The Strategist

by Gerrard Cowan

  Whatever was driving these people to the Strategist had not affected him, he realised. Hope grew. He could sneak away: run to the West, perhaps, and hide himself in a vineyard or a tobacco farm or a mine. But then he felt a cold hand at his own shoulder, and turned to face a Watcher.

  He had been here, in this room, this cell, for as long as he could remember. Was there ever a time before this cell? He had new memories, now, things he was certain had never occurred, or at least not to him. He had been to a city of dark spires, where people plucked out their eyes, just to avoid looking at her, the woman in the white mask. He had seen a temple, a place of wisdom, reduced to ashes by the power of her mind, its inhabitants throwing themselves into the flame to escape her gaze.

  Her name was Shirkra.

  She had brought all this before him when she visited. She had penetrated him, used him, tormented him with visions. No, not visions. Memories.

  She was here again, now. How long has she been here?

  ‘You’re wondering why I am hurting you,’ she said, her voice free of emotion.

  Canning nodded.

  The Operator – for that was what she was, she had told him so herself – shrugged her narrow shoulders, and giggled. Her red hair bounced in curls. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

  ‘It’s not your fault, really, I suppose. You didn’t mean to be Selected. You are unlucky, so unlucky, to have been Selected when you were. Mother told me to kill you all, long ago. I didn’t get you all, though, did I? The white-haired woman is gone, and you’re still alive. But it doesn’t matter, does it? Perhaps it never mattered – perhaps she made me do those things, just to distract me! To keep me out of the way, me and my Chaos! But still, we have you, and she doesn’t want to kill you now. That means I can play with you forever. What fun!’

  **

  Sometimes, Aranfal was there, too. Canning did not resent the Watcher. It was not his fault everything had come to this. It was all her.

  Aranfal gave him cups of water.

  **

  ‘When will this end?’ he asked her one night. He was unsure if he had spoken, or simply thought the question; it did not seem to matter with her.

  ‘It does not have to end, so it may never end,’ she said. ‘It might be good to make you into a story. Yes, everyone would know what you suffered, oh yes, down here, at my hand, and then they would never seek to place themselves against Mother.’

  ‘I did not place myself against her.’

  ‘Hmm, perhaps, perhaps. But the Machinery Selected you, and that is the same thing.’

  She raised her arms, and took him back to the day he was Selected.

  **

  The Watchers had come early in the morning. Strange, but he had already known what they wanted. He had known when he woke. His room was a hovel, tucked into the back of a shop, stinking of fish, like everything else, with one dirty window facing out onto the lane. It had been grey, and cold, as it always was. He was thinner then, before all the lonely gluttony of the Centre, and as he stood from the bed he wrapped his smock tightly around his bones. He looked out the window; a girl with a stick in her hand was staring back. She pointed it at him, and ran away. He never did find out who she was.

  He left the hovel with a sense of dread. He knew, of course, that a new Tactician had been Selected. He had begged the Machinery to leave him alone. He hated the idea of being Selected, which meant he probably would be. Things always went like that for him.

  He quickly exited the lane and joined the main street, planning to go to the market as usual. He hoped this feeling was misplaced, or that they would not find him. But he did not make it very far. As soon as he turned onto the street, they were on top of him: the Watchers. He remembered it so clearly. There were three of them, narrow creatures, all wearing eagle masks. One of them held a parchment. He scoured it quickly, and then approached Canning.

  ‘You are Canning, the market trader,’ he said in a thin voice.

  Canning wondered how they had known where to find him, though he later learned much that was strange about the Watchers.

  ‘I am,’ he replied, feeling a fool.

  The Watchers fell to their knees, arms raised towards Canning, and with one voice began their spiel about the Machinery and how it had Selected him in its glory. But he was not paying attention. He was looking to the edge of the gathering crowd, where a young woman was standing. Her face was torn with misery.

  ‘Stand,’ he told the Watchers. It was the single occasion he ever summoned the courage to issue orders to these people. ‘When must I go?’

  ‘You are a Tactician,’ said one, though she seemed utterly unconvinced. ‘You may stay or go as you please.’

  The first Watcher came forward again. ‘But of course, your people need you to lead them into Expansion – to conquer the very Plateau itself!’

  The new Tactician nodded. ‘I will need one day,’ he said.

  When the Watchers had gone, Canning moved into the ogling crowd. ‘All of you, leave,’ he said.

  ‘You’re enjoying dishing out commands,’ said Annya, the only one to stay behind.

  ‘I am not. I want to stay here.’

  ‘You can’t. You’ve been Selected. You’re going to leave me behind.’

  She gave him that look of hers, then, such a strange look, wounded and piercing at once, a trembling defiance. And she turned and ran from him.

  He chased her all the way to the dock, where they stood before that hateful wall. She had done this many times before. She was half mad, he had been told. Half-mad Annya. But he never thought she would really do it. No, he never thought that.

  When she turned to face him, she was crying.

  ‘You have ruined my life,’ she said. There was no emotion in her voice.

  ‘Annya.’ He reached out a hand to her, but she knocked it away. ‘I didn’t mean for this to happen. How could I have meant for this to happen? The Machinery Selected me. It wasn’t the other way around.’

  Annya walked to him, so their faces almost touched. ‘They say it only picks those that want to be picked. That’s what my father said.’

  ‘Believe me, it is not true.’

  She snorted.

  ‘You can come with me,’ he said, lamely.

  ‘Tacticians aren’t allowed wives.’

  ‘It could be a secret.’

  In an instant she struck him. He raised his hand to his stinging face.

  ‘And then I can be your … what, whore? Up there in your pyramid, hidden away like a secret?’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

  Something changed, then. The anger seemed to leave her.

  ‘I can’t do that,’ she said.

  Canning nodded. And then, as if it was the simplest act in the world, the love of his life climbed onto the wall, and threw her young body into the sea.

  He never understood why she did it. Sometimes he thought it was an accident; perhaps she only meant to scare him, and had taken a tumble. But no. She had jumped. Half-mad Annya.

  This was the memory the Operator brought before him, more than any other. When he asked her why she did it, she just shrugged.

  She brought other memories, too: things that happened after he was Selected, and some that occurred long before. They were all twisted, somehow: a shade darker than he remembered. But when he was wrapped inside them, he was powerless. He would have done anything she asked of him. She preyed upon his old fears; she drained him of all hope.

  All the while, she seemed to take such joy from his memories. She sparked with a strange power, as she wallowed in them. Once, he turned to her, and the woman was gone, replaced with a flickering light. It had a kind of elemental force, and he could not look upon it for long.

  He never knew a memory could hurt so much. He never knew a good memory could be woven into something bad, or a bad memory made harder to bear. But she showed him it was so.

  Strangest of all were the memories that were not his own. Could he even
be certain they were memories, or were they the creations of her imagination? They were terrible, whatever they were; she could lift things from them, and make them real. How much power does she have?

  And that was how the last Tactician in the Overland spent his days.

  Chapter Six

  ‘What is there, when there is nothing at all?’

  Brandione opened his eyes. They had returned to the blackness.

  The Queen was by his side, her three bodies suspended in the air, weightless and timeless. Her gowns had been replaced by rags. Like Katrina Paprissi. Like the Strategist.

  ‘You are in mourning, your Majesty,’ Brandione said.

  Three heads turned to him. ‘Yes. In this place, we are close to death. Can you not feel it? Can you not taste it on the air?’

  Brandione sucked in a breath. ‘Yes.’

  The Queen nodded. ‘Last Doubter.’ She surrounded him, placing him in the middle of three ragged women. ‘What is there, when there is nothing at all?’

  Brandione looked around. ‘There is nothing,’ he said. ‘Just an empty room.’

  ‘But what if there is no room? What if there is no house, no land, no forest, no lake, no mountain, no stars, no moon, no sun, no birds, no people – what is there then?’

  ‘Emptiness.’

  ‘Emptiness,’ the Queen whispered. She glanced around the dark. ‘Once, long before my birth, there was only emptiness. We cannot know for certain what that emptiness was when it was alone. It is one of the great questions, is it not? What was there, before creation?’ She gestured at the void. ‘This is my imagining.’

  She stared into the blackness, and seemed to shudder.

  ‘My people call it the Absence. It was not good, or evil, or anything in between. It simply was. Or perhaps, it was not.’ She giggled, though there was no humour in it.

  Brandione gazed into the depths. ‘There is nothing here. Only a feeling of … death.’ He shook himself. ‘Not death – a void. Only the living die.’

  ‘Yes,’ the Queen said. ‘I never saw it in its original state. What a glory it surely was.’

  For a moment, Brandione felt a surge of anger. Was this all there was to the story of mortals? Were they nothing more than flotsam, pushed along eternal waters?

  The Queen sighed. ‘This is the Great Absence, at the height of its glory. But it is not a memory. It is only my dream, my drawing, of what the Absence might have been like, long ago. Before the mortals came to be. Before I came to be.’

  ‘I can’t see anything. But I can feel it.’

  ‘There is nothing to see. There is nothing at all, except eternity.’

  There was a sound, from far away in the ether, lasting only a moment: a low moan.

  The Queen turned her bodies away from Brandione, and lined up at his side. The smallest spark of blue had appeared, far away in the darkness.

  ‘The Absence was alone for such a long time. It existed, but nothing was there. It lived, but it was death.’

  The light in the distance began to grow. ‘But something happened to it,’ the Queen said. ‘The great emptiness, over the long ages of solitude, began to change. It developed … a mind. It recognised itself as a something. The expanse was no longer empty: something was changing, in the dark.’

  She sighed, and held her hands out, pointing at the blue light. It was still growing.

  ‘The changes accelerated. The Absence grew more aware of itself. It realised, for the first time, that it was alone. And it became lonely.’

  She burst into laughter.

  ‘Can you imagine? It realises its existence, and it becomes lonely.’ She laughed again, and the sounds were sucked out into the ungrateful void.

  ‘And so it decided to create companions.’

  Brandione realised, now, that they were travelling through the darkness; the light was not a light at all, but a planet, green and blue and wet and lush. New lights sparkled around it, and the darkness was no more: the deathly sensation dissipated and stars sprang up in the emptiness. A moon revolved around the planet, which spun around a blazing sun.

  The moment disappeared, and they were somewhere else: a field, in the sunshine. A naked man and woman lay in the grass, their eyes closed, their hands intertwined. Their bodies were surrounded by the blackness – by the Absence. It spun around them like a spider building a web.

  ‘What is happening to them?’

  ‘They are being created,’ the Dust Queen said. ‘This is the beginning of the world. Or rather, it is how I imagine it to have been.’

  The people stood, and it soon became clear they were not alone. Others rose across the field, the Absence crawling across them.

  ‘The Absence was no longer alone,’ the Dust Queen said. ‘It had created these things, so different to itself. Intelligent creatures, in a world of life.’

  The strands of Absence rose away from the people, and ascended to the sky, where they formed into a strange tapestry among the clouds. The people below stood utterly still, statues of flesh and bone.

  ‘The Absence had changed. It was no longer a void, but a god.’

  Brandione winced. That word had been on his mind a great deal of late, but it rankled to hear it said aloud.

  ‘It loved these creatures,’ the Queen said. ‘It loved them so much that, for a moment, it thought of giving them immortality. But this was the wrong path, it knew. They should die. Only the Absence should suffer the curse of forever: the sadness of being alone. Its children would sparkle for just a moment, but they would burn with such a fury in the time that they had. Still, the Absence did not want their lives to be meaningless. Do you understand, Last Doubter? It wanted them to remember the past. In this, it was selfish. It wanted to remember for itself. It wanted to hold on to the past, all of it, like trinkets on a shelf. Not just the glories of the world, but all the petty jealousies, and the rages, and the little loves and broken hearts. It was then that the Absence made its terrible mistake.’

  Small flames sparked in the sky, in the heart of the Absence, before drifting downwards towards the people. Each of the flames flickered before an eyeball, their brightness intensifying, and then disappeared.

  ‘The Absence gave the mortals a powerful gift, which it took from within itself: the gift of memory.’

  They had returned to the place of fleshless death: the heart of the Great Absence. In the distance, a white light sprung to life. It began to expand, sending out tendrils in different colours, sparking between green and blue and red and a thousand other shades. Brandione saw images in the maelstrom. He saw moments of his past, shards of memory: a young man in a military uniform; a barn aflame, somewhere in the West; a bloodied, emaciated soldier, marching ever onwards.

  Three hands pointed to the light.

  ‘Do you know what that is?’

  A familiar sensation overcame Brandione, as he gazed at the burning mass of light.

  ‘It is the Underland,’ he said.

  Three heads nodded. ‘Yes. The Absence placed great powers in memories: a part of its very being. But it did not realise what it had done. The powers of memory became their own creature: a thing formed of all memories, of all the power the Absence had put in them, and the new powers they had developed themselves. It was a god, to use the old word again. The god of memory.’

  There came a sound in the darkness: a great hiss.

  ‘The Absence realised its error. In its loneliness, it had unleashed something it could not control: a rival, created by its own hand. It felt a great agony, and despised itself for what it had become: a creature with a mind and a heart, and so capable of mistakes. It wished to be alone again, to cast any notions of life from whatever passed for its mind, and to return creation – and itself – to emptiness. But it could never go back. How could the father of time return to timelessness? How could the bringer of life become lifeless again? Even if it succeeded in destroying all of its creations, it would never become what it once was. But it did not understand, or did not care. It vowe
d that it would destroy this new god, and the world it had created: the birds, the trees, the humans and their memories. Everything, everything, everything.’

  Something was happening in the blackness. It was draining away, slowly forming into a new shape. A figure appeared in the emptiness: a thin giant, his featureless face, his limbs, his torso, all formed of the Absence. When Brandione looked at this man, he felt his life draining away: he sensed an immense pressure crushing his memories with its weight. He looked to the Dust Queen, and realised that even she felt that terrible sensation as she turned her heads away from the Absence. She was thinner than before: weaker.

  ‘This is nothing but my imagination,’ she whispered. ‘But even here, I feel its power.’

  The expanse around them now was formed of two things: the walking figure of Absence, and the Old Place, which sparkled into all the space the Absence left behind, eagerly taking his place, surrounding Brandione and the Queen in a crazed haze. But the Absence reached out a hand, and seized a tendril of the Old Place’s light, dragging the vortex towards it.

  ‘The war waged for many eras,’ the Queen said, gesturing at the creatures before them. ‘The Absence demanded that the god of memory submit, but the Old Place was not to be easily defeated.’

  Far above them, the Absence had become a towering creature. It held all that remained of the Old Place in a mighty hand: the light of memory still shone, but it was nothing more than a pinprick of blue. The pinprick began to tremble in the hand of the Absence. The darkness opened its paw, and emitted a low moan as it gazed at the Old Place.

  ‘What is happening?’ asked Brandione.

  When the Dust Queen spoke again, her voice had changed. It was the movement of the mountains; it was the thunder of the ocean.

  ‘The Old Place was close to defeat,’ the three mouths said. ‘In desperation, it looked within itself. It reached into its heart, and it plucked out a weapon, formed from all the strength and terror and love and loss that afflicted the mortal mind. A being was born: a creature of memory, a thing that could fight the Absence in a way the Old Place never could.’