‘Thank you,’ Kaiku said, when Asara was done. The words meant more than simple gratitude. There was no need to thank a servant for a duty that was expected to be rendered. What seemed a mere pleasantry was a tacit acceptance that Asara was no longer subservient to her. The fact that Asara did not correct her proved it.
Kaiku was unsurprised. Asara had altered her mode of address towards Kaiku, and was now talking to her as if she was social equal, albeit one who was not close enough to be called a friend. It spoke volumes about the new state of their relationship.
The Saramyrrhic language was impenetrably complex to an outsider, a mass of tonal inflections, honorifics, accents and qualifiers that conveyed dense layers of meaning far beyond the simple words in a sentence. There were dozens of different modes of address for different situations, each one conveyed by minute alterations in pronunciation and structure. There were different modes used to speak to children, one each for boys, girls, and a separate one for infants of either sex; there were multiple modes for social superiors, depending on how much more important the addressee was than the speaker, and a special one used only for addressing the Emperor or Empress. There were modes for lovers, again in varying degrees with the most intimate being virtually sacrilegious to speak aloud in the preaence of anyone but the object of passion. There were modes for mother, father, husband, wife, shopkeepers and tradesmen, priests, animals, modes for praying and for scolding, vulgar modes and scatological ones. There were even several neutral modes, used when the speaker was uncertain as to the relative importance of the person they were addressing.
Additionally, the language was split into High Saramyrrhic -employed by nobles and those who could afford to be educated in it - and Low Saramyrrhic, used by the peasantry and servants. Though the two were interchangeable as a spoken language - with Low Saramyrrhic being merely a slightly coarser version of its higher form - as written languages they were completely different. High Saramyrrhic was the province of the nobles, and the
peasantry were excluded from it. It was the language of learning, in which all philosophy, history and literature were written; but its pictographs meant nothing to the common folk. The higher strata of society was violently divided from the lower by a carefully maintained boundary of ignorance; and that boundary was the written form of High Saramyrrhic.
‘The shin-shin fear the light,’ Asara said in a conversational tone, as she scuffed dirt over the fire to put it out. ‘They will not come in the daytime. By the time they return we will be gone.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Somewhere safer than this,’ Asara replied. She caught the look on Kaiku’s face, saw her frustration at the answer, and offered one a little less vague. ‘A secret place. Where there are friends, where we can understand what happened here.’
‘You know more that you say you do, Asara,’ the other accused. ‘Why won’t you tell me?’
‘You are disorientated,’ came the reply. ‘You have been to the Gates of Omecha not one sunrise past, you have lost your family and endured more than anyone should bear. Trust me; you will learn more later.’
Kaiku crossed the hollow and faced her former servant. ‘I will learn it now.’
Asara regarded her in return. She was a pretty one, despite the temporary ravages of grief on her face. Eyes of brown that seemed to laugh when she was happy; a small nose, slightly sloped; teeth white and even. Her tawny hair she wore in a feathered style, teased forward over her cheeks and face in the fashionable cut that young ladies wore in the capital. Asara had known her long enough to realise her stubborn streak, her mulish persistence when she decided she wanted something. She saw it now, and at that moment she felt a slight admiration for the woman she had deceived all this time. She had half expected the grief of the previous night to break her, but she was finding herself proven wrong. Kaiku had spirit, then. Good. She would need it.
Asara picked up a cured-leather pack and held it out. ‘Walk with me.’ Kaiku took it and slid it on to her back. Asara took the other, and the rifle, from where it had been drying by the fire. The previous night’s rain had soaked the powder chamber, and it was not ready to use yet.
They headed into the forest. The branches twinkled with starfall
as it gently drifted around them, gathering on the ground in a soft dusting before melting away. Kaiku felt a fresh upswell of tears in her breast, but she fought to keep them down. She needed to understand, to make some small sense of what had happened. Her family were gone, and yet it did not seem real yet. She had to hold together for now. Resolutely, she forced her pain into a tight, bitter corner of her mind and kept it there. It was the only way she could continue to function. The alternative was to go mad with sorrow.
‘We’ve watched you for a long time,’ Asara said eventually. ‘Your house and family, too. Partly it was because we knew your father was one who was sympathetic to our cause, one who might be persuaded to join us eventually. He had connections through his patronage in the Imperial Court. But mostly it was because of you, Kaiku. Your condition.’
‘Condition? I have no
condition
,’ Kaiku said.
‘I admit I had my doubts when I was sent here,’ replied her former handmaiden. ‘But even I have noticed the signs.’
Kaiku tried to think, but her head was muddled and Asara’s explanation seemed to be throwing up more questions than answers. Instead, she asked directly: ‘What happened last night?’
‘Your father,’ Asara said. ‘You must have remembered how he was when he returned from his last trip away.’
‘He said he was ill…’ Kaiku began, then stopped. She sounded foolish. The illness he had feigned had been an excuse. She
did
remember the way he had seemed. Pale and wan, he was also quiet and lethargic; but there was a haunted look about him, a certain absence in his manner. Grandmother had been that way when Grandfather died, seven years ago. A kind of stunned disbelief, such as she had heard soldiers got when they had been too long exposed to the roar of cannons.
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘Something happened, something he would not speak of. Do you know what it was?’
‘Do you?’
Kaiku shook her head. They trudged a few more steps in silence. The forest had enshrouded them now, and they walked a zigzagging way through the sparsely clustered trees, stepping over roots and boulders that cluttered the wildly uneven ground. A dirt ridge had risen to waist-height on their right, fringed with gently swaying shadowglove serviced by fat red bees. The sun beat down from overhead, baking the wet soil in a lazy heat that made the world
content and sluggish. On any other day Kaiku would have been lost in tranquillity, for she had always had a childlike awe of nature; but the beauty of their surroundings had no power to touch her now.
‘I watched him these last few weeks,’ Asara said. ‘I learned nothing more. Perhaps he wronged someone, a powerful enemy. I can only guess. But I am in no doubt that it was he who brought ruin on you last night.’
‘Why? He was just a scholar! He read
books
. Why would someone want to kill him… all of us?’
‘For this,’ Asara said, and with that she drew from her heavy robe the mask Kaiku had seen her take from the house. She brandished it in front of Kaiku. Its red and black lacquer face leered idiotically at her. ‘He brought it with him when he returned last.’ ‘That? It’s only a mask.’
Asara brushed her hair back from her face and looked gravely at the other. ‘Kaiku, masks are the most dangerous weapons in the world. More than rifles, more than cannon, more than the spirits that haunt the wild places. They are—’
Asara trailed off suddenly as Kaiku’s step faltered and she stumbled dizzily.
‘Are you unwell?’ she asked.
Kaiku blinked, frowning. Something had turned in her gut, a burning worm of pain that shifted and writhed. A moment later it happened again, stronger this time, not in her gut but lower, coming from her womb like the kick of a baby.
‘Asara,’ she gasped, dropping to one knee, her hand splayed on the ground in front of her. ‘There’s… something…’
And now it blossomed, a raw bloom of agony in her stomach and groin, wrenching a cry from her throat. But this one did not recede; instead it built upon itself, becoming hotter, a terrifying pressure rising inside her. She clutched at herself, but it did not abate. She squeezed her eyes shut, tears of shock and incomprehension dripping from the corners. ‘Asara… help…’
She looked up in supplication, but the world as she knew it was no longer there. Her eyes saw not tree and stone and leaf but a thousand million streams of light, a great three-dimensional diorama of glowing threads, stirring and flexing to ebb and flow around the objects that moved through it. She could see the bright knot of Asara’s heart within the stitchwork frame of her body; she
could see the ripple in the threads of the air as a nearby bird tore through it; she could see the lines of the sunlight spraying the forest as it slanted through the canopy, and the sparkle of starfall all about.
I’m dying again
, she thought,
just like the last time
.
But this was not like the last time, for there was no bliss, no serenity or inner peace. Only something within, something huge, building and building in size until she knew her skin must split and she would be torn apart. Her irises darkened and turned red as blood; the air stirred around her, ruffling her clothes and lifting her hair. She saw Asara’s expression turn to fear, the threads of her face twisting. Saw her turn and run, fleeing headlong into the trees.
Kaiku screamed, and with that venting, the burning force found its release.
The nearest trees exploded into flaming matchwood; those a little further away ignited, becoming smoking torches in an instant. Grass crisped, stone scorched, the air warped with heat. The power tore from her body, seeming to rip through her lungs and heart and sear them from the inside; but she never stopped screaming until she blacked out.
She did not know how long unconsciousness held her before releasing her back into reality, but when it did calm had returned. The air was thick with smoke, and there came the harsh crackle and heat of burning trees.
She levered herself up, her muscles knotting and twitching, her insides scoured. Panting, she found her feet and her balance. She was alive; the pain told her so. Slowly she looked around the charred circle of destruction that surrounded her, and the sullenly smouldering trees beyond. Already the dampness from yesterday’s rains was overcoming the hungry tongues of flame, and the fire was subsiding gradually.
She fought to reconcile the scene with the one she had been walking through when the pain struck her, and could not. Blackened rock faces hunkered out of soil gone hard and crisp. Scorched leaves curled into skeletal fists. Trees had been split in half, roughly decapitated or smashed aside. The very suddenness of the obliteration was almost impossible to understand; she could scarcely believe she was still in the same place as she had been when she had fainted.
The mask, unharmed, lay on the ground nearby, its empty gaze
mocking. She stumbled over to it and picked it up. There was a terrible weariness in her body, a hazy blanket over her senses that smothered her towards sleep or unconsciousness or death - she was not sure which, and welcomed all equally.
Her eyes fell upon the crumpled white shape lying nearby. Numb, she staggered over to it, absently stuffing the mask into her belt as she went.
It was Asara. She lay strewn in a hollow where she had been thrown by the blast. One side of her had caught the brunt, evidently. Her robe was seared, her hair burned and smoking. Her hand and cheek were scarred terribly. She lay limp and still.
Kaiku began to tremble. She backed away, tears blurring her eyes, her fingers dragging at her face as if she might pull the flesh off and find the old Kaiku underneath, the one that had existed only yesterday, before chaos and madness took her in a stranglehold. Before she had lost her family. Before she had killed her handmaiden.
A choking sob escaped her, a sound not sane. She shook her head as she retreated, trying to deny what she saw; but the weight of truth crushed down on her, the evidence of her eyes accused. Panic swam in and seized her, and with a cry, she ran into the forest and was swallowed.
Asara lay where she was left, amid the smoke and the ruin, the gently drifting starfall settling on her to twinkle briefly and then die.
Three
The roof gardens of the Imperial Keep might have seemed endless to a child at first, a vast, multi-levelled labyrinth of stony paths and shady arbours, of secret places and magical hidey-holes. The Heir-Empress Lucia tu Erinima, next in line to the throne of Saramyr, knew better. She had visited all of its many walls, and found that the place was as much a prison as a paradise, and it grew smaller ever day.
She idled slowly down a rough-paved trail, her fingers dragging over a vine-laden trellis to her left. Somewhere nearby she could hear the rustle of a cat as it chased the dark squirrels that wound around the thin, elegant boles of the trees. The garden was an assembly of the most delicate foliage and flowers from all over the known world, arranged around a multitude of sheltered ornamental benches, statues and artful sculpture. Sprays of exotic foreign blooms stirred in the minute breeze; birds hop-swooped back and forth, their gullets vibrating as they chattered staccato songs to each other. Distantly, the four spires of the Keep’s towers lanced upward, rendered pale by haze; and closer by the dome of the great temple that surmounted the centre of the Keep’s roof was visible over the carefully placed rows of kamaka and chapapa trees. Today it was hot and balmy with the promise of a summer soon to come. The sun rode high in the sky, the single eye of Nuki, the bright god, whose gaze lit the world. She basked in his radiance as she watched the squirrels jumping through the treetops and spiralling along the boughs.