by Fonda Lee
Outside the city, though, Kekon was a lovely island. Shae could see why in ancient times foreign sailors had called it the “cursed beauty.” Being up here on the mountain was just the thing she’d needed to remind herself viscerally why she’d returned. There was something special about her home, about being Kekonese, that ran deeper than the unavoidable difficulties of being a Kaul.
The mine supervisor’s office was a small shack that looked as if it had survived a few landslides and still clung precariously to the mountain by dint of the logs roughly driven into the ground on its downslope side to prop up its tilting walls. Shae knocked on the door. She could hear the rumble of machinery and activity down in the mine pit, so someone must be on duty. She waited, but when no one answered, she opened the door and went straight in.
She found the supervisor engrossed in watching a relayball game on the small black-and-white television in the back room. He jumped when she walked in. “Who are you?” He shut the television off hastily and looked her up and down in surprise. She guessed he did not get young city women coming up here often, even ones in dirt-caked boots and trousers rolled halfway up their calves.
“I knocked, but you must not have heard me,” Shae said.
“Yes, yes, sorry. I’m half deaf,” he said. “What do you want? Are you with anyone?” He squinted at her suspiciously. It wasn’t unheard of for spectacularly unwise thieves to try to steal from the mine site itself. The supervisor glanced at his desk, where, Shae guessed, he kept his gun.
“I’m here to inspect the operations and your records,” Shae explained.
“I wasn’t told anything about an inspection. Under whose authority are you here?”
“Under the authority of my brother, Kaul Lanshinwan, the Pillar of No Peak.” Shae pulled out an envelope and handed it over. The supervisor broke the seal and scanned the letter, frowning. It was written in Lan’s hand, signed with his name and his title as a director on the board of the Kekon Jade Alliance, and stamped with the clan’s circular insignia in red ink.
The supervisor folded the letter and looked up at Shae with grudging politeness. “Very well. What would you like to see, Kaul-jen? Miss Kaul?” He studied her uncomfortably again, clearly confused that she did not appear to be wearing any jade.
“Miss Kaul is fine,” she said. “If you wouldn’t mind taking me out to see the work site?”
The supervisor grumbled a little to himself but ushered her out of the back room into the office proper. He put on a brimmed straw hat and led the way out of the sagging building and down the path that followed the ridge. The noise of machinery grew louder, drowning out the sounds of the forest. As they walked, Shae felt a flutter of sensation that prickled her skin like a shift in the damp air. It grew stronger with each step she took, until it became an unmistakable tug in the gut, pulling her like a cord through the navel as they emerged from the trees onto a ledge that overlooked the entire stadium-sized pit. Shae let out a soft breath of awe.
In the old Abukei myths Shae remembered Kyanla telling her as a child, the First Mother goddess, Nimuma, fell into the ocean and perished from exertion after creating the world. Her body became the island of Kekon, and the veins of jade that ran under these mountains were her bones. Her green bones. If she imagined it like that, Shae thought, then the scene below was the largest grave-digging operation imaginable. Here, the most valuable and coveted gemstone in the world was exposed to the air and pulled from the earth. From where Shae stood on the ledge, the huge rock-breaking machines and rickety aluminum-roofed buildings were the size of toy models and the Abukei workers were small figures moving industriously around hills of debris. The air smelled of diesel exhaust and vibrated with the shrill whine of water-cooled diamond saws cutting into rock. Among the boulders on the ground, and in the beds of the enormous flatbed trucks where the muddy gray rocks had been cut apart, she saw the green gleam of raw jade.
“Careful, miss,” called the supervisor as Shae started down the metal ramp that zigzagged down the side of the pit to the activity below. She put a hand out to grip the railing as the soles of her muddy boots clanged down the latticed steel walk. The supervisor followed after her. “Stop at the sign, please!” he shouted over the rumbling noise of trucks and heavy equipment.
At the bottom of the second-to-last ramp was a small observation deck and a large mounted sign. ATTENTION. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT. THIS AREA IS HAZARDOUS TO THOSE WITH JADE SENSITIVITY. PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK!
Shae stopped. There was more raw jade here than was properly safe for anyone without immunity to be exposed to. Shae watched the Abukei workers walking on the ground below. They wore hard hats, thick gloves, and muddy canvas pants but worked bare-chested in the heat. Like their ancestors, only they could safely live deep in the interior of Kekon. In the modern world, the Abukei had carved out their second-class place in society based on their immunity. The scrawny workers down there worked all day, every day, leaning up casually against the huge boulders and touching all that lustrous green without feeling what Shae felt now—the woozy craving in the bottom of her stomach, even deeper and more gnawing than hunger.
Deep-seated Kekonese prejudice maintained that the Abukei were an inferior race, but Shae had studied history and science at an Espenian university and knew that belief was erroneous. The Abukei had inhabited Kekon centuries before the first arrival of settlers from Tun, so in truth they were the survivors. They lived unaffected by the substance that drove later explorers to murder each other or throw themselves into the sea. Ironic then, that now the more fortunate Abukei such as these ones worked for the Kekon Jade Alliance, performing back-breaking labor in order to drink and gamble and whore away their earnings during the idle three-month height of the rainy season, while the less fortunate of their kin squatted in ramshackle huts by the river and dove for runoff.
Shae took a few more steps down the catwalk. If she’d been wearing any jade at all, the thrum of energy vibrating through her body would have been too much, overwhelming. The supervisor called, “Miss Kaul, did you read the sign?”
“I’m not going far,” she shouted back. What would happen if she ignored him and went up to one of those boulders and placed the flat of her hand on the raw jade? She wondered if it would knock her unconscious or stop her heart. Would she, for an instant, experience a moment of unsurpassed power and clarity that would make her feel like a moth burning in ecstasy in a flame? Or would it have no immediate effect, but tomorrow, or a week or month from now, would she lose her mind in stages, and start cutting herself when the Itches came?
Pay attention. I’m here as a favor to Lan and no reason else. Shae pulled a pad of paper and a pen from her canvas rucksack and leaned over the railing, counting the trucks and workers. She made note of how many bulldozers and excavators were on-site. Everything seemed to be in working order, nothing unusual or out of place. The men were dark and ropy from hard labor, but they seemed to be healthy, efficient. She turned and made her way back up the ramps, the relieved supervisor tailing her. When they reached the tilting office again, Shae said, “I’d like to see the last two years’ worth of financial records.”
“The KJA has it all in their files,” the supervisor said. “You could get copies from the Weather Man’s staff in Janloon. All we have are original expense reports—”
“I’d like to see them, please,” Shae said.
Reluctantly, the man led her back into the room with the television. He opened a closet and turned on a single naked bulb. The closet was packed with cardboard filing boxes, stacked on top of each other and organized by the dates written on them in thick black marker. He cleared the television off the folding table and wiped the layer of dust off its surface with his bare forearm. It left damp streaks. “You can use this table,” he offered, clearly resentful that she would make it impossible for him to sit back down in front of his relayball game for some time.
“Thank you,” Shae said. “Would you please tell the driver of
the truck I hired to wait. I may be a few hours. Do you have a copy machine?”
The man pointed it out to her, then left her alone. Shae could hear him clomping around, then turning on the radio in the other room. She found the most recently dated cardboard box, hefted it out of the closet and onto the small table, and opened it. She pulled out the first thick file folder and sat down. Daily production reports. She flipped to an empty page on her pad of paper, then sat down and started to read. This was going to take a while.
It felt a little strange to examine the mining of jade with such analytical detachment. Scanning the dull files, jade mining came off like any other business, one with inputs and outputs, revenue and expenses. There were accounting statements, and invoices, and purchase orders. No different really than anything else that people manufactured and sold. Traditional Abukei folklore connected jade to the First Mother and the creation of the world. The Deitists believed it was a divine gift from the gods—the path to human salvation. Some foreign religions said it was an evil substance from the devil, a belief the Shotarians had forcibly espoused during their decades of rule. Jade was imbued with so much myth and emotion, so much mystery and power, and yet, here it was—boring. Something to be dug up, cut up, moved, carved, polished, sold for profit.
She made copies of the pages she thought were of importance, then moved on to the next folder. Personnel manifests. She flipped through them. She wondered what exactly she was looking for. Lan had told her to audit the operations, but he hadn’t told her precisely what he thought might be out of place. The personnel lists corroborated the rising salary costs. There had been little turnover, but a couple of injuries and a number of new hires. It all seemed very ordinary. Some of the reports used technical terms, acronyms, and abbreviations she wasn’t familiar with, but she possessed a solid enough grasp of the Kekonese mining sector to understand most of it. During her last two years at the Academy, she’d been tutored by Yun Doru, back when the clan had aspirations for her to hold a high post on the business side of No Peak—perhaps, even, to one day succeed Doru as Weather Man.
Unlike her brothers, Shae had not had a lot of friends at Kaul Du Academy. Of the other female students, the one she was closest to was Wan Payadeshan, the talented but shy daughter of a middling Lantern Man. Paya’s mother had died from illness some years ago, and Shae often brought her friend over to the Kaul house. One day Shae was searching for something, she could not even remember what, when she stumbled upon a manila envelope full of photographs in Doru’s desk. Pretty Paya, in her underwear, Paya on her hands and knees, wearing a dog collar, Paya naked, legs spread, pale and awkward looking, eyes moist.
Her friend had cried in shame and abject relief when Shae told her never to come back to the house. She begged Shae to understand: She wasn’t that kind of girl, she’d never wanted to do it, but Doru-jen was being so good to her father’s business, what could she have said or done?
Shae told her grandfather that she would not be tutored by Doru anymore. She’d learn whatever else she needed to about the clan business from the senior Luckbringers such as Hami Tumashon, but she would not have anything more to do with the Weather Man. Be reasonable, Shae-se, Kaul Sen had said. Every man has weaknesses; you don’t know what they did to Doru-jen during the war; he has never treated you with any disrespect.
Years away had not dimmed Shae’s loathing of Yun Dorupon. He’d cost her not just a friend, but the once matchless admiration she’d had for her grandfather.
Shae rummaged in her sack for a lunch tin—onion buns, shredded vegetables, and a marinated egg from the kitchen of last night’s inn—along with a bottle of water. She ate as she continued to peruse documents. The mine supervisor poked his head into the room to ask how she was doing; Shae said she was fine. She’d figured out the filing system now and was efficiently pulling and copying the monthly financial summaries so she could read them in greater detail later and compare them with annual KJA statements. Her plan was to rent a room in Pula; that way she could come back up the mountain if she needed to. Even if she didn’t find anything particularly interesting to report back to Lan, she would treat it as a working holiday of sorts, doing something useful while taking the time to relax in the mountains before having to begin her job hunt in earnest. At the very least, she would familiarize herself with the mining operations, and if she could give Lan some advice on how to make improvements, she’d be putting her business degree to some immediate use. She lifted the lid on a new box and opened the next file. Equipment purchase orders.
The mine had made several significant capital investments in the past year—diamond-tipped core drills, heavy hydraulic spreaders, larger capacity trucks—most of it going to new and expanded mine sites. It struck Shae as poor planning to absorb all the cost in a single year; she wondered if the Weather Man’s office applied any pressure on the KJA to do proper investment appraisals. She wrote Capital budgeting?! in her notebook, then pulled another folder she’d marked and checked the financial statements; first year depreciation on new equipment was indeed driving most of the rise in operating expenses. Mine production was up fifteen percent over last year, though the increase hadn’t been realized as revenue yet; perhaps the KJA was holding all that extra jade in inventory? The cartel kept strict control over how much jade was allotted to Green Bone schools, Deitist temples, and other licensed users in the military or healthcare fields, and how much was sold—primarily to the Espenian government. The rest was kept locked away in a massive national vault underneath the Kekon Treasury building.
Shae’s eyes skipped over the equipment purchase order pages one more time. Her gaze landed on the signature at the bottom. It was not one that she had seen anywhere else in the files. She studied it for a second before she realized whose name it was: Gont Aschentu. The Horn of the Mountain.
Why would the leader of the military arm of the Ayt clan be signing mining equipment purchase orders? Although the Green Bone clans were controlling stakeholders of the KJA, the mines themselves were state-operated, not managed by the clans directly. The annual budget for the mine’s operations was approved by the KJA board, so any signature on this form ought to be from a representative that sat on or answered to the board—either Doru, or Ree Tura, the Weather Man of the Mountain, or one of their direct subordinates. What could it mean that Gont’s signature was on this page, and several others?
Shae copied all the pages and tucked them carefully into her bag. She replaced the files, put the box back into the closet, and left the room. She wouldn’t be staying in Pula tonight after all. She had a long trip back to the city and needed to get on the road as quickly as possible.
CHAPTER
17
Night at the Lilac Divine
The charm girl’s voice was exquisite, by turns operatically high and pure, then sultry and suggestive. She played the Tuni harp and sang with eyes closed, her dainty head and waves of dark hair swaying to the melody. Resting on the plush cushions, Lan let the tension drop out of his shoulders, and his mind fall quietly into the music. He was the only one in the opulent room; this was a private performance. The song was about a lost traveler missing his island home. No one here would have the poor tact to sing him lyrics about love or heartbreak.
Lan was accustomed to traveling with one or two bodyguards, but he came to the Lilac Divine Gentleman’s Club alone. He wanted to enjoy himself without being tailed by anyone else in the clan. While he was here, he didn’t want to think about being the Pillar. Mrs. Sugo, the Lantern Man owner of the Lilac Divine, was appreciative of that fact, and could be counted on for her discretion as well as her excellent taste. There was never any trouble at this place either; everyone knew it was a No Peak–frequented establishment, and a person would have to be suicidal to cause problems, even if the gambling downstairs got out of hand.
Green Bones could take credit for certain things, Lan figured. On the whole, Janloon was one of the safest cities in the world. The clans kept out foreign criminals and g
angsters, stamped down street crime, and taxed and controlled vice at a level acceptable to the politicians and the public. If some of Mrs. Sugo’s late-night offerings were not entirely legal, she had the good sense to make her clan tribute payments timely and generous, and to spare no effort in making Lan’s visits enjoyable.
Yunni, the charm girl, stretched out the last melancholy note of the song, her throat vibrating as her fingers danced lightly across the harp strings. Lan set down his wineglass and applauded. Yunni ducked her chin with false shyness, looking up at him through dusted eyelashes. “Did you enjoy that one, Lan-jen?”
“Very much so. It was beautiful.”
She started to stand and let the silk scarf fall from her shoulders, but Lan said, “Do you have another song?”
She sat back down gracefully. “Something a little more cheerful, perhaps?” She plucked at the strings and launched into a lighthearted ballad.
Lan rested his eyes on the curve of her neck and the plump red gloss of her moving lips. He admired the way her gauzy dress hung off the slopes of her breasts and pale thighs. It was getting easier to work himself up to being with her. As Pillar, he could have any of the girls here, more than one at a time if he wanted, but the first few times he’d come, after he’d accepted that Eyni was gone for good, all he’d asked for was to sit and listen to Yunni sing. He’d told himself he didn’t want sex—just an escape, just company. He shuddered at the sorts of places Doru had attempted to suggest to him on a few occasions. But Yunni was easy to talk to, and beautiful in both voice and body. She was neither overly deferential nor too eager to please; she conversed with him about music and foreign films but never asked him to say anything about the clan or its affairs. When he did finally take her to bed, he found her pleasing and energetic.