by Dima Zales
Then again, what about this whole thing wasn’t hard to imagine?
I thought about the document Cordus had given me, which I’d read before lunch. It had turned out to be a short, handwritten early history of the other world.
According to what I’d read, the world I was standing in right now was called the “First Emanation” because it had emerged through natural processes. The cosmos had come into being, galaxies had formed, the Sun had been born, planets had consolidated around it, life had arisen and evolved on Earth, and so forth. All that sounded familiar.
But after that, the story diverged from what I’d learned in school. On Earth, the document said, living things began to appear that had the capacity to manipulate essence, which was defined — more poetically than helpfully, I thought — as “the grain of is-ness.” The Second Emanation emerged not from the unguided processes of nature, but through acts of creation by these new beings.
At first, just a few places on Earth gained echoes or shadows — other-space environments generated when essence-workers reshaped their surroundings to the degree that their place no longer meshed properly with the rest of the world. Over time, more and more echoes were created. The Earth’s landmasses and oceans accumulated multiple versions as different essence-workers reshaped the same places at different times. The duplicated environments — called strata — came in contact with one another, establishing connections until they formed a world of linked but discrete spaces.
The document compared the S-Em to a pile of autumn leaves. Its strata were multilayered, shifting, disordered. They came in many shapes and sizes. No one would ever count them all.
Passage between here and there was difficult. It took a super-strong worker to open a strait. Once you were in the S-Em, movement between strata was usually possible, if challenging. Sometimes, though, a stratum got completely separated from the rest of the S-Em — a little world unto itself.
What had surprised me most was the idea that the S-Em began to emerge billions of years ago. Countless species had contributed to its creation. The ability to work essence wasn’t limited to human beings or even to intelligent animals. Essence-workers appeared among dolphins and crows and elephants, sure, but also among bacteria and trees and goldfish. That meant the other world was the product of a lot more than the human imagination.
I thought about getting stuck in a bacterial stratum — not fun. And what kind of world would a tree invent for itself? One with twenty-four-hour sunlight and no caterpillars?
I looked down at the tub-toilet and shook my head. My new reality was a strange place.
Gwen had told me when dinner was served, and I’d said I’d meet her there at 7:30. I walked into the dining room ten minutes late and didn’t see her. I looked around the room and didn’t recognize anyone. Except Graham. He was sitting at a table by one of the windows, looking out. No one was sitting with him. No one was even sitting nearby. He’d become a pariah.
His untouched place setting suggested he’d only just gotten there himself. After a moment’s hesitation, I went over and asked if I could join him. He looked up at me, surprised. Then he nodded at the empty chair across from him, and I sat down.
An awkward silence ensued. Both of us seemed to be trying to think of something to say.
Thankfully, a waiter came to take my order, which was a rather lengthy transaction. I had to choose dishes for four courses, as well as beverages. When the waiter described the entrées, I didn’t recognize some of the things he mentioned. The process left me a bit flushed and embarrassed.
After the waiter left, Graham gave me the ghost of a smile.
“I wouldn’t have guessed you liked snails.”
“Snails?”
“The chicken breast comes with escargots.”
I must’ve look dismayed, because he said, “Don’t worry, they’re on the side.”
The waiter filled our water glasses.
“So, how are you settling in?” Graham asked.
“Okay, I guess. It’s all …” I paused, at a loss.
“A bit much? Really, really weird? Exciting and terrifying at the same time?”
“Yeah,” I said, “all that.”
He asked what I’d been up to for the last few days. My first course — an onion soup — arrived as I described my experience at court and my first lesson with Cordus.
Graham nodded. “Any questions?”
I hesitated, perplexed. “Do you still think of yourself as my trainer?”
“No. But I can answer questions.”
I must’ve looked dubious, because he gave me a sad smile and added, “Just don’t ask me something I’ll have to lie about.”
I gave him the laugh he was looking for, though his comment was painfully close to what I’d actually been thinking.
Well, why not ask some of the questions that had occurred to me over the past couple days, some of the things I couldn’t ask Cordus himself? It’s not like I had to believe Graham’s answers, if I didn’t want to.
I lowered my voice. “Why does Lord Cordus let Williams get away with wearing all black?”
Graham looked at me blankly. “I hadn’t realized that was happening. Williams doesn’t go to court much. I guess I never noticed.” He thought about it. “I don’t know why Lord Cordus would allow that. If you qualify to wear white, you have to.”
Our entrées came. My chicken breast was indeed accompanied by a dish of snails, each sitting in its own bath of melted butter. Graham showed me how to fork one out of its shell. It was actually pretty good.
“Do you know anything about the snowman ambassador?”
“They’re actually called ice men. And no. Sorry. She’s quite new to the job.”
“Good thing you helped with the snail, ’cause a fat lot of good you are on the questions,” I said, leaning back.
He smiled a little.
“Is Lady Innin stronger than Lord Cordus?”
“No idea. They keep that kind of information to themselves, understandably.”
“I thought you could tell if you touch someone.”
“Ah, right. First of all, I’ve never touched Lady Innin. Second, it’s more complicated than that. If you touch someone who’s weaker than you, you’ll probably get a pretty good sense of how strong they are. If you touch someone who’s stronger, you’ll know they’re stronger, but you won’t get as accurate a sense of what they can do. Touch someone like Lord Cordus or Lady Innin, and you’ll just feel overwhelming power. The differences between them won’t be discernible.”
Okay, that was helpful.
“Do you know how old Lord Cordus is?”
“He was born in Constantinople in the 330s or 340s, I think.”
My mind went blank. It was like he’d started speaking another language.
“Going on seventeen hundred years,” Graham added, when he saw I wasn’t getting it.
“That’s impossible.”
“Nope. The most powerful Seconds can live just about forever if they want to. Some of them are millions of years old. Hundreds of millions, maybe.”
I stared at him, amazed.
“How can that be?”
Graham shrugged. “You’re talking about beings that can rework the world itself. Reworking their bodies seems like small potatoes next to that, doesn’t it?”
It made intellectual sense when he put it like that, but on a gut level, the idea of living forever felt profoundly wrong. Like they were ignoring a law so fundamental that it should’ve been unbreakable. I mean, the world changed. That was the way of things. Everything that happened changed it. But mortality itself? No.
“Isn’t the S-Em overpopulated?”
“Not so far as I’ve heard. Keep in mind we’re only talking about the most powerful Seconds, here, not your run-of-the-mill S-Em shopkeeper.”
I popped a snail in my mouth and chewed slowly, contemplating this new wrinkle.
“I guess I don’t understand why they’re so worried about humans finding
out about them. Remaking the world, living forever — they seem more like gods than people. Surely they don’t have anything to fear from us.”
Graham turned and looked out the window. At first I thought I’d strayed into something he couldn’t talk about truthfully, but eventually he spoke.
“I saw a nature program a few years back. There were these big birds — toucans, or something — that laid two eggs in a hole in a tree. When the chicks were old enough to stick their heads out, some ants crawled up the trunk. The chicks killed every one of them. The narrator said that if even one ant got back to its nest with news about the chicks’ hole, all the ants would come. Later in the program, they showed the nest again. One of the chicks had fledged and flown away, but the ants had gotten the other one. It was still there, sticking its head out of the hole, but it was skeletal, picked clean.”
Graham turned back from the window. “The ants were so tiny, and the chick was so big, but it only took one getting away.”
“And the Seconds are like that chick? Trapped in a hole? Defenseless?”
“It wasn’t defenseless. It killed hundreds of ants. But in the end, when they came back by the millions, it couldn’t kill them all.”
I had to admit it was a shudder-inducing image.
“Okay, yeah, I get it. But what beings like Lord Cordus can do — it’s way beyond having a big beak, or whatever that chick had to work with.”
Graham shrugged. “You say they’re godlike. Maybe so. But humans kill their gods.” He looked up at me. “Humans kill everything. They’re nature’s own weapon of mass destruction.”
The way he said it gave me goose bumps.
We sat in silence for a while as we finished our entrées. Conversation picked up again when our desserts came, but we stuck to lighter topics — the quality of the gym downstairs, what sort of books and movies the library had, and so forth.
Graham and I parted ways awkwardly at the dining room doors. I was glad I’d made the effort to sit with him but relieved he didn’t offer to walk me back to my room.
I reminded myself that even if betraying Cordus wasn’t a bad thing, Graham’s way of doing it had put Kara and the others at risk. That was no good. Furthermore, he’d physically attacked me.
I did feel bad, though. Nothing he’d done struck me as deserving capital punishment, and that was probably what he was going to get. I imagined Cordus doing to Graham what he’d done to the green man. It was an unbearable thought.
16
A week or so passed. Every day followed the same schedule, so it was easy to lose track of which day it was. Each morning I got dressed and headed down to breakfast by 7:00, often with Gwen, Andy, and Theo, who seemed to be on the same schedule. Then I had a half-hour lesson with Cordus, followed by a workout. Then lunch, several hours of personal time, an hour of combat training, a shower, and dinner.
The personal time was mixed. I spent a little of it browsing the lending library, which was fun. I found plenty of good books and a bunch of movies I’d like to watch, if I ever had a couple free hours. A few times I hung out with Kara, which was nice, or poked around the stables.
On the other hand, I also used my personal time to visit Justine, who’d been given a first-floor suite not far from my room. Those visits were the opposite of fun. She still seemed unaware that she was anything but human. She swung irrationally back and forth between accusing me of kidnapping her and begging me to protect her from some unspecified threat.
She also mooned over Ben and the girls. That grated on me. Why had she gone and married a human man, anyway? Just to make her cover more convincing? It wasn’t fair to Ben or to the half-human children she’d borne.
Several times, Cordus came to see Justine while I was there. Her reaction to him was weird. She claimed not to have met him before the previous week, yet she clearly found his presence comforting.
She flirted with him shamelessly, which annoyed me. She was married to my brother, for god’s sake. Couldn’t she at least save it for when I wasn’t around?
At least he didn’t respond to it. Mostly he just asked her the same questions in slightly different ways. As the days passed, she noticed the repetition. I could see the questions were beginning to annoy her a little, though it helped that the asker was so attractive.
The fact that she remembered the questions she’d been asked earlier suggested to me that her mind and memory were working normally. I said as much to Cordus and got his version of “uh-huh” in response — “Your assessment is apt, Miss Ryder.”
I also spent a fair amount of time on the phone with Tiffany, which always left me feeling like a heel. I could tell that Ben was having trouble keeping things together. I thought about telling her about Callie, so that there’d be someone in Dorf she could talk to about her abilities. But that would mean exposing her to another person in Cordus’s organization, and I didn’t want to attract more attention to her and her sisters than I had to. I also wasn’t sure Callie’s religiously inflected understanding of things would be a net gain for Tiff. It might just confuse her more. Lastly, fingering Callie as a Nolander would be breaking the rules.
I tried to phone Ben a couple times. He seemed to be screening my calls. I couldn’t blame him, but it hurt.
So that was my personal time — mixed at best. The rest of my schedule pretty much sucked.
The lessons with Cordus were increasingly frustrating. I still couldn’t see any workings, and he only let me try a few times each day. Instead, we spent most of each half-hour working on Baasha, which turned out to be about a million times harder than French.
It just didn’t feel like I was making any progress, even though being a student was the one thing I’d always done well.
Plus, Cordus disturbed me. Every day I half expected him to pull his mind-control trick and take advantage of me. The thought of that scared me sick, and I was always knotted up with anxiety before entering his office in the morning. But once inside, I regularly found myself staring at him, my fears forgotten.
My fascination with him was distressing. I suspected he was a monster inside a pretty shell, and I didn’t want to find him attractive.
The physical fitness program was a total bummer. Gwen was in charge of that part of my day, and she was a fiend when it came to working out. She made me jog, lift weights, and try out various complicated machines that simulated rowing, skiing, and other forms of torture. It was unrelenting. I was sore all the time.
The combat training was ridiculous. My instructor was one of the people I’d met during my evening at court, Hortensia Tolosa. She was eighteen and went by “Tezzy.” Cordus had gotten her in a trade of some sort with another Second soon after she saw through at age five.
If Gwen was a fiend, Tezzy was an ogre. She must’ve studied taekwondo in the womb. She made me feel utterly incompetent. I wanted to empathize with someone who’d been traded like livestock when she was a little kid, but it was pretty hard to feel anything but resentful.
I had bruises everywhere. They weren’t from Tezzy hitting me — she didn’t do that. They were from me falling down while she tried to get me to hit or kick her, or rather, a pad she was holding.
By my fourth lesson, she’d backtracked to just trying to teach me how to stand still. She’d have me assume a particular stance, then coach me on making it solid and resilient. Then she’d walk up to me and try to push me down. I always fell down. Always. I could tell she didn’t know what to do with me. It was the pits.
One morning — I think it was a Friday — Andy and Theo were looking sort of worried when I joined them in the dining room for breakfast.
“Hey, what’s up? Something wrong?”
“Lord Limu’s in the city,” Andy said. “Hank saw him last night.”
Limu. That’s who Williams and Callie thought I’d seen at the other end of the open strait.
“It’s bad that he’s here?”
“Dunno. We’re trying to figure it out,” Theo said. “It’s definitely unu
sual. The regional powers don’t enter each others’ territories without a good reason, except for formal events.”
“Maybe he was invited,” I said, remembering how Cordus had asked the green man about him.
Theo cocked his head. “You know something about this?”
“Who, me? I don’t know anything about anything,” I said, kicking myself.
The two men sat back and studied me, then shared a look. They clearly weren’t fooled.
Andy said, “Should we be worried?”
“I honestly don’t know. I’m sorry. You know how new I am to all this.”
He nodded, but an awkwardness came over the table that hadn’t been there before.
“Can you tell me anything about Lord Limu? Just public-knowledge stuff?”
“Well,” Theo said, “he controls most of the Pacific Basin. So, the Aleutians and southern Alaska; the west coast of North America; the west coast of South America down through northern Chile — that’s all him. And the coast on the other side, from Russia down through Papua New Guinea, and the little islands, like Hawaii. And all that ocean.”
“Australia, too?”
“No, someone else holds Australia and New Zealand.”
I tried to pull a map together in my mind. Embarrassingly, I didn’t know where the Aleutians or Papua New Guinea were.
“He’s gifted with minerals and fire, and he’s strong. Some say he’s the strongest of the powers holding F-Em territories. He’s a real bad-ass — aggressive, irrational, maybe unstable. Not a good guy, not safe to be around.”
A fire- and mineral-worker. I thought back to the lava-man in the lawn chair. No wonder Williams and Callie had recognized him from my description.
Andy said, “We heard he was holding a strait open up near where you’re from.”
Dorf wasn’t the only place where gossip traveled fast.
“I don’t know that it was him.”
“Fine, be that way,” Andy said, looking annoyed.