by Matt Wallace
“I understand, Edger. I know what you meant. It’s okay.”
They’ve reached the end of the stony bank. A solid granite monolith rises from it, perhaps ten feet high and as big around as a centuries-old cypress tree. Dyeawan moves her gaze up its length. What appears to be an iron plate has been forged and set into the side of the monolith facing the shore. A single large rung hangs from the center of the plate. It’s wide enough for Dyeawan to crawl through, and thicker than one of her arms.
She’s immediately taken by the fact that she can’t discern its purpose, or what it could possibly have been built to do.
“What is this?” she asks Edger.
“A relic from another time,” he says, staring just as intently at the monolith. “It has stood here for thousands of years. It was here before the Planning Cadre was built, before Crache existed. We call it the God Rung.”
“I thought mythology was dangerous,” Dyeawan echoes his words without a trace of sarcasm.
If Edger could, he would grin, but he hasn’t even brought any of his masks. Dyeawan didn’t notice at first, but she is suddenly aware of his lack of expression. She finds herself wondering if that means he’s more comfortable around her than others.
“This isn’t mythology, it’s history, and one known only to the planners. Our studies of it and this island lead us to conclude it was used as a form of punishment, or more precisely, judgment.”
That sheds no light on the monolith for Dyeawan. “How?”
“At high tide the waves crash over this stone bank with ferocity. Were we to remain here for another few hours, we would be easily swept out to sea. In another age, the accused were brought here to the end of the bank before high tide. They would hold on to the God Rung with their bare hands. If they were able to resist the waves, they would be set free. If not, the sea or the gods, or whatever the so-called ‘nobility’ of that time pretended to believe in, judged the accused.”
Dyeawan wonders why she was unable to figure that out for herself. Now that Edger has explained it, the purpose of the God Rung seems obvious.
“You’re quiet,” Edger observes. “You want to know why the answer eluded you.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t worry, Slider, this wasn’t another test.”
“Then what is it? Why have you brought me here?”
“It’s a lesson. You couldn’t see the God Rung’s purpose because your mind isn’t capable of working like those of the people who built this. You’re not cruel, punitive, cowardly, or conniving.”
“I’ve seen cruelty before.”
“Not like this, not used by those who rule.”
“Maybe they believed in what they were doing. Maybe they had faith, like you have in me and in what the Planning Cadre does.”
“Faith does not relieve one of obligation or action. True faith isn’t in an imagined deity or some mystical force that solves all one’s problems. True faith is a reason to act, or it has no useful function. The men and women who built this rung used faith to excuse themselves from acting, from responsibility. They were cowards, and their cowardice bred cruelty. These were petty people who attained their station and status through lies about the sanctity of bloodlines, of extraction. Their entire lives were built, not around function or purpose, but around lies and self-interest.”
“Not like now, like us,” Dyeawan says, almost as if repeating words from a poem or a song.
“No. Crache was founded on a very simple doctrine: on the belief that the best person for a job should do that job, regardless of their parentage or how the flesh between their thighs was formed. Their beliefs even excluded women from performing many tasks simply based on the fact they were women, viewed as weaker and inferior to men in all ways. Our belief is that people, not gold or steel or wood or stone, are our finest resource. Finding their purpose, their function is everything… even in the condemned. That’s why we allow citizens to form Gens, to pool resources and talent and offer their skills and services. The best are rewarded as we are rewarded with the benefit of their function.”
“I’ve read about nobility. Being noble is supposed to be a fine quality in a person—”
“So is faith, and it is until it’s twisted and misused for personal gain. That’s what nobility was. If gods were the greatest lie ever told, nobility was the second. And their lies gave life to monstrosities like this thing in front of us. Nobles did not seek function in people, only submission and fear. The God Rung was only one such means. There was also a thing called ‘ritual combat,’ the idea that an accused person, regardless of their supposed crime, was innocent if they could win a physical fight, or if their chosen champion could win such a fight against their accusers.”
“I don’t understand.…”
“Of course you don’t. You didn’t understand the God Rung, either, and for the same reason. It’s a cruel fallacy. It was another way to twist the idea of faith and gods into a means of petty, wasteful control, and to absolve one’s self of responsibility or consequence for a cruel action. Inaction is often the harshest cruelty. Remember that.”
Edger falls silent then, allowing her to digest all he has told her.
“I can see the truth in what you’re saying. I don’t know if it’s… what’s the word… absolute. I don’t know if anything is absolute.”
“The nature of people is, I promise you. You can predict it like the coming and going of the seasons. Fortunately, unlike the weather, that nature can be controlled and harnessed, molded.”
“Is that what you think the Planning Cadre is?”
“That is part of it, a large part. The rest is simply keeping things running smoothly and making the lives of our people as rich and long and full as we can.”
“But no God Rungs,” Dyeawan says, more to herself than to Edger.
“That’s the difference,” he confirms. “Remember that, too.”
“Is this lesson the only reason we’re out here?” she asks, sensing more.
“That’s my girl. The God Rung may have puzzled you, but you still see through me.”
“So there is something else?”
“Yes. There’s a question. It’s one every candidate must answer before they’re welcomed into the fold as a planner.”
“I thought you said my last test was the last test.”
“It was. Think of this more as an initiation rite.”
“I’ve read about those. Most of them sound very much like the God Rung without the dying part.”
Edger laughs. “That is customarily astute of you, but I promise this is nothing like that. As I said, it’s a question. Nothing more. Almost a riddle, but it’s about Crache, and the Cadre, and earning the right to be the keepers of all that’s lost or unknown to most people.”
“What’s the question?”
“You know the Spectrum?”
“That’s the question?”
“No, I’m explaining what the question is to you.”
“I’ve never been inside, but I lived in the shadow of the Spectrum all my life.”
“Do you know how it was constructed?”
“No one does. No one knows how to make things like that anymore, not for longer than… I don’t know, but a long, long time.”
“Thousands of years, before even the God Rung here. It’s a craft lost to even Crache’s master and mistress artisans. And that’s the question.”
“How was the Spectrum built?”
“Yes.”
Dyeawan tilts her head back to look up at him. “The planners know?”
Edger nods. “We are the last ones with the knowledge of it.”
She asks the obvious question. “Then why don’t you use it to build things?”
“Because there is a vast difference between knowing how a thing was done and doing it yourself.”
“So I have to figure out how the Spectrum was built?”
“Yes, and present your theory to me and the rest of the planners.”
“What if
I can’t?”
“I promise all you’ve gone through will not have been a waste. You’ll still be invited to join any other part of the Cadre. They’re practically frothing to have you. Word has spread.”
“But I won’t be able to become a planner, like you.”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
Dyeawan stares out across the water. She can’t see the shore of the Capitol through the mist obscuring even the horizon.
“You figured it out?” she asks.
“I did.”
“When you said the Cadre hadn’t seen test results like mine in forty-three years, you were talking about yourself, weren’t you?”
“I was, yes. You’re very much like me, I suspect. In many ways.”
“Then I can figure it out too,” Dyeawan says resolutely.
“That’s what I wanted to hear. Shall we head back?”
“Yes, thank you.”
Edger begins maneuvering the tender around to point it in the opposite direction of the bank.
As Dyeawan shifts the paddles to aid him, she leans over the side and looks down at the rocks beneath her wheels. Acting on an impulse she doesn’t fully understand, Dyeawan reaches down and seizes one of the round, flat stones. She allows Edger to push her up the bank as she cradles the stone in her palm while her other hand runs over its unnaturally smooth surface.
Still unsure of why, she slides the stone inside her tunic before returning her arms to the paddles and urging them forward.
KNIVES SPEAK LOUDEST IN THE DARK
DAIAN DOESN’T LIKE THE SEA. He was born in the Tenth City, about as far inland as a Crachian can be extracted before changing nationalities. He didn’t come to the Capitol until well into manhood. The air that permeates the Bottoms never sat right in his nostrils, and always seems to cause his stomach to perform unpleasant acrobatics. The sea itself looks untrustworthy to Daian’s eye. It’s too vast, too silent, and yet always moving. That perpetual motion disturbs him the most. It’s not something to which he feels safe turning his back.
The Bottoms isn’t composed of the docks exclusively, but they are the center of its microcosmic world. The constant commerce and transport and construction draw those who belong to no Gen and accept no other place in Crachian society, those who choose to live outside the auspices of the state, but can either ill afford to leave the Capitol or refuse to do so. They come to feed off the scraps left by the massive machinery of the shipping trade and hide in the monolithic shadow cast by such towering enterprise.
Daian salutes the Aegins stationed there by grasping the hilt of his dagger in its scabbard with one hand and raising his other. They respond by holding their weapons aloft. Seafront Aegins carry daggers only as last-resort weapons, very few if any of them devoting the time and energy to the discipline of the short blade that city Aegins do. Not confined by the narrow streets of the Capitol, the seafront Aegin is issued a gleaming silver trident with a four-foot haft. They’re useful for crowd control, and as lifelines on the oft occasion a drunkard goes plunging off a dock.
For close-quarters combat, they carry short breaching axes that can also be used as tools to cut through line, mast, or hull in the much more likely event of an emergency onboard one of the ships docked in the bay.
Daian breathes through his mouth in a concerted effort to mitigate the smells carried on the sea air. The colossal trading ships crowding the bay are a city of wood writhing atop the low tide. He watches dozens of vagrants tethered to one another by thick wrist and ankle chains being led away from the docks by fellow Aegins. The triple prongs of their tridents prod the reluctant and the stragglers along.
Daian heard there’d been a recent sweep of the shipbuilding yards. Apparently dozens, if not hundreds of such vagrants had long taken up residence in the excess hulls stored there. He stops to watch the procession of new prisoners, the sight giving him pause. He thinks about those numbers, hundreds of vagrants, and the limited space in the Capitol’s cells.
It didn’t take Daian long to realize that most Aegins are concerned with precisely two mandates from the Spectrum and two mandates only: aesthetics and statistics.
Aesthetics refers to the appearance of the city, and then strictly its veneer. No one in the Spectrum seems to care what goes on behind closed doors, as long as it never under any circumstance spills into the clean, conflict-free streets of the Capitol. Daian can count on one hand the number of raids he’s experienced in his tenure as an Aegin. He’s often reflected on the notion that the brilliance of the sky carriages isn’t making travel within the city faster and more efficient, it’s in clearing the streets. Keeping people moving keeps them from quarreling or robbing or killing, and bottlenecking them in elevated sky carriage stations makes them easy to watch and control.
Statistics refers to the number of “undesirables” arrested and incarcerated by every Aegin. Officially, there is no number Aegins are required to meet. Unofficially, that number is handed down to them from their superiors on a weekly basis. Likewise, there is no official punishment or reprimand for not meeting one’s non-existent quota. In truth, going several weeks with low numbers of arrests is the same as an Aegin requesting a posting at some stinking stable in a satellite hamlet outside the cities.
In a society that demands constant proof of one’s value, that demands pure function in exchange for food, shelter, clothing, and above all, status, forcing a street Aegin to live by a number alone is enough to make that number lethal for others.
Daian isn’t naive; he understands the necessity of appearance in all things Crachian. If anyone, in fact, understands the importance of keeping up appearances, it’s him. Be it the picturesque street or an Aegin’s arrest record, image is the veneer that maintains order, far more than any number of men and women in green tunics carrying short blades. He doesn’t believe in arresting the innocent or even targeting harmless vagrants, however. In his mind it’s counterproductive. Crache worries too much about the aesthetic of every street and alley. What difference does it make what these people do down here? The only goal is not to be one of them.
His relationship with Chew is the perfect example. Any other Aegin in the Capitol would’ve clapped manacles around Chew’s wrist the second they witnessed him practicing his chosen form of grift.
Daian, on the other hand, recognized an opportunity presenting itself.
He finds Chew where Daian always finds Chew, plying the trade of an everyday fishmonger in the market. He’s a pudgy man approaching the twilight of his life, although most of his gray hair has already expired. His eyes have remained sharp and his arms strong, and the latter is hardly the result of tossing freshly caught fish across the market, something Daian doubts the man has ever done.
Most of Chew’s fish is several days old, some of it approaching a week or more. The smell alone is enough to keep most regular citizens from patronizing the stand, but Chew travels that extra mile by having his minions pound the fish into battered, unappealing roadkill.
“How’s today’s catch, Chew?” Daian asks him as he approaches the stand, pinching his nose between two knuckles.
“Couldn’t tell you,” Chew answers blandly, never particularly happy to see the Aegin. “You should’ve asked me four days ago, when it was the day’s catch.”
“That’s a shame. Uni sounded mighty good for supper tonight.”
Chew grunts. “Plenty other fish stands, if you had not noticed.”
Daian nods sincerely. “True, but none so informative as yours.”
The older man sighs. “What you want now?”
“I just have a little something that I need you to take a look at, perhaps offer your rarified expertise on.”
“I don’t suppose this is work for which I’ll see compensation,” Chew says drearily.
“Isn’t breathing free air the best compensation one can receive?”
“I’ve grown weary of that line, Daian. I am even wearier of being forced into your personal servitude. I am a humble businessm
an. Why torment me?”
Daian smiles. He closes his fist around the hilt of his dagger and draws it smoothly from its scabbard. Without looking down, he stabs the blade into a pathetically small, sickly green-skinned and eyeless tuna that’s been slit and gutted for sale. The tip pierces its rotting flesh easily, but stops short as it strikes what sounds and feels like steel.
Chew frowns, averting his eyes as the guilty do.
“Now, what did this little fellow swallow, I wonder?” Daian asks.
He removes the tip of the blade and uses it to lift one of the slit folds of the tuna’s body. A small, intricately forged piece of metal now occupies the space where the tuna’s guts once rested. It’s a decorative pendant folded and hammered into the crest of Gen Feng, who breed the insects that power the city’s streetlamps and oversee their maintenance and construction. Their allotment from the state is immense.
In Crachian cities a Gen pendant is more valuable than any hard currency. Each pendant allows one access to the cooperative bazaars, to food and even temporary shelter from inns and eating-houses that service Gen members exclusively and are supported by the state. Pendants bearing the right Gen’s symbol on its rim can grant the wearer a fortune’s worth of allotments from all those merchants. Falsely posing as a member of a Gen is a crime punishable by death.
Forging Gen pendants carries no less a penalty.
“This tuna has gone bad, Chew,” Daian informs the fishmonger.
He scoops up the body of the fish, fake pendant still concealed within, and cradles it on the flat of his dagger’s blade. Daian turns and flings the tuna across the wharf. It disappears over the break line and hits the water somewhere unseen.
Chew curses violently under his breath.
Daian turns back to the forger. “Shall I inspect the rest of your stock for you? You can’t be too careful with seafood, you know.”
“Just show me whatever it is you have to show,” Chew demands.
“Thank you so much,” Daian says pleasantly. “That’s very kind of you.”
Daian removes the coins he discovered among the charnel house ash and offers them to Chew. He’s cleaned them up enough to make the shaggy, hollow-eyed face gracing one side of each of the coins more visible.