“Does your family live on the docks?” Lilia asked Alhina. She was not much good at small talk, but suspected talking about much of anything related to herself would become problematic quickly.
“Usually,” Alhina said. She took another nip from her flask. “But we’ve moved to the gates. There are storage and living quarters inside the gatehouses, and all along the inside.”
“How far do the gates go? To the cliffs?” Gian asked.
“Yes, they span the entirety of the harbor. Faith Ahya and Hahko anticipated raids from Saiduan and Dorinah. It was among the first structures they built.”
Taigan said, “And you’re running patrols along the cliffs?”
“Of course,” Alhina said. “We have six squads patrolling the west where the wall ends and the black cliffs begin, and two more in the east, which is less ground to cover. It’s not as far from here to the mountains, going east.”
“Jistas with them?” Taigan asked.
“Each squad is eight militia, with three jistas. A coterie.”
“One of each type?” Gian asked. “Is that what that means?”
“Yes,” Lilia said, glad to show she knew something.
“Let’s get up onto the top of the wall,” Taigan said. “I’m eager to see how this looks from another vantage.”
Lilia gazed at the massive, twisted wall in the distance, blocking off the view from the sea. She was very interested as well, but for a different reason.
She wanted to see the people she intended to destroy.
* * *
Taigan came up the steps onto the great harbor wall just behind Lilia. The warm wind from the Haraeo Sea hit Taigan square in the face. She smelled the changing season in the wind. It was the same wind that had blown across Saiduan. She tasted salt and something bitter, and memorable – the acidic tang of the red tide, the kelp the Tai Mora had brought with them to assault living walls. She came up to the heavy rail with Lilia, and put her hands on the massive tirajista-trained wood. It was not dead. She saw greenery winding up the outside of it.
“What’s at the core of this wall?” Taigan asked. “It’s all living, like this?”
“The gates are,” Alhina said. “I think the wall was trained over a stone core.”
“Dead stone?”
“Is there another kind?”
“Sometimes,” Taigan said. She ignored the girl’s dubious look.
Two great piers jutted out over the water for a thousand feet into the surging sea, a necessary thing for a harbor when the pull of the moons resulted in extreme tides that swept the water out for miles. She had heard of families swept away by the force of the tides in little coastal towns in Saiduan. Whole villages were sometimes swallowed when the fractious heavens changed the ebb and flow of the tides.
For all the Dhai’s cowardice and unreadiness for war, they did have two very good defenses. What concerned her was that they relied on them so completely, to the detriment of their army, the construction of their cities, even the ways they organized themselves. Without a hierarchical structure to amass and order armies, they would be little better than a mob with pointed sticks and a few uncoordinated parajistas blowing around clouds before being wrapped in the breath of some jista on the other side. The Tai Mora would be coordinated… like their ships.
She stared out at the ships clotting the harbor. They barricaded the bowl of the blue bay. It was nothing like the number she’d seen at Aaraduan. These were fifty across and three deep, hardly a massive force. But Dhai had no navy, and only one harbor. That made fifty more than enough. What puzzled her was that the Tai Mora had not yet deployed anything against the gates. What were they waiting for? She saw bubbling red mist along the front line, and suspected they already had sufficient omajista barricades up to protect themselves from a gifted attack.
“Have they parleyed with your Kai?” Taigan asked.
“They sent an emissary,” Alhina said. “That’s why the Kai went to the temple first.”
“Is that usual?” Lilia asked Taigan, “for them to talk first?”
“They did with us. In the beginning.”
“They stopped?”
Taigan snorted. “They wanted us to deliver tribute in bodies. If we were going to give them bodies, bird, we’d make them fight for them.”
“The Kai will not give them bodies,” Lilia said.
“Then we best prepare,” Taigan said. “You see the omajista barricade?”
“I see it.”
Alhina stepped to the rail and squinted out at the ships. “What sorts of jistas do they have out there?”
“All of them,” Taigan said. “If they’ve come at you the way they did us, they’ll have eight coteries on every ship.”
“Twenty-four jistas on every ship?” Lilia said, as if Taigan had told her she could lay eggs.
“You’ll need to empty out the senior Oras from every temple,” Taigan said, “and deploy them here. You think your Kai will give leave for that? You think they’ll obey if he does?”
“Why wouldn’t they?” Lilia said.
“Under the Kai? After fighting a civil war?”
“It wasn’t like that at all,” Alhina said. “I was here. You weren’t.”
“People died,” Taigan said. “I thought you took that seriously. We certainly take death seriously in Saiduan.”
“We are not like Saiduan.”
“I’m sure you take great comfort in saying that,” Taigan said. “The reality is that if that man has any hint of illegitimacy about him, if even one senior leader does not respect him, you are lost. You may be lost regardless, but it will certainly happen much faster.”
“Let’s speak to the Kai about it,” Lilia said.
“In my experience, young men with power don’t take kindly to advice.”
“This is Dhai.”
“Men are the same everywhere.”
“It’s a good thing there are a lot of women here, then.”
Taigan grimaced. Dhai pronouns were cumbersome things; too many to remember, and trying to use their ungendered pronoun was uncomfortable. Ataisa was not ungendered, it was a gender in and of itself. Stripping away gendered markers in every conversation still grated. There were three types of people as far as Taigan was concerned, and what she defaulted to in any one anecdote depended upon which anecdote it was. Dhai people never understood the nuance.
“Let me take you to my cousin Mohrai,” Alhina said. “We can address this with her.”
Taigan waved at them. “You go. I want to watch the boats.”
“For what?” Lilia said.
“For myself.”
Taigan leaned out over the rail after they left. She gazed at row after row of ships. What bothered her was why they had come to Dhai at all. Why not selectively murder the few key people who were the doubles of those on the other side, and simply turn Saiduan into their new home? Why come down to Grania at all? What was there to gain here? People called Taigan monstrous, often, and she had done terrible things. She recalled smashing open the face of the woman who trained her, and flaying men alive for cheating her. She had destroyed people in every way they could be destroyed, but she always did it with purpose. These people were, if nothing else, calculated in the way they attacked. So why now?
She heard a scuffle behind her, and looked back to see Lilia limping toward her.
“Bored already?” Taigan asked.
“Mohrai is busy. I sent Gian down to eat while we wait for Mohrai.”
“I’m sure she depleted much of her stores on the way here,” Taigan said.
“It’s like she’s storing up for winter,” Lilia said.
“Perhaps she’s the smartest of us all.”
Lilia came to the parapet. Put her arms on the wall. “I was thinking, Taigan.”
“Always dangerous.”
“If they wanted to destroy us, we’d be dead now. They’ve come for something here, haven’t they? Something they don’t want to burn down or risk being lost.”
<
br /> Taigan smirked at that. Yes, this was the same little girl who played strategy games in the woods, after all. She wished she’d had time to make her some great general, an asset to Saiduan. Now she wasn’t sure what she was doing with this girl. Perhaps prolonging the inevitable. Soon Maralah would do more than just send notes that Taigan refused to answer. Soon, she would use the ward. She would call Taigan back, and there was nothing she could do to stop that when the time came.
“Oh! Taigan!” Lilia held up her arms, and Taigan saw little creatures scurrying up her shoulders and nuzzling her neck. They were baby tree gliders. Taigan saw their nest now, burrowed into the living wall. Lilia laughed and snatched at the little creatures, trying to pat their tiny heads, but they were fast, furiously fast.
Taigan regarded her a long moment while dozens of baby tree gliders scurried across her shoulders and then back down her arms. Several leapt from her head and rushed back into the nest. She still had two of them perched in her palm. She cooed at them.
“They’re so beautiful,” Lilia said. “See how cute they are?” She pressed her face closer to her final two friends, and they leapt from her palm and ran back to the nest with the others. She laughed again, a sound so lovely Taigan forgot for a moment she was ugly and so very broken in so many ways.
“How long did it take you to figure that out?” Taigan asked. “About the Tai Mora.”
Lilia’s smile faded, but did not disappear. Taigan suspected she enjoyed her strategy for revenge almost as much as the tree gliders. “I considered it on the way here. But when I saw the boats… I knew.”
“Not a fool bird,” Taigan said.
“You think the Kai knows?”
“I think the Kai still believes he can talk his way out of this.”
“Surely not.”
“You watch him. Remember he’ll do whatever it takes to avoid bloodshed. If you know that about him, you know his weakness.”
“He didn’t order us killed or turned back,” Lilia said. “He could have.”
“He wants to preserve who you are.”
“He wants to save this idea he has of himself.” Lilia’s jaw firmed. “But the ideas we have of ourselves are foolish. He’ll learn that.”
“Indeed he will.”
Taigan wondered, for the first time, if she was helping to make a savior or a monster.
She had such a plain, serious face. Taigan still worried about Gian’s influence. A handsome woman like Gian, raised a dajian, would be drawn to power like a moth to claw lilies. Taigan suspected Gian had fucked the wrong person in Dorinah, or perhaps the right one, and it had all gone bad. But a Dhai this young wouldn’t see a path to power through fucking. The older ones, perhaps, used sex and kinship to form strong ties. But not like Dorinahs did. Not like the Saiduan.
Such a peculiar little country, Dhai. It would be a shame to see it burn.
12
Harajan bordered an underground sea. Tactically, structurally, that seemed like a terrible idea, but it was another of the old holds built by the Talamynni, maintained by the Dhai, and inherited by the Saiduan. The Talamynni had an eye for making the illogical a reality. One level below the hold was a vast glass and iron ballroom jutting into the sea, twisted with still-living plant matter, suffused with some long-standing, and long-forgotten, parajista hex that kept the glass walls intact after these many thousands of years.
Instead of darkness, the view from the ballroom was luminous. Tens of thousands of bioluminescent creatures drifted lazily through the sea, casting an eerie light on those within. Maralah stood close to the glass. The smell of dust and damp was strong. No slave had been down here to polish it up for a party in at least ten years. Maralah remembered attending only one gala here, for Alaar’s predecessor, Patron Osoraan. It was a riotous, drunken affair made even stranger with a variety of imported hallucinogens tucked away into select dishes. One man died, bashing his head repeatedly into the glass wall. Two women tore the skin from their own faces, and best Maralah could remember, there was a great deal of fucking – the mad kind, not the fun kind. If she inhaled deeply now, she could almost believe she smelled the incense that had suffused the space that night, watering her eyes, muddying her head.
Driaa was her only company now. Ze rocked back on hir heels, sipping thoughtfully from a flask of aatai, hir face lit garishly by the blue and white lights from the creatures in the sea beyond the glass. Ze passed the leather flask to Maralah.
Maralah drank, trying to keep the silence, but knew Driaa had not asked her down here for some sultry assignation. No, this was the type of place used by those who wanted to talk about dangerous politics.
“You’ve spent your whole life propping up weak men,” Driaa said, finally. “How much longer are you going to wait to take the seat while Morsaar muddles about making cakes?”
The aatai burned Maralah’s tongue. She coughed. Did Driaa brew it hirself? It wouldn’t surprise her. Food stores in Harajan were grim. The last dog-sled caravan had been weeks ago, and half empty. Tai Mora scouting parties had slaughtered six of the eight teams. “I will be the woman who destroyed us,” she said. “No matter it was the decisions of others that brought us to this place. No matter that Alaar was the wrong man to lead a war. Our destruction will be heaped on my shoulders if I take the seat now. They won’t see we lasted five years longer than we would have with Alaar’s successor. We wouldn’t be here if not for me. We’d be singing to Lord Sina. But history won’t paint it that way.”
“What do you care for the books?” Driaa said. Ze took back the flask, and gestured at the dancing sea creatures. “You think anyone remembers who built this? What’s their name? It’s more likely no one will remember you or me or anyone but Rajavaa anyway. They’ll write the story the way they want to remember it. Nothing you do now changes the story. That’s for them to decide. You’re here to act.”
“I wish I hadn’t sent Kadaan on that fool’s errand. I could use him now.”
“Couldn’t we all?”
“He loved that Dhai boy.”
“Love is not a bad thing, especially now.”
Maralah hesitated. Was this an assignation after all? “Soft words,” she said. She almost growled it. She was not so far gone that she would fuck another sanisi to pass the time. Too many politics in that.
“I was a different ataisa in training, Maralah. I believed we must be hard, and ruthless. We must gut them before they gut us. Now I wonder if something was lost in all that gutting.”
“Is that so?”
“When I was very young, still living in Tordin–”
“I hope you don’t tell many people that story.” No one liked foreigners and slaves becoming sanisi. They had that in common, she and Driaa – Maralah once enslaved by an indebted father, Driaa clearly of foreign parentage.
“My father claimed me, yes,” Driaa said, “and brought me back to Saiduan with him. Got me the papers and everything, or I wouldn’t be here, would I? There was… bad business in Tordin in those days. My mother was a bit of a rogue. Wild. Not very popular with Saradyn. She and her people were killed. My father took me away from that.”
“Becoming a sanisi was easier than staying with your father?”
Driaa made a face. “My father wanted me to be many things I’m not. But I saw what Saradyn did to my mother’s people, and when you’re six years old… you can’t fight. I wanted to fight because of what I saw Saradyn do to the people I loved. Isn’t that why we fight? For those we love?”
“I fear I just don’t know how to stop. If it wasn’t the Tai Mora, who would we fight? Ourselves? The Dhai? The Dorinah? Always another face, always the same face.”
“You have, perhaps, had too much to drink.”
“Not nearly enough,” Maralah said, but she did not reach for the bottle. She remembered fucking on this floor. How many people? A time best left forgotten, like her five years of servitude.
Driaa shrugged and took another drink. “I hold my liquor better.”
“No more than your outpouring of nurturance is a female one,” Driaa said.
Maralah snorted at that. She’d had a daughter once who’d said something similar, in precisely the same sarcastic tone. “Sometimes I wonder why we bother persevering at all.”
“Well. It matters to me. It matters who I follow.”
“That’s a discussion for another time.”
“If you don’t take the seat, Maralah, someone else will. Others will be consolidating power.”
“Have you been contacted by other parties?”
Ze shrugged. “I’m a sanisi. You know there are always warring factions.”
“Who?”
“Just know this, Maralah. If you move, I am with you. If you do not… When Rajavaa dies, things may be very bad. No one dares now because of the loyalty of the army. But without Rajavaa–”
“I know,” Maralah said.
Driaa tried to give her the flask again. Maralah shook her head.
“I best get back,” Driaa said.
Maralah did not answer. Driaa shifted her weight, almost imperceptibly. “You should have the seat,” ze said, and then ze was walking lightly away, back into the dim corridors.
Maralah lingered in the space, though she would have preferred to be first to leave. Instead, she found herself stuck with far too many thoughts and an unclear plan of action. As she watched the creatures beyond the glass, a hulking form moved through the darkness, glowing softly blue, brighter and brighter until she could see its vast head, as big as a doorway. It fixed her with one of its eight massive eyes, each the size and shape of her fist, as it swam lazily past the tank. It was free to swim on, unencumbered, but the only thing that made it possible to stand here was to create a prison for the observers. Of all the things the gifted could build with their brilliant powers, they chose this decadent room, spying into the sea. Perhaps, in some other age, it was an observatory, an enclave for research and advancement in the study of obscure fauna. Alaar would have used it for that purpose, certainly. But that peaceful, prosperous dream was over now.
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