Flame's Shadow

by Anna Eluvae

  "Do you ever wonder about the system of the world?" asked Dravus as he lifted his leg.

  "In what sense?" asked Lolly.

  "Just … kings and queens. The illustrati and the nobility. People paying each other with coins stamped with the face of whoever is currently at the top of the heap." It was hard for Dravus to express what he was thinking, despite all the time he'd had nothing to do but think. "Whenever I see the marble hallways and gilded flourishes that decorate what should have been a simple table, I think about how much it must have cost. How much energy do the illustrati pour into being known? How much of their time does it consume?"

  "This is nothing that hasn't been said before," said Lolly. "Not only that, it's been said before by older and wiser people who were far more learned that either of us."

  "I know," said Dravus. "But was this something that they solved? Or did they just talk in circles?" But it was more than that. The scholars of the past didn't have an artifact that could change the structure of society.

  "They talked in circles, obviously," said Lolly. "Otherwise we wouldn't have the world we do now. Okay, I think you're good to go. The Red Angel was kind to you. He was very precise. It made things a lot easier."

  "I don't think it was kindness," said Dravus. "I think that's just how he is."

  "Either way," said Lolly. "Everything should be in working order now. Try walking around for a bit, touch your nose, and stretch yourself out."

  Dravus did as she asked, trying his best to twist and turn in order to stretch his muscles. It felt wonderful to move around and scratch at itches. More than anything, he wanted to go running, to pump his legs and let loose, but a small part of him knew that it would feel hollow after the speeds he'd been able to attain as an illustrati. It was hard to complain about being restored to wholeness though.

  "I think it would be possible to find you a place here at Xeo," said Lolly. "If you don't have a trade, you're still young enough for an apprenticeship. You might be able to put all the stories behind you. There's no real need to worry about the system of the world."

  "Thank you," said Dravus. "But I think I have to see this through."

  * * *

  Dravus walked with the Bone Warden down a set of narrow halls. She'd come to his room in the morning, just after a servant had woken him up. She hadn't said where they were going; Dravus kept his questions to himself.

  "I do not trust easily," the Bone Warden said when they reached a thick oak door near the bowels of the palace. The air was damp and smelled of wet dust. "In my opinion, no one should trust easily. I believe much of your story, at least those parts which seem most important, but that belief does not extend to you as a person."

  "I understand," said Dravus.

  "Are you aware of how I built my reputation?" asked the Bone Warden. Her horns had shrunk down from the last time he'd seen her, the better to accommodate the small doorways.

  "You keep prisoners," said Dravus.

  "Keeping illustrati confined is difficult," said the Bone Warden. "In most cases, it involves building thicker and more sturdy boxes. Pile up stone and iron, enough that a motivated individual with an absurd amount of strength can't break through, then close it off entirely such that there is nothing more than a small hole for food and water to be put in and excrement to be removed. On the whole, this is horrifically expensive, especially when you take into consideration that oftentimes a prisoner must be kept alive and healthy for political reasons, as when the prisoner in question is a member of the royal line being held for ransom." She stared at Dravus for a moment. "I take it you have already heard of my solution to the problem?"

  "Make the body itself the prisoner," said Dravus. "The same thing Wenaru did to me."

  The Bone Warden opened the door in front of them, then strode down forward. Dravus followed after her. There were a number of doors in this hallway; the Bone Warden went to one of these and opened it up. It didn't appear to be locked.

  "Christopher, this is the illustrati formerly known as Lightscour," said the Bone Warden. "You are to keep your mouth shut in his presence and do nothing more than serve as an object lesson."

  The man's bones were twisted into curls. He had been reading a book, though he put this down to look at Dravus. The bones of his arms looped in and around each other, limiting his movements. His legs were similarly bent and bowed. Dravus didn't imagine that the man could walk terribly well, if at all. There would be no need for a lock on his door.

  "My methods are better than Wenaru's," said the Bone Warden. "They are much more refined. In my youth, I was a traveling jailer. People all around the Calypso needed my services, so I would go wherever I was wanted. I could provide a lock to which I was the only key."

  "Only if there wasn't another illustrati of bone," said Dravus. He kept looking at the man's arm, at a place where the bone spiraled like a corkscrew.

  "I killed Oso, Ivory, and Asgwm in the space of a single month," said the Bone Warden. "The Iron King was eleven years old, his grand stadiums not yet built. The world was a different place back then. I doubt that my scheme would have worked so well today, but back then it made me a particularly valuable woman, even after the rumors began to swirl about what I had done. I made myself part of how illustrati dealt with each other. Once an illustrati was jailed by me, both my client and my prisoner had an incentive to keep me alive, because only I could undo what had been done. I dined with the king of Lerabor while his son was held captive, his twisted bones keeping him docile despite his years of training and brutish strength."

  She was saying this in order to impress her strength and savagery upon him, Dravus had no doubts about that.

  "As time passed, there came to be other illustrati of bone," continued the Bone Warden. "These were younger, weaker than the ones I'd killed. I knew that my tiny empire couldn't last, not if it required me to kill the competition. So instead, I became a landlord of people. Every time I heard of an illustrati of bone, I would pick up my skirts and make haste towards them, hoping to make a deal. I did not trust those men and women, I only trusted that they would act on the incentives that I provided to them. It was, after all, better for us to work as one, like a guild which shuts out all competition in order to drive up its prices. I was the Bone Warden; they became my acolytes. We would negotiate for our services as one. It gave these bony fingers a great deal of reach."

  "I'm not thinking of betraying you," said Dravus.

  "You are thinking of using me," said the Bone Warden. "Just as I am thinking of using you. I want us to be clear on the incentives on offer. Play your part and everything will be fine. If you abuse my kindness towards you …" she gestured to the man with twisted bones. "From your story I am given to understand that you are bad with both contracts and honesty. It is my hope that perhaps you have gained some wisdom since those days."

  "I have," said Dravus. "Just tell me what you want from me and I will do my best to comply."

  "I will be sending a small number of illustrati with a wide degree of latitude," said the Bone Warden. "You will act as bait, not just for the conspiracy but for Nemm and Lexari as well, if need be."

  "Consider it done," said Dravus.

  "No matter what you find has happened in your absence?" asked the Bone Warden.

  Dravus gave a firm nod.

  Chapter 21

  It was all falling apart.

  There was a flaw in the artifact which they had run into early on. When someone with a link placed their hand inside it, the artifact would draw that link out, taking the domain and standing with it, an ephemeral connection to the stories and interest of the masses. Once the artifact contained the link, it would be dispensed to whoever reached inside it next. The problem was that it was indiscriminate in what it gave and took; a person with two links would have both taken. Lothaire had confided in Faye that this would be trouble. He had talked at great length about how rules would invariably determine results, even before he had birthed the group that was now calling themse
lves the Allunio — the Reshapers. Lothaire thought that simple rules were the heart of society. Understanding what emerged from those rules was the difficult part.

  Lothaire had been full of stories. Before he was one of the secret leaders of the Iron Kingdom, he had been a scholar and an adviser to the king. In Quishto, to the far east, a supposedly wise king had wanted to stop people from stealing. He'd made a law that if you stole something, you would have your hands cut off before being trussed up like a pig and left to die in the hot sun. The king thought that would solve things, because no one would be so foolish as to risk the punishment. Instead, the criminals became more violent. If a guard was chasing after them, they would attack with sharp knives, because they knew that the penalty for theft was just as bad as for killing a guard. That wasn't to say that this aggression was successful all the time, but a few guards were seriously injured, and some died. After some weeks had passed, the guards didn't chase after the thieves anymore, or they ran at a jog instead of a sprint. That made it easier for thieves to steal without facing any consequences. All of this might have been predicted in advance, if you thought about what the rules were setting up.

  Lothaire had loved games. He would bring out a wooden board with a grid marked on it to play games with new sets of rules. He didn't play himself. He would explain the setup to members of the Allunio and watch them as they explored what those rules meant in terms of strategy. Sometimes the rules resulted in what Lothaire called a disordered game. One particular setup was eventually solved such that the white player could always win by following a specific pattern of moves which would result in black's defeat. The metaphor was a powerful one, all the more so because Lothaire rarely stated it outright. If the rules had been set up improperly, the outcome might be undesirable, even if there was nothing wrong with the rules on first blush. When Faye wanted a happy memory, she would think back to those days, of playing games while Lothaire's wise eyes looked on, listening to him hold forth on some subject of great importance.

  Of course, laws and games were only the most obvious systems of rules. Lothaire believed that rules governed the world, in one form or another. Man needed food and water every day, which meant that cities grew in places with arable land and a source of fresh water. If you looked at a map of the Iron Kingdom, stripped of all information except the topological, Lothaire thought you would be able to make a good guess at how the population would be distributed, so long as you knew the rules of fluid movement and human biology. If humans could be untethered from the need for food and water, cities would naturally move to some other place which would be predicated on some other aspect of how humans function. Society was built on rules.

  The artifact had rules. Lothaire had predicted those rules would have bad results. The artifact would allow power to consolidate more than it ever had under the reign of the illustrati. In fact, because of the rules which governed the artifact, this hypothesized disorder was what Lothaire had called the default state of society. Once there were multistrati, they would be able to take the artifact with them in order to steal from weaker illustrati. The powerful would grow more powerful, using power to gain more power, until eventually power would be concentrated in the hands of either a single individual or a small cabal which was capable of resisting the urge to devour itself like a pack of ravenous wolves. There had been an argument for burying the artifacts where they'd been found, a strong argument made among Lothaire and the others, lasting for days. Yet for all that Lothaire had believed it was the rules that gave rise to the nature of the world, he also believed that man was fully capable of creating new rules, those with the capability of enduring just as long as any of the rules of nature. The artifacts would allow them to forge a new path. Society was already in a state of disorder; there seemed to be no other way to change it.

  Faye could imagine someone looking in on the meeting of the Allunio in Parance and being just as baffled as someone in Quishto watching a seemingly apathetic guard strolling after a thief.

  "It should be mine," said Boniface. The artifact sat on the table in the center of the room. Boniface had taken to wearing the armor of his domains, steel and copper braided together. There were feathers woven into it, black and white ones hanging down from the pauldrons, and a rolling steam of cold air where he walked. Faye could remember when Boniface had been simply dressed, when his curly black hair hid a round, pleasant face. Now there was something mean about him.

  "I brought it here," said Gauthier. "I should have just taken it then and there, if I had imagined there were any question of where it would go."

  There were five of them now. Two months before they had been three score. They were concentrated in Parance, where once they had been spread out across the nations of the Calypso. The Iron Kingdom was suffering as a result of the civil war, but there was little that could be done about that. Most of the illustrati had fled to distant lands, or to hidden places where they might lay low until the war was over. Others had gone to Castle Launtine, to join Lexari's side.

  "We should find someone to give it to," said Faye. "We all have too much power."

  The others stared at her as though she were mad.

  "Who would you find?" asked Boniface. He was holding his tongue; normally every other word was a curse. The incredulity on his face spoke volumes on its own. "We are beset by traitors. The Ministries only care about ensuring their own survival, no matter what they might say. You've seen the increasingly anemic response of Legends. You've heard of the issues that we've had with Trade. People are angry with us for poaching the illustrati they depended on, even though what's really happened is that those illustrati have been driven away by the conflict. We have allies of convenience, people tentatively betting on our success, putting forward only enough that when the dust is settled, they can claim they were stalwart in their support — or if we fail, they might claim that they only did what they had to out of fear and coercion. You would give this power to one of them."

  "We have become too few," said Faye. "We had said that we would take no more than the power of two men each."

  "Who was the first to violate that?" asked Cherise. She had beautiful hair now, with sculpted, arched eyebrows. The vanity was unbecoming on her, in the same way that Faye had always found the vanity of the illustrati unpleasant.

  "It was necessary in Torland," said Faye.

  "It is necessary now," said Gauthier. "I know you have your hesitance, but if there were anyone we could trust with the power we would already have drawn them into our inner circle."

  Faye had no response. She felt hollow inside. Lothaire would have known what to say. He would have given a grand, eloquent speech about how they needed to not lose sight of their goals. She could imagine the speech that he would give, but she knew that if it passed her lips it would come out sounding as hollow as she felt, just as it had been the few times she'd tried to paint a scene she could see vividly in her mind.

  Even if they won, what would they be? Multistrati replacing illustrati was no improvement. Lothaire had seen that path clearly laid out, engraved into reality by the rules themselves. His mistake had been to think that he was more clever than the rules.

  * * *

  Nemm watched the manor where the Allunio were meeting. She had slipped into a disused attic after following one of the illustrati — multistrati, they called themselves now. They were on the third floor, with the curtains drawn, but Nemm would be able to watch and learn their numbers. There couldn't be many left, but these would be the survivors, those who she and Lexari hadn't been able to pick off. Charging in now would give her the element of surprise, but if there were more than two it would be a difficult battle.

  Nemm had spent too much time in her armor. She would have stripped down to nothing if she felt like she had the luxury. She smelled offensive and her hair was greasy. What she needed was a hot bath with copious amounts of soap, but she didn't consider anywhere in Parance to be safe enough for that. All their allies had been extracted to Cas
tle Launtine. Everyone else of importance had fled to the countryside, hiding until the dust of the civil war had cleared. There were perhaps a dozen illustrati left in Parance, fewer than there had been at any time in the last hundred years. Some historian would probably make note of that.

  Nemm stretched and looked down at the artifact beside her. The thing still frightened her, even though she'd been carrying this one around for days on end. They had eight in their possession now, though that was more than they would ever need. Lexari held the others back at Castle Launtine, while Nemm kept this one with her.