Silk fire, p.6
Silk Fire, page 6
Green velvet draped the sandstone interiors, covering centuries-broken control panels. Couches and cushioned mahogany stools lined the walls. Night wind poured through arched windows, washing the room with scent from the lavender oil pots on each sill. The great bed was headed by a pillar rising nearly to the ceiling, curtains spiraling from its apex down the walls. Heart-shaped poems embroidered the silk sheets.
The perfect chamber for a boy with nothing to hide.
Lady Dzaroshardze—my aunt, Dzaro—sat at my table, wearing an older, shrewder version of my own face. Her skirt and fajix were silver-studded black cotton. An iron dog’s-head pendant hung from her throat. Scarlet fire in her eyes hinted mischief; the thin line of her lips promised a building avalanche.
“I dined with Lady Xezkavodz,” Dzaro said, her voice a deep rumble. “Jasho-eshe walked in, bright as the judge herself, bragging he’d mastered you. I went straight to my helicopter to come see. You don’t look duller. Is there anything you’d like to tell me?”
Did she want to know why I still shone? Hurled slurs rose to mind. Essence-stealing whore. Was this a criminal investigation? Sex work had always been legal in War, but courtesans were arrested every year for “improper essence extortion.” Just because Dzaro was my ally and kin didn’t mean she’d believe me. “Dzaxa.” I leant into the honorific. Placate her. Her order keeps the High Kiss rent-free. Her protection shields me from Vashathke’s wrath. “Please, I didn’t…”
“Did Jasho extort you?” Dzaro continued. “You excel at checking your desire. You’ve never lost a drop of essence in the time I’ve known you. Did Jasho threaten or blackmail you into tithing essence to him? I don’t care whose son he is. I’ll have him dragged before Judge Rarafashi and branded Unrepentant if he won’t pay back what he stole.”
For a moment, I didn’t understand. Then the tightness in my chest slackened. “You’re offering to protect me. At the cost of Lady Xezkavodz’s friendship.”
Her hand curled about my wrist. “Family first. Vashathke excepted.”
I flushed. Was she playing a game, or was this true affection? I didn’t have time to speculate. My life depended on concealing I’d breathed Jasho’s new essence. “Please don’t worry. Jasho brought a second courtesan, an untrained boy who spilled his whole store. Sad, really. Only exceptional men succeed in this profession. I’m fine.”
“Are you certain? That must have been upsetting to see.”
Had my lie not convinced her? “I’ve seen worse. I’m no pampered dzaxa boy. I chose this life and I’m strong enough to handle it. Please don’t pry. I can’t discuss a client’s bedroom secrets.”
“You can come to me with anything, at any time, and I’ll help you.” Her grip on my wrist tightened. “Okay?”
“Okay,” I muttered. I had to change the subject before her care sank deeper inside me. I wouldn’t let myself be hurt when she inevitably pulled her love away. What mattered was she saw in me a good, sweet, pleasant young nephew she’d want to protect. A hard-enough image to maintain as a sex worker. “I’m glad you took the helicopter. Street traffic is awful tonight.”
“Did you see the stone dragon? I flew past the eye sockets. They’re glowing like Voro’s sacred forges. Lady Xezkavodz thinks the fire signals the creation of a new dragon. She suggested we buy nets.”
Dragons. I summoned my bedchamber detachment, commanding my skin human. “Let’s talk strategy. How are your friends?”
“Don’t worry about my friends. Focus on your work and leave the rest to me.”
“Please. If I don’t know where they stand, I’ll just get more anxious.”
She sighed. “Well. Right now, they’re happy to endorse whoever I decide on. But no one wants to risk making an enemy of a judge. If we can’t connect them with Akizeké soon, they might choose Vashathke just to save trouble. Maybe I should approach her—”
“I’ve set up a private meeting with Akizeké,” I said, hoping Faziz would come through. So what if the magistrate had boundary issues? I had to forge the alliance between her and Dzaro myself. I had no title or obscene vault of wealth. My value was bringing the right people together, and if I couldn’t do that much, my co-conspirators had every reason to shut me out for good. “I’ll be her date at the state banquet.”
“You’re going? Are you sure that’s wise?”
“She’s a widow. It’s not like her jealous husband will pour acid in my shampoo.”
“She’ll be seated at the high table. Beside Rarafashi and your father.”
I sucked in my lower lip. Dinner with the judge and my father. Their lying red eyes on my chest while the blood on their hands clogged my throat.
“You don’t have to do this.” Dzaro’s gaze weighed me up. “You look… unsettled.”
Unsettled. One word for a man’s anger. The seething pulse in my chest like the beat of a second heart. The distant echo of my mother’s sobs. The sizzle of a brand on flesh. Scarlet eyes flickering past me in a crowd. I will punish you. I will do the justice law ignores.
Yet my aunt wouldn’t understand if I voiced my frustrations. Under the customs of War, gender was as much a public performance as a facet of the soul. When Dzaro had declared herself female, she’d swept off to Warmwater where the jegiseij had knit the change in her flesh and returned with a blazing force of presence. None could challenge her as a true daughter of War.
Judge Rarafashi had embraced her as a sister, and brought her into the imperial household as an advisor. Vashathke had grown strange, bitter toward her. Accused her of betraying a brotherhood they’d never truly shared. All had culminated in a shouting match between my father and his wife that shook the hovering palace of Skygarden and echoed onto the streets below.
For once in his marriage, my father had won. Dzaro had been evicted, and her wound still festered. She and Vashathke had been each other’s worlds as children—rich, but lonely, merchant mother ever traveling, father lost in an opiate haze. She didn’t understand how the truth of herself would turn her little brother against her.
I knew my father better than anyone. He’d rejected Dzaro because it served his game. If any of Rarafashi’s sons revealed a feminine facet in their own souls, decided to transition genders—no doubt something the judge had encouraged—they would almost instantly secure enough support to inherit the throne. Vashathke’s heart would have delighted in wreaking this practical misery: disowning his sister to terrify his sons.
“I’m fine, Dzaro. Truly.” My lips twisted into a false smile. What more lies could convince her to stop prying at my weak points? “I just need a plan to get the Lost District on Akizeké’s side.”
She shook her head, but didn’t push further. “Tell them Akizeké can offer a trade deal when she inherits. What goods can the Lost District sell? Salvage from their ruins, meat from their massive beasts, maybe lumber…” She tapped her cheek with a long, elegant finger.
Unconsciously, I copied her gesture, doing sums in my head.
“I love it when you do that. You’re like the mirror of myself who has fun,” she said.
I laughed. “You’re like the mirror of myself who owns twenty dogs.”
“Eighteen. I sold Buzzy’s last litter. I still have collie puppies if you’re interested.”
No. Pets were too good at making you love them. “Offer one to Sadza. Free with her endorsement. Puppies make the best bribes.”
“Dzkegé willing, I’ll never sink that low.”
“Excuse me, dzaxa.” Kge bowed as she opened the door. Vomit streaked the yellow-and-blue bronto leather of her skirt. The imprints of bright hands covered her bent baton. “Boss, there’s drunk trouble.”
“My favorite kind,” Dzaro said, and we ran for the stairs.
Ria stood, swaying, in a puddle of wine. Red soaked up her skirt. Anger roiled in her topaz-brown eyes. Päreshi, the Fire Weaver who’d come with the envoys, offered a supportive hand. Ria slapped it away.
“How dare you insult my father?” she shouted, slurring the round vowels of the common Engineering tongue.
“Listen to me,” Päreshi answered in the same language. “Your father is a slut who hides behind his beard. He’ll never promote you because he knows me and my allies, all us real, skilled Fire Weavers, threaten his leadership. Yet you hunger for his approval like a fledgling bird. Stop wasting time in naivety. Come with me and the envoys. Learn what we can teach you. Claim your place in history.”
“Do you think I’m not good enough to succeed without shortcuts? I’ll earn my second bracer myself, I swear in Voro’s name—” Ria punched her fist against her own breastbone. The gesture shifted her momentum. She stumbled backwards and sprawled across Sadza’s lap.
Dzkegé’s tits. The ambassador. A heartbeat later, I was at Sadza’s side, mumbling apologies as I rolled a drunk Ria into my arms.
“Koré?” Her eyes pled, wide and vulnerable. “I’m not a complete dumbass, right?”
Then she threw up on my skirt.
Damage control, I mouthed to Dzaro. She moved to pacify the ambassador as I dragged a trembling Ria toward a couch, hoping to salvage the evening and the alliances it promised.
“By the bar,” Bero whispered from the pole—and I looked up to see Tamadza slap Stonefire across the face.
Stonefire reeled, pinned between bar and wall. One Lost District visitor had an arm around her waist. Tamadza pulled her hair, shouting, “Disloyal whore! How dare you go off with her?”
“Enough!” said Stonefire. “She bought my next hour. I don’t belong to you!”
My heart dropped. “Order! Order!” I needed to intervene, but Ria weighed me dead. I couldn’t—
Red-faced and raging, Tamadza brought a pitcher down on Stonefire’s head. Blood flashed under violet light.
Dzaro screamed and raced forward. I dropped Ria on a couch. The world blurred neon as I cradled Stonefire to my chest. She lolled like a doll. I didn’t dare look at the back of her head.
“You dried-up shriveled hole!” Dzaro slammed her knee into the envoy’s face. With one fluid twist of her torso, she had Tamadza in a headlock. “Guards! Murder!”
INTERLUDE: AGE SIX
The Prizeheron
27th Thzejezxo, Year 72 Rarafashi
“Once upon a time, a rich merchant remarried to give her young son a father. But the evil stepfather envied the boy’s bright beauty and banished him to the stables.”—‘The Straw Boy’, a traditional children’s story of lower Victory Street
The last day of my childhood began with a bucket of slops-water flung across my chest.
Bodzi clutched his hands to his belly and laughed. “Got you!”
I’d been cornered by a grocer’s stall. Bodzi and his friends tightened around me. The grocer reached for my arm.
They moved too slow.
I flung a ripe plum into Bodzi’s face. My feet blurred as I escaped, laughing like mad. Shoppers cursed as I weaved starling-nimble around their skirts. I snatched a fistful of chocolates from the confectioner’s and leapt atop a pillar to enjoy my prize in secret.
The market guard nabbed Bodzi and my pursuers. I sucked nougat from my fingers and watched their ears get twisted. Three gave up my name. I marked them for more plums tomorrow.
“Koreshiza.” Boots landed on the pillar’s top. “Starting trouble again?”
My mother, dressed in her bank guard’s uniform, towered over me. Her grey curls fell loose around her face; her sneer alone could stop a thief. I spoke true. “The girls were playing with me. But Bodzi said they were his friends, not mine, and chased me—”
“Six years old, and every boy already wants to rip your face off.” She sighed. “Better too friendly with girls than improper with boys. But I’m not looking forward to fighting off your rivals the next ten years.”
“I got him with a plum,” I said. That struck me as the most important part. But my mother didn’t smile, and I wilted. I’d done wrong.
“No more plums. Let’s get you presentable for the Chosen Heir’s festival.”
My mother dragged me back to our apartment: an ancient bubble in the green glass of the Prizeheron. She dropped me into a tub, dressed me in a new skirt and sandals, and called the man next door to cut my hair.
He set his two-year-old daughter on our floor as he took up shears. “It must be hard, raising a boy alone. You’re a hero, Briza.”
“He’s difficult, but I try my best.” My mother let the toddler fondle her baton.
She’d never let me hold it, no matter how I begged. Like every true baton, the green holdspark knob of a punishing shiki hummed at one end, and the sedative njiji darts pricked free at the other. Scallop shell patterns imprinted the shaft. Her boss had gifted her the weapon after she’d caught her fifth thief.
She was a hero, as a guard and as a mother. She’d raised me after my father had died. I’d never known him, but I didn’t care. My mother was all I needed, and all I needed was to please her.
When my hair was neat, my mother gave me a packet. “You’re old enough now.” Inside lay nickel-alloy bracers, set with garnet chips and embossed with dragon scale patterns. Real jewelry. What boys wore in tales when ladies dueled for their hands.
This Chosen Heir’s festival had to be important.
“You’ll do, though I wish you’d outgrown this baby fat.” She tweaked the skin hanging over the hem of my skirt. I winced. “You like your gift, Koré?”
“They’re beautiful. Thank you, Mama.” I reached out for a hug.
She sidestepped. “Don’t get sentimental, boy. Do as I say.”
With a few quick instructions, she sent me off.
The stair of the Neck rose from the Prizeheron’s gizzard high into the giant glass bird’s brain, where Lady Fidzjakovik held court. Ripples of emerald and gold light poured through the fifteen-foot-thick feathers. Reja ran through the inner lanes, raptors snapping as they passed. People climbed the outer lanes on foot, some imposing and lovely, most stooped under heavy burdens. I darted through their maze in a nimble blur.
Familiar whispers rose behind me. Bright. Ge-imigo. Thothasha.
At the summit of the stairs, guards waved me forward. The doors to Lady Fidzjakovik’s apartment lay wide open. The owner of the Prizeheron sat atop a blue jade throne, her lip curled in boredom, a picture-book in hand. A crowd of children stretched out the door.
Chosen Heir’s festival honors ties between War’s dzaxa and its common children. Once, a general’s only daughter was captured by Entertainment District spies, who demanded she negotiate peace with their neighborhood as ransom. Instead, she adopted a dull girl as her heir, watched her daughter’s execution on live television, and burned three buildings to the ground. The ladies of War commemorate her charity by welcoming in tenant children for sweets and blessings.
Admiring eyes picked me out as I joined the throng. Green eyes. Brown. Blue. No reds among them. I, as ever, was exceptional.
The landlady’s strong voice carried a story to the crowd. “And still, the wandering gods found no place to call home. So bright Dzkegé, their leader, called them together and declared, ‘We will build the grandest city in the universe, large as a planet. We will call it Jadzia, and we will fill it with humans worthy to worship our names.’”
She told the story of Jadzia’s creation—but incorrectly. The marketplace storyteller, an elderly man who wore his locks stacked in a tall spiral bun, said the gods built our world as equals, hand-in-hand. Why didn’t such a powerful person know the truth?
“To bend the laws of physics and lay Jadzia’s foundations, the gods needed eleven arcane substances, from lowly holdstone to priceless holdfast. Yet only the brightest of mortals, the Shapers, could grow substance from their souls on command. The gods’ cleverest servants, the dragons, stepped forward and—”
“It was the giants!” I said, reading ahead on the page she held the book open to. “The giants discovered how to draw substance from the dead, not the dragons. That’s the right story!”
I didn’t realize how loud I’d spoken.
“Come, boy!” A strong hand dragged me through the crowd. A tall, pale girl with ruddy blond curls and strawberry eyes kin to mine. “Don’t struggle! I’m helping you!”
I could break away. But my instinct urged me to be polite, to please her. I let her drag me to the throne and didn’t cry out as she twisted my arm.
“Let the boy go, Iradz,” said Lady Fidzjakovik, not looking up from her book. “You can’t torment every mouthy brat in the building. You’ve homework to do.”
Iradz shoved me forward. “See how bright he shines!”
I shivered at how she said bright. That word followed me whenever I stepped outside. A name for the fineness marking me unique among the slow and ugly children in my hall. Brightness. Something people wanted. Something people envied.
Iradz spoke like it made me a target.
The lady gripped my chin, tugging me into the light. I made myself smile as she studied me—my mother liked my smile, and a boy in a story would be honored by a lady’s attention. “You shine brighter than my daughters. What’s your name?”
“Koreshiza. Just Koreshiza.”
“A mistranslation if I ever heard one. Where’s your mother?”
I told her of our apartment. Lady Fidzjakovik nodded. “Iradz, have your tutor evaluate his essence. I want answers from this Briza.” Fast as lightning, she ran across the room. Children stared disappointedly at her wake.
Iradz grabbed my arm. “You have to obey your landlady. And I’m the heir to the Prizeheron, so you have to obey me, too. Everything in it will be mine.”
She pulled me down an interior corridor, past hanging tapestries, etched poems, and priceless holdlight tablets flashing family photographs. A thin-faced tutor met us in a schoolroom twice the size of my apartment. I stumbled through math problems, needlework, and a poem written in Old Jiké glyphs. The tutor’s stone expression gave no feedback, but Iradz laughed at my every mistake. The joy I’d felt at being chosen melted to a terrifying churn in my guts.
“Don’t let Iradz bother you,” the tutor said. “She has a crush on you, that’s all.” With a smile, she swept up her armored skirts and left us alone.
