SIGN OF THE DRAGONFLY: PROLOGUE

Prologue: The Stairs

Hama hated the climb to his master’s rooms. Sixty-seven steps hewn from rough limestone led up to the first landing and its mullioned window of unblemished glass panes looking out over Saffron Bay and the forest of masts that swayed on the water; these weren’t so bad. Then a door to the left of the faded tapestry of the Hunt of Marana, a short walk down a hall, and up one hundred and forty-four creaking wooden stairs, circling round and round the squared ascent of Red Kudu Tower. This was the worst stretch, the one that always set Hama’s legs to burning and his lungs to sucking helplessly for air. Often he would have to rest at the top, risking being spotted by the minister’s chamberlain, a foul-tempered woman by the name of Karima, before climbing the last forty steps to the minister’s solar. The other runners took the stairs with ease, but Hama had been plagued by frequent chest colds as a baby, and even now, at the age of sixteen, his lungs were weak. By the time he arrived he was always sweaty and flushed, hardly able to speak without gasping. It seemed foolish to Hama to leave a whole empire waiting on the strength of a runner’s legs, but the palace had stood for two hundred years now, and no one seemed interested in moving the soothsayer’s apartment closer to the emperor’s. 

Sahar Soyu, Keeper of the Oracle Bones, sat on a pillow in front of his cold hearth, reading a little black book with a cover of cracked and crumbling leather. He was a short man, stocky and handsome with thick, woolly eyebrows and a hawkish profile. In his plain gray robes and heavy damask sash of office with its iron weights he looked more scribe than soothsayer. Many at court called him The Clerk, sometimes even to his face. Hama considered it a mark of his master’s great character that he could laugh at such jokes without losing face. Sahar glanced up with a faint smile as Hama entered. Outside the windows, the first fireworks of Komali’s Night burst purple and green over the bay,  

“Master,” said Hama, working hard to mask his heavy breathing. “The Third Consort has asked for you. She says she must have another reading.”

The soothsayer sighed. “Very good, Hama,” he said, shutting his book and setting it aside. He rose to his knees and swept his bones from a low stone table into a pouch of soft, supple antelope hide before standing, which he did with spry good humor. He was much quicker and stronger than his eight and forty years would suggest. “I will want you close at hand, to serve. You know how particular the Third Consort is about her tea.”

Hama still had a little burn scar where the Third Consort had thrown her teacup at him a few weeks before after Sahar’s reading had failed to ease her anxieties in the wake of a nightmare. He nodded, still breathing hard. Before he’d recovered his breath they were off, Sahar leading the way. At least it was easier going down the stairs. They descended Red Kudu Tower, the spiral staircase bring them around again and again to the sight of fireworks over the bay, with only the colors changing. Gold and emerald. Saffron and rose. 

The Third Consort’s apartments were in the new wing of the palace, downhill and east from the imperial rooms and the court with its scriptoriums and repositories, its archives and great halls, and overlooking the textile markets and the Ku Ma arena, where slaves and criminals had spent the day killing one another for screaming crowds. Hama wished he could have gone. His mothers and brothers would have been there, crammed onto the wooden risers behind the old stone seats, eating pickled duck eggs and flatbread wrapped around fried crickets. He wondered if they thought of him, their tithe to the palace staff. 

Sahar led the way across a courtyard lit by hanging paper lanterns, the two of them surprising a muntjac doe as she drank from a fountain. The little deer chuffed at them, flashing her tusks, and then picked her way daintily over the mossy flagstones and out of sight behind a statue of Vandi in his first incarnation, a six-legged boar with fire blazing in its eye sockets. Hama bowed in passing and muttered a prayer, in case the deer knew any local spirits who might curse them for interrupting it.

On the far side of the courtyard stood the Consort’s house, a pair of palace guards flanking the stone steps in their tall black caps and high-collared armor of lacquered bamboo, their polearms shining in the lantern light. Both gave Sahar the slight bow due to a court astrologer as he hurried up the steps and through the rounded archway of stained teak into the Consort’s antechamber. Hama followed, nearly jogging to keep up. The Third Consort had been sending him running back and forth to his master more and more in recent weeks. He had a sense that the Third Consort was trying to choose an auspicious day to conceive, hoping to entice the emperor back to her bed with promises of a destined heir.

The antechamber was dark, a pipe-fed indoor fountain stocked with luminescent jellyfish burbling opposite the door. Beyond, the apartments were a maze of polished teak and rice paper doors that could be slid on tracks set into the floors and into recesses in the walls. Hama slid several aside until at last they found the Consort, picking her cuticles beside the Oracle Bowl.

Third Consort Sima Aryin had borne the emperor only a single child in her eleven years at court, and as the flower of her once-famous beauty faded with each passing season, her desperation to quicken again had become the subject of much gossip. There were even whispers that she had turned to other lovers to lend a little aid to the emperor’s seed, in addition to the charms and talismans she wore, the spells written in henna on her arms by Tlonist magicians, the yogis and gurus who pushed her daily through grueling exercises until her noble plumpness had melted away to expose the nervous, wiry frame beneath. Now, at the age of twenty-eight, she looked past forty. Deep lines ran from the corners of her mouth, and there were threads of gray in her thick black hair, scraped and oiled into an elaborate knot behind her headpiece. 

“You’re late,” she said fretfully as they entered the oraculum. It was a small, dark room, one wall opening onto the third consort’s rock garden. A humid breeze made the lanterns gutter, and Hama nearly leapt out of his skin as the flickering light revealed a stranger leaning against one of the posts that held up the eaves over the garden porch. He was tall and thin and smoked a long-stemmed pipe of fired clay. In the orange light of the pipe’s smoldering bowl, Hama could just make out his pox-scarred cheeks and crooked nose, the faded tattoos under his dark eyes. At first he thought the man wore a heavy sash or belt of some kind over his sherwani and underrobe, but as his eyes adjusted to the gloom he saw with a sharp intake of breath that it was no length of cloth, but a serpent, wrist-thick and mottled milky white and pale yellow, wrapped about his waist with its blunt, triangular head swaying inches from his right ear. Its blue-black tongue tasted air and flicked against his earlobe. The stranger blew smoke from his nostrils and offered a smile. What teeth he had left were brown and rotten, worn down to pegs.

“My apologies, Third Consort,” said Sahar. He shook out his sleeves and sat down cross-legged opposite the consort, the oracle bowl between them. Cast in bronze and polished to a mirror sheen, the bowl weighed more than most men. Its flat bottom was etched with the thirteen signs of the imperial zodiac, each contained in a triangular slice of a single great circle housing many more within it, so that each triangle was divided vertically into wider and wider segments. Within the lines of each segment were characters in Kussuluti, the scribes’ tongue, and Old Enkish. Sahar drew a small bag out of his sleeve and untied its neck, tipping its contents into his left palm. Fingerbones. The teeth of men and animals. Shards of bone chipped from the heads of armored fish and the shells of tortoises. Sima’s eyes followed his every motion, glittering in the dim light.

“My mistress may recall the auspices are poor this week,” Sahar said, with the lightest tone of reproof. “The planet Tem is in ascendance. In four days’ time, when Shidan enters its ho—”

“You will read my fortune now, soothsayer,” the Third Consort snapped. The silver-edged pattern of ginkgo leaves embroidered on her scarlet robe caught the light as she leaned forward. Hama didn’t like the look in her eyes. He had seen it there more and more of late. Perhaps it was only that she feared losing what she still retained of the emperor’s favor, which had drifted more and more to the Fourth and Fifth consorts. 

Silhouetted against the fireworks bursting over the garden walls, the stranger blew a smoke ring, still not speaking. Sahar seemed to take it as a signal of some kind. Without further preamble he flicked his wrist at the Oracle Bowl. There was a sharp bang and a puff of aromatic smoke swirled up out of the bowl, and as it rose Sahar flung his handful of oraculi into the receptacle. The Third Consort leaned in close, raising her sleeve to shield her nose and mouth from the smoke. It cleared slowly, revealing where Sahar’s little trick — a twist of paper filled with gunpowder — had left a black smudge on the bronze. The smudge’s location was supposed to be important to the reading, but Hama didn’t know how. This one was over the cha ansi, the two Kussite characters that made up the sign of the dragonfly. And besides, it was hardly the most interesting thing the bowl contained.

“Oh,” said Sahar, his voice soft. 

“Thank you,” whispered the Third Consort, squeezing her eyes shut and clasping her hands together, her head bowed. “Thank you, thank you.” 

The stranger took his pipe out of his mouth, awestruck. Hama could only stare. Every oraculi Sahar had cast stood on end in a dizzying pattern zigzagging back and forth across the bowl. A dog’s canine tooth balanced on its yellowed point atop the sign for the planet Unat, throne-world of Lord Vandi. A fishbone leaned at an angle against it. A thumbnail-sized jade ring stood upright at the fishbone’s end. Each little trinket rested against another in a delicate array ten thousand soothsayers throwing their bones ten thousand times a day couldn’t have produced in ten thousand years. The hair on Hama’s arms stood on end.

“What about the boy?” the stranger asked. He had a deep voice, raspy and strained, as though he had been screaming for a very long time.

“Oh,” said Sahar. He looked at Hama. He paused, brow furrowed in thought. “He knows nothing.”

“I don’t like it,” said the Third Consort. She straightened. There were tears of joy at the corners of her hard, dark eyes. “He’ll tell the other servants. The guards. Someone will know. It will make its way back to 

“Hama is very discreet,” said Sahar, shaking his head. “He was born under the sign of the Guanaco. Very discreet. Very loyal. I myself have had no—”

“I don’t like it,” the Consort repeated, pronouncing each word carefully. Hama’s stomach clenched. He felt a sudden urge to run. Was he about to be punished? He wished he’d stood outside the room. Stupid. Stupid. The Third Consort had the right to have him beaten with a bamboo rod, or with a strap.

Sahar sighed. “Very well.”

The stranger crossed the room in the space of a breath, so fast he seemed almost to dissolve and reform, leaving a swirl of smoke in his wake. Hama felt something hot and slippery in his stomach. He looked down and saw a knife’s hilt protruding just above his sash. The stranger gripped his shoulder, hard, and pulled the knife out of him. There was blood, and a cold, stinging pain in the side of Hama’s throat. The snake had bitten him. The room tilted. The strength went out of Hama’s knees. He fell. The stranger guided him down to the floor. As he did, the snake swayed toward Hama, its empty eyes reflecting the light of the fireworks. Its tongue tickled his cheek.

“Don’t fret, little monkey,” the snake whispered in Hama’s ear. It had a woman’s voice, soft and gentle. It made Hama think of his mother. “You will not be forgotten.”

It’s too far, thought Hama. The room was so dark. He had been sweating only moments before, but now he felt terribly cold. It seemed to him that he was climbing the steps to his master’s rooms again, legs shuddering and weak, breath failing in his chest. It was so far, and getting darker as he climbed. Fireworks boomed in the distance.  

The stairs stretched on and on, shrinking into the distance above. Hama closed his eyes, his legs burning, his lungs straining for air as a great weight pressed down on his chest. He tried to call for his master, but his voice was a thin, strangled squeak, and no answer came. He faltered. Tripped. The stairs rushed up at him. Too far.