A Conspiracy of Truths

by Alexandra Rowland

  I started hearing people screaming down the hall. I saw people being dragged past, too, and the whole cell block got a little more lively. I began hearing whispers between the cells—unfair arrests of common citizens, of civil servants, of suspicious-looking foreigners. . . . This is always the way when a country begins to gnaw at its own flesh. It is a sign of sickness, a sign that things may be about to get much worse than they are.

  Someone, down the corridor, screamed that they were innocent, that they had nothing to do with it, that it was all her, that they’d testify however they were told to testify. Two guards walked by a few minutes later, having silenced the screaming one way or another.

  And then, at last, I got a little solid information. One of the guards muttered to the other as they passed, and the part that I caught was, “A Prime hasn’t been arrested in fifty years, y’know.”

  “Arrested? A Prime?” I said, springing to the bars of my cell. “Who? Why?”

  And then, for some reason, they told me.

  “Anfisa Zofiyat,” said one of the guards. I don’t know their names, so we’ll call them Ana and Mila to save on confusion. “Treason, harboring a fugitive, and witchcraft.”

  We all know how a Nuryeven witchcraft trial goes. I was . . . unsettled, to say the least. “Aha,” I said.

  “Order’s arrested several of her blackwitches,” Ana said. Innocents, I assumed, the same as me. Normal people, minding their own business, who got caught in the middle of things because someone thought they looked suspicious. I suppose I ought to have felt sorry for those poor accused souls, ought to have felt a kinship with them. Maybe part of me did feel that way: I didn’t want anyone innocent to be found guilty, of course, but . . . I’m only human, and in my ugly parts, I thought it served them right. “You were the one who told Vihra Kylliat that they were there, right?” She gave me a grudging nod of appreciaton. “I’m sure she’ll be grateful.”

  “As soon as she’s got a moment to spare a thought,” Mila agreed.

  I couldn’t even be relieved at that. I was already slated to die. What good would it do me either way? “A moment?” I said. “Well, I suppose she must be very busy with the, ah . . . situation.”

  They both gave me a hard look. “Watch your tongue,” Mila said.

  “What did I say?”

  “I don’t know; what did you say?” Ana said, stepping forward. I retreated from the bars, out of her reach. “It sounded like disrespect.”

  “I’d have to know what was going on to be disrespectful of it! I’m ignorant—what is she so busy with, if not a situation?”

  “She’s been arrested, idiot,” Ana said, as if I were supposed to be a fully informed citizen instead of a man moldering to death in a jail cell.

  But arrested! Vihra Kylliat! “How?”

  Ana leaned against the bars, crossed her arms. She looked at me for a long time; Mila hung back. “I guess,” she said after an age of silence, “that you wouldn’t have heard from anyone.”

  “I could hear from you, if you’d tell me,” I said.

  “Vihra Kylliat was arrested by the Coin enforcers.” See, I’d thought Order was the only one who could arrest people, which is . . . mostly true. But supposing Order starts misbehaving—who arrests them?

  Order handles the vast majority of criminal arrests, but Pattern has its Weavers, and Commerce has a small force of its own too. The reasoning is that Commerce-related offenses are rather more delicate, require a certain amount of expertise to investigate, and can often be resolved without throwing someone in prison to await a lengthy, boring trial. It takes a trained eye to identify forgeries, for example, or to ensure that the city bakers are adhering to mandated quality standards. The Commerce enforcers track down debtors, tax evaders, and merchants operating without licenses, and when they’ve found an offender, they simply . . . balance the books. If they can’t, then the criminal is turned over to Order and Justice.

  “Arrested on what charges?” I said.

  “Stupid ones,” Mila answered.

  Ana added, “Suspicion of embezzlement and accepting bribes, criminal nepotism, and brazen impertinence.”

  “Those are stupid ones,” I agreed, as quick as I could—best to agree in situations like this. “What does Taishineya Tarmos think she’s doing?”

  “She thought she was next,” Ana said, again as if I were an imbecile.

  “But why?”

  “Because of what happened last time.”

  “Oh, I see.” I looked back and forth between the two of them. “What happened last time?”

  THE NINTH TALE:

  What Happened Last Time

  About fifty years ago, things were really screwed up. The King of Order wanted to go conquer Enc, but he needed a lot of money to do it, so he bribed the King of Coin to approve his budget in return for, uh . . . land rights or something.

  (“Canal tariffs?” Mila said uncertainly.

  “Coin would have had those anyway.” Ana turned her attention away from me, away from the story.

  “They would have had the land whatsits too.”

  “Yeah . . . Anyway, it was something like that,” Ana said. “It was something that was supposed to go to that King of Coin individually, not to the office or the Ministry.”

  “Right.”)

  Anyway, all that isn’t important. They were colluding together on shady dealings for personal profit, is the thing, and they were going to drive Nuryevet into ruin in a war that would have bankrupted the country for a stalemate. And even if we had won it, we wouldn’t have had the resources left to manage what we’d gained. Everybody knew it was a stupid plan, and nobody wanted to go to war with Enc on that scale—we’ve been picking at each other’s borders for a thousand years.

  So the Queen of Law tried to pass some legislation that would have upset the balance of power, so that she’d be able to overrule Order and Coin and stop the mess. Order accused her of treason and arrested her. The Queen of Justice knew that was a spurious accusation and arrested the King of Order. The King of Coin then arrested the Queen of Justice for tax fraud, on the grounds that the advocate who prepared her paperwork had listed his name without his patronymic. Then the Queen of Pattern stepped in and put a stop to all of it, and that was that.

  I was silent and expectant. “That’s it?”

  “Yeah,” said Ana.

  Thrice-curse these people! “What about the ending?”

  “Eh?”

  “How did the Queen of Pattern stop them?”

  “Oh. They were impeached, all four of them.” She said it casually, offhanded.

  “What!” I squawked. “For what? All those silly charges?”

  She blinked at me. “For being criminals.” Mila was frowning at me too; she clearly couldn’t understand why I couldn’t understand.

  “What sort of criminals were they?” I asked, careful not to snap at them.

  Ana sighed. I could tell she didn’t have much patience left. “Do I look like a history scholar? I don’t remember all the details; ask someone who cares.”

  “I know Justice was harboring a blackwitch,” Mila said suddenly. “I remember that from school.”

  Of course she was, I thought to myself.

  Ana nodded in agreement. “And in all the trials, it came out that the King of Coin had some very unsavory sex-related offenses that he hadn’t kept quiet enough, so he ended up getting kicked out of office too.”

  “Doesn’t matter how quiet your scandals are, though, because Pattern always hears about them,” Mila grumbled.

  “So witches and sex scandals,” I said.

  “And bribes and things,” Ana said in that same careless tone. “You know, the usual sort.”

  “Is it? Usual, I mean? Common?”

  Ana and Mila shrugged in unison. “They’re politicians,” Mila said. “They’ve all got their plots and such, haven’t they? Except Vihra Kylliat.”

  “Yeah. She doesn’t like games. If she did, maybe she wouldn’t have gotten
arrested,” Ana mumbled. Mila gave her an inscrutable look.

  “Fine, fine, but what happens next?” What happens to me, that’s what I meant.

  “Well, with the three of them locked up—”

  “Three? Who else? You’ve only mentioned Pattern and Order.”

  “Oh. Tarmos.”

  “Her too?” I shrieked.

  They gave me a long, cool look. “You don’t seem happy about it,” Ana said. “Are you working with her?”

  “She did come to see him a while ago,” Mila muttered to her. “We’d better mention that to the Duke’s office.” The Duke of Order, they meant—Ardan Balintos, Vihra Kylliat’s second in command.

  “I’m on trial, that’s all!” I hurried to assure them. “She came to discuss that with me, nothing more. But who arrested her?”

  Mila leaned in and whispered something into Ana’s ear; Ana nodded sharply in reply, and they both turned on their heels and off they went down the hallway, leaving me alone with dozens more questions than I started with and only one or two more answers.

  I had to piece together the rest in scraps like a quilt of rags. Taishineya had panicked, I guess—arresting Vihra Kylliat was a severe miscalculation on her part. But it was a panic mixed with overconfidence: fear that she was on the cusp of losing everything; confidence that she could protect it with all her powers and expect no consequences in return. And perhaps it would have been different if the dice had fallen otherwise. I daresay no one would have batted an eye if she’d gone for Anfisa Zofiyat’s throat, but Vihra . . .

  Well. Order and Justice had always been cozy with each other, hadn’t they? That’s what Consanza said. Taishineya should have known she couldn’t touch Vihra Kylliat without retribution from Zorya Miroslavat.

  I suspect that part of the miscalculation was rooted in what I’d told her in our little meeting—I certainly hadn’t given her the impression that she had anything to be particularly wary of. Or perhaps at that point she felt that “pick up the chisel,” as I’d told her, meant “start playing their games, get involved.” But she’d tried to play her game, not theirs, and hers was about social circles and knowing people and reputations. She wasn’t playing the political game, which is a game with teeth.

  Vsila did not quite fall into chaos. People don’t really need a fully functioning government; it’s just a very helpful thing to have. Business went on as usual, for the most part, but it was strained, labored. All this I heard from Ylfing later, so if you want specifics, you should ask him—though I daresay he missed a few significant sections too. He would have been very absorbed in sticking his tongue down Ivo’s throat.

  Vihra Kylliat, Taishineya Tarmos, Anfisa Zofiyat. Three Queens arrested in two days. Those two days, that was when the first tremors started, though the cracks wouldn’t show for a little while yet.

  I expect you’re thinking that I seem awfully indifferent about this, and you wouldn’t be wrong. I’d been in a murky, sluggish mood since I’d been found guilty and sentenced to death—you know the sort of mood I mean? That kind of mood always makes me feel like a blunt knife. Everything becomes dull and cottony, and I stop feeling hungry. Sometimes I’ll put food in my mouth and move my jaw, but my tongue doesn’t wet and it’s a struggle even to rationalize why I ought to waste the effort on swallowing. Most times, I don’t even notice it coming upon me; I don’t even notice it until there’s a cup of water in my hand and I’m having a serious debate with myself whether it’s worth raising it to my lips—it was that sort of mood that had crept over me, locked in the cold, damp little cell, huddled in my threadbare blankets next to the brazier that I nursed like an orphaned puppy with a supply of twigs that had become, more often than not, too miserly to noticeably improve the conditions.

  My fate was to bide and to trust my neck to Consanza. There were still the appeals. The whole mess with the Queens had bought me a little time. And as I sat in that cell, I thought to myself that if it all settled down and it turned out they were angry at me for lying about the blackwitch in Pattern, or for putting ideas into Taishineya’s head, well, what were they going to do about it? Kill me?

  It dawned on me that I had nothing else to lose. Perhaps I was going to die. And perhaps, before I did, I could give someone else the power to avenge me.

  I hoped and hoped that Ylfing would be as bad at lying as he usually was. I hoped he would bring Ivo to me again.

  You know, they weren’t telling me the truth about things, Consanza and that steward in Pattern. They swore up and down that Nuryevet was no different from any other place, that it was normal. They had gone out of their way, both of them, to tell me how lucky they were—how lucky that they got to choose the person who exploited the office for gain, how lucky to have money wrung from them like they were dishrags. There were other choices available, lots of others, but such a thing had never occurred to them—they knew in their bones that they were lucky with what they had.

  Yes, Nuryevet was already sickly when I arrived. Consider how the Pattern Primes kept abruptly dying in office. Consider the very existence of Taishineya Tarmos as a viable choice of elected official. Consider how offhandedly Mila and Ana talked about political corruption and bribes—people aren’t bored with things like that unless they are obnoxiously common. Consider what Ivo had said about the country schools and what Ylfing had told me about Ivo’s friends.

  But I’ll be honest: I hadn’t been in Nuryevet long enough to really get my hands into it, to uncover the depth of the rot for myself. I arrived and was snatched up and thrown in jail within a week or two; there was no time for me to be out amongst the people, taking the pulse of the country, listening for the rattle in its lungs, looking for sores on the back of its throat. What little time I did have in freedom was out in the country, the villages and farmland.

  So you’ll just have to take my word for it, I suppose: Nuryevet was already sick when I arrived. Perhaps, without me, it would have staggered forward on its own momentum for another generation, perhaps two. But sometime, eventually, it would have broken down. That, at least, is a certainty. So when I tell you what I had to do to escape, to save my own neck . . . Just remember that much. Nuryevet was dying. Perhaps I hastened its death, yes, but isn’t a swift death arguably preferable to a long, slow, lingering one? There’s no way to know how many deaths I caused, but there’s no way to know how many lives I saved—from slow starvation, from sickness, from despair, from a bloody civil war. That’s got to be worth something, hasn’t it? There was nothing in Nuryevet worth saving, and everyone knew it, even if they refused to say so aloud. They only wanted better for themselves and their families, and then to be left alone.

  I should clarify. When I say “Nuryevet” here . . . How do I describe this? Nuryevet wasn’t a real thing—it was a story that people told one another. An idea they constructed in fantasy and then in stone and mortar, in lines of ink in labyrinthine law books, in cities and roads. It was a map, if you will, drawn on a one-to-one scale and laid out over the whole landscape like so much smothering cloth. So when I say there was nothing in Nuryevet worth saving, that’s what I mean: the story wasn’t worth saving, and none of its monstrous whelps were either—the government, their methods, the idea that they could feed their poor to the story like cattle to a sea monster so the wealthy could eat its leavings. And not only the wealthy. Even the well-to-do like Consanza and her family, who could afford coffee, good foreign wine—hell, meat. That came about because of people like Ivo and his family paying taxes for schools they never saw built and roads they only saw maintained for the good of the tax caravans. You’d never see someone like Consanza thinking to change anything. She’d told me outright that she wanted a cushy desk job in Law or Justice; she wanted to do the bare minimum she needed to get by, and of course that left no room to care about anyone but herself.

  Perhaps it is unfair of me to lay any blame at her individual feet—it’s not as if every aspect of her life was the result of simple good fortune. I bring her up
only as an avatar, an example, a symptom of Nuryevet’s sickness. She, like many other people, was in a position to do something; she had the means, the education, the social standing. And yet her highest concern was to avoid as much real work as possible, and to protect and advance herself. To kiss ass like never before, and to win herself comfort, ease, and security. She had even balked at helping me in any way that might hurt her chances, and I was her job.

  The Queens’ trials dragged on interminably, and the first snow of winter fell around the same time that the riots started in the streets.

  It was colder than hell in the prison, and I almost caught my blankets on fire more than once, huddling up to my brazier. Outside, there were people dying. Ylfing told me that there was a whole week or so when you couldn’t buy a loaf of bread for love or money anywhere in the city.

  I ate my usual gruel. My usual apple every three days. I wondered if everyone had really abandoned me. I thought that was the low point, that it couldn’t get any worse, and I remained vaguely grateful to be alive, though the cold sank into my bones and made me ache and ache.

  And then Casimir Vanyos died—he’d been ancient and decrepit anyway, and he’d probably been fading out for months or weeks, but to die now in the midst of all this . . . I heard there were some suspicious circumstances, but it may have been pure speculation and rumor. An equal number of people attributed it to stress.

  In any case, it was Zorya Miroslavat’s next move in the wake of that that clinched things for the speculators. She declared martial law and appointed herself interim Queen of All until the judiciary proceedings could be carried out and Casimir Vanyos’s sudden demise investigated. At which point Ardan Balintos, the Duke of Order and Vihra Kylliat’s second, promptly arrested Zorya Miroslavat on suspicion of the murder of Casimir Vanyos in an attempt to grab total control of the government.