They took seven of Uvanari’s claws from its hands before it answered, before it gave a single word. “Balatiri! Civaqatto balatiri!” We came to pray.
I swore, eliciting raised eyebrows from Inquisitor Agari, and said, “It said they came to pray.” The torn-off talons sat in a steel bucket on the cart. Beneath the frosty chill of the room I could smell the fetid metallic stink of blood.
Her follow-up question drowned under more words from the ichakta. Uvanari’s deep voice cracked with pain, but it was lucid. “Your people were not supposed to be on this world. We jumped in blind. We did not know.”
“Did not know?” the inquisitor repeated when I finished translating, and at a gesture from her, one of the cathars prodded Uvanari with a shock-stick. The current ran through the creature, and its flesh strained against the leather restraints as it bucked. “How could you not know?” She made a slashing gesture when I automatically began to repeat her. I fell silent, watched the inquisitor as she brooded on this, tapping her way through prompts on her wrist terminal. A flow chart. She had her questions on an Earth-blasting flow chart. The awful mundanity of that fact took me like a physical blow. This wasn’t even religion. This was business.
The inquisitor took a moment, then asked me in Galstani, “The Cielcin have religion?”
“I don’t know much about it,” I said, wishing there were a god and that he might crush this little bubble of a room with me still inside it. “Their word for ‘god’ means . . . watcher? Teacher? That’s all I know. I’m sorry.”
She waved me into silence. I could see the connections forming in her hunter’s mind. The Cielcin. The ruins. The Quiet—did she know about the Quiet hypothesis? She saw xenobites coming to a world with other xenobites. Coloni. She would make the connection, rightly or not. The Umandh would burn for this, doubtless seen by Chantry zeal and human supremacists as somehow complicit in the Cielcin war against mankind. Another pogrom, another march of the faithful.
“Are there more of you coming?”
Blood dripped from seven of twelve fingers, black as oil. Uvanari rolled its head counterclockwise. “No.”
Unable to speak, I shook my head, and the inquisitor raised a hand. Instead of peeling the eighth claw from its fingertip, the cathars removed one mutilated fingertip, severed it at the joint. The second cathar placed the amputated little stump in the steel bucket on a bench against the back wall of the room alongside a deep-bellied washbasin. They did it without malice, without pomp or melodrama, just broke the fingertip off with a push knife and a light tap. I almost expected the glassy bones in the hand to crunch, for Uvanari to shatter like a sculpture. It only screamed. “What did you do that for?” I shrieked, “It answered you!”
“Too easily,” the inquisitor replied. She looked up at one of the cameras as if she were a prophet and it her god, as if answers would come pouring from it. In that pose she waited out Uvanari’s screams.
When Uvanari’s wailing had quietened, I said to it, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
It glared at me, glassy teeth biting down on one lip, cheeks heaving, four nostrils flared. But it did not speak, would not.
“No speaking to the prisoner, translator!” the inquisitor snapped. I glared her down; in my present state, I was too far past caring to concern myself with the fact that this was a Chantry inquisitor, that even though I was palatine I ought to fear her. The facts of the moment had crushed all caring out of me. But for a quirk of fate, but for my mother, it might be me in inquisitorial white, head shaven, asking these questions. I confess it was this thought and not compassion for the bleeding xenobite that consumed me. I experienced a moment of curious double vision, seeing myself in the inquisitor and again in the tunnel at Calagah, a stunner pressed to the head of that other Cielcin.
Inquisitor Agari rephrased her question. “When does the next invasion fleet arrive?”
I translated it as fast as I could and added, “I believe you, but you have to give them something.” One day the recording of this exchange would be reviewed by Legion military analysts, perhaps, or by anagnosts of the Chantry, or by the logothetes of the Emperor’s own court. A translation would be made, and my addition would be discovered. But for the moment I could get away with it.
Uvanari was still breathing hard, and it leaned forward, sagging against its restraints, its ruined arms akimbo. “Asvatoyu de ti-okarin, hih siajeu leiude.”
“It says it can’t tell us what it doesn’t know,” I translated, then half turned away. Away from the inquisitor, away from Uvanari and the cross, away from all of it. The woman twitched in the corner of my eye, but I stepped toward her. “A moment, please! Give it a moment! Let me try.” I waited, and when the inquisitor nodded her consent I turned to Uvanari and spoke in hoarse tones. “You weren’t an invasion fleet, then. You said you came here to pray? What do you mean, here to pray? In the ruins?” I could feel the inquisitor’s eyes boring into the back of my head and waited for her to change her mind, to object, but this time she held her peace.
At last Uvanari managed to say, “You have seen the ruins.” Its chest rose and fell, sweat beading on its forehead beneath the bony fringe, runneling down the fine, scale-like lumps of skin where horn transitioned to white smoothness. I nodded, then realized my mistake and instead rolled my head in imitation of the creature’s own affirmative gesture. Seeing this, the creature bared its glass-scalpel teeth in the snarl I was starting to realize was a smile.
“You worship the . . . the ones who made that place?” I didn’t know the word for “builders” and so had to improvise. Funny how that of all things should stick in my memory, that little failing. When the inquisitor made a noise, I turned to her and in Galstani said, “Inquisitor, please.” Uvanari tipped its head to the right, a curt Cielcin affirmative. It winced, then sagged back against its restraints. There was no headrest, so its crown sagged between the spars that held its arms akimbo. “Ichakta, please,” I said. “There’s nothing they’ve done so far that cannot be reversed. Tell me, is this planet threatened?”
“Veih!” the captain spat. “No, it is not! We were here because they were here, not you. The gods. They built those caves, same as the ones they built on Se Vattayu.” On the Earth.
It took me a second to work that little bit out—the word vattayu meant earth, ground, dirt. For a moment I imagined our Earth—the Homeworld-goddess of the Chantry—and had to shake off the idea.
“On your homeworld?” Se Vattayu. That was new information, at least to me. They called their homeworld the Earth too. I hadn’t known that. The implications clicked into place a moment later. “You had such ruins on your homeworld?” Scholastic consensus was that the Cielcin were a subterranean people, a theory reinforced by the cavernous, unlit nature of their ships and by the trick I’d pulled with the suit lights in the tunnels of Calagah.
“What is he saying?” the inquisitor pressed.
I didn’t want to tell her, for I felt certain that to do so was to threaten Elomas, to threaten all who worked on the Calagah dig site. To threaten Valka. I imagined those unlighted tunnels melted to slag, atomic charges transforming the delicate arches and non-Euclidean parallels to cinders. “There won’t be another attack, Inquisitor.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it,” I lied.
“You can’t be serious,” she sneered, broad nose wrinkling. She stepped forward, seized the shock-stick from one of the silent cathars, and jammed it into Uvanari’s ribs. She held it there, an animal glee in her eyes that sickened me. What had they done to her on Komadd, or wherever she’d been indoctrinated? How had they made such a woman? Or had she always been broken? “What are you planning, inmane? Another invasion?” She pulled back, then slapped the heavy stick across Uvanari’s face. It grunted but held itself still. “Is it the people you want?” One of the cathars hurried forward, gloved hands on the creature’s face, checking for unplanned inj
uries. This intervention of her subordinates got through to Agari, and she staggered back. I hadn’t translated anything, and she hadn’t noticed.
I glanced up at the ceiling, wishing that some voice—Olorin’s or the chancellor’s, maybe—would sound from the speakers and call an end to the horrible experience. Yet the horizons of reality were bounded by the steel bubble of that cell, and it was hard to imagine that anyone was out there to interfere.
The cathar checked for concussion, for broken bones in the face, for shattered teeth. Then he screamed and fell backward into the arms of his brother, cradling one of his hands. For a moment I did not see the blood against the darker-than-black of their robes, but the wet glint was unmistakable, and the red that dribbled down Uvanari’s chin was not the black of Pale blood. For a horrible instant I saw the stubs of two human fingers poking out from between the captain’s lips. Then they vanished, crunched between Uvanari’s teeth, and were gone. Oh, Crispin’s voice sounded in my memory, so they aren’t all cannibals? Suddenly the technical distinction between what was and was not cannibalism did not matter. I staggered back, unable to master the thrashing horror in my gut.
The second cathar stopped the inquisitor from exacting retribution with an upraised hand—they were forbidden to speak during the rite of inquest by ancient custom. Horrified as I was, I could not help but admire the Cielcin’s spirit, its refusal to be cowed. I liked to imagine that I might show such spirit, were our positions reversed. I would have spit out the fingers, but I wasn’t Cielcin.
While the inquisitor busied herself helping the wounded cathar, I said, “Biqathebe ti-okarin qu ti-oyumn.” They will hurt you for that.
“Let them.” Uvanari could not wipe the blood from its chin, and it dripped carmine onto its chest. Its blue-black tongue slithered out, smeared the blood on its lips. “You humans are all the same, always the same.”
At the time it did not strike me how curious a pronouncement this was, and I said, “I’m sorry.” I could not look Uvanari in the eye. The muscles beneath the waxen flesh pulled it into shapes and feelings strange to me. In a way they were stranger than the Umandh, though they walked and talked like men; the minds behind those eyes were the minds of persons incomprehensible. What I interpreted as bravery or stubbornness may have been no such thing. Seeing that—seeing them—I reasoned that perhaps the Chantry was onto something.
Perhaps all we shared was pain.
The creature spat at my feet. There was no malice in the gesture, as if it were no particular insult amongst the Cielcin. There was blood, though, blue-black in the sputum. I stepped back, rattled into the cart, and froze.
“What are you doing?” the inquisitor demanded, rounding back on me as the steel door sealed with a pneumatic whir. “What did it say?”
“Brave talk,” I said, cocking my head to one side. “I told it that it shouldn’t have done that.”
The inquisitor straightened, dots and streaks of red marring her otherwise immaculate robes. “He shouldn’t have.”
“I think it’s telling the truth, though,” I said, taking a fractional step to place myself between the cross and the inquisitor, hoping that might quiet her rage. “I don’t think there’s another fleet coming. Question the others.” The gravity of what I was saying hit me, and I backpedaled. “Just question them. They’re not . . . They’ll tell you. Isolate them. Get them to talk. Either they tell you different things and they’re lying, or they all say the same and you know we have the truth. That’s standard procedure, is it not?”
The inquisitor took the shock-stick from the cart, hefted it, ready to resume her work, and echoed the horrible words Ligeia Vas had once said to me. “You would make a good priest.” The blood in me thickened to poison at the words, and I turned away, hiding my eyes. Uvanari howled as the current ran through its body. The sound collapsed into a high-pitched, nasal whine as it forced air through the slits that passed for a nose. She hadn’t even asked a question. She did it again, and only after she had made the creature scream a fourth time did she say, “Ask it who it serves. Ask it where its people are right now.”
CHAPTER 73
TEN THOUSAND EYES
IN THE ENSUING WEEKS I was witness to dozens of separate interrogations. To my relief, all of them were simply that: interrogations. Uvanari was kept in a private cell, isolated as Makisomn had been in a place just above sea level at the base of the Chantry bastille. The others were similarly isolated, kept from one another to grow truth from lies in separate gardens. Those whose stories diverged from that of the majority were noted, watched, compared against the others and against the tortured Uvanari. I was present for each session. Lord Mataro would not see me, nor Lady Kalima, nor Knight-Tribune Smythe.
From all this, we concluded surprisingly little. Tanaran, who it seemed was some sort of clerk or minor logothete equivalent, spoke the determined truth the entire time, and from it and those that corroborated its narrative we discovered that I had been correct to trust Uvanari’s word. The Cielcin were not attacking Emesh, or else had not attacked it. The orbital forensics groups under the joint direction of House Mataro and the 437th Legion corroborated this revelation, to even zealous Agari’s satisfaction. Theirs was not an invading force. It barely counted as military.
However I suffered for all this, no one seemed to care.
I sat alone in the suite appointed me, the same one I had occupied before my flight to Calagah. The count had appointed a pair of hoplites to stand watch in the hall. I suspected they were there as much to police me as protect me, but I offered no complaint, nor did I try to leave my chambers except when the Chantry sent for me. Anaïs visited and left messages on the room’s comm console. Sometimes she brought her brother along, hoping to persuade me into some game or idle distraction. I did all I could to keep my distance, and to my surprise the girl seemed to get the message. More than that, she seemed to understand. Perhaps I was too cruel. They meant well, she and Dorian.
And so I was not surprised when a knock sounded on my door on the fifteenth day of interrogations. Whoever it was had been cleared by the guards, and so I opened it without hesitation. “What is it? What do you—” I shut up.
Valka Onderra stood in the doorway. She had cut her hair, removed the topknot she’d favored and cropped the sides and back short, leaving stray threads of black hanging about and across her face, obscuring one eye. The red in it glowed as she stood there, one hand drumming on the Umandh comms pad clipped to one broad hip. Conscious suddenly of the darkness of my chamber, I waved a hand over the sensor pad, keying up the room’s illumination and casting the dark accents and darker oil paintings of space into relief.
“Valka!” I said, trying to sound bright. “I didn’t know you were back.”
She smiled, a sad little thing—she must have heard what was happening—but she didn’t seem angry. “Just this afternoon.” I half expected her to hit me. She did not hit me. “Home Defense Force closed Calagah for the season, wouldn’t let us out of Springdeep until yesterday.”
“And Elomas?”
“Trying to negotiate with the HDF to let him return to clean out the campsite. I think he left his wine.”
“Not the wine!” I did my best to affect an imitation of horror, but my heart wasn’t in it. Stepping aside, I waved a hand. “Would you . . . Would you like to come in?”
The Tavrosi doctor stood in the doorway surveying me, one hand still feeling the comms tablet. I was glad to see that she was allowed to continue carrying one in Borosevo even after the events that day in the fishery packing house. A part of me—a small and stupid part—needed to claim some of the credit for that tiny victory, and I brightened to see it there. I know now that it had nothing at all to do with me. I only wished to believe that I had helped in light of everything else.
At last she spoke. “You look awful.”
I was sure I did. I had seen my face in the looking glass in the bath
room not ten minutes earlier. My face, always severe and angled, had acquired a waxen, sunken quality. My violet eyes were hooded and bruised; my ink-dark hair, once neatly combed, fell in a curling tangle past the point of my chin. I probably smelled bad. The time I’d spent homeless in the canals below the castle ziggurat had broken my autonomic need to shower, and after what I had seen . . . well, I’d been forgetting to eat, much less do anything else.
But Valka came inside without further comment, permitting me to shut the door. Aware of the cameras, I slumped into an armchair near the holograph plate and the low coffee table. The doctor surveyed the room, taking in the casual disarray of it, the drawing supplies scattered on the low table, the rumpled jacket flung over a chair, the empty wine glasses and half-filled water cups on shelves and counters and tables. She crossed to the window and pulled the paisley blinds, admitting the burgundy sunlight with a snap. “You should clean up.” She stood framed by the window, darkly feminine against the glass and the city below. I sighed.
“Servants will do it,” I said, but I began plucking the pencils from the table and from the broad open face of my journal, the exposed page depicting the image of an alien hand: six fingered, clawed, each finger with an extra joint, each joint too long to be human. Only three of the six fingers had claws, and one had been shortened to the knuckle. The skin at the wrist was flayed in a band two inches wide, the muscle exposed. At a glance it looked like a work out of some antique but fanciful anatomy text. It might have passed for just that were it not for the pain. Pain was always easy to portray, easier to feel.
“When was the last time you went outside?” Valka asked, then repeated, “You look awful.”
“There hasn’t been time!” The words came out harder than I’d intended, brittle and glassy. “I’ve been . . . I don’t want to talk about where I’ve been.”
Valka seated herself on the arm of the sofa opposite me, side-lit by the window. Her lovely face shone in sharp relief, both golden eyes shining, though one was in darkness. The music in her voice broke. “I . . . I’ve heard. Anaïs told me.”
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