by Anthology
"Song,” the Major interjected, “is Attia's courier and control officer. Her local contact inside the Mandate.”
Song continued: “Attia said that she was ready to come in from the cold. Back home to the Commonwealth. She said that she was going to bring…” The tall Han woman paused there for a moment, as if searching for a word. “Bring a high value asset with her."
The Major nodded and drummed his fingers on the table. “The extraction was supposed to have happened two weeks ago."
I was still trying to process everything they were saying. Why were they telling me all this? Why would they reveal state secrets to some one-time counter revolutionary who had been hiding like a coward for the last twenty years? Was it part of some elaborate ruse? It didn’t make sense…
Unless they need me. Instantly I knew it to be true. Why else would they bring me here, why else tell me this? I needed to be careful. I needed to play this just right. I licked my cracked lips and leaned forward. "What happened to her?"
Song shook her head. "She didn’t show. She disappeared from her apartment, her labs. Vanished without a trace. Our initial assumption was that she’d been burned. Caught by counter-intelligence agents."
“She makes a habit of missing appointments,” I said without thinking.
Song looked at me a moment, cocking her head as if considering.
"But then," the Major continued, "last week we received a coded message from her at a secondary dead drop. Vitellia wants to meet again."
Curiosity warred with anger. “So what? What does this have to do with me? What do you want?”
"The message indicated that she would only meet with one man. One Gaius Plebius, known currently by the alias Artur Liefson."
Song pointed to my pocket. “She gave us that letter.”
Something shifted inside me. A small gap opened and all my fear drained away. All that remained was anger. She left me sitting alone in that fucking kaffahouse for three days. For twenty years. Until now, when she wants something. Another betrayal, in a long line of them “What?” I nearly growled. “What does she want?”
“We don’t know.” The Major folded his face until it manifested as something miserably unhappy. “We need you to find out.” He entwined his fingers and leaned forward. “You and Song will travel to Korla in the Eastern Mandate, and there make contact with Vitellia. We need you to talk to her. Find out what happened.”
“You are going to help me extract Attia and the asset.”
I wanted so badly to laugh. It was just too ridiculous. Travel with spies into the heart of the Mandate? “And why,” I said instead, “should I help you?”
The Major flashed his row of capped teeth. “Curiosity?”
All mirth was gone now. I glared at him.
His own false smile fell. He pulled a gun from his pocket and placed it on the polished wood table. “You’re going into the Eastern Mandate, or you’re being pulled out of here by your feet. Your choice.”
I stared down at that cold barrel. I wasn’t afraid, I realised. A Commissariat bullet was how I’d always thought I’d die, though I’d always pictured it happening with me blindfolded and lined up again a brick wall rather than sat in a well-appointed hotel room.
I couldn’t help but feel that I had nothing to lose. I ignored the gun and locked gazes with him. “You wouldn’t have brought me here unless you thought you needed me,” I told him. “Sounds like if you kill me then you’ll never be able to get her out.”
The Major narrowed his eyes. “Maybe so. But getting her out is merely our preferred option.”
Song stepped forward. “We need your help,” she said. “We can give you your life back.”
“I don’t want my life back,” I said, thinking of the mouldering apartment that was my home, the rusted gas element and sink full of pots that was my kitchen, the ceiling with flecked spots of black mould, the bookshelf with a handful of dusty volumes, the bowed mattress with stained sheets. The walls without picture frames, paintings or art.
“Your old life then,” she said.
Smoke and blood and screaming students in Aelia Capitolina. I wasn’t sure I wanted that back either. I flicked my gaze from Song’s pleading eyes to the Major’s expressionless ones, to the cold barrel of the gun. "You said that she was bringing out a high value asset. What is it?"
I could see him hesitating, weighing.
“Tell him,” Song said.
Finally, he shrugged. "Dragon's eggs," he said.
This time I really did laugh. The major blinked in surprise, which just me laugh harder. The last dragons had died out nearly forty years ago, along with the Empire and their patrician masters. And now the New Commonwealth, a state founded to destroy them, worked to bring them back. And somehow Attia was in the middle of all of it.
Res mutatae mutatae non sunt…The words—her words, our words—came back to me then. All humour drained away. Was this why she’d written them. Had she been trying to tell me something?
I looked to Song, and the Major, still waiting, breath baited, for my decision.
I realized then that I’d already made it.
***
EXCERPT FROM “ON WINGS OF VICTORY”
(TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL MANDARIN)
The first mechanical flight—conducted in what is now the Commonwealth, on the Dis Pater Collis by the brothers Antropov—was actually witnessed by members of no less than five Patrician families, a cartel of dragonriders who had funded the endeavour on a whim. Upon seeing the brothers’ rickety wooden contraption skim a bare two-hundred feet down the side of the hill, the riders are said to have only laughed. The thought that one of these flying machines might ever pose a threat to the great draci of their houses was beyond anything they could imagine. They couldn't see a future for that ridiculous contrivance of wood, string, and wire. In the Mandate, however, officials would take the Brothers, and their invention, a little more seriously.
***
3
I sat with Song in the back of a military plane, a noisome Ruz-54 that glinted silver in the sunlight and juddered from the power of its twin props. We were to go south and east to Eikstown, and then on to Marakanda on the Mandate border. We would cross the border by train, as air travel between the two nations had been once again severed.
It was the first time I had ever flown, and I realized quickly that I hated it. The rumbling engines roared so loud I could barely think, and the brief moments of free-fall that accompanied every patch of turbulence were terrifying. At my feet was a disintegrating leather bag stuffed with spare clothes. In my hands I clutched a copy of the Party Green Book. I’d grabbed both from my apartment before we’d left, inspired by the words that had been written on that letter.
I flipped the book open. On the inside cover: res mutatae mutatae non sunt, scrawled in her handwriting. I flipped it open to a random page where the margins were filled with more of her cramped writing.
It was the same book she’d been writing in the night I’d met her, at a party for disaffected students Sina and I had hosted in our walkup. Even in those days she'd had been something of a prodigy, assisting the university's most senior magisters with experiments at the cutting edge of chymistry and physics. She hadn’t been political when we’d met, it was only after the struggle sessions and university closures of the Cultural Adjustment had threatened her work that she’d fallen in with radicals like Sina and I. It had taken some time to get started, but our affair had burned hot and bright.
She’d given me the book the night we’d snuck into the great hall of the university library after it had been locked and shuttered to make love beneath the suspended ebony bones of a dead dragon. We’d been lying, sweaty and tangled in a scratchy woollen blanked that we’d thrown hastily over the marble floor, when she had pressed the book against my chest. I remember feeling the weight of it, the heat of her beside me as she lay curled against my body, watching the dragon above us sway slightly on its hanging wires. “When I’m a f
amous magistra and find my new element,” she said, “I’m going to name it after you.”
It was the night I’d known that she loved me. Now the memory of that set my teeth on edge.
“What a good little Party member you are,” Song said, raising her voice to carry over the droning engines. She was sat across from me in the long, bare metal fuselage of the transport plane.
I blinked and looked down at the book still in my hands. I shoved it into the leather bag. “A different kind of memento.”
She stood and stepped surely across the deck towards me, a thick folio clutched in her strong hands. She had changed outfits, eschewing her grey Party tunic-suit for a dark pleated jacket and thigh-length skirt, fashions, I gathered, that were popular now with women in the Mandate. She had unbound her hair and it fell loose about her shoulders. She sat down. “I don’t like having to yell.”
We hadn’t spoken much since leaving the interrogation room. She and several broad, featureless men with meaty hands had escorted me from my apartment to the aerodrome, but the men had stayed behind when we boarded the plane, which was now empty except for the unseen flight crew.
Song nodded at the book I had stuffed away. “A present from your lover?”
There had been a time when I’d looked at that book and thought only of how much she had once loved me. “A reminder that not everything stays the same.”
I could feel Song’s gaze boring into me. “She might not be how you remember her,” the agent said. “It’s been a long time.” She brushed invisible lint from her skirt. “You really haven’t seen her since the riots?”
I shot a glare over at the agent. “No,” I said. “And what does it matter anyway?”
Song was shaking her head. “I got to know Attia over the last few years. We worked together a lot. She—I think of her as a friend.” She dropped her gaze. “I don’t understand why she didn’t show up to the meeting. It’s not like her.”
“Doesn’t surprise me,” I muttered, thinking again of the empty kaffahouse.
“I don’t understand why she wouldn’t meet me. I don’t understand why she sent for you.”
“That makes two of us.”
Song sighed. “It’s possible that she has been burned,” she said. “It’s possible that Mandate intelligence is pulling the strings here.”
I shrugged. “So I stay here and get killed by the Commissariat or go there and get killed by the Mandate. Does it matter? I’m dead either way.” I smiled a bit. “It’s only you that has to worry.”
She looked at me. “And what about Attia? What about your former lover? Are you worried about her?”
“No,” I said, but even as I did I knew it was a lie. If she’s dead then I’ll never know why she left me, I told myself, but knew that wasn’t quite the truth either. I cared for the same reason I’d brought that copy of the little book. “She’s always managed to take care of herself,” I said.
“She saved your life,” Song said. “That has to be worth something.”
I didn’t say anything. What could I say to that? It was true, even if I tried not to think of it. I saw here there again, in the smoke and the haze of Aelia Capitolina, rifle clutched firmly in hand. Saving my life, only hours before she would leave me forever. Why, Attia?
Song reached down and pulled a hemp envelope out of the folio that rested now at her feet. She passed it over. “Take a look,” she said.
I unwound the red string that sealed it and looked inside.
It contained: a handful of creased Mandate bank notes pressed into a soft leather billfold, a cheap nickel-plated watch, a passport with a foto and another name, and several typescript pages detailing my new identity.
Yet another new identity. What fork had my life taken to lead me to this?
“You’ll need to memorize that if we have any hope of getting through the border,” Song said.
I nodded. The border between People’s Mandate and the New Commonwealth stretched across the centre of the continent, through deserts and steppes and heaving mountain ranges. Countless wars had been fought over that massive frontier, but the unforgiving terrain and sprawling distances reduced battlefields to charnelhouses where hundreds of thousands of men were minced for the gain of a few spare miles. Every decade or so since the revolution another war would spark, and millions would be bundled onto trains for the front line, to be cut down my machine gun fire, or pressed into the earth by an artillery shell. Economies would teeter, food would become sparse, and then an armistice would be signed, giving each state enough time to recover before the cycle would repeat.
It had been nearly a decade since the last war had ended, but by all signs another would start soon. Maybe within weeks.
"You'll probably pass."
I looked up from the folio open on my lap. Song was eyeing me.
"For what?"
"You look like a mongrel,” she said seriously. “You can pass for a local in any number of cities. How much Türkik do you remember?"
Mongrel. I’d been called worse, but never with such clinical detachment. My father had come to Aelia Capitolina from the northern Persia—at that time a protectorate of Empire—though he and my mother had given me her family’s name. They’d thought it would help me fit in, though it certainly hadn’t helped. I’d first learned Türkik from the grandmother who’d raised me, and when I wasn’t writing slogans and hosting counter-revolutionary meetings at University I had actually been studying linguistics. And of course the Commissariat knew that. "A little.”
Song nodded. "Try to stick to what you know. It will be slightly less obvious than gothic." She twisted her mouth a little. "Or latin."
We refuelled at the old capital in Eikstown (once Byzantium) where the Plaza of Heroes could be seen easily from the air, a long concrete slab that had been built over the ruins of the Hippodrome and now seemed to blend with the lead sky and grey seas.
"We're operational now," Song said as we lifted off once again. "From now until we're back, you are Unal." It was the name on the passport that I now held in my hand. He was a man who had been born in Kyiv, lived in Persia—now independent, though a client state of the Mandate—and sold petroleum drill bits. "The Mandate have spies everywhere, so don't feel safe because we're still in the Commonwealth. The hardest part will be getting through the border without raising any eyes."
"What do I call you," I asked. "What's your alias?"
She cocked her head quizzically and then laughed. "Song," she said.
We flew east again, closer and closer to the Mandate border. Out the window, the mountains crawled by. I pictured a dragon soaring somewhere below, it's feathered wings stretched out in full flight, the small figure of a man strapped to its arched back with ropes and leather harnesses. Ptolomey had flown this way, I remembered suddenly, while mapping the East for his Geographica. I thought of Attia, who must have also travelled this way before defecting. What had she been thinking?
"Why is this Egg so important?"
Song’s eyes were closed and her thin long fingers were clasped lightly in her lap. "Because the dragons are all dead. You know that." She didn't open her eyes.
"A dragon isn’t gone win any battles. Not anymore."
She opened her eyes. "The shooting with the Mandate has stopped for now, but the war still continues underground. A living dragon would be a rallying-point. An important victory in the psychological struggle."
"I thought the Central Committee said that dragons were a tool of oppression?"
"Anything can be politically rehabilitated, Unal. Even you."
I ignored that. “And so what about Attia,” I pressed. “What does a metallurgist have to do with dragon’s eggs?”
Song shrugged. “I’m no magistra.”
I stared out the small porthole in the transport, at the desolation crawling by beneath. “Attia hated dragons. Her grandmother had served in a Patrician household, had watched her sons and husbands fed alive to the family draco because they’d offended their
master. She was as opposed to their existence as anyone I’ve known in my life.” I shook my head. “As much as anything has changed, I can’t imagine her working to bring them back. I can’t understand why she would help you do that. It doesn’t make any sense.”
When I looked back to Song she seemed pensive. Then with a bare shrug she closed her eyes again and leaned back. “You’d be surprised, Unal. Not everyone who works for the Central Committee is as sinister as you’d believe. Some people end up in places they’d never expect, for reasons they never dreamed of. Anyways, like I said. There’s no more true power in dragons. They’re symbols. Nothing more.”
Who was this woman, this Han, a native of the People’s Mandate who now worked for her nations enemy? Lies and mysteries, layers and layers that I couldn’t even begin to penetrate.
***
EXCERPT FROM ON “DRACI AND REVOLUTION”
(CENSOR’S COPY, REDACTED)
The causes of the First Mandate War (as we call it here in the west) were varied and complex. Treaties, alliances, wars between client states: all these things contributed. But the most widely believed cause is this: some strange ailment was afflicting the Himalayan Draci within the Mandate of Heaven, and for decades they had been dying. The Mandate was, the Patricians of the Empire thought, defenceless. A fruit ripe for plucking. And yet why did strike when they did? The truth was, they were afraid. Afraid of the growing strength and wealth of the Mandate, the political reforms that had ended the monarchy there and transferred power to the proletariat (though in truth it was the burgeoning merchant class who held the true power, then as now). And so it was fear that led the children of the Great Patrician Families to gather their ancient draci and strike in a writhing, flame-wreathed fist at the Mandate capital.
***
4
The Mandate border crossing was crammed into a narrow point between weathered granite cliffs, and everywhere I could see barbed wire and concrete. Bundled soldiers squinted down from metal watchtowers, their faces wrapped tight against the cold.
We had landed in Marakanda and then taken a train up into the mountains, travelling through the night in a freezing sleeper car with windows that rattled like loose change. Song had made me go over border procedure again and again, memorising each typescript that had been inside the hemp folder. After hours wending up into Tiān Shān Mountains we had finally pulled to a stop at a depot several hundred feet from the border. The Mandate used a different gauge of rail, and so we would transfer to another train once through the border.