The Priory of the Orange Tree (The Roots of Chaos)
The Priory of the Orange Tree: Part 3 – Chapter 42

Sweat quivered at the tip of his nose. As Niclays wet his brush and cupped his hand beneath it, unwilling to spill ink on his masterpiece, Laya brought a cup of broth to the table.

“I hate to interrupt, Old Red, but you have not eaten in hours,” Laya said. “If you fall flat on your nose, your little chart will be destroyed before the captain can spit on it.”

“This little chart, Laya, is the key to immortality.”

“Looks like madness to me.”

“All alchemists have madness in their blood. That, dear lady, is why we get things done.”

He had been hunched over the table for what felt like a lifetime, copying the large and small characters from The Tale of Komoridu on to a giant roll of silk, ignoring those of middling size. If it proved to be a fruitless endeavor, he would most likely be on the seabed by dawn.

As soon as he remembered the starry vault in Brygstad Palace, he had known. First, he had tried arranging the oddly sized characters in a circle, as Mentish astronomers did, but only nonsense had come out. With a little coaxing, Padar, the Sepuli navigator, had surrendered his own star charts, which were rectangular. Niclays had continued, from that point, to translate each page of text to a pane he had sketched on the silk, keeping them in the order that they appeared in the book.

Once the panes were full of the large and small characters, he was certain they would form a map of part of the sky. He suspected the size of the character was a measure of the radiance of the corresponding star, the larger ones being the brighter.

Somewhere below, the dragon began to thrash about like a beached fish again, rocking the ship.

“Damned creature.” Niclays marked the position of the next character. “Won’t it be quiet?”

“It must miss being worshipped.”

Laya pulled the silk taut for him. As he worked, she scrutinized his face.

“Niclays,” she murmured, “how did Jannart die?”

His throat filled with the usual ache, but it was easier to swallow when he had something to occupy his mind.

“Plague,” he said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Not as sorry as I am.”

He had never spoken to a soul about Jannart. How could he, when nobody could know how close they had been? Even now, it made his insides flutter, but Laya was part of no court in Virtudom, and he found that he already trusted her. She would keep his secrets.

“You would have liked him. And he would have liked you.” His voice was hoarse. “Jannart adored languages. Ancient and dead ones, especially. He was in love with knowledge.”

She smiled. “Aren’t all you Ments a little in love with knowledge, Niclays?”

“Much to the distaste of our cousins in Virtudom. They often wonder at how we can question the foundations of our adopted religion, even though its bedrock is a single bloodline of no great exceptionality, which hardly seems sensib—”

The door snapped open then, letting in a gust of wind. They rushed to pin down the pages as the Golden Empress walked in, shadowed by Padar, whose face and chest were dripping in blood, and Ghonra, self-styled Princess of the Sundance Sea and captain of the White Crow. Laya had assured Niclays that her rare beauty belied an equally rare bloodlust. The tattoo on her brow was a puzzle they had yet to solve; it simply read love.

Niclays kept his head down as she passed. The Golden Empress served herself a cup of wine.

“I hope you are almost finished, Sea-Moon.”

“Yes, all-honored Golden Empress,” Niclays said brightly. “Soon I will know the whereabouts of the tree.”

He concentrated as best he could with Padar and Ghonra breathing down his neck. When he had transferred the last of the characters, he blew lightly on the ink. The Golden Empress brought her cup of wine to the table (Niclays prayed very hard for her not to spill it) and studied his creation.

“What is this?”

He bowed to her. “All-honored Golden Empress,” he said, “I be- lieve these characters from The Tale of Komoridu represent the stars—our most ancient means of navigation. If they can be matched to an existing star chart, I think they will lead you to the mulberry tree.”

She studied him from beneath the frontlet of her headdress. Its beads cast shadows on her brow.

“Yidagé,” the Golden Empress said to Laya, “do you know Old Seiikinese?”

“Some, all-honored captain.”

“Read the characters.”

“I do not think they are supposed to be read as words,” Niclays offered, “but as—”

“You think, Sea-Moon,” said the Golden Empress. “Thinkers bore me. Now, read, Yidagé.”

Niclays held his tongue. Laya hovered her finger over each of the characters.

“Niclays.” A line creased her brow. “I think they are meant to be read as words. There is a message here.”

His nerves evaporated. “There is?” He pushed his eyeglasses up his nose. “Well, what does it say?”

“The Way of the Outcasts,” Laya read aloud, “begins at the ninth hour of night. The . . . rising jewel—” She squinted. “Yes, the rising jewel—is planted in the soil of Komoridu. From under the Magpie’s eye, go south and to the Dreaming Star, and look beneath the—” When she reached the last character of the final pane, she let out a breath. “Oh. These are the characters for mulberry tree.”

“The star charts,” Niclays said, breathless. “Can these patterns be matched to the sky?”

The Golden Empress looked to Padar, who spread his own star charts on the floor. After studying them for a time, he took up the still-wet brush and joined some of the characters on the silk. Niclays flinched at the first stroke, then realized what was forming.

Constellations.

His heart pounded like an axe into wood. When Padar was finished, he set down the brush and considered.

“Do you understand it, Padar?” the Golden Empress asked.

“I do.” Slowly, he nodded. “Yes. Each pane shows the sky at a different time of year.”

“And this one.” Niclays pointed at the last pane. “What do you call that constellation?”

The Golden Empress exchanged a look with her navigator, whose mouth twitched.

“The Seiikinese,” she said, “call it the Magpie. The characters for mulberry tree form its eye.”

From under the Magpie’s eye, go south and to the Dreaming Star, and look beneath the mulberry tree.

“Yes.” Padar strode around the table. “The book has given us a fixed point. Since the stars move each night, we must begin our course only when we are directly under the Magpie’s eye at the ninth hour of night, at the given time of year.”

Niclays could hardly keep still. “Which is?”

“The end of winter. After that, we must steer between the Dreaming Star and the South Star.”

A silence fell, taut with anticipation, and the Golden Empress smiled. Niclays distinctly felt his knees wobble, either with exhaustion or the sudden discharge of days of fear.

From the grave, Jannart had shown them the star they needed as their point of navigation. Without it, the Golden Empress would never have known how to reach the place.

There was that flicker of doubt again. Perhaps he should never have shown her. Someone had done their best to keep this knowledge from the East, and he had handed it to its outlaws.

“Yidagé, you spoke of a jewel.” Ghonra had a gleam in her eye. “A rising jewel.”

Laya shook her head. “A poetic description of a seed, I imagine. A stone that rises into a tree.”

“Or treasure,” Padar said. He exchanged a hungry look with Ghonra. “Buried treasure.”

“Padar,” the Golden Empress said, “tell the crew to prepare for the hunt of their lives. We make for Kawontay to replenish our provisions, and then we sail for the mulberry tree. Ghonra, inform the crews of the Black Dove and the White Crow. We have a long journey ahead of us.”

The two of them left at once.

“Are—” Niclays cleared his throat. “Are you content with this solution, all-honored captain?”

“For now,” the Golden Empress said, “but if nothing waits at the end of this path, I will know who has deceived us.”

“I have no intention of deceiving you.”

“I hope not.”

She reached beneath the table and presented him with a length of what looked like cedar wood. “All of my crew bear arms. This staff will be yours,” she said. “Use it well.”

He took it from her. It was light, yet he sensed it could deliver a shattering blow.

“Thank you,” he said, and bowed. “All-honored captain.”

“Eternal life awaits,” she said, “but if you still wish to see the dragon, and to claim any part of it, you may go now. Perhaps it can tell us something else about the jewel in The Tale of Komoridu, or the island,” she said. “Yidagé, take him.”

They left the cabin. The moment the door had closed behind them, Laya seized Niclays about the neck and embraced him. His nose smashed into her shoulder, and her beads dug into his chest, but suddenly he was laughing as hard as she was, laughing until he wheezed.

Tears seeped down his face. He was drunk on relief, but also the exhilaration of solving a puzzle. In all his years in Orisima, he had never found the key to the elixir, and now he had unearthed the path to it. He had finished what Jannart had started.

His heart was swelling in his chest. Laya took his head between her hands and grinned in a way that lifted his spirit.

“You,” she said, “are a genius, Sea-Moon. Brilliant, just brilliant!”

The pirates were all over the decks. Padar roared his orders at them in Lacustrine. The stars shone bright in a clear sky, beckoning them toward the horizon.

“Not a genius,” Niclays admitted, weak-kneed. “Just mad. And lucky.” He patted her arm. “Thank you, Laya. For your help, and your belief. Perhaps we will both be supping on the fruit of immortality.”

Caution stole into her eyes.

“Perhaps.” Hitching up her smile, she placed a hand between his shoulders and guided him through the confusion of pirates. “Come. It is time you claimed your reward.”

In the deepest part of the Pursuit, a Lacustrine dragon was chained from its snout to the end of its tail. Niclays had thought it magnificent when he first saw it on the beach. Now it looked almost feeble.

Laya waited in the shadows with him. “I must go back,” she said. “Will you be all right?”

He leaned on his new staff. “Of course. The beast is bound.” His mouth was dry. “You go.”

She gave the dragon a last glance before reaching into her coat. From inside, she drew a knife, sheathed in leather.

“My gift.” She held it out by the blade. “Just in case.”

Niclays took it. He had owned a sword in Mentendon, but the only time he had used a weapon had been in his fencing lessons with Edvart, who had always disarmed him in seconds. Before he could thank her, Laya was making her way back up the steps.

The dragon seemed asleep. A tangled mane flowed around its horns. Its face was wider than the serpentine heads of wyrms, and gaudier, with decorative frills.

Nayimathun, Laya had called it. A name with no clear origin.

Niclays walked toward the beast, staying away from its head. Its lower jaw was loose in sleep, showing teeth the length of a forearm.

The dome on its head was dormant. Panaya had told him about it, the night he had first seen a dragon. When it illuminated, that dome was calling to the celestial plane, lifting the dragon toward the stars. Unlike wyrms, dragons needed no wings to fly.

He had tried to rationalize it for weeks. Months. Perhaps the dome was a kind of lodestone, attracted to particles in the air or the cores of far-off worlds. Perhaps dragons had hollow bones, letting them ride the wind. That was the alchemist in him, theorizing. Yet he had known in his gut that unless he could split a dragon open, to see it through the lens of an anatomist, it would remain inexplicable. Magic, for all intents and purposes.

Even as he studied the beast, its eye snapped open and, in spite of himself, Niclays backed away. In the eye of this creature was a cosmos of knowledge: ice and void and constellation—and nothing close to human. Its pupil was as big as a shield, ringed with a blue glow.

For a long while, they stared at each other. A man of the West and a dragon of the East. Niclays found himself overwhelmed by the urge to fall to his knees, but he only gripped his cane.

“You.”

The voice was cool and susurrating. The billow of a sail.

“You are the one who bartered for my scale and blood.” A dark blue tongue flickered behind its teeth. “You are Roos.”

It spoke in Seiikinese. Each word was drawn out like a shadow at sunrise.

“I am,” Niclays confirmed. “And you are the great Nayimathun. Or perhaps,” he added, “not so great.”

Nayimathun watched his mouth as he spoke. On land, Panaya had told him, dragons heard as humans heard underwater.

“The one who wears the chains is a thousand times greater than the one who wields them,” Nayimathun said. “Chains are cowardice.” A rumble filled the cavernous hull. “Where is Tané?”

“Seiiki, I assume. I hardly know the girl.”

“You knew her enough to threaten her. To try to manipulate her for your own gain.”

“This is a cutthroat world, beast. I merely negotiated,” Niclays said. “I needed your blood and scale to carry out my work, to unlock the secret of your immortality. I wanted humans to have a chance of surviving in a world ruled by giants.”

“We tried to defend you in the Great Sorrow.” The eye closed for a moment, darkening their surroundings. “Many of you perished. But we tried.”

“Perhaps your kind are not as violent as the Draconic Army,” Niclays said, “but you still see to it that humans worship your image and beg you for the rain that swells the crops. As if man is not also enough of a marvel to be adulated.”

The dragon huffed cloud through its nostrils.

Niclays decided then. That even if his alchemical tools were lost, and even if he was on his way to a font of eternal life, he would take what he had long been denied.

He laid down his staff and bared the knife Laya had given him. Its handle was lacquer, its blade was serrated down one side. He ran his gaze along the wealth of scale. When he had found an unmarred patch of scale, he placed a hand on it.

The dragon was smooth and cold as a fish. Niclays used the knife to pry the scale up, exposing the sheen of silvery flesh beneath.

“You are not meant to live for eternity.”

Niclays flung a withering glance at its head. “As an alchemist, I must disagree,” he said. “I believe in possibility, you see. Even if I cannot replace the elixir of life in your body, the Golden Empress is on her way to the island of Komoridu. There we will replace the mulberry tree, and the jewel that lies beneath it.”

The eye flared wide.

“Jewel.” A rattle stemmed from the dragon. “You speak of the celestial jewels.”

“Jewels,” Niclays echoed. “Yes. The rising jewel.” He softened his voice. “What do you know of it?”

Nayimathun remained silent. Niclays wrenched the blade upward, biting into scale, and the dragon twitched in its chains.

“I will say nothing to you,” it said. “Only that they must not fall into the hands of pirates, son of Mentendon.”

According to her journal, my aunt received it from a man who told her to carry it far from the East and never bring it back. Jannart’s words kept returning to him, circling in his head like a whipping top. Never bring it back.

“I do not expect you to stop your pursuit. It is too late for that,” the dragon said, “but do not let the jewel fall into the hands of those who would use it to destroy what little of the world is left. The water in you has grown stagnant, Roos, but it is not beyond cleansing.”

Niclays kept his grip on the knife, quaking.

Stagnant.

The dragon spoke true. Everything around him had stilled. His life had stopped, like a clock in water, when Sabran Berethnet had sent him to Orisima. He had failed to solve one mystery since. Not the mystery of eternal life. Not why Jannart had died.

He was an alchemist, the unmaker of mystery. And he would not be stagnant again.

“Enough of this,” he hissed, and carved.