Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 48

Moran turned with his gun, coolly tracking the Creature. He did not see his prisoner rise up from the ground clutching a rock in his bound hands, and my shout came too late. Even as he spun, the villain laid him out.

Then, suddenly, Miss Irene Adler was standing behind the prisoner, something glittering in her hand. She drew her arm back, and with a Valkyrie shout she plunged the Count's dagger deep into the Arab's back. The man stiffened, shuddered, and clawed, tied hands thrust into the air as if to drag Miss Adler off his back. I was eerily reminded of the poor, wounded elephant.

He sagged to his knees as the Creature snarled its throbbing snarl and spun about on its haunches. It took a step toward Miss Adler and screamed as only a cat can scream.

The prisoner fell to the ground dead, and Miss Adler stood defiant and braced behind the corpse, ready for whatever death might find her. Seeming unaffected by the death of the Arab, the Creature crouched to leap. Pain grinding in my broken leg, I started to drag myself upright with some futile idea of hurling myself on the thing.

At that moment, the rain came.

The monsoon was upon us like a wall of gla.s.s, and the Creature screamed again-this time, in agony. It turned this way and that, frantic to escape the raindrops, like a dog that seeks to elude a beating. Each drop sizzled and steamed as it struck, and with each drop the devil's light flickered, spots appearing on its hide like the speckles on a coal sprinkled with water.

It twisted about itself, shrieking, and finally seemed to collapse. A sickening scent of char rose from the wet ashes that were all that remained.

My leg flared at last into agony, and a black tunnel closed upon my sight.

I groaned and opened my eyes on a vision of bedraggled and ineffable beauty tucking a jeweled dagger into her reticule. There was a tarpaulin under me-wet, but drier than the ground-and another one hung over the branches of the tree to s.h.i.+eld me from the worst of the rain. I recognized it as gear Rodney had carried. Moran lay beside me, under a blanket, quite still.

She laid a damp cloth on my forehead and smoothed back my hair before she stood. "Your leg is broken. I beg you to forgive me for leaving you in such straits, Mr. Larssen. I a.s.sure you I will send help, but I must leave at once: it is a delicate matter, and vital to the security of a certain Baltic n.o.bleman that the theft of this dagger from his household never be proven-either by the English or the Russians."

"Wait," I cried. "Miss Adler-Irene-"

"You may certainly call me Irene," she replied, something like amus.e.m.e.nt in her voice. I saw that her gloves were burned through, and the palms of her hands were blistered.

I tried for a moment to formulate a question, but words failed me. "What has happened here?" I finally asked her, trusting that she would understand.

"I am afraid you have been rather overtaken by events, my dear Mr. Larssen ... Magnus. As have we all. I came here to retrieve this dagger, which was stolen from a friend of mine. The rather vile Mr. Kolinzcki, whom I fear is neither a Count nor a Lithuanian but an agent of the Tsar, stole it and brought it here with the intention of providing it to this Afghan sorcerer."

She spurned the corpse with her toe.

"For all I know, he intended some foul ritual of human sacrifice, which may have greatly discomfited the British army. At the very least, it seems to have had the power to control that." She gestured expressively to the pile of ashes. "A pity I had to kill him. I imagine he would have befuddled British intelligence greatly, if they had the chance to interrogate him. But once I understood that he was somehow holding back the storm ..."

"Monsoon. If I may be so bold as to correct a lady."

"Monsoon." She smiled.

"But how? You cannot tell me how?" I wished I could grit my teeth against the pain in my leg, but they chattered so that I could not manage it. I did not look to where Rodney lay, out in the cold rain.

"It seems that there are things in heaven and earth that lie beyond our ken as Western minds of scientific bent."

I nodded and a wave of pain and nausea threatened to overwhelm me. "The Count?" I asked.

She lifted her strong shoulders and let them drop, her expression dark. "Left behind and eaten, I presume. I a.s.sure you that your a.s.sistance has been invaluable, and that the war in Afghanistan may now come to a close."

She set a pan of rainwater and a loaded pistol close by my hand. "The colonel is alive but unconscious-it seems the blow rendered him insensate." A final hesitation, before she turned to go.

She turned back, and seemed to study my face for a moment. I hoped I saw something like affection there. "I am also very sorry about Rodney."

It was a very long, cold night then, but the villagers and Dr. Montleroy came for me in the morning. We did not speak, then or ever, of the thing we had seen.

James survived, although Conrad never regained himself. I had occasional dealings after with Colonel Moran, until he left the region for cooler climes. I understand he has come to a very bad end.

As for Miss Adler-her, I never saw again. But my dreams are haunted to this day by her face and, less pleasantly, by those eerie words-Ia! Ia Hastur cf'ayah 'vugtlagln Hastur!-and I have never since been able to take up a gun for sport.

Love Among the Talus You cannot really keep a princess in a tower. Not if she has no brothers and must learn statecraft and dancing and riding and poisons and potions and the pa.s.sage of arms, so that she may eventually rule.

But you can do the next best thing.

In the land of the s.h.i.+ning empire, in a small province north of the city of Messaline and beyond the great salt desert, a princess with a tip-tilted nose lived with her mother, Hoelun Khatun, the Dowager Queen. The princess-whose name, it happens, was Nilufer-stood tall and straight as an ivory pole, and if her shoulders were broad out of fas.h.i.+on from the pull of her long oak-white bow, her dowry would no doubt compensate for any perceived lack of beauty. Her hair was straight and black, as smooth and cool as water, and even when she did not ride with her men-at-arms, she wore split, padded skirts and quilted, paneled robes of silk satin, all emerald and jade and black and crimson embroidered with gold and white chrysanthemums.

She needed no tower, for she was like unto a tower in her person, a fastness as sure as the mountains she bloomed beside, her cool reserve and mocking half-lidded glances the battlements of a glacial virginity.

Her province compa.s.sed foothills, and also those mountains (which were called the Steles of the Sky). And while its farmlands were not naturally verdant, its mineral wealth was abundant. At the moderate elevations, ancient terraced slopes had been engineered into low-walled, boggy paddies dotted with unhappy oxen. Women toiled there, bent under straw hats, the fermenting vegetation and glossy leeches which adhered to their sinewy calves unheeded. Farther up, the fields gave way to slopes of scree. And at the bottoms of the sheer, rising faces of the mountains, opened the nurturing mouths of the mines.

The mines were not worked by men; the miners were talus, living boulders with great stone-wearing mouths. The talus consumed ore and plutonic and metamorphic rocks alike (the sandstones, slates, schists, and shales, they found to be generally bereft of flavor and nutrition, but they would gnaw through them to obtain better) and excreted sand and irregular ingots of refined metal.

The living rocks were gentle, stolid, unconcerned with human life, although casualties occurred sometimes among the human talus-herders when their vast insensate charges wholly or partially scoured over them. They were peaceful, though, as they grazed through stone, and their wardens would often lean against their rough sides, enjoying the soothing vibrations caused by the grinding of their gizzards, which were packed with the hardest of stones. Which is to say carborundum-rubies and sapphires-and sometimes diamonds, polished by ceaseless wear until they attained the sheen of tumbled jewels or river rock.

Of course, the talus had to be sacrificed to retrieve those, so it was done only in husbandry. Or times of economic hards.h.i.+p or unforeseen expense. Or to pay the t.i.the to the Khagan, the Khan of Khans might-helive-forever, who had conquered Nilufer's province and slain her father and brother when Nilufer was but a child in the womb.

There had been no peace before the Khagan. Now the warring provinces could war no longer, and the bandits were not free to root among the spoils like battle ravens. Under the peace of the Khanate and protection of the Khagan's armies, the bandit lords were often almost controlled.

So they were desperate, and they had never been fastidious. When they caught one of the talus, they slaughtered it and butchered the remains for jewels, and gold, and steel.

As has been mentioned, the princess of the land had no brothers, and the Khatun, finding it inexpedient to confine her only daughter until marriage (as is the custom of overzealous guardians in any age), preferred to train her to a terrifying certainty of purpose and to surround her with the finest men-at-arms in the land. To the princess and to her troop of archers and swordsmen, not incidentally, fell the task of containing the bandit hordes.

Now, the bandits, as you may imagine, had not been historically wellorganized. But in recent years they had fallen under the sway of a new leader, a handsome strong-limbed man who some said had been a simple talus-herder in his youth, and others said was a Khanzadeh, a son of the Khagan, or the son in hiding of one of the Khagan's vanquished enemies, who were many. Over the course of time, he brought the many disparate tribes of bandits together under one black banner, and taught them to fletch their arrows with black feathers.

Whether it was the name he had been given at the cradleboard, none knew, but what he called himself was Temel.

To say that Nilufer could not be kept in a tower implies unfairly that she did not dwell in one, and that, of course, would be untrue. Her mother's palace had many towers, and one of those-the tallest and whitest of the lot-was entirely Nilufer's own. As has been noted, the Khatun's province was small-really no more than a few broad plateaus and narrow valleys- and so she had no need of more than one palace. But as has also been described, the Khatun's province was wealthy, and so that palace was lavish, and the court that dwelled within it thrived.

Nilufer, as befitted a princess who would someday rule, maintained her own court within and adjacent her mother's. This retinue was made up in part of attendants appointed by the Khatun-a tutor of letters, a tutor of sciences, a tutor of statecraft and numbers; a dancing-master; a master of hawk and horse and hound; a pair of chaperones (one old and smelling of sour mare's milk, the other middle-aged and stern); three monkish warrior women who had survived the burning of their convent by the Khagan some seventeen years before, and so come into the Khatun's service-and in part of Nilufer's own few retainers and gentlewomen, none of whom would Nilufer call friend.

And then of course there was the Witch, who came and went and prophesied and slept and ate as she pleased, like any cat.

On summer evenings, seeking mates, the talus crept from the mines to sing great eerie harmonies like the wails of wetted crystal. Nilufer, if she was not otherwise engaged, could hear them from her tower window.

Sometimes, she would reply, coaxing shrill satiny falls of music from the straight white bone of her reed flute. Sometimes, she would even play for them on the one that was made of silver.

Late one particular morning in spring, Nilufer turned from her window six towering stories above the rocky valley. The sun was only now stretching around the white peaks of the mountains, though gray twilight had given a respectable light for hours. Nilufer had already ridden out that morning, with the men-at-arms and the three monkish women, and had practiced her archery at the practice stumps and at a group of black-clad bandits, slaying four of seven.

Now, dressed for ease in loose garments protected by a roll-sleeved smock, she stood before an easel, a long, pale bamboo brush dipped in rich black ink disregarded in her right hand as she examined her medium. The paper was absorbent, thick. Soft, and not glossy. It would draw the ink well, but might feather.

All right for art, for a watercolor wash or a mountainscape where a certain vagueness and misty indirection might avail. But to scribe a spell, or a letter of diplomacy, she would have chosen paper glazed lightly with clay, to hold a line crisply.

Nilufer turned to the Witch, darting her right hand unconsciously at the paper. "Are you certain, old mother?"

The Witch, curled on a low stool beside the fire although the day was warm, lifted her head so her wiry gray braids slid over the motley fur and feathers of her epaulets. The cloak she huddled under might be said to be gray, but that was at best an approximation. Rather it was a patchwork thing, taupes and tans and grays and pewters, bits of homespun wool and rabbit fur and fox fur all sewed together until the Witch resembled nothing so much as a lichen-crusted granite boulder.

The Witch showed tea-stained pegs of teeth when she smiled. She was never certain. "Write me a love spell," she said.

"The ink is too thin," Nilufer answered. "The ink is too thin for the paper. It will feather."

"The quality of the paper is irrelevant to your purpose," the Witch said. "You must use the tools at hand as best you can, for this is how you will make your life, your highness."

Nilufer did not turn back to her window and her easel, though the sun had finally surmounted the peaks behind her, and slanted light suffused the valley. "I do not care to scribe a love spell. There is no man I would have love me, old mother."

The Witch made a rude noise and turned back to the fire, her lids drawing low over eyes that had showed cloudy when the dusty light crossed them. "You will need to know the how of it when you are Khatun, and you are married. It will be convenient to command love then, your highness."

"I will not marry for love," said the princess, cold and serene as the mountains beyond her.

"Your husband's love is not the only love it may be convenient to command, when you are Khatun. Scribe the spell."

The Witch did not glance up from the grate. The princess did not say but I do not care to be Khatun.

It would have been a wasted expenditure of words.

Nilufer turned back to her easel. The ink had spattered the page when she jerked her brush. The scattered droplets, like soot on a quartz rock, feathered there.

The princess did not sleep alone; royalty has not the privilege of privacy. But she had her broad white bed to herself, the sheets and featherbed tucked neatly over the planks, her dark hair and ivory face stark against the snowy coverlet. She lay on her back, her arms folded, as composed for slumber as for death. The older chaperone slept in a cot along the east side of the bed, and the youngest and most adamant of the monkish warrior women along the west side. A maid in waiting slept by the foot.

The head of the bed stood against the wall, several strides separating it from the window by which stood Nilufer's easel.

It was through this window-not on the night of the day wherein the princess remonstrated with the Witch, but on another night, when the nights had grown warmer-that the bandit Temel came. He scaled the tower as princes have always come to ladies, walking up a white silken rope that was knotted every arm's-length to afford a place to rest his feet and hands. He slipped over the window-sill and crouched beside the wall, his gloved hands splayed wide as spiders.

He had had the foresight to wear white, with a hood and mask covering his hair and all his face but for his eyes. And so he almost vanished against the marble wall.

The guardians did not stir. But Nilufer sat up, dark in her snowy bed, her hair a cold river over her shoulder and her b.r.e.a.s.t.s like full moons beneath the silk of her nightgown, and drew a breath to scream. And then she stopped, the breath indrawn, and turned first to the east and then to the west, where her attendants slumbered.

She let the breath out.

"You are a sorcerer," she told him, sliding her feet from beneath the coverlet. The arches flexed when she touched the cold stone floor: of a morning, her ladies would have knelt by the bed to shoe her. Scorning her slippers, she stood.

"I am but a bandit, princess," he answered, and stood to sweep a mocking courtesy. When he lifted his head, he looked past a crescent-shaped arrowhead, down the shaft into her black, unblinking eye, downcast properly on his throat rather than his face. She would never see him flinch, certainly not in moonlight, but he felt his eyelids flicker, his cheeks sting, a sharp contraction between his shoulder blades.

"But you've bewitched my women."

"Anyone can scribe a spell," he answered modestly, and then continued: "And I've come to bring you a gift."

"I do not care for your gifts." She was strong. Her arms, as straight and oak-white as her bow where they emerged from the armscyes of her night-gown, did not tremble, though the bow was a killing weapon and no mere toy for a girl.

His smile was visible even through the white silk of his mask. "This one, you will like."

No answer. Her head was straight upon the pillar of her neck. Even in the moonlight, he could see the whitening of her unprotected fingertips where they hooked the serving. A quarter-inch of steady flesh, that was all that stayed his death.

He licked his lips, wetting silk. "Perhaps I just came to see the woman who would one day be Nilufer Khatun."

"I do not care to be Khatun," Nilufer said.

The bandit scoffed. "What else are you good for?"

Nilufer raised her eyes to his. It was not what women did to men, but she was a princess, and he was only a bandit. She pointed with her gaze past his shoulder, to the easel by the window, on which a sheet of paper lay spread to dry overnight. Today's effort-the ideogram for foundation-was far more confident than that for love had been. "I want to be a Witch," she said. "A Witch and not a Queen. I wish to be not loved, but wise. Tell your bandit lord, if he can give me that, I might accept his gift."

"Only you can give yourself that, your highness," he said. "But I can give you escape."

He opened his hand, and a sc.r.a.p of paper folded as a bird slipped from his glove. The serving, perhaps, eased a fraction along the ridges of her fingerprints, but the arrow did not fly.

The bandit waited until the bird had settled to the stones before he concluded, "And the bandit lord, as you call him, has heard your words tonight."

Then the arrow did waver, though she steadied it and trained it on his throat again. "Temel."

"At her highness' service."

Her breath stirred the fletchings. He stepped back, and she stepped forward. The grapnel grated softly on the stone, and before she knew it, he was over the sill and descending, almost silently but for the flutter of slick white silk.

Nilufer came to her window and stood there with the string of her long oak-white bow drawn to her nose and her rosebud lips, her left arm untrembling, the flexed muscles in her right arm raising her stark sinews beneath the skin. The moonlight gilded every p.r.i.c.ked hair on her ivory flesh like frost on the hairy stem of a plant. Until the bandit prince disappeared into the shadow of the mountains, the point of her arrow tracked him. Only then did she unbend her bow and set the arrow in the quiver-her women slept on-and crouch to lift the paper bird into her hand.

Red paper, red as blood, and slick and hard so that it cracked along the creases. On its wings, in black ink, was written the spell-word for flight.

Blowing on fingers that stung from holding the arrow drawn so steady, she climbed back into her bed.

In the morning, the Khagan's caravan arrived to collect his t.i.the. The Khagan's emissary was an ascetic, moustached man, graying at the temples. The Witch said that he and the Khagan had been boys together, racing ponies on the steppes.

Hoelun Khatun arranged for him to watch the butchering of the talus from whose guts the tribute would be harvested, as a treat. There was no question but that Nilufer would also attend them.

They rode out on the Khatun's elderly elephant. An extravagance, on the dry side of the mountains. But one that a wealthy province could support, for the status it conferred.

A silk and ivory palanquin provided shade, and Nilufer thought sourly that the emissary was blind to any irony, but her face remained expressionless under its coating of powder as her feathered fan flicked in her hand. The elephant's tusks were capped with rubies and with platinum, a rare metal so impervious to fire that even a smelting furnace would not melt the ore. Only the talus could refine it, though once they excreted it, it was malleable and could be easily worked.

As the elephant traveled, Nilufer became acquainted with the emissary. She knew he watched her with measuring eyes, but she did not think he was covetous. Rather she thought more tribute might be demanded than mere stones and gold this time, and her heart beat faster under the cold green silk of her robes. Though her blood rushed in her ears, she felt no warmer than the silk, or than the talus' tumbled jewels.

The elephant covered the distance swiftly. Soon enough, they came to the slaughtering ground, and servants who had followed on a.s.ses lifted cakes and ices up onto the carpet that covered the elephant's back.

Despite its size and power, the slaughter of the talus was easily done. They could be lured from place to place by laying trails of powdered anthracite mixed with mineral oil; the talus-herders used the same slurry to direct their charges at the rock faces they wished mined. And so the beast selected for sacrifice would be led to the surface and away from others. A master stone-mason, with a journeyman and two apprentices, would approach the grazing talus and divine the location of certain vulnerable anatomic points. With the journeyman's a.s.sistance, the mason would position a pointed wrecking bar of about six feet in length, which the brawny apprentices, with rapid blows of their sledges, would drive into the heart-if such a word is ever appropriate for a construct made of stone-of the talus, such that the beast would then and there almost instantly die.

This was a hazardous proceeding, more so for the journeyman-rather trapped between the rock and the hammers, as it were-than the master or the apprentices. Masons generally endeavored to produce a clean, rapid kill, for their own safety, as well as for mercy upon the beast. (The bandits were less humane in their methods, Nilufer knew, but they too got the job done.) She licked crystals of ice and beet sugar from her reed straw, and watched the talus die.

On the ride back, the emissary made his offer.

Nilufer sought Hoelun Khatun in her hall, after the emissary had been feted through dinner, after the sun had gone down. "Mother," she said, spreading her arms so the pocketed sleeves of her over-robe could sweep like pale gold wings about her, "will you send me to Khara-Khorin?"

The possibility beat in her breast; it would mean dangerous travel, overland with a caravan. It would mean a wedding to Toghrul Khanzadeh, the sixth son of the Khagan, whom Nilufer had never met. He was said to be an inferior horseman, a merely adequate general, far from the favorite son of the Khagan and unlikely, after him, to be elected Khan of Khans.

But the offer had been for a consort marriage, not a morganatic concubinage. And if Toghrul Khanzadeh was unlikely to become Khagan, it was doubly unlikely that when his father died, his brothers would blot out his family stem and branch to preclude the possibility.

Hoelun Khatun rose from her cus.h.i.+ons, a gold-rimmed china cup of fragrant tea in her right hand. She moved from among her attendants, dismissing them with trailing gestures until only the Witch remained, slumped like a s.h.a.ggy, softly snoring boulder before the brazier.

The hall echoed when it was empty. The Khatun paced the length of it, her back straight as the many pillars supporting the arched roof above them. Nilufer fell in beside her, so their steps clicked and their trains shushed over the flagstones.