God-Empress’ first acts upon getting control of Csorwe’s stolen body had been to wrench the gold tusk from her own jaw. Shuthmili, ever a scavenger, even then, scrabbling indiscriminately for scraps, had gathered it up and cleaned off the blood and hidden it away.
The tusk was both oddly heavy and oddly light, for what it was. Shuthmili raised it to her lips and kissed it.
“I am going to win this,” she said. “I promise you.”