Notes from the Burning Age

by Claire North

  We ate in silence sat opposite each other, cross-legged on floor cushions, leftovers of re-heated beans and grains, thick white yoghurt and hot red spice. I finished first, and when I put my bowl down she took it without a word and refilled it to the top, and I gobbled it up in an instant, and she poured clear water into a cup by my side, and I drank it down, and had never been so thirsty, so hungry, or so full.

  When at last I stopped, aching with bloated satisfaction and still feeling a strange hunger – the hunger of not knowing if this feast would ever come again – we sat in the low dark of the kitchen, bowls scraped clean between us.

  “Yue…” I began, and she shook her head.

  “Not now.”

  “You don’t know what I was going to say.”

  “You were going to say that you have vital intelligence for the Council. You were going to tell me about Farii’s defection and the things that needed to be done. You were going to talk about Georg Mestri and the war. Am I wrong?”

  “No.”

  “Not now. Tomorrow. Georg can wait until tomorrow.”

  I nodded, and thought perhaps Yue was just as tired as me, that she too had left her body behind and was watching this as the kakuy do, apart from it all, just moving air that hummed and shuddered in strange noises.

  She twined her fingers in mine as we went back upstairs in the half-dark of the skylight. The hall smelt of moss and linseed oil. The door to the balcony of her room stood a little ajar, letting in a slither of winter air. Her back beneath the blankets was warm; her fingers were cold. I did not think I would sleep, and was dreaming in an instant of the sea, and was strangely unafraid. I do not know if Yue slept, or, if she did, what she dreamed.

  Chapter 60

  I woke, I thought, from a nightmare, and did not know where I was, or whether I was drowning.

  The mind can find reason, calm, a place of safety, but the body still rushes on. In that grey hour before dawn, a thing beats against your skull and says lies, lies, lies. All this reason, all this rationality, this repeated safe thing, these words, lies, lies, lies. Listen to the pounding of your heart; listen to the rushing of your breath and know this civilised safety you have talked yourself into – it lies.

  You will never be safe. You will always pretend, when the sun comes up, that it will not set again.

  The mattress next to me was cold where Yue should have been. There were birds calling to the morning, and in the distance human voices raised from the high minarets, summoning the faithful of the old religions to prayer. The kakuy are angels, or devils, guardian voi or djinn of fire and sea – all the oldest stories survive because they find their place in the new. There is but one God, sang the chorus to the dawn, and all of us are one. There at least, Temple and the old faiths find a point of agreement, though they will still bicker over the nuance until the tea has gone cold.

  The single light by Yue’s desk glowed low, but the rising grey through the half-open shutter would soon outshine its dim illumination. A bicycle clattered by in the street below, cargo bouncing on uneven cobbles. A door closed; a shutter slid back. Yue’s inkstone was plugged into a hard-wired dataport, the kind we used to queue to use at the Tinics post office when we were children, always discovering as soon as our downloads had finished that someone else had downloaded something better. Someone else would always have something better, when we were young.

  I shuffled to my feet, feeling the need to be silent without knowing why. Dressed in the clothes Nkagosi had left me, bare feet on woven straw. Folded back the mattress, laid the pillows on top, heard a temple bell ringing, the voice of a novice calling a prayer for the dawn. In Bukarest, the novices kept such prayers inside the temple courts to rouse only sleeping Medj. In Isdanbul, where the last of the Burning Age minarets still stared proudly down at the sea, the temple felt perhaps a certain need to disturb its neighbours with the best of them, insecurity fluttering in the chilled lungs of the boy in the street.

  Yue stood on the little balcony outside, a steaming cup in her hand, the smell of cinnamon and liquorice rising from within. She glanced at me as I emerged, then looked away, as if waiting to see the first lick of sunlight rise above the black-timbered buildings opposite, pushing through the heavy night. I ran my fingers over the wooden rail of the balcony, listened for the ticking of the batteries and the water pipes, heard someone shout at a passing cyclist, another morning of abuse in the ting-a-linging, chain-crunching streets of the city. Said nothing at all.

  She did not drink her tea. The temple bells stopped ringing; the faithful scurried to prayer.

  All things went in cycles, the inquisition liked to teach. Day and night; summer and winter. Human behaviour too. Lah is an eyeless corpse, swaddled in their infinite robes, laughing like a prophet’s bones thrown onto sea-scoured stone. We forget how it felt to suffer, they say. The capacity to forget is how we carry on living. It is our happiness. It is much easier than asking why we had to suffer at all. Round and round and round it goes.

  “Farii is awake,” Yue said, and any chance we had to continue saying nothing to each other was gone. I watched it vanish with the morning mist, and was grateful she’d spoken before I did, and wished she hadn’t said a word.

  “Good.”

  “Weak, but awake. We’re going to release her image – an interview, perhaps, the tyranny of Maze, the cruelty of Kun Mi, rebellion, that kind of thing. It will be more effective to do it while she’s still in a hospital bed. More valiant, you see.”

  “Sounds very practical. Cynical, even.”

  “That,” she replied primly, “is war.”

  Nadira is kicking autumn leaves. She tells her agents that the only thing you can’t lie about is how you feel. Lie about anything you need to, do whatever you need to do to get the job done; lie about why you’re scared, of course, lie to save your life. But don’t pretend you’re not afraid.

  “It might be worth holding off on Farii’s announcement for a few hours.”

  “Why?”

  “There is an order in which things need to happen, I think.”

  “Do you have a plan?”

  “Maybe.” Words on the tip of my tongue; they taste like bile and emptiness. “I had a lot of time cleaning dishes to think things through.”

  “I’m sorry. For that. For what Georg did to you. I tried… I had hoped to negotiate… but it was just another game he played.”

  “It’s fine. Georg mostly did it to himself. Priests of old would listen to your sins and forgive them. He is in many ways an old-fashioned kind of man. Thank you for trying to get me out.”

  She watched the light, squinting up into the sky as if trying to spot the sun. I stayed with her a little bit longer, until it hurt to look any more.

  Chapter 61

  A day of being not human. Or perhaps too human to bear. These things are growing harder to distinguish.

  Close my eyes and here it is, here it is…

  Khasimav, drowning. I did not see him drown and yet I cannot shake it from my mind: the sea, the night, the cold. He is drowning and so am I, reliving, replaying, reliving.

  I sit in front of Medj of the inquisition in someone else’s clothes and I talk, and they listen. I sit and watch myself speak, and for a little while I am not myself but the wind, drifting in and out of my breath, and the earth, pressed beneath me, and the water in my eyes and the sea in my blood, and it is impossible that I might drown, being made already of the world that will take me into it; it is impossible I should die while crows may feast on me and insects clean translucent wings in the moisture of my lungs. I am a machine for condensing and expiring, a perambulating gas exchange; matter enters my body in one state, leaves it in another. I convert energy to heat, and one day my heat will leave me and other creatures will convert my energy for themselves.

  One of the inquisitors asks: “Who do you think Pontus is?”

  And in that moment, I am something else instead. A tiny, fleshy thing, a scrambling organism scuttling across the
dirt, blind to the forest around, seeing only danger and fearing the things that come in the dark. “I will tell Jia,” I reply.

  “We are Temple. You are one of us.”

  We are the same ecosystem. We are the same breath. Sometimes I forget this, and then I remember.

  “Yes. And I will only tell Jia.”

  “May we know why?”

  “No. Call it trauma. Call it madness. Call it whatever you want. I will only tell Jia.”

  “Are you mad, Ven?”

  “I think so. I think it’s very likely. Don’t you?”

  The Medj mutter amongst themselves. I had not seemed mad – not until this moment. What smile should I give them? I try to remember how it felt to smile. When was the last time I laughed at anything other than the dark? I think, perhaps, it was with Georg. I think, perhaps, he said something that I found genuinely very funny. Now I’m not so sure. Things that seemed real are only stories, when I try to remember them.

  Just in case, the Medj send me to see an emergency counsellor before I am taken to report to the Council. They are a priest called Jaqcs, who adjusts their robes a little tighter against the cold, leans forward over a flask of water to pour me a cup, sits up straight, runs one pink hand over a silver scalp and says at last: “So, tell me why you’re here.”

  “I was a spy, I was betrayed, I escaped, I was captured again, held as a prisoner of war, forced to work for my captors, escaped, nearly drowned, and am now going to destroy it all. The inquisition wants to make sure I’m not insane before I make my report.”

  Jaqcs clicked their tongue in the roof of their mouth. “Insane is a strong word. Is it theirs or yours?”

  “I think I need to commit heresy.”

  “Why?”

  “Might be the only way.”

  “Well. Always nice to have lots to talk about.”

  After, inevitably, I am sent to meet the Council.

  The building in Isdanbul was not as grand as Budapesht’s, a symptom of Council’s hurried flight. The street around was cleared of bicycle and pedestrian alike, creating an urban moat of empty space where guardia in heavy hats and gloves like bear paws paced, as much for warmth as duty. The entrance gate was busy with security who didn’t have quite enough room to do the tasks they were set to. Bags were searched by two men with elbows tucked in close so they didn’t knock against each other; visitors patted down by a woman who’d managed to squeeze a stool, which she rarely got to sit on, into the furthest corner by the door. Nothing electronic came in or out. Even the cables hastily slung down the corridors were guarded by patrols with batons and radios at their belts, as if the technicians who’d installed them weren’t quite convinced the whole infrastructure wasn’t about to start singing its secrets in operatic binary.

  “Do you have a shrine?” I asked Yue.

  “What?”

  “A shrine. Is there a shrine in this building?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I see it? I would like… a moment, before we do this.”

  Doubt flickered through Yue’s eyes, but she nodded and led the way. I felt a little of Kadri Tarrad stir as we prowled through the corridors, counting doors, watching faces, until we reached the small room set aside for prayer and contemplation, sandwiched between a cleaning cupboard and an overflowing office. I stepped inside, removed my shoes and left them on the shelf beneath a line of hooks for coat and bag, bowed to the kakuy stone on its little plinth, took a cushion from its shelf, sat, pressed my hands in prayer, did not pray.

  There was room on the straw mats for no more than ten people to sit in contemplation. Only two others sat there now, and the incense stick someone had lit earlier in the day was already burned down in its little ceramic jar. I watched the others shamelessly, their eyes closed, a violation of their privacy in my gaze, an insult they would never know, then rose, bowed again, retrieved my shoes and said to Yue, who waited by the door: “Thank you. I am ready now.”

  They meet me in a room with thick timber walls and a heavy, soundproof door that takes a shoulder’s weight to seal properly.

  Antoni Witt, who can’t quite reconcile his desperate desire for victory with Jia’s refusal to start pumping oil from the earth or blast iron from the mountain. No one has seen the kakuy, he whispers, no one has seen them for centuries, we have a war to win – by sky and sea, we have a war to win!

  He should have turned traitor, an Anglaes heretic with a one-track mind – but he loves Jia too much.

  Krima vaMiyani. No one really knows how much she knows, or precisely what she does with her days. When they told her that her agents had been wiped out in Vien, every Council mole and spy she’d ever snuck into the heart of the Brotherhood, they say one eyebrow twitched, but she still left the office at her usual hour.

  Pav Krillovko, chief of staff. He could have been sacked years ago for calling Shahd of the Delta a self-important little bleeder, but for all it was terribly impolitic, there was enough truth in it that Jia kept him on. He is pious in the mornings, outrageous in the afternoon, repentant in the evenings, and what he does at night is his own business, for better or worse.

  “I would like Yue to be here,” I say.

  “She is not cleared for this debriefing.”

  “I am an inquisitor, not a Council agent. I answer to none of you, yet I am here. And I would like Yue to stay.”

  Witt looks ready to argue. Pav looks small and tired, skin hanging loose beneath his jaw where he’s lost weight. They let Yue stay. She sits cross-legged behind me, a little to the left, where I would sit sometimes when Georg made his pronouncements.

  Jia is late. She is often late to things, these days – meetings seem to endlessly overrun. No one can reach consensus.

  They have already interviewed Yoko; she swears that Merthe’s army is ready to turn, stab Georg in the back. If they strike now, they can have Bukarest before spring, turn the tide. Now is the time, mutters Antoni Witt, for decisive action. If only we’d built our own tanks.

  Witt demands: Can we trust Farii? Why has she turned? She seemed loyal enough before.

  That was when she thought Jia killed Ull, I reply. That was before she realised who really benefited from the bomb on Kirrk. Her sin has been stupidity and grief, nothing more.

  Who is Pontus? Krima doesn’t ask the question with much interest. It is a passing thought, barely worth her time. But her eyes are bright moons in a triangle face.

  I would like to speak to Jia, I reply.

  We are her Council.

  Yes. But this is her fight.

  Krima huffs in incredulity – her scorn, at least, she is willing to show. Georg sits next to me, right leg folded over left, as he used to before I stuck a knife in him. He’s smiling too. I think he is interested to see what I’m going to do next. I close my eyes, try to will him away, but he’s still there, in the swimming darkness behind my eyelids. It makes me angry that he got into my skull instead of Nadira or Lah or Yue.

  Jia is even smaller than I remember when she arrives. She, who holds the remaining Provinces together by sheer will and clawed fingers, now walks with her neck sticking out in front of her like a pecking bird. Her smile, as she sits at the centre of the table, is like mine – a thing of habit, a half-remembered art folded out of paper. She isn’t sure if it’s the right smile any more. What will people think of it? Will they see that she is an alien, that she’s pretending? Perhaps it would be better not to smile at all, but that doesn’t feel right either. I want to talk to her about it, more than anything. Perhaps we can work out something together, some mimicry of humanity that will allow us to pass, accepted and acceptable through the day, without anyone stopping to ask if we feel all right or expressing concern for our sanities.

  Someone moves to pour her tea, which she waves away. She leans back far enough to tilt her head up, and her eyes are still alive, glistening, framed in sagging grey folds. “Ven, yes? We met on Kirrk.”

  “Yes, honoured kin.”

  “They tell me you’
ve been busy.”

  “Not really.”

  “No – you have. You have. They tell me you have things you need to say but will only say them when I’m here.”

  “That’s right.”

  “May I know why?”

  “I need to discuss Pontus and heresy.”

  “And heresy too? How lovely.” She speaks like she’s discussing a burnt slice of cake. Will someone fetch her a new one? She won’t make a fuss if it’s impossible, but a war leader in her own capital can dream sometimes. “Well, you have my attention, for the few minutes I can give it. But please be concise. The only reason we’re not all hiding in bomb shelters is that winter has slowed even Kun Mi to a halt. But the spring will come and the snow will melt and we will not be able to hold the roads when it does, and time is short.”

  “Winter is not the only reason the war has slowed – but I will try to be concise. When I was an active agent in Vien, Temple contrived an operation to ascertain the identity of Pontus. Documents were distributed to the prime suspects, ostensibly containing military heresies. They were false. Each file we sent contained a unique error that marked out who had received what – a spelling mistake, for example, nothing that would stand out. It was a fishing exercise. Who would take our bait? It took a while, but eventually the doctored document was given to me in Vien, by Georg Mestri, to verify whether it was genuine. I photographed it, returned it to my handler, Nadira, who concluded that the version I was seeing came from Pav Krillovko. He was Pontus.

  “Temple shared this intelligence with Krima, Krima drew up an arrest warrant, but before it could be enacted, it emerged that Pav was not in Budapesht when the document was distributed. He could not have seen it nor have forwarded it to Georg. He could not be Pontus.