A Conspiracy of Truths

by Alexandra Rowland

  “Who is this?” the Empress asked. She stood, great and terrifying, with her child swaddled and sleeping at her breast—the crown prince, Jou Xi, who would one day die of river fever well before his time.

  “No one,” blurted one of the Ten Noble Heroes, and it was at that moment that their fate was sealed.

  “My name is Lieutenant Ger Zha of the Third Camellia Company, and I am a survivor of the campaign to Hashelon.”

  This was a little unsettling, of course. There was an elegance to how the Ten Noble Heroes had presented themselves at the gates of the city. It was an easy story to tell—this brave group of loyal comrades fighting their way out of hostile enemy territory, surviving against all odds, and sticking together all the way home. The heralds had proclaimed it all through the city, and the troubadours had begun composing songs about it.

  And Ger Zha merely appearing out of nowhere struck a blow against all that. But then she spoke, and the empire learned the treachery of their celebrated Ten Noble Heroes.

  Ger Zha had carried General Ano on her back out of the mountains, traveling only at night to avoid the mountain tribes. She had foraged for food, which she fed him now and then when his fevers allowed him to wake up, and she trickled water into his mouth, and she—

  Vihra stopped me. “What’s the purpose of this?” She had been surprisingly quiet until then.

  “Of telling you about it?”

  “Yes.”

  I was rather taken aback. “You didn’t like it?” That was interesting—the first tale about Ger Zha had held her rapt, but this one she scraped off her boots like mud without a second thought beyond impatience.

  “Is this all you do? Come up with stories?”

  “I don’t come up with them. This one happens to be true.” I sniffed. “I thought it would be helpful.”

  “How? How is a syrupy story about someone else’s problems ‘a long time ago and half the world away’ supposed to be helpful?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s useless. Maybe you wouldn’t have seen your problems reflected in the mirror of the general’s problems. I just thought you might be interested, that having a little of her in your head might help you.”

  “I don’t have time to listen to all this right now,” Vihra snapped. She pushed herself to her feet. “I don’t care about her steady adherence to ethics and honor, as if that’s supposed to make her special. That’s the bare minimum required of a decent person, and she deserves no adulation for it. And I? I’ll do the right thing. There was never any question about that.”

  “What’s the right thing?”

  “Abide by the law. Use the system we have in place. There will be proper trials.”

  “Even for Zorya Miroslavat?”

  “Yes,” she said, without hesitation. “Of course.”

  “Even though her second got you acquitted?”

  “Even so. That was their decision; this is mine. They should have known this is what it would be. She was arrested, so she will have a fair trial. I have no doubt that she is innocent, but that must be proven lawfully, or there’s no point at all and it’ll plague both of us for the rest of our lives. And, moreover, they arrested me for criminal nepotism, and I won’t go proving them right.”

  “May the gods smile on all your endeavors, then.”

  She left, in a swirl of wool and a clank of more metal than her artificial limbs—I heard the separate ring of at least two daggers on her. You learn to hear these things after a while, and I wasn’t surprised that she’d come armed. When a woman like Vihra Kylliat has a convicted spy and an accused blackwitch in her custody, she takes no chances.

  In accordance with Vihra Kylliat’s declaration to me, Anfisa Zofiyat was investigated for the charges that had been laid against her. An inquisitorial team was sent into the Tower of Pattern, where—not to my surprise—everyone claimed to know nothing about any blackwitches and insisted most staunchly that all who had been arrested on those charges were completely innocent, upstanding members of society and loyal civil servants. I don’t know what hard evidence the inquisitors were expecting to find. Vihra Kylliat was not pleased with me.

  “You lied, didn’t you? You made it all up,” she hissed through my bars. “You’ve made me look a fool. I should have you killed tonight.”

  “You’d be wasting a resource,” I said quickly. “I can help you, I swear it.”

  “From a cell? Bound and gagged, so you can’t spout any more lies and turn my guards’ brains to clay for you to mold?”

  “Keep looking,” I insisted. “She’s got something to hide, surely, and if she doesn’t, she’ll just try something as soon as you let her out. The blackwitch was just a rumor—maybe they were trying to frighten me into compliance! It was psychological torture, is what it was.” I had already lost the argument, though. That would have been it for me, but . . . well, I’d been having terrible luck for weeks, and I was due for a favorable roll of the dice. We both heard a commotion elsewhere in the prison—there were screams. Vihra Kylliat vanished at speed, and I sat back to twiddle my thumbs and wait. As I had been waiting for weeks. I thought about resources—which ones I could offer to Vihra Kylliat, which ones I had available to get me out of this mess.

  The greatest resource one can have in times like that is a friend. I thought of all the people I knew, all the people who could have helped me if they weren’t half the world away, who had helped me in the past—Pashafi, who found me thirsting to death in the desert and pulled me up from the sand onto his walking hut, shaded me with his own shawls, shared his water with me. Ciossa, sensible woman, who taught me to play draughts and never once lost, who always saw through me like I was made of glass and yet was kinder than I ever expected I’d deserve. Heba and Azar in Xereccio, whose love was like something from stories, who opened their home and their hearth to me, who whiled away long, starry summer evenings with me, laughing and joking, all of us plying one another with wine, trading stories as they looked at each other and held hands like they were still in the first wondering flush of young love. Ylfing, sweet child, who always thinks the best of everyone, who gives his whole heart to the world. Ivo, with his anger, with his dream of something better for his country, with his friends.

  And you. I thought of you. I thought how, by this time of year, you must have made your way to the foot of the mountains with your horses and all your kin. I thought how perhaps at this moment you were sitting by a fire as other clans arrived and built the vast tent city to shelter for the winter. I thought of you trading your smoked meats and your furs, and of your wizards humming songs of strength and warmth as they pitched the tents and picketed the horses. You, of anyone in the world, you were the closest. Two weeks’ ride away, that was all. Less, perhaps, if the weather was favorable and the horse bold-hearted.

  So close. I had fantasies of sending for you, how you might come over the mountains with your horse-tail banners and parlay for me, or ride in like thunder and snatch me away, out of the jaws of death.

  If only, if only.

  My thoughts were interrupted.

  The first thing I noticed was foulness. It was familiar—I’d sensed it before, right before I met Anfisa Zofiyat. It prickled over me like flies walking across my eyeballs and filled my mouth and nose with a scentless miasma of death, and it grew stronger with every heartbeat.

  I didn’t hear the footsteps, of course. When the four figures appeared in front of my cell, I knew two things immediately—that they were Weavers, and that they were here to kill me. I would have known without their blue-and-charcoal uniforms. They had scarves over their mouths, and their skin had been grayed with ash, all the better to keep any kind of light from shining off them. Even with the faint light from the banked embers, I could barely see them.

  I was frozen in terror.

  Now, there’s no need to fret, is there? You see me sitting before you, clearly not gutted or drowned in the bay. I would not have lived to see you again if it hadn’t been for two small
pieces of luck. First, something I did not know at the time: Weavers rarely work in groups. They are trained as lone wolves. Second: the lock on my cell door, ancient and rusty, stubborn on the best days.

  One of the Weavers dropped to their knees to try to pick the lock. Tense moments passed; I was crammed against the back wall of my cell, unable to even scream. The foulness pressed against me like a physical force—the Weavers didn’t seem to notice it at all, and I thought to myself, Magic. The Nuryevens have magic in their earth and water. They were immune; they couldn’t feel it.

  Three of the Weavers carried crossbows, including the one failing to pick the lock; the fourth was unarmed. One of them was breathing like a dying man, a long, slow rasp.

  “It’s jammed. Rusted.” A man’s voice. That’s all I could tell. He rose from his knees and raised his crossbow as if to smash the lock, but the fourth Weaver stepped forward silently.

  They raised their hand and brushed the lock with their fingertips. I felt a sudden pulse of the foulness. The lock creaked. Rust spread across it, ate away at the metal like a hundred years of neglect had set upon it all at once. It crumbled to pieces and fell, and the Weaver breathed with an awful, death’s-rattle in their chest.

  Blackwitch, screamed the animal parts of my brain. Get away, get away.

  There was nowhere to run.

  A clatter at the end of the corridor; one of the Weavers shouted and fired their crossbow, and I heard the thunk of quarrel hitting flesh, the gurgling cry of pain. The others’ attention was wrenched from me, and then chaos descended.

  Three of the Order guards went down with quarrels in their necks as soon as they turned the corner, and the Weavers drew long, wickedly curved daggers and flung themselves at the others. They moved like water in the dark, swift and deadly, but they had been trained to fight individually, assuming that each would be defending themself alone. The Order guards trained in squads and teams, and they had the advantage of knowing their own territory.

  The Weavers’ daggers rang against the small bucklers the guards carried. A Weaver went down, and two more guards, and the tide would have turned against Order if reinforcements hadn’t arrived from the other end of the corridor. The Weavers were summarily butchered in front of my cell. They died in silence. None of them begged for mercy. None of them looked at me. The guards slit all the Weavers’ throats, even the dead ones, just to be absolutely sure.

  “B-blackwitch,” I stammered, pointing. “That one. Blackwitch.” The guards froze and stared at me for a moment.

  They fell upon the body of the blackwitch. Hacked it to pieces. Dumped its head in my brazier.

  There was a scream from another part of the prison. “They’re going for the Queen,” one of them shouted, and they clattered off back down the hall in a great rush.

  I sat there and looked at all the corpses for three or four hours. The blood pooled all across the floor—you’ve seen things like that, you know how much blood is in one person’s body, and there were eight or nine in here.

  As soon as I could move again without feeling like I was going to throw up, I piled all my spare twigs and grass logs onto my brazier. I tried not to look at the head, though as the flames rose, I had no choice but to smell it—first, the sharp acrid bite of the hair burning, then the flesh after. Better that than the alternative.

  The alternative was to sit in the dark with all those dead bodies and wonder why it was so important to dismember a blackwitch, even when you were sure it was dead.

  I closed my eyes tight to fan up the flames as high as they could go and tried not to think about any of it.

  They barely spoke to me when they eventually came to drag the bodies away, but a younger Order soldier, assigned to cleaning duties, came with buckets of water and rags, and he let me have one of his cloths to wipe off the blood that had spattered across my face and hands. “They were coming to take me,” I said to the kid. “They were going to kill me, I know it.”

  “Not just you,” he grunted, scrubbing the stone floor. “Anfisa Zofiyat. She was in the central wing, max security, and up a floor.”

  “Oh,” I said. The guards had said that, hadn’t they? The Queen, they’d said. I thought they meant Vihra Kylliat. “Did they . . .” I swallowed. “Did they get her out?”

  He shook his head. I saw that his hands were shaking, and he kept swallowing hard. Not the strongest stomach, perhaps, or just not used to mopping up an ocean of blood. “No, they . . . they didn’t. They fumbled it. Didn’t think—well, they’re Weavers, aren’t they? You don’t hear about Weavers fumbling a mission like this. They’re supposed to be like ghosts.”

  “They sent too many,” I said. “They were fighting right here in—well, you can see that, I guess, you’re in the aftermath up to your elbows—”

  I had to pause while he threw up. It didn’t make the floor any worse than it already was.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Anyway, they went in as a big group—they should have sent just two. One for Anfisa Zofiyat, one for me. Then they would have gotten away, but they sent too many and they weren’t used to working together in so many numbers.”

  “I know,” he said, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. “We arrested them. Um. Most of them.” He closed his eyes and gagged again, but managed to keep whatever was left in his stomach down this time.

  Poor kid. He was about Ylfing’s age but had nothing of Ylfing’s coloring or manner. He had the broad, flat features of the west-country Nuryevens, limp dark hair, and rather fine and luminous hazel eyes. Ylfing probably would have looked him over at least twice.

  “The blood ran into my cell,” I said. “D’you have another spare rag? I can scrub up in here for you.”

  He had several tucked into his belt. He pulled one out, dunked it in the water, and handed it to me, moved the bucket over near the bars of my cell so I could reach it. With some difficulty, I lowered myself onto the floor and tucked the horse blanket under my knees so that I wouldn’t be in too much pain the next day. “Never seen blood before, have you? Not like this.”

  He shook his head.

  “You don’t get used to it, so don’t try. You’re either born with the stomach for it or you’re not, and there’s no shame in not having it. Some people just can’t learn to dance; some people just can’t deal with blood.”

  “Can you stop talking about it?”

  “Certainly. Sorry.”

  He wiped his sleeve across his nose. “They were going to kill you, you said?”

  “Yes. No.” I stopped scrubbing. “If they’d just wanted to kill me, they could have shot me through the bars.” I swallowed. “If they’d gotten me out, I would have been as good as dead anyway. I mean, I’m as good as dead even now.”

  “I was told not to speak to you,” he said, wiping his face on his upper sleeve.

  “Said I was a blackwitch, didn’t they?” He nodded. “I ain’t.” I picked up a stick and poked aside some of the twigs on the brazier. “That’s a blackwitch.” The head was blackened, the flesh sputtering. The foulness hadn’t yet eased.

  The kid gulped, but he didn’t flinch or look away. “You should build the fire up more. Make sure that thing burns. You don’t want it coming back again.”

  I don’t think he could have said anything more effective. I scraped up every bit that I had, which wasn’t much, and flung it all onto the heap, until the flames licked high and heat washed through the room.

  I wrung the rag out into the bucket and kept scrubbing. It’d take a few days to get the stain out, if it ever came up entirely. It had already seeped into the mortar between the stones. That blood might mark this cell for the next hundred or thousand years.

  “Vihra Kylliat was angry when she heard they’d come for you,” he whispered, glancing over his shoulder down the corridor. “I don’t know why. I’m just a slop boy.”

  “Why are you telling me?”

  He shrugged. “You’re helping me clean this up. I just thought I’d warn you. In case she mo
ves your execution up, you know. So that you can write letters to your family or . . . or pray, I guess. Do blackwitches pray?”

  “No, but I do,” I grumbled. “Seeing as how I’m not a blackwitch, or any other sort of witch for that matter. I don’t have any family anyway.”

  “I thought they said you had visitors a while ago.”

  “My apprentice, his new lover, and my advocate. None of them have come to see me in ages. They’ve all abandoned me.”

  He glanced up at me and frowned. “I didn’t think advocates were allowed to do that.”

  “What, run out on a case? She kept talking like she was going to. Said I had to convince her it was worth it for her to stick around. Not surprised that she lost her patience, to be honest.”

  “I thought they were just barred from the jail, the last couple weeks.”

  “Eh?”

  “Because everyone’s trials have been frozen until the mess with the Primes is sorted out. That takes precedence, obviously—at least, that’s what my old mum told me. She’s a court scribe, see.”

  “Is she? You should ask her if she knows this boy Ivo.”

  “Ivo who?”

  “Okay, I don’t know his last name or his ’nymics, but would you ask her? And if she does know him, could you ask her to ask Ivo to take care of Ylfing?”

  He blinked. “Ask my mother to—Who is Ylfing?” He drew back. “I’m not supposed to carry messages out of the prison, actually. They’re very clear about that in training. Very clear. So I’m sorry, but no, I can’t do that.”

  “Of course you can’t,” I said soothingly. “Of course not. I shouldn’t have asked you. I’m sorry. It’s not really a message—Ivo is my apprentice’s lover, you see, and since my stupid apprentice has decided to run off and abandon me as I always knew he would, I just wanted to make sure that—” It wasn’t working, I could see that, so I fell silent just in time to hear the distant metallic rhythm of Vihra Kylliat’s approach. “Well, never mind. You’re going to need to change the water in that bucket,” I said, tossing the rag towards him. “It’s all full of gore.”