“It’s a bad time for you,” the girl said. “There’s so much water, but it’s bad. Sour. You’re running out of time to be noticed even though it’s all you’ve ever wanted. Your lives are running out, the world’s life running out—” She sounded like she was about to cry. “I wish I could help you all.”
The girl’s coils wrapped around Lee, Huynh, Kim, and Wong, and tightened ferociously. “I can’t. You know it can only be one,” she said. Her eyes were the size of books, laptops, pillows, getting larger by the second. For a moment they welled up again. She wanted to console them by letting them know that the one who had called her here—well, that person just wanted it more, didn’t they? But all of them wanted it! They wanted the face that would be their face and theirs only; they all were so tired of appearing and immediately receding like a finger painting made in the sea, they wanted to be carved as stone into the minds of their friends and family and loved ones and hated ones and people worldwide who’d never meet them in the flesh, whether they were the one who was obsessed, or the one who didn’t feel good about anything else, or the one who was naturally talented and too lazy to find praise elsewhere, or the one who wanted to be famous and loved in a way that didn’t require talking or looking good. It was too bad! The girl lifted her face to the ceiling in a silent cry and wept for a minute. Then she bent her head and ate.
In the morning, they woke up jolly and hungover. Three of them less than they used to be, but they would not ever know it. Nor would the one who had become more, who had received some crucial bump in talent or desire or perseverance or pure idiot luck, and who would be famous, in a way, years later. We don’t need to talk about that. Better to think about what the fame did to the others—how the sheer proximity of awardpartymoviesbookstravelhotelcruditesgraduationspeeches made success feel actually possible, maybe even attainable, while at other times inducing in them a fresh, keening despair, inscribing behind their eyelids shining golden letters like:
H E R E I S Y O U R L I F E then a sickly, disorienting leap over hundreds of millions of miles of alien terrain over to T H E R E I S T H E I R L I F E
These lands were on the same planet only technically. In one direction they were so far away from each other on the globe that in another direction, they almost touched. But they never touched. Years later, one was famous, and meanwhile, the others would hope to be, almost be, and finally, never be. There were so many tiny little steps between each stage that each one felt much like the last, and thus, the letdown was gentle, merciful, barely noticeable, even.
LAWS OF NIGHT AND SILK
Seth Dickinson
SETH DICKINSON (www.sethdickinson.com) is the author of the epic fantasy The Traitor Baru Cormorant and sixteen short stories. Born in 1989, raised in the hills of Vermont, he studied racial bias in police shootings, wrote much of the lore for Bungie Studios’ Destiny, and threw a paper airplane at the Vatican. If he were an animal, he would be a cockatoo.
KAVIAN CAN PRETEND this girl is her daughter through drought and deluge, but the truth is the truth: Irasht is a weapon, and never any more.
It hurts enough to break even the charcoal heart of Kavian Catamount, and so she does a forbidden thing—she puts her arms around the girl Irasht who is not her daughter, kisses her brow, and whispers: “I will protect you. Go.”
Then Kavian pushes Irasht onto the stone above the battle.
In the valley beneath them the Cteri, the people of the dams, the people of Kavian’s blood and heart, stand against the invader. The Efficate comes baying to drain five centuries of civilization into their own arid land.
So the word has come from Kavian’s masters, from the Paik Rede and warlord Absu:
You have had time enough to tame her. Go to the battle. Use the abnarch girl, the girl who is not your daughter.
Destroy the Efficate army.
Kavian cries the challenge.
“Men of the Efficate! Men of the owl!” Her wizardry carries the bellow down the valley, across the river, to shatter and rebound from the hills. “I am Kavian Catamount, sorcerer of the Paik Rede! I like to warm my hands on your brothers’ burning corpses!”
Fifty thousand enemy spearmen shudder in fear. They know her name.
But the battle today does not ride on Kavian’s fire.
The girl Irasht (who is not her daughter) stares at the battle-plain, wideeyed, afraid, and puts her hands up to her ears. Kavian seizes her wrists, to keep her from blocking out the sound of war. Irasht claws and spits but does not cry.
Over Irasht’s hissing frenzy Kavian roars: “My hands are cold today!”
She hears the cry go up in the Efficate ranks, a word in their liquid tongue that means: abnarch, abnarch, she has brought an abnarch. And she sees their eyes on her, their faces lifted in horror and revulsion, at the girl Irasht, at what has been done to her.
You poor bastards, she thinks. I know exactly how you feel.
KAVIAN HAS BEEN in pain for a very long time. There’s the pain she wears like a courting coat, a ballroom ensemble—the battle hurt that makes her growl and put her head down, determined to go on.
And there’s the other pain. The kind she lets out when drunk, hoping it’ll drown. The pain she reaches for when she tries to play the erhu (this requires her to be drunk, too). It’s a nameless pain, a sealed pain, catacombed in the low dark and growing strong.
The night she met Irasht, the night she went down into the catacombs to decant her daughter: that night belonged to the second pain.
In the Paik Rede’s summit halls, past the ceremonial pool where the herons fish, catacomb doors bear an inscription:
We make silk from the baby moth. We unspool all that it might become. This is a crime.
Silk is still beautiful. Silk is still necessary.
This is how an abnarch is made. This is the torment to which Kavian gave up her first and only born.
The wizards of the Paik Rede, dam-makers, high rulers of isu-Cter, seal a few of their infants into stone cells. They grow there, fed and watered by silent magic, for fifteen years. Alone. Untaught. Touched by no one.
And on nights like these their parents decant them for the war. “Kavian. Stop.”
Warlord Absu wears black beneath a mantle of red, the colors of flesh and war. For a decade she has led the defense of the highlands. For a decade before that—well: Kavian was not born with sisters, but she has one. This loyalty is burnt into her. Absu is the pole where Kavian’s needle points.
“Lord of hosts,” Kavian murmurs. She’s nervous tonight, so she bows deep.
The warlord considers her in brief, silent reserve. “Tonight we will bind you to a terrible duty. The two mature abnarchs are our only hope.” Her eyes! Kavian remembers their ferocity, but never remembers it. She is so intent: “You’re our finest. But one error could destroy us.”
“I will not be soft with her.” So much rides on the abnarch’s handler: victory, or cataclysm.
Absu’s golden eyes hold hers. “The war makes demands of us, and we serve. Remember that duty, when you want to grieve.” Her expression opens in the space between two blinks—a window of pain, or compassion. “What did you name her?”
“Heurian,” Kavian says.
A grave nod. Absu’s face is a map of battles past, and her eyes are a compass to all those yet to come. “A good name. Go.”
And then, as Kavian pushes against the granite doors, as the mechanisms of gear and counterweight begin to open, Absu warns her.
“You will find Fereyd Japur in the catacombs. He went ahead of you.”
Fereyd. The scar man, the plucked flower. Her only rival. Why send him ahead? Why is he in the dark with her buried daughter?
Kavian tries to breathe out her tension but it is a skittish frightened breed and it will not go.
SHE GOES DOWN into the catacombs where eight children wait in the empty dark for their appointed day. Where her daughter waits to be reborn and used.
Magic is bound by the laws a wizard carries
. Day and night, air and gravity, the right place of highborn and low. The lay of words in language. The turn of the stars above high isu-Cter, the only civilization that has ever endured. All these are laws a wizard may know.
This is why the upstart Efficate produces so many wizards: it fills its children with the mantras of fraternity and republic. Their minds are limited, predictable—but like small gears, together they make a machine. This is why the Cteri wizards walk the world as heroes, noble-blooded and rare.
There are other ways to make a wizard. A child raised in a stone cell knows no laws. Only the dark.
Fereyd Japur waits for her in white silk ghostly beneath the false starlight of the gem-starred roof. He is tall and beautiful and his eyes are like a field surgery.
He was not always a great wizard. Not until he gave himself to the enemy, to be tortured, to learn the truest laws of pain.
“Why are you here?” Kavian asks.
Fereyd Japur’s eyes burn old and sharp and clot-dark in a young brownbronze face. Whispers say that the thing he did to buy his power killed him. Left him a corpse frozen in his first virility. The whispers are wrong, but Kavian still remembers them. He’s a popular companion for those who want to claim dangerous taste.
“You don’t know,” he says, and then, “She didn’t tell you. Absu didn’t tell you.”
Oh.
Kavian understands at once, and she steps forward, because if she doesn’t, she’ll run.
“They’ve given her to you,” she husks. “Heurian. My daughter.”
“And mine to you.”
“What?”
“My daughter Irasht.” An awful crack opens in his face, a rivening Kavian could recognize as grief, if she believed he was human, or as rage, if she were wiser. “The warlord prefers to spare us from attachment to our charges. So I will have your daughter as my abnarch. And you will have mine.”
She wants to weep: she will never know her daughter. She wants to cry out in shameful joy, she will never have to know her daughter, and that thought is cowardice.
Kavian says the rudest thing she can manage. “You never told me you fathered.” Women have bragged of having him, even made a sport of it—he is beautiful, and his lowborn status makes him scandalous, coercible, pliant. But Cteri women don’t conceive without intent. Who—?
His full lips draw down to one narrow line. The fissure in him has not closed: grief and hate cover him like gore. “The mother wanted a wizard’s blood to water her seed. The child was meant for the catacombs. That was all.”
“You did this to hurt me.” Her anger’s speaking for her, but she has no hope for any kind of victory here and so she lets it speak. “You knew this would happen, didn’t you? Fifteen years ago you planned this? You made a child to be given to me, so that you could take my daughter, so that you could say, at last, I have something Kavian Catamount wanted?”
He lashes out at her. The word he speaks would kill any lesser wizard, the third-best or the fourth or maybe even Fereyd Second-Best himself. But Kavian turns it aside without thought, an abject instant no. He must have known she would.
“You have everything I wanted,” he hisses, and it feels as if she can see through the dusk of his skin and the white of his bone into the venom of his marrow, into the pain he learned beneath the enemy knife.
She turns away.
They unseal the cells and decant their children.
The girl Irasht, daughter of Fereyd Japur, waits wide-eyed and trembling in the center of her cell. When Kavian comes close she rises up on narrow legs and begins to make soft noises with her lips: ah, ah, ah.
She doesn’t know what a person is. She’s never seen one before.
By the time Kavian has coaxed the girl into a trembling bird-legged walk, Fereyd Japur has taken Heurian and gone. The closest Kavian comes to her daughter is the sound of footsteps, receding.
Kavian protests to Absu, bursting into the war council, scattering the tiny carved owls that mark the enemy on the map and raging for her daughter Heurian.
But the Warlord says: “Without your two abnarchs on the front, they will break us this summer. They will open our reservoirs, take our men for their fraternity, and use our silk to wipe the ass of their upstart empire. You are a soldier first. Look to your charge, Kavian.”
So: a night that belonged to the second kind of pain.
GO TO THE front. Train your abnarch on the march. Summer is upon us, and the enemy moves on the dams.
Kavian curses Absu’s madness— train her on the march? Irasht could go catatonic, overwhelmed by the sweep and stink of the world beyond her cell. She could lash out in abnegation and blot herself and Kavian and their retinue and a mile of Cteri highlands into nothing.
But Kavian’s known Absu since childhood, and for all the rage she’s hurled at those golden eyes she has never known them to measure a war wrong.
She finds she cannot sleep until she snaps something: a branch, a lyre-string. Sometimes it takes a few.
Every time she looks on Irasht, teetering around in tentative awe like a hatchling fallen from a nest, she thinks: where is my daughter? She thinks: I could go to that lowborn boy and take Heurian back. He could not stop me. But she cannot go against Absu and the Paik Rede. Cannot defy the ruthless will that keeps isu-Cter safe.
So she hardens her heart and begins the training.
“Hssh,” she murmurs—Irasht freezes when touched, and must be soothed. “Hssh.” She draws a cold bath while the abnarch girl watches the motion of the water, rapt. When Kavian lowers her down into the ice cold, arms around her tiny neck and knocking knees, she reacts with only a soft “oh”. From then on the temperature doesn’t seem to trouble her, even when Kavian leans her back to wash her knotted hair. She sculls the water in small troubled circles and stares. Kavian thinks she is trying to reconcile two things: the sight of the water rippling around her palm, and the feeling of it on her hand. Whether she succeeds, Kavian cannot tell.
Irasht is at the peak of her power as an abnarch. All the logic she learns will confine her. When she sees the difference between sunrise and sunset she will diminish. When she understands that the chattering shapes around her are people like herself, she will be a lesser weapon. So Kavian keeps to the strict discipline of the handler. No language. Simple food. Strict isolation, when possible.
But for Irasht to be useful, she must learn to trust her handler. (Or dread and fear her handler, Fereyd Japur would remind her. Or that.) So Kavian reaches out to her—touch, meaningless sound, small acts of compassion. Holds her when the world becomes too much and she retreats to clawing frenzy.
Irasht is a burnt stump of a person, like a stubborn coal pulled from a fire pit. She stares overmuch and needs housetraining like a stray dog. To Kavian’s frustration and shame —this is what I am reduced to?—she finds that Irasht cannot chew. So she crumbles the girl’s food by hand.
This would be easier, all in all, if Kavian could think of her only as a weapon.
But in the villages and terrace farms along the path to war she sees Irasht do things that take a chisel to her heart. When Irasht finds doors she goes to them and waits patiently, hoping, Kavian imagines, that someone will invite her in.
When it grows too dark in their tent Irasht panics, tangling herself in her bedding. Kavian is moved: Irasht fears going back to the dark. Somehow this is a comfort. It makes Kavian feel she has done a good thing, bringing her out into the light.
She takes Irasht out to see her first stars, and holds the girl, rocking her, thinking: we did this. We made her this way.
No. The war did this. The war makes demands.
In the Efficate they make wizards in vast numbers. Bake them like loaves of bread. Kavian knows this because she’s slaughtered them by the dozens. All they can do is make little shields and throw little sparks—the laws of their society leave no room for heroism, and Kavian suspects the quality of their blood gives rise to no heroes.
But there are so many. And they are
winning.
And this is not her daughter.
THEY PASS THROUGH everything that will be lost if they fail. The terraced farms and waterfall mills of the highlands. The gulls that circle library-ships on reservoirs raised by wizards of centuries past.
For all remembered history, isu-Cter has been the still eye at the heart of the world. Kavian still believes with patriot fire that, for all its faults, high green isu-Cter must stand.
Fereyd Japur travels with her. It’s distasteful company but a military necessity. She tells herself it’s good to be close to Heurian. She’s lying. Fereyd keeps his abnarch to himself, and the space between Kavian and Heurian feels like forever, as wide as grief and deep as duty.
As they come down from the highlands towards the dams and the war-front, he walks into her tent to take a meal and brag. “Heurian is active. Ready to be used. When I give her an image, she changes the world to match it.”
Kavian sets her cup down with soft care. She has not even begun to push Irasht towards useful magic. “Oh?”
“You think I’m lying.”
“No,” Kavian says. The firelight makes Fereyd’s beauty almost painful, a scrimshaw thing, etched into his face by acid and tint, worked into his bones by years of hungry eyes. She touches the edge of hate and it feels hot and slick as a knife coming out. “I believe you.”
“And Irasht?” The kohl on his eyelids turns his blink into a mechanism of dark stone. “Is my daughter ready for the war?”
Kavian lifts her chin. “I will need more time.”
Fereyd watches her across the fire. It might be something in his face, or the set of his muscled farmer’s shoulders, or the way he holds himself so properly as if to remind her she is higher born—it might be one of these things that screams of mockery. Or it might only be her imagination.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eleven Page 26