Tag: Tel Viv

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Karesh Ni: Chapter 8

Previous chapters to the right.

Hopefully, this is the final chapter 8.

Chapter 8

Tel Viv made several odd faces. She was wonderfully expressive, and she kept squinting and wrinkling her face, unsquinting and unwrinkling her eyes, and glaring at me like a new and unpleasant bug. I get that a lot, so she unintentionally put me at ease. Maybe it was intentional. I doubt it. She didn’t look someone executing a master plan. She looked like eaten something that upset her stomach.

“You’re a wheat merchant?” she demanded.

“I don’t handle it myself. I connect buyers and sellers,” I said.

She kept squinting. She needed a little more.

I continued. “The winter crop is already gone. I’m sure the Celephians have some in storage, but they’d fleece you. I can–”

Tel Viv interrupted, “You don’t know that!”

“That they have any in storage or that they’d fleece you?”

She squinted again. I could see her deciding if she really wanted to defend the Celephians against overcharging a customer.

“Let’s put that aside,” she said. “You’re not a wheat grower. Who do you know who is?”

“I won’t answer that directly, because you’ll try to go to my supplier and cut me out,” I replied. “But I did just show you a contract from the Truis.”

She sat back and crossed her arms. Her face closed.

I pushed. “The Truis won’t help you much because Citi Kageran observes the Maurite Prohibition. The Celephians don’t, but they’re difficult. They’re not the only exporters in Pallas, though. Who do you want to talk to?”

She exhaled, but I think she thawed a little. I pushed farther.

“What’s your timeline? Are people starving in the streets? The winter crop is growing, so most merchants will have found buyers already. The first summer crop is harvested around midsummer. Is that doable?”

She sighed again but definitely thawed. “By midsummer, you mean solstice?”

“Depends on where, but yeah.”

“I’m not under an executioner’s axe. Solstice would be fine. I could even push to autumn if the price was right.”

My knowledge of the wheat trade wasn’t too deep, but I had picked up a little. “Autumn is good. You can get a commitment cheaper that far out, but it’s risky. Weather, drought, dust-storms, bugs, anything could throw you off, but you save some money if everything works out in your favor, more if you pay up front.”

Tel Viv did a side-to-side nod. She didn’t like the thought but wasn’t reflexively arguing me. I smiled. We had a little connection.

“So you’re looking for something in summer or autumn?” I asked again, trying to get her talking.

She corrected me. “I’m looking for stable trading partners away from the Ashirai. I, we, are looking for bilateral relations.”

“Who did you used to trade with? Can you talk to them?”

“Because the Empire is leaning on its connections to cut our partners. They don’t want anyone to deal with us but them. Your contacts in Kageran won’t help. Citi Kageran is a small place, and once the Ashirai creeped in, they kept creeping. They’re like pythons, throwing one coil at a time over their prey.”

“They’ll deal with you themselves?” I asked. That sounded odd.

“Their terms are unacceptable.”

“What are their terms?”

“Unacceptable.”

I thought for a second. “Does it have to be wheat?”

She looked at me like she didn’t understand the question. “What?”

“Down south, away from the Ashirai, there’s a lot of rice.”

“You can’t make bread with rice.”

“They eat it straight.”

And we talked.

She wanted food. The people of Whitefire traditionally ate bread, so while she thought in terms of wheat and medium grains, she was willing to talk about rice. But as much as she wanted food, she wanted food not from Ashirak. The empire galled her. Her jaw clenched, and she scowled when she talked about them. She spoke in terms of deep grievances she wouldn’t clarify, old grudges she wouldn’t explain.

That’s unusual. People love telling me why they’re mad at other people.

She didn’t have as much time as she said. She needed something done, and she couldn’t do it herself. The Hierophant and other eparchs would be involved. But Eparch Tel Viv wanted to present a full plan by herself, and money wasn’t the biggest sticking point.

It was a sticking point. Money always was. But she was willing to pay to get someone talking to her.

She didn’t know it, but she was talking about Celephians. They cared nothing for Ashirai threats or pressure. Threatening Celephias across the seas was such a bad idea they enjoyed it. If the Ashirai threatened Celephias over trading with Karesh Ni, the Crystal City would have emissaries in Karesh Ni before the season turned. But the trade would be expensive.

Still, the Celephians wanted money, Tel Viv had some, they had wheat, Tel Viv wanted some, and things could be arranged. Tel Viv didn’t trust them either, and that put her in a bind.

No one should trust the Celephians, ever, about anything, but these were the players.

I needed time. My immediate contract was to find Kyria, and Tel Viv seemed pretty sure Kyria was dead. That would take some unravelling.

“Wherever you get it from, they’re going to have to bring it up here,” I said later. “And the stairs–” I hesitated.

“Can you find someone who will make the trek?” she asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “I came here through the Hyades lake, and my boat, a little one, has probably floated away. I need a boat back,” I said. “Or I’m not finding anyone.”

Tel Viv went from smug to frowning. “What do you mean it floated away?”

I told her of the rowboat. I left out Alyssa.

Tel Viv looked less and less pleased as I spoke, and my short story was enough to put her in a foul mood. Perhaps it was just late.

She offered, “Why don’t you accept our hospitality for the night, and we can continue in the morning? Or later.”

“Thank you.”

She took me to lodging in the Sunset Basilica, this place, which was a dream come true. It had hot showers, flush toilets, and no bugs. I slept warm, dry, and clean like I hadn’t in years, and when I woke up, I had a horrible, terrible, probably blasphemous idea.

#

I hadn’t intended to be a spy. I came to Pallas to be a hero, a savior, and a champion of the world, and failed catastrophically. After all that ruin, I worked in a bank because it paid well. I’m okay with numbers but I don’t enjoy them, so I started out as a translator. Then I became a thief. Now I was here.

Remember how I feel about offices, and how no one gets it but me? Another little thing like that is languages. People don’t think you can learn a language in Pallas. If you’re Celephian and want to talk to someone from Ashirak, Celephians don’t believe they can learn. They think vocab, nouns, and verbs, are endowed upon them at birth and forever their domain, and theirs alone.

I don’t really understand what their grammar school is for, because all Celephians send their kids to it. If the language is a sign of their divine gifts, why send your kids to school? Shouldn’t infants be conjugating in the cradle?

Also, translators exist. After I arrived in Celephias years ago and learned their language was close enough to English to be speakable, I’d picked up Demseen, the language of the Ashirai too. It was hard. Demseen has a lot of irregular verbs with irregular tenses. But it’s just a language, so I learned it, got a job, and did soul-sucking translation for angry, overworked bosses. I hated them, they hated me, and I took a job in the goblin city of Invedeletch to get away.

In Invedeletch I ran a bipartite house for Celephians who manage an elvish way-house. It’s the only goblin city where foreigners are allowed. That means not only foreign goblins, but humans and elves. It’s the home of the Thunderblood clan, and Invedeletch- Invedeletch is a weird place.

The city’s under a hurricane, the Gath Mahore. Always. The Gath Mahore doesn’t go away but rotates about the Sevenfold Spires year in and out. The city’s on the Kahserach coast, where the mountains meet the sea. North is the Fhysay, the great water ocean of Pallas. It’s half the size of the Pacific but covers the north pole. The Kahserach isn’t that far north, but the Fhysay brings wind down from the arctic, and the currents that ring the pole bring cold water down year round. Further south, only a few hundred miles, beyond great mountains and deep waters, the rest of goblin territory is warm, often high desert, but the Fhysay coast is brutally cold.

Underneath the hurricane, it’s worse. There is no sunshine, and it only stops raining when the rain freezes. It’s the storm from which Thunderblood makes other thunderstorms, the ones goblins sail across the world. They spin little bits of storm off Gath Mahore.

It has endured since Nilo built the first stormcloud out of poetry, which probably meant a spell, but that was almost a thousand years go, a century after the fall of Whitehall to the army of Dread. Dread shattered the one goblin nation, and they were many small peoples until Nilo built the first storms to tie them together. Goblin traders on stormclouds go everywhere there are goblins, except Death Mountain, and the storms come from Gath Mahore over Invedeletch.

And I got used to it. I lived in Invedeletch for three years, and I got used to it. Goblins sail the high deserts on thunderstorms carrying wheat, fish, seal blubber, and seaweed, and it stopped being weird. Every now and then I’d stop and think, Goblins are on a stormcloud over my head. That is weird. But it was a dry, cognitive thought instead of a visceral one. I felt obligated to think about how weird it was so I didn’t take it for granted.

Humans and elves are allowed in as well as other goblins. We’re definitely second-class people, and our rights are subservient to goblins, but if I went to, say, Thra Koakha, a Tallfoot city on the Shaggeritarch coast, I would have no rights. If some goblin found me in the city, other goblins would have wondered why if he didn’t kill me. In Invedeletch the Thunderblood goblins live on top of the clouds, humans live underground the low with elves, and goblins of other clans liver wherever they can find a place. Those goblins are above us. They can take our places in line, our homes, push us to the side if the hallways are narrow, or kick us out of the way if we stand in doorways talking. If we don’t like it, we can leave. Thunderblood thinks we should be happy to come into Invedeletch at all, the only city of goblins that tolerates lower beings. In the bipartite home, we humans and elves stayed together and made bothering us too much trouble for goblins.

We lived in caves and mines. The fires and magmas of the mountain had receded, but the earth remained warm. Folds in the old mountain were still shot through with lava tubes, and by opening shafts uphill, we could syphon rainwater down into our houses. Used water vented into chosen wadis like sewers. Every house had a little one-story shack above ground, little more than an entryway and door, but ours had nine floors underground, stacked on top of each other. The highest buried floor was for entry and exit, the next two for elvish purposes, then came five for human beings, and finally one for deep storage. The port and volcano shared a slowly expanding web of tunnels and covered walkways, expanded piecemeal as people built homes.

There I learned Klime and Isari, what humans call Low Elvish and High, but elves call Moonlit and Day. They all speak Klime until they’ve gone to the Solange, when they switch to Isari. Imagine making the Hajj, but instead of gaining a honorific, you switch languages. You can understand one from the other, but an elf from the Solange would only speak Klime to a lesser elf. Klime has an ‘I’m better than you’ case.

Elves don’t have a problem teaching other people elvish. Elves are mildly perplexed why we don’t speak elvish already, and they wonder what’s the slow-down. They’re too polite to say anything, but they wonder. Thannius Al Fir once asked me why Celephians speak Celephian at all when Klime exists, and that’s a really weird question to answer. I learned Klime and spoke it for a year without really understanding the difference until in passing I mentioned my ship from Celephias to Invedeletch had made a port-call in the Solange for resupply. It was like they learned I’d visited Heaven. I had to learn Isari straight out, and suddenly I was brunching with elven lords and ladies.

I liked living in Invedeletch but not the city. There was an exciting but tiring element of danger to it, a sense of possessing secret lore. I learned goblin tongues, Whitehall, Throathurter, and Stonefoot, and no goblin I’ve ever met knows any human. I would overhear their conversations because they don’t pay attention to humans, especially not normal-sized ones, and steal away will secrets and rumors. Most I shared with the Celephians who ran the house or the elves who paid them to run it, but one day I heard that four of the ancient relics of Whitehall were being moved. I decided to steal them.

How to say this? I didn’t mind goblins, and I didn’t get upset when they shoved me in the caves or cut in line. But when I had the opportunity to do them harm and take something of theirs they treasured, I did. I didn’t think twice. I’d learned about them. I’d learned they don’t see well in contrast, bright light to dim. Lightning does not harm them, and they describe being struck by lightning as like warm water in a bubbling spring. They live longer than us, for centuries sometimes, and their grudges grow with them. They’ve carried axes against Dread for the sack of Whitehall for more than a thousand years, and they still hold it personally. They don’t like humans because Dread was a human, and so the sack of Whitehall (which happened more than a thousand years ago!) is our living fault. They’ll knock packages out of your hands, kick dirt in your food, and trip you on the stairs in revenge for ancient Dread’s attack. And the relics of Whitehall are great treasures to a past that humans denied them. So when two goblins spoke of relics after taking my spot in line for water, I decided, I’m going to take your stuff.

So I did.

Fabled swords: the Ending, the West Wind, the Blackwing, and the King’s Blade, goblins had forged them from lightning in the forges where the Clockwork Gods had made the world. The blades crackled. At rest, they glittered and shone, but when they were moved, they leaped like lightning. They arced to steel swords and killed the wielders. They burned weapons of wood. Their goblin wielders had thought themselves invincible at Whitehall with blades of lightning.

Dread had used archers. The goblins had gotten a few. Dread had had legions of archers.

To touch a lightning sword was death, so I wrapped them in rubber, wrapped that in fur for silence, and put out the lights in their Temple of Luminance. It is a great cathedral in Invedeletch in the heart-chamber of the ancient volcano. Where once magma bubbled and boiled, Thunderblood goblins have built a church of light. Candles burn in sconces, torches hang on the walls, brazziers burn charcoal, and oil-wicks hang from platters. It is endlessly bright, so I created dark places where no goblin could see.

They just can’t see contrast. They can’t go from dark to light or vice versa, and the Temple of Luminance was supposed to be all light, all the time. I arranged a distraction, put out some lights, ran in, stole the artifacts that make them a people, and ran out. Someone chased me. I kinda stabbed him a little bit. By then they were looking for me, so I couldn’t go back to the home where I’d been staying. I went up.

From the magma tubes and delved corridors under the mountain, where I had lived, I climbed through the high shafts. At the peak of the old volcano seven ring dikes rise in the eye of the storm, tall walls of black stone that curve on themselves. The walls are obsidian and yet impregnated with gems, so to walk on the summit of Invedeletch is to walk among walls of sky, and outside the dikes swirl the Gath Mahore, a seething boil of gray clouds, striking lightning, and endless rain.

High goblins, Thunderblood-clan goblins themselves, built their city on the top of the hurricane. Their towers rise and fall with the seething clouds. Cables and ropes connected them, attached to pulleys and clockwork. When the hurricane draws two castles apart, the storm winds cranks and pumps their water. When the storm drives the houses together, gears harvest the energy to mill their wheat. When lightning strikes a cable, gear, or tower, it leaps to special crystals in their houses to shed light, reflected, refracted, and controlled to be long, low glows instead of sudden bright flashes. The true city of Invedeletch is on those clouds.

But goblins carry stones up here, brass gears, and pallets of food. They do something to the cloud, something they learned from Nilo after the breaking of Whitehall, and the storms are thick enough to walk on. Standing on the hurricane felt like standing on a floating dock in a rough sea, for the floors moved underfoot but I never fell through.

The southernmost goblin city, Bloodharvest, had been Whitehall. Now, then, it was a prison. Once a year, at midsummer, a cloud sailed from Invedeletch to fallen Whitehall in the middle of the Arsae, the tree-ocean of Pallas. It wasn’t where I wanted to go, but the cloud was leaving when I wanted to leave. I stowed away, left at Bloodharvest, and wandered through the woods and the wilds until I returned to human places.

That wasn’t a story. I walked for miles, starved, got bitten by bugs, and chased by coyotes. It was cold, wet, and I nearly died of dysentery. Alone in the woods, that may have been the worst death I’ve come close to. But luck, fate, or whomever saw fit to deliver me to a small village on the south coast of Temerraine. Its name was Holist, and there humans fished the seas near sunken Meom. They put me on a ship to Celephias, and I never saw the place again.

I found out goblins had searched the bipartite house. They’d showed up, kicked down some doors, harassed everyone, and searched the place without saying why. They did that every few years. When I’d never come back, my old housemates had assumed something bad had happened to me, and that happened every few years too. I felt better knowing I hadn’t caused them any unique trouble.

Once in Celephias I started looking for buyers for ancient, priceless, goblin artifacts, and instead, a stranger wearing yellow robes hired me to return to Bloodharvest. He’d paid me in ‘never work again’ money, which with the ‘I don’t know what I’m doing’ exchange rates meant I had to work again in a year and a half.

That had been a great year and a half. Then I was broke.

So I’d gone back to the Solange, spoken Isari to the elves, taken a contract payable in wheat options to rescue Prince Aehr from Bloodharvest, and the whole situation had been so strange, the elves so desperate, they’d never asked if I had any idea what I was doing.

I had none.

I was no spy. I didn’t know anything about combat or money laundering, and sooner or later, someone was going to figure out I was faking everything. I just paid attention to goblins when I lived there, and no one else did. I listened to the elves, and they thought that meant something. Even Alyssa thought I knew what I was doing, and sooner or later, she was going to figure it out. They all would. I had never met anyone from Whitefire, so I couldn’t listen. I didn’t know anything.

After a long, deep sleep, I woke to the smell of breakfast. A covered tray had appeared by the door, and I are it while it was hot.

My idea terrible idea percolated. It grew in my head.

After breakfast, I sent word to Tel Viv, and said it was important. She met me after lunch but acted like she’d hurried.

“Yes?” she asked. “You said you had something?”

“Have you considered goblins?” I asked.

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Karesh Ni: Chapter 8

Fidays
Previous chapters on the right.

Chapter 8

Tel Viv made several odd faces. She was wonderfully expressive, and she kept squinting and wrinkling her face, unsquinting and unwrinkling her eyes, and glaring at me like a new and unpleasant bug. I get that a lot, so she unintentionally put me at ease. Maybe it was intentional. I doubt it. She didn’t look someone executing a master plan. She looked like she’d been constipated all week, and things were starting to move unexpectedly.

“You’re a wheat merchant?” she demanded.

“I don’t handle it myself. I connect buyers and sellers,” I said.

She kept squinting. She needed a little more.

I continued. “The winter crop is already gone. I’m sure the Celephians have some in storage, but they’re going to fleece you. They might not,” I admitted.

Tel Viv interrupted, “Might not what? Have wheat in storage or fleece us?”

“Technically either, but let’s be honest. We both know Celephians. They’ll fleece you even if they don’t have any wheat in storage.”

“You don’t know that!” Tel Viv snorted at me.

Which was also technically true. “Okay,” I agreed.

She squinted again. I could see her deciding if she really wanted to defend the Celephians from charges of fleecing a customer.

“Let’s put that aside,” she said. “You’re not a wheat grower. Who do you know who is?”

“I won’t answer that directly, because you’ll try to go to my supplier and cut me out,” I replied. “But I did just show you a contract from the Truis.”
She sat back and crossed her arms. Her face closed.

I pushed. “We need to talk a little bit. I did just show you my last contract, but there are many suppliers in the world. I can talk to people. What do you need?”

She exhaled, but I think she thawed a little. I pushed farther.

“What’s your timeline? Are people starving in the streets? The winter crop is growing, so most merchants will have found buyers already. The first summer crop is harvested around midsummer. Is that doable?”

She sighed again but definitely thawed. “By midsummer, you mean solstice?”

“Depends on where, but yeah.”

“I’m not under an executioner’s axe. Midsummer would be fine. I could push to autumn if the price was right.”

My knowledge of the wheat trade wasn’t too deep, but I had picked up a little. “Autumn is a little far. You can get a commitment cheaper that far out, but it’s risky. Weather, drought, dust-storms, bugs, anything could throw you off. You save some money if everything works out in your favor, more if you pay up front.”

Tel Viv did a side-to-side nod. She didn’t like the thought but wasn’t reflexively arguing me. I smiled. We had a little connection.

“So you’re looking for something in summer or autumn?” I asked again, trying to get her talking.

“I’m looking for stable trading partners away from the Ashirai. I, we, are looking for bilateral relations.”

“Why away from the Ashirai?”

“Because the Empire is leaning on its connections to cut our partners. They don’t want anyone to deal with us but them. Your contacts in Kageran won’t help. Citi Kageran is a small place, and once the Ashirai got in, they just creep. They’re like pythons, throwing a coil at a time over their prey.”

“They’ll deal with you themselves?” I asked. That sounded odd.

“Their terms are unacceptable.”

“Okay. Does it have to be wheat?”

She looked at me like she didn’t understand the question. “What?”

“Down south, away from the Ashirai, there’s a lot of rice.”

“You can’t make bread with rice.”

“No, you eat it straight.”

And we talked.

She wanted food. The people of Whitefire traditionally ate bread, so while she thought in terms of wheat and medium grains, she was willing to talk about rice. More than anything else, she seemed intent on not-from-Ashirak. The empire galled her. Her jaw clenched, and she scowled when she talked about them. She spoke in terms of deep grievances she wouldn’t clarify, old grudges she wouldn’t explain.

She didn’t have as much time as she said. She needed something done, and she couldn’t do it herself. The Hierophant and other eparchs would be involved. But Eparch Tel Viv wanted to present a full plan by herself, and money wasn’t the biggest sticking point.

It was a sticking point. Money always was. But she was willing to pay to get someone talking to her.

She didn’t know it, but she was talking about Celephians. They cared nothing for Ashirai threats or pressure. Threatening Celephias across the seas was a bad, bad idea. The Celephians wanted money, Tel Viv had some, and things could be arranged. But Tel Viv didn’t trust them either, for good reason, and that put her in a bind.

I needed time. My immediate contract was to find Kyria, and Tel Viv pretty firmly told me she was dead. That would take some unravelling.

“So, what are your transport and storage arrangements?” I asked, fishing for a delay.

“We have a port,” she said so idly and flippantly she was bragging.

“From…down there?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“Can I see it?”

“Easily.”

“And warehouses?” I added.

“Of course.”

“Can I see them too?”

“Will that take some time?” she asked.

“Days, at least.” It would take days, but I could pad a few days of spy work into there. “Maybe weeks.”

She nodded. “I’ll have someone show you around. For your stay, you are invited to take one of the guest rooms in the Sunset Basilica.”

“The Sunset Basilica?”

“This place.” She waved an arm around.

“Oh, I accept.”

“Good.”

“Am I still under arrest?”

“You mean bound and detained?”

“Yes.”

Tel Viv thought. “No, but you’ll have an escort. You aren’t detained provided you don’t leave,” she said finally.

I sorta expected that. “Food, drink, a bed?”

“We will provide all.”

“Oh, wonderful. I accept,” I said again.

“Good.”

They took me to a very nice white room that did have bars on the doors, but the guards didn’t lock them. I had a window, but it didn’t open. But I also had a bed, sheeted in silk, and several small cabinets and shelves. Eparch Tel Viv spoke with the hospitallers outside while I looked around and came in when they were done.

“You’re not detained,” she repeated. “But you may be here a while. Tell someone if you need to leave, and if possible, you’ll be escorted.”

Again, what I expected. “The necessary?”

She looked at me blankly.

“Out house? Hanging garret?”

“Oh, the water house. That door.” She pointed at a flat wall.

I looked at her, the wall, and her again.

She walked over, put one finger on several glowing red spots and pushed. A line of yellow lights appeared in the outline of a door, and the wall swung inwards.

“Just press any stars in the shape of the Door.” And then she frowned.

But I wasn’t paying attention. Through the hidden door was a bathroom. It had a sink. It had a toilet. It had a shower.

In awe, I examined the shower tap. Two little chains hung from a white bevel supporting a short, metal rod. I pulled the little rod down, and water fell from the ceiling. I twisted it, and the water steamed. They had hot, running water.

“Do you know how to use a rain closet?” asked Tel Viv condescendingly, but she didn’t bother me at all.

“Oh yes, Eparch. I do.”

And she left.

The guards outside smiled and shut me in. They didn’t lock the door, but I had no intention of leaving.

I took the first hot shower I’d had in years, and it felt like heaven.

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Karesh Ni: Chapter 7

Previous Chapters

Chapter 7

The front doors looked like the outside thirds of an oval shoved together. They were round and tall, and came together at a point. On either side hung a lantern on a silver cord, glowing with red, blue, and white light as if many different fires were confined to one small vessel of glass. Inside the floor was polished, and yet my feet could tell where the floor was smooth marble and where it was slicker quartz. But it was warm, and my breath no longer steamed. My hostess had me lead to another office, one with frosted glass walls and a glass roof, two floors up from the entryway to the building. She dismissed the guards at the door.

“Are you sure?” asked one of the guards when she told them they could leave us alone.

“Yes. You hospitallers may go,” she said.

“If she tries to escape?” asked the guard, a hospitaller apparently.

My real captor looked at me, the glass walls, the star-filled sky above, and back to him. “She can try.”

That ended their conversation. The guards left. She sat behind her desk and looked me up and down. Without taking off the ribbon, I couldn’t sit down. She put her knuckles to her lips like she was punched herself in the mouth very gently and sighed.

“Would you mind, please?” I asked. I held my hands out to her.

She stared at my hands, either lost in thought, cold and numb, or something else. I couldn’t tell. Suddenly she reached out and caught the ribbons with one index finger and pulled. The ribbons fell off.

When I was younger and had assumed serial killers would play a much larger part in my life, I’d learned to get out of handcuffs and ropes. I hadn’t started working on these yet, but I’d poked at them. I figured they were doable but tricky. They were not loose pieces of ribbon. They should not come off with a one-finger pull.

She got up, walked around the desk, and pulled the ribbon off my ankles the same way. Taking both, she returned to her seat while I transferred my coats to a hook on one wall. She looked at the binding, looked at me, and her face told me nothing. Her hands shuffled the ribbons back and forth as if she’d forgetten they were there.

“To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?” she asked.

“Astrologamage Elegy.”

“Astrologamage?” she repeated in a voice that didn’t imply she wanted a response.

I took off my first three jackets, left the last one on, and hung my various clothing, bags, sacks, and gear against the wall. I sat down. The room was pleasant and warm, brightly lit with more lanterns. They cast the same multi-hued glow. There were no drafts.

Like a frozen ship breaking out of the ice, my brain took a while to get back to that point.

She had lanterns and no drafts.

I looked around the room: no fireplaces, no vents, no holes in the ceiling. The room was warm and dry. There were no smoke trails on the glass, and the clean marble didn’t have soot trails. I stared at a lantern and saw twinkling white lights behind glass.

“You use stars in your lanterns?” I asked.

“Welcome to Whitefire,” said the woman, opening her hands to display her empty white desk and bright office. “The name means starlight, and we’re rather familiar with it. Now Astrologamage, star-sage, drawer of horoscopes, and reader of the future, why have you come to Karesh Ni?”

“I’m here to see Amon Tim,” I said.

“But you have not come to Hierophant Amon Tim, you have come to Eparch Tel Viv. Why do you wish to speak to the Hierophant?”

And that was the real question. I had actually thought about this, but my cold, confused brain wasn’t working. I had that feeling where I knew I knew something and couldn’t say it.

The first thing that came to mind was, “I’m looking for the previous hierophant, Kyria.”

Tel Viv rolled her lips around like she was tasting my words. “Why?”

“I threw her numbers, and she’s at the peak of my ascending fortune. The Treasure Chest favors her.”

“Bad news, girl. She’s dead.”

“My horoscope says she’s not.”

“We fed her to a dragon.”

“I believe.”

She didn’t really shake her head, just cocked it to the side like a half-shake. “Good luck.”

Our weird half-argument ground to a halt.

“Why did you ask for Amon Tim if you’re looking for Kyria?” asked the eparch.

“He is the hierophant. She was. He might be able to help me.”

Tel Viv gave that little half-shake again.

She sounded confident. She also wasn’t overcome with sadness. Alyssa had said Amon Tim and his eparchs, and Tel Viv called herself an eparch, had deposed Kyria. Also, just now, the eparch had said, ‘we fed’ of Kyria’s death.

“Why did you–” I wasn’t quite sure how to finish. I blinked a few times. If I could just start thinking, she was saying things I needed to know!

Tel Viv answered anyway. “Treason. Consorting with dark powers. Murder. If you want specifics, she summoned the dragon, we turned it away, and summoning dragons tends to end with someone getting eaten. Someone happened to be her and she deserved it.”

After a few seconds she continued, “You’re rather openly associating yourself with a dead traitor.”

And she jumped ahead of me. I hate the cold.

“I’m not associated with her yet!” I said quickly and just as quickly added, “Or at all if she’s dead. I can’t associate with her if she’s dead. I had no idea about any of this.”

Tel Viv looked at the ceiling. “Yes, I’m getting that impression. Well, Astrologomage, your astrology seems to be as useful as one would expect. I doubt the dead traitor is going to bring anyone to the Treasure Chest, or ascend through your Treasure Chest, or whatever. As a practical matter, I don’t think you’ll find anything you want here. We are the true followers of starlight, and you’re not impressing me much. There is no fortune here for an astrologer.”

“Oh.”

She thought I was too incompetent to be a traitor, which was good, I guess?

No, it was definitely bad. It was bad and better at the same time.

“In fact, unless you happen to be a wheat merchant, I think there’s really nothing for you here at all.”

I stared at her like a dog confronting a doorknob until the logjam of my thoughts cleared. “I just sold a contract of ten cargos of winter wheat to the Truis of Kageran.”

Tel Viv stared at me so blankly I think sheer incomprehension blocked her. She obviously thought I was lying, lying so badly she couldn’t believe it.

I kept going. “The buyer is House Ossaria of Elvenhome. The Celephians cleared the contract. Strike price is confidential. Baroness Alyssa and her consort Satre witnessed it. I have the contract in my bag.”

After several more long seconds Eparch Tel Viv said, “Show me, please.”

Because obviously, obviously I was lying. Obviously!

Except I went into my bag, pulled out the contract, and showed her. I even showed her the deposit receipt the Gesphains gave me when I deposited my loot. Satre had escorted me and insigned the receipt too. I don’t think he really trusted me, and I definitely believed he didn’t like this whole operation. Putting his stamp on the contract probably gave him a feeling of agency. But none the less, I had all the paperwork, and I hadn’t forged any of it.

Tel Viv couldn’t believe it or me. She kept shaking her head and unblinking like she was fighting sleep.

While she was staring at this incomprehensible truth, I scooted forward so I could put my hands on her desk. The chair complained when I dragged it.

“Tell me,” I said. “Do you need wheat?”

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Karesh Ni, Chapter 6

Previous Chapters
Chapter 6

As I descended, I thought about Whitefire. After leaving the Baroness’s office I’d asked about them because I’m super curious and definitely not just nosy.

Whitefire followed Starlight, one of several Celestial elements (Alyssa knew another, Lightning). They were lead by a Hierophant and four Eparchs, Kyria having been Hierophant before and Amon Tim being the Hierophant now. Hierophant Mal Set had built this fortress up among the stars, their source of power, after they fled in exile. It was called Karesh Ni, the Silver City.

When asked why the Ashirai empire ordered broad sanction against Whitefire, the Kagerani had generally agreed that nearly a century ago, Ashirai Emperor Thullus had married a young woman, Aryce, who’d already been engaged to Maurius, a Whitefire initiate. Royal Ashirai weddings are three-day affairs where the couple don’t sleep together until the third day, the first day of celibacy representing a sacrifice to their gods and the second a sacrifice for the people. By tradition the groom stays awake partying while the bride gets some sleep so the whole world can attest to their celibacy before heaven. Thullus had caught Aryce and Maurius breaking celibacy during God’s Night.

Before dawn he’d dragged them to the Gold River that runs through Ashirak, and before being cast in, Maurius had cursed him and all his people. Thullus had heaved him into the rapids himself, and within those waters, Maurius had been drowned or beaten to death on rocks. Aryce had begged for mercy, but when Thullus lifted her as he had her lover, she cursed him as well. She followed Maurius.

The romantic ending of the story is the lovers found each other down there. I don’t know.

But that didn’t cause the Maurite Prohibition. That came later. During the somewhat subdued feast of the People’s Night, Thullus had a bit too much to drink and went to the Gold River’s canyon wall to taunt their ghosts. The canyon wall gave way, and Thullus fell to his death.

The Empire left without an emperor, the Baron of Dylath-Leen, the Saffron Prince of Tyr, and Duke Larange, a cousin of Thullus’s, all went to war for the throne. The legions stayed out of it, and the Prince of Tyr won. However the oaths the Red Guard swore were to the ‘Emperors of Ashirak, born sons of Jermaine, Kings of Kings,’ and a matter of bloodlines precluded the Saffron Prince from taking the seat. When he tried, the legions threatened mutiny.

Prince Eigen of Tyr, the Saffron Prince, apparently told the Reds to kick rocks. Two legions marched on Tyr, and on the morning of the battle when the Prince realized that he was going to have to fight the Red Guard, the Swordsmen of Ashirai, he suddenly discovered a willingness to negotiate.

In the play Birthright of Gods the Red legions send their lowliest foot solder, Ve Therrin, to challenge the entire Tyrian military to a series of single combats. After seeing his forces ruined by one man, the Prince sued for peace. Pretty much everyone agrees that didn’t actually happen.

Anyway, without the bloodline to take the throne, the Prince Eigen ordained himself king, demoted everyone else to less-than-kings, a custom which continued to Alyssa’s ‘royal baronacy,’ and the legions declared obedience to the king of Tyr. End of that, right?

Of course not. Perhaps you see the loophole? If not, let me give you a hint. Duke Larange had a daughter, Hnoss, who at this point was eight. The Prince Eigen of Tyr was fifty three and married.

The Emperors of Ashirak were ‘sons of Jermaine’ and drew their birthright from direct descent from one of the gods of old. He couldn’t take the throne of Ashirak, but he could give it to a son, provided the mother of his son was Larange’s daughter.

His wife Tamora did not agree. She murdered him and Hnoss (the eight-year old!), the legions murdered her, and the Baron of Dylath-Leen took the throne, swearing the same oaths to respect the line. The throne was ‘given back to Jermaine’ since no one lived of his lineage to take it.

The Baron blamed the whole thing on Maurius and Aryce, because clearly their curses led to this affair. Rumor escaped that followers of Whitefire were to be rounded up and beheaded, their mouths stuffed up or tongues pulled out, and none of them stayed around to find out if the rumors were true. On pain of death, the followers of Whitefire were exiled from the lands of Asharai for the evil power of their curses.

The killing of Hnoss is the part that really got me. It was a hundred years ago, so I suppose it’s just history, but there was no reason for that! She was eight!

Kageran had joined the Ashirai Empire about twenty years back. Queen Alyssa had become Baroness Alyssa. Citi Kageran had accepted the Maurite Prohibition. Many Whitefire refugees who had lived in Kageran at the time disappeared. The people I’d asked hadn’t known where they’d gone, nor about this place. Alyssa and Satre had but seemed to have kept their mouths closed. The feeling of having secret knowledge, that I was one of the elect, pleased me. In spite of the cold, I hurried down the stairs.

Several hours later, that feeling of being special was really struggling to keep up with the desire to feel my toes.

I decided to give up. At the time, I was several hours into the murderously cold descent and had stopped to huddle on the stairs and eat another flat. I’d been walking in a trance, concentrating on keeping my footing on the wide, flat, and smooth stairs. Since I couldn’t feel my feet, every step had an element of hazard to it. I wouldn’t know I was slipping until too late. A low balustrade ringed the stairway, intricately working in white marble, and I sat by one of the balusters. For a while I looked out at the world, the skies undimmed by clouds, and wondered why I wasn’t overwhelmed.

I was too cold to be overwhelmed.

That was it. If you’re too cold to appreciate the vastness of space, the world laid out like a painting, and mythical architecture, you are too cold for anything. I ate my flat. I gave up. I slouched over to tie my shoes and happened to look down, past the stairway.

The island that hung below was a brown island about a deep cone. From an outer triangle, it rose to a vaguely circular ridge, and inside the ridge a deep pit sank into more white stone. Houses, buildings, roads, and clustered on the ridge like white crows sitting on rooftops, and two greater palaces stood on either side. One of the white stairways descended to each of them. The gold rope sank into the very center of the central pit.

The mountainsides were grim and dull, covered in the naked trunks of brown trees. Yet between them grew a few evergreens, dark enough to look brown or black themselves. At the center of the pit bubbled a white froth, and mist flowed through cracks in the right to fall down the slope. Cloud rivers fell off the sides of the island like smoke rises from a candle yet in reverse, descending smoothly in straight lines until they began to fold and curl up before catching the winds and spreading. They blew east, the direction Pallas passed far below. A wide band of milky white light flowed underneath the island.

I ate another flat.

Okay, fine, I thought, and I un-gave up. It was right there. I had to be almost done. This was one of those darkest-before-the-dawn moments.

It wasn’t. I wasn’t even close. I had to go twice as far as I’d come before. It turned so cold my eyes hurt. My eyelids froze shut, and I couldn’t see. I had to thaw them with my fingers, which made my fingers freeze, and then I had to thaw my fingers with my breath.

I got stubborn, kept going, did an awful lot of whining, said some very, very unfriendly things about Alyssa, Satre, people in general, and used a bunch of language that would not make Prince Aehr swoon with desire.

Did elves swoon?

They’d better. Someone was swooning after all this, and it wasn’t going to be me.

Honestly, I was getting pretty tired and felt like I could go for a swoon.

I couldn’t swoon now. I’d fall over the railing.

I kept walking.

#

The bottom of the stairs flattened out on a wide landing. On either side, the landing looked like it ended in cliffs, but that was because the landing was perched on one of the high points of that central ring-like ridge. There were paths and lower buildings below on both sides. Forward and behind more buildings rose from the crest, some of them geometric with windows and doors, some botanical like alabaster flowers, and some oddly shaped like spirals or points, all made of that same white marble.

Two stood out. One, a huge white orchid, stood by itself, and the body of the building resembled a closed flower, just in the act of unfurling. Between the petals, a red and gold light escaped. The other resembled a dragon’s skull and was the only animal-looking thing around. It perched on the crest of the ridge some distance behind me. It was a little bigger than a house.

I squinted at the dragon skull when the stairs passed overhead. It could be real. Dragons did get that big, and the skull was grayer than marble. The eyes, nostrils, and mouth had been blocked up with stone, making the difference obvious. But a skull that big would need a body even bigger, and I didn’t see any half-mile dragon carcasses lying on the island.

I didn’t see many people, and those I did see moved quickly. They usually had white cloaks with pointed hoods, ornamented with stars or silver bands. Many of their clothes looked quilted, with plenty of white designs sewn into white jackets, coats, and pants.

I don’t think they had much dye. That catches me by surprise sometimes, even as long as I’ve been here. People generally work with whatever color thread comes off the sheep or plant. Kageran is so unusual in its colors. Here, I spotted embroidery, but it was all the same white thread as the basic garment.

They didn’t look prepared for the cold. Most had little white shoes with turned-down cuffs no higher than the ankles and no gloves. They hustled, outdoors and walking quickly down a street, to return indoors again with a slammed door behind them.

I also spotted stair guards, and they looked miserable.

Sitting in a little hut facing the stairway were three people. Each one wore two or three of those white cloaks, but the same tiny shoes. Two had their arms folded with hands inside their armpits, but one’s sleeves hung floppily empty. I saw little pink fingers poking up through her collar as she breathed on her hands. The man on her left was frowning so hard his wrinkles looked like creases, and another man had his head down against his chest.

I was about two circuits up when one bumped another and pointed at me. They spoke among themselves, and someone ran off. I couldn’t very well turn around now, so I kept going. Before long several more guards arrived with one among them who seemed in charge, a dark-skinned Malician woman with her hair done up like two cacti. They stood informally at the bottom of the stairs, waiting.

Half a circuit up, I paused, tried to shake off the cold, and decided what I wanted to say. I adjusted my clothing and gear into the most comfortable manner. Then I walked down with fingertips on the railing.

The waiting party said nothing as they stood at attention, watching.

On a hunch, I stuck my both hands into my pockets as I stepped down onto the wide marble landing, and the lady in charge said, “On bound law, do not move.”

“Okay.” I did not move my hands out of my pockets.

“I am Eparch Tel Viv. Who are you?”

“Astrologamage Elegy.”

Official people tend to like following their own rhythm, so I let her go.

“Astrologamage Elegy, you have entered Karesh Ni. Do you have a mark of passage?”

“No.”

“Then you are detained and shall come with me for questioning. Do you have any remarks?”

“I’m here to see Hierophant Amon Tim,” I said.

She gave me side-eye while the guards stared straight ahead or turned their necks to stare at me.

“We’ll see about that. Hospitaller Ain Var, bind her hands and feed.”

The original lady guard, there were three there now not including Tel Viv, said, “Ma’am,” and took some white ribbons from her pocket. She looked like she’d been holding them while she waited.

Detaining seemed much like being arrested. They searched me and found the knives in my sleeves, belts, and boots. They missed two. We didn’t talk. The guards in the hut rotated, and Tel Viv lead the rest away.

We passed rows of sterile white houses with dead lawns out and empty gardens. Frozen watercourses, dry fountains, pristine white pathways swept of old leaves branched off the roads we followed, looking like they’d been carved of ice. The whole city, glorious, elegant, and polished, looked like some abominable dream in crystal. I was so tired.

People had told me about this. I didn’t listen. Mountaineers, Malicians, the incomprehensible people who voluntarily live even further north than Malice: they talk about how the cold wakes you up at first but then puts you to sleep, confuses your brain, and makes you stupid. I’m not stupid, so I’d just ignored them when they said the cold does it. But I was suffering the cold now, and it wasn’t some brutal, anguish of suffering. I wasn’t being cut by blades or burned with irons. I was just cold, miserable, dumb, and I hated it. The only way I could fight back against the cold was not complaining, so I walked along as silent as everyone else, as silent as the ghost-shaped people who watched from the rowhouses, as silent as the houses themselves. We entered the white lotus palace, veined with glittering quartz, and shaped like a blossom opening to the moon. It was, I would learn, the Sunset Basilica, and it had been made by humans imitating elves.