Welcome to the project.
Kindest regards,
The late Honesty Kabrir
Elisiant
“Is he real?” she asked Iraji.
“I doubt it very much. Who could say? So many records are hidden behind unbreakable codes. But this was the letter Apparitor was given when he was exalted. Elisiant is a tradition of sorts, I think.”
She should discourage him from liking her. Men who liked her were invariably doomed. “Would you like to take dictation?” she asked him. “So you can tell Apparitor what I write?”
He covered his smile. “Will you strangle me for it?”
“Not without provocation,” Baru purred, and the purr reminded her of Treatymont, pretending to flirt with Bel Latheman as he pretended not to hate her, or up in her accountant’s tower with Muire Lo, watching the city’s laundry lines blow against a low cold autumn sky, taking bets on the ducal partisans fistfighting in the plaza.
Her eyes stung in the dry. “Let’s begin,” she said, harshly.
First she dictated a poisonous note to Xate Yawa. A jab—I know your game—a casual threat of death, and an apology for failing to save her brother, Olake. Iraji took it all down expressionlessly. That should satisfy Apparitor she had no alliance with Yawa.
“Now,” Baru said, tapping her brow, “I should write to Aminata. I’m sure you read a file on her?”
“She was very lovely, last we met,” he said, with an innocence so studied Baru looked up in outrage. He was refreshing his quill.
“You’ve never met her.” Baru leaned in on him. “Have you? Apparitor didn’t turn up in Falcrest until . . .”
“He was arranging the pieces for some years. A fact he brings up, often and bitterly, when you seem to be receiving too much credit.” He smoothed out his paper. “Your letter? You must be very eager to get back in touch.”
In fact, Baru was terrified, for it was very likely Aminata loathed her and would never speak to her again. Suddenly she didn’t want Iraji to hear a word of this letter. “I’ll write it,” she snapped. “Give me that.”
They had a childhood code, which they’d used in the Iriad school to pass letters in a little kitchen dead drop. Aminata had shown Baru how to seal the drop with saliva and a single hair. If it’s moved, you treat that drop as compromised, understand?
Dearest Aminata, etc. etc. Baru hesitated.
I read of your promotion to Lieutenant Commander. My congratulations. Upon her return to Falcrest, I intend to recommend you to Province Admiral Ormsment. You may wonder why a technocrat thinks to recommend you to a flag officer, and, well—more cause to hear my story!
She would mention Juris Ormsment so as to bring up the Welthony matter sideways. Ormsment had commanded the tax ships Baru betrayed and sank. Baru was trying to say, hey, I know what I did. Will you talk to me about it?
She went on with more dangerous material. I wonder if we could discuss navy politics again, and the mutability of government . . . If Aminata hated her, she could bring the letter to Navy Censorate right away, and then Baru would know, without ever having to ask her, that Aminata never wanted to see her again.
Find me at the return address. We simply must catch up. I have a remarkable wound to show you.
Regards,
Your sword thief
Baru signed, blew, and sealed. Iraji was watching her very curiously. “I’ve got to tell you,” Baru said, heavily, “the last man who took my letters died of plague. Do you have any strange diseases I ought to know about?”
Iraji’s bright eyes went suddenly dim: his lids half-shut, his hands loosening. “No,” he said, thickly. “I’m going to bring you some books you might find interesting. Back in a moment.”
A peculiar reaction. Well, she was alone now. Baru closed her eyes against Muire Lo’s guilty ghost. One secretary, and now another. She so rarely spent Falcrest lives. Somehow she kept tangling with the provincials. . . .
She should decrypt Purity Cartone’s message now, and get at that ledger of secrets.
She set the envelope down, picked up a letter opener, and
HU had been so beautiful on that last night. So fierce. Look: she was raising Cattlson’s banner in her mailed fists. She was standing on the Henge Hill with her hair in the wind. The Coyotes were setting off fireworks, and the light came down through the tent cloth, on her broad and naked shoulders, down her broken nose, as they lay together between passions, and Baru reached for her.
MY lady?”
How strange, Baru thought. I do believe I’ve been sitting here staring at the letter opener for quite a while.
She commanded her hand to move. Her hand replied that it could, but why should it bother? Opening this envelope would just lead to pain.
Stupid hand. She ought to be glad it would hurt. Pain was an ally. Pain was true. If something made you feel like death, then you had to believe in it. It couldn’t be a fantasy you’d invented to protect yourself. Comfort was a lie. Pain was the truth.
Pick up your fucking hand and open the letter.
Nothing happened.
Everything felt far away, and yet very beautiful: a keening, edged beauty, like a distant iceberg under moonlight. The coffee beans, and the pot of fresh ink, and her own still hand. All of them swaddled by a layer of invisible wool like the ruff of a winter coat. Perhaps she could just sit here a moment. It was warm and dark, and she was surrounded by books.
“My lady!” Iraji cried.
Baru thought about answering for a few seconds, and then, finally, said, “Yes?”
“You were absent. And your right hand was moving.”
She’d scrawled something on the back of Purity’s envelope. Iron Circlet. She looked at her hand and wondered how it had done that.
Iraji stood on his toes and bobbed in alarm. He was carrying a stack of books. “My lady, might I suggest, if it’s not too forward, that you take a moment for yourself? I understand, from your service jacket, that you love to read. I brought some titles you might find fascinating.”
“You’re distracting me,” Baru said, dully. “Go away, I have a coded letter to decrypt.”
Iraji huffed. Then he sat down across from her, picked up a book entitled Born of Salt and Stone, licked his fingers, and opened to the front page. “Are you allowed to read that?” Baru squawked, catching the subtitle: Upon the Young Apparitor. “Does he let you read books about him?”
“Of course I can read about him,” Iraji said, airily. “Don’t I comfort his ego as well as his body?”
Baru hrmphed and moved her chair so her body would block the lantern light.
Iraji moved his chair back into the light and kept reading.
“Ooh,” he said, cupping his chin. “That’s fascinating. How scandalous . . . my goodness. You don’t know what you’re missing.”
“Prick,” Baru muttered, and then she reached for On the Nature of the Eastern Supercontinent (from the Satamine Report). Her hands did exactly as she wished. She opened the book and a shiver ran from the crown of her head down to the cable of her calves: like cold water, poured from above.
AFTERWARD, renewed, she saluted her new colleagues.
To my peers of the committee . . . Power was the opposite of the sea. It flowed upward, away from the commons, toward the peaks. Show her a city with a council of five hundred, and she would find the demagogues who divided them in two. Show her ten friends: some would be spoken of, and some would do the speaking.
Why? Why? She wanted to know. And if the Oriati had lasted a thousand years, how had they kept so much power in their commons?
Was it a tradition they had? An idea?
Or was it in their blood?
I have completed my initial review of Apparitor’s documents, she wrote. We clearly face important strategic challenges.
And each of those challenges was an opportunity, a fang in Tain Hu’s ghost maw.
A resurgent Stakhieczi monarchy. The steel people north of Aurdwynn had united under their Necessa
ry King. Usually they starved, or turned on each other. But this time, with secret help, they might crash down on Falcrest. . . .
Backlash from our ongoing efforts to destabilize the federated governments of Oriati Mbo. War was coming, Baru had no doubt of that. Falcrest had gained the whole Ashen Sea and the Oriati federations couldn’t stand for it.
She did her best work in wartime, didn’t she? Imagine what she could do with the whole Ashen Sea at war. The clay of humanity in her fists, wet with blood. . . .
An increasingly apparent pattern of epidemic disease in the unconquered west. The maps called the west the Camou Interval, a vast historical lacuna left by the collapse of the old Tu Maia. On her voyage up to Aurdwynn, Baru had visited a Camou fishing town called Chansee, where pale people died of cancer.
And, of course, the disturbing findings of our expeditions across the Mother of Storms.
And oh, those findings did disturb her, they filled Baru with terror and with joy.
Falcrest sent its ships across the great eastern ocean from which no visitors ever arrived. Across the Mother of Storms. The fourth expedition went under the command of Lindon Satamine, a brave young captain in the Storm Corps. Not two weeks out of Grendlake he stumbled on a fleet of primitive Stakhieczi longships. He seized their young leader, Svirakir, as a hostage: the fact that he was a prince was not recorded. (Hello, Apparitor, so that’s your real name? Svirakir?)
Then, with Stakhieczi ships as sacrificial vanguard, the Storm Corps went on east through maelstrom and burning sea. Through the eel-swarming dead water that had killed the first expedition by thirst. Through volcanic peaks and jagged fjords, into lush lake-lands where the second expedition had recorded boiling ponds and died together in the night. Through beautiful naked stone land afire with burning pits, and long tidal flats where the third wave of expeditions had all gone mad.
Baru tasted each word like pufferfish-meat, sweet and poisonous and delightful.
Lindon and his hostage led the fourth expedition to the unexplored mountains. Star-tall mountains that rumbled so low you could only feel the sound. On the peaks there was fire, volcanism or burning forest, perhaps even the mysterious energies of the Oriati sacred stone called uranium.
And above the fire raged the storm, the endless thunder, the clouds that never broke. Forks and graphs of lightning hammered the mountain slopes again and again as if some celestial clock counted out the universe moment by moment.
In his reports, Apparitor said, As we approached the site of the lightning strikes, we perceived moving lights, like the shapes made by a thumb pressed into the eyeball. And the lights gathered into symbols. And wherever we looked, the symbols moved with us. There was a sharp smell, and a sound we cannot agree on. . . .
They passed through rings of stone monoliths. “Reminiscent of the pyramids and greatwells built in ancient Falcrest and the Normarch,” Lindon Satamine reported, “perhaps by an ancient transoceanic civilization.”
Burnt trees, carbonized into black pillars. Shattered ruins marked by fire.
Above the expedition endless lightning strobed off the peak. All of them complained of headaches, and a sense of meaning, as if they had a word on the tips of their tongues but couldn’t quite remember it. . . .
And then the attack came. Out of the dark. Out of the lightning.
Most of the accounts agreed the attackers had been human.
Baru wrote, We must confront the possibility that these eyewitness accounts are not hallucinations, and that natural law on the supercontinent somehow differs from our own.
This was a good dream. This was the dream she would hold to when she couldn’t see any reason to go on. To visit the mountain where the lightning never stops, and to name it for Hu.
Baru laughed into her hands, stirred by joy and fear.
There were powers in the world still beyond the grasp of Cairdine Farrier or the designs of Falcrest. So as Baru wrote about causal closure (let by my choice become exactly synonymous with by Imperial decree), as she signed the letter with the name Agonist, she sang to herself:
Tain Hu
kuye lam
you are beyond them
like the lightning in the east.
A STORY ABOUT ASH 1
FEDERATION YEAR 910:
25 YEARS EARLIER
Tau - indi Bosoka came into this world alone.
Now, you might protest, who is not born alone? Stop a moment and think, o listener! Do you have the answer? Correct! Twins!
Now, the House Bosoka had no tradition of twin births. There was no twin to accompany Tau-indi’s mother Tahr when she popped out of her lamother Taundi through the mine foreman’s slippery hands and fell into a wash bucket, nor a twin for grandlam Taundi who came out of Toro Toro downside-up and burbling, so small they wrapped her up in a leaf.
But Tau-indi Bosoka was different.
The first difference was that Tau had been elected, before their conception, to become a Federal Prince, raised to help rule the Mbo.
The second difference was Tau-indi’s stillborn twin.
What do you call a wound that everyone has, but no one notices? What do you call the loneliness of not-having-a-twin, a loneliness most of us will never acknowledge? Imagine that wound. Imagine that you are haunted by the ghosts of people who should have loved you. But you did something wrong, and they abandoned you, or never arrived at all.
Imagine that this loneliness strikes you on the morning of your thirteenth birthday, in your home upon Prince Hill, above Lake Jaro which is the center of the world’s crossroads, Lonjaro Mbo. Imagine that you cry out in grief and paint your brow with white lamp ash from temple to temple, which is, in Lonjaro, a way of mourning.
Then you run across the hill to see Abdumasi Abd.
Your neighbor Abdumasi is a good guy. When he sees how upset you are, he gives you a caraval kitten to hold. He tells you he’s training the gangly little kittens to kill pigeons, for gambling reasons. You try to explain to him the pain of missing someone who was never born.
“You sound like you’re in love,” Abdumasi says. “I read that you can fall in love with someone before you’ve ever met them. And when you see them at last, you say, ‘Oh, that’s why I hurt,’ like you just found an old splinter buried in your foot.”
You hate splinters, so you shudder.
“People need some things even if they’ve never had them,” Abdumasi opines. “That’s why we invented the Mbo, right? Some people said slaves have never been free, so they can’t want freedom—but the Mbo said no, everyone wants freedom. Now there’s no more slavery anywhere. We ended it. We’re mbo people because we help other people get what they need.”
You pet the caraval kitten listlessly. It squirms from your arms.
“Tau-indi,” Abdumasi says, looking at you in worry, “Tau-indi, manata”—which means my beloved friend—“you need to let this twin thing go.”
The attending doctor and her midwife tried to take blame for the stillborn child, identical in every way to Tau, except that they never screamed or breathed at all. Tau-indi’s umbilical cord had strangled them. “As we rushed to your house, Tahr, we must have walked along the shadows,” the doctor said, trying to take the blame, “and today there was a calendar taboo against following the sun’s lines. The twin’s soul saw us break taboo, and turned away in disgust, back to the Door in the East. Thus they were born dead.”
But Mother Tahr was gracious and of good trim, and she chose to blame the umbilical rather than the doctor. She burned her unnamed ungendered child out on the hill, raked up the ash of the burning, and ate it in an ash cake, to put her given body back into herself. Then she put her grief behind her and set about raising Tau-indi.
The House Bosoka asked the child, at age six, for their gender, and the child was a laman. Lamen did not exist everywhere in the world, but many mbo people were lamen, and Tau-indi felt quite sure they must be one.
At age thirteen, the day this story begins, Tau-indi asked their friend Ab
dumasi a terrible question.
“Do you think,” Tau-indi whispered, “that I killed my twin in the womb, so that I could be Prince alone?”
The caraval kitten began knocking Abdumasi’s ceramics down off the shelf. They both ran around after it, begging it to be civil. Quickly they forgot the terrible question. After a while Abdumasi said, “Tau, this is the first birthday you’ve had without your mother here, right?”
“It is.”
“And there’s no sign of your father ever coming home.”
“No.”
“Manata, I think that’s why you’re lonely.”
It was 910 Federation Year, one decade into the Glass Century. Not so long ago mother Tahr had left Prince Hill to visit Segu Mbo.
She was representing young Tau at a summit concerning a small nation called Falcrest, which, of late, had begun to think itself a crocodile instead of a crane.
TAU-INDI’S family lived in a fine compound of stone alongside a towering termite colony, which they tended out of a desire to help Tau seem a little conservative. Abdumasi’s family the Abds, led by his mother Abdi-obdi, lived in a compound of brown and black wood with high banners, and Tau-indi often went over there to fly kites off the south slope. Abdumasi called Tau-indi Your Federal Highness, and Tau-indi called Abdumasi obscene names like You Rich Bastard and Cancer Eater and Horn Eye, too young to understand the obscene weight of these epithets.
And when it was too hot to stand the earth or air they went down the hill to the honeybee compound of the third house on Prince Hill.
It was not technically a proper House, for it had no rate and did not belong to one of the kingdoms of the Thirteen-in-Three-in-One which was Lonjaro Mbo. Rather it was named for the Prince who lived in it, Kindalana of Segu, who had come to be raised near the great city of Jaro.
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