“WHAT’S WRONG?” Dzhi asked.
Hsheng closed her eyes and swayed, then sat back down, fearing she would fall.
“I was dizzy,” she said. “Everything looked blurry.”
Dzhi’s brow wrinkled. “Do you think you’re sick? Maybe you’ve been out in the sun too long.”
Hsheng considered that. The two girls sat on the high terrace that surrounded their mother’s summer house in the hills outside of the city. It was a nice change from their dark rooms in the Emperor’s Keep, and Hsheng looked forward to the trips precisely because of the sunshine, the air, the trees and flowers and wide blue sky. She and Dzhi had spent most of the day before and all morning digging little canals with spoons they had borrowed from the kitchen. The plan, once they were finished, was to have the servants fill them with water so they could sail toy boats on them. It wasn’t hot, and there was a nice breeze. The sun felt good on her skin.
“I don’t think it’s the sun,” she said.
“Did you eat this morning?” Dzhi wondered. “You get so absent-minded.”
“Yes,” Hsheng said. “It’s just—maybe I am sick.”
“What?” Dzhi asked.
“It’s just—the food didn’t taste like anything.”
“That’s peculiar,” Dzhi said. “Did you have the berries? Those were good.”
“Yes,” Hsheng said, “with honey. They tasted like sand.” She shrugged. “I ate them anyway. And the sweet cakes. I don’t think they had any salt or ash in them. And I’m still hungry.”
“They had plenty of both,” Dzhi said. “You must be sick. Maybe you should go tell Mother.”
Hsheng did that, reluctantly. Her mother put her in a cool, dark room and brought her a cup of water. She took a sip.
“Could I have some honey drink instead?” she asked.
Her mother looked at her for a moment then took the cup and tasted its contents.
“This is honey drink,” she said.
“Oh,” Hsheng said.
“Lie down for a while,” her mother told her.
Hsheng did as she was told. After a time she felt no better, but she also felt no worse. Bored, she rose and went to find Dzhi.
Her sister wasn’t there, but the canals they had dug were now full of water. Dzhi had scooped mud from the canals and used them to form small temples, towers, and houses along the banks. It made Hsheng smile. That looked like fun. She knelt by the small ditch, reached her hand in, and brought out some mud. She looked over, across the terraces, to the distant outline of the fortress and the Earth Center Tower.
That’s what I’ll make, she thought. Her own version of the tower. It would be taller than any of Dzhi’s buildings.
She started piling the mud. It didn’t want to keep its shape; it kept trying to flow into a lumpy mound, but she incorporated dry dirt to stiffen it up, and finally her tower began to gain height. She was just beginning to be pleased with it when she grew dizzy again. She put her head down, smelling the damp soil. For the first time she was afraid. Maybe something was wrong with her. Something bad.
She started, realizing she must have fallen asleep. Then she realized Dzhi was there, talking to her. No, yelling at her.
“What is wrong with you?” her sister demanded.
“Nothing,” she said. “I fell asleep.”
“I mean that,” Dzhi said, glaring at something.
Hsheng followed her gaze. Where Dzhi’s buildings had been there was now only ruin. Someone had knocked them all down.
“I didn’t do that,” Hsheng protested.
“No? Then who did?”
“I was asleep!”
She stood up, but then everything spun around and around, and her knees wouldn’t hold her up.
“Hsheng!” Dzhi cried as she fell to the ground.
* * *
HSHENG WOKE but could not move. She tried to cry out but was unable to find her voice. Her will moved, strove, worked to make itself felt, but her body was cut off from her. Her mind festered and filled with the rot called fear.
After what seemed a very long time, something entered the darkness, dim red snail trails that pulsed and faded away. They distracted her, lessened her fright, formed patterns that seemed familiar. Eventually she understood that they were words. Someone was talking to her. Someone was calling her name.
She asked her arm to move, and a finger twitched. She commanded her eyes to open, and there was light.
For sixty breaths she could do no more. She counted them. Then she slowly tilted her head.
She was in a room she did not know. The floors and walls were all of pale yellow stone marked here and there, as if someone had written on them, but after studying them she saw that instead the marks appeared to be various sorts of shells imbedded in the polished rock. Some looked whole, some cut in half so she could see the spirals inside. The light she saw that by came through a narrow window. She lay on a bed raised a little from the floor, and next to it a man sat on a stone bench. Talking to her. She had seen him before, although it had been a long time.
“Father?” she asked. “Emperor?”
“You hear me now, daughter? Have you come back to the world?”
“I’m scared,” she said. “It will be better from here on,” he assured her. “The mind-rot will clear.”
“But what happened?”
He smiled. “You are my daughter,” he said. “My true daughter, my heir. I have waited so long, I had begun to think you would never arrive. If I had known it was you, I would have protected you. But there was no way to know that. Generations have passed. Many of my children have lived and died, and none of them were you. But now everything will be fine.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You were too far away from the Earth Center Tower,” he said. “You could not tolerate the distance. By that I know you.”
“Is that where I am? The Earth Center Tower?”
“Yes.”
“But I’ve only been in the tower a few times.”
“True. But your mother’s rooms in the Keep are near enough. Her summer house—that was where you were when this happened. And it is too far away.”
“But I’ve been to the summer house before. Many times.”
“That was before you awakened. Things are different now.”
“I still don’t understand, Father.”
“You will, in time. And you will see that what you gain from this will outweigh what you have lost.”
She nodded. “I’m feeling better,” she said, moving her limbs. Everything worked now, and she felt not only well, but strong. She sat up.
“Can I go back now?” she asked. “Dzhi and I were making something. And Mother is planning a party of some sort.”
“You can’t go back,” he said.
“You mean until I’m well?”
“You can’t go back, ever. From now on you will stay here, with me, in the Earth Center Tower.” He spread his hands. “This is your room. If it does not please you, I will find you another.”
She blinked and looked around. “This whole room is mine?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. But—does this mean I shall never see Mother or Dzhi or Sueh again?”
“You can visit them when they are in their rooms in the Keep. You can stay there when you wish. And you can go out into the fortress. But if you go any further, what just happened to you will happen again. Do you understand?”
She tried to say something, but her throat was choked with sobbing. The Emperor waited patiently for a little while. Then he put his hand on her shoulder. He had never touched her before, and it shocked her so much she forgot to keep crying.
“In the tower, you will be my first,” the Emperor said. “In the tower, none shall be above you but me. You are my one true child. I am so glad you are finally here.”
He rose to his feet. “Rest. I’ll have food and drink brought. Then we shall talk further. Later your mother and sisters will visit. All will be well, you’ll see.”
She watched him leave. Then she got up from the bed and walked across the stone floor. It was cool and made her bare feet tingle. She looked out the window and saw the fortress far below her, the city, the river, the distant mountains. A breeze blew in.
A little later, a small old woman arrived with a platter of fruit and sweet cakes. It was all Hsheng could do not to snatch them up and stuff them in her mouth, but she managed to wait until the woman left. She couldn’t remember ever having been so hungry, and the food looked and smelled wonderful.
But it didn’t taste like anything. She might as well have been eating mud. She ate it all anyway, and, although there was plenty of it, when she was done she was almost as hungry as before she’d opened her mouth.
* * *
HSHENG’S SERVANTS prepared the vapor bath, and when it was ready, she disrobed, entered the darkened stone chamber, and rested on a bench of jade, inhaling the fragrant steam, preparing her mind and body for what was to come. Sweat slicked her then ran down her body in hundreds of rivulets, like a mountain shedding snowmelt in the spring. When she was done, she washed with cold water then used incense wands to dress herself in dry smoke.
She mounted the steps to the top of the tower and gazed in every direction through the tall, arched windows, taking four long breaths at each of the eight points. In the northwest, lightning flickered. A storm coming their way, or moving to the north?
In the east, the moon had risen. She stared at it, feeling the slight tremble she always did, the pull of the small hairs of her arms and neck toward the dim lantern of night. She studied the marks of the ancient war, the scars of a world blasted clean of life. Images stirred in her mind of fantastic beasts, forests of gigantic flowers, plains of moss and fungi, still, silvery pools. But then—storms of lava, obsidian winds, dry lakes brimmed with shattered bones. As if she had been there, or was somehow still there, although she had not been. She had been born here, in this place, thirty-seven years ago. The visions, no doubt, were merely from dreams she did not remember having.
From the sky and the eight winds she turned her gaze downward.
The fortress below was not quiet. Things were happening. Unexpected things. Something had burned a hole in the rooftops near the Bright Cloud Tower, but it was more than that. She could sense it. She closed her eyes, focused her will, and then went to the center of the room and stood between the four mirrors there. She kindled coals in a bowl and sprinkled dried, broken flower petals on them. She stood straight and faced the north mirror, which was of obsidian. She spoke the names she knew; she sang the verses she had learned. Then she turned south, to a mirror of polished blue stone and did the same, then west to a copper mirror. To the eastern mirror—the silver mirror—she did not speak.
And they came, the ix, the eerie phosphorescent reflections of the dead, the parts that remained of people after their real souls were gone, the most awful bits of the people they had been. They pressed against their sides of the mirrors. They moaned and imprecated and chattered incessantly. She could feel their lust for her, their yearning to infect her with their awful substance, but they could not reach through the surface of the mirrors. But she could, and they knew it. She teased them, reached for them, pretending that she might touch them just a little, just slightly, if they told her what they knew.
Among them were three that were angrier, brighter than the rest. Newer. So new they did not yet understand they were dead and had not yet learned the toothless, tongueless speech of ghosts. But unlike the older spirits, who were mostly faceless, these still looked something like they had in life, so their mere presence told her a lot.
After that she sat alone, drinking tea made from a flower that no longer grew anywhere. It was sharp and bitter and the only thing she could taste, so she savored it. She burned resin of the whitegum tree to purify her from the pollution from the ix. And she thought about what she had learned.
Dzhesq, Hsij, and Zu were all dead. Three tower masters fallen in less than the span of a day. But there had been no report of it. No alarm raised. As far as she knew, she was the only living person in the fortress aware that they were deceased. Except for the killer, of course.
She took another sip of her tea, considering. What was happening, really? According to some of the other ix—the ones who could speak—the tower masters had all been killed by the same person, but none of the spirits were able to tell her who it was or even what they looked like. That meant sorcery or at least someone protected by a spirit or spirits. Her father had just begun his war against Zełtah, which was unlikely to be a coincidence. But was the murderer an assassin sent by Zełtah, or had one or several of the tower masters decided that the war presented them with an opportunity to act?
She needed to know these things and more. The brief rest and the tea had refreshed her, but, considering the speed with which things seemed to be moving, there was no time to waste.