Notes from the Burning Age

by Claire North

  I curled tighter in my coat, the cold heart-deep. “They knew who he was, but they tortured him anyway. The Council spy. They knew. And I walked away.”

  “You protected your mission. Not too hot, not too cold. Georg Mestri only trusts people he thinks he can own. Do you want out?”

  The first time I met Nadira, it was at the Temple of the Lake, two months after Lah recruited me to the inquisition. She sang the evening prayers before a congregation of laypeople and novices, a solo voice without drum or bell, and after there was honey cake and camomile tea and people asked her how her little book of poems was going and if she’d had any luck finding a publisher, and I saw only a devout civilian, a little frumpy and a little loud, and couldn’t quite believe she was inquisition until Lah swore by moon and star she was. It took me weeks to ask her how she did it – how she played so well the part of the affable neighbour writing barely competent poetry. “By being it,” she replied primly. “And I’ll thank you to call my poetry average at least.”

  Now the snow moves upon the mountain, a skin-sharp biting of silver in the dark, and I say: “Antti is going to pass a motion granting the Brotherhood access to all temple servers in Maze – even the classified ones. As soon as the bill gets out of committee, they’re going to send militia. The Medj won’t have time to erase the data; every archive in the Province will be seized.”

  “Council can oppose it in court. Tie it up for months.”

  “They’re hoping Council will. Further proof of the interference of outside forces on Provincial independence. Doesn’t matter – the militia will occupy the temples the moment the bill is read. They’re calling it a ‘day of people’s action’. The temple in Grazt has nuclear fission on its servers. Vien is a centre for the study of ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide. Innsbruk has nearly two thousand entries on ‘re-education’ camps. Antti says people are easier to work with when they’re already on your side. He makes it sound like a joke.”

  The cabin rocked a little in a crosswind, clickety-clacked on the high overhead wires as it passed the counterweighted car descending in the opposite direction. Nadira was silent a while, hands fixed in her lap, feet rooted on the ground. She made me unlearn how to sit, when she’d become my handler. Only priests sit for hours cross-legged with palms at prayer, she’d say. Inquisitors slouch.

  Finally: “Who knows this?”

  “Antti. Georg. Kun Mi. Brika and Tanacha. A dozen or so staffers for the Brotherhood. Me.”

  “If they go into the temples and find the hard drives wiped, they’ll know they’ve been infiltrated.”

  “If they go into the temples and find material on nuclear fission, the kakuy will be the least of our concerns.”

  “What do you want me to do, Ven? We can protect the archives or we can protect your cover – I don’t see how we can do both.”

  “For what my cover is worth. Krima said something when she tried to recruit me: ‘There are gaps in your story’. She was looking at Kadri Tarrad, and of course we made that cover weak, made it so that Georg could punch straight through it, but I don’t think she meant that. She may have thought there was something criminal she could leverage, didn’t connect the gaps in my story with the inquisition. But Georg could. If he looked hard enough. If he has a mole on the Council.”

  We clattered a while upwards, shrouded in snow and wind. Vien was only a few hours away by train, but close your eyes and you could forget that there were cities or traitors or secrets and lies. We are children of the clouds. With our feet, we pray to the mountain; with our breath, we become one with the sky. So say the Medj, and sometimes, very occasionally, I remember what it is like to believe it, to feel the ocean in my blood and breathe my ancestors in every exhalation. Then I close my eyes, and instead I remember only the fire, and the kakuy.

  “Pontus,” said Nadira, and it seemed that she too was speaking to the darkness, to the turning night that all things shared. But look again and for a moment you could see the old inquisitor there, the woman who had infiltrated a sect in the Delta who knew just enough about genetic editing to cause a plague; the historian who had dared the first dive into the flooded caverns beneath Martyza Eztok, where the last archivists of the Burning Age had buried their secrets in the old mines beneath the cracked earth. “Georg’s spy in Council – we call them Pontus. We don’t know who Pontus is, don’t have the power to investigate. Krima vaMiyani is in charge of counter-intelligence and has proven reticent to move.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re not sure. Internal politics, perhaps. If there is a mole, the damage it would do the reputation of her department, and the Council in general, would be severe.”

  “More severe than someone sending Georg classified heretical material? More severe than if Maze does split, commits heresy – more severe than war?”

  “I believe the Council, and the other Provinces, are all hoping it won’t come to that.”

  “Georg doesn’t fear the kakuy.” I couldn’t meet her eyes as I said it, and as the words passed my lips I thought I saw Lah sitting beneath the cypress tree, sighing: we have failed. Humanity grows arrogant, forgets that it is part of the world, not above it, and we have failed. “Georg cannot conceive of anything upon this earth that cannot be conquered by human intelligence.”

  “How very old-fashioned of him. I do have an idea, but it will, of course, be absurdly dangerous.”

  I opened my mouth to laugh, or curse, or tell her where to get off, when a sharp twist of her chin silenced me. I felt the clatter as the cable car bounced onto the slower track, decelerating on its approach to the higher station. Then her face was set in a gormless grin and she was blathering: “Oh, look! The view, oh yes!”

  Klem and Sohrab were waiting for me at the top of the mountain, eyes narrowing and lips curling at the sight of Nadira in the swaying cable car. But she did not get out, and I did, dragging the bags of the great men of humanity reborn onto the station floor.

  Chapter 16

  I did not attend the lunar festival that greeted the new year, celebrated as the first icicles began to thaw. Instead, I worked late. We were often working late, and Georg never seemed to care.

  “Have you had enough?” he’d ask me, when I yawned. It wasn’t reproof, reproach. If I’d had enough, I could go home, and that would be fine. He would learn from this the measure of me and my skills and use me accordingly. Some men were weak; others were strong. That was the truth that lay at the heart of the Brotherhood.

  “No,” I lied. “I can keep going.”

  He nearly smiled then, and nodded, and we carried on with our work.

  “Ull, what a pleasure.”

  I had never seen Ull of Lyvodia, Minister of my home Province, up close before. The old man had skin the colour of summer night, hair like winter snow. He leaned on a walking stick and looked round Antti’s office disapprovingly, as if counting every heresy on the wall, every trapping of Burning Age pomposity knotted at Antti’s throat and pinned into the cuffs of his shirt. His deputy, Farii, looked around with a somewhat less outraged gaze, eyes bulging at the panoply of items, historical and new, assembled in the Brotherhood’s lair. I stood behind, inkstone poised to record conversations, take notes, run errands; Georg’s loyal secretary.

  “Antti,” Ull greeted the Minister with only one part of his mouth in motion, the rest clamped shut around what he wanted to say. “You’ve done well for yourself.”

  “Maze is thriving, despite Council interference – as you can see. Please, let me show you round.”

  In private, Antti cursed Ull and Lyvodia, called him a backwater mystic, a tree-hugging crone with wooden teeth and a peg leg. In public, he smiled and smiled and invited Ull to observe the authentic burning era collection of iconic “action figures” he’d salvaged from the landfill site, muscle-bound hunks of manhood and women in skimpy pants and bras, their hair flowing free behind impossibly glued-on masks. “We can learn so much about the idealistic culture of the past, the aspirational na
ture of their story-telling,” he said, one arm on Ull’s shoulder as if he might at any time split down the middle, teeth rupturing from his rib cage, and swallow the old man whole.

  Farii looked at me and said: “Where do I leave my coat?”

  That night, as they argued, the door stayed open and I sat outside it, listening.

  “If Maze is committing heresy, then Jia has the right to call on the Provinces to intervene.”

  “Heresy! Old women in old shawls making pronouncements on how we should live, what we should do? How many times has the Temple got it wrong? How many times have they banned knowledge that now we thrive on?”

  “A gradual process—”

  “Is their excuse! It’s always their excuse.”

  Georg passed me, sitting stiff on my strange, refurbished chair from another world, stopped as if he’d never seen me before. “Are you always listening?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  He thought about this, then nodded, “Good,” and went inside and did not close the door behind him.

  Dinner was an austere affair, designed to demonstrate to Ull that Maze, for all its talk of prosperity, humanism, freedom, was still culturally right up his street. Dumplings and cabbage, sweet and sour sauces that clung like molasses to the tip of your tongue, fruit tarts served in custard; white wine from the vineyards to the north, which I poured into small ceramic cups as the table toasted good fortune, perpetual peace, the brotherhood of man, and so on.

  Then, as if he had wanted to say it all along and could no longer hold his tongue, Ull blurted: “We give thanks for the food that feeds us, the water that makes us whole. We give thanks for this gift from the earth.”

  Antti’s face flushed a peculiar shade of incensed crab as Ull bowed his head, hands raised with cup between them in ancient ritual blessing. Georg tilted his cup towards the old man in polite acknowledgement, drank without a word. Farii bowed her head as was the tradition of the thing, but her eyes were raised, watching everyone, and her lips mouthed the words without sound.

  “You. Come here.”

  Her voice, when she spoke on her own part, away from the ears of men, was sharp, trained to command, frustrated that it didn’t have as much opportunity in that area as she wished.

  I approached the corner of the balcony where Farii stood, cup clasped in one hand, eyes running across the city. Vien at midnight, the half-fallen, newly restored spires of old temples lit up like knives to heaven, the lazy curl of the river a visible line of black cutting through streets of hanging lanterns. The Deputy Minister had been a voice in politics since she was old enough to vote, but achieved minimal political success until finally paired with old Ull some four years ago. Certainly, people said, she was a woman who could get things done. Competence rolled off every pore, and without much in the way of small talk to accompany this trait, it was as if she had embraced this one attribute into her heart, into every fibre of her being. However much people said she seemed cold, stand-offish, harsh, rude, or whatever the latest word was for the most efficient way of doing business, at least she had this – at least she was competent. Ull hugged children, talked about compassion and honour. Farii sacked those who made false promises; harangued those who didn’t get the job done, and everyone was appreciative, and no one thanked her for it. Fine russet hair stopped an inch above her shoulders in a straight, thin bob that hardly moved when she did. Green-grey eyes looked down on the city as if waiting at any moment for a fire to start. When her face was neutral, it was an almost formless thing, with thin pale lips and small flat nose seeming to blend into each other. On those occasions when she frowned – or, more rarely, smiled – contours of fibre and tendon emerged from cheek and chin, as if she existed in only two states: animated, or corpse-like, with no middle ground between.

  “Take my cup,” she said, and I took her cup, made to leave. “What’s your name?”

  “Kadri Tarrad, sky-kin.”

  “Where are you from? Your accent. Lyvodia?” I had barely spoken ten words in the entire evening, but she had an ear for it. “Where?”

  “Tseonom.”

  “Why are you here, not there?”

  “I prefer the work here.”

  “You are Georg’s… what? Assistant?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Stay his friend, Kadri Tarrad. Whatever you do, stay his friend.”

  I nodded, half-bowed, hesitated. “May I ask you a question, sky-kin?”

  “For yourself, or for Georg?”

  “There’s not much difference any more, is there? But for me.”

  She shrugged. “Go on.”

  “All this… talk. All this change.”

  “All this heresy, you mean? Georg’s man shouldn’t have to mince words. Come – say what you’re thinking.”

  “As you will. All this heresy. It is clear that Ull is not interested, but that, perhaps, you are.”

  “Is there a question there?”

  “What will you do, if you’re wrong? What will you do if the kakuy wake?”

  She thought about it for a moment, eyes drifting across the city, through its streets and to the lights still burning in the tops of every close-woven hearth. “I believe in people,” she murmured – not for me, but for the night, perhaps; for the heat of the bodies pressed into the streets below. “I believe in people.”

  That seemed to be her answer, for, with a flick of her hand, I was dismissed, and bowing, I backed away.

  Chapter 17

  Nadira said: “There is a plan.”

  We met only in the dark places now, in scuttling moments snatched between the hours I worked, worked, worked for Georg. She waited for me near the dead drops where I left my stolen data rinsed from any inkstone foolishly left open in my sight; where I deposited the little capsules of microfilm snapped of documents half-glimpsed on a midnight desk. There were dark rings around her eyes. I had forgotten whether there was ever anything else around mine.

  “There is a plan,” she repeated, as we pressed like lovers into the corner of the alley, beneath the ticking of the high-up compression battery and the scuttling of a startled cat. “To find Pontus before Pontus finds you.”

  I waited, head on one side. Georg never needed many words, and I had grown out of the habit of inquiry.

  “Temple shares heresy with Council. Pontus shares heresy with Georg. We have prepared a document – plausible without being correct – on autonomous military drones. Highly classified. Very tasty. We deliver this document to the relevant parties – identical copies, apart from a unique identifying error in each one – a spelling mistake or a comma misplaced. Do you understand?”

  “Yes. You bait Pontus with false intelligence. Pontus sends it on to Georg. Georg gets me to verify it. I look for the error you have introduced. The error reveals Pontus. I understand. It is all very… simple.”

  It is simple, yet it is hard not to close my eyes and whisper to the earth beneath me, hold me tight, hold me tight, I never feared you, I have never feared death and yet I fear, I fear, I fear. Why is this? Why does Georg’s face blaze in my mind brighter than a forest fire?

  “Ven,” she whispers, a hand on my arm – she’s never done that before. “This is how we save your life.”

  I nodded, and could not speak, and, in the sleepless darkness of the night, thought that perhaps I had forgotten how to pray.

  Georg said: “Read this and report back in an hour.”

  And Georg said: “Check what time Witt’s train arrives!”

  And Georg said: “Drink?”

  And Georg said: “No, that won’t do. We’ll have to re-work the entire thing.”

  And Georg said…

  Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night in a panic and don’t know where I am. Georg sits at the end of my bed and tuts and has a knife in his hand – that knife that he keeps somewhere about himself, all the time. Perhaps it was his father’s, the last relic of a man too intelligent for this world. And then I wake again and he is not
there, not in my room, not in my head.

  A parade of dignitaries through the office door.

  Pav Krillovko laughs and says, though there is nothing funny in his voice: “Dearest thing, it sounds like you want war!”

  Shamim, Chief Minister of Damasc, takes the train up from Isdanbul, sits and listens without commenting, then says: “The Voices of the Assembly thank you for your clarity,” and leaves again, showing no sign as to whether Antti’s pitch of humanism, freedom, justice has made any difference whatsoever to the old man’s ears.

  A delegation of Medj accompanies Chief Minister Shahd from the Delta, and they are furious. Their faith is one of denial, of leaving not a footprint on the earth, of eating only the bare minimum to survive, of bleeding on the soil in apology for an endless, uncertain litany of crimes. They are of the Temple, but not Temple as I know it. They call the Medj of Lyvodia weaklings; they say the priests of Maze do not merit the name. Their trip is a waste; Antti does not even bother to meet them in person – too busy, many apologies. After, they are lambasted in the press, mocked as fanatics, hypocrites, zealots. There is nothing in this world that they do not believe cannot be cured by carrot juice and prayer. Go back to the great river of the south. Go bleed on Council time.

  I do not bow as they depart, this increasingly desperate line of people trying to pretend there won’t be a war, and I wonder: which one of you is Georg’s spy?

  This is a secret so precious that he won’t even share it with me, his nearest shadow.

  I will find it out by myself.

  One morning, as I am drinking tea in the cold dawn air, I find the microdrone.

  It’s the size of a dead pigeon, folded gossamer wings limp at its sides. It has fallen just outside the back door, where Klem parks the car. An accident, an error – it’s hard to tell. Most of its body is battery and solar cell, but there is a little panel beneath its belly that I can slide back and…