A Conspiracy of Truths

by Alexandra Rowland

  “I need to speak to her.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I need to speak to the Queen of Order!”

  “About what?” he demanded.

  “Vasili, child, listen to me. I’ve remembered something that happened to me in the Tower—or most of it. And the Queen of Order must know immediately—she’s responsible for the guards, right?”

  “Well . . . yes.”

  “And the army?”

  “What is this about?” Vasili’s eyes were getting wider.

  I seized him by the forearm. “Please. Go fetch her, ask her to come here or to have me brought to her.”

  “Fine, fine.” He eyed the pile of blankets on the bench in the corner. “Can you at least neaten that up? She hates mess, and I don’t know whether she’s going to come down here or have you brought to her.”

  “Tell her . . .” I paused. “Tell her I wouldn’t want to inconvenience her—tell her I see it must be difficult for her to get around. You know, with her leg.”

  “I am not telling her that.”

  “You’re not telling her anything you said, you’re only telling her what I said.”

  “She’ll come all the way down here just to punch you in the face,” Vasili whispered between the bars. “You’ve never seen her move. She was a general, you know! She trained in seventy different kinds of weapons. She even traveled to Xereccio to learn from their masters.”

  “She lost her arm and leg in battle?”

  “Arm, yes. Leg was an accident—injured and took fever or something while she was abroad.” Bless little Vasili for being so easily incited to running his mouth. “Look, you don’t understand. Everyone thinks that her leg slows her down—at first. I’ve heard stories from the other guards. Every couple years someone new does something like open a door for her, thinking he was being nice, right? And she walks him right outside and makes him spar with her until he’s collapsed on the ground, shaking and throwing up and pissing himself. She’s terrifying, and I’m not telling her you said anything about her leg. You’re just a prisoner. She can have you flogged, you know, that’s her right, just like it was Anfisa Zofiyat’s right to take you for private questioning. Do you want to be flogged? A man your age, you’ll probably die, and none of the Primes will care at all, and neither will your advocate. And whoever you wanted to send a letter to will never see you again.”

  I ground my teeth. “Fine.”

  “There’s just things you shouldn’t say to people,” Vasili added. Beating a dead horse.

  “You’re wasting time, kid, get out of here! Go tell her I want an audience with her.”

  Vasili gave me one final reproachful look and loped down the corridor.

  I shook out my blankets and folded them up as neatly as I could, hid the ink and parchment in a new place, and waited.

  After fifteen minutes, I heard footsteps, one set of which was almost certainly Vihra Kylliat’s—every other step was a metallic ring of her artificed leg against the stone.

  She came suddenly around the corner and stopped just out of arm’s reach of my cell. “Vasili Lienityat said you begged an audience. Said you’d be happy to walk up to my offices, but I don’t think it’s wise to let spies out of their cages for flippant little reasons whenever they ask.”

  “Thank you for coming down,” I said, rising and bowing slightly.

  “Vasili says you’ve been cooperating with his questioning. You’ve provided us with a lot of interesting information already.”

  Ah, good, I thought. Everything I’ve said has reached her. Good! “He said . . .” What would make little Vasili look good? I wondered. “He convinced me it’d be in my best interests to be honest.”

  “A generally wise course of action,” Vihra Kylliat said dryly. “And what is this great new epiphany you’ve had about the Tower?”

  “Actually, Your Excellency, it’s not about the Tower specifically.” I paused—builds tension. “Not directly. It’s about some of the guards and soldiers who answer to you.”

  “Go on,” she said, nearly expressionless. I couldn’t read her. She was a rock wall and I was patting around in the dark to find a chink, taking gambles. But I was not without clues. . . . Anfisa Zofiyat had given me some, Consanza and Vasili had given me others, and I’d seen some with my own eyes during the trial. I’d seen the cold, steady glare Vihra leveled at Anfisa.

  The Queen of Pattern, Consanza had told me, had dirt on everyone. And everyone, as I know myself from my years of wandering, everyone has something to hide. Either Anfisa had Vihra’s secret in the palm of her hand or she didn’t. Either way, what Vihra had was fear. I can use fear, mold it like clay, direct its course like a river bound in dams and dikes.

  I just needed to find an angle. Spies, then. Spies, and witches.

  “I saw a ledger,” I said, taking a guess. “When I was in the Tower—lists of wardens of Order who are taking bribes from Pattern. People who are betraying you for real. Actual traitors, not just this unfortunate misunderstanding I’ve gotten myself caught up in.”

  “Have you any proof?” she growled. Not a moment of hesitation.

  “Well . . . only my word.” Which wasn’t that valuable in and of itself, and Vihra Kylliat didn’t think so either.

  “The word of a prisoner.”

  “A prisoner who has seen some of what the Weavers do in there. Some of them are traveling to other lands, to find texts of magic that they can use to strengthen Pattern even further against the other Primes.” I took a deep breath and another guess. “You know Anfisa Zofiyat thirsts for power. She’s taken up one of the most powerful Ministries. Spies. Weavers. Assassins. Assassins with a blackwitch to back them. Do you think she’s going to stop at being just one of the Primes, if she has the tools available to her to further the reach of her power? If she has an army hidden in darkness, spelled to be unwaveringly loyal to her? If she has your army in her pocket?”

  “And you tell us this because . . . ?”

  “Because I just want to go home.” I let my voice crack a little. “Because I’m innocent and I want to go home. Because people are going to die if she moves before you can oust the traitors from your ranks and take essential pawns away from her.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “I don’t believe you. I don’t believe anything about you. I don’t believe you are who you say you are, or that you do what you say you do. You’re a fraud, an imposter, and I don’t know what your game is. I don’t think you’ll ever let on what it really is.”

  Somehow, the gods smiled upon me and allowed me to hold my tongue. I was playing games with her, and as Consanza had predicted, she was having none of it.

  Vihra Kylliat pulled up the chair that Consanza always used and sat down. Her metal limb clinked as she crossed her legs. “They say you’re a storyteller, amongst a laundry list of much more ridiculous and unlikely professions. Is that what you are?”

  “And a scholar, sort of,” I said.

  “What do you study?”

  “I go to places and I talk to people, and they tell me about the great deeds of their ancestors. Their heroes, ones who fell in battle for honor, for glory. They tell me how they lived, how they ruled, how they died.”

  “I suppose a historian is a variety of storyteller,” she said. Her tones were still flat and unimpressed.

  “Yes,” I said. “And history is cyclical, you know. Which is why I was so alarmed to find these things out about Anfisa Zofiyat—it’s because I’ve seen it before.”

  “Is that right,” says she. Patting around in the dark for a chink in the wall, I thought I felt a breeze on my fingertips and narrowed my focus entirely to that. I didn’t know what it was, but all my instincts said follow that.

  “Yes,” says I. “I study these things, and then I tell the stories to other people, so that maybe we can learn from the mistakes of those who went before us. And, ah, this situation, this whole situation, it’s familiar. You’re like characters in a play and you don’t even know it. You d
on’t even know that you’re following your lines as if you’d learned them by heart.” She was quite still, and she made no move to respond, so I continued. “Anfisa Zofiyat, well, she’s the Grand Dowager Duchess Banh Seu. Zorya Miroslavat is almost the Empress-Mother Sen Hai Soh, the Flower in the River. And you—you’re the Honorable Lady Ger Zha, the General of Jade and Iron. You’re exactly her.”

  “These names are unfamiliar to me.” But she had that look in her eyes, you know, the same as Vasili. She’d been looking right at me, and then she’d noticed me.

  I stifled a smile and leaned forward.

  THE SIXTH TALE:

  The General of Jade and Iron

  A long time ago and half the world away, Jou Xi (the King of the World, Earthly Son of the Glorious Sun-Tiger, Reflected Brilliance of the Mirror of Heaven and, the most mundane and relevant of his titles, the Emperor of Genzhu) died of river-fever in the heat of summer and well before his time, and the land fell into chaos. This is part of the natural life cycle of an empire, and we should never be surprised by it. There were three primary factions in the struggle that followed.

  The Flowers: those who were loyal to the throne and who backed Jou Xi’s son, the Eminent Prince Te Suon Csi. The Eminent Prince was nine, so support for his rule was understood to be support for a regency by his mother, Sen Hai Soh, the Flower in the River. This faction consisted of a number of the less powerful nobles and almost all of the army (led by the General of Jade and Iron herself, the Honorable Lady Ger Zha). The Flowers represented dynastic continuity, stability, tradition. These are always popular concepts. At least, they’re popular with the people who’ve already gotten most of what they want out of life.

  (Vihra snorted here and half-smiled, and nodded very slightly.)

  Most of the resistance against the Flowers originated with a fundamental prejudice against Sen Hai Soh herself, and an outrage at the idea that someone such as she would wield power and influence for so long—ten years until the Eminent Prince attained his majority. You see, she was not a native daughter of Genzhu, but had been born and raised in the courts of Map Sut, just downriver. She was a close relation of the former ruling family of that nation, whose dynasty had been broken by Genzhu’s expansion and conquest two generations previously, and she had been married to Jou Xi in a vain attempt to strengthen the ties between the empire and its most troublesome province, inconveniently located immediately south on the Ganmu, their shared river and Genzhu’s only easy route to a warm-water port.

  And so there was a certain irreverence for the foreigner-Empress, a certain outright disdain. Map Sut was generally regarded as less civilized, less cultured, less educated, simply less in general. Comments like “all shit flows downstream” were so prevalent as to be proverbs.

  Thus, the opposition:

  First, the Tiger’s-Claws, headed by the Grand Dowager Duchess Banh Seu, Jou Xi’s younger sister, a legitimate claimant to the imperial throne. She made no secret of the fact that she wanted power, and she was fully prepared to use whatever means necessary to secure the throne for herself, including sorcery. Now, fortunately for the world as we know it, Genzhun magic is difficult, intricate, and not terribly powerful. It is practiced by court magicians, scholar-priests of a sort, whose primary duties are the calculation of the movement of the heavens in order to determine which dates and directions are particularly auspicious. However . . . Some of them, the very great ones, have the power to summon demons. Banh Seu was popular amongst the more powerful nobles in the court, and she had the support of nearly all the court magicians, not to mention that of the general populace, who rankled at the idea of being ruled by the foreigner-Empress and her half-breed son.

  And finally, the Iron Knives, a faction of merchants and their mercenaries, supported by an underground web of peasantry, interested more in using the chaos as an opportunity to claw their way up from their current positions than any more specific ambitions. They had a few powerful names in their group, men and women who could have stood a chance of taking the throne for themselves if they’d wanted to, but none of them seemed truly fixed on it, and none was personable or charismatic enough to draw the sole support of the faction. History remembers them as a force for chaos more than anything else, an unpredictable element. The whole affair could have been ended without a sea of blood if it hadn’t been for the Iron Knives.

  That bright, humid summer was a dark and difficult time for Genzhu. It was a time of dishonor, broken loyalties, shattered promises. And wading through this mess was Ger Zha, the General of Jade and Iron. She was a woman of irreproachable honor and courage, a tiger on the battlefield and a gracious and upstanding diplomat at court. She backed the Flowers because she was loyal to the empire above all else, and because the Empress-Mother and the Eminent Prince were the empire. She could have supported Banh Seu—the Grand Dowager Duchess may well have been the better choice of ruler, when compared with a nine-year-old boy and his mother, both unfamiliar in the arts of war and nearly ignorant in matters of statecraft. But they, not the Dowager Duchess, were the empire, and Ger Zha had sworn herself to its service.

  I don’t think there was ever a question of who she would fight for. I don’t believe she would have had even a moment’s hesitation. And when her opponents were, first, a bloodthirsty woman who would have the Black Hand Demon summoned to eat the hearts of the Iron Knives’ children, or the Yellow Tongue Demon to lick gruesome disease into any unwarded Flower, and second, a cadre of self-interested, greedy, grasping merchants—no, there was never a question of it. She had been laying down her life for the empire for forty years at that point, and the only reason she failed in the end was because she thought that the Tiger’s-Claws and the Iron Knives would see sense, would . . . I don’t know, brush the debris from their minds and hearts and find an essential core of honor they’d forgotten they’d had. I think she believed everyone was essentially capable of honor.

  That’s why she died, and that’s why the Eminent Prince was murdered, and the Empress-Mother tied with silk ropes to heavy stones and thrown into the river alive. The Grand Dowager Duchess Banh Seu won the day, in the end. Such are the ways of empires.

  Vihra Kylliat watched me as I spoke, a lioness lying stone-still in the grass. I think it was the bit about the demons, to be honest. The suggestion of magic as political warfare.

  Now, what I had heard of blackwitches at that time was mostly foolish stuff. You know, ascribing to them responsibility for all sorts of little inconveniences, like Vasili’s odd experience with reading, or a keg of beer going sour, or a house plagued with vermin. And more magical but still foolish things—blackwitches stealing the color from your eyes, or your name from the world. . . .

  But there are other stories. I hesitate to tell them now, and if that makes me no better than the Nuryevens, so be it. These folk are loath to speak of the blackwitches’ specific evils too often, for fear of calling down those misfortunes on their heads, just as the people my ancestor-Chants protected were loath to draw the Eye of the trickster god Shuggwa.

  Found out later how much this little snip of story had worked on her. They’re like boots, stories. Some fit you just right, some keep your toes warm in the winter, and some of ’em rub at you until you’re sore and blistered. I’d tucked a burr into her shirt with that one, and it itched and rubbed at her until she was raw.

  Consanza came early the next morning. “Right, grandfather, I left it to you—did you manage it?”

  “Yes. I told her Anfisa Zofiyat is paying off some of the wardens of Order.”

  She went very still. “Chant. Is that true?”

  I shrugged. “No idea.”

  “Chant!” she cried. “If Anfisa Zofiyat finds out you said something like that, you can say good-bye to her support in the trial!” She looked like she would have strangled me herself if the cell bars hadn’t been in the way.

  “Please,” I scoffed. “She won’t find out. It’s all just jabber, it’s nothing they’ll talk about specifically.
Order just wants an excuse to give Pattern some trouble. I’ve seen it all before,” I said airily. “Vihra Kylliat wants to put Anfisa Zofiyat in her place. She’d do that whether or not I was here. You don’t get it, Consanza, she was hungry for it. It’s not just professional irritation, it’s deeper than that. Personal. So what if I told her that there’s bribes being passed around? When in the history of the world haven’t bribes happened?”

  Consanza pinched the bridge of her nose for a moment. “What’s done is done,” she said. “It might be true. I suppose she’ll need to find only one traitor to be convinced.”

  “See? Exactly as I thought. Have you handled Taishineya Tarmos?”

  “I sent her a letter this morning. As you say, it was just jabber, but I didn’t put my neck on the line with egregious, provable lies. Now we sit quiet and see if she comes through.”

  “She likes fashionable things, doesn’t she? What’s fashionable now, besides me?”

  “Fucked if I know,” said Consanza, which didn’t surprise me in the slightest.

  “I don’t know anything about Nuryeven fashion,” I grumbled. I could have told her all about fashion in Kaskinen, if she didn’t mind the information being sixty years out of date. And I could have gone on for days about Map Sut and their astounding hats. Lovely place, Map Sut. Best pair of shoes I ever owned were given to me there. They were a comfy pair of turn-toe boots, made just for me, made for walking and tromping all over this world. Would have lasted me ten, twenty years, those boots, but they were stolen by some urchins not two weeks later. I have long held the loss of those boots close to my heart, and in their memory I have complained about the urchins at any possible opportunity. It’s not often that you come across a pair of boots that good. They were perfect, and they had looked rather dapper as well, with that saucy little pointed toe turned up. And watertight! It was a shame, that’s all it was.

  “I honestly pay no heed to such things,” Consanza said. “My household is very practical. If any of my daughters were going to make a career for herself out of knowing everyone in the city and giggling like a tinkling bell . . . Well, I guess I wouldn’t stop her, but I’d wish only that she’d go about it better than Taishineya Tarmos. The thing can be done without being an obnoxious twit, you know?”