Page 54

Chapter 54

The medikkers swept Ana to a cradle where they began to examine her, all their augmented eyes and noses and ears poring over her like beetles seeking a bruise upon a gourd. Ana whispered to them as they worked, and though I could not hear her words, the medikkers seemed quite surprised, consulted their various tomes, then approached me.

“She asks us to put her in an uyumak, sir,” said the medikker. “A profound sleep. One that could last for days.”

“She said she needed rest, ” I said, shocked. “That seems much too far.”

“It is her orders. And it is a possible solution for her issues, but it is a very rare balm, one only done when the brain has suffered immense trauma. Has this happened to her?”

“Not that I saw.”

“Then perhaps you can convince her otherwise.”

I approached Ana, who lay on her side like a child—the position reminded me strongly of Pyktis’s false body in the box—her spindly ribs rising and falling with each rattling breath.

“Ma’am,” I said hesitantly, “they say—”

“Don’t bother trying to persuade me, child,” she said, her voice soft yet surprisingly strong. “This is not my first experience with such exhaustion. Five days of sleep should do it.”

“You wish to sleep for five days ?”

“I do! For you have things under control, do you not? You remember all I said and did. You may speak for me as things…settle.”

“It may be a very violent settling, ma’am.”

“Then you should be aptly placed. For though your wits are merely sufficient, you are wicked with a sword! I shall trust you as I rest.”

I watched as she took another deep, labored breath. “Are you in pain, ma’am?”

“Pain? Feh? That is but nerves reporting discomfort, and can be ignored.” She raised her blindfolded head and whispered, “But…do you know what hurts worst, Din?”

“What, ma’am?”

“Why, it’s the…the crushing disappointment of it all. The investigation ends. It’s all over now. No more riddles, no more need for imagination. And all was so small, at the end. It was for money, and land, and brutal, petty nihilism. Honestly, how…how tremendously disappointing. ”

I studied her, curled upon the cradle. I suddenly realized for the first time that Ana might feel much as I did at the end of an investigation: the loneliness, the alienation. Yet hers was different, perhaps: a hunger unsated, and hopes dashed.

A person, just like everyone else. It made me think on Pyktis’s last true words, before he died.

“You think of him now,” said Ana faintly. “Don’t you?”

“Can you read minds as well?” I asked.

“Despite all my wishes, no! But a frustrated imperial servant might see a little of themself in the man who was killed tonight—true?”

“Some…some words he said had the semblance of truth,” I admitted.

She laughed bitterly. “And which words are those?”

“That we are but tools. I make my body and mind an instrument for others and have no say in its use.”

“You are a junior officer, Din,” said Ana, bemused, “a hypokratos. All such officers feel so. Indeed, many senior ones feel the same—as do many civilians, I suspect! What are we, if not instruments in service to one another? But…” She sighed deeply. “I do owe you something, boy. I owe you a conversation about your future, and which path you shall choose.”

“Even you cannot change my debts, ma’am.”

Another bitter laugh. “How certain you seem! But we shall soon have more to discuss than debts, dear Din.” She paused for a moment, panting. Then she said offhandedly, “I…I need for you to recall a segment of conversation we had, boy. Just after we first met Ghrelin and Thelenai—I mentioned an art the Empire occasionally uses to keep secrets safe. Recite what I said now, please.”

My eyes fluttered in my skull as I summoned up that evening. “But…what would it pertain to no—”

“Just do it, please,” she said, but her voice was oddly strangled.

I took a breath, and her words spilled from my mouth: “ Did you know, boy, that the Empire has methods of rendering certain secrets unmentionable? Grafts and arts that, when suffused into the body and mind, alter a person in such a way that they are physically incapable of divulging a specific piece of information? ” I blinked as I finished. “But then, you told me you didn’t think this had been done to Ghrelin.”

“True,” she said weakly. “I did.”

Slowly, my skin began to crawl, and something went cold in my belly.

“Why do you mention this now, ma’am?” I asked softly.

Ana swallowed, then said in a carefree manner, “I have a gift for you, Din! Listen carefully now. I wish to give you a…a blue scarf.”

“A scarf?”

“Yes. One that I enclosed in a book, to keep my place. The book is under my bed.” Again, she swallowed. “Please open it and get the scarf for me. I believe it would look quite lovely on you, with your uniform. Again—open the book and get it for me.” She rolled over and hid her face from me. “Do that, Din, and let me sleep. And in five days, we shall talk again.”

—

I returned to my quarters, my mind awash in blood, betrayals, and the sight of Thelenai so pristine and despairing before the Shroud. I knew that the cause of this was fatigue, at least in part, but before I slept, I went to Ana’s chambers to fulfill her request, no matter how strange it might be.

I got down on all fours before her bed and found many books waiting there, but only one had been marked with a blue scarf. I pulled the book out and squinted to read its spine: The Letters and Conversations of Ataska Daavir, Fourth and Final Emperor of the Great and Holy Empire of Khanum.

I grunted in surprise: this was the very book that Pyktis had quoted so often when taunting us. It was a slender volume, a bare slip of a thing compared to the usual ponderous tomes Ana so frequently preferred. She’d marked her spot with a blue scarf, just as she’d said, yet this too was strange, as she often read so quickly that I could scarcely recall her needing to mark a page at all.

Hints and suggestions, but nothing ever said outright.

“Because,” I said softly, “she cannot say it outright?”

I flipped to the marked page, and slowly read:

“And so we have wrought edifices and structures and entities to replace the brilliance of my lost kin,” the emperor said to them. “For while one common man is no equal to a Khanum, a great host of them working in agreement, and describing all they see and know, may not only match my kin, but exceed them in their deeds. Thus, with laws and strictures, and offices and election, and the changing of coin and the scribblings of many ledgers, shall a new Empire be fashioned. And should all proceed as I have foreseen, I shall watch these fruits ripen from within my Sanctum, and smile as the years slide over me, and stay silent.” And at this, the Senate of the Sanctum made great acclamation.

And Portniz Minor approached the throne, and bowed sixteen times, and said, “So shall it be, Your Grace, and very justly so. Yet eagerly shall we await the day when the titan’s blood spills forth new life, and the great and venerable line of Khanum can be remade again, and your holy kin can walk among us once more.” But at this, the emperor was silent.

I looked at the book in my hand. My fingers gripped it so tight they had turned white.

Remade again.

The fretvine house creaked about me in the breeze. I reopened the book to the marked page and read the words again.

Pyktis’s last words emerged in my mind, and his desperate scream to Ana: You call me an abomination, but I know what you are! I have read it in your body, in your very movements! You disdain kings, but I know what you are !

I whispered aloud, “What you are.”

Memories came bubbling up within my mind, one after another.

I recalled what the augurs had told me in the Shroud: There are whispers of other attempts to replicate the Khanum, to remake the emperor’s bloodline anew. These efforts produced beings wild and savage, and full of strange passions and alien appetites. None of them lived past a year, we are told.

Legs quaking, I slowly sat down on the floor.

Strange passions, I thought, and alien appetites.

My eyes shimmered, and I pictured Ana, sitting within a mound of oyster shells, her chin gleaming with their liquor as she said: You can taste in each one which reef they came from, which side they grew upon, which waters they flourished within. They are like melodies of the ocean itself rendered in flesh…

The augurs again, whispering: The Khanum of old could enter a…a fugue. An elevation of their minds to the highest levels, calling upon all their faculties. This made them capable of incomprehensible brilliance, feats of intellect even we cannot decipher.

Her face, twisted and stretched and bloodied in the shadows, her yellow eyes dancing in her skull: I see his game, his mind! I see all the warp and weft he spins about us, even now!

And then what Malo had said to me: I confess, there is a strange scent to that woman sometimes. One I don’t quite know…

Another memory. I had watched her play her lyres, here in this very room, and asked: When are you going to tell me what augmentations you have, Ana? And how it is you can do all you can do?

To which she’d cheerily responded: When I need to, you little shit, and no earlier!

I projected the memory on the empty floor before me. How she’d sat, how she’d lovingly held the lyres, how she’d cocked her head. Her pale skin, and snowy hair, and her familiar, predatory grin: too many teeth, and all too white.

“The day when the great Khanum can be remade again,” I said to myself quietly. And yet—what if that day had already come?

—

I raced back to the medikker’s bays. I was unsure what my goal was in doing so—for if her hints had all been true, she herself was incapable of telling me anything—but I knew I had to see her, to signal to her that I had understood, that I’d comprehended all her suggestions.

Yet when I returned, the medikkers shook their heads. “She sleeps now. You may look upon her, but she will not wake.”

I tottered into her rooms and gazed upon her lying in her cradle. They had removed her blindfold from her. For some reason it made her seem small and shrunken, this pale little thing wrapped up in gray blankets, like a seashell emerging from the dark sands of a beach.

I wished to ask her many things then. I wished to know what she was; how she had come to be this thing; why she toiled here, in the hinterlands of the Empire, applying justice in such broken places. But I dared not speak any of it aloud, for fear of being overheard.

She coughed in her sleep, a short, pained sound. I recalled more of her words then: The most passionate Iudex officers are the ones who’ve been harmed, you see…It puts a fire in them. Doesn’t make them good at what they do, necessarily, but it does make them…enthusiastic, let us say. Willing to suffer, and bear burdens others could not…

Willing to suffer, and bear burdens. She had been hinting at it even then, though I could not have comprehended then the nature of her suffering; nor could I even now, truth be told. Though she slept before me like a child, this frail white thing remained beyond me.

I gently lifted her blindfold from her nightstand and tucked it about her eyes again.

“For when you wake, ma’am,” I said softly.

Then I left.