City of Lies

by Sam Hawke

  Tain sat, composed, on the spindly old iron seat running the circumference of the gazebo, seemingly unfazed by the lateness. I wished I shared his optimism. Risking him on a meeting that could be a trap was stupid, but once I’d told him about it there was no talking him out of it. We had snuck out without his guards, telling only Argo that we were leaving. Kalina, hidden away in an abandoned shop across the street from the entrance to the garden, would provide our only warning of impending trouble. She had expanded my hidden pouch with new slots and flaps, and now it comprised a miniature arsenal of chemicals and poisons.

  “They’ll come,” he said. “They have to.” He knew better than to tell me to calm down, or sit. We each dealt with the wait in our own way.

  They appeared so quietly that they nearly reached the gazebo before we spotted them. My messenger from earlier led the way, garbed in her dull cloak, pushing past hanging lacy vines and graying tendrils, scattering silver clouds of insects. She entered the gazebo with a glance at me that, while not quite a glare, was by no means friendly. Behind her glided an older woman who smiled at the sight of us—tentative, but warm. Clutching her hand, a boy of perhaps three or four stared up at me with eyes like little lamps beneath brown curls like his mother’s.

  “Thank you for coming,” Tain was already saying. “My name is Tain Caslavtash Iliri. I hope you don’t mind Jovan bringing me, but I wanted desperately to meet with you.”

  I watched their reactions, hoping Tain’s sincerity reached them. So much rode on this meeting. The mother lowered her head while the boy pressed against her leg, silent. My messenger tilted her head with enough respect to avoid outright rudeness, but cynicism radiated off her like an unsubtle perfume.

  “My name is An-Salvea esLosi,” the mother said, the syllables dripping like honey in her low, melodic voice. “It is a great honor to meet you, Honored Chancellor, Credo Jovan.” She gestured to the boy at her feet. “This is my son, Il-Davior, and my daughter, An-Hadrea, whom I understand Credo Jovan has already met.” Like her daughter, she spoke slowly and with great formality and pride.

  “A pleasure to see you again,” I said to An-Hadrea, noting the furtive glance she gave her mother, which told me she’d not described the nature of our meeting. I handed the necklace she had left at the door to her, and she snatched it from my hand, quick as a snake striking. “And a pleasure to meet you, An-Salvea, Il-Davior. Your family is from the Losi valley?”

  An-Salvea nodded, her smile showing surprise. I only knew the country surname convention because my mother had introduced an assistant who accompanied her to Silasta years ago, and had explained it. “Please, you must call me Salvea.” She ducked her head to Tain. “May I sit?”

  “Of course! It’s not the most comfortable chair, I’m afraid.”

  She shrugged her cloak off and spread it on the rusted seat and settled herself among her layers of embroidered clothing, elegant and poised. “It is quiet here. That is prudent.”

  “Will you sit, An-Hadrea, Il-Davior?” Tain joined Salvea on the bench and turned his warmest smile on her children. The boy sprang up beside his mother with his feet tucked up on the seat. An-Hadrea glanced at her mother and then nodded stiffly. She sat as far from us as possible, back pressed against the twisted old iron, her eyes constantly searching around the garden, suspicious and alert.

  “I was born in Losi,” Salvea told me. “On the Ash estates. We served there for most of my life. My family tend the kori crops, and distill the spirits.”

  “Mother,” An-Hadrea said, “we do not have time for a family history.”

  Salvea sighed. “There is always time for manners, Daughter,” she said. “And our history is not irrelevant to this discussion.”

  “We’re so grateful you’ve come,” Tain said. “Terrible mistakes have been made, and I want to put them right.”

  “Mistakes?”

  “Daughter,” Salvea said, her tone a bit harder. “Please.”

  “Please, let her speak,” Tain said. “We’ve wanted to hear this. But no one will talk to us, and there are people trying to stop us learning the truth.”

  “You are the Chancellor,” An-Hadrea said. I could almost hear the omitted supposed to be. “How is it that you say you do not know what has happened?”

  “Please,” Tain said again. He sounded old and tired. “Please, can you start from the beginning. Assume I know nothing. Assume I have been a thoughtless boy, concentrating on my own affairs without looking outward. You wouldn’t be wrong. Please tell me what’s happened.”

  And so they did. Salvea with sadness, An-Hadrea with tightly contained fury. And the tale they told …

  Part we now knew. The beginning, decades ago. Deaths at the mines, and help and attention from the city slowing and fading. On the estates, life growing worse. Salvea told us how conditions on Credola Nara’s Losi valley holdings, where her family had lived and worked for generations, had become harder. “Once, before my time, they say others envied the esLosi,” she said, shaking her head. “The estates were prosperous. We worked hard for decent wages, and we had great tah with the land.”

  “Tah?”

  Salvea looked flustered, fluttering her hands, searching for words, and looked to her daughter. An-Hadrea rolled her eyes dramatically.

  “Tah. Connection to the secondworld, to the spirits of the land. We no longer have your letters, out where we live, but you have forgotten more important things.” She pulled the middle charm from the necklace I’d returned, and held it aloft, as if the symbols should have been clear as text. She indicated the two interlocking circles, one at a time. “Tah and honor. Respect for the land and the spirits, respect for humankind. If you have good tah, you are in harmony with the spirits of the land. If you have good honor, you are in harmony with the people around you.” Scorn tinged her words. “This is your history, not just mine. Your vain and greedy cities have forgotten half the code they once lived by, and twisted the other half to something your ancestors would not recognize.”

  “Daughter,” Salvea admonished, and An-Hadrea frowned and fell silent. Her fingers still twisted the necklace aggressively in her lap.

  “Over time, things changed,” Salvea continued. “Families spent less time on their properties, no longer sent their heirs there to learn the estates. Stewards became distant relatives or simply employees, sometimes kind, sometimes not. But the orders kept coming from the cities. We must work longer on the land each day. We are told we must produce more in less time. Lay crops in fields that need fallow time. Things the estates once did for us, they no longer do. And so we are pushed from one side, and pulled from the other, and there is always more work.

  “My grandmother told me stories of when she was a girl. Then, there was a little school in the village, which she attended. Her mother was very clever, and was even sent off to a city for school. But I have never known this. There is no longer any time to send children to school, to memorize all those little symbols. What use do the greedy stewards and Families have now for their workers’ learning? We cannot read, so we do not need books, or art, or science. Instead of sending our children to learn from a Guilded carpenter or shipwright or mathematician, the Families send cityfolk in to perform high skilled jobs, then send them away again. Our livelihoods are diminished. The Families dispense what orders they wish, and we have no recourse to complain.”

  Salvea paused, jaw quivering, then gave us a sad smile. “All this is the way of the world, is it not? The powerful Families divided up the lands all those years ago, and they have grown wealthy off them ever since. We are not starved, on the estates, nor physically endangered. Perhaps if we did not remember what we had lost … but our grandmothers and our aunties and our Tashien whisper the stories of the past to us as we sleep, and we know that this was not how it was meant to be.”

  “No,” Tain said. “This is not how it was meant to be.” He sounded queasy and looked ashen.

  “And what about your religion?” What Salvea said confirmed the wors
t of our fears about the growing chasm between the city and country, but there was still more. The fury in those men’s faces, the strange magnetism of the Speaker woman, the cruel murder of our messengers. Spirit killers, they’d called us, and they had meant something by it, something more than schools and language and lost chances.

  “You have forgotten,” An-Hadrea said again, with even more venom. “Your religion, you say? This is not religion. This is the essence of the very land we stand on. Your ancestors on the first Council signed a compact, a promise of a country built on both tah and honor. And then they built your cities and they forgot that what they take from the land is a bargain, not a right.”

  “We warned them,” Salvea said softly. “Just as the Speakers all over the country warned us.”

  “Speakers?” I had not told Tain—or anyone else—about my experience, and I tried to keep my tone interested but not over-intense.

  Salvea answered quickly this time, before her daughter could interject. “A Speaker is one with a very strong connection to the secondworld. They are a conduit for the spirits, to communicate or act in our world.”

  “We do not have many left,” Hadrea put in bitterly. “None at all in Losi anymore. When I was young a traveling Speaker told me I had great potential for fresken. But there are no teachers, anymore, and what use is ancient power and heritage when I could be making drinks for spoiled—” She cut herself off this time without comment from her mother, as if her brittle fury had simply snapped.

  I wanted to ask more, but Tain was already prompting Salvea. “What did the Speakers warn you about?”

  “That the spirits were growing angry at the lack of heed and respect the people are paying. We took too much from the mountains, and the earth, and the rivers, with no offerings in return to strengthen them. We drew on the special places at the core of them, the sacred places that should not be depleted.” She shook her head. “In truth, though, we did not need the Speakers to tell us that. The land told us itself.”

  “Yet even this you ignored!” An-Hadrea said. “It was more important to keep taking stone and spices than to listen, and so when the spirits acted out, people died.”

  “The earthquake,” Tain said, frowning as he looked between them. “You mean the earthquake at Sabir Quarry?”

  “That is only the most recent. Earthquakes, floods, collapses, rains that never come where they are needed, fields that will no longer grow anything but scatterburr. The Maiso grows fiercer each year, and drier, but no matter how he howls a warning with his breath, he is not heeded. Each year it grows worse. The Families closed their ears. They did not care. They treated our warnings as the foolish squalls of children, for that is how they see us now.”

  I avoided eye contact with Tain. An-Hadrea watched me with unblinking scrutiny, waiting for a chance to attack, and I had no wish to appear skeptical of the claims. Whether the cause of the natural disasters was supernatural or not—and the strangeness of my encounter with the Speaker aside, I doubted any such thing existed—it hardly mattered; the land could be abused by overuse either way.

  “I know this is a lot to understand, all at once, if you have never heard it before,” Salvea said gently, as if reading my mind. “But tah and honor are the backbone of our very culture. Without respect for our culture, it became harder to live a balanced life. We are told we may not have public shrines, because visiting Credolen see them as rubbish marring the landscape. Some of our most important rituals we are no longer allowed to perform out in the natural world where they belong, because it is said they make people who are not Darfri uncomfortable. We are given no chances to connect to the secondworld. My daughter, who might have been a very strong Speaker in my great-grandmother’s time, has been denied that connection. Do you see? Our children are being denied their very birthright as people of this land.”

  “I can see.” Tain crossed his arms over his chest, hands tucked under his armpits and head sagging, like an embarrassed child receiving a deserved lecture. And we did deserve it. Only a few weeks ago we had sailed past lands and raised a lazy hand to people working in the fields. They had looked healthy enough, and had waved back, so nothing had challenged my basic assumption that an oppressed people would look thin and cowed and starving.

  “I’ve kno—well, I’ve been told that my uncle was trying to do something about this. That he was meeting with elders and pressuring the other Families.”

  She sighed. “It is true. In fact I met the Chancellor, weeks ago, and his sincerity struck me. He did not deflect or defend, but listened. It is why I am here. I had hoped to prevent all this.”

  “Was he just too late? After all these years, how did it turn into a rebellion?”

  “Ah. Well. There has been quiet talk for years. Many grandmothers whispering tales into headstrong young folks’ ears, about what we lost, and who was to blame. But it is a big country, and we are scattered. I do not think anyone truly imagined all the estates coming together like that. But then there were some things that changed it all. First, the travelers.”

  I leaned forward, blood pounding in my ears. We had always been sure the rebellion was aided by someone external. Were we at last to know who? The Doranites? A western allegiance?

  “They came in wagons but traveled off the main roads, avoiding the main estates, coming into the villages. They had peddlers, healers, and priests. And they took our hospitality, and returned it with kindness and good trading. They were so charming, you understand. They listened to our stories.”

  “Who were they?” Tain asked, a hint of intensity in his voice. “Where were they from?”

  “All sorts of places,” Salvea said. Il-Davior, visibly bored, climbed down off her lap and started drawing patterns in the dust and dirt scattered on the tiles. She stroked his curls absently with one hand. “All colors and shapes, they were. Many from other lands, though some claimed to be Sjon who had abandoned a life of excess in the cities, or quit the army.” She shrugged one shoulder eloquently. “They said we were not alone, that they had heard the same tales all over the country. That the hardworking people of this country were being left behind, kept fat and compliant on the slops of the cities like animals. People listened.” She smoothed her hair back from her brow and I was struck by her poise and calm.

  “In truth, they merely said aloud what many had been thinking. It gave us kinship with people on the other side of the country, to know the same things happened there. And it gave strength and courage to those who had already whispered romantic fantasies of taking the cities back from the oppressors. Once those ideas were planted, they were easily fertilized.

  “And all the while, the damage to the secondworld grew even worse. Some spirits, the stronger ones, were angry, yes, and lashed out. A sudden flood, a blight that destroyed six fields of crops overnight, a cave collapse. These spirits are strong enough to punish us. But the younger spirits and the ones in quieter, lonelier places, they did not have the strength to reach out to us in that way. Without offerings, and without balance, they have…” Salvea broke off, for the first time seemingly too emotional to continue.

  “They’re dead,” An-Hadrea supplied, and the comforting hand on her mother’s shoulder quivered with rage. “You are murdering the very spirits of the land. There could be no greater betrayal of the Compact. Ask yourselves why the people should not tear down this shining place you have built on the shoulders of suffering. You spit on the traditions that formed this country, you kill our souls and then eat and laugh and dance and gamble all the way to hell. You—”

  “Please calm yourself, Hadrea,” Salvea said. She took her daughter’s shaking hand and squeezed it. “You are upsetting Davi.”

  The small boy was in fact staring up at his sister, wide-eyed, though to my eye he looked more interested than upset, channeling a child’s uncanny ability to blissfully ignore adult conversation unless and until you wished them to. Still, An-Hadrea took a breath and smiled down at Il-Davior. “Are you all right, poppet?” she asked
him.

  “Ye-es,” he said with an indignant huff, then went back to his game. The brief interlude had given Salvea a moment to regain her composure, but it did nothing to improve mine; a dark and hollow feeling inside me had taken root and was spreading through my whole body. If the country people of our land believed our abuse had literally killed their spirits, how could we possibly get them to ever negotiate with us at all? How could we overcome anger that must run to their very hearts and souls? I didn’t have to believe spirits existed to understand how people who did would feel about their apparent demise.

  “Even after this, when plans for an uprising were murmured in the shadows, some of us tried to raise our complaints peacefully. Please understand that, Honored Chancellor. We were heartbroken, but we still believed that the right thing to do was to bring a case against the Families. From Losi we sent representatives to Moncasta to bring a case to the determination council there. But they demanded forms and papers that we did not have and could not complete, and they told us our relationship with the Families was outside their business. Private affairs, they said. We paid for a scribe in the city to send a message to the Chancellor but heard nothing back.”

  “But my uncle found out eventually,” Tain said.

  “Yes. When we had no success in the other cities, several men from Losi traveled here to Silasta. They had no luck reaching the Chancellor in the normal petitions, but they were … well, resourceful, I suppose you would say, and they managed to intercept him and speak to him alone.”