The Grass King’s Concubine (46 page)

In the mesh of the orrery, in the canopy overhead, the stars shivered. The breeze fell away, dropped into stillness amid the leaves of the gardens. Tsai’s fountains paused, droplets caught in midleap. All through the Rice Palace, down the walls and under the floors, through pillars and roof tiles, along drains and flues and passages, through plant root and tree root, leaf tip and blossoming head, the thrill ran. For long moments, WorldBelow held its breath.

From his hip pocket, Liyan drew five small straight-barreled keys, all alike in shape and size, each bright and neat, carved from crystal, one for each domain, one for each side of the plinth. He set them to their sockets, one by one, tiger’s eye and white quartz, jet and garnet and aquamarine. One by one, he turned them, and the clepsydra began to move. At its base, the watergate lifted. The waters of the conduit pushed their way within, into the waiting scoops, each dropping downward as it filled, pulling the next scoop after it. At the head of their chain, a gear drive began to run, tripping cogs and levers, setting further chains and shafts into motion. Shivering and thrumming, the clock awoke. It sang beneath Liyan’s feet as he stood at its apex and watched the orrery begin to turn. Beyond him, WorldBelow shook itself and breathed anew.

A lever fell, setting a new cog into motion. Around the clock’s waist, doors began to open, sliding aside. Jacks, green-robed and green-capped, carrying silver bells and brass cymbals in their painted hands, emerged from each one, bowing. Their wooden arms rose and fell, striking high sharp notes from their instruments. The first hour.

The first hour. Across the palace, birds started up from their perches. In the kitchens and chambers, scullions and cooks blinked awake; courtiers turned and muttered and
blinked on their cushions. Bannermen scrambled to stand, reaching for weapons even before they fully woke. Qiaqia snapped from her thoughts, eyes wide and worried. In the small room with its loom and its papers, Julana nipped Marcellan’s arm in her terror. On her beam in the Grass King’s bedroom, Yelena jumped from her doze.

The Grass King sat up, frowning. Lying beside him, Tsai wriggled and turned, began to laugh. “Oh,” she said, gasping. “Oh. That tickles.”

The Courtyard of the Cistern

S
HIRAI HAD MISLED HER.

It did not take Aude long to realize that. The door into her rooms—the Concubine’s rooms—opened now to her touch, and her feet could take her wherever she wished within the palace. But nowhere was there an answer. Room followed room: Fine halls and kitchens, offices and bedchambers, withdrawing rooms and lounging rooms, stillrooms, laundry rooms, weaving rooms and bathing chambers. Stone warriors stood at certain doors or reclined on bunks; piles of garments—some silk, some linen or cotton—lay in heaps on stools or at desks and tables. Bees busied themselves in silent courtyards or basked on window ledges. Everywhere was deserted. The first time she came upon a library, her heart leaped. Line upon line of scrolls lay in long racks, stretching along the sides of a single plain courtyard, each neatly labeled. She pounced on them, lifting out double handfuls and unrolling them on the oblong tables that stood opposite the racks. All her life, she had been taught that answers lay in written words. Somewhere in the scrolls must be what she sought. She located the catalogs and used them to find the sections that seemed most likely to offer what she needed. She wound and unwound the most promising scrolls, scanning each new portion eagerly, until her neck and shoulders burned. She worked through records of harvests and renders, each bushel or bale or
barrel noted on receipt and again on use; account rolls for foodstuffs and fabrics, perfumes and sandals, pigments and plaster, wages and stipends. Another shelf held nothing but dry notations of court rituals she did not know or understand; a third was devoted to judgments in court over lands she had never heard of and officials whose titles were meaningless. A whole wing was given over to poetry and plays and songs, many in tongues she did not know. Nowhere among the labels and catalogs did she find any reference to histories, of this place or any other. Nowhere did she find any hint of what had happened. Nevertheless, head aching and throat sore with thirst, she took an armload back to her room to study through the night, and she found nothing piled upon nothing. She had been tricked, with that casual offer of freedom to roam. If an answer lay anywhere within the Rice Palace, it was well hidden. She needed a map or a guide. Neither was forthcoming. The bureaucrats who had made the libraries and muniments rooms had counted the chambers and windows and arcades of the palace, foot by foot, but they had not thought to map them. It was hard enough to make her way back to her rooms; she might, she suspected, lose herself her for months or years and never find what she was looking for.

A trick, or a simple piece of cruelty. Either way, her precious gain had fallen apart in her hands. As she had in the Woven House, she fell asleep over the scrolls, propped up on her divan.

Her dreams were full of broken blooms, shattered mirrors, empty echoing ballrooms. She wandered through them, her court gown ragged and dirty, lured on by a glimpse of candlelight and a faint hint of distant voices. Marble floors hurt her bare feet; her sides ached with the effort of walking so far in corset and heavy petticoats. In the mirrored fragments, Jehan’s face stared out at her, gray and lax in death. Dust caught in her throat, pain made her limbs heavy as she struggled up steps that grew steeper with each tread. Her abdomen was swollen, but whatever was within
lay sluggish and sour. She was trapped, she was sinking, and there was no one to see or to care.

She woke into hot twilight, her hair tumbled over her face and winding into her mouth. For an instant, the dream still held her, pinning her down, bringing panic. Jehan would not come. He lay out there, somewhere on that empty steppe, his body flayed by the winds. Her head swam, and a vague nausea gripped the pit of her stomach. She gulped and tasted the ends of her hair. A dream, just a dream, and a stupid one that.
I’m on my own here. I shouldn’t be surprised.
She spat out the hair, turning to curl on her side. Jehan was alive and well, she was sure of that. She would know—surely she would know—if any harm had come to him. She closed her eyes, seeking him, and her body conjured the memory of his hands on her shoulders, the smell of him when she coiled close, the quiet noises he made in his sleep. She wrapped her arms around herself, turning her face into the pillow in default of his shoulder. She did not want to be alone. She did not want to have to rescue herself from this tangle. He would come. He had come for her in the Brass City, and he would come now. In the meantime, she would learn everything she could to help them both.

It would do her no good to spend another day wandering through the echoing chambers of the palace. She needed a plan. She was sick with it, this searching, this piling up of questions without answers. If she had stayed at home…There was no point to that wish, either. She was here, and that was that. She wanted Jehan, his body solid against hers, his impatience at her starts, his resigned practicality. Until he came, she must supply all that for herself.

She rolled over, dislodging the scrolls, which slithered to the floor. She looked across at the mural wall. Streaks of light crossed it in amber bars. Had the steppe ever looked so fertile? She could not bring them together, the bright lushness of the painting and the desiccation she had traveled through.
Water. Everywhere, it’s to do with water
. No water for fields and crops, livestock and people. Where did
they go? They could not all still be there, wandering the plain as envelopes of old dry flesh. Most of them, she supposed, would have left long ago, abandoning their yurts and huts to chase a new livelihood in some other place. The rest…She shivered. If there were more of those shambling undead things out there, she did not want to know it. She did not want to think of Jehan up there, out there somewhere, facing such creatures. As for here…She frowned. What had become of those who worked and played in this vast palace? She could not put it together; her mind kept skittering away, to Jehan, to the rags of her dream. Had the women who had dwelled here been no more than ghosts, had they simply stepped through their mirrors into some other space? Or, like Tsai, had they washed away? She sat up and hugged her knees.

Nothing here was human. She could not afford to lose sight of that. And if not human, then…Then what? What became of the wind when it died away? Did it coil away somewhere, tucked into rock crevices? Did it rise up and up and up above the clouds, so high that it became intangible? Or did it simply fall apart, drift into puffs and snatches of breath? She might, she supposed, ask Sujien about that. A smile touched her lips at the thought. He would scarcely thank her for the question. But if air blew away, and stone hardened, what of water? She propped her chin on her knees. Heated, it evaporated; left in a fractured vessel, it seeped away; subjected to bitter cold, it froze. In no case was it gone; it simply transformed itself. Even on the steppe—and she looked back up at the mural—even there, the stone ground had carried with it the memory of water, locked away in that iron ground. And here…She turned, looking toward the entrance to the bathing room and the silent bedchamber beyond it, with that sad small hollow on the bed. Fading, but not yet completely gone. The water that supplied her baths must come from somewhere, a well, a cistern, a spring. If she could find that…

And…
Some small cold thing at the back of her mind was unconvinced.
Finding it does what, precisely?
She frowned.
Surely there would be some clue, some indication of what had happened.
Indeed,
said the voice, and this time it was Jehan’s.
Why should that be? Wells fail and cisterns empty. Even springs can run dry. But that doesn’t tell you why. There can be deeper reasons than that.

“Yes, but,” Aude said, and stopped, startled by her own voice in the quiet room. She shook her head. What caused wells to fail and springs to dry, that was the deeper question. She did not know. Nothing in her education had addressed such issues.

Water mattered. That much she was certain of. The deeds and ledgers of her property were crisscrossed with references to water rights and settlements, to disputes over ownership and access. In the Brass City, shipmasters paid a premium rate for favorable moorings and merchants for well-sited warehouses and mills. The regent’s council sold licenses to travel on the great river or to site water-powered factories, and they levied heavy fines on those who broke their rules. In the great marshes surrounding the city, the boatwomen kept a tight hold on their routes and privileges. And in the country…She was not sure. Some land was better watered than other places, more suited to particular crops or beasts. Her own lands were rich in water rights and water access. None of that told her why water might fail.

The Brass City wells and public pumps frequently ran sour. Jehan had told her that on one of their long wanderings. They had come to a crossroads to find it blocked by a scrim of women carrying jugs and flasks, each one jostling her neighbor, muttering and calling insults at a handful of men who stood around the communal pump, their arms linked. Aude stopped in the middle of the road, transfixed, and Jehan put his hand on her elbow. His fingers dug in, finding the soft place between the bones, so that she exclaimed and tried to pull away from him.

He said, “Come away. This is no place for you.”

The tide of women rustled and surged forward. The ring of men held firm, and five or six more came to join them, shoving their way between the front row of the women and
their comrades before the pump. “There’s no water for you today. The mill master has the right to it.”

Jehan tugged at her again. She ignored him.

“That pump’s city property. It belongs to the street. To those who live here.” The woman who spoke was square-built and squat. Gray hair flopped into her face; her bare forearms were muscular and mottled. “The mill master has no more rights than the rest of us.”

The spokesman pulled a rag of paper out of his sleeve and shook it in her face. “The mill master has any rights he likes. And this here’s the warrant as says so.”

The woman spat in his face. There was a moment of stillness, then the spokesman raised his hand to strike her. From somewhere in the crowd, a jug came sailing to smash into his chest. The man snarled and grabbed for the square woman. On either side of him, his colleagues stepped forward, fists clenching. A barrage of jars and flasks, stones and cobbles, pelted down on them.

Jehan caught Aude about the waist and lifted her backward. She gasped and wriggled, twisting to free herself. His hands were unrelenting. Tug as she might, she could not break loose as he carried her away from the trouble. When at last he set her down, they were in a side street some distance away. She glared at him. “How dare you!”

“Mademoiselle, it’s nothing to me if you get yourself killed in the general way. But not when I’m with you. It’d look bad on my record.”