Crown of Smoke Read online

  “And if you do choose to leave, we’ll require you to chew enough sultis that you never knew you were here, even before you pass through the valley. I’m not one to gamble.”

  Even if I wanted out of here, I never want to go through those realizations again.

  She shrugs and presses a square of stone that recedes into the wall. The door swings closed as she leaves, shutting with a soft click.

  I cross to the polished granite basin in one corner, alongside a deep bath. Thick bars of soap sit in a woven basket. I bring one to my nose. Lime and basil. Unusual combination.

  The bed is covered with a blanket decorated with an embroidered six-petalled flower. Dahkai. Just like the carvings in doors and stone back in Aphorai City – though this one is inside a circle. When I sit, the mattress yields kindly beneath my weight. I give the pillow an experimental prod. Feathers. Laced with chamomile and lavender to aid sleep. Seems the Order of Asmudtag enjoys its creature comforts.

  There’ll be time enough for washing and rest. But first, I want to see what the others have made of all this. I tentatively press the mechanism I’d seen Luz use on the stone door. It slides open.

  Out in the hall, Kip is guarding the next door down.

  “How is he?” I enquire of Nisai.

  She folds her arms. “Are you tired after all that travel?”

  “Exhausted.”

  “Then imagine how he feels.”

  She’s right. I’ve been so preoccupied with my own grief that I’ve not been checking in on Nisai as much as I should have. It’s clear the poison continues to have lingering effects, even if he does seem to grow stronger by the day.

  “You know where Barden is?”

  She waves down the hall.

  I start in that direction.

  Light spills from a doorway. But it’s not Barden’s. It’s Luz’s. She’s standing over a large desk piled with scrolls. She gestures for me to enter, sinks into the chair behind the desk and takes up a scroll from the pile, waving it under her nose.

  “Pass me the molshir essence, would you, petal? Top shelf, third jar from the left.”

  I retrieve the jar, knowing the right one from the purple-red hue extracted from the plant’s leaves.

  Luz dips a brush in and washes a thin film over the scroll. As if by magic, words begin to appear behind the others, these ones pale and glowing rather than of dark ink.

  “How’d you do that?”

  “My informants are thin on the ground, but they all honour our system. We only ever write surface-level messages that are completely innocuous if intercepted. The real message is hidden beneath. But if you use the wrong reagent, you’ll destroy it.”

  “How did you know this one needed molshir?”

  She taps her nose. “The code is in the scent. Whatever perfume used on the scroll has a matching reagent. And the codes are updated regularly.”

  She studies the scroll but gives nothing away as to what it reveals.

  I crane my neck, blushing when I realize she’s noticed.

  “You want to see, petal?” She rises from her desk and hands it to me.

  I take the scroll and pretend to read. Luz leans against the desk, long legs crossed at the ankles, as she watches me.

  The letters on the parchment are a mess. Reading is a big-enough challenge at the best of times, let alone with two messages running into each other. But I’m not about to let Luz in on that. Everyone here seems to act all high and mighty, as if their scat doesn’t stink. And Luz is just as annoying as ever, like sand in your clothes – once it’s there, it’s almost impossible to get rid of every last irritating grain.

  So while I’d love to know what’s in that message, I’m not going to give her the satisfaction.

  Finally, I manage to make out a few words.

  Ekasya.

  Shield.

  Dungeon.

  Dead.

  Each word is a blow. Just because you know something is true, doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of it.

  “Satisfied, petal?”

  I hand back the scroll, swallowing hard. Luz stands and crosses to the fireplace, lights the parchment with a candle and tosses it into the grate. Leaning on the hearth, she watches as the message goes up in pungent smoke, expression unreadable.

  When there’s nothing but ashes, she returns to leaning on the desk and pops something into her mouth, taking a long moment to roll it over her tongue. The exhale is practised, elegant, and curls towards me as if it had been sent on an errand. Clove. “You can’t read, can you? I thought as much back when you signed your contract before the perfume trials.”

  “As if I can’t,” I sputter.

  “Don’t consider changing trades – you’re a terrible liar. Being able to read, on the other hand, is useful no matter one’s vocation. Reading can take you wherever you wish to be. It’s one of your many shortcomings that we’ll have to remedy, long term.” She looks back to the fire, the flames reflected in her dark blue eyes. “Though it’s probably for the best, on this occasion.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  She stands and brushes invisible dust from her robe. The movement reveals she’s still wearing her travelling clothes beneath. I would have thought she’d be the first to want to wash away the stench of the trail.

  She runs her hand along the shelves, retrieving a jar and a series of vials she slips into a leather holder, rolling it up and tying it securely. Both get stowed in the pack beside the door. “Feel free to take a look around. Use anything you need while I’m away.”

  As if it’s a reflex, my gaze flicks to the shelves. There must be hundreds of ingredients here. Many of them I’ve never heard of. “Away? Where are you going?”

  I turn back towards the desk.

  But Luz is already gone.

  CHAPTER 3

  ASH

  “I must survive,” I murmur to the sweltering, sticky stone of the cell wall. “I must survive.”

  It’s a refrain I’ve repeated countless times over countless hours until the words themselves almost become devoid of meaning. Perhaps all it is now is the very sound of them, the feel of them whispering from my mouth and into the hot, fetid air of the dungeon, that tethers me to this life. Without them, my mind may have lost itself.

  I thought I’d known pain. The heartache and fear of my father seeing me as a curse. The anguish of watching my mother wither and fade before my young eyes. The deep, gnawing hunger that only comes from being a child alone in the streets for moons on end with barely a morsel of food passing your lips. Old pain. Buried pain. The blades of memory dulled with the passage of time.

  There has been newer pain, too. The devastation of seeing Nisai on the verge of death – a harm I should have protected him from. The anguish of knowing I’d led Rakel to what could have been her end. I can still see the guard who seized her in the throne room and the red, red blood trailing from where his knife pressed against her throat.

  After that, only agony. The pain when I was no longer me.

  Now I know I’ve never had a notion of true pain.

  None at all.

  How many moons have I been here? Two? Three? Four? Long enough to grow a full beard, long enough for it to mat with filth.

  During that time, I’ve been scraped, sliced, my veins drained of vial upon vial of blood. Heated metal instruments seared red welts in their wake. My arms were stretched on a rack until they dislocated from my shoulders, only for one of Zostar’s black-robed Guild of Physician assistants to count the heartbeats it took for my joints to click back into place with a sickening pop.

  And Zostar himself? He satisfies himself with excising sections of my tattoos with the smallest and sharpest of scalpels, the neat segments of inked skin and flesh quivering in specimen jars as he bears them, smiling, to wherever he’s conducting the rest of his macabre research.

  Through it all, my body heals. Even if the middle toe they removed down to the knuckle didn’t grow back as they hypo
thesized, the wound took mere days to knit over the bone until it was once again embedded beneath flesh and smooth skin.

  More than once I’ve wished it wasn’t so, that instead of healing I’d succumb to festering or blood loss and slip from the mortal realm.

  Because next came the long nights when I realized through a searing fog that Zostar must have ordered them to stop putting Linod’s elixir in my water. Nights I spent sweating and shaking, emptying my stomach on to the floor because I couldn’t make it to the slop bucket, retching and convulsing as my body was wracked with cramps long after there was nothing left to expel. Then, I shamed myself with the amount of times I wished I would die, wishing the curse that courses through my veins to make me whole again would this time fail.

  But even during the worst of it, there would be distant glimmers.

  Amber eyes that challenge with fierce tenacity or question with tender fragility. A smile that spreads warmth through my chest. The scent of desert rose.

  I’d remember why I must persevere.

  Rakel is out there somewhere, far above this labyrinthine dungeon. She’s in the light. But for how long? She has no idea who was truly behind Nisai’s poisoning. Who hunted us across the Empire. Who hunts her still.

  In the worst of the most-recent sessions, when my captors flood a sealed-up room with a rancid-smelling smoke until I’m choking, hands curled into claws that want to tear open my own throat for the chance at some air, the only thing that keeps me from succumbing is my thoughts of the two people I most care for in this world.

  Where are they? Are they together? I imagine them taking refuge somewhere safe; Rakel’s determination to set things aright will burn like a fever. Nisai will stay her hand until he’s confident of a plan. He’ll be thinking of the big picture, of what’s at stake, that the threat could have come from so many places within the capital or beyond. That he must be certain before his next move.

  Would it have yet crossed his mind that his biggest enemy is the man appointed physician to his father? The man who has long been closest to the ailing Emperor, if Kaddash has not yet finally succumbed to the Affliction. The man who paved the way for Iddo to take up the Regency, and who undoubtedly plans to strike Nisai down again.

  “I must survive,” I repeat to the wall. “I must find a way out of here.”

  “Ash?” The timid enquiry comes from the next cell.

  I’m too exhausted to move, but for a small, sad smile on my lips. Until I found myself in the dungeons beneath Ekasya, I never would have thought I’d be relieved to know the walls have ears.

  “Ash, I’ve got to tell you something. It’s important.” Del’s almost-adolescent voice warbles and breaks on the last.

  I haul myself to my feet, rolling the stiffness from my neck, and cross to the opposite wall. There’s a crack in the mortar near the rear corner of the cell, down at shoulder height if I sit with my back to the hot, clammy wall, the black Ekasyan stone as heated as it gets in the sun up on the surface far above. It’s just enough space to hear through.

  “I’m here,” I murmur into the gap.

  “Thank the Twins.” Del’s Hagmiri accent is pronounced enough to be evident even in whispers, betraying the fact he only left the mountains recently. The boy had visited the capital with his elder brother and neither of them, apparently, were prepared for the press of Ekasya’s market. They’d been separated, and Del found himself lost in the warren of back alleys off the main spokes of the city’s boulevards, where he ran into two large men who had snatched and bound him and thrown him on the back of a cart. The only thing he’d noticed was they each had a tattoo of a black sun on the inside of their wrist.

  The Brotherhood of the Blazing Sun.

  It would be cruel to tell him so, but the coincidence of Blazers finding him so soon after his arrival in the city seems … off. I’d wager his brother had always intended to trade more than the cedar oil they’d spent weeks lugging on their backs down from the Alet Range.

  And if that’s the case, may mother Esiku’s wrath fall upon the poor boy’s excuse for a family. Nobody that young should be down here.

  “What is it?”

  “Lark heard something.”

  Larkai, the girl from the Ekasyan slums in the next cell over from Del. Younger again. Couldn’t be more than eight turns, the poor wretch. Her cell shares some sort of vent with Del’s, letting through hushed voices along with the steaming air escaping from the mineral springs that provide hot water to the palace far above. One way or another, with whispers between cells and across barred hallways, the prisoners have linked a chain of communication.

  At last count, there are twenty-eight of us in this wing of the warren-like tunnels. Most are from the capital’s slums, but a few, including Del, hail from further afield. I’m the eldest by a half dozen turns. For the first time in my wretched existence, I find myself a default leader, the younger ones looking to me for guidance, no matter how much I wish it weren’t so. At first, I’d wondered if Del was perhaps a spy of Zostar’s. A ruse of innocence to keep close watch on me. But there’s no reason to keep so many of them for such a purpose, and my heart believes there’s truth in the boy’s earnestness.

  I tilt my face towards the wall. “Out with it, then.”

  “She heard two of the Testers talking.”

  The Testers. The name the kids have given to the physicians working with Zostar. Or for Zostar – the longer I’m down here, the more I witness and hear, the more that seems to be the way of things. But whether Zostar is working for someone else, I have no idea. Perhaps he is working only for his own ends.

  Truth be told, that terrifies me.

  Something scrapes on the other side of the stone as Del shifts his weight. “They’re starting another round soon. One said they’re getting closer to answers. The other said he would prepare the Room.”

  An involuntary shudder wracks me. It’s clear they’re trying to discover whatever it is that makes me heal quickly. The Room is the place I’ve come to associate with sessions where I’m exposed to various smokes and steams, some of them pleasant, some of them downright noxious, like the aftermath of explosive powder. Though I’ve learned even the sweet-scented ones can carry a punch. I can’t last too many more sessions in there. Even if my body does, my mind was on such shaky ground after the last round…

  “Ash?”

  “I’m here.”

  “There’s something else. They said they were including the young ones this time.”

  How cruel for Del to have to think of himself as no longer young, before he’s even grown fuzz on his chin. But nobody could be young after spending any amount of time down here. Sometimes that makes me feel as old as the Emperor. Yet other times I feel barely more than a child myself.

  What is Zostar intending for us? The children have nothing in common other than each of them was unwanted, or wandered where they shouldn’t have.

  Wandering where one shouldn’t. That turns my thoughts to the day I met Nisai. When we were set upon by … Blazers.

  “Del? Has anything unnerving ever happened to you? I mean before you came to Ekasya. Perhaps when you were younger? You might have blacked out and woke up to find you’d … done things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Have you ever hurt anyone?”

  There’s a pause on the other side of the wall.

  “Once,” the boy whispers. “A boy in my village took my fishing pole. Said he’d throw me into the river and catch me like a lossol eel.”

  “And what happened?”

  “He was bigger than me. Faster. I didn’t know what to do. He cast the hook into my hair and it caught on my ear. Burned like the five hells combined as he dragged me towards the water. It was rushing that day. Mad and frothing white. So, I pushed him. He landed on a rock. I felt good about it at the time. But then he limped for days. I felt terrible.”

  I suppress the urge to laugh in relief, instead rolling my neck to ease muscles that had ratcheted ti
ght. “You were only trying to defend yourself.”

  “Not what my parents said. They said I’d done something evil. Said I was cursed.”

  The tension returns and my heart clenches with it. “Cursed?” I reach for the prayer braid that’s no longer wrapped around my arm.

  “Aye. Because I came into the world on the unholy days.” He swallows the end of the last word, almost as if he was stifling a sob. “I was born in the Days of Doskai.”

  Footsteps begin down the corridor. They’ll be coming for me first; they always come for me first. On the occasions they do take Del or Lark, it’s only to question them. But just because they haven’t harmed them physically yet, it doesn’t mean the voice in my mind doesn’t speak the truth: When they run out of patience with me, they’ll start their experiments on the younger ones.

  The gods may have truly turned their backs to me, but if I don’t get Del and Lark and the others out of here, who knows what they’ll be put through.

  The footsteps come closer. Four pairs. They never send less than four guards, despite my shackles. And every one of them seems on edge now that Linod’s Elixir no longer numbs me, their furtive glances and white knuckles giving them away.

  I don’t blame them.

  “Ash?” Del has been silent since his confession, but he must have heard the approaching guards.

  “Try to get some rest. I’ll be back before you know it. We’re going to find a way out of here, I promise.”

  The door slams shut behind me.

  This is not the Room.

  Whereas the Room is not much bigger than my cell, this place is huge, larger than thirty or forty cells combined. It’s floors above – I was half shoved, half dragged up flight after flight of stone steps. This far back up the interior of Ekasya Mountain, I wouldn’t be surprised if this space covers half an entire level. What was its original purpose? A storeroom for the imperial complex? An armoury?

  It’s dimly lit like the floors beneath, but even I can smell that the candles in their iron sconces anchored around the walls and supporting pillars aren’t tallow like the rest of this place. They’re something incongruously cleaner. Wax. More than a little upmarket for a prisoner.