I sound like a historian instead of a storyteller, don’t I? I apologize—it’s difficult to tell a story this fresh and raw when I wasn’t actually involved in any part of it, when I was shut away from the action while all the excitement happened to other people. And this, I suppose, was history, and it was happening before our eyes. In any case, I commend your patience with me. I’m nearly finished—I wasn’t shut away from all the action, just the first half of it.
I’ll make it quick: Ardan Balintos patched things together. He got trade moving in the city again, got people fed and warm. It took nearly a month, but Vihra Kylliat was cleared of all charges. Criminal nepotism had been a frivolous charge, something that was on the books but never actually brought up in court. Apparently, the so-called nepotism she’d been accused of was a personal tendency to play favorites amongst her junior officers and some kind of sex scandal from twenty years ago.
Ardan Balintos and Yunia Antalos, the Duchess of Justice, were most likely sleeping together, which brought up a whole host of ethical concerns, but together they cobbled together a solution: for Vihra Kylliat’s trial, Yunia presided on the panel, supported by the four youngest judges there were in Nuryevet at the time—ones whom Zorya Miroslavat herself had appointed, and recently. Ones who would rule in favor of Zorya’s other protégée—Vihra Kylliat’s accusers didn’t stand a goddamn chance. It was criminal nepotism being used to brush off a charge of criminal nepotism. You can’t make this stuff up.
Vihra Kylliat was released from prison and, as the highest-ranking free member of the government and using Zorya Miroslavat’s decree of martial law as leverage, seized sole control of the government. Ardan Balintos and Yunia Antalos put up no objection. I thought that was an unexpected act of loyalty and honor, considering, but Consanza explained later: while some little bit of honor may have been in play, it was mostly a show. Ardan Balintos was young, and mostly unknown; he had no military glory to rely on in a political campaign—he’d been in the quartermasters’ corps for his entire career with Order, and had been sent on only two brief, mediocre wars with Cormerra. But he wanted to run for King of Order one day, so he needed at the very least to be known as an orderly, rule-of-law kind of person. In short, releasing Vihra and reinstating her power made him look good.
She wasn’t a merciful Queen—she enforced a curfew, sent troops of guards to patrol the city, and expanded the situations in which the use of force was authorized. My time in jail got markedly less lonely quite soon after that as the cells filled further. The prisoners whispered through the bars to one another while the guards were elsewhere, and it was then that I heard the parts that I had been missing.
Gyorgy Imros, the Duke of Coin, was implicated during Taishineya’s trial, and Vihra promptly had him arrested on charges of unlawful arrest of a citizen and the making of fraudulent accusations; the embezzlement, bribery, and general corruption charges, which had come to light in court, were tacked on as more of an afterthought than anything else. Gyorgy Imros was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment and stripped of his title. This in particular was a terrible idea on Vihra’s part, because it meant that no one was captaining the ship of Commerce, and it contributed to the mess that followed later. I’m sure she felt very pleased with herself at the time, having defanged Coin like that.
Vihra Kylliat came to me the night that she sentenced Gyorgy Imros. The guards had spent the day moving prisoners farther away from me, crowding them into another wing of the prison: Vihra Kylliat and I were alone in the room. I heard the clanking rhythm of her step several moments before she appeared in front of my cell. She drew up a chair, and I noticed that she too sat close to the brazier. She wore a thick red woolen half-cloak with white trim—she wasn’t fine enough to spring for fur lining, or perhaps she didn’t want to seem like she was showing weakness by needing the warmth. Or perhaps she was merely accustomed to the cold.
“Pretty necklace,” I said, nodding to an oddly shaped pendant of twisted metal hanging from a long chain around her neck. I hadn’t seen her wear jewelry before.
“It’s not a necklace,” she snapped, and stuffed it beneath her tunic. “You used witchcraft in the service of Taishineya Tarmos, I hear.”
“What? When?”
“You read her future for her.”
“Oh. Does that count as witchcraft?” I muttered. “I don’t know that I really believe in such things. . . .”
She waved her hand. “It doesn’t matter to me one whit whether or not you actually told her future. She believes that you did, and her staff believes that you did. I’ve just had them questioned. Anyone can make up things and sound like an oracle. Be vague enough, and anything you say can be somehow interpreted to fit the circumstances that actually happen. Is she paying you?” she asked suddenly.
“Paying me?”
“For information. You’re a bit of a slut with your mouth, aren’t you?” She snorted at me. “You’ll blab information to the highest bidder.”
“Only to save my life,” I said dryly. “As I don’t owe loyalty to anyone but my personal beliefs and my life’s work.”
“And your apprentice.”
“Sure, the kid’s all right. Don’t want to see him hurt. He’s like a nephew to me.”
“Certainly. I’m no barbarian, Master Chant. I don’t hurt children to get information from their parents. Or parental figures,” she added. “Why tear out his fingernails when you have ten perfectly good ones?”
I swallowed. “Fortunately, ma’am, I’m fairly fond of my fingernails where they are, and I’m willing to be a . . . how did you put it? A slut with my information, in order to keep them. How can I help?”
“I never said I wanted your help.”
“No? My mistake.” She wasn’t making me nervous or anything, mind you. She—well, she was an intimidating woman, that’s all.
“You’re known as a person who knows things.”
“Depends on the things you want to know.” I swallowed again. “I know a few things, maybe. And, like many people who have lived as long as I have, I have a good bit of experience in worldly matters. Are you sure I can’t help? What is it you want of me?”
She sat in silence.
“Perhaps I can make a guess, then, Your Majesty,” I said, inching closer to the bars. “You’re a strong woman, and you’ve inherited a bad situation. You’re the only Prime at liberty now, and that’s a tricky position to be in. Delicate. That said, Coin’s not an issue anymore, and the Duchess of Justice and the Duke of Law aren’t causing you any trouble. Thing is, maybe you’ve noticed you have . . . you have a wealth of opportunities available to you. Maybe you want someone to help you choose the right path. Maybe you want to know what would happen if you were the only Queen. Maybe you—”
“I’m no traitor to my kingdom,” she snarled. “I won’t be the only Prime.”
“Oh,” I said. That surprised me—if it had been me . . . I take what opportunities are handed to me, you know? But perhaps she was even more like the General of Jade and Iron than I’d expected. I took the opportunity to stop running my mouth. “So . . . to what do I owe the honor of this visit, then?”
She tapped the fingers of her hand against her knee.
There was a long silence.
“Things are falling apart,” she said at last. “They’ve been falling apart for a while. I want to fix them.”
“Perhaps the system is broken.” Like I said before, Nuryevet was already sick when I arrived.
“The system is fine. I won’t go making wild changes, especially not while I’m in this position. I have to be careful. If Casimir Vanyos hadn’t died . . .”
“I got the feeling he wasn’t much respected amongst his peers.”
Her jaw tightened. “He was a good man. He worked for the realm for decades, he knew more about the law than anyone else alive today, and he had principles and ethics. More than I do.”
“Taishineya Tarmos seemed to think he was weak.”
“As water is
weak, perhaps. But water flows downhill—it will get around barriers, it will wear through stone, it will quench fire, it will rise through the air and rain down on dry fields. He was careful, precise, and deliberate, and his understanding of his Ministry was second to none. We are lesser without him.”
“And his second? The Duke?”
She shrugged. “We’ll see, I suppose. He will take over until Casimir Vanyos’s term of office ends in four years, and if he does a good job, he may be elected in his own right. That remains to be seen. I’ve never felt that he was a particularly forceful personality, but I suppose Casimir Vanyos didn’t give that impression until you got to know him either.”
“So what will you do? You want something from me, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”
“Casimir Vanyos was wise,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard me. “In some ways, you remind me of him. I don’t actually think you’re wise in and of yourself, but you say wise things sometimes, and . . . as I said, you are known as a man who knows things. The higher you go in society, the colder it gets, you know. Queen of Order is a wintry place to be indeed. The Queen of All, even more so.”
I pounced on that spark: I laughed softly. She raised an eyebrow at me. “Sorry, Majesty. It’s just . . . I know what you mean.”
“How could you?” She flicked her eyes over me. “You’re a pauper.”
“I am a friend of queens and princes, madam. I have sworn by my blood to be a brother to chieftains and lords.”
“And yet you say you hold loyalty to no one. You have no honor, have you?”
“I swore to them as men and women, not to their titles. I owe their titles no loyalty, no. I owe them the loyalty due only to a friend.”
“And so you think you know how I feel?”
“I’m more familiar than you think I am. I spoke to you once about the General of Jade and Iron. . . . But you probably don’t want to hear me yammer about her anymore.”
“Genzhu was a powerful empire. Still is, in its way,” she murmured. “I would have dreaded to go up against its armies, in my youth. Before I was retired from service and put out to pasture.” She smacked the palm of her hand on her knee above the prosthetic.
I nodded. “General Ger Zha was a great tactician. They used to call her the Sword of Heaven. For fifteen years, she was the empire’s worst-kept secret, but that was a century ago. She was fading from memory when you were just beginning your career. But in her day, she gave new meaning to the word ‘glory,’ and she did it without taking the slightest scuff to her honor.”
Vihra Kylliat grunted, pretending not to care, but she said nothing, and so I took a gamble.
THE TENTH TALE:
The Sergeant of Yew and Silk
A long time ago and half the world away, a young woman named Ger Zha joined the army and swore to serve, to be steadfast, to advance the glory of the Queen of the World, Earthly Daughter of the Glorious Sun-Tiger, Reflected Brilliance of the Mirror of Heaven, the Empress of Genzhu, En Bai. She was given a war bow, and the first thing she learned was how to care for it—to push her knee into the belly of the bow when stringing it, to unstring it when it was idle or at the first sign of damp, to fletch her own arrows, to never pluck the string without an arrow nocked to it, to whittle a draw-ring from antler or bone, and to draw to her cheekbone, always her cheekbone, in perfect unison with the rest of her company: Nock, draw, fire. Nock, draw, fire. She learned the singing twang of the silk bowstring, the hiss of arrows flying past her ears—the offbeat volley from the second line, behind her. She learned the painful snap of the string against her inner wrist when it rolled off her draw-ring instead of releasing smoothly, the lashing sting of it that she could feel even through her leather vambrace.
Ger Zha learned to march in formation, to shoot from horseback. By the time she saw any real action, she’d loosed more arrows than she could possibly count and worn through a dozen draw-rings. The blisters on her hands had risen, healed, risen again, healed again, and formed at long last into the particular calluses that distinguish all Genzhun archers from any others.
Genzhu sent her west, across the river valley and into the mountains, and she was glad to go—with each arrow loosed from her bow, she expanded the reach of the empire and redoubled its glory.
It should have been a fairly simple campaign, and likely it would have been in the hands of a younger commanding officer, a more energetic one who was still excited about their studies of tactical treatises. And indeed, in his youth, General Hei Ano had been known as the Ravening Bear. But just as the year turns and the bear, having gorged itself, trundles into a cave to sleep through the winter, so too had time overtaken General Ano. It was a shame he had amassed so much glory, because when his mind started to go, no one was brave enough to suggest it might be time for him to be put out to pasture. He made a series of stupid decisions on that campaign, from trouble with the supply chain, to working the horses lame, to an unfortunate mismanagement of a cholera outbreak amongst the troops. By the time they reached the mountains, their glorious force had been reduced by a quarter, and every soldier was tired, hungry, and footsore.
General Ano not excluded, of course, and if we are feeling charitable, we might attribute what happened next to the sheer frustration and weariness of a cranky, tired man much too old to be playing at being a young man still.
We’ll just go straight through and have done with this damn fool thing, he said, which turned out to be exactly the wrong thing to do.
Ger Zha, in the meantime, had already been elevated to the rank of corporal and then, technically, was the most senior corporal present amongst her particular archer company—the cholera, you see, had taken out a good number of the others. Two had been seized by river monsters one night in camp, and the last had been sent home with more than several broken bones when his horse, struggling up a hill, slipped on the rocks and fell atop him.
So. General Ano said to go straight through the mountains, and they did so. And they were promptly obliterated by tiny bands of mountain people harrying their fringes to nothing, like minnows nibbling at an elk’s carcass in the river until it vanishes.
Ger Zha was one of only twelve soldiers who survived. Of the other eleven, ten were archers from her company, and one was General Ano, with two broken legs and a concussion. As the story goes, the ten archers pointed out to one another that Ano was already 90 percent dead, and the thing to do would be to dispatch him the last 10 percent, sneak out of the mountains, and make their way home. And why not? He had caused the death of a good two and a half thousand Genzhun soldiers, not to mention the camp followers, horses, oxen. . . . If you added in the material cost of the equipment lost—food, cookpots, boots, wagons, carts, chariots, maps, armor, swords, sabers, daggers, spears, javelins, tower shields, round shields, short bows, longbows, quivers, more arrows than the mind could possibly fathom, abacuses, nail files, shoelaces, et cetera . . . Surely even a great and venerable man deserved at least 10 percent of a death for this outrage?
Ger Zha disagreed most strongly—her argument was that honor was honor, and as long as General Ano breathed, they had an obligation to protect him and see him safely delivered to the capital at any cost. There was no room for compromise, and the last eleven archers of the glorious Genzhun army came to no agreement that night.
Corporal Ger Zha slept with her arms around the unconscious and feverish general so that the others could not kill him in the night, and when she awoke, she found that they were completely alone. The other ten had deserted her, had taken every scrap of food, every weapon, every arrow. They left her only the clothes she wore and the contents of the pack she’d used to pillow her head: a spare uniform, a small folding knife, a tinderbox, and some letters. She was alone in the wilderness with only these, and the boots on her feet, and an aged, sickly man to whom she owed her solemn fealty.
The ten archers made it back to the capital within the month, tattered and grimy and footsore and sullen, and they told the story of how the a
rmy had been wiped out. They were given long robes from Empress En Bai to honor their sacrifice and bravery, and they were named the Ten Noble Heroes, and each of them was awarded an arrow with a shaft of silver, a golden head, and peacock-tail fletchings. A dozen solemn banquets were given to honor the perished general and the glorious army’s tragic stand against the mountain barbarians, and the Ten Noble Heroes attended each one, as solemn and haunted as any soldier would be.
At the stroke of midnight during the twelfth banquet, just as the dancing boys were winding up their long veils and collecting their tambourines, when all the guests were stuffed like roasted geese and swaying with the vapors of rice-wine, of barley-wine, of tamarind-wine, the great doors to the feast hall opened, and a woman in an army uniform stood in the doorway, lit by the torches and candles. The Ten Noble Heroes froze when her eyes caught theirs from across the room and glittered like thin black ice crusting a deep river. She was bloodstained and mud-stained, but her tunic was cinched neatly at her waist. Her boots were scuffed and water-marked and worn through, her leggings torn, her hair cropped short and sloppy.
And she bore a war bow of a strange, snow-white wood, strung with braided red silk.
And she bore a red quiver, with red-shafted arrows fletched in feathers of every bird of the forest.
And she bore, shining on her breast and on each shoulder, battered lieutenant’s pins of a style older than she was that had nevertheless been polished to shine like flames and glittered no less brightly than her eyes.
And behind her, palace servants, nervous and wary.
A Conspiracy of Truths Page 20