by Sam Hawke
“Thank you, both of you,” I said. “The good Credo is probably just outspoken, not a villain.” As I said it aloud I wasn’t convinced myself; after all, I had been right to act on my suspicion regarding the storehouses last night.
Tain waited for us in one of his Tashi’s favorite audience rooms; a quiet, curved space at the back of the Manor, built into the side of the mountain itself and lit by elegant blown-glass lamps suspended from the ceiling. He started to rise with immediate concern at the sight of me, but I shook my head quickly from behind Bradomir and he took the signal, diverting to clasp the Credo’s hand instead. “Thank you for coming,” he said. “I’m afraid I have further news about matters within the city. I’ve just been informed by the Stone-Guilder that thieves raided one of our storehouses last night.”
Bradomir froze and Lazar gasped. “How much was taken?”
“Enough to damage us,” Tain said. Even at prior levels there had been grumbling in the lower city about the rationing system, rumors others were hoarding, storing up for their own families or for trading if things got grim. If the rations had to be spread more thinly, things might flare up.
“And do we know who—”
“I’m afraid not.” Tain ushered the Credolen to a seat among the fat little chairs of which Caslav had been so fond; not quite the familiarity of sitting on cushions on the floor, but less formal than a full meeting room. He poured the tea carefully. “Was it opportunistic, or intended to weaken our position?”
“I rather think we should assume we have traitors within the city looking to assist their brethren out there,” Bradomir said. “After all, this theft confirms what we already suspected, that those in the country resent the wealth and power they see here in the city, and want to take it for themselves. It is no surprise that they would steal food, when this uprising is really at its core about taking what is not earned.”
It was then I noticed a strange look on Tain’s face, a kind of bright-eyed intensity as he looked between the men. “And we’ve earned our wealth, haven’t we?” he asked, with such false mildness that I almost wanted to shout caution at blustery, oblivious Lazar as he nodded in fierce agreement.
“Precisely! Our ancestors, the first Council, made this city and this country what it is!”
“Aren’t we finding out right now how dependent we are on the rest of the country to sustain us here, though? For food, for labor, for the supply of trade goods that make us rich?” Tain still spoke levelly, but this time Bradomir caught the undercurrent; he shifted back to solicitous-uncle mode in a heartbeat.
“You are right, of course, Honored Chancellor. So wise for your years! The country does depend on all of us doing our part. We are a great engine, are we not? And our farmers and miners and estate workers have all contributed to that greatness. As have we! We provide education, justice, the finest healthcare in the continent, and countless opportunities to learn the fine arts and crafts and skills of our Guilds. All are welcome in Silasta. But this?” He spread his hands in the manner of a disappointed tutor and clucked his tongue. “This violence and brutality? This is not what our country stands for. Though it saddens me to oppose my own countrymen, we are bound by our honor and loyalty to our country and they have betrayed that loyalty. I believe we must stand up and defend this city.”
I thought of the head in the bag, and my own beating, and the murder of our uncles. There was no easy answer to this, but I found myself not in disagreement with Bradomir, which was an odd sensation.
Tain stared at the wall, a muscle in his jaw working, and said nothing for a very long time. The Credolen shifted, uncomfortable; even Bradomir seemed to have run out of things to say. Abruptly Tain got to his feet. “I’ve got some important things to take care of, gentlemen,” he said.
“But, you summoned us, Honored Chancellor,” Lazar stammered, looking confused.
“I don’t think you can help any further, Credo,” Tain said coldly. “Attend your duties. I have a lot to think about.”
Lazar mumbled a hasty apology, but the shutters came down on Bradomir’s smooth expression, and I knew Tain had made a mistake, maybe even an enemy.
I told him so, once we were alone, along with my theory that Javesto might have tipped someone off about the best time to break into the storehouses. “We need to seriously consider the possibility that Javesto is actively working with Darfri rebels inside the city.”
The anger was gone as abruptly as it had erupted. “I’m just tired. I want a solution, not rhetoric about traitors and loyalty.” He looked up at me, bleak. “Lini was up here last night. Did you see what she’s found about the Guilds? And the school? We’ve let the estates go, Jov. We’re not treating people outside the cities as part of Sjona—we might as well be two separate countries, where we’re taking everything and it’s not clear that we’re giving anything in exchange. We don’t know what education their children are getting, or what quality of judicial services there are in the villages. Money goes from the Administrative Guild to the Families for determination councils and schools in the estates but the amounts have dwindled and we’re not getting any accounting for the funds. I asked Budua when we’d last had an appealed decision from an estate determination council to the city ones, and she blustered and couldn’t tell me. I went through my family’s steward’s reports and there’s never a mention of any of these services. I was going to ask Bradomir and Lazar to explain how it works on their lands, but what’s the point? They just tell me they don’t know precisely, that their stewards take care of these things. And I can’t even argue because that’s what mine does, too. And yours.
“We call the Darfri outside traitors for rising against us, but what reason do they really have for loyalty? What proof is there that we’ve been any kind of proper government for them?”
I let out my breath in a puff. “Look, I won’t pretend this isn’t all troubling. Maybe services have been run down out there. But there’s a big jump between resentment about living conditions and pitching a siege on the capital. If things are bad out there, why not petition the Council directly? Or write to the Chancellor? Why raise a bloody army as a first step? And honor-down, Tain, look what they did to our messengers. I know you’ve been obsessing over the Warrior-Guilder, but I never thought you’d think violence was the way you solve difficult problems.”
He scowled. “Aven’s not violent. She’s brave, and she’s a fighter of course, but she—”
“Tain, I don’t want to hear a treatise on the virtues of Aven the precious Warrior-Guilder, all right? I don’t trust our Council and I’m not convinced they wouldn’t enslave the population of the estates if they could get away with it, so I don’t believe people rebelled for no reason. What I do believe is that murdering people for living in a city and trying to destroy our entire civilization is not the right course of action, and we don’t deserve to be killed for whatever grudge they might have, valid or not.”
He looked at the floor, sails drooping. “I know,” he said at last. “I do know. But you should read some of the Council records. Did you know there’ve been motions to get additional Guilds—for years they’ve tried to get a farmers’ guild, and a miners’ guild.…” Animated again, he sprang up. “The deaths in our gemstone mines, Jov! I never knew how many people died in there, and there’s no Guild to look after them, or change the way things are done. But every time it comes up, it gets crushed. And these people who were my Tashi’s closest allies, and who we’re meant to trust with our lives here, they’re the ones who were always arguing how the Guilds are part of our traditions and we can’t go adding new ones. They don’t care that people die out there.”
“Well,” I said, fidgeting, “we can’t have a Guild for every job there is, or the Council would be hundreds strong. It’s hard enough getting twelve people to come to a decision on something.”
Tain’s mouth twisted as he looked at me, like he’d discovered something unpleasant he’d never noticed before. He shook his head and spoke slowly
. “Jov, we’ve got two different Guilds just for kinds of art. Surely one Guild which looks after the people who aren’t in the cities is warranted, at least, given we couldn’t even feed ourselves without them. Did you know there are ten times as many people who live outside the cities as in?”
I thought of the camp outside our walls, an ocean of tents and figures trying to swallow us whole. “Yes, actually, I did.” When he fell silent, staring at the wall with his hands jammed under his armpits, I levered myself up and stood beside him. “I do understand, and of course you’re right.” Etan’s kind, serious face flashed across my eyes then, and my throat tightened at the wave of emotion—the love, respect, and trust I’d shared with my uncle, soured by grief at his loss, and shame at my failure to save him. “It’s just hard to think about these things when we’ve lost so much.”
“We have to, Jov.” Tain’s face was still serious, but without judgment. He picked up a paperweight from the table and passed it from hand to hand, his gaze distant. “We have to find out why this happened before we can stop it.”
He was right. I needed to put aside the illusion of Silasta as a perfect place, a beacon of illumination and progress. Whatever our strengths, we’d had a key weakness and it had been exploited. Our Council hadn’t upheld the principles that should have guided them. Honor was not an entitlement, but a reflection of our values. The leaders of our society, supposedly a society built on honor, had furthered their own causes while those without a voice suffered. The supercilious voices of entitled Councilors played around my head, whining, scheming, plotting, all the while holding themselves out as all that was right and good in the world.
“We’re still missing the trigger,” I said, to shift attention from my uncomfortable thoughts. “No matter what’s been happening over time out there, something must have changed. People don’t resort to violence as their first step.” I wished again we had survivors from the first attack to question. “Was there any indication in the Council records that something had changed recently?” If Etan and Caslav had been alive when the siege started, would we know more?
“No,” Tain said, rubbing his forehead. “I searched through meeting records for the last half year or so. There’s nothing specific. But something must have happened. And those leeches out there aren’t telling us anything.” He glared at the nearest chair as if contemplating kicking it.
Letting him stalk around the room, I sat still, thinking. If Caslav or Etan had known things were at boiling point on the estates, why had they not told us? Had we truly been so removed from their affairs? Or had things only come to a head in the last weeks before their deaths? I cursed my absence over the summer. Tain rarely attended Council meetings; the Heir’s seat was often treated as little more than an occasional tiebreaker available to the Chancellor. But I had to believe that Etan would never have been party to deliberate wrongdoing, and would have told me if he’d seen signs of it. I had to.
“What I can’t understand is how they supported this.” Tain flung the paperweight into a corner, the dull clunk muffling the curse he sent after it. I heard the same defensiveness and guilt that warred within me, and I didn’t need him to elaborate on who “they” were. The thought of Etan being oblivious or uncaring about anyone, let alone tens of thousands of people, seemed too alien to be real. I couldn’t reconcile it with all I knew of him: his compassion, his empathy.
But the more we found out about how our world worked, the more apparent it was that we’d been woefully, willfully blind. And neither of us had truly known our Tashien.
Bitterseed
DESCRIPTION: Poison derived from the inside of certain nuts, the seeds of some fruits, and the stalks of some grasses, deadly when combined with water. Poisoning can be by ingestion or by transfer through the skin.
SYMPTOMS: At low levels include weakness, confusion, shortness of breath, headache, dizziness, and seizure. In acute ingestions they are immediate and dramatic, usually involving convulsions, collapse, and death.
PROOFING CUES: Burns the tongue, acrid and bitter, detectable and difficult to mask in fatal doses. Smell is nutty and distinctive.
8
Kalina
I slipped out of our home into the rainy afternoon, hoping the combination of grim weather and a hooded waxed raincoat would discourage anyone from approaching me. My limbs and joints ached and I was still overtired from the previous day’s exertions, but the empty homes in the poor neighborhood had given me an idea. The sewers were a dark and dangerous way out. We had temporarily dammed the main pipe to let our runners out that first night, but now the flow would be treacherous, perhaps impossible, to navigate. Still, for a traitor who did not need to fear being shot at the far end as our messengers must have been, it might be a risk worth taking.
The weather had eased to a light sprinkle when I set off to the north side of the city, where the lake turned wide and marshy and the minor sewer tunnels joined the main waste conduit from the city out into the northern landscape. Not a well-trafficked area of the city, for obvious reasons. My hooded cloak bore the added weight and chill of the drizzle and my chest wheezed and squeaked, unable to fill properly.
Shallow breathing was something of a necessity anyway once the smell hit, pungent and forceful. I wished I’d thought to bring some of whatever Thendra had given us to mask the smell of decay. The grate was guarded by a solitary woman, bored and miserable as she loitered under the eaves of the closest building, carefully arranged between fat drips from the edge. “Empty your bucket and move along, lady,” she barked, when I’d stood there more than a few moments.
Instead, I joined her under the eaves, pushing back my cloak to show her my tattoos.
“Apologies, Credola,” she said, smartening up.
I waved it away. “How long’s your shift? This must be dull.”
“It’s the worst,” she agreed, without rancor. “You get used to the smell after a while, but you never really warm to watching people dump their shit all day.”
I laughed. “Fair point.”
As if summoned, a figure trudged up with a bucket and dumped it over the grate. The guard offered me a scented rag and I breathed it in thankfully.
“Begging your pardon, Credola, but this is no place for a lady like yourself.”
I shrugged. “A siege is no place for ladies such as either of us, but here we are.”
This time she laughed. “Now there’s a fair point if I ever heard one.” Another few citizens came by, laden with foul buckets and sodden demeanors. She watched them, stoic, with barely a nose wrinkle. “Can I help in some way?”
“The Council’s focused on deserters,” I told her. “The sewer tunnel is an obvious way to try to leave the city.”
She followed my thought easily enough. “Checking if anyone’s tried coming through? Well the grate’s locked tight, Credola, and there’s one of us rostered here all the time.” She looked me over. “’Course we were told that was to keep an eye out for the enemy trying to get in through the sewers.”
I shrugged. “The longer we’re in here, the greater the appeal will be to escape.”
“I suppose. Drowning in other people’s shit isn’t the way I’d like to go, but each to their own.”
“Anyone asking too many questions? Sounding out bribes?”
“Not to me. I can ask the others—there’s four of us rotate here.”
I paused to wait for another citizen to empty their bucket. This one didn’t smell foul; perhaps my nose was adjusting. “Thank you,” I said. “Please, if anyone does approach you, don’t confront them. Come to me or my brother, Credo Jovan, or the Chancellor, instead.” I handed her a small stone marked with the Oromani symbol. “You can bring that to Jovan or to the entrance of the Manor. Whatever you or your comrades are offered, my family will pay triple if you come to us instead.”
“What good’s money in this city now?” she said with a snort. “Three times useless is still useless. If you don’t mind me saying, Credola.”
> I hesitated. What value had money in a besieged city when you couldn’t use it to buy food or to keep yourself safe?
“Just a joke, Credola,” she said, grinning. “Of course we would obey the will of the Council. Besides, you can still buy kori.”
“Well, we aren’t barbarians.” I started to say more, but out of the corner of my eye saw that the last man to empty a bucket remained, lurking about between two buildings up the street. A small wiggle helped my hood farther forward over my face. His bucket hadn’t smelled like household waste. And now he lingered in the rain. My brother wasn’t the only one who could be paranoid.
I thanked the guard again and left her to her unenviable duty via one of the side alleys. Thankful for the rain now, I padded around the narrow street behind, head down, just one more faceless drudge on my own business, until I circled back to the sewer street. Our overly interested friend hung about still, playing a little skill game balancing and tossing stones on the backs of his hands. I didn’t believe his false idleness for a moment.
When he spun about and stalked up the street, leaving his bucket behind, I’d enough time to slip back into the shadows of the alley, the heavy splatter from a broken eave providing further cover. He didn’t even glance at me as he passed. I barely glimpsed his profile, hidden under a brimmed hat, and from behind nothing about his gait or physique seemed remarkable. He was thin, with dark hair worn long and braided over his shoulders, and his coat was plain and cheap.
Etan had taught me to observe, so observe I would. I tracked behind the stranger through a winding series of small lanes until he reached his apparent destination: a kori bar called Branno’s that had remained open, albeit to greatly reduced custom, during the siege. It had low, wide windows with broad sills, and stone benches inside and out. In good weather and better times, customers had probably sat at the front of the kori bar and enjoyed their drinks outside amidst fat little citrus plants in glazed pots. Today the outside was bare, the citrus plants stripped of fruit and the benches cold and empty, pooling with little rain puddles. I loitered near a table by the window with a good view of the inside of the building and watched the man as he made his way to the bar. Without his coat it was easy to mark him as a Doranite: olive-skinned and long-nosed, though his garb was Silastian.
