He had been her student for two years. The Call, which had been to him and many a total mystery, was now familiar. To begin with because he was foreign and not an adept she had taught him as a philosopher. They discussed the nature of attraction, and how things became bound to one another: people, animals, plants, societies, chemicals. His talent complemented hers. He understood the combination of one being and another, their potential for reproduction. This did not always go along with personal attraction. She understood everything else, it seemed – every signal, every symmetry, every desirable and repellent feature of each thing to another in the world. This was the Call, of liking to liking, the glue of the daily business of life. She had ways to encourage it and ways to sever it. People supposed her a matchmaker but she despised the notion. He understood their assumption more forgivingly, being much more human than she was.
Her halfbreed status was like his, mixed parentage, mysterious circumstances – she suggested he could even be the result of a pollination between his human mother and the plant life of the far Northern Steppe in an effort to explain his slender Karoo leanings.
She on the other hand was more like a Karoo who had happened on a human form and wore it in order to pass as one, but carelessly, features always slipping through. The exact details of their inheritances were unknown to them: Night never knew her parents, if she had had any, and Zharazin’s mother had never spoken a word about his father, or much of anything. The Steppe people led simple, harsh lives utterly unlike Empire humans, and their virtue was stoic silence about most things. What was unknown could not be held against you, even if the evidence was staring you in the face and talking to you. He’d always been different and it hadn’t mattered. It was his own need for exploring that had led him away slowly but surely to Glimshard, the city on the plain, and to Night, with whom he had fallen in love.
They were discussing the unspeakable issue of enmity between Empresses. Night was concerned about protecting their own Empress, but gloomy too. ‘She is too different. Her ways and why she has them. I can’t feel a path to harmony between them. There is a path of repulsion active between her and the Dirt Empress.’ She turned on the bed restlessly, arm flung over her face. He let the sheet slide with her, away from him, and knew that soon she’d be dancing if she did not conclude her thoughts. She processed things with her body. Her mind didn’t work without it. And she saw in terms of connections and roads, ways in, ways out, infiltration and assimilation. In that he knew her very Karoo.
Zharazin saw it differently and tried to express that in ways she understood. ‘That woman, Dirt, took another kind of path. Her life is nearly done, she has no children and she thinks only about profit and labour, how to manage the land and cull the seasons. She favours the company of Parchers and eats only once a day. Her devotion to her own spirit is very great, the more so because she believes that she paves the way to another life with deeds of sacrifice. Our Empress is everything she isn’t. It is like an insult in one way, rejecting all her advice and experience. Glimshard nullifies her. And because we survive she fears she might be wrong, in case Glimshard’s path proves better and the afterlife doesn’t exist after all. Or it does and all that effort wasn’t needed in order to get there. She would have spent herself for nothing.’
‘You think she wants to prove her way by force?’ Night sighed, thrashed restlessly, fighting with his notions as if they were pests on her skin. He knew better than to try touching her at a moment like this.
‘She doesn’t want to be or look like a fool. Her pride won’t allow it. Reason can swing in the wind with that kind of person.’
‘I cannot understand those who desire these cool, dry, dead things,’ Night said after a while in which her violence grew less and finally left him naked in the air, sheets tangled around her like a shroud. It was warm so he didn’t mind it. ‘Production, methods, systems of thought as if thoughts needed a system. It grinds my soul to dust. This is how minds are trapped and evil brought into the world. And you make excuses for her, as if she is innocent.’
‘I’m only pointing out why she is as she is, as far as I can guess. It’s not an excuse.’
‘It is! You think it is all right to lead thousands with that kind of banner?’
‘It is how things are. Humans like putting things together and organising them. They fall in love with their ideas as much…’
‘Blasphemy!’ Night hissed and Zharazin shut up. The room had sunk into an ominous gloom. ‘Heresy,’ she said, tasting the word, trying it out, her tone uncertain. She hummed and her mouth shaped syllables meaninglessly until finally she said with conviction, ‘Abomination!’
He felt he had to defend the race, the position, somehow. ‘You would rather what?’
‘I would rather they navigate by the true ways: loyalty, jealousy, passion, desire, love and loss and heart and body. Not these paper idols, these analyses and methods. Zhara, you, why are you standing for them?’
‘I’m not. I am trying to hold another point of view so that yours isn’t the only one. I tend to agree with you – the intellect is only a servant of the masters – but you can see why it’s attractive to want to regulate life, to make it easier and less painful… Not everyone experiences this passion and love the way you do.’
Parlumi Night rolled suddenly and immediately into his view with a rustle of silk. Her body pressed over him like soft, ripe fruit. Her breath smelled of mint and liquorice. ‘Listen,’ she said. He felt her tendrils puncture his skin, almost like a tickle, they were so fine, so subtle. ‘This fairness you are clinging to. What is it for? There is no fairness in nature, only the rule of fitness, competition and a little luck. The strong can be bested by the weak if they are cunning, and that is strength, but here you have weak people making castles of ideas and forcing everyone to live in their weak little worlds. Because they lack heart and conviction. They have too much power for their puny vessels but they remain uneaten’
Zharazin felt her various venoms entering his blood and lymph. He felt slower, milder, and knew he had moments before the edge of his awareness became fuzzy and his body’s humours began to merge with hers. She’d win an argument any way she could and consider it fair. He pushed her off him, snapping the injectors even though it would leave a painful rash in his skin. ‘No. Maybe. Only within the domain of your vision. There are other visions. Just because you are as you are does not make you right.’ His words lost their way. He sat up and rubbed his arm, leg and chest where they were sore.
She looked at him with a sullen, spoiled expression. ‘How can you say this when you know very well that we understand them better than they themselves can ever do?’
‘That’s your conceit,’ he said, finding himself more at odds with her than he wanted but unable to stop. ‘It’s not for you to judge them any more than they can judge you.’
She laughed at that. ‘Idiot,’ she said, fondly. ‘It is for everyone. The fact is they don’t know how they are ruled, even within themselves. Karoo know. They always know.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But Karoo are not free of it. They vie and fight and eat each other all the time. It’s not better, only different in its appearances. At least the humans don’t always end up killing each other.’
Her long tail lashed the bed silently. ‘Desire is the path, the only path.’
‘What about altruism? Parents protecting children, or their interests?’
She had nothing to say about that. Karoo had no altruism, did not breed in human ways and parented or not as their genotype demanded of them. Their unity bound them but nothing else tied one to another, across or between generations. Friendship, loyalties, mate bonds – these things existed sometimes, to greater or lesser degrees. They were all kin and so none had particular kin loyalty to another. They had no particular enmity either. It wasn’t that she had no regard for what he said, it was that she could not grasp it at all.
Reluctantly, after a while, she admitted as much. She asked him one of her favourite que
stions, as an apology of sorts, and approached him gently to lick his arm where it was leaking tiny dots of blood, to fix it with her saliva. ‘Tell me what it was like, growing up with a mother.’
He relented as her nursing took the sting away. He told her the familiar tale, dwelling on the parts that fascinated her; these were all concerned with connection, loyalty, moments of care and sacrifice, ordinary things as far as humans knew. He was sure his childhood was not exceptional in any way, other than for his fatherless status which had left him and his mother at the whims of the married women until she was taken up as a wife by an older herdsman who had enough money to buy her out of her animals. He left by the time he was ten.
‘Did it hurt, leaving?’ Night asked, rapt as a child herself.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I was old enough, it was expected. Being different, it was the right thing to do, take myself away. It was approved of. She knew it as well as I did. I went with the spice traders on their spring pass and came to the Empire as fast as I could.’
It had hurt of course, but he was used to swallowing that kind of thing by then, had grown used to it over the years and now still tended to believe what he said about it. It hurt unbearably, like many things that everyone smiled and put a brave face on and said were good deeds. It made most of the Empire think the Steppefolk were hard and unfeeling brutes. But they had only chosen a different way to deal with things. It wasn’t that they didn’t understand. They understood very well but it would take a better storyteller than he was to explain how they showed their kindness and sympathy in actions, gestures, little deeds, glances, the touch of hand on an arm, a nod, a moment of silence. It was nothing like Empire life. It was so far from it as to be nearly unrecognisable.
Night waited, clinging to him like a lost person in a desert, waiting for a drink of water.
‘Do you think that everyone is capable of understanding each other?’ he asked her then. ‘If they had enough time and patience, if they wanted to enough?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘History is particular to the individual. Every moment turns a new pattern. Why do you lie about your childhood, Zhara?’
‘Because it’s mine,’ he said. ‘Do you understand that?’
She looked hurt and nodded, withdrew and lay down beside him again. A hot breeze moved the curtains. ‘You and I are done here,’ she said. ‘That hurts and is sad. I have nothing else and you don’t want me more.’
How to explain a thing like that to someone else? People assumed they had argued and broken up over a critical analysis of the Call – the theory of desire. It was why Imperial people broke their friendships and alliances, over ideas and principles, over hypotheses and the right thing to do. He couldn’t say into that expectation that they had simply run to the end of their road and had come upon it surprised and dismayed, so attuned to their commitment to pursue their callings that they couldn’t lie about that even for a moment to one another. It was the Imperial way to find a compromise, to soften a blow. But a Steppelander simply took the blow and Karoo accepted what came without trying to turn it, they sank or swam.
She took his hand and their fingers interlaced. ‘Where will you go?’
‘To the middle of things,’ he said. ‘I have to find out for myself if you are right. I have to prove it until I don’t have hope in mutual understanding any more.’
‘I wish it wasn’t so,’ she said, ending on a rising tone, trying to comfort him with what sounded like a small girl offering up a statement to be disagreed with, to show she knew her place.
‘So do I.’ He didn’t know what she referred to exactly with that wish: did she want her statement or their parting to be undone? He decided he didn’t want to know. It could be both. It was both for him.
They slept together until the next afternoon and then he rose and left without another word.
Until the afternoon he followed Isabeau Huntingore to her offices Zharazin did not see her again.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SHRAZADE
‘Mazhd’s greatest fault is that he doesn’t understand hate,’ Shrazade said to Alide as they met in the gloomy confines of the infomancer’s sanctum. They sat in a room she had chosen to emphasise claustrophobic responses as she knew he hated confinement. ‘He can witness all kinds of acts and not see simple loathing in them, always looking at other motives.’
‘It’s not your business to speculate on motive,’ Alide replied, apparently relaxed in his chair although she could smell the faint scent of sweat. ‘Only to report the facts. Motivations are for inquisitions to bother with. Neither you nor I have time for them.’
Shrazade inclined her head politely in a gesture of agreement, feeling a deal of satisfaction at this, although she couldn’t disagree more. If you were sure of them, motives were more valuable than any facts. Motives were a person’s soul in action, rules of behaviour which could be used in any number of interesting ways. She was not so naive as to assume he spoke the truth of his views here, but Alide had always been a straightforward person, unafraid to hide his opinions, even when they opposed the Empress. Until now she had wondered if this was a ploy to develop his public face as an honourable man. Lately, however, she had come to suspect that he did not realise the depth of his betrayals. For some reason he was convinced of his own correctness so much it did not occur to him that others may feel differently about where the right of things lay. She surmised from this in turn that he must have a backer, a confidant, who held a position of some prestige. She could not under any circumstances see Alide as the kind of person who could stand alone this way, but he certainly could be lulled into security by a sponsor. Now she wondered who it was and as he began speaking again her mind began to plan out who she would use to find this out, and how.
‘Have your spies in the Plains States discovered more?’
‘War councils are gathering over the next few weeks,’ she said. ‘The reports have reached them that many of the mercenaries are not returning from the front. Nor is the portal trusted. There will be moves to attempt to destroy it, and there are spies in the city attempting to discover how extensive the defences are. I have let them move relatively freely so far. They are particularly interested in garrison numbers and the intentions of Borze considering war with the Karoo. They watch the passes to the other cities avidly. They have probed the palace arrangements, but I have fed them disinformation about the methods of communication between cities and within it. We are hampered somewhat by the other cities themselves however. We believe that the city of Grass has a portable portal device or caster which they are denying at present. But they have an equal number of engineers and technomancers to Glimshard. Plus my operative has witnessed portal usage by small numbers of people without anything like the structures we have built on the pass. I would say that if you are going to achieve anything in the southern digsite you will have to achieve it very soon.’
Alide nodded slowly. ‘What of the Karoo at the palace?’
‘An unlikely anomaly,’ Shrazade said, pouring tea for herself. ‘But not, we think, the first of more.’ She knew that Alide had approved sending the Karoo south to the site, together with Huntingore and an elite troop of homebred guard. That meant he had got what he wanted from the engineer. She knew it was a weapon of some kind. With them gone the Empress and the city would have only the cut-down remnants of the army to protect them. No doubt Huntingore was typical of her type in having no clue of her place in the play of such things – that pamphlet she’d written proved that she had barely opened her eyes outside her laboratory in the last ten years. And now Alide was hoping to bury her in a distant plot of land because he would never leave a scorpion alive under a rock once he’d turned it.
Shrazade did not point this out as she was sure it was part of his plans. All that frustrated her so far was the lack of any hard evidence that he had insurrection on his mind. She fished, idly.
‘You will not go south yourself?’ she asked and with pleasure saw his chest puff up.
‘Certainly not. To abandon the city to my inferiors at this time would be treacherous.’
‘As you say,’ she sipped the tea. Perhaps he would only wait for nature to take its course here and for the Empress to prove herself incompetent. If he were wise he would do that, she thought. No need to push when events already turn in your favour. She briefly considered the alternatives.
A new Empress would mean changes. There was no Empress in waiting, as far as she knew, although cities had a way of keeping these under wraps until the last moment, for their own protection. Before Torada, Glimshard had been ruled by Divit. Fierce and martial, Divit had not much time for men of any kind except as necessary adjuncts for the continued existence of the people. She had been the one who had built the army so successfully for Torada to inherit. Men were employed in it sacrificially, with honour but no pretence. Divit saw them as expendable units and, under her command, they agreed. The city had been full of grimly determined soldiers, noble and self-sacrificing. She and Torada were worlds apart and the Glimshard that Shrazade knew now was unrecognisable to the one of forty years ago. Shrazade preferred Torada’s sweet generosity of spirit to Divit’s driving ambition. She did not want to lose it already, especially when it was so unproven. The other cities had familiar demons at their heads. Torada was an unexplored avenue of being and as such, fascinating. But she knew most people did not like unfamiliar things. In that they were weak, and she despised them. Alide’s failure to adapt left him well inside this bracket but though she had looked for connections that joined him to Dirt and her city of Grass, these remained elusive.
She maintained a silence and waited for the crushing smallness of the dark room to work on Alide, counting how many seconds it would take for him to bail out.
‘I must be going,’ he said, making a show of getting out his pocket watch and observing it.
More than a minute, she thought, not bad.
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