by Patty Jansen
Come on, Alius!
Sady tried the handle, and the door opened with a creak. It was dark in the room, and an odd kind of musty smell wafted out, as if the room had been closed for a long time. Slowly, Sady walked in.
A lamp against the far wall was sputtering the last of its flames, gilding piles of boxes just inside the door, identical to the ones that had been delivered to Sady’s office earlier. The room smelled musty and damp, and there was a cloying sweet scent that he couldn’t identify.
Sady nearly tripped over a book that had been carelessly flung onto the floor, its pages open.
What was going on here?
He grabbed for the lamp and turned the wick up so that it gave more light, and held it up.
All through the room, books were spread over the floor, yanked off shelves and left open, pages ripped. Alius’ desk stood by the window against the back wall. The high back of the chair faced the door. Alius often complained about the room’s layout, necessitating the placement of the desk facing the window. Today, the chair was empty . . . no, it wasn’t . . . Someone with grey hair lay slumped over the desk, his head on the books.
Mercy.
“Alius!”
Sady rushed across the room, tripping over more books. He set the lamp down with trembling hands.
Alius’ head lay sideways facing away from the door, on the open pages of a book. The eye that stared into nothingness was open, glassy. A trail of blood had dribbled from his mouth onto the book, but it was already dry and black. Some little insects were crawling into his open eyes and nostrils.
His hand, gnarled and aged, clutched a pen. The other lay on his lap.
When Sady touched the Most Learned’s shoulder, the flesh was rigid and unyielding under his hand.
Above his head lay a wooden box, the lid open, with inside a tiny glass vial, empty. The matching glass stopper lay on the desk.
Sady had to stand back. The body gave off a cloying scent that suddenly became too much. He ran to the gallery, feeling dizzy and struggling to keep control of his stomach.
“Orsan! Orsan, quickly!”
Orsan had wandered a little away from Alius’ room and came rushing back.
“Proctor?” His face was concerned.
“Look!” Sady gestured into the room.
Orsan looked, and swore. He walked around the desk without touching Alius. Sady followed, covering his nose with the sleeve of his robe. That cloying smell was the beginning of decay.
Orsan looked up. “He’s been dead for a while.” He picked up the wooden box. “What’s this?”
“Careful of that box, whatever is in it.”
Orsan put it down carefully. “Poison?”
“Looks like it.”
Orsan’s brown eyes went from the box to Alius’ unmoving body. “Why would he do a thing like this?”
“I gave the pills he made to our southern guests. Both Dara and Loriane said the medicine had been made from a common herb, and would offer absolutely no protection against sonorics.”
Orsan frowned. “And you believe them over Alius’ word as academic?”
“Neither of the women knew what the pills were meant to do. Both are familiar with herb lore, and offered their opinion without knowing any of the story behind these pills. I cannot see why they should lie.”
“But why would Alius send us medicine if it doesn’t work?”
That, of course, was a very good question.
But Sady got a cold feeling. There was no medicine. That was why Alius had been late delivering it, why he hadn’t wanted to promise its delivery nor talk about it, why he had looked nervous or evasive, and had been unhappy that Lady Armaine had mentioned it. He never had a working sonorics medicine.
Why Alius?
Sady glanced at the shelves to the side of the desk. The books were all ones he’d expect to see in an academic’s room. Medical volumes, fat books with titles with long, academic words, the meaning of which Sady had long forgotten. There were so many books, so much information in this room.
“Have you seen this?” Orsan asked.
Sady turned. Orsan was pulling a sheet of paper from under the book under Alius’ head.
“What is it?” Sady took the paper from Orsan. It was, in fine script that Sady recognised as Alius’ handwriting, a letter, addressed to him.
It said,
To the honourable Proctor of Chevakia.
By the time you read this, I will be dead. I have deceived my country and the country will be better off without me. There is no excuse for what I have done. I’m afraid that I’ve let myself be distracted by politics in a time where I should have been working harder for Chevakia.
It is well over ten years ago, when I was unhappy with the way your brother was unseated, that I made some political comments that led Destran to cutting money for the Scriptorium. It was a necessary thing from his point of view. The wars had drained a good deal of our money, destroyed a lot of factories and converted others into making weapons. A lot of people came back from the wars needing care and housing. These were important issues for the doga to address. The Scriptorium was less important and lost a lot of its funding. Nevertheless, I believed, perhaps foolishly, that the doga should invest in knowledge for the future. The doga did not share my views.
In a public speech, I made no secret of my anger, and afterwards, a woman came to see me at my office. I didn’t know her, but she said she heard my plea and offered to pay for some of the work I would no longer have the money to do. I asked her motives, and she said she had come into money and wanted to spend it on a worthy cause. She acted innocent and although she clearly had southern blood, I thought she was well-intentioned but naïve. My work was to find better ways to protect humans against sonoric rays. How could I refuse? That decision has haunted me ever since.
Sady felt cold. Just by pure chance, and a less desperate situation, he had avoided making the same decision. He wondered what would have happened had he not insisted that Lady Armaine’s contribution to his travel expenses had been registered as non-political. It had been more dumb luck than anything, that he’d had the presence of mind to ask that. He continued reading.
Over the years that followed, she continued to fund a larger and larger proportion of my work. She encouraged me to work on using sonorics as an energy source. Since our forests are suffering from our need for wood fuel, I thought that was an excellent idea, providing we could find a way to protect ourselves from sonorics.
She said there were ways in which sonorics could be made harmless, and brought me into contact with this group called the Brotherhood of the Light. She told me that when the City of Glass was plunged into the dark ages by the Knights, the Brotherhood kept knowledge about sonorics alive. I soon learned that the Brotherhood wasn’t made up of just refugees from the City of Glass. Many of its members are rich Chevakian merchants, disgruntled with the doga, and lured by the prospect of cheap energy and new technology. Many of those merchants had been in close contact with the City of Glass under the royal family, and had lost much trade when the Eagle Knights took over.
They saw an opportunity to regain what they had lost. They knew that the Brotherhood and its supporters planned to bring down the barriers and they supported that plan, providing a way could be found to protect Chevakians from sonoric rays. This is where I came in. There were some hopeful results from a new ingredient, they said.
I was given a huge stack of material. I don’t think they expected me to go through it as closely as I did. I might have been gullible, but I will not be accused of substandard work. In the pile, I found results from experiments done on Chevakians who we know to have been forcibly moved to the City of Glass, all of whom had died horribly. The research, while macabre
in nature, was interesting, but the main ingredient of the pills I was to make, from a plant that grows in the borderlands, had not been used in any of those trials.
How was this meant to help me find a medicine, I asked, and I was told that there should have been data about another experiment, which they would provide. You have to understand that none of these people were academics and their knowledge of the subject matter in question was rudimentary at best. They would not have realised that these were the wrong trial results they had given me. I asked for the correct results. They promised me to send them. Except they didn’t, and every time I asked, they gave me some excuse that seemed plausible, if annoying.
Just make the pills, they told me, and we did, because if we were going to test it, we would need them anyway.
Next thing I knew, Lady Armaine had told you about this medicine.
I should have walked out at that point in time, but the problem was that I had no other way of paying all the students I had taken on and I couldn’t leave the project without major loss of face, both to myself, my staff and students and indeed all of the Scriptorium.
And there was another, deeper, problem, namely that of deeply-rooted corruption. If I walked out, a lot of my colleagues and friends and others in the higher echelons of power would have lost their positions. In the beginning, when she first came to me, Lady Armaine had used her own money to fund my work. However, she fled the City of Glass with only the clothes she wore, and married Darius han Lavani, who was always much better at gambling than at merchanting. He was well-off but never as rich as his father and grandfather had been. Then of course he died in suspicious circumstances, and there was no more money coming in.
So she used her ground army of Brotherhood supporters to keep politicians in office, and demanded payment from them in return. Then she recycled those bribes by paying us. We were paid with money that had mysteriously vanished from doga accounts.
If I had walked out, all that would have been exposed to great upheaval in the doga. Lady Armaine repeatedly let it shimmer through that if I walked, she would harm my family, and they are innocent and know nothing of this.
So they forced me to bring out the medicine regardless of my objections. I can no longer live with the guilt.
Please, Proctor, the medicine does not work. Do not believe anyone who says otherwise. Please evacuate everyone from out of the path of this storm.
Once the storm has passed and Chevakia is safe, please take the book underneath this message to the doga. It contains everything they need to know. I believe in Chevakia. I believe you are by far the best leader the country has ever had. I will not have any more Chevakian deaths on my conscience.
With trembling hands, Sady opened the book.
There were columns of financial data. Sady recognised references to the books that had gone missing. Those books Destran appeared to have deliberately hidden. Alius had received how much money from Lady Armaine? She had received how much from Destran? And the money had gone where? To an account in the City of Glass, for what?
Lady Armaine’s riches were paid from money scammed from the doga. Mercy. He met Orsan’s eyes.
“Did you know about any of this?”
But Orsan, proper as he was, didn’t answer the question. If they came through all of this, he must remind himself to pass a ruling that doga guards could be questioned about this matter.
Who was involved? Worse—who wasn’t involved? He stared at Alius’ lifeless body, his heart thudding. The entire doga was short of money. Every senator had been a target for Lady Armaine’s group. Any of them might betray him. Any of them might still believe that the pills worked.
He’d run out of ways to protect the country. He’d given the orders for people to find shelter. Now he could only go home and prepare his own house for the inevitable. He wished there was something else he could do. And in the back of his mind, he still heard the rough, pain-laced voice, You will beg me to help you by the time it’s too late.
* * *
In the cosy darkness of the kitchen, Sady ordered everyone in this house to sit down for dinner. He’d deliberately left Orsan at the gate, so that Farius and Ontane could be inside. Young Farius sat next to Myra. They talked in low voices and judging by their coy looks, he had a suspicion there was something going on between those two.
Dara had finally stopped fussing with pots and pans and sat down at the head of the table. Reili had shoved her study books out of the way of the plates, and it was as if everyone understood that the spot next to Sady was reserved for Loriane. She had come into the kitchen quietly. Myra said that following the family meeting, she had gone with Andrean to look at his pregnant wife, because Andrean had complained that with the sonorics warnings, no one would come to see a patient unless they were about to die. Sady suspected that Andrean was bluffing, and that his wife was perfectly fine, but Loriane had gone and come back looking impressively professional. Myra had confirmed that apart from a breeder, Loriane was a midwife.
The soft light from the plethora of lamps and candles around the kitchen gilded her hair and made two bright spots of reflection in her eyes. Her broad-lipped mouth curved into a smile, and Sady noticed that she had little dimples in her cheeks.
“How was my niece?” he asked her.
Loriane waggled her hand. “Not time yet.”
Thank the heavens for that. Sady might not like his nephew’s choice of wife, but he could hardly think of worse times to have a baby as in the middle of a sonorics emergency.
“Mother is just bored,” Reili added.
It struck Sady how normal life continued in the face of danger, and he hated to shatter that small bubble of normality.
He said, “I don’t know how much of this you will understand, but I’m going to need your help.”
They all looked at him.
“Reili, Farius, please help me explain if anything is not clear. The medicine doesn’t work. It seems it was part of a conspiracy to assure Alius’ cooperation with a group called the Brotherhood of the Light.” He used the southern term.
Myra repeated it in the way it was supposed to be pronounced, and said something else. Dara nodded.
“You know these people?”
It was Loriane who spoke. “They have . . .” She stopped, and said something to Myra.
Myra said, “Schools? Is that word for place for children?”
“Where children learn?”
“No, they live. With no family.”
“You mean orphanage.” As far as he knew, the City of Glass didn’t have schools.
“Yes.” Her eyes lingered on his. “Brotherhood of the light have orphanage. In City of Glass.”
“What do people in the City of Glass know about the Brotherhood?”
Myra quickly translated the question.
Ontane said something, spreading his hands and rolling his eyes at the ceiling.
“Father says they crazy.”
Dara nodded.
Loriane looked more pensive. She spoke to Myra.
“Loriane says that in City of Glass Brotherhood teaches about icefire. The have old books from king.”
“Caldor,” Sady said.
She flinched.
Sady understood the situation with a clarity that should have been obvious long ago. Fifty years ago, the City of Glass had been prosperous. He had only been a very young boy, but vaguely remembered the envious talk of his parents and grandparents. At the time, there had been a regular trade between Tiverius and the City of Glass. But, while the Tiverians were both enchanted and fearful of the south and its technology, within the country, a revolution was rising of people who had been abused for the sake of that technology. This was the part that Chevakians in border regions call
ed magic, and that academics in Tiverius had always denied existed.
The resistance against the abuse of magic—let’s call it side effects of sonorics—led to the rise of the Eagle Knights, who blamed the icefire technology for their ills and banned it. At the same time, Chevakia was developing steam technology, and found out how to build the barrier to stop sonorics. But all of the southern sonorics technology, their “magic” and Alius’ barrier were part of the same academic discipline, and in both countries, those who saw good in the power of sonorics were driven underground. They had formed one large cross-border alliance, which, in Chevakia with its eternal limitations on cropping and land use, had drawn strong support from influential people.
And now, the sonorics supporters had done something to the source of the power and it had gone badly wrong.
“So, here is the situation: a large storm is coming this way, clouds heavy with sonorics—-icefire. The Chevakian who knew most about sonorics is dead. Without shelter, many of us will die. Since we had the barrier, no new shelters have been built, and they are not big enough to hold the entire population. There is no time to build more shelters. Many people will die. Except, the prisoner Tandor claims that this . . . dacon . . . thing is the only way to reduce sonorics. My question is: do you think there is any merit in what he says?” Acknowledging the potential existence of the magical being felt like making a hard confession. He would have preferred to ignore the issue if another option had been available. Which there wasn’t.
Myra said, “I don’t know what the creature is.”
Loriane shook her head. “Is real. I seen it.”
Dara said something in a harsh tone. Loriane replied, equally harsh. Myra loosened the sling and took Beido out. Ontane glared at Loriane from the corner of his eyes.
Loriane glared back at him.
“Is real,” she repeated. “Is kill people. Baby.”
Dara made another sharp comment.
“She says Loriane is not good in the head.”