The Hand of the Sun King

by J. T. Greathouse

  Okara yipped, and Hissing Cat glared at him.

  “The gods did not listen. And so, the witches of the old sort waged against them a battle that threatened the end of all things. When the world seemed so brittle the slightest spell might break it, the gods and the witches of the old sort met, and parlayed, and made a pact. No longer would the gods wage their war for dominion over the pattern of the world, nor would they interfere directly in human lives. But in exchange, the witches of the old sort would allow their power to be sealed.”

  I held out my right hand to show the witch-marks there. “What of this?”

  “That is the seal itself,” Hissing Cat said. “The witches of the old sort were not willing to give up all of their power. The gods agreed that any who showed the capacity should be taught, but that none could be trusted with the whole of magic. We each chose a few powers of our preference and taught them to our people.” She pointed her needle at the scars. “That is the symbol of the pact I made with Okara, Tollu, and Ateri.”

  “But my grandmother wielded magic beyond those limits,” I said, and remembered when I had awoken in her arms, returned to my human shape, aching but alive.

  “Not so,” a voice echoed in my skull, like my own thoughts but placed there by another. A voice I knew from my dreams.

  Okara lay in the doorway of Hissing Cat’s house, watching us, his scarred eye glinting in the firelight. “She unmade your magic, Foolish Cur,” the voice said. “She restored the pattern as it would have been, had you never reshaped it to your will. The pact does not forbid such a thing, though the effort of it nearly killed her.”

  “You can speak,” I said.

  The dog barked.

  “He’s a god,” Hissing Cat said. “But speaking strays close to violating the pact, so he’ll say as little as possible. Put a paw wrong, dog!” She pointed her needle at him, then drew it across her throat.

  “I am not the only one who strains the pact,” Okara said. “You have hidden yourself long, Hissing Cat. Have you kept an eye on your peers?”

  “How could she have done?” Doctor Sho said. He emerged from the house, rubbing the small of his back. “She’s been in a bloody cave for the better half of a millennium.”

  “I had passed on my pact, and watched my students succumb to ambition and brutality, like the gods before them,” Hissing Cat said. “Gods, beasts, humanity--none can endure peace for long. Always there must be war. And I tired of it. But enough of me. What is the dog talking about?”

  “The Emperor,” I muttered. The weight of his power had eclipsed even my dreams of the wolf gods.

  Hissing Cat shrugged. “What about him?”

  “He’s one of you,” I said. Yet I felt none of that awe when I looked at Hissing Cat. “Only he made himself King of Sien and made Sien into an Empire. One which conquered this island, along with everything East of the Batir.”

  “I knew of his little kingdom, and why should I care that it has grown and devoured its rivals?” Hissing Cat glared at Okara. “Nation building is no violation of the pact.”

  “But he gives power to his Hands and Voices,” I said.

  “Transmission is the pact magic of Sien,” Hissing Cat said. “Meant as a way of communication, or so Tenet--your Emperor--led the gods of Sien to believe.”

  “A magic suited to that already sprawling kingdom,” Okara cut in. “Yet he has put it to uses we did not anticipate.”

  “If he has broken pact, rain fury on his head,” Hissing Cat said with a dismissive wave. “What has it to do with me?”

  “Where the Emperor conquers, he outlaws local customs,” Doctor Sho said, seated on the steps of Hissing Cat’s house. “Think, Cat. You know well enough what you stood to gain from the pact. Safety. A world that wasn’t cracking apart at the seams. Did you ever stop to ponder what the gods got out of it all?”

  “They got to survive, is what,” Hissing Cat said.

  Doctor Sho stared at her, his expression drawn with stale frustration. An undercurrent ran beneath their exchange, speaking silently to a long, fraught familiarity. I recalled his hesitancy to enter the cave. Had he known we would find Hissing Cat here? What reason did he have to want to stay away? .

  “While you held on to a scrap of your power, they held on to their rivalry,” Doctor Sho said. Who was this strange little man, with such knowledge of ancient things that appeared in no history I had ever read? I might have asked how he knew so much, but he still carried anger toward me from Burrow, and I’d no interest in diverting our conversation into such troubled waters while it seemed to flow so easily toward topics I had longed to discuss my entire life. “The pact forbade them from waging open war,” Doctor Sho went on. “So, rather than dominion over the pattern, they vied for worshippers, and waged their contest on the battlefield of human culture.”

  “Then the gods of Sien are losing,” I said. “Growing up, the only gods I knew were Nayeni. My father taught me to worship the Emperor and the Sages--a witch of the old sort, and his servants.”

  Doctor Sho nodded. “The Sienese gods have lost, yes. Yet the borders of Sien are always spreading.”

  “And the ranks of the Emperor’s hand are always growing, and with it the canon,” I said. I was seeing glimpses of the Emperor’s grand strategy, but I needed to better understand the rules of his game. “Wherever Tenet conquers, he steals magic--or, at least, that’s what he claims.”

  In fact, I realized, with the sorcery of transmission he could add any magic at all to the canon, just as easily as he could wield any magic in the world. He was a witch of the old sort, after all. Then why didn’t he? Why go through the trouble of using me to infiltrate the windcallers when he could have given his Hands the power to call the wind whenever he pleased? And why wasn’t it a violation of the pact when he gave his Hands magic meant for the Girzan, or the Toa Aloni?

  “He isn’t stealing magic,” Okara said. “He is stealing the pacts themselves.”

  I rubbed my forearms and thought back to the sting of Katiz’s needle.

  “A pact gives the right to power over certain aspects of the pattern,” Hissing Cat elaborated. “The pacts were made with spells of the old magic, woven to restrict the changes a witch might make to the pattern. For example,” she gestured toward Okara. “When we made our pact, I agreed that my followers would only veer and conjure flame, and so I crafted a spell, and a seal, and carved it in my own flesh.”

  “Thereby weakening your followers by constraining them,” I said, remembering Oriole in my arms, my desperate grasping at a deeper power beyond the sorcery of healing, and the intractable wall that kept that power away. “Once one Hand is marked by a pact and wields its magic, the Voices can learn it--they feel every magic a Hand touches. Then it can be added to the canon without the Emperor teaching them himself and violating his own pact with the Sienese gods.”

  Okara stood, and his hackles rose. “One witch might wear many marks without breaking pact. As you well know, Foolish Cur.”

  “Each magic in the canon is permitted by a pact, but they were separated,” I said. “One by one, the Emperor is joining them together, like the pieces of a puzzle. Yet at any moment, he could transmit the old magic, and make every Hand as powerful as a witch of the old sort.”

  Okara wagged his tail and barked.

  Hissing Cat scratched the dirt between her feet with the tip of her needle. “That would violate the pact.”

  “Which is why he progresses as he does,” I said, imagining a stones board; the slow, subtle push into enemy territory, the constant need to disguise the purpose of every move even as it paved the way to victory.

  The dog wiggled, hopping from one paw to the other. A slow whine built in its throat.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t see…It can’t be that he means to reignite the war with the gods, can it?”

  “It can be nothing else,” Okara said.

  “But that would mean the end of the world,” I said.

  “Not if he struc
k fast enough.” Hissing Cat stabbed her needle into the fire. “If--if!--you are right, the truly clever thing he’s done is find a way to make his own witches of the old sort. With transmission, he could turn ten-thousand ordinary men into an army of sorcerers with the old magic at hand.”

  “You speak as though you want him to do this,” Doctor Sho said.

  “Age does little to kill old grudges,” she said. “As you and I both know.”

  “But if he fails--” I began.

  “This is all based in speculation, and by a child,” Hissing Cat said. “Oh, don’t take offense. I’ve been alive for quite a while. Thirty is very, very young.”

  “I’m twenty-three,” I said.

  She scoffed. “Not a child, an infant! I know Tenet--your Emperor. I need not speculate. He would not risk the world for petty revenge. Okara, you must chafe at the loss of your temples and witches. That is all that concerns your god, boy. The first and pettiest rivalry; the contest between divines.”

  I considered her words and found myself floundering in a sea of new information. Gods and witches of the old sort were beyond my comprehension. But there were a few certainties, which I clung to, anchoring myself.

  “I am not a god and have no stake in their rivalry,” I said. “All I know is that I watched children hunt for rats in the streets of An-Zabat, and that it was the An-Zabati, not the Empire, that tried to feed them.”

  “I have been all over this Empire of his, and I can say that the boy is correct in this--the Empire is cruel,” Doctor Sho said. “It has a beauty of its own, and its culture is far from empty or meaningless. But it is self-centered and callous, as Tenet has always been. Whether or not he means war against the gods, he certainly plans to craft a world of his own design, and rule over it forever. And it is not, I think, a world you would want to live in.”

  Hissing Cat opened her mouth to speak, and Doctor Sho put up a hand to stay her. “You could go on living in this cave and pretend that what happens outside is not your concern. But you once fought to save humanity from the whims of the powerful. Why not do so again?”

  “I always took you for a coward,” Hissing Cat said.

  “Oh, I am,” Doctor Sho said with a heavy nod. “But I’m a doctor. What I prescribe for you may not be the medicine I need.”

  “Will you teach me, if she will not?” I said.

  His expression toward me hardened.

  “I know I erred at Burrow,” I said. “But--”

  “He can’t teach you,” Hissing Cat said.

  “Because of the pact?”

  “Because I am not a witch,” Doctor Sho said flatly. “I’m just a doctor. A very, very good one.”

  “That’s impossible,” I blurted. “No ordinary doctor could know as much as you do. About anything.”

  “As I said, I am very good,” Doctor Sho said, turning the conversation back to Hissing Cat. “And my history is not at issue here. Her decision is.”

  The fire crackled. The dog, at last, lay quietly. I watched Hissing Cat stare into the flames.

  “Every heart in the world should break when children starve,” Hissing Cat said. “Though at times, that is where the pattern leads.” She reached for the bone she had kept at her side. The firelight played along its surface, filling the cracks and runes with shadows.

  “You did not give an honest answer, when I asked before,” she said at last. “Why do you want to learn?”

  “Because I saw the cruelty of the Empire, and I want to resist it,” I said, and leaned toward the fire, letting hope rekindle in my chest.

  The skulls in her hair clattered. “No. You sought magic before--you said so yourself. Tell me truthfully.”

  My mouth went dry. Like the imperial examinations, my answer to her question could open a door, or forever seal it.

  “My grandmother marked me,” I said. “I feel a duty to--”

  “No one ever sought magic from a sense of duty,” she said. “Last chance, boy.”

  She had asked for the truth. Would that be enough?

  “When I was a child, I felt the wake of my grandmother’s magic,” I said. “It was true to me, and meaningful, in ways that her stories and my tutor’s lessons never were. All my life I have been constrained by the paths others intended for me. I want to make my own way through the world, for my own reasons, based upon my own understanding. And the first, true step is learning magic as I first touched it. Magic without the canon, and without a pact.”

  She studied me for a long moment. Nausea blossomed in the pit of my stomach as I wallowed in the inevitability of rejection.

  “The pact forbids me to teach you magic beyond the pacts you wear,” she said. “But I can teach you the pattern--the world as it is you so long to comprehend. And when you have comprehended it, I can teach you how to do as your grandmother did when she made you whole. To restore the pattern as it ought to be and unmake the spells of your enemies. Who knows? If you’re as bright as you claim, perhaps with what little guidance I can offer you’ll arrive at the old magic on your own.”

  I sat with her words, unable to believe her.

  She was going to teach me. Here, I would find the answers to questions that had dogged me since childhood. Relief washed through me, and then excitement, fast and hot and energizing as lightning.

  “I’m hungry,” she muttered. “There’s smoked fish in the house. We can start after I’ve eaten.”

  The shoulder blade whistled as she flung it through the air. It, too, shattered in the dark.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The Pattern of the World

  “No, you idiot,” Hissing Cat snarled. “Don’t try to do anything yet. Just feel how the pattern changes and rewrites itself around the flame.”

  I knelt beside Hissing Cat’s fire pit, my eyes bound by a cloth that stank of mould, my hands in my lap and my legs folded beneath me. The first autumn chill swept through the cave and pricked goosepimples on the back of my arms and neck. A sensation I focused on and dwelt within until, like the pain in my knees and the stiffness of my shoulders, it no longer felt apart from me, but core to my being.

  The cold--and the heat that washed over my chest and thighs--was outside of me. The sensation was the shadow of the real cast on the wall of my consciousness. The fevers and chills, cramps and weight that I had felt in the wake of magic were shadows just the same. The first step in comprehending the pattern, Hissing Cat had said, was to perceive the distinction between the self and the other, and to regard the other as its own reality.

  “Do you feel how it burns but should not burn?” she said. “How no fuel is consumed, yet there is heat?”

  Her voice was muted, as though far away. In my mind I was a sphere, hard and smooth as jade. And all around that sphere the myriad things of the world revolved in an infinite, rebounding dance. I touched them with the same sense that once touched the walls of the canon, and I felt the pattern as I had when I was a child, before I wore the witch-marks.

  There was another will with me in the pattern, like a spar of iron jutting down from some higher, unseen place, moving against the flow of the dance.

  “I feel it,” I said.

  “Good,” Hissing Cat said, her voice its own intrusion. “Now extinguish the flame.”

  I pressed against the spar, but it was solid as the walls of the canon.

  “Force it out like the thorn it is,” she said. “Feel the world as it wants to be. Align your will with the pattern.”

  I took a deep breath and opened myself further. Align my will with the pattern...align my will with the world as it was, is, and will be.

  But there were things I wanted that were not and could never be. I wanted to be on the Batir Waste, on the prow of Katiz’s windship, fighting the Empire side-by-side with Atar. I wanted to be in Voice Golden-Finch’s garden, drinking and playing stones with the only friend of my youth. Yet I saw only crumbling obelisks, and Oriole’s blood on the ground.

  “Enough,” Hissing Cat said. The spar van
ished from the pattern, and she tore the blindfold from my eyes. “Useless fool.”

  I opened my mouth to explain, but she waved a hand to silence me. “I’m through for today, but you are not. Every teacher you’ve ever had has given you only their limited, narrow vision of what is possible. Until you see beyond that, you’ll never grasp the pattern in its completeness. Resume the first exercises until you can feel the pattern with your eyes wide open and a monkey screaming in your ear. I’m going to do what I would be doing if that bloody dog had never led you here.”

  I saw the bait, but bit anyway. “What’s that?”

  “Taking a nap.”

  The door of her house banged shut.

  I swallowed frustration, shut my eyes, and tried to open myself, repeating the breathing exercises that had been Hissing Cat’s first lesson. At twelve years old, I had veered by little more than instinct. It had been easy to imagine that I could change myself and my world with a thought and my force of will. Age and experience had taught me otherwise, had bound my mind with the rigidities of pact and canon.

  After so many years, I had found someone willing--and able--to teach the deeper truths that had always lingered just beyond my comprehension, taunting me. Too late. A terrifying thought that filled my mind with heat and thunder, ruining any possibility of concentration.

  I stood, massaging sore knees and my stiff back, and set off toward the mouth of the cave. When not learning from Hissing Cat or continuing to expand and refine the account of my life that I meant to give my uncle, I had taken to sketching and cataloging the cave paintings. As I examined them by torchlight--Hissing Cat had forbidden me to so much as conjure a flame until I could extinguish hers--I marveled at what they evidenced; that ancient people had lived lives different, but parallel to mine, and walked these same caves thousands and thousands of years before.