Empire of Bones Read online

  Toward the head of the valley, the first peaks were visible. They towered up like clouds, tinged with the light of the sun, floating and unreal. It had been a long time since Jaya had been in these mountains, and these were only the foothills of the Himalayas. Remembered awe caught in her throat and she thought: We should not be here. This is somewhere sacred, somewhere only the gods should live. She noticed that Sirru was staring straight ahead, purposefully putting one bare foot in front of another as if drawn by the magnet of the mountains.

  They met no one, only a herd boy with a straggly flock of goats. The child sat silently on a boulder as they passed and gazed at them with wide, frightened eyes. Along the valley, Jaya could see a building—another cottage abandoned in the wake of revolt. It seemed derelict, and no one came out to watch them go by. Jaya was thinking ahead, wondering whether the fort at Yamunotri would be the same, how it might have changed. The past was compressing, folding back upon itself; it seemed only a few days since she had last walked these passes.

  She gazed ahead to the distant peaks, falling now into their familiar configurations: Swargarohini’s spires hidden in cloud; the summit of Bandarpunch arching against the backdrop of the sky. Her husband, Kamal, had known these mountains from childhood, had been raised here among the changing light and the glacial air, and it was her belief that he had come back, his spirit renouncing the wheel and rebirth and fleeing into the snows like the Christian ghosts were said to do. Yet she did not think he would know her if he should glimpse her again. She felt, somewhere deep in her heart, that he had become another kind of being altogether, something as ancient and strange as this alien Sirru who now walking by her side. And she thought: What are we becoming, for surely change is not so far away.

  Her senses retained their unnatural alertness. She could see a hawk coasting on the air, far down the valley, and though it was no more than a speck in the distance she could hear its thin sharp cry. Voices floated past her on the wind like the spirits of the dead, and she could hear the thoughts of those around her in fragmented cacophony. Accustomed as she had become to speaking with the ship, this did not seem so strange, and gradually she learned to filter them out. Rajira was weary; Halil afraid. She placed a comforting hand on the child’s shoulder but he shook it away; she could feel his resentment like a burning coal clasped in the palm of his hand. He still blamed her, and there seemed little enough that she could do about it. She had tried talking to him, but he wouldn’t listen.

  It was very quiet. They had come up onto the path now, and Jaya was concerned that they might meet a pilgrim climbing toward the little shrine that lay at the gate of the fort, but there was no one. The land was empty as far as the high peaks. Way down the valley, she could hear the bells of the goats. A bird rocketed up out of the thin grass and was gone.

  Jaya stepped around a curved wall of rock and suddenly the ruin of the fortress was there before them, unchanged. The Yamuna River, no more than a torrent slicing through the rocks, boiled down toward the valley. The fortress stood on its left bank. Veils of steam from the hot springs drifted across the stones.

  The place where Kamal had died was still there: a rocky ledge jutting out across the river. The old story said that if you bathed in the waters of the Yamuna, you were spared a painful death. So much for that. Jaya had to force herself to look, but of course there was nothing there. Before her surrender, she and two of Kamal’s lieutenants had carried the body up into the glacier, to the lake of Saptarishi Kund. She tore her gaze away from the rock and strode grimly on.

  The fortress was deserted, but there were still traces of the revolution’s last stand: a rotting rucksack tossed carelessly into a corner; empty shells of ammunition littering the stone floor. It even seemed to her for a moment that she could see footprints in the dust and blood on the walls, but then she looked more closely and there was nothing there. With Rakh, she allotted rooms for the night: herself, Halil, and Rajira in one of the abandoned antechambers, the men in another. Sirru had found his own place, out in what had once been a garden but which was now little more than a tangle of weeds around a pond whose water was as dark and still as the bottom of a well.

  When all the necessary tasks were done, she went down to the shattered shrine. The silver image of Yamuna was still there: serene lunar daughter of consciousness and the sun. Perhaps the goddess of the moon would look favorably upon visitors from another world. Jaya breathed a prayer, but had no garlands to offer. The shrine was cold and damp, and she did not stay long.

  Tomorrow, they would head up toward the lake and the passes. There were too many memories here, and besides, Jaya did not like retracing her steps into a place that Amir Anand knew so well. She turned over possibilities in her mind. He would surmise that she had headed up here, but would he think it was too obvious a place for her to stay, or would he suspect that she was attempting a double bluff? Now that Ir Yth had remained behind in Varanasi, would he even care? Jaya believed that he would, and that being demoted would only have fueled his fury.

  She had expected to die here, during those days of revolution, and now she could feel change coming in like a storm over the horizon’s edge. She sat on the windowsill, perched high above the stones of the hillside, and listened to the wind. Rajira, wearing a petticoat and holding a sodden sari in her hand, stifled a gasp.

  “You shouldn’t sit there like that. What if you fell?”

  I’ve already fallen, she felt like saying, but she smiled at the courtesan and shifted to a more secure position. Turning her head, she watched the kites wheel high above the valley, no more than motes in the clear air. Thunderheads were massing over the peaks, and she took a deep, anticipatory breath. Far below, she could see Sirru. He walked slowly, picking his way across the stones and pausing to stare out at the mountains. She saw his arms slide about his waist and wondered whether he was shivering. Then he turned and walked slowly back toward the fort. He moved like someone old. Like I used to move, before they cured me, Jaya reflected.

  Threads of understanding were beginning to pull and weave within Jaya’s mind. Colonization and disease. Sirru had suggested that something had gone badly wrong with this little world, but what, exactly? To people who could speak without words, who spoke with a language of the body, what would sickness mean? Would it mean the same thing as it did to a human? She had lain close to illness all her life: listening to her father talk about the medicine markets, how everything was sewn up by the multinationals and how illness was the only legacy that the poor had to pass down. When the British came, he would tell her, they brought cholera. They brought syphilis. They brought influenza. Disease accompanies colonization like flies accompany shit. And the conjuror’s daughter thought now: But what if disease was the purpose of colonization? What if it was not originally intended to harm? Can illness have functions other than destruction? What does “harvest” really mean?

  There were too many questions…She turned to Rajira, who was shaking her sari out of an adjoining window. Water drops sparkled in the sun.

  “Rajira? This morning…I thought you might be sick. Are you all right?”

  The courtesan gathered up the sari and frowned.

  “I don’t know. I keep hearing voices; I told you that. And it’s like a fever—it comes and goes. Sometimes I feel hot.” She gave a rueful smile. “Then again, I haven’t had so much exercise in years. Maybe that’s it.” But a lost look crossed her face for a moment, as though she sensed that something might be very wrong. Her mouth tightened, and she turned back to her laundry. She barely seemed to notice when Jaya slipped away.

  2.

  Varanasi

  Kharishma had done her best to take Jaya’s place, but she came in a poor second. Tokai’s people reported that many of the acolytes who’d flocked around the Temple of Durga had drifted away, in search of new dreams and diversions, and Kharishma was enraged to find that far from being the center of attention, she had managed to quiet the whole affair down. The military had come and sni
ffed around the temple, accompanied by UN teams, and despite exhaustive tests had apparently found little to occupy them. American soldiers had finally been allowed in, under Pentagon command. Kharishma had gained some satisfaction from their obvious approval of her, but their general had been a cold-eyed man who seemed to regard her as an unwelcome distraction. Eventually she had been forced to withdraw.

  Kharishma did not know how Tokai had gained access to his information, but he seemed to have been granted a remarkably free rein by the government of Bharat. Scientists had taken soil samples from the temple courtyard, but apart from the little animal that had been captured, the monkeys that had once haunted the precincts had vanished. Kharishma did her best to find out what was going on, but Anand wouldn’t tell her a thing, and she rarely set eyes on Tokai. Perhaps that was just as well, because Tokai frightened her, with his old turtle’s face and lipless grin, and the cane always seemed to be sniffing around her sari skirts.

  A few moments of excitement came when Kharishma was interviewed by both Bharati and UN authorities. But though she tried to explain that she was the important one, and Jaya Nihalani no more than an upstart dalit, they didn’t seem to be listening. In her saner moments, during the restless darkness just before dawn, she remembered the look that had appeared in a German journalist’s eyes after a few minutes of talking to her: a kind of wary, watchful amusement, the sort of expression that one might assume when conversing with the mad. When Kharishma would remember this look, she’d fling herself from her bed and begin to pace the echoing precincts of the Khokandra Palace.

  The raksasa had chosen not to be seen by anyone except Tokai, Anand, and Kharishma herself. Ir Yth seemed able to flicker in and out of view, predictably but annoyingly at the least convenient moments. Kharishma had intended Ir Yth to be her pièce de résistance during interviews, given the infuriating absence of the second alien, but the raksasa had suddenly assumed an unbecoming modesty.

  She was weary of dealing with the desqusai, the humans, she told Kharishma. Tokai was different. He understood her; he was sympathetic. When in Varanasi, Ir Yth went into seclusion in the isolation lab; here, in Khokandra Palace, she kept to the little shrine. She seemed to require neither food nor water, and Kharishma’s attempts to gain access to her had proved unsuccessful. Indeed, entering the shrine in a rage a few nights ago, Kharishma had found it quite empty. She remembered looking around, baffled, for the raksasa had not been seen to leave. Then, in a corner of the room, she saw a pair of cold golden eyes staring unblinkingly at her, and nothing else.

  Kharishma, unnerved, had fled the shrine and had not been back since, but she was determined to face the raksasa again. After all, she told herself self-righteously, it had been Ir Yth who had first sought her out and whispered promises of glory in her ear. Wasn’t she supposed to be the savior of the world? She had risked everything and nothing had happened: no plaudits, no congratulations, no alien villain served up to the authorities. Kharishma smacked her fist against the warm stone of the garden wall in frustration. She couldn’t help feeling that the action was going on elsewhere, without her, and that she could not bear. It was center stage or nothing.

  “Wait,” a voice whispered inside her mind. It wasn’t like the silent voice with which Ir Yth communicated; it felt as though someone had lodged deep in her bone and blood and was whispering to her.

  “What?” Kharishma murmured, startled.

  Came back from the market this morning and I said——what is happening to me? My head hurts—/—/ want a glass of water—/

  The voices were all different: male and female, young and old. Kharishma did not recognize any of them. She looked wildly around, suspecting a trick, but the garden was sunlit and empty. She sank down the garden wall among the overblown roses, her arms wound tightly about her knees, and began cautiously to listen.

  3.

  Khaikurriyë

  Anarres and Nowhere One traveled slowly, relying on smell and touch to make their way through the tangled root system. It seemed to go on forever, and Anarres had no idea where they were heading, or even if they would ever be able to make their way up and out. But every time she faltered, she remembered the írHazh and the touch of EsRavesh, and the memory was enough to spur her on. She clambered grimly over roots, beneath trailing lines of fungus, and the earth was thick and clammy under her feet. Anything, she thought, would be better than death at the claws of an írHazh, even a stifling end below ground. And almost anything would be better than the punishments EsRavesh might devise, if he ever caught up with her.

  “Have you noticed,” Nowhere One said cheerfully, somewhere off to her left, “that there’s enough air down here to breathe? So it must be coming from somewhere.”

  “But where?” Anarres froze as something skittered along the root below her. “What was that?”

  “I don’t know,” Nowhere One hissed. “Stay still.”

  Anarres complied, then yelped as something ran across her hand. She felt a prickling of myriad legs.

  “There’s some kind of creature down here!”

  “Probably lots of them,” the Natural said, which did not reassure Anarres at all. Then, to her immediate right, something started to rustle. Anarres’ hands shook on the hard, curved surface of the root.

  “Nowhere One?” Abruptly, the Natural was at her side. He clasped her as the mulch beneath their feet came alive with a thousand writhing forms. Anarres shrieked and buried her face in Nowhere One’s shoulder. A carpet of moving life swarmed up her spine, wriggling amongst her quills. A moment later it was gone, and then Anarres heard a sharp, decisive crunch.

  “I know what these are,” Nowhere One said indistinctly, through a mouthful of something. “House lice. Want some?”

  “No!”

  “Suit yourself.”

  THE house lice had disappeared, for which Anarres remained profoundly grateful, but climbing over the slippery roots was a nightmare task. The roots were wet, and coated with some kind of film that Nowhere One said was a protective measure against decay.

  Anarres, standing high above Nowhere One’s head, called down, “I can’t feel where it ends. It goes higher than I can reach.”

  “Can you climb any farther?” the Natural’s voice floated up from far below.

  “I don’t think so. The roots seem to curve back on themselves.”

  She thought she heard him curse.

  “It’s the end wall of the Marginals. Its own root system is sealed off from the rest of the city, in case anyone tries to infiltrate it.”

  “What can we do?”

  “Stay here for the rest of our lives and grow pale on house lice, or think of a plan.”

  “I’m coming down.” It felt suddenly lonely up there in the stuffy darkness by the end wall. Anarres slithered along the roots to the floor.

  “The trouble is, I’ve no idea how to break the barrier. You’d need a heavy-duty meme to get through this. Or a large axe.”

  “Could we convince it to spit us out?” Anarres asked.

  “That would be hard. This is the wall of the Marginals, not a carnivore.”

  “I wonder what parameters they’ve set,” Anarres said. Something was tugging at her memory. Her own house had gone through a period when it didn’t want to let anyone else in; she was sure now that EsRavesh had done something to it. But Sirru had managed to get in, by lying to the house. She told this to Nowhere One.

  He reached out in the darkness and grasped her arm.

  “How did he lie? Did he tell you?”

  “Yes,” Anarres answered. “Later that night. A friend of his had modified the scale so that when you gave it the right instructions, it broadcast an emergency code. And the house opened up.”

  “Scale modification needs a lot of work, and we don’t have the tools,” Nowhere One said. “But we might still be able to lie…You still have EsRavesh’ implant, that you used to get into the translation storage area; you have khaith codes.”

  “But they were keyed
into the orbital itself. Surely they wouldn’t work here?”

  “The codes will retain an impression of EsRavesh. If you can activate the implant, and enhance it so that the wall thinks a khaith is standing before it, trapped in its root system, it might open up.”

  “Enhance it? How?”

  “Anarres, you do it all the time. You are constantly manipulating your own presence—your own pheromonal signature. This time, you’ll have to do it with someone else’s. I don’t think you realize how powerful you can be.”

  “I’ll try,” Anarres said, doubtfully. “But I’ve never done this kind of thing before.” Even as she spoke, however, she thought, Maybe that is what an a psara in fact does: reflects a lover back upon himself enhancing him in his own eyes. I’m like a mirror. My lovers look at me, and they see their own prowess and allure.

  She touched the implant, and thought about EsRavesh. She conjured up the image of his stumpy hands and thick-petaled mouth. She recalled the musty odor, and wove it expertly into her own pheromonal array. She overcame her revulsion, feeding sexual arousal back upon itself to generate a fantasy of the khaith, conjuring the impression that it was he who was standing before the wall of the Marginals. She could sense Nowhere One off to the side, and, slowly, the presence of another. Gradually, with a corner of her mind, she became aware that it was the dome to which the end wall belonged. She could feel the sunlight on its arch, high above ground; the wet depths of the earth beneath her feet. Chlorophyll seeped through its veins. It was like her house, but larger and more complex.

  It sent, inside her mind, What are you doing down here? Astonishmentalarm/I must alert someone!/

  That will not be necessary, Anarres sent hastily, her modulations laced with overtones of EsRavesh. I was undertaking an inspection, and became trapped. I require access.

  There is another with you. It feels wrong; it is not a clade member. I will alert clade.