CHAPTER VIII

Snow on the mountain. Cold wind, biting. Cold water, the river’s depths. Dark, dark. Kaeo is drowning deep in the dark.

The wind smells of snow, dry, cold, burning his nose, his throat, sucking the heat from him; lips crack, bleed in the cold. Rank barnyard stench. Animals. Something groans, some beast. He cannot see it; he sees only the stars, the distant stars falling. They leave streaks of light like the colours inside the shell of a mussel. Faint crunch, rocking. A canoe crossing the great pool of the market by deserted night, the stars over him, under him. Stars over him, cold and sharp and close in the blackness, white expanse and the wind wails like a trapped ghost. There are ghosts trapped in Yeh-Lin’s sunken palace in the Golden City, damned to guard it forever.

Sharp pain. She has struck him in the face. She does, when Kaeo does not see what she wishes, when the words leave his tongue and pour from him meaningless, or when she believes they do. She is a fool, a fool; the empress is a fool to believe herself a goddess and the chosen daughter of the Old Great Gods. She is a fool who wishes to see and punishes him when he does not see what she desires.

But he does see, he does, he does. What dreams the gods dream come only fractured, broken to smallest fragments. Shattered and tossed in the ferment the tea makes of his poisoned mind.

The desert. Snow in the desert. Stone like a madman’s dream. Corals in the desert. A beetle, he, dragging a slow way through a forest of lichen frozen to stone, old logs rotting in the lord’s forest preserve to grow mushrooms, delicacies for his table and they’ll be beaten at the very least if they are taken here, poaching, and his sister clings close as something shoots by but it is only a woodpecker, big as a crow, black, white, flash of red. His mother beats them; the lord might take them and brand them his slaves for their crime, but she cooks the mushrooms. It is the next spring she sells them. Stone formed like lichen, like mushrooms for the lord’s table, towering high against the stars. He is the madman. He is the dream. Stone. Storm.

The desert, the empress says, seizing that. He comes from the desert. The badlands. Fool, ranting of mushrooms. Who is he? The false heir of the gods, who is he, how do I know him? The messenger of my Gods cannot see him. Tell me, tell me, how can he die?

The heir of the gods, the child of Nabban. The false god is here, false, lie, dupe of—

She strikes him, or maybe it is the fist of the captain of giants. He did not know he had risen to his feet, but he must have because he falls, he feels himself falling, a long time falling, like a star, and like a star he bursts in shards and fire.

A star, a broken shell, crushed, all meat prised out, empty, dead. She prays to raise a storm, and storm rises in the night. The heir of the gods of Nabban will not die of a storm, he says, not like the wives of the Exalted Otono, sent into exile on the island province of Vansaka and sunk in an autumn storm, which is why the Kho’anzi of Lower Lat Province, father of the second wife, made a treaty with the Wild Girls of the tribes and withdrew his army from the border, letting the hordes who had slaughtered the governor of Dar-Lathi and burnt the fortress-town of Ogu pour out, across Lower Lat and into Taiji, a flood rolling inexorable now towards the lands of the Imperial Demesne. The high lord suspects sabotage; he does not suspect the storm itself. Buri-Nai’s fan clatters a threat. She does not want to hear his opinions. The queens of the tribes are cannibals, barbarian headhunters of no account; the reverence the chieftains hold them in founded on the lie that they are the daughters of the paramount god of the highlands, the perverse marriage ritual enacted in every generation ended by Bloody Yao’s civilizing conquest. The Old Great Gods will never let them come within sight of the Golden City.

His tongue is thick and swollen again, and he chokes on blood and bile. The tea is yellow as bile, and he has given up resisting when they bring it to him. When the empress wants the prophet of the Daughter of the Gods to dream for her, they will pour it into him regardless, and he will choke and gag and dream the same in the end.

Prophet of the Daughter of the Old Great Gods. Prophet of the empress. Prophet of the gods she says are dead and gone but their dreams flow through him when drinks the tea, and she has killed five wizards, diviners who dreamed, since she brought him to the palace, trying to see if their dreams would show her the enemy she wants to see.

She strikes him. The guards throw him to the floor. It has happened, will happen. It is happening again. She cannot see. She is the mask and the mask wears her, the mask hides unseen and she strikes him, the guards throw him to the floor. He dreams, but he is only an actor, a singer of songs, his words have never been his own. He vomits at her feet, but that is the poison they steep for him, yellow as bile, bitter in the throat, in his nose, foul on the tongue, churning his stomach so he cannot eat. She is only a ghost, he says, a forgotten ghost, nameless.

The heir of the gods comes from the desert and the north and the snow and his shield is fire and ash and bone. The heir of the gods comes like a king and the sky is the banner over him and his horse is white as snow. He is the wind that blows off the mountains; he will sweep you all away.