by C. A. Lang
The honeyed pastry melted in his mouth, and the spirits Yaz was drinking suddenly looked appealing rather than blasphemous. But momentary pleasure was fleeting. “I became tired of running from Valoii death squads. I tired of fanaticism backed by incompetent action. I just left and went out on my own.”
“Just like your father, eh?”
Dannac scowled. “Without getting into three years of theft and bodyguard work, let’s say that I have become stranded here. My... partner and I.”
“Stranded? I could offer you passage out of here, I suppose.”
Yes—he should have realized as soon as he saw Yaz that this could mean an end to their problem. “I would be grateful.”
Yaz stood and gazed at the field of dark water dotted by lights from the boats, like the night sky mirrored. “The Bhagovan Republic of Arnhas sympathizes with your people, Dannac. We wish to help in any way possible.” He faced Dannac. “Did you know that our researchers are tracing the Ehzeri back thousands of years? We believe that we are in fact quite related. Both our peoples date back to the Ildra culture.”
“Fascinating.”
“But to be completely honest, old friend... sometimes there is such a thing as doing too many favours. For example, your sight. We still have yet to see any returns on that investment.”
“You said it was a gift.”
“Of course. But, naturally, we had thought it would be beneficial to our cause as well.”
Dannac rose—just a small reminder of the discrepancy between his bulk and the other’s. “I fought our mutual enemy.”
“Yes, yes. Now, what were you really doing in Blightcross?”
He told Yaz everything about his misfortune with Capra and their mission for Helverliss, right up to the pathetic trap Vasi had led them into, only to suffer from a sudden change of heart.
“Breaking into Sevari’s prized collection?” Yaz rubbed his neat beard and hummed for a moment.
“So, you see how it would be much appreciated if my colleague and I could avoid such a problem. At this point, we do not even know where this collection is. I have a feeling it is in those vaults.”
Yaz came within biting distance of Dannac’s face and touched the jewel embedded in his skull. Dannac did not flinch. “Here’s the thing, Dannac.”
“I do not like that tone.”
“Listen, loyalty is a funny thing. It is not always convenient.”
“What are you saying?”
Yaz paced around the deck. “Dannac, I think this is a good opportunity for us to gain some valuable information about Blightcross. Your jewel, that thing that allows you to see, can also remember what you see. This is why we gave it to you, after all. You are an invisible eye for the Republic.”
He opened his mouth to speak, yet said nothing. Had he been that naive? Had he really thought that the Republic field operative who had saved him and brought him to the Republic’s advanced surgery was motivated by compassion?
But sight was sight, and because of this, he could see where he otherwise should be blind.
Still, he felt used. Now his sight would never feel like his own. He would forever be in the presence of this undefinable other, this abstract thing overlaid upon his own consciousness. The Republic.
Yaz continued, his slightly apologetic tone now replaced with a matter-of-fact coolness. “Sevari is much too paranoid to keep his precious things—especially things of a mystical bent—in some generic vault with the district’s gold reserves and emergency grain supply.”
“You know where it is, then? Do you want it for yourself?”
“No, you misread me. I mean that if you can get to his collection of mystical nonsense and confiscated art, you will have penetrated his security. There will be any number of answers to questions my department has about this strange place.”
He crossed his arms, raised an eyebrow.
“You have a new mission: continue on your original plan to liberate the artwork.”
“If you want me to do this, what else can you offer me? I had thought you would help us avoid this very situation.”
“I do not enjoy doing things like this, Dannac. But I am afraid I can offer you nothing except your own continued existence for this favour. If not, I will just have to sign a termination order.”
Dannac grabbed the table and tossed it over. A cascade of pastries and liquor pelted Yaz’s feet, yet the man remained still and composed. “The jewel in your head, stupid. Did you think it was a gift free of any controls or safeguards on our part? Yes, I can kill you with the flick of a switch. You are still my responsibility, after all. I have kept your control mechanism for these last few years because I knew you would return to us someday.”
“You son of a bitch—”
“If I die, the man who takes my position will see your file, and I have made several notes to terminate you if I am killed, as I doubt anyone else would have the patience to deal with such a rigid, old-fashioned man like yourself. So please do not kill me—if only for your own sake.
“Now, tonight I will set your eye to record all that you see from hereon in. You will find this collection, and get a good look at each piece. You will also capture in your vision any targets of opportunity, such as pieces of technology, documents, schematics. Do you understand?”
Dannac grunted and flexed his fingers and wished to tear off Yaz’s arms and throw him overboard.
“Do you understand, Dannac?”
He grabbed Yaz by the collar of his coat, pulled him close. He saw a sudden change in colour in the man’s head. With this type of vision, he could see fear flush a man’s face even when the skin was too dark to show it under normal circumstances.
Yaz struggled and wheezed. “You... will not drink the finest whiskey, but you will threaten a man who gave back your sight? That is some moral imperative you have.”
He shoved Yaz into the upturned table and made to leave the yacht. As he approached the stairwell, he stopped at the sound of coins hitting the ground behind him. At his feet sat a pouch of Tamarck pistres, the drawstring slightly open so that the silvery glimmer of coins stared like misplaced eyes.
“Go buy yourself a good night’s sleep and a decent woman.”
The void—a thing for which no words existed except words like “void” and “darkness”—all negatives, none really denoting any property other than the lack of something. The more Vasi tried to work out the various inversions of her thoughts, the less she understood Akhli and the Shadows and the disturbing way Helverliss had worked vihs into it. Vihs was power, it was something, yet he had used it to create absence and void.
She walked around the lab, hands pressed to the sides of her head. Who could think under this kind of pressure? It was impossible to work when she could not even convince herself that Rovan still lived. Where was he?
The moment she found him, they were going to leave.
He would kick, he would holler and call her names, but when he grew up to be a real man, he would thank her. It just was not worth it to stay.
And this, she realized, was probably why she could no longer even give the appearance of continuing Sevari’s research without losing track.
There was a knock at the door. She shut her eyes and envisioned the small hole in the door. A tunnel of light bored through the blackness behind her eyes, and she saw Rovan standing at the entrance. She immediately willed the locks to unlatch, and the door to open.
“Rovan, you shit. Where have you been?”
“Working, just like you.”
She touched his face and examined him for signs of damage, as one would a piece of fruit, until he shrugged away from her.
“I’m not a kid, Vasi. I make a lot of money now.”
“That does not mean you are any stronger, smarter, or wiser.”
He gave her a cocky grin and invited himself to tour her lab. He picked up an artifact, examined it, and put it down disinterestedly.
“Rovan, I have some news. We are going home.”
&nb
sp; He went still, and Vasi sprinted to him and snatched the charged idol from him, set it back on its shelf. “What do you mean we’re going home?”
“Have you not been paying attention? Young men are being killed here, for no good reason. These are not accidents, Rovan. They are just randomly killing Ehzeri males.”
“I work for Sevari now. On the fifth floor of the clock tower. Nobody will kill me. They all want to be me, not kill me.”
What was with this kid? Did he really think that nobody could be murdered in the tower? It was off limits to most people, sure, but that would not stop a killer from sneaking in to murder its inhabitants.
“What exactly do you do here, anyway? You have no power, Rovan.”
“You people are too arrogant to carry things, put things away, deliver things... I help out in ways you refuse to. Sevari doesn’t judge. He has more in common with me than he does with you.” There was a strength in his voice and sparkle in his eyes, as if he’d found the ideal father. He reached into the satchel he carried and produced a sleek obsidian cylinder. “This is why I came. Sevari wanted you to have this.”
She took the cylinder and nearly dropped it. There was a familiar resonance within it, but she could not quite place it. “What is it?”
“He told me to tell you that Section Three had a breakthrough and that this would help you figure out how that painting really worked. He said you needed to use it for an experiment.”
She weighed it in her palm. Yes—just the other week, she had written in her progress report that without some kind of detached energy, she could not observe directly how the painting’s energies affected a conscious being. At the moment, she was only relying on how it directly affected herself, and unless she submitted to the painting’s weak, yet seductive pull into a very real darkness, her empirical observations would continue to be flawed.
“You mean they found... detached energy?” she asked.
Rovan shrugged. “You’re the magician, not me. I just do the real work.”
She held it up to the gaslight. There was a slight glimmer inside, and again she could not shake the feeling of either having done this before, or having seen something like this before, or...
“So Section Three was able to synthesize it? From what? Raw vihs? A kind of artificial...”
“I have no idea, sister. Still want to leave?”
“Yes, I do.” But this changed it all.
“Well, I’m staying here. Only a fool would give this up.”
She stared at the cylinder, gazed at the glow inside. Finally, something to feed to the void, something to watch it devour. Again she closed her eyes and opened herself to the world of vihs reflections and flow.
She saw scenes—dry land, sagebrush. Any Ehzeri would feel homesick when faced with such landscape set in front of a mountain backdrop. Land not even their Valoii oppressors were allowed to inhabit. Ehzeri faces—emblems of a different family, since the knot was much different to hers and it was decorated with emeralds rather than sapphires. Someone talking to her—
No, not talking to her.
“Stop being so sensitive—my father does like you. You would not have married me if he did not approve.”
A woman, talking to someone—
The scene faded and in came another, this time a view from the flying boat. Now thoughts came into her mind: It must have cost a fortune to purchase such a craft, and to give us free passage... how fortunate are we? Below she saw where the ocean met the land, and the smokestacks of Blightcross smouldering in the distance, and the river delta.
The thoughts were not hers. She had come via sailing ship.
Another scene played in her, eclipsing the others.
She saw her laboratory door, that slab of security. She saw it open, and watched herself greet whoever this was, and take an envelope from these strange hands that were not her own.
Her eyes fluttered open, because she recognized the scene. Not only that, but the flavour of energy within the crystal.
“Rovan? Where did you go?”
The mail clerk. But how?
Section Three had not synthesized an energy that could mimic a human. They had just killed the mail clerk and stuffed his consciousness into a piece of obsidian so Vasi could feed it to the painting and watch what happened.
So Vasi could feed the shadows.
“Rovan?” She went into the hall. The empty hall.
She locked the door, double-checked it and jammed an unused chair against it.
There was no crazed Ehzeri-killer loose in the plant. It was Sevari and his attempts to gain some impossible mystical clarity, some divine justification for his actions.
Rovan was his new pet.
Sevari the killer. Who knew what the maniac could do, even to a favourite employee. Everyone knew about the memorial he had created for his family. This was the kind of logic that could drive a man to kill his friends in order to preserve them.
She snatched a bag from the coat hook and stuffed it with food, extra coins, and a few artifacts that would give her power a short boost if needed.
Maybe Rovan would not agree to leave until it was too late, but could he fight his big sister, the huge man with the jewel in his head, and an ex-Valoii stormtrooper?
CHAPTER NINE
There were two different lunch breaks at the factory. The one at noon, where the skilled workers, like Laik and his crew, took thirty minutes that somehow lasted forty-five, and brought their company-supplied lunches onto the factory floor to eat wherever they wanted. The other lunch break was for the ladies and young men who did not produce directly, whose drudgery made sure the factory ran smoothly. This one started two hours later, lasted for fifteen minutes, and was confined under the low ceiling of the auxiliary cafeteria.
It was during one of the noon breaks that Capra swept out a corridor and saw the men on their break. She saw Laik among them, overall straps hanging at his sides and showing his barrel chest. He ate a giant sandwich in two bites, and, ten minutes into the break, began to gesture wildly at the others. Another man stood and raised his fists.
Tey came wheezing by, under the weight of an overburdened dustbin.
“What are they doing?” Capra asked, as the men organized into a circle.
“Beating each other for fun.”
“Why on earth...?”
“’Tis what men do. Really, are your men all eunuchs in Mizkov?”
Capra forgot what she was doing and watched intensely. Of course it was stupid, at least to a Valoii, but something else about it intrigued her.
“We don’t fight each other in Mizkov. Not even for fun. Well, there is sparring for instruction, but...”
She watched Laik pound another man senseless, and afterwards they shook hands. Why would they either act like friends when they hated each other, or fight each other if they were friends?
They went quiet when Laik spoke. They moved out of his way, they cheered him on.
These men fought to reinforce notions of status?
“Is that why they do it?” she said out loud.
Tey let out an inquisitive grunt.
“They gain respect—it is a way of distributing surplus status among them.”
“You have some strange terms, Capra. Get back to work, otherwise you’ll run afoul of the boss again.”
“What do you mean, again?”
“We all heard about the tiff in the hallway with Laik.”
Capra peered over Tey’s shoulder, and once she was sure no-one else was listening, whispered, “What did you hear, exactly?”
“Well, Marta said she saw him beat you, and of course she had her own problem with the man. She’s married, you see, but of course that never stopped Laik. Then there was that gutsy woman who actually learned a trade and joined his crew, and of course he pinned her down and speared her with his dangler...”
Tey’s words soon sounded like a string of disjointed sounds, and all Capra could think of was how to use this situation to her advantage.
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“... and he is on the Board, too, so what can you do?”
Aha. “A board? Which?” Before Tey could answer, she said, mostly to herself, “Never mind. A board is a board, and here it seems everyone who has any power is on some board. Which means he may be able to get me to Sevari...”
“Sevari? Till Sevari? Our Leader?”
Capra nodded and caught the gaze of a supervisor searing the air between them from across the shop floor. She shoved a handcart loaded with machine parts out of her way and pretended to sweep under it. That had been the man’s scathing criticism—Don’t just sweep around things, you lazy cow. Move them and get all the rubbish underneath.
She did this now with a smile, and the supervisor left.
“Ah, I was just joking around.”
Tey giggled. “Oh, I see. He is a handsome man, isn’t he, that Sevari?”
“Maybe, but I think he’s a little old for me.”
“Don’t let that stop you, dearie. If you can do it... I hear he has not taken a wife... ever. Could you imagine living in that palace with him?”
Had Tey even seen the palace lately? And it hardly seemed like the residence of their great leader. It was a collection of offices. Perhaps he lived behind the gated walls of Damwall? That would make more sense—the politicos of Tamarck also chose to live in exclusive residential developments, rather than in the palaces and mansions owned by their king. Or, for that matter, the houses in which everyone else in the nation lived.
“I have been to the palace, Tey.”
“Ooh?”
“All I saw were offices and signs either pointing me towards or warning me about the Sevari Family Memorial.”
“Ah, the memorial. Poor man.”
Capra stopped sweeping, face screwed into a puzzled grimace.
“Well, just the way he lost his whole family during the war. No wonder he searched the wreckage for their bodies and did what he did. Still visits them once a week, like clockwork.”
Part of her did not want to know what exactly a man like Sevari was capable of doing to a corpse. Actually, most of her did not want to know.
The conversation dissipated under the pressing matters of dustbins and dirty floors. Capra found drudgery oddly meditative—after a while, the action seemed to perform itself, and her mind could drift as it wanted. Her dreamlike trance flitted between inane thoughts of what Laik might look like in a dress, how much money she might have left after finding Helverliss’ precious artwork and paying the army to leave her alone, the travesty of using corn starch to thicken a sauce instead of a roux, desserts, pastries, shalep with spices, like they drank in the south...