A Conspiracy of Truths

by Alexandra Rowland

  I found out that she would hold her office for life. The other royals were elected for terms of varying length, but Anfisa’s term would last until she chose to retire or, more likely, until she died.

  “Is it really more likely that you’ll die before you retire?” I asked thoughtlessly. “How many of the other Kings and Queens of Pattern have died in office?”

  She left suddenly at that question.

  Belatedly, I began to think. It’s something I never seem to have gotten the knack of.

  I asked the guards if I might have some books or reading material to keep myself occupied, particularly histories. They were reasonably accommodating, bringing me stacks of books and taking them away again as I looked for the information—slow going, as reading Nuryeven is much more difficult for me than speaking it, and their printing presses seemed of rather poor quality. Nothing wrong with my eyes, of course, they’re as good as ever they were, but what am I supposed to do if the printers don’t keep their type sharp?

  I should have known to stick to tried-and-true methods: I spoke to the guards. I suppose I was turning out to be a prisoner of some significance, as there was always a guard strolling around and around that circular landing outside the door or sitting on a chair, or tending the brazier. I nudged the outer door open and pulled up my own chair.

  “What’s your name?” I asked the man there. He was short and stocky, with a thick black beard, not yet touched with silver.

  “Steward Ilya Svetozaros,” he answered, not unfriendly. He wore the typical blue coat and charcoal trousers of the Pattern Guard, but the coat he had unbuttoned, due to the cozy warmth of the brazier not ten feet away.

  “I’m bored to tears, Steward Ilya Svetozaros,” says I to him.

  “And I as well,” says he. “You’re not a very exciting prisoner.”

  “Dealt with many exciting prisoners in your time, have you?”

  “Some,” he said—these Nuryevens hate communicating new information, don’t they? “I thought you’d at least break the glass and try to squirm out the bars on a rope made from your blankets by now.”

  “It’s a hundred feet to the ground! I am a very old man!”

  “It’s what I’d try.”

  “Have much experience breaking out of cells?”

  “Mmm,” he said, and I thought that was going to be all I got from him, but he really must have been as bored as he claimed. “Actually, yes. Part of, ah . . . ongoing training. For the elite guard, you know. The Weavers.”

  “I don’t know, in fact. Are you to be promoted?”

  “Maybe one day. Hard to say at this point.”

  “How did you come to work for Pattern?”

  “I applied when I filed my paperwork for adulthood. Started out with the patrol, promoted to the stewards two years ago.”

  “And what does a steward in Pattern do?”

  “Administration. Guards the Tower. Helps on city work sometimes, if the patrols are short staffed.”

  “Doesn’t Order patrol the city?”

  “The streets, sure. Pattern keeps an eye on . . . big-picture concerns.” He smirked. “Any fool can arrest a street thief or a murderer. Takes a sharper eye to find evidence against embezzlers, spies, foreign agents.”

  “And the elite guard?”

  “Away work.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know, the country. Abroad. Going places, looking at things, sending letters back. Taking care of inconvenient problems for Her Excellency. Delicate matters.”

  “Examining the pattern,” I mused.

  “Aye.”

  “Is that what you’d like to do one day? Be part of the elite?”

  “Well . . . The pay is the best anywhere. But you’re away from home a lot, and obviously it’s quite dangerous—and I’m thinking of marrying a couple friends of mine, see.”

  I had to pause for a moment there. “Plural friends?”

  “Yeah. Good business match, it’d be. We’ve been close since we were kids.”

  “Perhaps my Nuryeven isn’t as good as I thought. When you say marry, you mean . . . joining your households together and producing heirs, yes?” It wasn’t that the concept was alien to me. It’s just that I hadn’t expected such an arrangement to be commonplace in Nuryevet—well, no, I’ll be honest. It’s that I hadn’t spent even a blink of time thinking about their practices, and if you’d asked me at that time, I probably would have told you that all Nuryevens lumber along like they’re made of stone, not a drop of hot blood in their bodies and no interest whatsoever in romance, and that they acquire children by filing paperwork in quintuplicate and being assigned one by an advocate.

  My new friend Ilya said, “Aye, that’s right. Though I don’t think Anya and Mikket will care to manage it themselves. Heirs are cheap, though, you can scrape together half a dozen of ’em right off the street, so long’s you got flexible standards.”

  I shook my head. “Is this a common thing in these parts?”

  “Eh? Oh, aye, common enough. I’ve seen marriages with more partners than that.” He pulled his chair to face me fully. “The Umakh only ever have two-partner marriages, did you know that? And it’s not about business. They don’t even seem to care about their assets at all.”

  “Well, no, the Umakh marry for love and sex—”

  “Is that right? That seems messy—lots of feelings involved if you combine sex and business.”

  Ilya had certain opinions, shall we say, which may not have been representative of the general Nuryeven philosophy. Marriage here is a great amalgamation of every kind of legal partnership: they get married when they’re going into business together, they get married when they want to own property jointly, they get married when they’re in love. . . . Some of these arrangements do involve a physical element or the biological production of heirs, as they do elsewhere; some, as Ilya mentioned before, simply involve formally adopting half a dozen heirs off the street; some are a mere legal formality. Like many things in Nuryevet, you can do as you please so long as you’ve got your paperwork in order. I didn’t quite understand all this at the time—it took a while for me to glean the intricacies of it. Or, rather, the lack of intricacy.

  At the time, I only asked Ilya if he had a separate lover.

  “Not right now,” he said. “I hire a private contractor for that.”

  “A prostitute, you mean?”

  “No, a contractor. Prostitutes are—well, you’re foreign, you wouldn’t know. We don’t have those here. Prostitutes just stand on the street and don’t have a license or pay taxes, right? They just have sex with whoever in an alley?”

  “Ah . . . Some of them. In some places. In other places, they’re . . .” I waved vaguely. “Higher status.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning they’re more expensive; they do things besides the act. In some places, they’re priests and priestesses. In some places, they’re popular society figures with property and businesses, patrons of the arts and so forth.”

  “Here, you hire one of them like you’d hire a doctor or a tailor or someone to build a house for you—and you wouldn’t grab just anybody off the street for that, would you? They show you their license, and you sign a contract together, and so on. It’s a good system.”

  “What about people who don’t have a license?”

  “Arrested, of course, just like a doctor practicing without a license would be, or a . . .” He waved his hand, gesturing at me. “What is your trade, anyhow?”

  “I travel. I look at things. I remember what I’ve seen. I tell stories about it.”

  “Ah, like one of the Weavers.”

  “I don’t know what the Weavers do, exactly, but I have a feeling it’s wildly different.” It is.

  “It’s what you’re doing for Anfisa Zofiyat—telling her about things so she can plan accordingly.”

  “Spies, then. The Weavers are spies?”

  “Well . . . That’s a nasty word, ‘spies.’ Sounds sneaky.�
�

  “Do they sneak? You mentioned being disappointed I didn’t try to escape out my window.”

  “Well, sure they sneak; they sneak everywhere, but they ain’t sneaky, if you know what I mean. It’s different. They can come up behind you quiet as anything, probably kill you if they feel like it, or pick your pocket, or find out anything about you that they want, but that’s not sneakiness. That’s just . . . Weaver stuff.”

  “That’s not what I do. I’m more like a teacher. I tell stories.”

  “Aye, then, teach me something.”

  Nothing brings me so much joy as a captive audience willing to have their boredom eased, but I was on a mission for information. “Perhaps we could trade stories. An even trade. Nothing comes free,” I said, thinking this would appeal to Nuryeven sensibilities.

  “If you like,” he said.

  “What are you interested in learning?”

  He thought about it, leaning his head back against the wall and looking at the ceiling. “Something strange. Something no one’s seen or heard of before.”

  “If no one’s seen or heard of it, then I probably haven’t either.”

  “No, not like that—just something most people would never see in their lives, something rare. Something that if you saw it, you’d know you’d been lucky. You ever seen anything like that? Traveling all over like you do?”

  I leaned back in my own chair and stroked my beard. “Have you ever been to sea?”

  “Nah, not me. Riverboats, that’s about it, and even then I don’t like the tossing.”

  THE SECOND TALE:

  An Ocean of Peculiar Things

  In the middle of the Unending Ocean (I said, improvising something from a ragbag of memories and story fragments, not all of them exclusively mine), waters unknown and uncharted by all but the most adventurous sailors, the waves at night rise in placid and inexorable rolls like great monsters of the deep, their edges limned by the soft light of the strange creatures who glow with their own light, moving like little moons beneath the surface of the sea. The strangeness of the creatures here reflects the strangeness of the whole ocean—there are bizarre currents that run through these waters, places where the water is as warm as a garden pool in summer, and regions where the sea is as still and smooth as glass. It is an ocean of peculiar things.

  (“Like what?” said the guard, which was annoying, because I was about to tell him.)

  The farther in you sail, the more the water becomes somehow more than water, flowing around the ship like dark oil, and the air becomes more than air. . . . It is a sensation, almost, a strangeness in the air. Sailors call this the ufstora, the touch of the gods, and none of them that I have ever met will consent to go in search of it. There are places, though, where it can be found, in the most remote places of the ocean, as far away from land as it is possible to get anywhere in the world.

  But even without the ufstora, the night sky above this sea is extraordinary—a velvet of such richness as I have seen nowhere else in this world, and so deep that it seems like you’re looking into the reflection of the deepest reaches of the ocean. The stars shine above like jewels, glowing with divine light in an infinite cosmos.

  (Mind you . . . It’s a sky. A pretty sky, to be sure, but I was fluffing it up a little for him; you know how it goes. Ilya nodded along the whole time and said things like, “Goodness,” and “You don’t say.”)

  One of the many exceptional phenomena of the sea is something the sailors have no name for. (This part is absolutely true.) When I first encountered it, I called it ufstora too, but the crew was quick to correct me—this was not a supernatural thing. You see, there is something in the atmosphere here, a mist or a miasma that appears in the sky over certain areas, as unpredictable as the wind or the clouds or the northern lights, and when this mist comes overhead, there is no visible warning—and suddenly the stars explode into brilliant splendor all across the sky, their light scattering and multiplying into ten thousand shards and splinters of fire and color, and the sky behind them appears in an amazing array of hues, arranged in dazzling clouds and streaks, filled with the light from stars never before seen—even the dimmest star becomes as big and bright as a candle flame held at arm’s length. It lasts but a few moments, no longer than it takes for a cloud to pass over the moon. I can call it dazzling, but that is as close to the truth as a sigh is to a hurricane.

  But encounters with the nameless brightness or the ufstora are rare. Some have seen them many times. Many die without seeing them once. There are other things here, in this place that is not a place: The odd creatures that swim up from the unknowable depths. The stormfire that comes during a tempest and blazes on the ends of the bowsprits, as steady as anything even while the boat is being tossed to pieces.

  (He shuddered at this, and I don’t think he was faking the faintly sickened expression that came across his face.)

  Once, many years ago, I crossed the sea in a rowboat tethered to its ship by a long rope.

  (He looked further sickened at this. By the way, this was a lie: it wasn’t me who did this, but my own master-Chant, well before I ever became her apprentice. She had a great love of the ocean.)

  I wished to study what I could of those eerie maritime occurrences, and riding in the rowboat put the noises of the ship at a distance so I could focus. I would pass the nights half sitting, half lying against the stern, with my feet propped up on the thwart and my right hand hanging over the gunwale, trailing my fingers in the thick, rich water. I remember one night when we were passing through the doldrums, when all the waves stop and the sea goes as still as glass, all soft and sweet, and the smallest ripples of waves just lapping at the hull of my little boat were the only thing that broke the perfect silence. Both moons were shining that night, and the stars, and the only other light was from the Captain’s lamp as she stood at the wheel and whispered wind charms into the sails, just enough to keep them billowing. In those days, they used silk sails when they were doing a Great Crossing, which is the name for the course that takes a ship directly across the middle of the sea. That night I wasn’t sleeping, but I had my head propped up and I watched a pair of moonfish following my little boat, twirling around each other as they swam. Moonfish are small, for ocean fish—their silver bodies are the length of a man’s forearm, and they have delicate trailing fins that glow with a pale green light. You never see them alone. Always and only in pairs. It is said that they mate for life, and that it is bad luck to catch one and not the other.

  (That is exactly as my master-Chant told it to me. I myself have never seen moonfish, and I’m too old now to be crossing the ocean in a rowboat anyway.)

  I went on in that vein for a little while, but those were the interesting parts. He was an attentive audience, nodded along with everything I said, interested but not pushy. When I finished, I said, “Now it’s your turn.”

  “Aye. And what would you like to learn about?”

  My heart beat a little faster in my chest, and I hemmed and hawed to cover my nervousness, feigning indecision. “Well,” I said slowly, at long last, “I suppose I’d like to know more about Nuryevet. And you—you seem like a patriot, being a public servant and all, so you’re a good person to tell me about it.”

  “I guess,” he said, frowning a little. “And what is it that you want to know about, specifically?”

  “Well. Hmm. I suppose I’m most curious about things that are going to affect me personally, to be honest with you—how trials work, how long I can expect to be imprisoned. . . .” I could have gotten that information from Consanza before, if I’d thought to ask. This was all camouflage for the things I really wanted. “Or—well, I suppose I don’t even understand your system of government at all. There are so many Primes,” I quavered, a feeble old man, “I just can’t keep them straight.” All lies, of course. “Maybe you could tell me about them . . . or what their Ministries are concerned with and how they came to be. . . .”

  What I actually wanted was gossip and blac
kmail material, or at least enough of a personal sketch of each of the Queens that I could deduce things about them. I had spoken to two Queens already at that point, and knowing anything about who they were as people would have given me a foothold into turning my fortunes around. If I could give Anfisa Zofiyat what she wanted, then she would begin to like me, and I could use that as leverage.

  Ilya shrugged. “All right. It’s not as complicated as all that.”

  THE THIRD TALE:

  An Introduction to Nuryeven Social Science

  About three hundred years ago, there was only one King. His name was Chadvar Chadvaros, and he was awful. He taxed the common folk to poverty and starvation and spent all the money bribing foreign merchants, and he very nearly sold us out to Enc and Cormerra. Long story short, everyone decided that hereditary monarchy was a stupid idea, and they killed him.

  “I have an idea,” said someone. “What if we all just pick someone who we think would be good at looking after things around here, and after a while we have the opportunity to pick someone else if the first person starts being terrible?” That sounded like a good idea, so they elected someone smart and tough, Timea Dorotayat. She was the first elected Prime, so they called her the People’s Queen. A bunch of stuff happened, and as it turned out, not every Prime was good at every aspect of ruling—some sole-ruling Primes were great with money, but crap at war. So they started splitting the government into branches so they could pick people who were right for each individual job. First they divided it into Hearth and Field. Hearth concerned everything to do with things inside Nuryevet: law and taxes and so forth; while Field concerned everything outside: diplomacy and war and foreign trade.

  Eventually, after a few more splits, they ended up with the current system: Law, Justice, Order, Pattern, and Commerce—or Coin, as you’ll more often hear. Law obviously makes the laws, Order enforces the law, and Justice interprets it. Coin is pretty self-explanatory, and Pattern is there to see the big picture, to offer wisdom and guidance, and to provide a sense of long-term continuity.

  (“Surely Zorya Miroslavat has more life experience? More wisdom? Why would they elect someone as young as Anfisa Zofiyat to Pattern, if it is about those things?” I said. I was bored of all this dull, useless stuff. I wanted some specifics. Something contemporary, something practical.)