Chapter the Thirteenth
In the Dead Zoo of West Knamis there lay the twisted bog-body that had once been named Helena Ji. It had once been loved by the people who loved her but it lay now in a glass box smeared with the grease of many long-ago and recent fingerprints. This was a dark corner of the Bipedal Chamber and the darkness strained the eye. The air was all laden with dust that might once, too, have had a name.
He had stood over the thing that had been Helena Ji. He had put a hand flat and firm on the glass, matching fingerprint-to-fingerprint with the chevalier that had gone before him, whoever had stood here last and asked her for permission to vanquish. He could still feel a little of its heat radiating from the glass, a handhold through the eons.
Innadhor-Dynin had met him there. The Dead Zoo charged no entry fee, but on an early morning like this one the chambers were empty and the only footsteps belonged to his chevalier as he approached. They had echoed about the domed ceiling of the Horned Chamber through which he walked, bowing deep beneath the enormous antler of the exhibited Eighth Elk – mistakenly placed, certainly, it should have been in the Cervid Chamber, but the curators could not bring themselves to move such an avowed favourite of a public who didn't understand the difference. Innadhor-Dynin rounded the doorway, and stepped into the Bipedal Chamber, and squinted through the darkness at the shape of his scion standing over the last victorious chevalier of the Eighth Land.
Wakíŋyaŋ said, delightedly, "doesn't she look darling?"
Innadhor-Dynin had gazed down at the body. A little paper placard sat atop the glass coffin listed her generation and accomplishments. Chevalier of her era. One flesh, gone to her one end. She had taken the Paper Throne – well, Wakí mused, her scion had. The chevalier had merely kept her alive long enough to see it through. "May we all look so well when our hour comes."
"And I shall see to it," said Innadhor-Dynin, "that the hour not come too soon, my scion."
In the layman's version of the Seventh House, a second name was granted as an award for gallantry and chivalry in the extreme; that his chevalier had already earned it boded well for the entire undertaking. Were people ever awarded a third? Wakí ran a finger across the glass, tracing the twisted black ridge of the dead woman's brow.
"Alright," he said. "Don't be such a fucking bore, Dhori."
The castle sat on the river that carved its path through the First Land; it was boarded on one side by a set of impressive cliffs that descended down to the beach, and on another by a long tree-lined avenue along which the genteel crowds of the Paper City paraded to while away idle days. On the third side, a set of bureacratic buildings tangled with moss overlooked the courtier's entrance to the castle complex. With a few short words, Wakíŋyaŋ Sicun had secured them a servant's quarters in one of those buildings – only a few days, they had been warned on the way up the stairs, and they weren't to leave until they were prepared to depart for good. Wakí's mysterious contact delivered a small package of food each dusk. They slept in shifts. A Selection in microcosm, Inadhor-Dynin had mused, a rehearsal for the real thing.
Wakíŋyaŋ eschewed the use of a knife when he ate. He slept with his arms over his head, curled towards the edge of the bed, sheets tangled about his legs. He was twice as old as Innadhor-Dynin, at least, but had earned only a single name in that time. He wore his hair in a natural chestnut cloud around a broad, clever face, and cared for it with the kind of zealotry that another necromancer might have placed into following the strictures of the Brotherhood. He kept his nails short and straight, but he kept them. When he was not sleeping, he was reading one of his myriad dread tomes, poring over what Innadhor-Dynin thought might have been his own notes in his own handwriting, and when he was not reading, he was watching.
They both spent most of their time watching. From here, they could see the castle. Enough of the castle. They could see the emissaries of the Floating House in paced, whispered consultation before that first fateful knock on the door of the Keep; they could see the princeling of the First House and his smiling fair-haired companion running their strange errands from city to castle and back again, returning to the palace each night with bagfuls of weapons and papers and silks, greeted at the steps of the royal apartments by his veiled sister and her anxious dark eyes; they watched as the Third House carved his way through the defences, the man from the mainland trailing in his wake with his white coat gleaming through the dark like a spectre.
Wakíŋyaŋ was quite determined to arrive last, it seemed. Innadhor-Dynin could not bring himself to ask why; whenever the conversation seemed to angle in that direction, he would brush it aside, and smile, and say, "oh, wouldn't it be funny if we kept them waiting for-ever?"
On this particular evening, there had been an awful storm and a wind that had crept through the weak wooden frame of the window. Wakíŋyaŋ, watching from above, said, "that must be the Second."
Innadhor-Dynin, reclining on their sole bed, had glanced up sleepily to ask how he had gleaned this knowledge. His question had died in his mouth when he saw how the fight in the street lit the window scarlet and charcoal, painting Wakí's face all inferno and shadow and glow. The fire had risen red, and intensified to a white-blue so quickly that it had seemed, for just a split second, that the dawn had arrived early and vicious.
Innadhor-Dynin rose from the bed, and went to the window. When he put his hand to the glass, he could feel the heat from the flame below warming the glass, a strange sort of handshake with the unknown.
"There's more of them down there," he had said. "Don't we have a full house now?"
Wakí glanced down at the scrawled notes in his hand. "Ne," he said.
"Someone might have made it in," said Innadhor-Dynin. "Someone we didn't see. Someone else."
His scion shook his head, and jabbed a finger at the glass. The smoke billowed so densely about the window that Innadhor-Dynin could not see what he intended to indicate, but the chevalier reckoned he could guess: the front door of the Keep. The deceptively simple advance through the front courtyard, under the watchful eyesockets of the dragon skull astride the walls, led to wide stone steps that led to a wide stone door. Innadhor-Dynin gritted his teeth, and nodded: true, and fair, and true enough.
There was a single entry point for the Selection: they were funnelled into a bottleneck here and forced into the simple ignominy of waiting for someone to aswer the door.
He continued, quite stubbornly: "we might have missed someone."
Wakí's voice was mild. "Did you?"
Innadhor-Dynin could not keep the insulted tone from drenching his voice. "Of course not."
"Well, then," Wakí said, "I won't do you the insult of questioning your competence."
He set his boots to the floorboards, and stood, and stretched, and smiled.
"Let's leave them to stew for another day or two," he said. "Does that work for you, Sonolis?"
Innadhor-Dynin's voice was flat. "Sir."
The remnants of the storm had left a maelstrom of detritus across the street: remnants of the lives at the periphery of the Selection which had not even known to close their doors and windows against the danger coming down their street. Wakí picked his steps around the ruins carefully, his head bowed towards the street to search for whatever shards of bone might have been abandoned in the wake of the chaotic night the night before, while Innadhor-Dynin strode ahead of him, gratified to be out amidst the fresh air for the first time in seven days.
To Innadhor-Dynin's enduring surprise, they found that the enormous gates to the palace had been left open. The dragon skull hanging over it looked less menacing in the light, though so much larger than Innadhor-Dynin had realised: it drowned the entire courtyard in its shadow, spiked and malevolent, as the sun crested the clouds and began its long descent into night. It was not long after noon, but the day had a certain chill to it, crisp and golden. The light refracted through the cobwebs strung up in the eye-sockets of the dragon's enormous skull, and sent tiny fractal rainbows spinning against the walls of the Paper Castle. All was quiet, and the complex seemed to lie open and defenceless.
Innadhor-Dynin drew one scimitar as they crossed the threshold into the first courtyard, and then a second as he caught sight of the princeling sitting on the steps to the Keep, his horsecutter lain across his knees.
Ezust the First said, "there you are."
Wakí said, "here we are."
Innadhor-Dynin's heart quickened in his chest, a bird twisting in a net. They were not safe until they were through those doors. He twisted his second scimitar, and the brute they called Cú n'Ármhagh quirked his lips in what might have been a smirk on any other face.
Ezust the First rose. He was taller than the stories said: he was at least one head above Innadhor-Dynin, perhaps too, and he veritably dwarfed Wakíŋyaŋ Sicun, who merely inclined his head politely in the direction of the other scion. Wakí the Seventh carried no weapons, and thus did he reach for none; Innadhor-Dynin felt the handles of his scimitars burn into his hands as he watched Ezust rise, and sheathe his sword, and scowl.
"We were about to ask the Seventh House for another pair," he said. "Your Selection would have been over before it had begun."
"Oh," said Wakí, feigning wounded disbelief. "But we're hardly the last to arrive."
"Depends," Ezust said, "on how fast she flies."
Above him – high above – the door to the Keep had swung open, and a dark-haired chevalier had stepped out into the light, his eyes cast skywards. He could not cross the threshold, and he did not attempt to: he only stood there, and gazed up at the heavens with the expression of one who believed in souls and damnation.
Ezust descended the steps slowly, moving like a man much older than he was, and gestured behind them. Innadhor-Dynin swung, quite instinctively, and found nothing waiting for them in the courtyard; Wakí put a hand, very gently, to his young chevalier's chin, and tilted his head up so that he, too, was cloudgazing.
There were no clouds. The day had dawned bright and clear and cornflower, the kind of perfect blue one never glimpsed in West Knamis. The sun had ascended her throne at the sky's apex, and blazed down upon the castle with such a fiery sheen that Innadhor-Dynin's field of vision was utterly swamped with sun-spots, dark shapes dancing across his view of the world.
One dark shape drowned out the others: it grew large and swallowed the sun as it met the edges of sky, until Innadhor-Dynin had the unmistakeable impression that something had fallen from the edges of the galaxy and was plummeting down towards earth. It dropped still and steady, gliding across the air like skating across ice.
Where it caught the light, the dragon's scales shone dark and iridiscent.
Its shadow stretched across the courtyard, dark and cool, seeming to extinguish all light and warmth from the world as it glided low. Its wings furled and unfurled again, beating a cool gale across the courtyard and spurring up clouds of dust as it slowed above the Keep, once, twice, three times and then coming down into a hard descent on the rampart of the castle: one claw pierced the stone of the wall, digging deep and sending tiny shards of stone raining down onto the courtyard like a meteorite shadow; two talons caught the skull atop the gate, which splintered beneath the weight of the dragon astride it.
The enormous creature lifted its serpentine neck to the sky, its long horns arcing back as though to scrape the sky, and extended its wings wide. Their span was at least twice their length, each a delicate fan of translucent skin as iridiscent and gorgeously coloured as its armoured body, stretched violin-string taut between long, branching bones. It opened wide its enormous black maw, baring dagger-sharp teeth, and roared a sound that Innadhor-Dynin had never before heard: it was guttural and hoarser than he had expected, a shriek at the sky for some undescribed wrong. Behind those fangs, Innadhor-Dynin could make out the furnace within: the unmistakeable scarlet glow of a sleeping fire as bright as the sun itself. The heat rolled across them, ash and a veil of smoke and the heat, dry and awful and sudden. The dragon screamed, and shone, and settled.
The woman astride him shone brighter again, dressed in the dragonscale chainmail of the Sixth House. Caged within the silvermail coif that hid her hair, her pale brown face was set into an icy masque as she gazed down at the assembled chevs and scions with something that Innadhor-Dynin could not name: it could have been disdain, and it could have been contempt, but it was something which found the seams of his skin and crawled and turned within him like an insect, made him feel like an insect, skewered on the faraway dirt below her as the dragon shifted its weight atop the wall. She wavered with it, like a mirage.
"Sepideh," said Ezust. He didn't seem to realise he had said it. His face was still turned sunwards, his fair hair lit silver and blue by the sheen reflected off the scales of the dragon.
The chevalier behind them, restrained by the boundaries of the Keep, withdrew back into the cool sanctuary of the entrance hall, and Innadhor-Dynin released a breath that had bottled up in his chest like a scream. His scion lowered his hand only slowly from Innadhor-Dynin's face, as though he had quite forgotten they were still touching.
"Oh," said Wakí, slightly dreamily. "Wouldn't you love to see the full skeleton?"