Rise

by Kim Lakin-Smith

  Kali sensed his new distaste for the stones. She took them from him and cradled them in her arms like the ancient treasures she believed them to be.

  “I will hide them under my corner of the mattress. If I am caught with them in my possession I will not be bled out on the spot. You might not be so lucky.” She went to walk away, but then she stopped and said over a shoulder, “My father has stolen your legacy, Mohab. I suggest you think of a way to steal it back.”

  Fourteen

  Three Months Earlier

  Something had been growing inside her granddaughter for a long time. To call it guilt would be to overegg it and miss the subtleties of the change. Looking back to the sparrow-killing child she once was, Grizmare could see that Kali had altered immensely over the years. Throughout her trial at the Nilreb Imperial Court, Kali had remained cold – ultimately feasible as a Lieutenant in High Judge Titian’s National Guard. Less so in her role as a Vary sympathiser, intent on polluting her nation’s rationale. Kali had crossed the line by abusing her elite access to the datastacks and publicly criticising the regime. Grizmare might have made this point to her granddaughter if she thought it would do any good. Instead, she instructed her driver to pull into the underground docks at the court dome and made up her mind to endure Kali’s predicament. After all, the girl had tied herself up in knots!

  “What can I do?” Grizmare muttered, shifting her weight between her aching feet as she waited on the elevator.

  “What’s that?” The latest in a series of personal companions paid for by her son stared at her with almost rude intensity. This one – apparently named Lizabeth – was a nun, and young as a prostitute from Geno’s red-light district. Wearing the traditional black habit and wimple of her order, she looked like a child playing dress up.

  “Mind your own stinking business!” Grizmare masticated her gums. The fire-lamps were too bright in the basement; they made her old eyes hurt.

  The lift arrived noiselessly, the reflective inky panel sliding back to reveal a softly lit interior.

  “So, should I ask which floor we need? Or is that none of my stinking business either?” The nun waited by the panel of gel patches as Grizmare hobbled inside the lift.

  “Well, you’re a spicy little minx.” Grizmare nodded to the numbered patches, many of which required an identification scan to activate. “Floor forty-three. The main court room. Unless my granddaughter’s act of treason has been bumped to a smaller court in favour of a worse felon.”

  “A worse felon does not exist.” The nun thumbed the gel patch and the doors closed silently.

  The motion was imperceptible. Grizmare outstared the nun, who had the most perfectly Bleek green eyes. “My son would like you,” she said, jabbing the floor with her ornate cane.

  The nun’s mouth twitched; a micromovement. The doors slid open, letting in the noise from the corridor.

  “My son’s secretary promised me it would be a civilised proceeding.” A few steps from the elevator and Grizmare was already recoiling against the flashes of gel film and an assault of questions from the datakeepers.

  “Madam Titian. What do you say about this charge of treason?”

  “Madam Titian. Have you spoken with your granddaughter?”

  “Will High Judge Titian intervene?”

  “Did you know Kali was going to post a personal manifesto on the datastacks?”

  “Were you in on it?”

  “Were you in on it?”

  “Were you in on it?”

  Grizmare didn’t answer their questions. Instead, she barged on through, whacking shins with her cane and muttering, “Get out of my way, lice!”

  The nun, too, proved her worth. Pulling Grizmare back by the shoulder, she pushed her way in front and held up the crossed swords pendant which hung around her neck. “Let us pray to Lord Gothendore to lend us intelligence and listening ears in the trial ahead, ladies and gentlemen. Let us pray.”

  The whole corridor fell into a begrudging silence. No respect for the mother of their great leader, thought Grizmare darkly. But you fools prostrate yourselves before a piece of tin on a chain!

  “Oh, holy divine, the sacred, the iron rod. Keeper of benediction and salvation. Grant us weight to our ambition. Purity in our blessed design. And the humanity to shine longest and brightest. Lord Gothendore, hear our words.” The nun brought the pendant to her lips, kissed it, and led Grizmare through the crowd as if parting water.

  “See how straight she sits?” Grizmare nodded towards the distant figure. “I taught Kali that. Drummed it into her with a choice between pound cake and a backhander.” She nodded smugly. “The National Guard will take credit for that posture, but I bred her that way since the beginning.”

  “Bred?” The nun stared at the solitary figure in the dock. “I understand you keep a zoo, Madam Titian. Do you enjoy the company of animals?”

  Funny girl, this Lizabeth, thought Grizmare. Was there intent behind her words?

  “I find comfort in the retardation and spontaneity of beasts. We –” she nodded to the rows of dignitaries and datakeepers in the main hall below. “…are cut from the same cloth. It’s all entirely too dull.”

  “And yet you failed to breed the wild animal out of Kali when you made her sit up straight.” Lizabeth fixed Grizmare with her sharp green eyes.

  Oh yes, there is intent there! “Could it be, Lizabeth, you would have benefitted from a stronger hand in your own upbringing?”

  Before she and the nun could pursue their verbal dance further, a clerk’s voice boomed out below and brought the court to order. The judges materialised at their bench. Like flies on shit, Grizmare told Lizabeth out the corner of her mouth. She held up a hand and, from a distance, ‘captured’ each judge between a thumb and forefinger and pretended to squash them flat.

  Last to arrive was High Judge Titian. Her son. Although, looking down on him from this angle, she would never have recognised him. He wore the black uniform of the National Guard with added stripes and medals, despite having seen no active service of course. Grizmare couldn’t keep in a snort, attracting the attention of one or two of the vultures below. She produced a handkerchief and mimed choking into it.

  “Imbeciles. My son, he walks well though.” She nodded towards the man striding to take his central seat at the bench. “Pound cake or a backhander.”

  It was the first time she had laid eyes on her son in a month and a half. His hair was thinning, she decided as he placed his peaked cap on the long table and took his seat. And Kali? How did she look? It was impossible to tell from that far away. All Grizmare could do was interpret the outline of her granddaughter, dressed in the washed-out grey of a prison smock behind a translucent wall of glass-sheet. Kali sat so very straight. Unflinching.

  “That’s my good girl,” Grizmare said softly. It took all her steel not to throw herself over the rail and fight tooth and nail to reach the child she loved the most.

  Fifteen

  High Judge Titian was to make an inspection of Abbandon. Kali heard the news in the holding bay, her father’s name resonating between the prisoners like the strike of sledgehammers in the quarry. She pictured Titian in his uniform, boots laced up his shins like scars. His close-cropped beard had always reminded her of the monks who wafted incense through Geno Benedictory; she had visited often as a child, her grandmother having a penchant for the sour gin produced by the monks using the benedictory stills. For a moment, it would confuse her to imagine the grey hue of her father’s skin, and then she would remember the lungrot which had struck him down like her mother, and how she had received weekly reports on his progress while she took over the country’s pompadours. Seeing him again might evoke an instinctual sense of comfort; after all, he was still her father. But then she would remember where she was and on whose order, and all false hope evaporated.

  “Will he be moved to see you?” Groff worked to uncoil cabling from a drum, feeding it up to her.

  “I can assure you my father is not comin
g to see me.” She patted the gunner’s underbelly. “This warcraft is the more likely candidate. I haven’t seen a gunner like this before. The fact its fuselage is blown after re-entry suggests it’s still experimental. And there is a far greater degree of bio-engineering going on beneath these bolt plates than I’m used to.” She sent sparks flying as the cabling synced and fed into the magnetised clips. “The only way my father will see me is as the ghost of a girl he once knew.”

  “I don’t know how a father could be like that with his daughter.”

  Groff visibly jumped when she looked at him, as if expecting a new outburst in defence of her origins. But Kali knew he was just voicing the same sentiment as the Speaker had when she first arrived.

  Sparks fountained around her like Skyfall. “I never set out to harm my father. We just disagreed on his politics.” She shook her head. “Increasingly, I think I have been very stupid, Groff.” Her voice cracked with the sentiment.

  Groff squinted. He didn’t look as monstrous as he should have. Kali remembered the tooth of the Vary male killed by the blocker at the spinning machines, how it had reminded her of the milk teeth she lost in childhood.

  “I have lived in a cage made of lies,” she said.

  “Why did you speak up for the Vary, Kali?”

  She expected to feel sickened by the presumptive use of her first name. Instead, she felt almost grateful for Groff’s attempts at kinship. And so she told him the truth. All about the time a year and a half ago when, on her father’s orders, she travelled north of the Nedmac Traps.

  Commandant General Ricklan, an elite member of her father’s cabinet, had met her off the passenger wagon and guided her through his Cull System with wind in his sails and wild gesticulations. As Rickland had explained it, the bedrock of pumice was carved out by the first cargo load of Vary to arrive at the site. Once seven large trenches had been cut, the first shipment were stripped, made to lie face down in one of the trenches they had dug, and bled out via their nicks. The first rows were soon submerged under subsequent layers of bodies.

  Arriving alongside one of the trenches, Kali had peered down at the mess of hair and limbs and faces, and had thought how much the bodies below looked like melted wax dolls. Seeing movement at the sides of the trenches, she had watched as a pair of guards clubbed the survivors to death with their beaters. Up close, it was more difficult to put aside the fact that the Vary were in fact not wax, but flesh and bone. The mix of putrefying bodies and the expulsions of those who had opened their bowels in their last few desperate moments was staggering to the senses. Death clogged the nostrils; Kali tried to breathe through her mouth only to find its crud on her tongue. She had ordered executions, but a signature on a gel frame was a far cry from the moral inferno she saw before her. These Vary were the pregnant and the elderly. They were neighbours, gardeners, maids, teachers, lamp lighters, stone masons, glass-sheet workers, surgeons, actors, engineers, and lawyers. They were blonde haired and brown haired and pale skinned and dark skinned. They were tall and short and round shouldered and straight backed.

  Ricklan had turned to her, bloated with pride. “We eradicated fifteen thousand these last two days alone. A dusting of lime salt will melt the remains back into the lava flow. It will be as if they never were.”

  Standing on the precipice, Kali had finally understood the cancer at the heart of her nation. Hearing the tale, Groff had hardened his face to her and, for the first and only time, it had seemed to Kali that he could have killed her there and then with his bare hands had he been free to do so.

  The tremor had knocked out the security coils around the house, gardens and zoo. Grizmare hadn’t noticed immediately. Neither had the groundsmen who only worked a couple of days a week now. Harriot had heard about the break-in from her staff who had been gossiping with Grizmare’s stable hands and she was quick to call, offering her condolences. Grizmare didn’t say much. There was real sadness to her day. Boohoo and Shy-lo, the mating pair of desert otters, were missing. No doubt they had been stolen by opportunists and sold for a pretty penny. Grizmare kept thinking about the menu at the Red Orchid hotel, the listing for highly prized desert otter and a price to reflect their rarity. She didn’t like to think of Boohoo and Shy-lo ending up on the chopping board of some impartial chef and served up bruised and braised in wine stock.

  “I cannot talk right now,” she told Harriot. “I have the coils to reset and charge, not to mention five otter kittens to hand-rear. The little bastards probably won’t take to the bottle. But we’re not monsters, are we Harriot? We have to try these things.”

  Harriot made it clear that Grizmare should forget the animals and concentrate on barricading herself back in. “There are unpleasant rumours, Grizmare. Enemy combatants infiltrating our forces, warcraft shot down over Nilreb. Naturally, one doesn’t believe a word…”

  “More’s the pity.”

  “Now you are just being antagonistic, Grizmare. Loose lips cost lives.”

  Grizmare had heard enough. She cut the wire phone connection. Her day was already bad enough without Harriot’s inane contribution. The truth of it was that even Bleekland’s grand dames were forced to fight over scraps of information about a war taking place above their heads. The datastacks still broadcast the same patriotic diatribes and overinflated numbers of defeated enemy. The skies still smoked and glittered with warcraft. And now her son had disowned her.

  “Not literally, of course,” she told Lizabeth later that afternoon after several sour gins. The otter kittens were playing in a makeshift sandpit below the water clock. After a couple of hours mourning the loss of their parents, all five had bucked up and taken to the bottle with the brutish insensibility of the animal kingdom, pleasing Grizmare greatly. “But he has put me to one side. And I…” Her eyes greased. “I should have done a better job of raising my granddaughter, but I thought she would shake free of her father’s influence in time. To be quite honest with you, Lizabeth, I thought this entire nation would shake free of my son’s ideals long before now.”

  Lizabeth wasn’t scrimping on the measures of sour gin for once. Grizmare was wise to the young woman, though. She was actually surprised that it had taken Lizabeth this long to try her luck. Often the nun had appeared on the verge of saying something meaningful. She had talked of injustices in the world and corruption of the church. You have an ulterior motive for taking care of an old fart, Grizmare had concluded. One day you will show your cards. One day I might show mine.

  “Grizmare,” Lizabeth began, Grizmare’s insistence on the nun’s use of her first name having finally stuck. “I feel we might broach an unpopular subject today.” She nodded towards the otter kittens, lulled to sleep by the chimes of the falling water against the bells. “After a tiring day, we have peace at last.”

  Grizmare nosed her glass. She had no intention of speaking first. Let Lizabeth struggle through her bit; it would be more amusing and put Grizmare at the advantage.

  She was taken aback when, rather than confess her secrets in a mess of tears and weakness, Lizabeth returned to the drinks tray and, uncorking the decanter, poured herself a measure of sour gin. Grizmare was in her usual place of residence in front of the wall of glass-sheet which gave out onto the garden. Grizmare sat in her favourite recliner while Lizabeth opted, as usual, to sit on the chase lounge, perched on the edge as if Gothendore himself might disapprove of the privilege of comfort.

  Grizmare made no comment on the gin. Just watched and waited. Everyone had stories. It was one of the things that irritated her the most about her aging acquaintances. Everyone was so enthusiastically, desperately eager to tell their tales of privileged lives – tales of daring, exoticism, flamboyance… to Grizmare’s mind, so gut-wrenchingly dull.

  But Lizabeth had a far more interesting story to tell and Grizmare wanted to hear it. The woman had admitted she deliberately gained a position on High Judge Titian’s staff. More specifically, she had wormed her way into being Grizmare’s personal companion. Now Grizm
are wanted to know why.

  After a long sup of gin, she said, “Go on then, girl. Spill your guts. And feel free to take that ridiculous wimple off and lose the eye contacts. None of it looks comfortable and I’ve seen through your ruse since the day we met.” She pursed her lips. “Good effort, though.”

  With a sigh, Lizabeth pulled off the wimple, revealing short black hair cropped tight to the scalp. She didn’t remove the green contacts. “My real name is Eva,” she said firmly. “I was born in Zochgeng, five kilometres outside of Nilreb. My family were embroiderers, my mother, my father, and my twin younger sisters. Only my older brother escaped the family calling to become an entertainer in the city.” Her hand started to shake and she drowned the remainder of the gin. The liquor appeared to calm her slightly and she rolled back her shoulders, as if shaking off the emotion. “I suppose it is fair to say I always envisioned a different path for myself as well. I wanted to be an actress. Like my older brother, I wanted my time in the sun. Once I was of age, I think my parents knew I wouldn’t stick around to stitch vesils and mantles and family flags.” With clear pride, she said, “A vesil is a ceremonial pair of gloves. The mantle is an embroidered silk scarf worn for worship. The flags are tradition. But a clever woman like you, Grizmare, already knows these things.” Lifting a hand to her face, she touched a fingertip to one of her eyeballs. “Do you see? No contacts.”

  Grizmare didn’t quite believe her. “But you are Vary. Vary have black eyes.”

  “Black, green, blue, grey, brown, hazel and every shade in-between. But you are right in that, over the past 50 years or so, Bleek have been at pains to maximise the green-eyed gene. These” – She pointed to her clear emerald eyes – “…are all mine and they have helped me to move in circles I should never have been allowed in.”