Her father stared at her. He looked tired momentarily, as if he hadn’t slept for days. Mohab collapsed to his knees, his father’s body limp in his arms, head lolling.
“We are not a cruel race,” she said, the same logic she had employed in court and knowing, as she had then, that her words were diaphanous next to his father’s hefty jingoism. She persevered, despite the dread in the pit of her stomach. “If we treat the Vary as animals, what is to say we won’t turn on our own? How long until we persecute the old, or weed out the elite amongst our children and execute the rest?”
“You do not get to talk in terms of ‘we’! You have no Bleek affiliation,” said her father with the maniacal conviction he used for his sermons. His features corrupted. “Bleek blood was flushed from your veins the day you betrayed your nation and joined the Vary swine.” He snapped his head aside and, addressing the Commandant Superintendent, said, “Do with her as you wish.” Turning his back, he walked off in the direction of the political offices, accompanied by foreign minister Kirkland and their personal guard, leaving Kali with the roaring swell of anger in her ears.
You would abandon me again. The reality struck her hard in the stomach, making her bend over and retch. What now? Would she be led to the Killing Fields? Or would her nicks be activated where she stood?
She straightened up and wiped the back of a hand across her mouth. The Commandant General eyed her while fanning flies from his face.
“Commandant Superintendent.”
Joltu stepped forward.
“I leave this matter in your hands.” Drescher turned to the waiting officers. “Finish roll call and get the swine to the quarry and the factory. Too much of the morning has been wasted already.” He left in pursuit of Titian.
Joltu glared at Kali, whose emotions oscillated between blind fear and perverse excitement that death would bring relief. “You will help the Speaker’s son carry his father’s body,” Joltu said quietly. “You will throw the body inside the factory furnace and then return to your work duties.” He blinked. “For the time being.”
Kali glared at the Commandant Superintendent. She hated his passive wretchedness. None of the Bleek guards would risk Titian changing his mind about her – which meant she could rage against the regime of hate all she wanted. No one would take notice. She was not Bleek, but neither was she Vary. She was a silenced voice.
With no alternative, she helped Mohab move his father’s body because she was told to. At the factory, she took the Speaker’s feet while Mohab supported the head and upper body. Together, they staggered down a metal staircase to the boiler room. There, in that putrid atmosphere, she worked with Mohab to lower the body onto the wheeled tray. Lifting the grate to the giant furnace, she shielded her eyes against the heat and the sight of a son forced to feed his father to the flames.
Later that afternoon, Commandant Joltu poured himself an excessively large glass of wine and sat down heavily in the chair behind his desk. He drank deeply then pressed a thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose, squeezing away the tension.
Helping the Commandant General to host High Judge Titian and his staff had been exhausting, both on a professional and personal level. Ever since the High Judge had signed off on his own daughter being sent to one of Bleekland’s labour camps, no one took their position for granted any more. Admittedly, it took a certain degree of conscious rebellion to find oneself in Kali’s reduced circumstances. All the same, it paid to be careful.
Joltu let his head rest against the back of his chair and closed his eyes. Everything ached – his jaw, his teeth, his shoulders. Another uncomfortable emotion niggled at him. It felt suspiciously like pity. However, the idea that he might feel sorry for the Vary was too simplistic. What he felt was closer to frustration at the way this slow decay of living creatures was being drawn out by their life inside the camp. It could all have been brought to a decisive full stop just by activating wrist nicks. After all, if you are going to kill the bastards, why not get it over with? Commandant General Ricklan had the right idea with his Cull System, disposing of hundreds of thousands of Vary swiftly and effectively. No prolonged suffering. No need for guards to watch the physical breaking down of a species.
But it wasn’t High Judge Titian’s desire to fully exterminate the Vary any more. Not only were their numbers providing a free and increasingly essential workforce during the war effort, but Titian and his doctor generals had new plans for the Vary.
Joltu learnt as much after roll call earlier that day. He had taken a seat at the long table in the guards’ quarters, and was joined by the Commandant General, the High Judge and his attendant cabinet.
“The purpose of my visit here today is twofold,” High Judge Titian had explained from his seat at the head of the table. His voice was quieter than Joltu was used to. More refined. “Firstly, I wish to thank those guards and officers in charge here. The Vary are well-mastered and the quarry and the factory are at peak production. Secondly, I wish to inform you all of a potentially revolutionary application of science to the Vary problem.”
That voice, so soothing… Those eyes, pregnant with happy possibility… Joltu pictured Kali’s childhood with this man. Titian had been an occasional visitor to the family estate, not unlike Joltu himself. Both attended politically sensitive dinner parties at the residence. He had even heard High Judge Titian enquire as to which staircase led to his daughter’s nursery since he could not be expected to remember. “A lot has happened since my last visit,” he had told the servant. “We have gone to war!” As if the conflict at large explained why he couldn’t remember the route to his own daughter’s nursery!
Presumably he and Kali had encountered one another now and then inside the house, or out in the grounds, or in Grizmare Titian’s infamous and obscure zoo. What then? Had the High Judge scooped the girl up into his arms? Had he showered his only child with presents and compliments, in lieu of affection?
Joltu thought about that morning and Kali speaking up for the Speaker’s son despite the very real threat of the wrist nicks above her pulse points. The Commandant Superintendent had studied the High Judge, standing a few short steps away. From a distance, Kali would have thought her father unmoved. That wasn’t true, though. Up close, Joltu had seen a trace of sadness in the man’s face. Titian’s breathing had quickened too, the rise and fall of his chest counting out the seconds of tension between father and daughter. Watching the High Judge rise above his parental emotions, Joltu imagined Kali naked in his office. She was his reward and his punishment.
Sitting at the long table that afternoon, he was distracted by the High Judge introducing a newcomer, a Doctor General Tristan Harris. Harris was faintly ghoulish in appearance. Thin grey skin stretched taut over his prominent skull and his clothing looked a size too big, as if his body had shrunk in the coffin. When the doctor spoke, he showed off his pale pink gums like an enraged primate.
“Thank you, High Judge Titian. Thank you,” Harris chattered, spreading his hands out on the table as if to assert a calming influence over it. “And thank you Commandant General Drescher. It is very exciting to be setting up this new laboratory in Abbandon. We shall start small, of course. But I am confident that an intense timetable of procedures will lead to excellent results.”
“Procedures?” Joltu liked to understand the everyday running of the camp. “We have an infirmary. Are you talking about another ward? Something more specialist?”
“Indeed, indeed. Commandant Superintendent Joltu, isn’t it?” Harris showed his gums again. “But don’t let me dazzle you with words. I will reveal my plans for the Vary through practical demonstrations.”
“Now, to other business.” High Judge Titian turned the discussion to other matters – new reductions in rations for the Vary (“Ravenous as rats,” Harris had interrupted and High Judge Titian had smiled); an increase in stone wool quotas; the proposal to extend the quarry, and the lowering of the age of children working its surface from seven to six years old.
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After Titian had brought an end to the meeting, he called Joltu back.
“Commandant Superintendent. Stay a moment.”
With a small thrill of fear, Joltu turned back from the door. He saluted. “High Judge Titian.”
Titian held his chin characteristically high, as if tilted to meet his own personal sun. He’d aged over recent months, thought Joltu. Acquired a new depth to the wrinkles at his mouth and eyes, lending him a permanently sour expression.
“My daughter is still alive.” He said it matter-of-factly, if with the slightest hint of surprise. “Her breeding aids her resilience.”
“Naturally, High Judge Titian.”
“She is a disruptive force?”
“She can be. But she is a useful conduit between the Vary and the Bleek.” He didn’t say how she drove his mouth to the salt lick between her legs. How she bit and thrust like a she-wolf. How the dust engraved her navel like unpolished wood and he feasted on her knots. Instead, he stayed silent.
Titian pursed his lips. “A document will be sent to your personal datascreen. I want you to put your name to it.”
With that, the High Judge strode from the room and Joltu had followed after. Now though, tucked behind the door of his office, legs spread, wine in hand, Titian’s words came back to haunt him. ‘She is a disruptive force…?’ ‘Put your name to it…’
Opening his eyes, Joltu sat forward, drained the glass and reached for the remainder of the bottle. ‘Do with her as you wish,’ the High Judge had told him out in the yard that morning, in front of Kali and so many listening ears. In truth, though, back behind closed doors, Titian held both his daughter’s and Joltu’s fates in his tight grip.
Joltu shook his head. When it came to Abbandon, it didn’t matter which side of the fence you lived. Freedom was a fallacy!
Part Two
Seventeen
The journey had been an irritant. While the first-class passenger car provided a smooth ride over the slipstreams, Grizmare had found her patience wearing thin as the minutes passed achingly slowly. A simpering waiter with greased-back hair and a limp moustache had offered her desert otter for luncheon. “A rare and uniquely palatable dish,” he had announced superciliously, indicating the listing on the gel frame. Grizmare had thought about breaking the menu over his head or hobbling him with her cane. She would have rather liked to watch that officious face crumple in agony.
But she had resisted, demanding instead that the meat be discontinued from the menu in future. She had ordered the curd and fennel pie, enduring – and enjoying – the surreptitious glares of her fellow diners now deprived of their desert otter.
With her journey finally complete, Grizmare found Nilreb as unmanageable and overbearing as she had remembered it. While Geno rose from the basalt bedrock in great stalks of glass-sheet which were almost organic in nature – at once striking and as one with the fractured landscape – Nilreb was a sprawling mess of brutal architecture.
Seated in the back of a limousine sent by the hotel, she got the impression that the driver was going out of his way to keep to the most impressive boulevards. To either side, huge glass-sheet palaces shouldered the heart and lungs of the government’s municipal buildings. Among them was the Grand Library with its spiral columns and domineering bust of High Judge Titian erected relatively recently above the entrance. Soon she was passing Capital Hall, which was the country’s political hub and the pinnacle of Titian architectural design. As he had been at pains to point out to her in the past, the smoked walls were underpinned by a curving spine of gel and grey-stone amalgam to allow for quake movement. Even the hotel, a huge grey-stone rotunda called The Perpetual, was a testament to her son’s skills in taming elemental things and producing rigidity and order.
Grizmare, though, thwarted the driver’s attempt to pull up in front of The Perpetual. Jabbing her cane into the back of his seat, she told him, “I am not finished with my sightseeing yet! I want to see the city at sunset. I want to see the Seven Bridges!”
The driver aborted his turn and gave a small cough of annoyance.
“Go on then, man!” Grizmare rooted around in the onboard wet bar and found a half bottle of sour gin. She didn’t bother with a glass, but took a big gulp, enjoying the fire and tears it brought to her throat and eyes.
“Speak up!” she spat when the driver muttered something from the front seat.
The man cleared his throat. “Nilreb may be much changed since you last visited, Madam Titian.” His speech was accented with the forward sounding vowels of the capital. “You can’t just move around the city any more, can’t go wherever you please. We’ve got to keep the city clean, so Vary are quarantined to the East Quarter until every household has been processed.” He waved a hand to the colossal structures either side – great citadels of power with their moulded emblems. “Look how beautiful these streets are. High Judge Titian has given us clean air, a city to be proud of.”
“Yes, yes. It is all very big and impressive. My son is the patron saint of dust handlers!” She gulped from the bottle. “All the same, it’s insipid. I want to see the Seven Bridges. I’ve always liked their argy-bargy, all that colour, all that life!”
The driver gave his silly cough again. He was the kind of man who was worn by his uniform and not vice versa. Grizmare was newly irritated.
“Speak up again man! All I can hear is buzz, buzz, like I’m being driven around by a blasted botfly! Have the spine to spit your words out!”
“The Vary slums are not a tourist destination. They are not suitable for a person of your standing, Madam Titian.”
“Fuck off!” Grizmare thudded her cane against the back of the man’s seat again. “I’m the VIP. You are the chauffeur. So show me the Seven Bridges, or I’ll feed you to my son or my tiger dog. And, trust me, neither option will be pretty!”
The driver didn’t need any more convincing.
Half an hour later, Grizmare learnt that a border control unit had been established at the very edge of the East Quarter – or, as it was now named by thick lettering sprayed over the outer facing wall of the guards’ office, ‘Pig Town.’ On the approach, both sides of the street were dominated by billboards playing Bleek propaganda. The underlying message was ‘Stay Where We Can See You’, Grizmare concluded, and she took in the sight of shiny faced Youth Guard manning the border. As the limo pulled up, four uniformed teenagers approached the driver’s door. One girl marched forward of the rest. Grizmare noted that she had the horse-like bone structure so common amongst Bleekland’s upper class. Her nose was long and straight. Even the two small moles beneath either eye were eerily symmetrical. In every way, the girl appeared to represent Titian’s ideal of balanced perfection. It was soon clear that she was bred with the self-assurance to match.
The driver opened the windshield at the front of the vehicle.
“Papers,” said the girl. Demanding it of a grown man as if he were beneath her.
She would make the perfect daughter-in-law, thought Grizmare – and chomped at her gums as if she had tasted something sour.
“No papers. I have with me a VIP on a visit to Nilreb and they have instructed me to show them the slums. You would be advised not to delay us.” The driver shook off his lengthened vowels and spoke with clipped efficiency. “As per section 259 of the Nilreb Transport Code, any official on state business may move unhindered through Bleekland and its border dominions.”
“But not every official has filed and had authorised the necessary data stamp.” The girl’s long nose twitched officiously. At her back, her fellow youth got a slight twist to their mouths, as if trying to suppress their delight at the threat of disorder.
Grizmare lost patience. She tapped on the roof with her cane to indicate the driver should open the shield fully. As sunlight dawned across her face, she took pleasure in the reveal.
“I am Madam Titian, mother to the High Judge, Lord Elect. I have business at the Seven Bridges and you will allow this vehicle to pass unhin
dered or I will have you excommunicated, you idiotic child!”
The confidence drained from the teen’s face, like so much hot air squeezed from a lungrot sufferer’s lungs. The girl nodded curtly and stepped back, leaving the driver free to pull onto the road beyond the billboards and to slide the shield back up into place.
This much Grizmare saw on her unofficial tour of the Seven Bridges and the Vary slums. Poverty – swathes of it, infecting the streets – alongside boarded-up shop after boarded-up shop. Where the tremors had cracked the sidewalks and gone untreated, fat clumps of feather gorse had broken through. Grizmare knew from experience that the plant was rough to the touch while the stem had a coating of sticky sap which caused a rash and had been known to kill the very young. Where the wind had brought in ash at broken doors and windows, thick grey crusts had collected. The quarter and its bridges, once potent with families, artistry and commercial wealth, was now squalid and diseased-looking. Girders hung loose beneath the bridges. The dry riverbed was pocked with newly ruptured steam vents and bloody lava pools. Grizmare couldn’t quite piece together what she was seeing; it was as if the streets and the riverbed had been turned inside out, their rawness exposed and rotting.
“What has happened here?” she said aloud, mainly to herself but the driver took it that he was required to answer.
“It shows you how uncivilised the Vary are when left to their own devices. A shock, I know!” He shook his head vigorously. “Bleekland owes High Judge Titian a tremendous debt for keeping the Vary in order for as long as he did while they moved amongst us. But we’ve got the segregation in place at last and an end to their persistent leeching of the city’s resources.”
Even from the backseat, Grizmare could hear the righteousness pouring off the man. He was one of the zealots – fans so committed to her son and his teachings that they would happily sacrifice their own children to prove their idolatry. His kind terrified Grizmare more than the sunken eyed Vary trudging the streets.
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