by Claire North
The first settlements of the new age had begun around the river, to catch the boats drifting down the Ube. In that we followed our ancestors, all things in a circle, renewing again. They were built from the reclaimed materials of the past, a bewildering jigsaw, each brick marked with the scratches of a different history from a different home. Then, as the city grew, modern materials were introduced: bricks of hemp and mycelium, floors of pressed clay and walls of compacted straw. Uncertain how to honour a city of so many histories, Budapesht became an architect’s paradise, the focal point of every new experiment and curious idea. Towers unfolded like the leaf of the fern. Rooftops of chitin grew on geodesic domes crowning the hearths, their crops of legume and spice shrouded behind the milky material. Canopies woven by silk spiders shaded the narrow marketways, and solar pylons turned to catch the light on engineered sunflower stems.
Council had been in residence in this city for three of its allotted ten years; after a decade here, its apparatus would be uprooted for the migration down to the Delta – a moving capital that favoured no Province above any other. Its presence filled the train station with new styles from further afield, be it the itching robes of the southern Medj or the straight-cut, high-booted garb of some Lyvodian magnate straight from an embassy with the roving Rus.
As with all cities, there were many shrines and temples, but the largest sat within the walls of a building that had once been sanctified to a monotheist God of old. The great dome that crowned it had collapsed many centuries ago, but had been replaced over time with a solar crown dyed with streaks of liquid blue and crimson through which the winter sun spilt like oil. The scarlet marble columns had cracked and been repaired with biopolymer grown from the seaweed vats, adding new veins of translucent black to their white capillaries. Where the monochrome patterns of the floor could be recovered, they had been, new tiles of clay laid in the gaps, guiding visitors to the place where once an altar had been.
Pictures showed how the faded walls would once have been blazoned with gold and blue, and in one alcove set in a shadowed corner, under soft lights, the recovered fresco of a martyred saint was still visible, one hand raised as though begging the god of the sky to rescue him, the other turned towards his bare belly as if he could not contain the despair within.
The monotheists still came to pray before this icon, filling the vaults with song every second seven-day. An overzealous Medj had talked about removing it altogether, sanctifying the space entirely to the kakuy, but local residents had been outraged, and after a certain amount of back-pedalling and “you misunderstood entirely”, the martyr was left where he was, and the altar to the kakuy remained where it always had been – in the wide, bee-buzzing gardens behind the faded walls, beneath a rainbow of slung spider silk and slatted timber walls. In summer, the shrine burst with crimson tulips, pink peonies, the dry petals of the blue poppy and beds of tiny daisies. In winter, low fire pits shimmered in carved hollows between the paths, and the wax from the hives was pressed into the hundred candles that burned day and night until spring came again.
A novice offered me a hot stone drawn from one of these pits as I approached, to tuck beneath my robes. I realised that I still wore the faded blue and grey of the order, as he bowed low before me. I returned the bow automatically, felt a pang of inquisitor’s horror at the mistake, saw no frown of condemnation, heard no sirens at my back. His deference was not a trick. Georg was not waiting in the crowd.
Evening prayers were done, but couples sat on the benches, holding hands and talking softly of quiet truths, while occasional lone figures marched through the gates to the altar itself, and bowed and gave thanks, and contemplated human things before the image of the earth, and bowed again, and walked away. How strange it all seemed now, this abasement before a shrine that cared nothing for prayers. How odd to pray to a world that saw in us no more and no less than the scuttling of the busy ant.
Away from the pious and the casual, the usual tucked-back buildings of Temple business. A kitchen, private rooms for study and contemplation, a laundry, business-like vegetable boxes and a high, steaming compost pile. A locked door heading perhaps to some minor, classified archive. The lights of the Medj’s quarters, bright and warm through translucent sliding doors.
I passed through the gate from public yard into inner sanctum and asked the slumbering priest there for an officer of the inquisition, and waited patiently until they came, and said my name was Ven, and my case handler had been Nadira, and she was dead, and I had nowhere left to go but here.
Sitting in the guest quarters.
I have been given inquisitor’s robes, loops of grey and faded red.
I have been given a bowl of potato soup, brought to me on a black lacquered tray.
I have been invited to sit with the Medj of the temple and neither talk nor pray but merely sit and be in this place. I fear doing such a thing, but it is rude to decline the invitation of the Medj, so I obey, and sit cross-legged by their side, and sometimes shake, and sometimes sit in silence, and sometimes feel light-headed, and sometimes feel as though I am the centre of the world, and sometimes feel as if every part of me were dust in the air, and at the end realise I have no idea how to be whoever it is I am, now that I am here.
Somewhere, in the heart of the place that is my home, the forest grows. When all else is swept away, I close my eyes and take great comfort in that.
The next morning, I went to the halls of the Council and met Yue again.
Chapter 30
Entering Council premises took nearly twenty minutes.
I watched, as one might observe precise points of a surgical procedure, as bags were searched, bodies patted down and scanned for electronics. Nothing in, nothing out, said the guardia on the door. Council security kept everything on hard-wired systems cut off from the world, and unless you had filled out your form II89 and got it stamped by someone with an active B20 authorisation, you would be lucky to be let in with your lunch box.
“An inquisitor?” murmured the guardia, struggling to work out how to search the many folds of my awkward garb. “We don’t see many of you – at least, not in the robes.”
“My cover was blown,” I replied, and it was the first time I’d said these words out loud. “I don’t know if I’m an inquisitor any more.”
He smiled politely and didn’t know what to say, and neither did I, as I was waved through the gated airlock to the interior.
So here we are.
Yue sits, cross-legged, in her office of wood, stone and glass. The room was rebuilt into the side of a crumbled-down market hall, the scars of the old world a jagged slice down one wall, a timber frame bolted into its remains. Where ancient meets new, yellow resin defines the join like the border between two warring states. Unlike Georg, she has no restored wooden desk but sits stiffly on a low stool on the polished timber floor, hemmed in by cushion and blanket. She wears blue, trimmed with white, and her hair is pulled up high, in a formal style. There are two teapots – one large, one small – and matching cups the colour of a stormy sea. There are little rolls of bean and cabbage, still hot from the stove. There is a single sprig of rosemary in a thin-necked vase. These things are arranged on a tray between us, and for a while that is all there is between us as I settle, fold my legs, straighten my back, wait.
Yue tests the temperature of the larger teapot, finds it satisfactory, sprinkles dry leaves into the smaller pot by its side, pours water over them, waits for the liquid to brew, and we do not speak.
In one corner of the room there is a shrine. It is not sanctified, and the incense has long ago burned cold, but the arrangement of objects upon it speaks of a certain amount of contemplation, perhaps even prayer. Feathers from birds of prey, collected and tied together in a bundle. Glass beads polished and blasted by the sea. A vertebra from some unknown four-legged thing. A single page from an ancient document, half torn away, the other half framed and preserved against all time, the colours faded.
I cannot see any te
xt, but the jagged half of the image that survived shows a woman’s leg, impossibly smooth and pale, contoured to a soft dune of muscle, stepping down from a short yellow skirt to a pointed, raised pink shoe. It is easy to imagine the female face that had been ripped away above it: smiling, laughing, entirely content with her life, joyful in her body and all that she owned. Yue follows my gaze, half-turned in her chair, sees the paper, smiles, nods, turns back.
“From a fashion magazine,” she explains. “I was trying to find one about lip fillers, but they’re almost entirely gone these days, or already snatched up by eager collectors.”
“Why?”
She thinks about it for a moment, head tilted to one side. “It is good to remember,” she concludes. “Everything changes. Beauty, sex; right, wrong. Krima says it is important to pay attention to the fluidity of these things. Tea?”
I nod dumbly as she sweeps her sleeve back from her wrist, pours a dribble from the pot into a cup, swirls it three times in a little whirlpool, pours the rest, passes me the cup between both hands with a half-bow, waits for me to sip, pours her own.
We sit together, drinking tea, and it is the closest I have come to home for I do not know how many years. She watches me over the lip of her cup and I do not care. Her scrutiny is nothing next to Georg’s; there is no death lurking behind her eyes, no black wolf of the mountain. Finally she lays her cup back down and, inclining the plate of nibbles towards me, says, as if it is the easiest thing in the world: “Krima will need to debrief you. If you want someone present from your order during this process, we can arrange it.”
“I have… a lot of questions.”
“Of course. I’m sorry I didn’t answer them in the forest. You didn’t look in a fit state for conversation, and it was not wise for me to linger.”
“Why? Why were you in the forest?”
“That should be obvious. I was looking for you.”
“Why?”
“It is my job.”
I am the forest. I will grow and I will wither and my molecules return to the earth, and when they do they shall rise again into my neighbour tree and I will be the forest. Georg found such thoughts distasteful, a crude reduction of the wonder of human endeavour. I have always found them a comfort.
Yue’s voice is calm and steady, a thing moulded from clay. “I assist Krima vaMiyani in matters of Council security. Legally speaking, the Council having its own intelligence service is a grey area – the Provinces are responsible for their security – but some threats transcend the need and expertise of any one Province. The Brotherhood is one of those threats. When the inquisition reported one of its agents was missing, that they did not have the resources to find him, it was considered worth the risk of a cross-border incursion to recover him. To recover you.”
“Did you know it was me?”
“No. Not until I saw you in the shrine. The inquisition are… jumpy.”
She sips her tea, and the motion is so small I’m not even sure she’s drinking.
“I’m… not sure if I should be here,” I blurt. “I don’t know if—”
“Pontus.” She says the word so simply, so matter-of-fact, that for a moment I struggle to recognise it’s a word at all. She shifts a little in her seat, as if her legs are stiff, turns the teacup in her hand. “You are here because of Pontus.”
“What do you know about them?”
“Not much. I am cleared to run operations of the kind you witnessed in the forest – recovery, counter-intelligence. I am not cleared to know about Pontus.”
“How do you?”
“Krima. Do you know she had an arrest warrant drawn against Pav Krillovko? The inquisition came to her with actionable intelligence which implicated Pav as a double-agent. Except it couldn’t be him. He was on retreat in the southern mountains. But someone is – someone with the highest clearance. Do you know how your cover was blown, Ven?”
“I know that every time I fed intelligence back to the inquisition, I made it more likely I would be discovered. A pattern builds up – a cascade of betrayal that could only have come from one source. How much does Council know about me? About Pontus?”
How much does Yue?
“I don’t know,” she replies, eyes fixed on some distant place. “I don’t have access to that information.”
“Then – if I may – why am I here? Talking to you?”
“Because we are also friends.” She speaks as if remarking on the coolness of the wind; a truth that will still be true when bones are dust. “Your hearth shared bread with mine. We have… there were things we saw. We are… these things are also important, no?”
Are they? Aren’t they? I have no idea. Kadri Tarrad has no idea. Kadri Tarrad is formless in thought and deed. Kadri did not see the kakuy of the forest burn.
“There was a spy – in Vien.” My voice sounds distant, dull, even to my ears. “A Council agent. One of Georg’s tests was seeing if I would kill him.”
“Did you?” Her voice sharp and sudden. I had never known the name of the man I left to die in that cellar, all those months ago. Yue does.
“No.” She isn’t sure she believes me, and I have never been so desperate for another human to see that I do not lie. “Pontus destroyed the Council’s operation against the Brotherhood. Georg practically said as much. With Krima’s agents out of action, only the inquisition remained in play. I imagine that makes me useful.”
“It does,” she replies, simple and stiff. “We are friends, you are an inquisitor, and you are also useful, Ven.” She says my name as if it was my own. My name is Ven. How strange it is. “You are going to be debriefed by Krima and Witt. The inquisition has approved it. This is not your debriefing. I am not authorised to debrief you. This is simply tea. This is us drinking tea, as friends should.”
I am the mountain. Is the mountain a living thing? Does the kakuy slumber in the stone? Is this world a breathing, conscious thing? Or is it madness, humanism run wild, to say that sentience can be only defined by humans, that a network of neurons surpasses in value an ecosystem that is fed from the blackest pit of the volcanic ocean to the highest bird in the sky. As if the mountain could ever be “merely” rock; as if the sky could ever be “merely” air; as if we were not all spinning creatures within the kakuy of the world, turning through the stars.
Then she says: “I met him, you know? Georg. When I was at university.”
I have no idea what I’m meant to make of this, so shrug. “What was he like?”
“You wouldn’t have expected him to end up where he is. He was going to go far, of course, but we all assumed… tech, perhaps? Or maybe a teacher. A brilliant teacher. Not… propping up someone as inept as Antti Col.”
“He has no interest in Antti. Antti’s just what he has to work with, for now. As soon as he can, he’ll find a way to replace him with someone more useful.”
“Like who?”
“I don’t know. Tanacha, perhaps. Or Kun Mi. Someone happy to feel like they’re in charge, without acting like they are.” Her eyes are still studying some place I can’t see. I have to resist the urge to turn and try to spot the distant land on which she has turned her gaze. “Yue… I don’t know you.” Finally her gaze returns to me, almost surprised to discover that I sit before her, a grown man, rather than the child she had left by the kakuy tree. “We were children. We saw the kakuy and—”
“I did not see a kakuy,” she interrupts, quick, calm. “I have never seen a kakuy.”
“You were there. In the forest, it was—”
“I have never seen a kakuy,” she repeats. “The kakuy have not stirred for a hundred years.”
I try to wrap my mind round these words, to read anything in her face, and cannot. What would Lah do, what would Nadira say? Nadira would say the mission, Ven, the mission: what serves the mission? Nadira is dead, and I am not sure what the mission is.
My skin hurts across my chest, and I remember briefly that there is a cut inflicted by man, not by any spirits of stone and
cinder, which tugs a little beneath my robes.
Then Yue says, a little kinder, and I wonder what she sees in my face to provoke her: “You are right. We do not know each other. We come from the same place, that is all. But I have read about Kadri Tarrad. In the days before we found you, I studied your file. So much of it redacted – so much Temple wouldn’t say – but I felt… familiarity. It mentioned Tinics, your age, but I didn’t know any Kadri from home. It was… I could have sent in a unit and stayed behind. I wanted to be there. I don’t know you, Ven. But I know you risked your life for the inquisition. I know you got out alive. I would like to know you better, if you are willing.”
She pours more tea, offers me the refilled cup. I take it. The heat feels real, and I could do with a certain solidity in my universe.
“Hello, Ven,” she says, raising her cup in salute. “It is very nice to see you again.”
“Hello, Yue,” I reply, and drain the cup down.
Chapter 31
I was, as promised, debriefed by Krima vaMiyani and Antoni Witt.
Witt is a rarity, an escapee from the Anglaes islands who fled before the purity laws could spill his blood in offerings to the wild sea and dark forest. His eyes are green-grey, skin pale enough that he could have almost passed as pure Anglaes. They say his hair was white by the time he was seventeen, that he speaks seven languages and paddled down the Rhene River to the northern border of Maze in a canoe he carved himself. He neither confirms nor denies any of these statements. He learned a long time ago to keep his mouth shut.
He was also one of the suspects to whom Temple gave their doctored files. So was Krima.