“Probably well into autumn,” she said. “And then we’ll head north to warmer climes before it gets too cold—Tash, maybe. Some of us have fussy constitutions.” She glanced accusingly at Lanh Chau. “And you? How long are you staying?”
“I haven’t decided yet,” I said weakly, still processing “well into autumn.”
“You’ll be here through the stormy season, at least,” she said confidently, as if she were telling me what my orders were, instead of guessing my intentions. “You won’t want to get caught on the road in a tempest.”
“Maybe more than that,” I said. “Maybe a few years. Maybe longer.”
She frowned. “You find the Heyrlandtsche so interesting?”
“They’re all right. They’re as interesting as people are anywhere.”
Her frown deepened. “A young lad like you, you ought to be scampering about from one end of the earth to the other. Use all that youthful energy while you have it.”
“I’ve already done that with my master. I’ve seen plenty.”
“You hadn’t seen our bowl, though,” Lanh Chau said suddenly. “I could tell. You’d never seen anything like that. And you didn’t even ask us anything about it. Chant says you should always ask questions when people show you something they think is nice.”
“Hush,” said Mistress Chant, without heat.
“Oh,” I said. “It didn’t seem like the important thing at the time.”
“It was a present,” Lanh Chau said.
“From the king of Inacha, yes. Arenza said.”
He gave me an expectant look that faded gradually into outrage. “You’re not going to ask? It’s from a king, and you don’t want to know anything about it?” He looked incredulously at Mistress Chant, who shrugged. Lanh Chau threw his hands in the air and repeated that Sut phrase they’d used before—the one that meant something like torque–tacking–tilting head.
“Perhaps he’s met his fill of kings,” Arenza murmured. “You wouldn’t know.”
“I haven’t,” I said quickly. “I meant no offense. If you’d like to tell me about it . . .”
“There,” Lanh Chau said, smug and satisfied. “Go on then; tell him. Tell him how we got it.”
* * *
178. Oh, that boy! I’ll smack him upside the head if I catch him pestering her again. He’s got a very Chantly natural inclination to assume everyone’s business is his business, but now he needs to learn that not all subjects require his nose shoved into them.
179. This is probably a lie. He just wanted your attention. Arenza might have thought you were handsome, but she’s too reserved to say anything about it. She prefers to hang back and watch a situation, like someone sitting beneath a tree on a lazy day with a fishing rod—the fish will bite or they won’t, Arenza thinks. We’re working on it. I’m hoping she and Lanh Chau can learn from each other.
180. Seriously? Really? You think you can come up to my apprentice and start meddling with their training? You think you’re entitled to criticize my methods or my teachings? You should count yourself lucky I never heard about this. We would have had a row and no mistake.
181. Hah! That’s my boy! He’s impossible to impress or intimidate. He has no patience, and he can spot bullshit like yours from a mile away.
182. He did tell me that he thought you were soft. This must have been why.
183. A tool? Well! That’s not selfish and manipulative of you at all. People aren’t tools, Chant. But you knew that, didn’t you? You’re not the sort of person to phrase something like that. This is one of the bad things you inherited from your master, isn’t it?
184. You know what? Yes. It was a pleasant surprise, though I suppose you wouldn’t believe me. I was surprised and I was pleased. I thought we could finally find a moment to talk properly. I thought we—plural, both of us—could come to an understanding. But let’s just see how you framed things, eh? Let’s see how you do with casting me as the villain in this next part. Let’s see how you convince yourself that nothing I said in this bit was right or worthwhile. You hated every word I said that night; I could see it then and I can see it now.
185. No one wished for that more dearly than I. And yet . . .
186. Not bad. Pretty close. Closer to a general gutter-tongue than a thieves’ cant specifically, but the distinction is often blurry.
187. Oh, that was in those pages I burned, wasn’t it? In my defense, they didn’t seem relevant at the time or like something you’d ever mention again.
188. I expect that I’m about to be scandalized. I cannot bear to look at the next page. I dread looking at it. When I look, I’m going to see that you’ve copied down the story I told you in the same words that came out of my mouth. I would have been pleased and flattered to find out that you’d relayed my little story to someone else, but copying it down? Copying down one that’s mine? Just beyond the pale.
189. What I said: “Be mindful that he’s got some screwed-up methods and attitudes. I don’t want you getting ideas.”
THIRTY-ONE
The King of Inacha
Several years ago,” Mistress Chant said,190 “only a few weeks after Lanh Chau had become my apprentice, we were traveling east from Map Sut, following one of the tributaries of the Ganmu River, and we came into Inacha. The king was having some trouble with the ambassadors from Genzhu—”
“He’s always having trouble with the ambassadors from Genzhu,” Lanh Chau spat. “Because Genzhuns are greedy cheats.” He was Sut, so of course he’d think so, quite understandably. The Genzhun empire sprawls across the entire, vast Genmu River Valley and all its tributaries, except for those two tiny kingdoms: Map Sut at the root of the river delta, and Inacha off by the mountains to the east. Year after year, both of them just barely manage to fight off the Genzhun armies and diplomats, and every other generation or so, one of them falls and is absorbed for a time, until it manages to shake itself loose once more. Even for an empire, the amount of money it takes to conquer just one of them is unfathomable—they’re both blessed with an extremely inconvenient (and therefore defensible) landscape, as well as allies at their backs who are very much invested in suppressing Genzhun expansion campaigns. A particularly motivated monarch with a few years of good harvests and robust tax seasons can manage taking one, barely, but so far they’ve never been able to hold it long enough for their grandchildren to see.
“The nature of this particular trouble was related to a so-called peace treaty which the Genzhun diplomats had put forward, which appeared at first glance to be a welcome opportunity for Inachans everywhere to take up a new hobby besides sharpening spears and fletching arrows for the next summer’s siege. But the king of Inacha had a feeling that something was wrong, and he had a feeling that his advisers might be keeping secrets from him,” Mistress Chant said. “Now, I’m an old friend of His Majesty; I spent a summer as a court troubadour when I was new to Chanting and he was new to his kingship. We became very close. So when I turned up on the palace doorstep, I was given a warm reception, even considering I had Arenza and Lanh Chau tagging along on my apron strings.”
Lanh Chau whispered loudly, “I saw ’em kissing.” Arenza bit back a laugh and glanced at Mistress Chant, who was completely unaffected.191
“As I said,” she continued in a voice like honey, “we became very close during my time in his court. He knew that he could trust me. He asked me to look at the peace treaties for him, and of course I agreed. It took me a week or two, and it would have taken longer if I hadn’t had Lanh Chau along to help read the damn thing—I speak Genzhun, of course, but I never bothered learning to read it. There were two copies, quite usual in this sort of situation: the Genzhun copy and a translated Inachan copy. Now, the translation was technically correct, but there were a few key differences between the treaty when read in translation versus in the original. The Inachan version stipulated that upon signing the treaty, the two kingdoms would exchange symbolic gifts of silver and copper to mark the new friendship between their
countries. And in the Genzhun version—”
“It said that Inacha had to give Genzhu all of their mines!” Lanh Chau burst out. He slapped his hand against the side of the wagon.
“Hush,” Arenza said sharply. “You stole the end from her.”
“They’re greedy fish, the lot of them!” Lanh Chau went on. “Like fish in a pond! You throw in some breadcrumbs, and the Genzhuns appear out of nowhere and gobble gobble gobble until it’s all gone!”
Mistress Chant laid a quelling hand on his arm. “I showed His Majesty the discrepancy, and he had his advisers executed, and he had the Genzhun diplomats packed off home with a letter requesting that if the empire wanted to engage in a game of sneaky tricks, they could at least do His Majesty the honor of sending competent players.”
Lanh Chau snorted. “And then he threw a big party for us, and he gave us this bowl, and we ate so much food—”
“Here we go,” Arenza whispered to me. “Brace yourself.”
“I memorized the menu,” Lanh Chau declared. “First course: a salad in the Araşti style, greens with goat cheese and walnuts and figs, dressed with a pomegranate balsamic vinegar reduction. Pale white wine. Second course—”
Mistress Chant folded her hands in her lap and gazed off into the distance with an expression of exceeding patience.
“—a soup, chicken and cream and onions, flavored with makrut lime leaves and ginger. Also, a selection of sweet peppers and pickled mushrooms, preserved in olive oil. Third course—”
Arenza rolled her eyes and sighed.
Lanh Chau continued doggedly. “Third course. Fresh river trout poached in rice wine with ginseng. An assortment of baked turnips and parsnips from Sharingol. Roast pigeons stuffed with oranges. Fourth course!”
“You’ll have to forgive him,” Mistress Chant murmured to me. “He was living on the streets when I met him. Food is very exciting to him.”
“Roast pork, tender enough to fall to pieces, with an oily chili-ginger sauce. Roast peppers and cherry tomatoes, lamb kebabs flavored with garlic and sumac, and those Araşti rice things rolled up in grape leaves—what are they called? Dolmas!”
“Nearly done,” Mistress Chant said.
“Fifth course, a clear chicken broth flavored with lemongrass. Sixth course, fresh bread of seven types, with herbed butter, honey butter, plain butter, five infused olive oils (chili, cumin, basil, malisess, orange peel). Seventh course, tiny fowls the size of my fist, one for each of us, with an orange-ginger glaze, served in nests made of twigs of carrots and potato and beets. Eighth course, twenty different sorts of dumpling—some with meat, and some with just vegetables, some with a combination, some with juicy sauce inside; some baked, some steamed, some fried. Ninth course.” And here he held up his hand and started ticking things off on his fingers. “Sweetbuns with custard filling. Sweetbuns with apple jelly filling. Honeycakes. Sticky sesame cakes with red bean filling. Baklava of two varieties, cashew and pistachio. Miniature dome cakes with almond whipped cream. Egg custard tarts. Fruit ices—peach, strawberry, and rambutan. And cool jasmine water to drink at the very end.” He fell silent and looked at me expectantly.
“It sounds amazing,” I said politely. What I wondered most was how deeply into debt the king of Inacha had thrown his kingdom in order to offer a spread of such exotic variety—rambutan in Inacha is . . . not unthinkable, but not what you’d particularly regard as affordable, either. And makrut lime leaves—that’s not a plant suited for the Inachan climate either. “It clearly made an impression on you. Does the king of Inacha have an Araşti cook?”
“An Araşti and a Sut,” Mistress Chant said, nodding. “Behnou Atil of Şehir and Oung Te Jue. They don’t get along,” she added wryly. “Hence the, uh . . . assortment of things. They’re very passive-aggressive with each other.”
“Have you ever seen that much food at once?” Lanh Chau demanded.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “But now I’d like to.”
“I ate all of it.”
“All right, if you’re not going to be quiet as we agreed, then scat,” Mistress Chant said, shooing him away. “I was hoping to talk to my brother-Chant about more than just food.”
“Why?” Lanh Chau demanded, aghast.
“Away with you! Arenza, go with him.”
“He mentioned something about specializing in songs,” I murmured, as soon as they were out of earshot. “I’ve never heard of such a thing, but why would he pick that, of all things? Hasn’t it occurred to him that he could do food instead?”
“I’m planning on mentioning it to him when he’s older,” Mistress Chant said. “Preferably after he’s sunk his homeland beneath the waves, and after he’s had a few years as a journeyman. The plan is to tell him right as I’m hugging him goodbye and he’s about to go off on his own, so he won’t be my problem anymore. We’d never hear the end of it if that thought occurred to him.192 So don’t you dare breathe a word. I’m waiting to see if he thinks of it himself.”
I nodded. “Sister-Chant,” I said, with some difficulty. “Can I ask you something?”
“By all means,” Mistress Chant said.
“Why did you take a second apprentice?”
She quirked an eyebrow at me. “He picked my pocket quite deftly, and then he came back a few minutes later, angry and demanding to know what I thought I was playing at, carrying foreign coins around to entrap young street rascals into their own downfall or some nonsense like that. Arenza and I had just come from Mangar-Khagra, and we were in Sou Yun Pin, a small town near the mouth of the Genmu delta. We were planning to go upriver, and I—”
“No, no, no,” I said. “You already had an apprentice. Why would you take a second one?”
She frowned, puzzled. “Why shouldn’t I have two apprentices?”
I resisted the urge to fidget. “You’ve got to admit it’s unusual.”
“Unusual,” she said.
“My master only had one at a time, so I was just wondering why—I mean, it’s so difficult and time consuming to have one, it must be even worse with—”193
“Do you have an apprentice, brother-Chant?”
“No.”
“Have you ever had one?”
“No,” I said. My mouth was dry.
“Did you plan on taking one soon?”
“No.”
“Ever?”
I looked away. “I can’t,” I said, even as I heard my master-Chant’s voice ringing in my head: It’s part of the job, training the next one.
“You can’t,” she said. “Interesting.”
“Why are we talking about me? I just wanted to know why you’d—” I gestured in the direction where Lanh Chau had stalked off.
“Why I’d what?”
“Never mind. I was just asking a question. You don’t have to be . . . like this.”
“Like what? What am I being?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Let’s talk about something else. Maybe we could talk about the flowers. That’s kind of what I came here about.”
“The flowers,” she said flatly. “The ones you’re selling your soul for.”
“Yes,” I said. I fidgeted under the weight of her disapproval. What does it matter to her, anyway? It’s no business of hers. And, on the other hand, what if she’s right? What if I’m doing something wrong? “Do you mind? Talking about them?”
“I don’t know what you expect me to tell you,” she said slowly. “You seem to know all about them.”
“There was an incident today,” I said, wincing. “And something felt off about it. I just wanted to talk to you.”
“Where was this incident?”
“In Sterre de Waeyer’s offices.”
“The incident was related to you conning hundreds of people out of their money?”
“That’s not what we’re doing,” I said, flushing so hard my cheeks stung. “We don’t control them; we can’t convince them to buy if they don’t want to.”
“But you can present them with a
beautiful platter of lies, and when they make decisions based on false information, that’s not your fault?”
“Well—”
“Well nothing. Why did you come here?” she asked sharply.
“Today there was nearly a riot in front of the store, and I was the only one who went outside to chase them off. They ended up bidding with each other for the bulbs.”
“And?”
“And I thought it was strange.”
“Yes, it is strange that you’d pick flowers, of all things, to fan the city into a hysteria. Of all the luxury goods you could have offered them! Not rugs or perfume or clothing. At least clothing has a purpose: it keeps you warm or dry. Flowers do nothing but look pretty, and some of them smell pretty. These don’t even do that.”
“They eat bugs,” I offered, feeling a little desperate.
“Oh, sure. Sure, yes. But to eat them, they first have to attract them. This city is going to be miserable in a year’s time or so, if you keep going at the rate you’re going.”
“I’m just doing what I was told to do.”
“And you think that means you have no responsibility? You have knowledge, Brother-Chant. You know what you’re doing isn’t quite right—I can see it in your face. You’re miserable with your knowledge. And you’re making a choice to do it anyway.”
“What else am I supposed to do?” I said.194
“You were supposed to make wiser choices. You were supposed to think about the ways stories can be twisted and perverted. You were supposed to be better.”
“Well, I’m not. I’m not better. I’m just me, just—” I swallowed hard. I’d almost said Ylfing. “Just the same as I’ve always been. I’m not wise, or special.” I gave up being Hrefni when I sank my homeland beneath the waves, but once you have a culture of realistic assessment of your own skills in your bones, it’s hard to break the habit: “I’m certainly not the best Chant in the world, but I’m not the worst either. I’m still learning—you said so yourself. You said I had things to learn. So what right do I have to make decisions about what’s best for Sterre and her customers? Why should I dare to think I know better?”
A Choir of Lies Page 15