A Conspiracy of Truths

by Alexandra Rowland

  “Thank goodness, thank goodness, I was so worried! Chant, I was so worried! We thought Vihra Kylliat had just vanished you in the night and killed you in secret!”

  “Pull yourself together,” I said gruffly. “Sit down. Do you want to eat?” Of course he did; he was a seventeen-year-old boy.

  That was a nice day. After he ate, I showed him all around the bank, and he goggled at the gilt wall sconces and was driven to distraction by the murals of the amorous mythical creatures, which is no less than I expect of him. It was unspeakably pleasant to be walking with him at my side again. At length, we drifted into a disused storage room on the upper floors and told each other everything that had happened. I saw then a glimpse of the Chant that he’ll become one day—he seemed more grounded and serious than he had been, a little more grown-up. I supposed he’d been getting some sobering life experience in the past few months; either that or Consanza was a good influence on him, which is a conclusion I refuse to consider.

  “You look better,” he said. “Better than the last time I saw you.” It had only been a week or so, but I didn’t doubt him.

  “They let me bathe here, but I have to haul all the water myself,” I grumbled. “Taishineya Tarmos wants me to compose propaganda for her. Help with public opinion, you know, so that when she takes over the rest of the government, the people will be on her side.” I switched over into Hrefni. “She’s taken rather well to the prophecy thing we fed her before. Really took it to heart. She’s all about the common working folk now, or so she claims.” It wouldn’t have lasted. People like Taishineya care only about the things that will advance their agendas. If you hadn’t come, she would have been back to grinding those common working folk into the dirt within . . . weeks? Probably too generous to say months.

  He nodded slowly. “Do you need help with the propaganda?”

  “Why? Do you have some brilliant plan?”

  “I can think about it.”

  “There’s more. She wants prophecies from me. With me under her thumb like this . . . She has too much access to me. She has me by the throat, Ylfing, so I can’t just bullshit something, I can’t just leave it to chance. I have to tell her something will happen, something really specific, and then I have to have it come true. She said if I could tell her a good deal about her future, so that she didn’t need me around, she’d let me go.”

  “So have you thought of what to do?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “But I can’t do it yet.” I was waiting to hear that you’d come over the mountains. I had only the barest skin of a plan—originally I’d had the idea that I’d just summon you here and you’d sweep across the country, raid Vsila, break me out, and then we’d all vanish into the snow and live happily ever after. But then I was worrying, and I was having second thoughts about how well that would actually work—what if you could only raise a small band of riders? What if all your wizards had come down with colds and couldn’t sing? What if the message had never reached you and you didn’t come at all?

  So I had to wait for a sign.

  “I’ve been watching things,” Ylfing said later, as I was wrapping an extra cloak around him and preparing to send him on his way. “In the city, as I go around. I’ve been paying attention to people, like you taught me.”

  I grunted. Did he expect a pat on the head and a cookie for doing the bare minimum required of the job?

  He asked, “Have you been outside?”

  “They don’t let me outside,” I said.

  “You should look. Go up top and look at the front of the bank. Watch for a while.”

  “Or you could just tell me what I’m supposed to be seeing.”

  “It’s the Order guards,” he said earnestly. “I’ve noticed them.”

  I groaned so loud it was almost a scream. “Gods and fishes, Ylfing! I really thought we were going to get through a whole conversation without you mentioning some new cute boy you saw! What the fuck happened to Ivo? Beautiful handwriting not doing it for you anymore?”

  “I noticed what they were doing,” he said, rolling his eyes.

  I paused and squinted at him. “What are they doing, pray tell?”

  “Buying coffee.”

  “So fucking what? The ones standing outside in the snow, pretending that we’re having a siege? They’re cold! Of course they’re drinking coffee.”

  “Yes, those. This is the business district; there’s something like eleven coffeehouses within three streets of here—at night, after all the senior officers go home, the rank and file has this system.” He was getting very excited then. “There’s only half of them on post at any given time, because the other half are down at the coffeehouses warming up. They go in fifteen-minute shifts.”

  I put my head a little on one side, considering. “Huh,” I said. “That’s interesting. That could be useful knowledge.”

  “It’s just . . . I was thinking . . . Taishineya has all the money here, right? All the money in the city?”

  “That was the point of taking the bank, yes. Well done.”

  “So . . . they’re spending all their money on coffee.”

  “Sure. Idiots.”

  “What happens when they don’t get paid?”

  “They walk off and we win. This isn’t news to me, kid.”

  “Yes, I know, but that’s not what I meant—they’re drinking coffee all night long to stay warm and stay awake, and when they run out of money, they’ll stop buying coffee.”

  “I really am blessed to have such an insightful apprentice,” I said wearily.

  “Chant! They’re going to go through withdrawal.” His eyes were shining with his joy.

  “Hmm,” I said. “Hmm. They go in shifts now, and they’ll have the shakes later, if their livers don’t give out under the onslaught first. All right. Good. I’ll . . . keep that in mind.”

  “It’s interesting, don’t you think?”

  I shoved him towards the guard who was to show him out. “Come back in a few days.”

  Two weeks passed. I watched the Order guards out front, as Ylfing had suggested. There were a few rooms on the top floor at the front of the building where I could easily see them milling about, their bright red coats targets against the snow. They stayed well back, out of crossbow range. There were stains on the snow, as bright red as their coats, which suggested that not everyone had been so wise at first.

  The rate at which they were pouring coffee down their throats got a little slower in the few days before payday, when everyone was scrimping. The first payday had been fine; everyone got their money on time, no one thought anything of it. But I suspected (correctly) that those were the last of Order’s available funds, and things were about to get interesting.

  It had been eight weeks since Vihra Kylliat told me I would die in five weeks, and nine weeks since I’d sent you the message, so we would have been somewhere in the vicinity of midwinter by then, with snowdrifts as high as your eyebrows in some places. Every day I listened for word of you and waited for a sign. Ylfing visited from time to time; I would have tried to get him to stay in the bank, but I needed him out there in the city, being my eyes and ears, scraping together the sort of information that I needed.

  I’d begun to write Taishineya’s propaganda pamphlets, and Ylfing helped me. I’ve never been much good at coming up with stories myself; I just repeat what other people have told me. Ylfing, though, he’s got the knack for it. I think I mentioned before that story he came up with about Nerelen, the god of wine, and his romance with a beautiful shepherd boy? That’s not the only example. It’s something of a Hrefni thing, you see—the Hrefni have a collection of folk heroes, and it is a great pastime amongst their storytellers to come up with new tales about those shared figures. It’s not as disorganized as you might expect—they put a great deal of emphasis on accuracy in their depiction of these heroes.

  So Ylfing was an excellent resource in the propaganda venture. Together we invented all sorts of stories. At the beginning, we were trying to
come up with things that were true, but garden-variety truth is so dull. It just doesn’t catch the heart and mind the way Truth does, and to tell the Truth, oftentimes you must lie. So we lied: we wrote about how Brave Taishineya was trying to liberate Nuryevet from the tyranny of the Primes, how bureaucracy was a devilish thing and would contribute to the downfall of the country. In Taishineya’s name we exhorted the citizens of Nuryevet to rise up against their oppressors. We made wild promises about what Noble Taishineya could do for the country once the corrupt Vihra Kylliat was knocked down from her place of power. We said things about how Enc would give up Lake Yuskaren for good, how we’d force them to pay reparations for the damages they’d caused us in all these little wars. We offered the Nuryevens a dream.

  Most stories begin with an invocation of some sort, like a very long time ago and half the world away. It doesn’t matter exactly when it happened, or exactly where it happened. The invocation tells us that it’s set in the Age of Stories, the Time of Dreams, which is beyond any calendar’s date and outside any mortal reckoning. The invocation invites us into the dream.

  The Age of Stories is also the time that people invoke when they talk about the so-called good old days. “The youth nowadays, hah!” they say. “They have it so easy.” Or perhaps: “Things have really gone downhill lately; when I was young, it was better.” But it wasn’t. Not really. It’s all a trick of perspective.

  Ylfing and I, we’re like artists. An artist can fool your eye into seeing depth in her painting by the use of vanishing points and scale and so forth. Chants can do the same. We invoke the Age of Stories, we convince folk that it was real, but more than that, we convince folk that it’s attainable again. It’s a time that they could get back to, even though they were never there in the first place.

  Or, more accurately, it’s a time that Taishineya Tarmos could take them to. We wrote promises into her mouth on those pages. Through our pens, she swore she would change things when she took her rightful place as Queen of All. She’d make Nuryevet a strong country, unified again under one ruler, a country where the men were beautiful and the women were powerful and the children were healthy and bright-eyed.

  All nonsense. Words are cheap. Emotions, though, emotions can buy you anything.

  When we’d drafted the pamphlets, I bullied a couple of the Thieves into helping us, and we all trekked down into the basement, where the mint was, to figure out how to use the printing presses. There were barrels of ink, rolls of paper, sheets of blank copper, and no type. Of course. Why would a mint have any need of type? They etched the designs of their bills onto the copper sheets; no typesetting necessary.

  This caused us only a brief delay in our proceedings, because Ylfing instantly, instantly concluded that we could have Ivo (with his beautiful handwriting) copy out the pamphlets onto the copper for etching. Ivo objected most strenuously, I think, at being recruited to the proceedings, but Ylfing brought him in the next day. I watched him work, not having anything particularly better to do with my time—Ylfing fluttered around him like a sparrow, making admiring noises all the while and asking intelligent questions, fetching materials as Ivo needed them, and so on.

  Ivo did not seem particularly impressed with this. I sensed a little bit of distance there, a vagueness. Ylfing spoke to him and he didn’t quite listen, and I should know—I’ve spent my whole life watching people to make sure they’re listening to me. Ylfing hasn’t learned that yet. I don’t think he noticed, or if he did, he must have ascribed it to tiredness on Ivo’s part.

  But he did a beautiful job copying the pamphlets. He has a lovely fair hand, does Ivo.

  We printed a couple of thousand copies of each type that we had, and then we went to work on the next batch.

  I had a moment alone with Ivo when everyone else was hauling bundles of pamphlets upstairs. “An opportunity to talk freely,” I said quietly, coming up to stand beside him at the press. “You seem upset.”

  “I’m helping my worst enemy,” he said back. “I’m helping the person responsible for starving my family. I’d rather just kill her.”

  “Have you ever played chess, lad?”

  “Never heard of it.”

  An Araşti invention, which had spread at least as far as Genzhu, and all around the Sea of Serpents—and to you, of course! I remember now; you know how to play, don’t you! But you’re much more civilized than the Nuryevens, so of course you’d know. “It’s a game,” I sait to Ivo. “And it’s like politics: Sometimes you sacrifice a battle so you can win the war.”

  “I hate that,” he said.

  I patted his arm. “Trust me. Be patient.”

  He gritted his teeth and pulled away a little—he didn’t want to be touched, so I took my hand away. “If I’m patient, the whole thing comes down, right? It comes down and we start from scratch with the—with your friends.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Just as you wanted.”

  Two more weeks passed. Order did not get paid. Taishineya held the wealth of the city in the palm of her hand, and under her management there would be no withdrawals.

  Heh, except the withdrawal that Order’s night shift went through a few days after that. They’d run out of pocket money, and as Ylfing had predicted, the result was not comfortable.

  But the Order guards weren’t the only ones suffering. Four weeks, it had been, without access to the bank, four weeks without money. Do you have any idea what that does to a city? Taishineya Tarmos had them by the short and curlies. People had left en masse to go to the country, where they could still buy and sell things. Where the lifeblood of the community wasn’t paralyzed.

  There were riots again, worse than before. Mobs of people with torches and any weaponlike thing they could lay their hands on stormed the city granaries and stole every bit of food they could lay their hands on. I don’t know if I can impress upon you how bad it was, because you’re hearing it thirdhand. All I saw of it were the shadows under Ylfing and Ivo’s eyes, the way they practically inhaled food whenever they came to work on the pamphlets. Ylfing got thinner, too. He’d lost some of the baby-softness in his face, and his bones stood out sharper now. He hadn’t shaved in several days, not that a boy of seventeen has much call to be shaving—his would-be beard was all patchy and scraggly. And his eyes seemed suddenly too big for his face.

  We paid them, of course, for helping out, but it didn’t do much.

  Taishineya Tarmos. More cunning in her littlest fingernail than a basket of snakes, I tell you. She may have been called the Queen of Thieves, but she was the quintessence of a Queen of Coin.

  Taishineya’s Fifty Thieves didn’t even speak to anyone outside, not publicly. They made no demands, they said nothing for that month beyond the boxes and boxes of pamphlets they smuggled out.

  Order was where you went if you had a natural inclination towards following and a good pile of patriotism, and so it took another week before they started actually deserting their posts, throwing off their uniforms, and joining the mob. The remaining ones . . . Well, the mob left them mostly alone—what would the point of it have been? Order had no money, had hardly any food. So they got taunted, they got some mud thrown at them, but I think that served only to motivate them to actually make a raid on the bank.

  Have you ever tried to get a squad of hungry soldiers going through caffeine withdrawal to successfully take a fortified building?

  I didn’t think so.

  It was a pathetic thing. I watched it all from my little eyrie in that top-floor storage room. About sixty Order guards, sluggish and weak and chilled to the bone, but damn it if they didn’t do their best. They had crossbows, but their hands were shaking too hard with hunger, cold, and caffeine withdrawal to aim true. The worst injuries our side took were scratches. But they shot a lot of free quarrels into the courtyard, and the Thieves went around gathering them up and then cheerfully climbed up to the top of the wall and shot them back. Killed probably twenty or so before the rest finally, finally decided that they’d had enoug
h and turned tail. The snow in front of the bank was dark with blood again.

  At least I could see something. I held on to that every day, no matter how frustrated I was. History was happening there, right outside those walls, history enough to wade through up to my balls, and the only feet I had on the ground out there were an inexperienced seventeen-year-old and his boyfriend. And my former advocate, if I cared to reach out to her.

  Taishineya Tarmos’s first official proclamation came just after that—it fell in line with the propaganda we’d been writing already. She declared herself Queen of All, and I wrote up something that used her victory as evidence of her righteousness, which is a classic piece of bullshit, but reliable as hell. Vihra Kylliat we called only the Pretender. She was the only one left. The new Queen of Coin had, as Taishineya had promised me, faded into nothingness. I don’t know whether she was killed or if she left for the countryside like so many others in the city.

  The other part of Taishineya’s proclamation was to declare that she would award a duchy to whoever brought her Vihra Kylliat’s head. (The implication was that said duchy would be awarded after Taishineya Tarmos was safely installed in supreme rightful power over all Nuryevet.)

  The city was already tearing itself apart in the riots, and if the propaganda had fueled the fire, then the proclamation did it five times over.

  But there wasn’t much time for philosophy. People were hungry by then, and they were still clinging to their hallucination about the value of coins and bills, though that dream had long since shattered. I tell you, the thing to do would have been for everyone to collectively shift over to bartering—a few loaves of bread in exchange for your wheel of cheese, a fine cart for a decent horse. . . . But these people had grown up with the coins, and although bartering did happen, there was a kind of compulsion when it came to these little bits of metal and paper with pictures on them.

  Ylfing told me all about it—how surreal it was for him, because of course he comes from a place without that particular hallucination. He and Ivo went out on the streets, begging and trying to sell whatever little skills they could think of—at least, ones they didn’t need an official license to practice. Ylfing told me about a man who offered them either the heel of a loaf of bread or a single copper penny in exchange for Ivo writing out a note to the man’s sister in the country. Now, in a time like that, you’d expect that the sensible thing to do would be to take the bread, because it’s clearly more valuable, right? You can eat it. At that time, you couldn’t buy anything for a copper penny.