A Conspiracy of Truths

by Alexandra Rowland

  in a hollow, hidden place.

  And shen they called it, meaning sweetness;

  they took it when they went away.

  And now it grows in farmer’s fields,

  and fevered wounds it swiftly heals,

  and brewed as tea, small pains it shields,

  its roots distilled, weak poison yields,

  and skem it’s called now, meaning nothing,

  the true name was long since concealed.

  ’Twas long ago and far away,

  and half again the world away.

  Fat tasty birds flew o’er the bay

  so thick one arrow felled a brace.

  And ggeb were fashioned from their bones,

  sweet simple flutes for children’s play.

  Alas, the birds of here and now

  have bones too brittle to allow

  such sturdy instruments; yet now

  the humble ggeb still has its place,

  with bone or antler made; somehow

  the flute, these days, is called by kep.

  The piping’s just the same, I’ll vow.

  ’Twas long ago and far away,

  and half again the world away.

  A mythic hero in his sleigh

  amongst the winter stars was placed.

  His name was Dwera then; his deeds

  were sung by hearth for feasting day.

  And when the oceans frothing came,

  o’er land and made their deathly claim,

  the people took the boats and blame.

  They followed Dwera’s northward race—

  and Tueha now lives on instead,

  and still they cannot burn my name.

  Hesera crept back to the band of mercenaries and related to them what Skukua was singing, and they puzzled over what it could mean, until someone thought, “If it is a song about names that changed, perhaps Skukua is a changed name too.” Then from each verse they took the sounds and, like a wizard’s knot-spell, unraveled the threads of centuries. And when this was done, they looked at the name they had scratched into the dirt.

  So they dashed into the clearing and set upon him again like wolves, and tore him to pieces while he laughed. He grinned at Hesera while she carved the first letter into his flesh, but his smile flickered a little when she got to the second letter. The third. The fourth. “Another fortune I’ll see for you!” he sang. “If I see it, it will certainly come to pass! A chest of gold, robes of purple and silver! A child, a husband, a fine white horse!” But she finished the name: S H U G G W A, in deep cuts across his face.

  And a trickle of blood ran out of those cuts.

  (“Thank fuck,” Nine-Fingers said.)

  And they threw the head in the fire, and Skukua shouted curses at them and fell silent.

  The mercenaries trekked on through the forest, and they came to the port, where they parted ways.

  Your fortune lies behind you, stupid woman, not ahead, Skukua had said to one of the mercenaries. She remembered just as she was about to set foot on the boat, and she hesitated, and glanced over her shoulder, just in time to see a young woman with beautiful dark eyes looking back at her.

  Another mercenary continued on, and three weeks thence stopped at a tavern, and drank too many pints of ale, and laid his glittering coins on the table, with no heed for the eyes of the men who might see them and think some thoughts to themselves, and when he left the tavern and stopped in a dark alley to piss, his fortune came out of the shadows.

  (“He was fucking murdered,” Nine-Fingers said.)

  It was an old man, who could see what the mercenary’s trade was, and hired him as a guard for a rich man’s household, where he was fed and clothed, well paid, warm in winter, and pensioned.

  (“Oh,” said Nine-Fingers.)

  And Hesera went to N’gaka to find her fortune in the arms of a man named Nge Olutenyo. She swore herself to his service, and saved his life too many times to count, and he saved hers, and she never married, and never had a child, and never had a chest of gold or a fine white horse or robes of purple and silver. But when she died, it was in the service of an honorable man, and he held her in his arms and wept on her face while she went, and that’s the best that any of us could ask for.

  And it seemed that Nine-Fingers agreed. She handed me a small flask. I opened it, sniffed it—menovka, of course, but more vile and astringent than the stuff Vihra Kylliat had brought before. I didn’t think she would mind. Nine-Fingers and the others were quiet and reflective, so I left, and took the flask to Vihra, tucked it in her one good hand, and left her there.

  Taishineya wanted to leave the bank, but the Tower of Pattern had to be ransacked first. I suppose she had a few of those former Weavers doing it for her.

  Ylfing came back a few days later, cheerfully reporting to anyone who would listen that his mission to distribute the propaganda amongst the outlying cities and villages had been a great success. He was even smart enough to assure them that the peasantry was in full support of Taishineya’s cause. (When he saw Ivo, he leaped into his arms, and though I did not appreciate Ivo’s cool initial reaction, I couldn’t help but notice he seemed to warm up a little as Ylfing kissed him ardently and told him how desperately he had been missed. For a moment, I thought perhaps Ivo had just had a bit of cabin fever; perhaps he’d just needed some time apart. And then Ylfing broke off kissing him to start chattering about all the little adventures he’d had on the road, and Ivo’s expression . . . flattened. That is the only way I can describe it.)

  We’d already heard that Taishineya’s forces had rousted the Umakha riders, and Ylfing’s account supported this, though he gave me a significant look that promised a different story for me, which I had later on that evening—the greetings you’d sent with him, the knowledge that you had only melted into the hills and mountains and were nothing close to being routed as you’d led the Nuryevens to believe, and that you were going to strike the town of Asoth next and then hide and wait for further instructions.

  Taishineya’s army began to assemble. She paid them in advance and fitted them out in mostly repurposed and secondhand uniforms and boots, with barely sharpened weapons, and they all spent a significant chunk of their pay on food and whores and new socks (and some of them on coffee, which was worth its weight in gold by then).

  Very soon after that, we reopened the bank, and the city gasped with life like a drowning wretch pulled out of the dark water. The price of bread dropped. People went back to work. Consanza and her family moved back into their own home, as did Ivo, though they all turned up at the bank every day to work.

  Some semblance of normalcy crept back into certain areas of the city—although there were pockets that denounced Taishineya as the Queen of Thieves, who should be exiled again or, better yet, executed for her treason. Most of those rabble-rousers were dismissed as hysterics and shouted down by the people who were happy to have bread on their tables again. The more tenacious were silenced in other ways—Grey Ward Prison acquired a few new tenants.

  Most people don’t really care about who is in power—no, that’s a lie. They do care, but it’s not as high of a priority as simpler things, like making sure they have enough food to eat, or enough fuel to keep themselves warm over the winter. The citizens of Vsila may have been willing to tolerate Taishineya Tarmos’s sole rule until spring, possibly even until Midsummer. She had relaxed her fist from around the throat of the country, and even this little mercy was a relief. But to keep her as sole ruler in a proper monarchy, when they had been electing their Primes for centuries? I doubt it—but then again, it’s not my job to tell you how things would have gone. My job is only to tell you how things already went.

  I had my usual fit of prophecy and spoke the name of Asoth. Taishineya’s map showed that it was significantly farther east from the border, and there was a general outcry of dismay.

  We had almost a proper war on our hands! If there’s one thing war is good for, it’s giving the economy a short, sharp jab of the
spurs to the ribs. Taishineya Tarmos let the bank fairly hemorrhage money as she organized a vast muster for the army.

  Around this time, we heard some belated news—all the other border towns you’d been overrunning, besides the ones I’d picked for you. All those government buildings destroyed, the Order outposts, the minor branch offices of Coin and Justice. It was excellent timing, the arrival of that news: added some tension, you know, when Taishineya found out and realized that I couldn’t predict everything for her. She was angry about it; almost slapped me, in fact. I gave her some bullshit line about how the gods wouldn’t send me a prophecy unless it was of paramount significance.

  I brought drink to Vihra Kylliat a time or two. I don’t think she was eating much, and she barely spoke to me. She wasn’t really living anymore. Not even surviving. Just . . . waiting for a death that Taishineya was too busy and distracted to schedule. I thought that was cruel of her. The waiting, as I know from my own experience, is the worst part.

  There was only one more time that Vihra Kylliat and I had any kind of conversation as significant as the ones we’d had when I was her prisoner.

  There had been another blizzard, and the snow had fallen so thick that everything was muffled and quiet. Alcohol was the only consumable that she would reliably accept. I’m not a softhearted sort, as you know, but I have some basic compassion, and I remembered how much being isolated had broken me down. I went to sit in Vihra Kylliat’s room almost every single day—I did my work in there some days, I took my meals in there more than anywhere else. It’s just that we didn’t talk, and she barely ever looked at me.

  But then that night, I was standing at the windowsill, wrapped in a blanket to keep out the chill. I looked out on the snow that covered the whole city and softened all its planes and angles and corners, gleaming blue and white in the moonlight. Pinpricks of warm yellow fire lit windows here and there. It was another of those crystal clear nights, and being so high up in the bank, I had a clear view over most of the rooftops and across to the southeastern quadrant of the sky, where Hatun’s Gate was just peeking over the horizon—the whirlpool of milk in the Woman’s Clay Pot, as your people call it.

  “Vihra Kylliat, what do you call that?” I asked her. Sometimes I did that—asked her questions. Most of the time, she ignored me.

  This time, though, she lifted her head off the couch where she was curled up. “Call what?” Her voice was rough and crackly. She sounded ill.

  “On the horizon, the big bright cloud of stars that looks like a whirlpool.”

  “It’s just stars,” she said. “Some people name them. I don’t know the names.”

  “You have names for the moons?”

  “The Boat and the Runner.”

  Not the worst names, I supposed. Not as uncreative as I was expecting; the Xerec call them the White One and the Stately One, which is worse, but I cut them some slack because they’re not aggressively boring like the Nuryevens. “That thing is just as significant in the night sky, so long as it’s clear.” I guess she must have decided to ignore me. “You know,” I said, quietly so that no one else would hear, “the Chants don’t pass much knowledge of ourselves down. Our histories, certainly, and each apprentice learns a little of their lineage: their master-Chant, and their grandmaster, and their great-grandmaster and so on. And we have very, very few rituals—if I have an apprentice when I die, and if I see my death coming, I’ll tell them my true name then. The last person in the world to hear it. For the most part, the job is about learning other people, not learning Chants. We don’t have many traditions.” I suppose I was telling her all that because I knew as well as she did that she was going to die soon. I’m only telling you this because I trust you more than almost anyone else in this world—and deservedly so, I might add, not to flatter you overmuch. “But that—those stars, that’s something we remember. Thousands of years ago, the ancient Chants called those stars the Eye of Shuggwa. General Ger Zha would have called it the Mirror of Heaven, the door to the afterlife.”

  “We don’t have one.”

  I yawned. “One what?”

  “An afterlife.”

  I almost started banging my head against the wall, I swear it to you. These damn Nuryevens and their complete lack of imagination. If I never set foot in this country again, I’ll die happy. “So when you die, you just . . . end?” I said. I tried to keep my voice even and calm—I was fully aware that afterlives and death must have been on her mind more than usual. “And here I thought you were all terrifically superstitious.”

  “Things can happen to you at the moment of death—a blackwitch can capture your breath, or you can become a blackwitch yourself. But all those things foreigners have, about a beautiful place that’s comfortable and soft and where nothing hurts and everyone lives happily and is reunited with all their other dead loved ones? No, that doesn’t happen. When you’re dead, you’re either gone or you’re a bad thing.”

  “How do you become a blackwitch?”

  “Nobody knows. It’s just a thing that happens sometimes,” she said tensely. “Though . . . if nothing’s done with your body . . . it makes it more likely. People who get lost in mines, or up on the mountains. Or who drown. Or die of sickness with no one around.” She swallowed. “Violent deaths too. Nobody becomes a blackwitch by dying peacefully of old age in their own bed.”

  “What ought to be done?”

  “A funeral. Prayers. Burning the body, if you want to be really sure.”

  I went over to her couch and perched on the chair that I’d pulled in front of it days before. “I want to talk about something. I want to be forthright.” She gazed at me with glassy, dull eyes. “You’re going to die soon.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there anything that I can do for you?”

  “No. You can’t help me.”

  “I can’t stop your death from coming to you when it is your time, no. But if you tell me what you’d like done with your body afterwards, I can try to see that it happens. I can speak for you after your death if you give me the words you want spoken. And I can try to ease your fear and pain until that day comes.”

  “Stories aren’t going to help anything now, Chant.”

  A long time ago and half the world away . . . , my brain whispered, but it wasn’t the time. If she didn’t want to hear it, this was one time to respect that. Most of the time people don’t know when it’s good for them to listen, when they really need to hear something. Most people only want to listen when it’s easy and convenient for them, and sometimes it’s important to make them listen, to speak even when there’s no one willing to hear.

  But a woman’s last days? A person gets a better idea, in times like that, about what she needs, about what’s important. I could provide comfort in the moment if she wanted it, but if she didn’t want it, then she wouldn’t be around long enough for it to make a difference.

  So I sat in silence with her, and stared towards the window, where I could just see a few stars above the rooftops, and the edge of one moon. “Is there anyone who should hear about your passing?” I asked eventually.

  “Anyone who needs to hear will hear. Her Majesty will make it known. I don’t think she’s got the stomach to parade my head through the city on a pike, but she’ll make it known.”

  “I think I’ll tell a story about you one day,” I said half-absently. I was only thinking about some of the things she had told me when she was drunk. I was thinking that there might be another Vihra Kylliat one day, in some other place, in some other city, and if I ever met her, she might need to hear these stories, the same way that this Vihra Kylliat had needed to hear about Ger Zha, the General of Jade and Iron, and the way that Ger Zha had probably once heard stories about a brave and honorable woman before her. And perhaps the next one wouldn’t be destined to die like this.

  That’s something I never told Vihra Kylliat—how Ger Zha died. It was eerily similar to this, in fact. She fought hard for her faction of the empire to prevail, to preserv
e the status quo and behave with honor and charity, though she was as hard and unbending as steel. And in the end, she lost, and she was imprisoned by the new Empress, and then she was quietly killed, with all the other high-profile supporters of the opposition’s faction. She died with honor, and I knew Vihra Kylliat would die with honor too. “I’ll tell someone, someday, about you.”

  “If you must,” she said. “I won’t be around to care.”

  “I will, though.”

  “I know you’ve never felt much of a need to stick to the truth, so just . . . don’t tell them about this.” She flopped her hand weakly. “Tell them I was brave, when I was taken in. Tell them I didn’t break. Tell them I didn’t waver.”

  “There’s truth and there’s truth,” I told her. “Some things are true even if they didn’t happen that way in real life.” She didn’t react. “That means I’ll tell them you were brave, that you didn’t waver.”

  “Good.” She turned over, away from me, and pulled the blanket up under her chin. I left soon after that, when it was clear that the conversation was over.

  That was the last time I ever saw her or spoke to her. She was taken away early the next morning and killed.

  She was brave.

  She didn’t waver.

  When I found out, I asked Taishineya Tarmos to ensure that the proper rites were spoken over Vihra Kylliat’s body, but she said that they’d already dumped the corpse in the bay. Any words she’d had said over her had been spoken in passing, casually, by whoever dragged the wheelbarrow down to the quay and dumped her into a dinghy to be rowed out to the deep part of the water.

  I never got a chance to speak words over the bay like I wanted to, after I heard. But a few days after that, we moved from the bank to the Tower of Pattern (it was more defensible, and the bank had to function as a bank now), and I climbed the endless stairs to the very top of the Tower, and I stood on the parapet, up to my knees in snow and shivering. There was the slightest sliver of water visible between the buildings, and I didn’t even know if that was the bay or the ocean, but I whispered words for her, and wished her peace, and freedom from blackwitches who would twist her into a monstrous thing, and I said that I would tell stories of her so she would be remembered as she was—and so I have.