The city had brushed off the morning’s attack in the way cities with business to get to often do. Yet traces of emergency lingered. Conversations were subdued, contracted to the bare necessities of transaction. Merchants’ wares huddled on carts and in boxes, ready to be whisked away at a moment’s notice. Iron locusts patrolled the skies, hulking creatures of gray metal glowing with the raja’s seal, broadcasting curfew instructions in four languages.
A sense of unease dogged Mokoya as she fell behind the other two. The gazes of shopkeepers and street vendors trailed her passage. Heavily wrapped women ducked their eyes at her approach and turned their heads once she walked past. Men, their hoods pulled tight around their heads, stared at her from side alleys and second-floor windows. Were they staring because they didn’t know who she was? Or were they staring because they did? She had draped her cloak over the bright colors of the lizard arm, but the scars on her face were unmistakable. Her entire face was unmistakable.
She walked faster.
Laid over Bataanar’s anxiety, Mokoya saw the ghost of Bengang Baru—the mutilated houses, the charred bones, the clogging, inescapable assault of putrefaction. The purge had happened six months ago, and she had pushed the memories deep into the quarantined districts of her mind. But it was all coming out of the ground again.
A child-sized shoe lay by itself in the middle of a street, surrounded by destruction, its twin nowhere to be found. Its rim was stained sticky brown. Trying to imagine how it got there was worse than looking at the dead shells of houses. Somewhere Adi was calling her name, but all she could see was a foot ripped from an ankle, some scavenger coming by later to pry the flesh out of the shoe with sharp teeth—
Mokoya desperately filled her lungs. The air in Bataanar was spiced with cinnamon, not decay. Under her breath, she whispered, “The Slack is all, and all is the Slack . . .”
Akeha turned around. “What was that?”
“Nothing.”
Bataanar had ghosts of its own. Wherever she turned, there was the same picture—hung in gilt frames, draped with garlands, grayed by incense smoke—gracing the fronts of shops or peeping from their dimly lit interiors. An old portrait of the royal family. Raja Ponchak, smiling, ceremonially dressed, seated on a simple wooden chair with a plain gray backdrop. To the back and the left stood Raja Choonghey, tall and thin and sharp-faced. To the back and right was their daughter, Wanbeng, child-aged and apple-cheeked.
The girl would be eighteen now, Mokoya calculated, with the selfish and gut-shredding pang that accompanied thoughts of other people’s daughters growing up.
Mokoya had met Raja Ponchak and her family only once: eight years ago, when the city had been consecrated, its streets neat and empty and the air still papery with construction dust. Thennjay had officiated the ceremony. She remembered very little of Raja Ponchak, except for the fragrant white buds she had worn in her hair that day. Of her husband Mokoya recalled even less. She did remember Wanbeng, who at ten years of age had developed an armor of aloofness. She had refused to play with Eien, whom she’d called “a baby who hasn’t even picked their gender yet.” Eien had been three years old.
It was strange walking through Bataanar and recognizing shards of its architecture—the splendid blue minarets of its grand mosque, the lines of its library tower—but having next to no memory of having visited. Intellectually she knew she had been here before, but a fundamental disconnect lay between her and the Mokoya who had accrued these impressions. That Mokoya had walked these pristine streets carrying her young child, probably laughing and thinking happy thoughts now opaque to her.
Maybe it was she who was the ghost.
The streets changed as they threaded deeper into Bataanar. The crowds diluted. The shops and open doors on the ground floors gave way to six-yield-high walls and barricaded gates. There the air was quieter and drained of smell. Buildings bulged like well-fed bellies, sporting arched windows and lamp-shaped cutouts on their walls. The streets sloped upward, more steeply at some points than others. Above them loomed the golden teardrop domes of the royal palace.
The raja’s palace was a series of round, white-walled stone buildings. A wide swath of extravagantly watered garden surrounded the compound, ardently lit and fragrant in the desert air. At its edge waited a statuesque figure: a woman with thick arms and a face that could light dreams. Her robes were that of a high-placed servant’s, simple, but well kept. Kebang? Mahanagay? Mokoya wasn’t sure.
Akeha hissed when she saw her. “Get out of here, Silbya. You can’t block us from seeing the raja.”
“I have no intention of doing so,” she said. “My mistress wishes to extend an invitation for an audience with Tensor Sanao.” She looked at Mokoya and made a small gesture of obeisance. “Tensor. My mistress, the raja’s advisor—”
“Tan Khimyan,” Mokoya said. The expression on Akeha’s face had told her everything she needed. A brief spurt of adrenaline ran through her. “What does she want with me?”
Silbya carried herself with calm and simplicity. “She has some matters she wishes to discuss. What they are, I cannot disclose.”
Thennjay was looking at her in alarm. Akeha’s lips curled in distaste. But the emotion that poured through Mokoya burned like fire and felt like the hunger of a tiger smelling prey. She wanted to face this woman and stare her in the eyes.
“I’ll go,” she said. Beside her, Akeha reacted with consternation, imperceptible to all but her. She squeezed his arm.
As children in the Grand Monastery, they had perfected a way of speaking directly through the Slack. Akeha looked fiercely into her eyes, and she quieted her mindeye to listen.
She’s dangerous, he said. Watch where your feet land. Try not to die on me.
Don’t be an idiot, she replied. Of course I’ll be careful. But she thought that it was the advisor who should be careful.
Chapter Ten
THE ADVISOR’S RESIDENCE STOOD in the middle of a massive paved courtyard, surrounded by gold-embellished white walls. The tops of trees could be seen within the compound walls: graceful swoops of willow, spikes of cherry blossom, heavy boughs of tamarind. The door, thick and red and punctuated by round gold studs, was guarded by a man and a woman in quilted Protectorate armor.
Mokoya followed Silbya’s unwavering path. The woman had not spoken on their trip up here, a sealed vessel from whom Mokoya could glean nothing. Mokoya had spent the time mouthing the First Sutra under her breath in a vain attempt to keep her heart rate steady.
“We are expected,” Silbya told the guards. The woman tugged on the Slack to open the doors.
Gravel paths forded thick rich soil. Peony bushes bloomed amongst the trees. The red arch of a wooden bridge graced a fishpond, where a pair of palm-sized terra-pins sunned themselves. At the end of the garden stood the advisor’s house, dark timber columns supporting a peaked roof threaded from corner to corner with carven dragons.
It looked and smelled like home.