by Rich Horton
Ruharn reported next to the generals’ bower, and stood at attention in the doorway. General Khy sat at a table with her feet on a chair, playing cards with her aide. She was a woman once handsome, but still dangerous, with hair shaved short and a conspicuous blank expanse where her medals should have been; she declined to wear them even on occasions of state. As one of the senior generals, she had taken Nasteng’s impotence hard. She and her cards were always here, and even now, as her aide contemplated options, Khy brought up a map to study the latest intelligence.
A quartet of cards burned for additional points sobbed prettily as they crumpled into ashes. Ruharn wished Khy wouldn’t use that particular feature, but Khy was entertained by the oddest things. Besides, she was one of the generals who understood strategy, so he preferred not to pick fights with her, on the grounds that she was more important than he was.
Khy liked Ruharn, a fact that he tried not to think too hard about. She waved her hand at him while assiduously keeping the cards’ faces out of her aide’s view. “General Loi,” she said genially. “At ease.”
It took a moment for him to recognize the house name he used now. Funny how long it had been since he’d lapsed. “General,” Ruharn said. “Any interesting developments?” He doubted it: Khy would hardly be tormenting her cards if something that required her attention were going on.
She sneered, which took him by surprise because she ordinarily approached everything with cockeyed levity. “Look,” she said, and flung her cards down. Her aide kept them from fluttering off the edge of the table.
Khy’s hands tapped rapid patterns on the nearest interface. Maps flowered, crisscrossed by troop vectors and dotted by the bright double-squares of bases, the cluster-clouds of aerospace fighters. Nasteng’s forces were violet. The enemy was green. The mercenaries were gold. Her hands tapped again. The troops moved as their positions and engagements were replayed over time.
“We might as well retire now,” Khy said. “Oh, maybe not you, you’re young yet, and there’s always a use for good staffers.” From anyone else it would have been a veiled insult, but Khy had never treated Ruharn as anything but a competent colleague and Ruharn was not so paranoid as to believe that things were different now. “But look, the mercenaries are doing all the work.”
“That doesn’t mean there won’t be more attacks, now that the outsiders know we’re here,” Ruharn said. And, when Khy didn’t respond, he hesitated, then said: “The mercenaries fight with numbers. But they don’t fight well.”
“You’re one of the people who can see it, let alone who is willing to say it,” Khy said bitterly. She flipped a pointer out of her belt, caught it, switched it on. Scribbled indications, in light and hissing sparks, on the maps. “There, there, there, there. Victory by attrition. So wasteful.”
“I understand there’s a noninterference clause,” Ruharn said neutrally.
“Noninterference, hell. I’ve had the scanners on it and they can’t even tell what our allies are. They come from nowhere and the corpses of their units degenerate with astonishing rapidity. There’s probably a paper in it for some scientist somewhere.”
Khy brought up more photos and videos. At first Ruharn didn’t recognize what he was seeing, too busy being distracted by fractal damage, stress marks, metal sheening red-orange in response to unhealthy radiations. Familiar shapes.
Except those weren’t the only familiar shapes. Burnt into the wreckage were symbols he remembered from his childhood. The depressions of board games he had played in the dirt, or score-tallies chalked onto walls, or warding-signs around which he and his friends had danced in circles, chanting rhymes to keep the Gardeners away. He glanced sideways at Khy, wondering, but she met his eyes with no sign that she saw anything in the faint symbols at all.
Then again, Khy would have grown up playing board games with real boards, made of marble or jade or mahogany veneer. If she played in the dirt, it would have been in a high-walled, well-tended garden while watched by anxious servants and the occasional guard. And she would never have had to worry about being sold to the Gardeners.
Still, it was dismaying to have one of the generals he respected confirm his observations. “Is there something you wish me to do, sir?” he asked carefully. For a mad moment he wished the answer was yes.
Khy only sighed and eased herself back down into the chair, swung her feet up again. “If only,” she said. “You go on, Loi. Your next shift here isn’t for hours anyway, isn’t it? Enjoy yourself.”
Ruharn saluted and passed out of the bower. He headed next to his quarters, where he opened the case and unwrapped the dolls. “You’d better not be bombs,” he told them. They didn’t answer, which didn’t make him feel better.
Dealing with bombs wasn’t one of his skills, but if the dolls were what remained of the stolen children, that wasn’t relevant. Besides, even if they were bombs, they were probably advanced foreigner bombs, and the fastness’s scanners had failed to pick up on them when he brought them in.
The two dolls were nearly identical. Prodding one revealed that the hair was a wig, and beneath it the top of the skull came off. The head was hollow. The eyes, half-domes with luminous irises, were held in place by putty. Systematically, he took apart the rest of the doll. The doll was jointed, and elastic ran through channels in the body and limbs so that it could be posed.
As for the slag of bullets, they appeared to be real metal, not resin. He prodded them and jerked his hand back involuntarily. They were the exact temperature of his own skin. Feeling like a squeamish six-year-old, he pressed his fingertips against the resin just above the slag. The surface was cool; significantly cooler, in fact.
Logistical necessities, Ruharn thought, staring down at the dolls. Then he wrapped them back up, laid them carefully in the case, and put the case under his bed. Stupid hiding place, but it wasn’t as if he had a better one. And anyway, the real hiding place was where he had kept it all these years, the pitted lump he had for a heart.
At the appointed time, Ruharn went to the Falcon Councilor’s chambers. He did not wear his uniform. Lately she liked him to wear what the courtiers did, necklaces of twisted gold and fitted coats with their undulating lace, dark red brocades. He obliged her; he understood his function. The guards with their falcon insignia acknowledged him merely with nods, making no comment.
The councilor stood looking at a tapestry-of-labyrinths when he stopped just short of entering, the way she liked him to. “Madam,” he said. In the very early days she had liked it when he knelt. Her mood varied, however, and he didn’t care one way or another. If pride had been important to him, he wouldn’t be here.
“Come in,” she said in the clear sweet voice whose inflections he knew so well.
Ruharn came up behind her and undid, one-handed, the clasps and knots and chains that held her veil in place. She had told him once that she only wore it here; everywhere else it was the familiar falcon mask. Ruharn found it telling, although he did not say so, that the fastenings were more elaborate than the veil itself. He was no pauper, but a bolt of the fabric, with its infinitesimally shimmering threads and texture like moondrift silk, would have beggared him. He always had the disquieting feeling that his fingerprints would sully the fibers, leave scars deep as trenches and hideous as gangrene. But he didn’t say that either.
“Your hands are cold,” she murmured.
It always took him a while to undo all the fastenings. “Sorry,” Ruharn said mildly, “but you didn’t like my last pair of gloves and it’s not as if I’ve had time to go shopping.”
She didn’t call him on the lie, and he bent to kiss the back of her head, inhaling the fragrance of her hair.
The veil fell away, drifting through the air like a feather, or a fall of light, or a flower’s breath. Ruharn always felt ridiculous whisking it away to lay it on the councilor’s dresser without folding it, but she had never complained. He lifted her hair, which was hooked through with crystal—it was getting near the time where she
would have to tear off her face again—taking care not to tug the dark coils. Unhurriedly, he pressed his lips to the back of her neck, once, twice. Again. Her perfume smelled of dried roses and wood-of-pyres. Inhaling it made his heartbeat quicken. Reportedly she wore it only for her lovers.
“Tell me,” he said right into her ear, “is it true what’s been happening to the children lately?”
He wanted her to tell him the truth, however familiar; however horrible. If she told him the truth, he would accept his complicity and forget Merenne again. He had been doing exactly that for all these years, after all. Surely he had earned a little truth in exchange for the years they had spent together.
The councilor’s laugh came more as a vibration against his chest than a sound, and her voice was teasing. “You’ll have to be more specific than that, my dear. Are we talking about schools, or orphanages, or some incident involving crawfish-racing?” (Naheng’s crawfish were surprisingly large and fast, or this game would have been less popular than it was.)
Ruharn heard the lie and was surprised by the force of his own rage. He brought his hands up and down and around. She cried out as she landed against the wall, hard, breath slammed out of her, her arm bent close to breaking in his grip. “Are the mercenaries harvesting the children now, or is it still you?” He added, “It’s been a long time since I did hand-to-hand. I could still get the mechanics wrong. So think about your answer.”
“Why does it matter to you?”
He broke her arm. She screamed.
No one came. She hadn’t triggered an alarm, and the guards were used to noise.
“Madam,” he said, very formally. She went very still, very quiet. “Answer the question.”
“We haven’t sent out the Gardeners since the mercenaries came,” the Falcon Councilor said raggedly. “It’s their doing this time around.” And, in a different voice entirely: “I had always hoped you might hesitate a little before doing—this.”
“Neither one of us has ever been under the illusion that this relationship was about love,” Ruharn said. “Did the mercenaries say outright that they would be recruiting the children?”
“They didn’t say, but we knew.”
“Is it too late to send them away?”
“We’ve paid,” she said. “They will give us what we paid for. Don’t you think we considered that people powerful enough to save us would also be powerful enough to plunder us? To wreck our way of life? But it was either submit to our destruction or choose the chance of salvation.”
Ruharn thought for a moment. “All right. Take me to the Garden.”
The councilor’s laugh was ugly. “It always comes down to this. It took you longer than most, at least. What, are you concerned that the mercenaries will destroy the supply before you get your chance at youth unending?”
Let her think what she wanted. “Madam,” he said, “you have a lot of bones and breaking them all would take time I don’t have. I would speak you fair, but I’m done with niceties. The Garden.”
“You picked one hell of a time to stage a coup, lover,” the Falcon Councilor said in a voice like winter stabbing.
Is that what you think this is? Ridiculous that he wanted her to believe better of him, yet there it was. “Shut up,” he said evenly. She was silent after that. It had been a long time since he had been anything but deferential to her, except in bed when she required otherwise.
It was a long way to the Garden. Ruharn expected her to call for help after all, or try to escape. But she kept looking at him, her eyes pierced through with pain, and she did neither. Sometimes she drew in a breath that might have become a sob; but then she controlled herself. He tried not to think about what he’d done to her.
The Garden, when it opened up before them in a staggering splendor of chokingly humid air and pearlescent lights, was choked with children, newborn to ten or eleven years old. It was impossible to tell how many there were, or how big the Garden was. They were sprawled every which way, a spill of limbs and crooked necks and lolling heads, and from them grew red pulsating vines, and from the vines shone red murmuring fruits. Perhaps it would have been less overwhelming if the children had been neatly organized, stacked by height or size in rows. Probably not.
In spite of himself, Ruharn looked among the faces for some echo of Merenne’s features. Some echo of his own. It was impossible to tell amid the red tangles.
“The raw liquor is effective,” the Falcon Councilor said after giving him just enough time to confront the sight, “if that’s what you’re thinking, but painful. Dragon is the only one who imbibes it in that form, and Dragon is a little peculiar. I’m surprised you didn’t just have me take you to the wine cellars.”
“No,” Ruharn said. “This is what I want.”
“The other councilors won’t stand for this, you know.”
“They won’t have to.”
She still didn’t understand. “When they come after you—” Tellingly, she didn’t say we: he was almost certain it was deliberate.
“Forget that, this is damage control,” Ruharn said savagely, resisting the temptation to hit her. Stupid, considering he had already broken her arm and threatened systematic torture. “You made a bargain you only half-understood and you sent children to die in the most wasteful way possible, without even the leadership of someone like General Khy so they’d have a chance. The mercenaries aren’t providing any sort of generalship themselves and I trust you weren’t assuming that a bunch of children that age were going to spontaneously turn up any convenient tactical geniuses to do the job.”
“This is rich,” the councilor retorted, “from someone who turned his back on those same children during all the years they were bought as fodder for the Garden. Or did you manage to lie to yourself about what wine it is I drink when I’m not in your arms?”
He flinched. “Oh yes,” he said, “I would rather be fucking you than dealing with this. I’m not unaware of what I am.” The red silken sheets, her fragrant skin, the coils of glossy hair. The marks her mouth of living crystal left on his skin. “But apparently even I have limits.”
Ruharn removed his ceremonial knife and laid it on the floor. Then he stripped, aware of her staring even though his body was no secret to either of them. He picked up the knife again, squared his shoulders, and waded into the Garden.
For all the useless ornamentation on the knife’s hilt and sheath, its blade was just fine. He had no intention of wasting further time plucking fruit or squeezing it into his mouth. Instead, he cut directly into a handful of vines and brought them, spurting livid red, up to his mouth.
She was right. It burned going down, and burned his skin too, not like fire (he knew something of fire) but like hopes crushed down to singularity nights. But he swallowed, and swallowed, and swallowed, even as he choked; even as the red fluid dribbled down his chin and soaked his clothes. When the spray slowed, he grabbed blindly and cut again, and again, and again.
“Ruharn!” the Falcon Councilor cried out behind him. “Ruharn, you have to stop, it’s too much—”
Good to know that she wasn’t interested in that particular perversion. At least with him. He kept drinking, unable to see although his eyes were wide open, so nauseated he couldn’t even throw up. Finally he dropped the knife and sank to his knees, coughing out an ugly pink-tinged spray.
After a while he became aware of her hand on his shoulder. Her touch, too, burned with the sticky-slick traces of the fluid. He shivered. Her hand felt large, and he felt thin, small, vulnerable in a way that hadn’t been true for years. He looked down, not at his own hands, but at his thighs and their scars, not all of which had been received in battle. Looked up. She was taller now, larger.
“Ruharn,” she said in a wretched voice. “You look—I never imagine you’d ever looked so innocent. Except your eyes.”
“Childhood isn’t about innocence,” Ruharn said, both cynically amused at the way she cringed at how high his voice was now, and hating the sound of it himself
. “It’s about being powerless.”
She didn’t contest the point.
“Your mercenary company,” Ruharn said. “You must have a way of contacting them still. Tell them to take me next.” He assumed it would be the fastest way, instead of wandering around in some city waiting for them to find him. “If children are the coin they desire.”
“You’re even more crazed than I thought you were if you think I’ll do that.”
Hell of a time for her to get maternal. “I’m not Khy,” Ruharn said. “I didn’t go to the nobles’ battle schools, or to the collegium for strategists. But I know more than those children do. Because that’s who the mercenaries are, aren’t they? Our children, transformed. Let me go.” He shook off her hand and rose to his feet.
The Falcon Councilor rose as well. “You have no guarantee that you’ll be anything more than a drone while you’re up there as—as whatever you become,” she said.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “If there’s a chance I can do some good, I have to take it.”
“Fine,” she said, distant, formal. “You have my gratitude, General.”
She drew out two bright-and-dark balls, no larger than Ruharn’s fists, and whispered into them. He couldn’t hear the words. Then she set them down, dry-eyed, and stepped back. A door ruptured the air above the balls.
You won’t feel grateful for long, Ruharn thought. But he bent his head to her, and went.
In five months and twenty-four days, the mercenaries reclaimed sixty-three percent of Nasteng.
In the fifteen days after General Loi Ruharn vanished, the invaders were repulsed entirely.
General Khy’s attempts to tally the mercenaries’ losses in both phases of the campaign, as opposed to the enemies’ losses, were blocked.
Merenne watched for Gardeners in all the years that followed, but never saw any. She made toys for her next grandchildren; there were a few. No dolls.