Magic Banquet (13 page)

In the swordsman’s arms, the empress moaned.
Her fingers twitched, and her wide lips parted.

“A scent strong enough to bring back the
dead,” the lord said.

“She’s not dead.” The swordsman glared at
him.

Aja also stared at the lord. The sickles of
his brows climbed in the first expression she had seen on him that
night. He stood, watching the kitchen stairway.

She asked him, “Do you know what’s being
served?”

“Only that it’s the first food I’ve smelled
in years.”

Golems marched from the stairwell. They
didn’t carry platters but only painted-silk partitions. Aja’s heart
skipped a beat. Where was the food? The golems arranged the six
screens behind the guests.

Janny swung a leg around a partition painted
with a white tiger stalking in bamboo. She shimmied a shoulder out
from her orange and green dress. “Guess it’s not a real meal unless
someone gets naked.”

“What do you mean?” Aja asked.

Janny tapped a partition. “Janny knows what
these are for. Stripping down to your buxoms.”

Undressing sounded like an awful idea to
Aja. She couldn’t let anyone see her like this, all shriveled and
spotty.

“Wait.” The djinn flew down to the carpet,
bottles of jade spinning around her. Each floated toward a guest.
“Spread this salamander unguent over your bodies.”

Aja lifted the gemstone container to her
nose and winced. “Why?”

“Because it’ll block your pores and tastes
foul,” the djinn said.

The swordsman scratched his stubbly beard.
“Those sound like the opposite of reasons.”

“It’d be scent vandalism,” the lord said,
“with this olfactory melody in the air.”

“The Chef requests you do this before he
serves the next course.” The djinn’s hair stormed red. “I can
understand how unsettling it must be for you to touch your own
squishy flesh.”

The lord, Janny, and Solin hurried behind
their screens. Aja hesitated. Would she have to trust the unguent?
She wouldn’t, if she could only find the strength to resist this
course.

Thinking of anything else might help. Her
gaze meandered up to the flocks of hanging lamps. Any of those
might be the one binding the djinn.

“You don’t like serving us,” Aja said to the
woman of fire and wind.

The djinn turned her blue-flame eyes on
Aja.

“I wish you didn’t have to. You’d rather be
searching for your son. You are a good mother.”

“A pity,” the djinn said, “that wishes don’t
light fires.”

Aja thought she likely wouldn’t be any
friendlier than the djinn if someone had enslaved her and forced
her to serve a strange people. “I was rude, wasn’t I? When we first
met, and I asked what you were. I should’ve asked your name.”

“Nothing’s as rude as having to wear this
body,” the djinn said.

“My name is Aja.”

“So it is.” The djinn floated away, then
drifted back, and the fire in her softened to a warmth. She touched
Aja’s jade bottle. “Don’t neglect to rub that over every inch.”

Aja had asked for a name and received what
sounded like good advice. She would do just that and be ready for
the next course. Hopping upward, her knees creaked, pain stabbed,
and her balance was lost.
Oh, no!

She fell into the arms of the swordsman. His
stomach thundered in her ear.

“Would you watch the empress?” The swordsman
whisked Aja beside the prone girl. Giving Aja no time to speak, he
snatched up his own unguent. “Won’t be long,” he said. “Just shout
if anyone tries to touch her.”

He glanced toward the crutch propped against
one screen, before dashing behind his own partition.

Aja found herself above Nephrynthian, ruler
of the Oasis Empire, a girl who would transcend death into godhood.
Her chin was sticky with orange juice. Her head seemed too small
for her body, and her chest too still for someone living.

“He shouldn’t have left you,” Aja said. “But
I can’t blame him with that smell.”

Two slices of orange were unattended on a
platter. Aja picked one up. It drifted toward her parted lips, but
she forced it back to the empress and squeezed its juice in her
mouth.

Aja used her robe to dab the wetness from
the empress’s face. Even the orange stains were precious, so Aja
tipped Ryn’s head up and tried to rub it into her mouth. Most of
the juice ended up on the empress’s lips. A grey tongue slid out to
lick them, perhaps by reflex.

Good. She lived.

Setting the empress’s head down, Aja
withdrew her hand from beneath the shawl. Her dry skin snagged on
something, and rubbing her fingers together, Aja felt a hair.
The empress’s hair.

Aja could not see the hair between her
fingers. Did she truly hold one? She lifted her hand to her face,
and the hair brushed against her cheek.

She would swear it had been an accident. The
hair must’ve ended in her grip by chance. Or had some part of Aja
wanted to see if she could do it? To steal something of the
empress’s. It was an odd, twisty feeling. That flimsy strand of
hair would make Aja a traitor and a hero. She had only to give it
to Solin.

It seemed so unimportant to her now. The
empress clung to life, and Aja had aged to the brink of death.
Honors would do her no good. What did she care for any of that? She
was ravenous.

Glancing up, she met the gaze of Solin. He
peered out from behind his partition. His eyes were of golden
sorrow.

Aja clutched the hair against her chest. She
shouldn’t have taken it, but now she couldn’t drop it. Solin might
see where it landed.

The empress’s swordsman scrambled back onto
the carpet. He thanked Aja, helped her on her way to her own
screen. Light shone through a painting of a waterfall going down a
mountain valley into a pool of koi fish. Aja didn’t know if she
should drop the hair now. Instead she rotated her brass bracelet
and pinned the hair in its latch. That clasp had caught and held
her own hairs many a time.

Another sniff of cooking aroma, and Aja
hurried to cover herself with the glop from the jade bottle. Her
stiff fingers could only move so fast. Her arms could only reach so
far. She would never be ready in time, and all was lost. Then she
spotted a man of clay, a golem.

She was naked and shriveled, and the golem’s
glass eyes stung her. Still she asked the creature of pottery for
help. The cold blocks of its hands smeared the unguent over her
back. The golem followed her requests in silence. It had no mouth,
no opening on its face except a pinhole at the center of its
forehead.

“Did we miss any spots?” Aja asked. Even if
the golem didn’t have a mouth, it could point anywhere not coated
with unguent.

The golem stood still.

Aja glanced into the bottle. Some of the oil
remained. She started to recheck her fingers, her arms, her ears,
when she heard the thump of the Chef’s step on the stair. She threw
on her robe. Her joints popped and creaked. Peering around the
screen, she was in time to see the first peek of the course.

From the kitchen stair, a tray ascended
laden with a doughy treasure. The dumplings were each sculpted into
a demon’s face with horns curving upward and mouth downward.

“The Taotie was a beast of jaws and
appetite.” The Chef lofted the tray. “He ate and ate and ate until
no other creatures remained in the land. Then he ate himself and
found he tasted best.”

The dumplings were lowered, and the lord and
Janny snatched two each. He nibbled while she devoured. The Chef
raised the tray before Aja could reach. The outflow of aroma
knocked her legs from beneath her. She collapsed on the pillows,
vision fading in and out.

The Chef tented the fingers of one hand over
his chest. “The meat of the Taotie is wrapped in its intestine and
cooked in its own juices. I fold the tripe in a dumpling sculpted
in his likeness. A due credit to the Taotie’s peerless zeal for
eating.”

The tray descended. This time Aja could
reach the dumplings. Hot, they burned her fingers, but she held on
and shoved half the demon face into her mouth. Her teeth sank
through the fluffy-cloud top and crunched on the dumpling’s golden
underside. She tasted the meat between, and life roared through
her.

Her loose teeth wiggled with every bite, but
she chewed faster and faster. She swallowed as soon as she could.
The dumpling stuck in her dry throat. She started to choke. No, she
wouldn’t cough out the dumpling, not so much as a crumb.

Flailing, she found a cup filled with milk.
A nutty vanilla washed down the dumpling. She crammed the rest into
her mouth and chomped.

“The milk of crushed cashew is a delicacy
fit for kings,” the Chef said. “But what you’re drinking is rarer
still, empowered as it is with the essence of a nine-tailed
fox.”

Of all the guests, only the lord paused long
enough between bites to speak. “Fox essence?”

The Chef said, “If you must know, the fox’s
saliva.”

The lord chuckled. “Then something from a
fox is edible after all.”

“The fox essence shrinks food in the gut,”
the Chef said, “allowing a man to eat his own body weight in food
in one sitting.”

The lord raised his glass. On it, a
blue-stenciled fox fanned its nine tails. “At last man triumphs
over his nemesis, his own digestion.”

Aja alternated bites with swigs of nutty
white. Food flowed into her. She finished the dumplings and felt
empty as a dry well. She ate spring rolls brought by the golems,
rice skins stuffed with sliced carrots, braised tofu, and soy
sauce.

She shared a grin with Janny. The woman was
eating as if her life depended on it. Janny had also come to the
Banquet searching for something, her youth, and she had been
tricked, along with Aja. For now they both could stop thinking of
their pain and enjoy the magical meal together.

Aja and Janny, they could be friends. If
their ages ever settled down to something close.

Chomping, gnashing, Aja bit her lip. She
kept biting it while gobbling down sweet red bean cakes. With every
scrape of her teeth, her lip swelled, and she chewed it more. She
had always hated doing that. Tonight, it didn’t bother her. Had her
blood always tasted so good? Its tangy ginger flavor reminded her
of the Taotie dumplings. She sucked at the wound.

The dumplings had run out, and the Chef had
returned to the kitchen. Aja still caught whiffs of that
mesmerizing smell. Her nose hunted down the goodness. The aroma
seemed stronger closer to the carpet. She threw her platter to the
side, searching for scraps. Something smelled delicious beneath
her. She raked the carpet.
Nothing!

Licking the inside of her lip, she
stiffened. Were the guests stealing glances at her? The swordsman’s
mismatched gaze ran down her legs, then flicked away. He wiped
sweat from his brow. Even the lord’s eyes lingered on her. Aja had
wanted to be accepted, but now her skin crawled.

She sucked her lip between her teeth and
sawed it back and forth. The flesh was soft, and biting clear
through would be so easy. Her blood slicked her tongue. She tasted
the dumpling again as well as the acrid sting of the salamander
unguent she had spread as a balm on her lips.

Puffing out her cheeks, she shook her head.
All the lamps in the ballroom seemed to flicker green. She had
never felt this disgusted and hungry.
Did I almost chew off my
own lip?
Perhaps only the oil from the jade bottle had stopped
her.

“My candied rose,” the lord said, “you’re
being more provocative than is fit for a girl of ninety.”

“I’m thirteen. Or I was.” Aja noticed Janny
staring and licking her lips. “And what do you mean? What’s
happening?”

“Your left foot.” The lord clenched his
hands into fists, thumb jutting from between his other fingers like
snaggle teeth. “You didn’t cover it with unguent.”

Aja glanced down and found the source of the
dumpling smell. Her foot had aged from the dragonfruit’s magic to
the appearance of camel jerky. Its aroma promised it would be more
juicy, more tender. Its meat would melt on her tongue. Aja used to
be able to stretch her foot into her mouth. Did she still have the
flexibility?

Likely not. Too bad because she would like
to lick her toes. Maybe just a nibble.

Her gaze wandered to a set of knives
arranged on the table in a floral pattern. Each bronze blade curved
like a scimitar. It would whisper through flesh. Bet it could hack
through bone joints. It could free her foot.

Aja blinked. What was she thinking? She had
to cover her foot with smelly grease before she did something
awful, or someone else did.

She trembled under the constricting focus of
the other guests. The swordsman had set down the empress to face
Aja. The lord and Solin had risen to their feet, and Janny crawled
closer on her hands and knees.

They surrounded her.

Seventh Course,
Part II:

Savory

“Don’t worry, my delicacy. No one’s going to
eat you.”

“It’s just that foot.” Solin ground the tips
of his crutches into the carpet’s weave.

“It’s delicious,” the swordsman said. “I
mean, distracting. I said ‘distracting,’ right?”

Aja reached for her jade bottle. “I’ll
just—”

“Let me.” Janny swiped away the unguent.
“Lie back and relax. They say that I have ‘singing’ hands.”

Aja dragged herself away, off the carpet and
onto the chill of the tiles. “What’s that in your hand?”

“Why, only the oil rub.”

“Your other hand.”

Janny had one arm behind her back. A tic of
pain contracted half her face and sharpened her brittle smile. She
staggered to her feet and advanced on Aja.

Aja glanced to the table. One knife in the
circle was missing. Someone had taken it. Her eyes whipped to
Janny. “Get away from me!”