by Matt Wallace
Taru, who was ready to sprint from the room and down the length of the tower, stops. They look to Lexi expectantly, blood-spattered hands clenched around their blades.
Lexi’s eyes are lost in thought. She’s no longer seeing the bodies or the blood or the chaos of the room.
“Te-Gen?” Taru prompts her, gently.
“They could not have gained access to us without help,” she whispers, talking to herself. “It’s impossible. There are not… they weren’t stealthy operatives. They were… brutes. They were allowed entrance into the Circus, into our towers.”
“By Aegins?” Taru asks, a hateful edge in their voice.
Lexi thinks in silence again before answering. “At the very least there must be Aegins in the Circus who are complicit in this. We can’t know who or how many.”
“Then what is your command, Te-Gen?”
“Go to the cooperative keep and raise the Circus alarm, on my authority.”
“That alarm is reserved for disasters that threaten the entire Circus, Te-Gen—”
“When you are being attacked in an alley, you don’t call for help, not if you want people to answer that call. You yell ‘fire!’ Everyone comes when they hear that.”
Taru nods, understanding. “Very wise, Te-Gen.”
“When everyone arrives I will demand an Aegin from outside the Circus to oversee this, one who could not possibly have been involved.”
“Also wise, Te-Gen.”
“Go,” Lexi bids. “Quickly.”
Taru bows their head and strides to the surveyor’s room doors, turning back to Lexi before closing them.
“Please, Te-Gen, lock the doors upon my exit until I return.”
Lexi nods quickly and assuredly, her thoughts still firmly mired in the events of the last few moments. Nevertheless, after Taru is gone she moves over to the closed doors and sets their heavy latch.
Lexi moves slowly and purposefully about the room, collecting the shattered remnants of her reed-of-the-stone-lake. She does her level best to ignore the bodies, their worsening stench, the rug near the window almost completely soaked through with blood. Picking up the pieces of the demolished instrument gives her just a small sense of focus, enough to carry her through what’s to come.
When she’s certain she’s located the last splinter, Lexi carries them over to the windowsill and carefully lays them out, arranging them as best she can to reform the instrument. It’s like putting together a puzzle made from her own memories, and when she realizes her hand is trembling around a length of the reed’s neck, tears beginning to prick her eyes, Lexi stops.
Thankfully she hears the first of the horns bellow a few moments later. It’s the gargantuan bone siren that arches out from the top of her cooperative keep’s parapets. Its call is deep and rippling, like the call of some great sea beast singing underwater. It’s soon answered by the horns erected in their neighboring cooperatives, and then the cooperatives beyond that, until the entire Gen Circus is a warning choir.
When Taru returns, knocking at the surveyor’s room doors and calling to her from the other side, Lexi’s eyes are dry and her hands as still as the corpses at her feet. She moves across the room and unseats the latch on the doors, opening them to find her retainer filling the passage beyond, once again clad in their leather armor, blades sheathed at the hips.
Behind Taru, it seems as though half the cooperative is gathered in the tower stairwell. Gen members, workers from the bazaar, and cooperative attendants all stand shoulder to shoulder in collective shock. There’s confusion on some of their faces, but word of what awaits them behind Lexi has obviously already started to spread.
At the head of the crowd are half a dozen Aegins. She recognizes several of them from inside the cooperative and the Circus paths outside. Lexi tries to read their expressions as well, but it’s more difficult. While one or two of them share the assemblage’s disturbed concern, most of their faces are stony, their eyes dark and guarded.
Most of the Aegins have their gaze locked on Taru’s back. They’re not even looking at Lexi or the scene behind her.
Taru speaks quietly and only for Lexi’s ears. “Te-Gen, I’ve explained the situation and your command to them. They are… not pleased. But I made it clear the only way anyone would enter this room is through me.”
“I imagine they were even less pleased with that,” Lexi remarks.
Taru nods. “And yet there they stand. Behind me.”
Lexi wants to grin, but she can’t locate the expression in that moment.
“They’ve sent word,” Taru says. “A third-class Aegin or above from outside the Gen Circus will be here soon.”
“And until then?”
“I will wait with you.”
Lexi nods and steps aside, allowing Taru to enter the surveyor’s room. She’s allowed one last look at the resentment and bitterness on several of the Aegins’ faces before Taru pulls the door closed once more. Lexi wonders if those looks were for her, or her retainer.
The thoughts are banished as she turns back to the carnage overtaking the small space, no longer able to ignore the gruesome scene or block the fresh memories of how it came to be so.
Lexi draws a deep, troubled breath. “I truly do not wish to spend any more time in this room. In fact, I may never be able to sit in here again.”
“I am sorry, Te-Gen. You could wait in another room, but I will be unable to guard both you and these bodies.”
Lexi shakes her head. “We must preserve what happened here and not allow anyone to tamper with the bodies until an official record is made by someone beyond reproach.”
Taru doesn’t even attempt to mask their disdain. “You ask a lot of Aegins.”
They seem to immediately regret speaking out of turn, but before they can apologize Lexi dismisses the incident with a wave of her hand.
“Perhaps I am. But it’s the best a Gen of two can do under the circumstance, unfortunately.”
They wait while the horns continue their bellowing, then one by one cease until only the call of Gen Stalbraid’s own cooperative remains. That horn discontinues its steady blowing in favor of short, signaling bursts every few moments, to mark the cooperative as the source of the emergent disturbance.
The next knock at their door is lighter and less insistent than that of Taru’s hammerlike fist. They cross the room to unlatch and open the doors. Taru’s towering height and wide frame obscure Lexi’s view of the petitioner, but she hears them exchanging words before Taru permits him admittance.
The Aegin is tall, though not quite as tall as Taru, and perhaps a few years Lexi’s senior. Short, dark curls crown his head. His face is clean-shaven and hard-lined with several thin scars permanently slashed across his right cheek, but something in his expression softens what would otherwise be a severe visage. There’s an openness about him, an approachability that all Aegins should practice, yet very few manage.
He does in fact appear to be, at least on the surface, the exact opposite of the two Aegins she and Taru encountered beside the sky carriage berth.
“Te-Gen,” he greets her formally. “My name is Daian. Aegin, third-class.”
“Lexi. My name is Lexi. I get enough of that from this one, thank you.”
She flicks her chin in Taru’s direction.
The Aegin grins, though it’s fleeting. His eyes have moved from Lexi to the stiffening corpse on the table behind her, then to the one steeped in its own blood on the rug by the window.
“I hope these weren’t… servants of yours, Te-Gen.”
“No, they were not,” Lexi firmly states.
Daian looks back at her. His expression is genuinely disturbed. There’s remorse in his eyes, for her and for the dead.
“I’m sorry. Are you all right? Did they harm you?”
Lexi shakes her head.
“I’m assigned to Old City. I’m told you requested an Aegin not assigned to the Gen Circus.”
Lexi nods.
“May I ask why?�
�
“Those men… they were sent here to kill me. One of them told me so. He did not say who sent them or why, but that much he made clear.”
Daian looks over his shoulders at the Aegins assigned to patrol the Gen Circus and guard the cooperative housing Gen Stalbraid. It’s a brief glance, and he drops it quickly.
What he says next he says quietly. “Your request was not… unwise… under the circumstances.”
She can see it’s difficult for him to admit, but the admission is enough to convince Lexi he’s both trustworthy and at least of above average intelligence.
“Te-Gen,” Daian begins, then corrects himself. “Lexi… if what you’re saying is true, we have to contact the Gen Franchise Council and the Protectorate Ministry. An assassination attempt on a Gen member is… beyond my grasp of words to describe. It’s also beyond my authority to investigate or even… confirm.”
“I understand that.”
“Then you understand that even a random attack in the Gen Circus by simple vagrants is an event that has never and will never happen, as far as the citizens of the Capitol have been led to believe. Such news is shattering enough. This city… this entire nation is built atop the notion Gens are untouchable, and the protection of Crache is absolute. The idea that the head of a Gen was hunted by assassins, successful or not, will crack the entire Capitol.”
“I understand that, as well. I simply want a record of what happened here, as you see it, set down before anyone else becomes involved. I want those details preserved and protected against corruption.”
Daian nods. “That I can do. I promise you.”
“I thank you.”
“It’s my duty.”
“I am sorry to say not all your colleagues I’ve encountered are so… forthright in that arena.”
Rather than taking umbrage, Daian actually smiles. “A person in an Aegin tunic is still a person, Lexi. Some are good, some are pig shit on two legs.”
Taru visibly tenses, and even more visibly scowls.
Daian holds up a hand. “Excuse my language, Te-Gen.”
Lexi, however, has to stifle her laughter, not the least of which the chaos of the last hour would no doubt turn the brief bout of levity into hysteria.
“I appreciate your honesty,” she says, composed.
Daian bows his head. “May I involve my colleagues now?”
“Of course.”
“Thank you, Lexi.”
“Let us take you to another room in the tower while they work,” Taru bids her after Daian has taken his leave. “You don’t need to be here any longer, Te-Gen.”
Lexi permits herself one last view of the carnage she helped create.
“Very well.”
As she allows Taru to escort her from the room, past the baleful eyes of the other Aegins and the concerned well wishes and queries of the Circus residents, their assurance that Lexi need not be here any longer lingers in Lexi’s head.
She will never tell Taru, or anyone else, but Lexi already knows a part of her will never leave that room and the violence that will forever stain it.
WHEN GHOSTS SPEAK YOUR REAL NAME
THEY NEVER RETURN TO THE camp that hosted the Revel. Instead, the wounded and the surviving Savages are herded onto wagons and carted thirty miles along the Sicclunan front—at least, what used to be the Sicclunan front. At dusk Evie hears a thunderclap directly behind the Legion caravan that turns out to be riders from the victorious Skrain, specifically the battalions who moved in to sweep away what was left after the Sicclunan retreated from the Savages.
From what Evie gathers listening to the chatter among the taskers and the soldiers, they’re now at the absolute vanguard of the conflict. The Skrain have pushed the Sicclunan armies farther back into their own lands than they have in decades, and they intend to press the effort until they reach the closest Sicclunan city.
“If they… we… win this war, what do you think will happen to the Savages?” Evie asks Mother Manai, who’s in the middle of sharpening the blades that have replaced half her fingers.
The older woman laughs. “Girlie, the reason you never hear about this ‘war’ in the Capitol is there ain’t no war. That’s not what this is.”
Evie has only just begun to grasp the idea that such consuming violence and all-out conflict can exist just beyond the borders of Crache. What she has witnessed and taken part in is bigger and bloodier than anything she had envisioned, even during the process of becoming a Savage. What’s coming can be nothing other than open warfare.
“If it’s not a war… what is it?”
“Something… vastly more dangerous. Expansion. Crache isn’t a country, it’s a great scythe cuttin’ down everything around it. That’s how it feeds its cities and keeps ’em so clean and free of woe. And it’ll never stop. It don’t know how. When it eats Siccluna it’ll move on to the next people, the next realm, the next meal.”
Evie falls silent after that, thinking again of the Professor, remembering what he said about Crache and history.
It’s south of a freezing midnight when Evie spots firelight from the back of their wagon. They’re spread out for half a mile, and unlike the journey to the front, this is no cold camp. They’re greeted with small bowls of hot broth with noodles and sprigs of winegrass and even a few slices of dried pork. There’s rice wine, too, though they’re each given scarcely a sip apiece.
Evie can see the smoke and flame rising from a giant bonfire at the center of the camp, but the Savages never get near it. Most of the encampment is reserved for the Skrain’s revelry and comfort. Evie can smell the meat and wine. She can hear the music and the celebratory laughter. The Savages, meanwhile, are herded into one small corner with much smaller fires.
Apparently, their celebration is over.
Rather than stake out a spot around one of the emaciated fires, Evie chooses to keep warm by searching the Savage quarter of the camp, careful to make it look like aimless wandering. She uses the barest corner of her eyes to examine every face she passes, never looking at anyone directly. None of those faces register even the slightest spark of recognition from her.
She ends up standing at the edge of the firelight, past the last of the raggedy tents. Evie stares into the darkness of Siccluna, a land she seems to know even less about than she did when she killed one of their soldiers for defending it.
Back near the largest gathering of fires, the Elder Company are enacting their own small Revel with what little resources they have, refusing to let the Skrain be the only ones to enjoy the day’s victory. Evie watches from a distance, admiring them, their resolve and their ability to laugh like the masters of all creation even in the deepest of bondage.
It’s not an ability Evie possesses. She walks away from the merriment, intent on finding the warmest place possible to sleep.
She sees the man hunched over the dying embers of several burned logs. Evie stops dead. He’s grown a beard that, while unkempt, is thick enough to obscure half his face. The other half is covered in a dozen tiny blue runes brought about by the blood coins, but there’s no doubting it’s him, not to Evie. His dark hair is longer, but he’s obviously done his best to smooth it behind his ears and into some passable shape with his fingers.
Evie can’t believe it at first, let alone accept it. Part of her wants to look away and then back to see if he remains sitting there, as if he might be a specter or her mind’s own creation.
But he’s real, and he’s sitting no more than six feet away from her.
“Brio,” she says, almost tentative.
He looks up immediately, a new light coming to his eyes.
When he sees her, really sees her, that light gives birth to tears that shine.
Brio rises, slowly and with an obvious pain shooting through one of his legs.
“Ashana?” he asks in utter disbelief, using the name she left behind when she became Evie, when she volunteered to infiltrate the Savage Legion in order to find him, if he was still alive.
And he is.
Unbelievably, impossibly, he is.
Evie nods. “It’s me.”
Brio can scarcely force the words out. “How… how can you be here? What are you doing here?”
“It doesn’t matter how I got here,” she insists, and then, with the resolve of a blade forged in the hottest of fires: “All that matters is that I’m taking you home.”
PART TWO UNRAVELING THE EDGES
THE BLACK EAGLE
IT’S SAID NO ONE IS ever brought before the Protectorate Ministry; they always come to you.
More to the point, they always come for you.
It’s said there isn’t a soul in Crache outside their ranks who knows where the Protectorate Ministry is located. They have no chambers or quarters in the Spectrum, at least none above ground. There are rumors they live and work in secret far below the Spectrum floor, in subterranean caverns that date back before the Renewal and the very founding of Crache itself. That’s why they clad themselves all in black, so they may wear the cloak of darkness to which they’re accustomed out into the light of day.
Lexi knows very well those rumors and all others are worth about as much as a handful of mule dung.
It’s not difficult to hide a building, even a large one, when you control virtually every piece of information released to the public. She imagines it’s even easier when your entire existence is structured around secrecy and subterfuge. It’s the Protectorate Ministry’s job to keep Crache’s confidence while learning everything about its enemies they don’t want Crache to know. Concealing an address is child’s play to such people.
Yet they do intentionally cultivate themselves with an air of the removed, even the otherworldly. The one standing in the Gen Stalbraid reception parlor, who introduced herself to Lexi and Taru simply as Ginnix, looks like a ghost attending her own funeral. Her stark white hair is cut close enough to the scalp to look like the top of a skull, and the strange pink of her eyes is light enough to be almost imperceptible from just a few feet away.