“I am a servant of King Pale Empire,” Doctor Lady Lzi muttered to herself, salt water stinging her lips. “My life at his command.”
Brave words. They did not quiet the churning inside her, but her discomfort did not matter. Only the brave words mattered, and her will to see them through.
Lzi told herself it was enough, that this will would see her through to the treasure she sought, and further yet. She held a long, oiled-silk package high and dry as she turned back in the warm surf to watch the metal man heave himself, streaming, from the aquamarine waters of the lagoon. He slogged up the slope beneath breakers rendered gentle by the curving arms of land beyond. The metal man—his kind were a sort of Wizard’s servant common in the far West, called a Gage—had a mirrored carapace that glittered between his tattered homespun rags like the surface of the water: blindingly.
Behind him, a veiled man in a long red woolen jacket held a scimitar, a pistol, and a powder horn aloft as he sloshed awkwardly through the sea, waves tugging at the skirts of his coat. He was a Dead Man, a member of an elite—and disbanded—military sect from the distant and exotic West. Right now, ill clad for the heat and the ocean, he looked ridiculous.
Afloat on the deeper water, the Auspicious Voyage unfurled her bright patchwork wings and heeled her green hull into a slow turn. The plucky little vessel slid toward the gap where the lagoon’s arms did not quite complete their embrace of the harbor. She took with her three hands, a ship’s cat, and the landing party’s immediate chance of escape from this reputedly cursed island. Even royal orders would not entice the captain to keep her in this harbor while awaiting the return of Lzi and her party.
They could signal with a fire in the morning if they were successful. And if not, well. At least it was a pretty place to die and a useful cause for dying in.
Birds wheeled and flickered overhead. A heavy throb briefly filled the air, an almost-mechanical baritone drone. A black fin sliced the water like a razor, then was gone. Lzi sighed to herself, and wondered if she had made a terrible mistake. True, her feet were on the sand and she hadn’t been afflicted with Isolation Island’s purported royal death curse yet, but there was water yet foaming around her thighs. Maybe the eaten-alive-by-maggots part wouldn’t kick in until she was properly beached.
Or maybe the blessing of her royal mission was enough to protect her. And maybe even the mercenaries, too. She had only hope—and the store of sorcery promised by her honorific.
Determination chilled in her belly. She turned her back on the sea and the splashing mercenaries and marched through the water to the dark gray beach, so different from the pink coral sand of most of the Banner Isles. Each roll of the sea sucked sand from under her, as if the waves themselves warned her away. She forced herself not to hesitate as she stepped from the surf: waiting wouldn’t alter anything.
When the solid, wet sand compacted under her bare toes, though, she still held her breath. And…didn’t die. Didn’t sense the gathering magic of a triggered hex, either, which was a good sign. She paused just above the tide line and turned back. While she waited for the mercenaries, she unwrapped her long knife and wrapped the silk around her waist as a sash, then stuck the knife in its scabbard through the sash, where she could reach it easily.
By the time she was done, the Dead Man had also gained the beach. The Gage was still heaving himself forward step by sucking step, his great weight a tremendous handicap.
Lzi threw back her head and laughed. “Well, here I am! Foot upon the sand, and no sign of warbles yet, you cowards!”
Whether the retreating sailors heard her or not, she could not tell. The only one she could spot on deck was Second Mate, and he seemed busy with the sail.
“This was a terrible idea,” the Dead Man said, as he found his stability in the sandy bottom. Water pumped from the top of his boots with every stride. He didn’t dignify their marooners with a backwards glance. Lzi supposed from the stiffness of his shoulders that the stiffness of his neck was quite intentional.
“At least you’ll dry out fast in the heat,” the Gage said, conversationally.
“Crusted in such salt as will rub one raw in every crevice.”
“You should strip down,” said Lzi. “I don’t know how you stand it.” She wrung out her own bright gauze skirt between her hands.
The Dead Man ignored her and thrust his sword through the sash binding his coat closed.
“I’ll be crusted in salt, too, very shortly,” the Gage said. Lzi wondered if it would flake and freckle off his metal hide. He didn’t seem to have corroded yet. He pointed with a glittering hand to the dark blue water the Auspicious Voyage was already slicing through. “How does a coral atoll form in such deep water?”
The Dead Man swept a hand around. “Ah, my friend. You see, this island is unlike the others. It is volcanic. The black sand reveals its nature. That’s not a coral ring. It’s the caldera.”
“You aren’t as ill educated as you look,” Lzi said. She kept her face neutral, hoping the mercenaries would know she meant to include herself in their bantering. “That’s the reason the King from this island chose the name King Fire Mountain Dynasty.”
“Is it extinct?” the Gage asked.
Lzi shook out her orange-patterned wrapped skirt so it would dry in the breeze. “It hasn’t erupted since about 1600, I think.”
The Gage paused—she supposed he was doing a date conversion to his weird Western system of dating by Years After the Frost—and came up with what Lzi hoped was a comforting thousand-year cushion. “That could just mean that it’s biding its time.”
“I’ve heard volcanos are so wont.” The Dead Man tugged his veil more evenly across his face. According to the books, such soldiers revealed their faces only when they were about to kill. “Do you not care to discover if your magical, impervious hide is magically impervious to molten stone, my brother?”
“Oh,” said the Gage. “I think I’ll pass on being smelted.”
“Anyway,” Lzi interrupted, pretending to be impervious to the smirk showing at the corners of the Dead Man’s eyes, “there’s plenty of fresh water on the island for you to rinse yourself in. There’s a stream right there.”
A braid of clear water trickled over steel-colored sand. When she stepped toward it, her bare feet left prints like pearls had been pressed into the wet, packed beach beside their parent oyster shells.
The Gage called her attention to the answering marks on the far side of the freshwater rill at the same moment that she noticed them herself—and just an instant after the Dead Man invoked his Prophet and her Goddess. A furrow, as if a boat had been dragged up the beach to be hidden in the greenery, with the divots of striving feet beside it.
Fresh.
“Isn’t it a strange thing,” the Dead Man said conversationally, “that we should not be the only visitors to such an out-of-the-way, shunned, supposed cursed and abandoned island on the very same day?”
Lzi stopped, staring at the furrow. “Strange indeed.”
“I don’t suppose there’s any significance to this particular date on the calendar?”
After a day’s acquaintance, Lzi had already learned that the more casually curious the Dead Man sounded, the more likely he was to have his hand on his wheel lock. She checked. Yes, there it was, resting on the ornately elaborate pistol butt.
She slapped at a mosquito that was insufficiently discouraged by the sea breeze and the brightness of the sun burning white in the rich blue sky.
“Well,” she said resignedly. “Now that you mention it. But before we talk about that, I’m going to wash the salt off.”
The outrigger was inside the jungle’s canopy, screened and shaded by ferns and vines. Lzi and the Gage stood over it, touching nothing, counting the seats, estimating the provisions cached under canvas for when the paddlers returned. Four seats, and they seemed to have all been filled. Leaving not much room for spoils…
Lzi slapped another mosquito and bent down to peer. She found that what was under the canvas was not food, but blown-glass fishing floats. Perhaps they too were here to steal the dead King Fire Mountain Dynasty’s treasure, and they intended to float the treasure back? Or sink it and mark its location? But then anyone could come along and claim it.
“So it’s possible,” Lzi said, “and perhaps even likely, that His Majesty King Pale Empire was overheard making preparations to rescind the old King’s curse on his island, and perhaps they decided to try to beat us to the treasure. If this interloper should succeed, of course, it would be disastrous for the poor, as King Pale Empire means to use these resources to provide for the needy.”
“That is a thing that still confounds my understanding. How is it that such treasure has come to be left in a tomb?”
“It’s not a tomb,” Lzi said, for what felt like the five hundredth time. “It’s a palace.”
“A tomb,” said the Dead Man patiently, “is perforce where a corpse is maintained…”
“Look at the bright side,” the Gage interrupted, coming back. “We just got significantly less marooned.”
“You design to steal their canoe and abandon them to the haunted island?” The Dead Man slapped at a mosquito as well, less patiently.
“Well,” the Gage said, “I’d still have to walk back. That won’t carry me. But I was thinking that they could take a message to the Auspicious Voyage for us, if they turn out to be polite. And maybe they’d let you straddle the outrigger.”
“Much to the amusement of the sharks,” the Dead Man said, slapping. “Doctor Lady Lzi. You’re a natural philosopher. Can’t you do anything about these mosquitoes?”
“Welcome to the tropics,” the Gage said lightly. “Tell him about the parasites, Doctor Lady Lzi.”
Lzi paused within the canopy and found long-leaved zodia plants. They had a pungent, fecund scent, and a handful of leaves stuffed into a pocket or waistband did a fairly good job of keeping the mosquitoes at bay.
“The fact is,” she said a few moments later while holding a tangle of vines aside for the Dead Man, “having all this gold tied up in mausoleums is murder on the economy.” Her knife was still sheathed in her sash. Whoever had come before them had done a good job cutting a path. While it was regrowing already, it would be useful for a few days more.
“So the current King wants to rob his ancestor’s tomb to put a little cash back into the system?” It was hard to tell when the Gage was being sarcastic. Unless he was always being sarcastic. He was a wicked and tireless hand with the machete, however.
“Not so much rob the tomb as…put the treasure back into circulation. To use as relief for the poor. And, King Fire Mountain Dynasty was not King Pale Empire’s Ancestor,” said Lzi. “Our Kings are not hereditary. Only their Voices are, and that’s because of magic. A retired King can only speak through his female relatives.”
“It would be less hassle if your Kings all came from the same lineage,” the Gage suggested. “Then at least the money would still be in the family, and the new King could use it, instead of its all going to sustain a relic. And the current Kings would keep siring Voices for their Ancestors.”
“Sure,” said Lzi. “There are absolutely no problems with hereditary dynasties. And everybody wants to spend all eternity being bossed around personally by their Ancestors. Smooth sailing all the way.”
“Well,” said the Gage. “When you put it like that…”
The Dead Man looked at Lzi shrewdly over his veil. “Will you be an interlocutor for the current King, when he is gone?”
“Not gone, exactly, either,” Lzi said. “The Kings drink certain sacred potions, which are derived by natural philosophers such as myself. Abstain from most foods, and many physical pleasures. If they have the discipline to stay the course, the flesh hardens and becomes incorruptible. The processes of life stop, but…the life remains. They may continue for a long time in such a state, far beyond a mortal life span. But eventually the flesh hardens to the point where they cannot move or speak on their own. And then they need interlocutors. Voices.”
“Interlocutors like you.”
“King Pale Empire has successfully attained the blessed state,” she said, aware her voice was stiff. “But he does not yet require a Voice. Once he does, a new King will rule, and he will retire to the position of honored antecedent. In the meantime, I am merely his servant, and a scientist. I am not of his blood, though in his kindness he adopted me into the royal family, and only women of the royal line may serve as Voices to the Ancestors.”
“How can you be sure the Kings are actually saying anything through their Voices that the Voices did not think up themselves? It seems like one of the few ways a woman could get a little power around here.”
Lzi had wondered that herself, on occasion. She chose to answer obliquely. “There are stories of Voices who did not do the will of their Kings.”
“Let me guess,” the Gage said. “They all end in tragedy and fire.”
“Stacks of corpses. As must always the ambitions of women.”
“So. This old dead King is not dead, but has no living female descendants willing to serve as his interlocutors,” the Dead Man said. “He’s a King with no Voice. What we are embarked upon, well, sounds like robbery to me, begging your pardon.”
Lzi shrugged. “Politics as usual. The voiceless are always powerless.”
The Gage said, “And is that the future you desire for yourself?”
Lzi opened her mouth to temporize, and wasn’t sure what it was about the Gage’s eyeless gaze that paralyzed her voice inside her. Maybe it was simply the necessity of regarding her own face, stretched and strangely disordered, in the flawless mirror of his face. She shut her mouth, swallowed, and tried again, but what came out was the truth. “I have no people beyond the King.”
“What became of the family of your birth?” the Dead Man asked, so formally she could not take offense. It was prying in the extreme…but the Dead Man was a foreigner, and probably didn’t know any better.
“My parents and brother were killed,” Lzi said, which was both the truth and devoid of useful information.
“I’m sorry,” the Dead Man said. He paused to allow that heavy throbbing sound to rise and fade again, then added, as a small kindness, “I lost my family too.”
“Do you miss them?” Lzi asked, surprising herself with her own rudeness in turn. She had, at best, jumbled memories of her kinfolk: warmth, a boy who teased her and took her sweets but also comforted her when she fell and hurt herself. Two large figures with large calloused hands. Sweet rice gruel served in a wooden bowl.
“The first family, I was too young to remember,” the Dead Man said without breaking stride. Nimbly, he leaped a branch. “The second family—yes, I miss them very much.”
Lzi looked away, wondering how to get out of this one. The Dead Man’s voice had been so matter-of-fact…
The Gage sank up to the knees in the compost underfoot. Lzi thought it was a good thing brass didn’t seem to feel tiredness the way bone and muscle did, or he’d have worn himself out just walking on anything except a paved road.
The Dead Man, kindly, took the opportunity to change the subject. “It’s amazing you ever get anywhere.” The Dead Man crouched on a long low branch, his soft boots still leaving squelching footprints. The wetness of the soles did not seem to impede his footing.
“I may not get there quickly,” the Gage replied, his voice as level as if he sat on cushions in a parlor. “But I have yet to fail to wind up where I intended, and when I pass through a place, few fail to remember where I have been.”
Lzi hid a shiver by shrugging her pack off her shoulder. She drank young coconut water. As she capped the canteen, she shrugged to herself. What else had she to spend her life on? More musty, if fascinating, research? More monographs that no one but other naturalists would ever even care about, much less read? More theory on the function of the body and deriving the essential principles from certain plants? More service to an ideal because she had no ambition of her own to work toward?
Perversely, ironic fatalism made her feel a little less empty inside. If she had nothing of her own to live for, it was surely better to find a purpose in life in serving others, rather than increasing suffering and chaos. If you were alone, wasn’t it the choice of the Superior Woman to serve those who were not?
The Dead Man shrugged. He stood up on his bough, pivoted on the balls of his feet, and ran lightly along the rubbery gray bark while the branch dipped and swayed under him until he reached a point where another limb crossed the first at midthigh. He stepped up onto the other without seeming to break stride and ran along it in turn, toward some presumed trunk invisible through the foliage ahead. The sound of his footsteps faded into the jungle noise before he vanished from view.
He had the sort of physique that grew veins instead of muscles, and it made his strength seem feral and weightless. In so many ways, the opposite of the Gage.
And yet Lzi could not shake the feeling that in every essential way the two were identical. Except that one wore his armor on the outside, and the other beneath his skin.
She did not desert the Gage. She couldn’t have kept up with the Dead Man’s branch-running, and it seemed a poor idea to allow their little party to become strung out. She wasn’t sure if the Gage noticed, because he labored along without comment.
She was relieved, though, when the Dead Man dropped through the canopy above and ran down a broad bough, his tight-wrapped veil fluttering at the edges. He skidded sideways on his insteps until he was just a foot or two above eye level, far enough away that Lzi didn’t need to crane her head back to see him.
“I found the tomb,” he announced.
“Palace,” she corrected, automatically.
He shrugged. “It resembles a tomb to my eye.”
Lzi insisted they pause to eat before pushing any further into unknown dangers—which was easy, in the rich lands of the Banner Islands. They had not even packed supplies: Lzi and the Dead Man simply scanned the earth under the enormous canopy of a breadfruit tree to find ripe, scaly globes, pulled them open, and dined on the mild, custard-like innards. She expected complaints—raw, fresh breadfruit was generally regarded as a bland staple at best—but the foreigner spread a linen cloth that was clean but no longer white across his lap and ate without comment, raising his veil with one hand while scooping morsels from the fruit with the other. Maybe there was no way to eat a ripe breadfruit daintily, but that did not stop him from trying. Lzi wondered what exquisite manners looked like where he came from. Something like this, she imagined.
The Gage didn’t seem to care about food.
The Dead Man finished and wiped his fingers daintily on the cloth. He was rolling the cloth so that the soiled portion would not smirch the clean when that searching drone rose once again.
The Dead Man glanced around, cupping a hand behind his veil to better localize the sound. “What is that?”
Doctor Lady Lzi had a hypothesis, but she didn’t like it very much, and anyway she wasn’t confident enough yet to advance it for discussion. One did not become a Lady Doctor by making assertions in public of which one was not confident, and which one could not back up with facts. “Insects?” she asked.
“Well, no maggot curse yet,” the Gage said as lightly as a seven-foot-tall brazen bass could be expected to say anything.
The Dead Man shook his jacket clean of nonexistent crumbs. “Mayhap we’ve not yet gone far enough in.”
Lzi followed him through the forest. He stayed on the ground this time, and paused at one point to show her four sets of footprints in a marshy place. They were fresh, filling with water but still sharp-edged. One set was smaller than the others.
The Gage looked at the swampy bit and took the long way around. By the time he rejoined them, Lzi and the Dead Man were already paused behind a screen of greenery, staring across a yard of crushed seashells toward a temple, or a palace, or—she had to admit—a mausoleum. The whole was constructed of pillars—pillars upon pillars upon pillars—stacked in tiers with black basalt in the middle, white coral at the center, and red coral at the top with intermediate shades between so the effect, rather than stripes or bands, was as of the fade from black night to crimson sunrise, only in reverse.
Lzi had expected the palace to be overrun with verdancy, the pillars stumpy and jagged. But it was at least somewhat intact and, if not manicured, she could see where the long knives had recently been at work.
“Maybe King Fire Mountain Dynasty is still aware,” she said. “Someone is tending this place.”
“Not the people from the canoe?” the Gage asked.
She shrugged. “They probably had machetes.”
Something burst into the clearing from the jungle to their left without warning, with such speed and force that Lzi stifled a cry of surprise. It was high up, oil-iridescent, as big and darkly barbed as a bluefin tuna and as sleekly shaped for speed. A blur of glistening wings surrounded it, and Lzi had a confused momentary perception of faceted sapphires glittering as big as her two fists before she realized they were eyes.
She hated being right.
“Well,” said the Gage complacently, “that’ll be the thing, then, that’s been making your buzzing sounds.”
“Well, it’s better than a maggot curse, right?” the Gage offered, when they had withdrawn a hundred yards or so and were considering their options. Crossing that crushed-shell barren seemed much, much less appealing than it had previously.
“Giant wasps?” The Dead Man shook his head emphatically. “I think not.”
“Hornets,” said Lzi.
The Dead Man looked at her. The Gage might have also: it was hard to tell in a creature that did not need eyes to see and did not seem to turn his head except when he remembered to.
“They’re called corpse-wasps,” Lzi said, feeling pedantic even as she embarked upon the explanation. “But taxonomically speaking, they are hornets. They form nests. Colonies.”
The Dead Man leaned forward. “So we must expect a great many of these creatures?”
She nodded.
The Gage said, “But they’re probably not interested in humans unless you threaten their nest, right? They eat fruit or something?”
“The adults eat fruit,” she agreed. “But…”
The weight of their attention stopped her, then compelled her to continue.
“…they do sting animals, including people, and carry them back to the nest for the larvae to feed on. That’s why they’re called corpse-wasps. Although, technically, they’re not feeding on corpses, at least not to start, because the prey animals are just…well, paralyzed.”
“Oh, there’s your maggots,” the Gage said to the Dead Man.
The Dead Man rocked back explosively. “You knew about these things?”
“I know they exist,” Lzi said defensively. “I didn’t know there were any here. Anyway, if you separate the infertile workers from the hives, they become really docile.”
She had a sense they were both staring at her though with the Gage it was hard to tell.
“They make great pets.”
“Pets,” the Dead Man said. “People use them like…watchdogs?”
“Oh, no. They’re far too tame for that.”
“Ysmat’s bright pen,” the Dead Man said, and closed his eyes above his veil.
They discussed waiting until nightfall, but Lzi pointed out that many insect species were more active at dusk and after dark, and the hornets could probably sense warmth anyway, so moving by daylight would actually afford them more protection.
“Theoretically,” the Gage said.
“Theory is what we have,” Lzi answered. “I think it’s unlikely, however, that they will be able to carry you off, Brass Man.”
He chimed like a massive clock: his mechanical laughter. “That does not, however, solve the problem of how to get you two past them.”
“Mud,” Lzi said, the excitement of an idea upon her. “And more zodia. The pillars of the palace look too close together for the wasps to fly or crawl through, so I think if we reach it, we should be mostly safe inside. But to get us there—”
“Mud,” the Dead Man said.
Lzi nodded. “And lots of it.”
The first half of their approach across the barren to the palace went, Lzi thought, surprisingly well. The green, heady scent of the zodia surrounded them densely, almost palpable on the air, making her light-headed. Their skin was invisible under a layer of pounded plant pulp and mud.
The only problem was that the mud/leaf compound, which had stayed pliable in the moist shade under the leaves, began to dry and whiten almost immediately as they came out into the punishing sun. She thought they would be all right if they hurried, but the mud cracked and flaked off, and they had not thought to plaster the Gage. It might not be possible for the corpse-wasps to sting him or carry him off, but it seemed as if the sunlight dazzling from his brazen hide nevertheless attracted the giant insects.
They had been walking, crouched down under camouflage improvised from handfuls of palm fronds she’d cut with her long knife, the saw-toothed-stem edges wrapped in torn cloth to protect their hands. The heavy thrumming heralded a shadow passing over: first one, then another, and another, until the crushed shells underfoot were darkened with blurry blotches. The corpse-wasps swirled down toward the Gage, who uttered what Lzi assumed was an ungentlemanly word in his own tongue and drew his ragged homespun robes and hood close about his featureless form.
Lzi ducked. “I should have thought of that.”
“So should I,” the Gage answered. A wasp as long as he was tall veered down, rumbling like a charging elephant, and clanged against his upstretched arm. Lzi stared for a moment. She thought of drawing her knife, then thought how laughable a blade merely as long as her forearm would be against something like that.
Then, as a second shadow swelled around her, she found her feet and glanced over at the Dead Man, who beckoned with an outstretched hand, too polite to grab her elbow and drag her with him. His eyes were white-rimmed, and as she started toward him, bent almost double, he turned and fled beside her.
She was getting the impression that he held no real love for bugs.
Another clang and a heavy, squashing thud followed them. Lzi stumbled while trying to look back and this time the Dead Man did touch her shoulder. “He’ll be fine.”
She had to trust him. Side by side, they ran toward the completely theoretical safety of the palace.
They were doing all right until they tripped over the corpse. It was just inside the pillars, where the shadow of the roof made it nearly impossible to see through the glare of the sun without. In retrospect, Lzi realized that she’d smelled it before she found it, but between the stench of the tomb, that of the festering mud, and the reek of the zodia her memory hadn’t automatically supplied the information that this particular terrible odor belonged to some sort of large and very dead thing.
The body had probably been that of a man, but it was bloated with stings now, the skin stretched and crackling with the products of decomposition. Lzi was startled to see that no maggots writhed through its flesh: surely the smell should have attracted every blowfly on the island by now.
Lzi hadn’t fallen, but she’d sprawled against a pillar in the second rank and her palm fronds had gone everywhere. She turned back, the breath knocked out of her, looking for the Dead Man. She wheezed in horror, her spasming lungs unable to shriek a warning, as the corpse lurched and twitched and began to push itself upright behind him.
Fortunately, Lzi’s wits, even scattered, were sufficient. With her right hand, she fumbled for her blade and shook it free of the sheath, which fell at her feet. She’d worry about that if she lived. Her bruised and scraped left hand, she raised, waving it frantically to get the Dead Man’s attention and pointing past his shoulder.
He had good reflexes, and must have decided she was worthy of at least some trust. He ducked even as he turned, and the corpse’s clumsy, club-handed swipe whistled over his head and thudded against the pillar with a noisome splatter.
“He isn’t dead!” the Dead Man yelped.
“Oh, he’s dead all right,” Lzi answered. “And mercifully, too.” She could see what the Dead Man could not. The corpse’s spine had been eaten away, and beneath the shredding skin pulsated the translucent segments of a great larva.
She hoped he was dead, anyway. Hoped with all the force of her rising gorge even though thick blood welling slowly from some of the fresh tears in the necrotic flesh seemed to give the lie to her desire.
Even as Lzi recoiled, the innate curiosity that had led her to natural philosophy made her focus her attention on the grub. It had a glossy black head like polished obsidian, and Lzi could see the pincery mouth parts embedded in the base of the dead man’s skull. The visible part of each was long as her finger, and the gentleness of the taper suggested that they continued for some distance more within the base of the brain. Segmented legs were visible here and there, grasping deep within the festering body.
The larva contracted along its length, a sick, rippling pulse. The corpse convulsed, whirling toward Lzi now in its staggering, seizing dance. The foul arms windmilled and she glimpsed, with ever-increasing horror, that the eyes within the slipping skin were clear, not clouded and dead.
Storm dragons cleanse it with thunder, she thought, and lunged out of the way. She swung with the knife, but the floor under a layer of plant detritus was mosaic, and what had once been smooth was now heaved by roots. Chunks of stone littered it from the collapsing roof. They snagged her feet and slammed her toes so sharp pain shot up her legs. She wasn’t sure how she kept her feet, then she wasn’t sure how she had lost them. She twisted, falling, and landed on her ass, looking up at the deliquescing face of the horror that pursued her.
The thing staggered like a drunk, dragging one leg and stomping wildly with the other, swaying and wavering. She stuck her long knife out like a ward. Over the blade, she saw the Dead Man raise his right hand. Something glinted bright against the blue of his veil, followed by a stone-cracking retort and the cleansing reek of black powder. The parasite jerked with the impact and collapsed unceremoniously across Lzi’s lower legs, twitching faintly.
Lzi screamed through clenched teeth, in disgust as much as pain, and yanked her ankles clear. She huddled, panting, while the Dead Man swiftly reloaded his gun. A shadow fell over her and she looked up, pulse accelerating.
It was the Gage, his robe and brass carapace streaked with fluids of two or three colors. Ichor, she judged, and probably venom. He was wiping his big metal gauntlet-hands on the robe, leaving unidentifiable streaks. Then he bent and picked up her soft leather scabbard from where it had fallen among the litter.
“Well,” he said, offering a cleaner gauntlet to Lzi, “that seems to have got their attention. Get up. There’s a flight headed this way and they might be able to squeeze through the pillars.”
“Or,” said the Dead Man, without holstering his pistol, “there might be more of those.” He gestured at the thing on the ground, which still quivered faintly. “There were four sets of footprints.”
Lzi pulled herself up with the Gage’s help, bruises stiffening. She stowed her knife. Then she bent down and with both hands hefted a sizeable chunk of rubble, one that made her grunt to lift. She thought of the brown, clear eyes in the parasitized thing’s melting face.
She lifted the rock to chest height, and threw it toward the ground. It struck the host’s skull with a terrible sound and the quivering stopped.
“Now we can go.”
The droning buzz of the corpse-wasps grew heavier, more layered, until Lzi felt the vibrations in the hollowness that had been her chest. She imagined she could watch the tremors shimmer across the Gage’s surface. If she looked back, she could see that the light was dimming not simply because they picked their way deeper into the palace complex, but also because the bodies of enormous wasps layered one over another blocked the white glare of the sun. The insects had a smell, in such quantities: musty, like dry leaves. But not so clean.
None of the travelers asked how they would be able to leave the palace now that they had won entrance to it, but Lzi was thinking about it. Maybe they could wait until it rained. A soaking thunderstorm was never far, in the Banner Islands, where the dragons roamed the Sea of Storms. Flying insects took shelter in rough weather, lest they be blown out to sea.
She hoped that applied to insects eight feet long.
There was light ahead and they made for it. The Dead Man’s teeth chattered behind his veil, but his gun hand was steady. He held a scimitar drawn in his off-hand, and that seemed steady too. The Gage moved with surprising delicacy between the columns, though his carelessness could probably have knocked the whole moldering palace down.
They came to an open space, unroofed, where the drone of the swarm was pronounced but distant, rising and falling like the mechanical noise of cicadas. Litter-filled ornate fountains and statuary bore witness that this had been a formal courtyard. A gigantic tree rumpled the surrounding paving stones and clutched benches it must once have shaded in gnarled roots, as if at any moment it might heave itself free of the earth and come forward, swinging them as weapons. Beyond, a tall building was surrounded by the litter of its own crumbling verandas. Like the pillars, it was shaded from black through white to red. It had once had glass windows, a profound luxury for the era and the place when it was built, and a few unbroken panes still gleamed.
“Can we cross that?” the Gage asked, stopping within the shelter of the penultimate rank of pillars.
“We must,” the Dead Man answered, with a glance at Lzi. She was the employer, she remembered. She could call this off right now.
But her life was service. And besides, they could not go back.
“We must,” Lzi agreed. And was looking about her for a plan, or at least a cluster of zodia plants, when the painted door up the steps behind the wreckage of the veranda opened, and a woman dressed in a white skirt and twining sandals, her long hair braided back as thick as Lzi’s wrist, stood framed against interior darkness.
Lzi touched the hilt of her long knife. “Well, don’t just stand there,” the woman said. “It’s safe to cross the open space right now as long as you move quickly. I spent a long time studying the corpse-wasps. I know a great deal about parasites.”
The darkness inside the doorway, once they had scrambled over the rubble of the wrecked courtyard and climbed gingerly up the steps—which settled under the Gage’s weight but did not crack—was less absolute than Lzi had anticipated. It was only the contrast with the glare of the direct sun that had made it seem pitch-black behind the woman. In reality, the interior of the palace was comfortably dim and cool.
And the interior of the palace was in much better repair than the courtyard or the pillared colonnade.
Ropes of necklaces and heavy bangles shifted and shone as she closed the door behind them, the gold rich against her brown skin. She was tanned—Lzi could see the paler brown behind the waistband of her skirt—but there were no tan lines behind the jewelry. There were wooden amulets sewn into the wrap cloth, though, and those looked long established, with frayed threads and bits of mud in the fine lines of the designs.
“The Emperor is waiting for you. I am the Lady Ptashne, his Voice.” She spoke with awkward dignity, worn like those unaccustomed jewels, and gestured them to follow her.
The woman’s feet and ankles were dirty under the sandals, as if she had walked through soupy mud then shod herself without being able to first clean her feet. Lzi saw the Dead Man gazing at them speculatively over his veil, and she knew he was comparing their size to the footprints beside the canoe. She was about to ask how a Voice came to be so presently arrived in a deserted kingdom, but words interrupted her.
Someone spoke…her name.
She glanced around. There was no one present except the Gage, the Dead Man, and this Ptashne. They were in an entrance hall of crumbling grandeur, hung with silk brocade so brittle it was shredding under its own weight and stacked with furniture coated in layers of dust. The walls were pale coral in shades of pink and white. They had once been hung with tapestries, but the tapestries had broken their threads and fallen from their rings. No one could be hiding behind them.
And the voice that said her name again was like a rustle of wasp wings in her mind. :Doctor Lady Lzi. Have you too come to disturb my rest, Granddaughter?:
She blinked with shock, and though the floors here were smooth, she stumbled so the Gage had to steady her elbow. She saw the Lady Ptashne glance over her shoulder speculatively and frown. Lzi kept her face carefully blank. Experimentally, she thought, King Fire Mountain Dynasty?
:You serve the new King.:
How is it that you are speaking to me, your majesty? I am not your descendant.
:Are you sure?: She could sense his amusement. :Descent through a mother’s line is often forgotten. And what person can say for certain who is his father? You have enough of my blood in you for the palace to awaken to your steps.:
Lzi considered that for a moment. She allowed herself to drift to the end of the group trailing Lady Ptashne, where Lzi could just follow the shoulders in front of her and not concern herself too much with what her features showed.
Who was the man with the wasp inside him?
:Lady Ptashne’s companion. One of them. There are two others. I think one was her husband.:
Do you control the wasps? Did you do…that…to him?
:The wasps are my guardians, but I do not control them. Long ago, I did bind their ancestors to this place. He and the others trespassed and the wasps defended me.: He sounded matter-of-fact.
If he was Lady Ptashne’s companion, how did he come to trespass?
:She was yet Ptashne,: the old King said. :But not yet Lady when it happened. She brought the men with her as a sacrifice, and she has some little talismans that give her certain powers. Will you be my Voice, Granddaughter?:
So the Lady Ptashne was, as the canoe had suggested, a recent addition to the royal household. How had she come to pass unscathed through the corpse-wasps, Lzi wondered, apparently alone of her party of four? And why did she seem so calm, despite the deaths?
I spent a long time studying the corpse-wasps. I know a great deal about parasites.
Lzi said—or thought, hard and clearly—You have a Voice.
:So I do,: the dead King answered. :One Voice. After a fashion. Is it not better to have a choice, than to have no choices?:
But…you have a Voice. Already.
:And you have one, too. Do you speak out with it in your own words? Or do you silence it except when commanded to its use by another?:
It was the same question he had asked before, which she had dodged, but more provocatively phrased this time. Was the dead King needling her? Trying to get her to rise to the bait?
What if I don’t have anything to say?
The undead King did not answer. She wondered if she needed to intend to speak to him for him to hear her, or if he were politely ignoring her own interior monologue.
I serve King Pale Empire, she said. But he does not own my voice.
:That is good to hear, Granddaughter. Ah, you are nearly to the presence chamber. Do not allow Lady Ptashne to know that you can speak to me, Doctor Lady Lzi. Not yet. It would be…unwise.:
Well, that painted Lzi with a wash of unease.
Ahead, Lady Ptashne had stopped before an ironbound door. It seemed recently maintained, and there were fresh scratches around the keyhole, which was sized to admit an enormous old-fashioned key. Ptashne lifted just such a key from inside her skirt pocket. A ribbon connected it to the material of her garment: it had been sewn into place with hasty stitches and thread that did not match.
She turned the key, struggled with the weight of the door before prevailing, and led them into another space, shadowy and echoing from its depths.
Nuggets of glass turned under Lzi’s feet. She was distracted keeping her balance and watching the Gage pick his way carefully until she realized that if the glass did not crush into powder under his feet, then it was not glass at all, but gemstones. Rubies and sapphires in every color of the rainbow littered the floor: a priceless trip hazard.
Lzi thought with frustration of kingdoms where such riches would not be left uselessly to molder as symbols of the bygone might of dead Emperors, but used to support trade, to buy medicines, to feed the poor. How much had her island home suffered through the centuries because of waste such as this? This…all this treasure…How much linen could it buy from the mainland for sails? How much hemp for ropes? The Sea of Storms protected the Banner Islands from any raiders more significant than the occasional pirate. But the Banner Islands, though rich in foodstuffs and spices and hardwood, were otherwise natural-resource poor. Trade was their lifeline. This would pay for trade.
As they reached the center point of the hall, lights flared in sconces along both sides. They looked like torch flames but burned strikingly violet and blue, and there were no torches beneath them. Their light stained the Gage’s bronze hide a most unearthly color and sent thick, watery, reflected bands of radiance rippling across everything in the hall.
More wealth gleamed on every side, and before them, another fifty steps or so along the enormous hall, was a throne whose golden seat hung suspended between two mammoth ivory tusks that crossed at the top in barbaric splendor.
The throne stood empty.
The Dead Man’s step checked. Lady Ptashne, though, seemed to have anticipated it. Without turning her head, she said, “His Majesty is in the Presence Chamber.”
She turned them to the right and brought them to a small door, much more human in scale than the one she had struggled with, recessed between two pillars in the side wall. This one was unlocked, apparently, for she simply manipulated the handle and opened it.
It revealed a small, comfortably furnished room that was lit with the same eerie blue flames, but did not need them. At the far end, two multipaned windows big as doors framed a Song-style ox-yoke armchair of carved wood and cracking leather, fragile with age but still strong enough to support the slight weight of the corpse who slouched in it. He was little more than a collection of brown sticks wrapped in moldering silken brocades, decorated with ropes of jewels. Over the robes, the corpse wore a dust-coated cloak. There were places where the heavy, feathery dust had been disturbed—brushed or blown off—and beneath them Lzi glimpsed the iridescent, translucent wings of insects, sewn together in tiers like the feathers of a bird.
The corpse was mummified, the skin glossy brown as lacquered leather. White bits of bone showed through where the fingers had crumpled or been gnawed by rats.
Following Ptashne, Lzi and the others approached. The Gage’s footsteps made a heavy careful sound on the flagstones. The dead King smelled of moths and attics, dry fluttery things.
:I never could stand that throne room,: said King Fire Mountain Dynasty, and Lzi swallowed and tried not to think too much about the fact that she was in a close little room with his thousand-year-old body. :Drafty old pile. This is a much better place to wait for eternity.:
Lzi bowed low before the chair. After a confused glance, the Gage and the Dead Man did as well.
“King Fire Mountain Dynasty bids you welcome, and rise.”
Lzi hadn’t heard him say any such thing. But perhaps he just hadn’t spoken to her.
Lzi turned to the Lady Voice, and said, “Your friend is dead.”
Ptashne frowned at her in mild distaste. “My husband?” She shrugged.
How had Ptashne known which of her companions they had encountered? The Gage made his chiming chuckle, and Lzi thought of King Fire Mountain Dynasty’s warning about talismans.
Ptashne twisted a hand in the folds of her white skirt. “His majesty commands your assistance. He wishes to be carried from this place, and to the beach.”
Lzi held her breath for a moment, gathering her courage. “What are the floats for?”
“Floats?”
“The fishing buoys. In your canoe.”
“Oh,” Ptashne said. “For floating King Fire Mountain Dynasty back to the big island, of course.”
“Back to the big island?”
“Of course,” she repeated. “You don’t think he wants me to stay here forever, do you? With his treasure and my status as his granddaughter…” Ptashne smiled. “We will have a good life. Of course, if you help me, I will share some of my wealth with you. Now, please have your soldier and your”—she waved a hand vaguely at the Gage—“lift him, and carry him down to the lagoon.”
:That is not what I require of you, Granddaughter.:
And in a flash of comprehension, as if he had shown her a map, Lzi understood what the dead King did require of her. It came on a tremendous warmth, a sense of belonging. Of being part of something.
She rebelled against his request.
I have only found you!
:And would you, too, use me for power and wealth?:
She felt deep shame. Wealth is why I came here. But not for me. For the current King.
:And will he not reward you?:
He has…she stopped. Thought. Given me service. Given me a place.
:Well,: the old King answered. :If that is all you want, Granddaughter.:
I want you, she answered. I have only just found you. Do not make me give you up so soon.
:I am tired. And you see what I’ve had to contend with in certain branches of the family.:
He didn’t move, of course. He couldn’t. He hadn’t moved in a thousand years. But she still had a sense of a dismissive flick of his fingers in the direction of the Lady Ptashne.
“Pick him up!” Ptashne demanded, increasingly shrill.
“Is that what you require us to do?” the Dead Man asked. “It is you who holds our contracts, Doctor Lady.”
You are my only family. She stopped herself from saying it—thinking it—out loud. Whatever she was or was not, she would not guilt-trip a man who had been alone for six hundred years because she was lonely.
“Well, no, actually,” Lzi said. She closed her eyes. She liked this long-undead ancestor whom she had so swiftly become acquainted with. She felt a great, tearing sense of loss as she took a deep breath and said, “I want you to destroy him.”
If she expected an outraged outburst, she didn’t get it. The Dead Man just said, curiously, “So there is in truth no curse?”
“Of course there’s a curse,” she scoffed. “Do you think any of this stuff would still be in there if there wasn’t a curse? But he wanted to be left alone, not protected. And now, he has been alone a very long time, and what he wants is to be gone.”
“How can you know that?” Ptashne said. “You can’t talk to him. I am his Voice!”
“She’s got the contracts,” the Gage said tiredly. “Or rather, her King does. Please stand aside, Lady Ptashne.”
The Brass Man took a step forward. The lady in the white skirt did not step aside. She wheeled and fell to her knees, clutching the mummified legs of the ancient King. They flaked and crumbled at her touch.
“Let me serve you, ancestor!” Ptashne cried.
Lzi felt her mouth shape words, her throat stretch to allow a voice of foreign timbre to pass. :The only service I require is destruction, child,: she said aloud. :What service you offer is for yourself, and not for the kingdom.:
Ptashne’s sobs dried as if her throat had closed on them. She rose gracefully, the cultivated daintiness of a lady. Lzi wondered where she had come from, and what had brought her here. It itched in her conscience and her curiosity that she would probably never know.
Ptashne turned to face the Gage. He towered over her, and she seemed frail and small. Her hands twisted in the waistband of her skirt, clutching at the amulets sewn there.
Her mouth pressed together until no red was left, and Lzi thought if there hadn’t been flesh and teeth in the margin, bone would have rasped on bone. It was the expression of an unwanted child who is reminded that there are children for whom parents make sacrifices.
Lzi felt it in her bones, and knew the interior shape of it intimately.
There are children for whom parents make sacrifices. It’s a thing some take a long while to understand in their hearts even if they see it with their eyes.
Experience is a more potent teacher than observation. And Lzi had never had a sacrifice made for her sake either. A terrible pity took her.
Ptashne looked Lzi in the eyes, forward as a lover, and spoke to her as if to King Fire Mountain Dynasty. “Let me serve you, Grandfather. You are my family. I need you. You are my ancestor, Grandfather. I honor you. I have honored you, and all my ancestors, all my life. With my sorcery and with my search. You owe me this small thing.”
Lzi’s lips moved around that voice that came not from her lungs, but somewhere else. :I am tired, Granddaughter. Take half my jewels. Make a life with that.:
Why do you speak through me? Lzi asked. Why not her?
:She has protections in place for that, as well. I can speak to her, but not through her, and these words need to be spoken aloud.:
“I do not want your jewels, Grandfather.” Ptashne straightened up, her muddy feet in their laced sandals set stubbornly on carpet that was more moth-hole than knot and warp. “I want to be your Voice.” The hard line of her mouth softened. She looked up at the Gage, who had stopped just out of his own ability to reach her, like a man trying not to frighten a cornered kitten.
She said to the giant metal man, “I’ve come all this way for him and it’s not fair, women are only allowed to hold power through men, why won’t he help me?”
It was a child’s voice. It cut Lzi like a knife. The ridges of wound, gummed cloth on the hilt of her machete were rough against her palm.
And then Ptashne steeled herself, and said, “Then I shall help myself.”
She twisted her hands in her skirts. She shouted, a shrill and wavering scream. One of the amulets at her waistband swelled with a green glow like light through young leaves. It streamed between her fingers in rays like the sun parting clouds. The Gage took a step forward, ornate tiles powdering under his foot. The Dead Man reached for his gun.
They were both too late.
The sidelight windows flanking the dead King’s chair of estate shattered in a hail of glass and buzzing. Two infected, flailing men stumbled into the room, followed by a half dozen corpse-wasps. The men both waved machetes haphazardly. The wasps brandished daggerlike stingers damp at the tip with droplets of paralytic poison.
Lzi, with her hand on her sheathed knife, froze. She made one startled sound—a yelp of surprise rather than a moan of terror—and then her body locked in place as surely as if the wasps had already had their way with her. She watched her reflection grow in a gargantuan, glossy green-black thorax. The part of the brain that screams run, run in those dreams where your body seems immured in glass was informing her calmly that this was the last instant of her life.
The Dead Man stepped in front of her and shot the corpse-wasp between the eyes.
Dust sifted from between the stones overhead. The shot wasp tumbled to the floor and buzzed, legs juddering, the spasms of its wings trembling the stones under Lzi’s feet. The sound…the sound of the gun was enormous. It filled Lzi’s ears and head and left room for nothing else. No other sound, no thought—and not even the paralyzing fear.
She fumbled her machete into her hand. She hacked at the nearest threatening thing—the convulsing wasp’s stinger. She severed it in two sharp whacks and looked up to see the Dead Man still standing before her, parrying wild swings by one of the parasitized men. The Gage was fending off two wasps, their stingers leaving venom-smeared dents in his carapace. Ptashne, her hair escaping its thick braid, had fallen back to stand before the chair of estate of the corpse she would have be her King. She had her own long knife drawn from its sling at the small of her back, but was holding it low and tentatively, as if she did not know how she would fight with it.
And between Lzi and Ptashne were five angry hornets and two pathetically disgusting not-quite-corpses. So that wasn’t really a solution.
A wasp came in from the left, furiously intent on the Dead Man as he drove Ptashne’s parasitized companion back, step by step. Its wings and the back of its thorax struck the ceiling as it curved, bringing its stinger to bear.
Lzi stepped forward and brought the machete down hard and sharp, as if she were trying to cut a poison-sap vine with one blow. It struck the underside of the heavy chitinous abdomen and stuck there with a sound like an axe buried in wood. Splinters of the insect’s carapace and splatters of pulpy interior flew, and the machete stuck fast.
With an angry buzz and a clatter of its mandibles, the sapphire-eyed insect tried to turn on her. Its feet scratched at her face and hair. She ducked to shield her eyes and held frantically to the long knife’s handle, locking her elbow and pushing the pulsing, seeking stinger away. The Dead Man was too busy with his maggot man and another of the wasps to come to her aid.
Lzi screamed with all her might and twisted the blade sharply.
The wasp’s carapace shattered with a crack, and the stinger twisted and went slack. The thing made a horrible buzz and tried to bite. She hammered at the jeweled eye with the pommel of the long knife, as it was too close to use the blade. Now she screamed, or at least yelled vigorously.
There was a revolting crunch, and the enormous wasp—which was terribly light, she realized, for its size, as if it were mostly hollow inside—scrabbled at her once more and fell away. She looked up into the featureless face of the Gage, smeared with ichor and more nameless things.
“The wasps are protecting the larvae,” Lzi said, as sure of the truth behind the inspiration as if she had learned it at her father’s knee. “Ptashne doesn’t control the adults. Just the larvae in the corpses.”
“Destroy the King.” The Gage’s head did not turn as his left hand flashed out to snatch at the wing of another wasp as it darted toward the Dead Man. He used its own momentum to slam it into the ceiling, his metal body pivoting inhumanly, like a turret, at the waist. He continued in a level tone—or maybe it was just that all its nuances were flattened by her deafness. “If Ptashne has nothing to fight for, she’ll stop.”
Dragon’s breath, I hope so. Lzi thought she might be desperate enough to keep fighting anyway, having nothing else to live for. “Get me through.”
The Gage did not respond in words. Instead it turned again, seamlessly, and lurched forward, flailing with its enormous arms. It didn’t attempt to prevent the enemies from striking it, and it didn’t seem to care if it struck them. It just created a flurry of motion that surrounded Lzi and fended the enemies away. It walked sideways, crabwise, toward the dead King and his Voice.
He turned, still keeping her in the shelter of his parries, and Lzi was next to the place where King Fire Mountain Dynasty slumped in his finery. She could smell him: not rot, but salt and natron and harsh acetone.
Ptashne seemed to realize what they were about and whirled on them. “No,” she shouted. She would have rushed at Lzi, but the Gage caught her effortlessly around the waist and held her tight. She hammered at him with the pommel of her long knife, and the room might have rung like a bell if Lzi’s ears had not still felt stuffed with wool. Holding on to Ptashne limited the Gage’s effectiveness in fending the wasps away from Lzi, but the Dead Man was between her and the enemy, a whirl of blades and faded crimson coat-skirts.
It was hard, so hard, to turn her back on the fight, on the slashing stingers and whirling blades, the clang of machete on scimitar, the screaming and flailing of the would-be Voice. But she did, ran two steps through the chaos, hefting her long knife, and stopped by the chair of the King.
:That will not do the job, Granddaughter. For this, you need fire.:
“Fire,” she said aloud. She didn’t look, but somehow there was a powder horn in her hand, and a flint and steel.
The Dead Man’s powder horn.
Fire. Black powder would burn nearly anything.
She poured it over the dead King, his rotting robes, his ropes of gold and jewels, his crooked slipping crown. His face drawn tight to the skull, the nose a caved-in hole. His eye sockets empty with the withered lids sagging into them.
She poured the contents of the horn over him, into his lap, into the tired wisps of his staring hair. She dropped the horn. She clutched the flint and iron and raised them over the corpse of the King.
Behind her, all the sounds of battle ceased. The buzzing continued, but when Lzi risked a glance, she saw that the one remaining parasite host had staggered back and was leaning against the wall by the door, and the two adult wasps that were still alive and mobile crouched in front of him, one on the ceiling and one on the floor, protecting the young of the hive but not, themselves, immediately attacking.
“Please,” Ptashne said. She had stopped struggling as well, and now just hung in the Gage’s grasp, bedraggled and bruised, her long knife on the floor where it had fallen from her hand.
“All this for a family,” Ptashne said, tiredly.
:My family is gone,: King Fire Mountain Dynasty said, through Lzi. :And you gave yours to the wasps in exchange for a weapon, Grandchild.:
The Dead Man looked at him, head sideways. At the mummy, Lzi noticed, and not at the Voice. Used to marvels, this mercenary. “You have family in this room.”
I would have given you my life.
:Keep it for yourself,: he counseled. :End this.:
Lzi struck a spark. She had been too cautious and kept her hand too far away. It fell and fizzled. Ptashne screamed.
Lzi struck again. This time it flared, and the powder caught. She backed hastily away from a shower of sparks and the strange dry smoke of burning mummy. King Fire Mountain Dynasty burned like a torch once he caught, and said nothing further in Lzi’s head. Not even the whisper of a thank-you.
Well, it was what she should have expected of a King.
“You ruined me,” Ptashne said dully. “You have ruined everything.”
Lzi glanced at the wasps, which seemed to have no intention of charging these dangerous creatures again. They buzzed menace and held the door. Lzi and her mercenaries were going to have to climb out a window.
“He gave you jewels,” she said to Ptashne. “Take whatever you can carry. May you find joy in it.”
Lzi sat alone on the beach beside a tree, waiting for the sun to rise and the Auspicious Voyage to return. She fretted the edge of her machete with her thumbnail. It was, understandably, dull.
She looked up as two silhouettes approached. “Did you get him?”
The Gage shook his head, which gleamed softly in the moonlight. He sat down on her left, the Dead Man on her right. “We looked. The wasps must have taken their last offspring somewhere safe from the likes of us.”
“Poor man,” Lzi said.
After a while, the silence of lapping waves was broken by the Dead Man’s voice. “So,” he said. “We shall collect our pay soon, and be traveling on. And then, where do you go from here, Doctor Lady?”
“It’s not hard to live here,” she said. She gestured to the jungle behind them, the sea before beyond. “Many people are content with the breadfruit, the harvest of the lagoons, the coconuts and mangoes and the pounded hearts of palm. Many people are content to sail, and swim, and find somebody to fight and make babies with.”
“But it was never enough for you.”
Lzi heard the length of her own pause, and the snort that followed. “Maybe the restlessness runs in the blood like the sea. My parents sailed off in search of an uncharted island and never returned, did you know that? Into the dragon-infested Sea of Storms. They took my brother with them. I was judged too young. They had ambition and it killed them. I had ambition…and also I was afraid.”
“So you studied the arts of science?”
“I learned to read,” she said. “I learned to heal. I learned to kill by poison and by blade, because you cannot learn to create without learning to destroy, and the reverse of course holds true as well. I made a place for myself in the service of King Pale Empire. My life at his command.”
The Dead Man nodded, perhaps sympathetically. He leaned against the tree she sat beside. “But.”
“But it wasn’t enough. I felt like I was scraping mud from the bottom of the well, that it was filling with salt water from beneath.”
“You can only give so much from a well until you fill it again. With rain or with buckets, or with time and the water that rises from within. When you are doing something entirely for somebody else—out of altruism, or out of a need to feel some purpose—”
“What else is there?”
“What are you good for?” He might have smiled. In any case, the shadowy stretch of the veil across his face altered. “You could try wanting something. For yourself. For its own sake. Or getting mad enough about something unfair to decide to do something about it.”
She considered it. So strangely attractive. Find something worth fighting for, then fight for it.
“But what?”
He blinked sleepily. “Doctor Lady Lzi, if you come to that understanding, you will have exceeded the accomplishments of fully half of humanity. And now please excuse me. It will be day before long, and I am going to look for some dry wood for the signal fire.”
She sat on the beach beside the Gage and watched the sun go down. The wind off the water grew chill; the sand underneath her stayed warm.
The Gage spoke before she did. “Do you want to wind up like maggot man back there? That’s what service to the unappreciative gets you. Ask a Gage how he knows.”
She decided not to. “What if you don’t have anything but service?” she asked starkly.
There was a silence. The stars burned through it, empty and serene as Lzi wished she could be.
“I had a family for a time as well,” said the Gage, over the hush of the waves.
“You?” Lzi’s expression of confusion was making her forehead itch. “But you are…”
“Gages are born before we’re made,” said the Gage. “The Wizard needs something to take apart, to animate the shell when she puts it back together again.”
“By the Emperor’s wings,” Lzi said softly.
“I volunteered.”
She stared at him, rude though it was. The light of the moons made blue ripples on his hide.
“Well,” the Gage said, reasonably, “would you want something like me around if it hadn’t decided it wanted to be made and serve you?”
“Were you dying?” Lzi covered her mouth with her hands. She was catching rudeness from these foreigners.
“Not yet. But I needed to live long enough to exact a kind of justice. For my family.”
Lzi hadn’t heard the Dead Man come up behind her. His voice made her jump. “I did live for service. Very like you. And then the service was taken from me.” He thumped a pile of sticks down on the sand. “In this life, one cannot rely on anything.”
“What kept you going past that point?”
“For me,” the Dead Man said, “it was also revenge.”
The Gage had called it justice. Lzi asked, “Revenge for your Caliph?”
The naïve might have mistaken his bark of pain for a laugh. “For my daughters,” he said. “And my wife.”
Lzi couldn’t think what to say, and said nothing, for so long that the Dead Man collected himself and went on.
“That desire kept me alive long enough for others to assert themselves.”
The Gage tilted his polished head. It gleamed with a soft luster in the tropic dark. “Revenge led me to become a Gage,” he admitted. “Since then, I have not met anything that could put a stop to me. So here I am.”
“Is that the only effective purpose? The only way to make a space for yourself in the world that is not…serving someone else’s whim?” Lzi asked. “Vengeance?”
“It is the worst one,” the Gage replied. “But it’s something to go forward on.”
“I don’t have anyone to punish.” Not even the parents who had abandoned her, she realized. For how do you punish those who are dead and gone? But she realized also that she could never make herself good enough, small enough, useful enough to lure them home. Because they were dead, and they were gone.
“All this for family?” Lzi said, and felt that expression push her mouth thin. “She was right, you know. This is the only power of her own that she would ever have had.”
“Yes,” said the Gage quietly. “I know.”
He was silent for a moment or two.
“Then a harder question. What would you be, beyond a servant?” the Dead Man asked her. “What else would you seek?”
Lzi shrugged. “I am not giving up my service. I am useful where I am.”
“What does your soul crave, though, besides being useful?” There was enough light now to see him shift slightly from foot to foot. Morning was coming.
“I suppose the first thing I seek is what I am seeking.”
He touched his nose through the veil, which she thought signified a smile. “Write me a letter when you find it.”
“You’re not staying?”
He shrugged.
The Gage rolled his enormous shoulders, as if settling his tattered homespun more comfortably. Lzi would have to see if the Emperor’s gratitude for the sapphires in her pack would extend to a new raw-silk robe for the brazen man.
He didn’t turn his polished metal egg, but Lzi had a sense that he was looking at the Dead Man…fondly?
“Not here,” the Gage supplied for his partner. “He’s seeking…something else.” He waited a moment, watching a pale line creep across the bottom of the sky. “You could come with us. We’re short a naturalist.”
He’s seeking a home, she thought. Does the destination matter, or is the value in the journey and whom you make it with? “Let me think about it,” she said, and watched the Auspicious Voyage’s silhouette approach across the broken mirror of the lagoon.