The Bone Shard Daughter (The Drowning Empire, #1)(120)

A little awed and apprehensive, I brought it close to my face. The chrysanthemums hadn’t been on the ceiling. In the haze of my first awakening, I’d mistaken this cloth tented above me as something much farther away. When I put my nose to it, the soft floral scent sent me tumbling back through time, to a moment when I’d gasped awake, chrysanthemums in my vision and a chill at my back. He’d made me here. I laid it back on its shelf, my fingers lingering. Books with blank bindings lined the other shelves, and when I picked them up to leaf through them, the pages were filled with my father’s handwriting and sketches. Others were filled with handwriting that looked like my own.

I turned to examine the rest of my father’s laboratory. A low hum caught my ear. Among the tables, close to the pool, was a wooden chest. A contraption lay on top – a metal band with thin silver wires running from it and into the box. His memory machine.

The lid was heavy, and lifting with my one good arm proved almost too difficult for me to manage. Inside, gears worked and strange liquids bubbled. A brazier for witstone, covered in a glass dome, was nestled into one corner. The whole thing smelled of cloud juniper. I had no idea what all the parts did, how it worked. But with the books the Emperor had written, I could learn how to operate it. I could bring Bayan back. He would wake, a little confused, a lot annoyed. He might sneer, or roll his eyes, and wonder aloud how long it had taken me to bring him back to life. “I could have done it more quickly,” he’d claim. The thought made me smile, even as my eyes prickled with tears.

Glass and rubber tubes protruded from the side of the chest, snaking across the stone floor and into the pool.

I rose to my feet, wondering what purpose these tubes had and where they led. The water had a reddish hue, and was so dark I could barely make out anything in it. But there was a shape. For a moment, I thought it might just be a log, or some rock formation. I squinted.

It was a face.

He’s growing people. I heard Bayan’s voice in my mind again, his eyes wide, his flesh melting. Cautiously, I approached the edge.

The body in the water was not mine, and some small part of me felt relief. I had no other self to contend with. But as I grew closer, I recognized the full lips, the strong jaw, the high cheekbones. The face of the Emperor lay in stillness below the surface, eyes closed.

I remembered my father’s limp, the fresh wound on his foot one of my earliest memories. I remembered his words when he’d confronted me in my room. “You must understand, by the time I figured out what to do, my wife – she was too long gone. I’d burned her body, sent her soul to the heavens.” It had not, it seemed, been too late to use a piece of himself to grow a body.

Bayan, then, was an earlier experiment, something that could be used simply to spur my ambitions. I frowned. None of the tubes led to the body. It floated unattached, suspended in the pool.

Something else in the water moved.

I froze, all the hairs on the back of my neck prickling. “Bing Tai.” He padded to my side and sat but seemed otherwise unperturbed. He’d likely been down here before with the Emperor or his wife. Marginally comforted by his lack of concern, I fixed my gaze on the widening ripples. A pale shape, like some cave fish, glided beneath the water’s dark and ruddy surface. As I watched, it rose.

It wasn’t a fish at all. A snout broke the surface, and then a head, and then a chin, large as a horse’s, came to rest on the stone next to the chest. One cerulean eye rolled from within the skull to look at me. A translucent eyelid blinked. The creature had some patches of thick hair, though most looked as though it had fallen out. It had a face like a cat’s, but with a longer snout, whiskers twitching as it exhaled. Two spiraling horns rose from its skull, just over its ears.

It let out a low moan. I leapt back. I couldn’t see the whole of it beneath the dark surface, but judging by the head alone, it would be as tall as my waist.

But it didn’t seem to have the strength to do any more than moan. Rubber tubes ran from the chest into the creature’s shoulders and neck. I couldn’t see the contents – whether they carried something into or away from it. Water pooled beneath its head. Its rough breathing sent a spray of water across my slippers.

Another moan, this time softer.

“My father did this to you.” My voice, low as it was, echoed from the cavern walls. My father’s memory machine. This creature had been hooked to it for at least the last five years. Something in it was the key to making the machine work. I’d not seen an animal like it before, but then, I’d not been to all the known islands.

The eye rolled back into the creature’s head, both eyelids sealing shut. It slid back into the water, its exhaled breath leaving bubbles in its wake.

I wasn’t a fool. I knew suffering when I saw it. My father had always been single-minded in his goals; everyone who stood in his way was expendable. Everyone who helped him was expendable.

This was different. I could learn to use the machine, restore Bayan, let the creature go.

Numeen’s shard still lay within my sash pocket. It was light as a piece of driftwood, yet I felt the weight of it, a weight I felt I could never unburden myself of.

I’d told him I wouldn’t be like my father. I’d told him I would make things better. Even as the creature suffered underwater, out of sight, I would know it was there.

I was Lin. I was the Emperor. And I could not let cruelty drive my actions.