A Conspiracy of Truths

by Alexandra Rowland

  The Captain was given one bench to herself. I was squeezed in between the two guards, and, bracketed like that, I could feel evidence of several weapons hidden under their coats. Daggers, it felt like. If they had those, they probably had other weapons too.

  Captain Ostakolin rapped on the roof of the carriage and it jerked forward. She gave me a beatific smile. “You look confused, Master Chant.”

  “I’m just an old man,” I quavered at her. “It’s been so chaotic. . . .”

  “Of course it has,” and she fairly brimmed over with sympathy. “The Queen of Order’s a penny-pincher, amongst other things. Well, she has to be; her term of office is only eleven years. And the office of Order doesn’t tend to draw the sort of person who . . . enjoys the little luxuries in life. Military background, most of them, and Vihra Kylliat is no different. Is she, Lupsek?” Above her scarf, her eyes glittered with merriment at the guard on my left.

  “Like a rock wall in winter, Captain.”

  “Who is the Queen of Pattern, please?” The frail-old-man play seemed to be gaining an audience. “And where am I going?”

  “Queen of Pattern, Queen of Secrets, Shadow Queen—you’ve never heard of her? You must be foreign—well. We know you’re foreign. Really foreign, I meant.”

  “From half the world away,” I agreed.

  “Oh? You speak the language rather well—we thought you were from Enc at first, with that accent.”

  “I speak a lot of languages.”

  Captain Ostakolin smiled. “I’m sure Her Excellency will be interested to know which ones.”

  The carriage came at length to a Tower—a single Tower, perfectly round and rising one or two hundred feet in the air, dotted with arrow slits lower down and glazed windows higher up. There was a single door, so narrow that only one person could pass through it at a time, and on the inside there were slots to hold wooden bars three times as thick as the door itself. When we passed inside, one by one, I saw that there was a tight spiral staircase in the very middle of the Tower, leading both straight up and straight down.

  “We have to take you up,” said the Captain. “All the way up. It’s a lot of stairs, even for a strong young lad like Lupsek, but we are to keep you comfortable, so we’ll go at your own pace. Eh, grandfather?”

  “Aye, Captain,” I said. I should have seen what they were doing at the time, buttering me up like that, treating me gently so that I would lower my guard. But I was tired, exhausted from being cooped up in the cell, and exhausted from the stony silence from the Ministries of Order and Justice. I remember being simply relieved that I had finally found at least one person with more than a nominal respect for their elders. Completely fell for the lines they were feeding me, ate up the story they handed me without questioning it.

  She was right—it was a lot of stairs. We stopped frequently on the way up, and neither the Captain nor her men made the slightest complaint or show of impatience, so I took the opportunity to get a good look at the Tower. The lower floors were open to the stairwell, with no walls between them—they were mostly desks of clerks, it looked like. As we went higher, the stairwell was ringed by a narrow landing and a wall with a number of doors in it. “Training rooms,” Captain Ostakolin said, or, “Confidential storage,” or “Plain confidential.” I was thoroughly winded by the time we reached the top, even with regular and judicious breaks. The final floor was a circular landing with six doors. When the Captain unlocked one of them with a key from the ring on her belt, I saw it was doubled: a thick wooden door on the outside, swinging out, and a barred door behind it, swinging in.

  It was, to put it mildly, a great improvement over the cell in the House of Order. It was wedge-shaped, like a piece of pie with a bite or two taken from its point, and it took up an entire sixth of the Tower. There was no stove or brazier, but there were enough people in the Tower, and enough stoves lower down, that the heat rose and made it comfortable enough. And a window! Yes, it was barred, and upon later inspection I found out that it did not open, but the presence of natural light was a blessing. The furnishings were sparse but serviceable, but even so, it was difficult not to be an improvement over my previous lodgings. A bed! A mattress directly on the floor, but a pillow! And no smell of rat shit or mildew; truly the gods had smiled upon me. “Her Excellency will be up soon to speak to you. Make yourself comfortable. Did they feed you lunch at the House of Order?”

  “Not today, nor any other day—a stale biscuit at breakfast and a bowl of slop at dinner.”

  Her mouth twitched with the slightest sneer. “I’ll ask the steward to send something up before Her Excellency arrives.”

  “I thirst, more than anything,” I said, doing my frail voice again.

  She gestured to a small urn by the window. “There should be water in the pitcher.”

  Truly I felt the gods had smiled upon me.

  Soft brown bread, soft white cheese, half a potato and two carrots from a stew, and a bruised apple: a feast fit for kings, as far as I was concerned—no, truly! It was! I scarfed it down so fast I almost choked twice, and a good thing I was so quick, too, for I was mopping up the last of the stew juice with the final morsel of bread when I felt a strange chill come over me. The air felt suddenly dank and foul, though I could smell nothing strange. The little hairs all over my body stood on end, and all my base instincts flinched to awareness and caution, but none of my senses presented evidence for the sudden feeling of dread and danger. Then it faded, and the doors opened, and a woman walked in—a woman who could only be the Queen of Pattern, Anfisa Vasilos Zofiyat Lisitsin. I scrambled to my feet and bowed as well as I knew how—it was a style more traditional in Echaree, which is south of Nuryevet’s southern neighbor, Cormerra. It was close enough, I thought, for a prisoner accused of espionage.

  She wasn’t young, but nor was she old, and she clearly had a family inheritance of persistent youth in her face. I can tell you all the details about what she looked like (dark hair, dark almond-shaped eyes; a cat-shaped face, broad in the cheeks and narrow in the chin), but I can’t describe the way she carried herself, the set of her shoulders, the way she filled up the entire room, the way she walked as silent as a shadow, without even the rustle of clothing.

  “Chilly in here, isn’t it?” she said to me. “Captain, have a brazier brought up and set in the corridor. If you don’t mind”—to me again—“we’ll leave the outer door open and you’ll get a bit more warmth in here. You can shut it again easily if you’d like privacy.” She smiled, then—dimpled at me, and I was set off balance.

  “Thank you, Your Excellency.”

  “And a couple chairs, Captain, if you’d be so good.” To me again: “You may call me Anfisa Zofiyat. I daresay that’s formal enough for just the two of us. Please, sit down again if you were comfortable.”

  “I’m very confused, madam,” I said. “No one has really explained anything.”

  “There’s nothing much to explain, Master Chant. Did you get enough food? I know that Vihra Kylliat is not the best representative of Nuryeven hospitality.” Not that there are any good representatives of it in this damn country.

  “Yes, thank you, madam. I was told you . . . wanted information?”

  “Oh, there’s no rush,” she said, dimpling again. “You just rest for today. We’ve sent for a clean set of clothes, and the steward will bring up some warm water for you to wash with later tonight.”

  “You’re very kind, madam,” I murmured, bowing my head.

  “Not at all, Master Chant, I was merely raised more gently than . . . others of my rank. I have instructed the guards and the Tower staff to treat you as if you were a guest in their homes.” I didn’t have high hopes for this, but then, low expectations are very difficult to disappoint. “I don’t mean to linger long. I only came up to introduce myself and to offer you a formal welcome while you’re under my roof.”

  “Thank you, Anfisa Zofiyat. Um. If I am truly a guest with you, I . . . Might I be allowed to send a letter?”

>   She put her head slightly to one side and considered. “Well, you are still a prisoner of Order, formally accused by Justice, and I only managed to wrangle you away from them on a technicality, so . . .” She got an impish twinkle in her eyes. “I’d be bending the rules a little bit. But then, my whole Ministry is one founded on a little bit of rule bending here and there. Shall we make a deal? You may send a letter if I have your honorable word as a gentleman that you will agree to be pleasant and cooperative. I’ve heard stories about your hearing day, you know.”

  I nodded solemnly. Winced a little that she knew about that already. “A time locked up underground has worn off some of my sharper edges, madam.”

  “Ooh,” she said, knotting her eyebrows. “They put you in one of those little burrow cells? I’m surprised you haven’t started growing mushrooms from your hair.”

  I laughed, surprised. “So am I.”

  “Well, I’ll leave you to rest. We’ll get this room warm for you—if there’s anything you need for comfort, there’ll be guards nearby somewhere. Just call out for them. Reasonable requests,” she stressed with a smile. “Let’s not get carried away—a guest has a duty to behave well, just as the host does, don’t they?”

  I was given a bucket of piping-hot water, as promised, and a cloth, and a little dish of soft soap, and I scrubbed all over. So much dirt came off me that the water was almost as dark as my own skin by the end. The soap was nothing fancy, the simple kind that the working class uses, but it was another blessed luxury to add to the piles that Anfisa Zofiyat had already heaped upon me—a proper dinner, meat and vegetables and more of that soft brown bread, as warm as it could be after being hauled up dozens of flights of stairs. I asked for a comb and one was given to me, and I cleaned the elflocks out of my hair and beard until they fluffed out in a coarse woolly cloud around my head. And then: a soft bed, clean sheets, a clean blanket, a second pillow. A second one! I have known deprivation before in my life—comes with the territory, you know, sleeping on the ground, taking shelter from the rain under trees or in caves, or not being able to find shelter at all and walking for miles in a cold drizzle. Yes, those times I was deprived, but I was free. Now I felt positively decadent, but I still was not free—there were bars on the windows and the door, and once I had gotten a good meal or two in me and slept as hard as ever I have, I started thinking a little more clearly.

  So when Anfisa Zofiyat came to see me the next morning, I asked for my advocate.

  “Oh, no,” she said—this was the one time she denied me anything outright, without preamble or negotiation. “No, that’s one thing we can’t have.”

  “Ah. Why, if I may ask?”

  “I don’t know her.”

  “You don’t . . . know her. Is that the only reason?”

  “I know everyone who works in this Tower,” she said. The soft-eyed smiling expression had flickered away. Her eyes were steelier now, set solidly against me. “No one comes into this Tower and no thing comes in without my knowledge and permission. Never. I can’t be having that.”

  “I would like to communicate with my advocate—and send a letter to my apprentice, but we already spoke of that.”

  “Strangers don’t come in here. Zorya Miroslavat and Vihra Kylliat can afford to allow such things, but they’re not Queens of Pattern. It’s different here. No. No strangers.”

  “I’m a stranger, though.”

  “You’re imprisoned,” she said sharply. “There’s guards in the hall, and we’ve taken precautions. You’re not a threat.”

  I found myself taken aback. “Well. No, I’m not. You’re the first one who’s agreed with me there,” I said with a faint laugh. “They all keep telling me I’m a witch, which is honestly news to me.”

  “You’re not a witch,” she said, as if she were a doctor giving a diagnosis with a very poor bedside manner. As if she were . . . reassuring me, somehow.

  “Yes, I knew that,” I said, “but how did you?”

  She shrugged one shoulder. “We tested you. We have ways of recognizing blackwitches, even if they’re new or unusually subtle.”

  I’d dreaded that the Nuryevens would try to test me for it. I’d had waking nightmares of being tortured as they tried to make me confess or show magic to save myself. I’d thought of hot pokers, or horrific instruments. . . . But why go to such trouble? The most terrifying imaginings were of a simple, solitary barrel of cold, dark water. “I beg your pardon, you tested me? When?”

  “When you arrived, naturally.”

  I didn’t know what to make of that.

  She rose and paced—towards the window and back again, once. “Never mind this, it’s none of your concern. I hear you know languages?”

  “Yes, madam, several,” I said; I tried to keep up with the conversation. I had to be pleasant, no matter how frustrated I was about being cut off from Consanza, no matter how shaken I was about the test that I had somehow passed.

  “How many is several?”

  “Seventeen fluently, eight well enough to insult someone’s mother, a handful more well enough to buy an inn room and supper.”

  “Enca? Cormerran? Echareese?”

  “About as well as I speak Nuryeven.”

  “Umakha?”

  “Fluently.”

  “Xerecci?”

  “Well enough to get by. There’s this odd thing they do with the nouns. I’ve never been able to get my head around it.”

  “Fine. What else?”

  “What other languages? Several dialects of Ondoro and Urtish, both fluently. Arjuni, Sharingolish, Dveccen, moderately. Hrefni, fluently—”

  “We don’t care about the Hrefni. They’re practically on the other side of the world.”

  “Ah, I’m . . . surprised you knew about them at all.”

  “I have very good intelligence.” Her soft-eyed mask had not slipped back down entirely. She paced back to the window and stared out of it. “Were you in Cormerra?”

  “Some months ago, my apprentice and I passed through. On our way here.”

  “What did you see there?” Her voice was tight, and a thread of iron ran through it.

  “Farms, mostly. Sheep. Forest. We didn’t come anywhere near the cities. Just ugly little mud villages.” I paused. “Primitive things, not like what you have here.”

  “Certainly not.” She rolled her shoulders. “Sheep, how many sheep?”

  “I didn’t count them.”

  “Cormerra is the closest to home and the hardest to read,” she murmured. “They know us on sight. They’re looking for us. They keep patrols on the borders. I get news from sources inside the cities, but I don’t trust them.” She asked me details about my trip through Cormerra, and when that proved mostly fruitless, she said, “Tell me about the Umakh.” Habits, seasonal movements, the significance of eagles . . . Things she knew about, things she had been told but didn’t understand, had no context for. I had to tell the truth about all that, of course—I couldn’t afford to lie. It could have been another test.

  At length, we fell silent. I had answered all the questions that I could.

  “What does a Queen of Pattern do?” I asked.

  She was quiet for a moment. “I was elected to this office to safeguard the secrets of the realm. To hold them in trust. To know everything that’s going on. To be an all-seeing eye, and to use my knowledge for our protection and defense. To see the pattern in the tapestry of fate before anyone else, to advise the other Kings and Queens on matters of state so that we might work together. I protect us from insidious enemies at home and abroad.”

  “A powerful place to be,” I said.

  “Yes. And no. Secret power—like water. Not immediate power, like Order.”

  “You seem to have considered your peers carefully.” There was something here that I thought I could dig up, something interesting to know about her if I could brush away the dirt quietly enough that she didn’t notice me looking for it.

  “Part of the job description.”

&nb
sp; “Yes—part of the pattern, I suppose.” I tugged my beard. “How do you hear so much?”

  “I listen,” she said. She turned away from the window, brushed off her dress, and left without another word.

  Anfisa Zofiyat came every day to see me, clothed in deep dusky blue, to ask me questions, and every day she began calm and soft-eyed and smiling, and ended fidgety and brisk. On the third day, she allowed me to write a letter to Ylfing. Brought me a little desk and a fine feather quill and midnight-blue ink. Don’t remember exactly what I wrote, but it took me a good while and a couple sheets of paper. I think I ended with an explanation—that I’d been arrested, imprisoned, charged, put on trial, charged with something else, imprisoned again. . . . Anfisa took the letter herself and tucked it into a pocket of her jacket, promising to send it by her personal messenger to Ylfing, if they could find him.

  She began asking me about her peers—what had I heard about them? What had they said about her? What were they planning?

  She brought us back to that several times over the course of those few hours we spent together every day—what were they planning? What were they planning? She was sure they must be planning something.