by JY Yang
I met the ones in charge here. Quick impressions, all I have time for:
The Head Abbot, Thennjay Satyaparathnam. I’ve never met him in person before, but he is just as the stories tell: tall and handsome and full of easy laughter. He was the first to welcome us, and we warmed to him immediately. He has a deeply reassuring manner, and we could use all the reassurance we can get.
His second-in-command, the once-prophet Sanao Mokoya. The stories they tell about her are so wild, it’s hard to know what to believe. But in the flesh? Intense, hard to understand, the kind of person who thinks fifty things and says only three. Her trust is much harder to win, which is frankly smart of her. She’s also very pregnant. So much more than I expected, based on the interrogation transcripts. The far north is no balmy pleasure village. I can’t believe she was out there just last week.
Her sibling, Sanao Akeha, the terrorist outlaw. Dangerous, and they know it. The kind of person who they paint as a noble hero in the stories but are really just thugs with the right kind of motivation. A killer with a noble cause is still a killer. They trust me even less than their sister does. Fair enough. I was the one who selected Ngiau Chimin to interrogate them, despite knowing her sadistic tendencies. I deserve all their suspicion. (I need to be mindful of their pronouns—I’ve been corrected too many times already. Let’s try not to give them more reasons to murder me.)
Then there’s Rider, the other outlaw. Hard to read, guarded, but generous with their patience. A gentle exterior, but tough on the inside. Not quite what I expected. I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to the way they fold the Slack to move around.
And finally, there’s Yongcheow, Akeha’s partner. Don’t eat anything he cooks.
Rider kept meticulous records of their journey into the caverns. May the fortunes bless them and keep them forever safe. I told them about what the Tensorate did with the transcript of their interview, and they said, “I thought that might happen. . . .” They were less dismayed than they were unsurprised. After all, living in the Protectorate was much worse for them than it was for me.
They let me copy from their journal, which was recorded on some kind of slackcraft device I’d never seen before, stolen from the Tensorate. I made light-replicas of the journal entries and they’re mine now. They’re proof that I’m on the right path.
I’ve found what the Tensorate was trying to hide. Stolen children and hideous human experiments.
See, Rider had a twin. When the babies were born—sickly, with soft bones—their rich trader parents sold the infants to Quarterlander merchants, but one of them was stolen by Tensors before they could cross the Demons’ Ocean. Rider has spent years tracking down their missing twin, only for all the leads to point to that terrible hole in the mountains.
“Why is the Tensorate after twins?” I asked.
“Twins are more likely to be prophets,” they said. “And we think that prophets might be able to influence the outcomes of events, given the right circumstances.”
I said, “Are you saying that prophets not just see the future, but can also control that future? What about Sanao Mokoya? She’s a prophet—can she control the future?
They said no. It’s theoretically possible, but she’s never managed it.
I thought about my dreams, about the underground ponds, and the fish forced to swim in patterns. Is that what they were doing? Kidnapping twins en masse and goading them into warping the fabric of the world, in hopes that a spark would be kindled into flame in one of them?
They’d only need one, after all.
I asked Yuan-ning if she wanted to read the journal entries, but she said no. She’s not yet ready to face what happened in those awful final hours.
I gave Sanao Mokoya and the Head Abbot a list of names that were mentioned in Yuanfang’s letters but weren’t on the list of the dead. Mokoya recognized one of them immediately. It turns out she has a network of spies (of course) who feed her the names of Tensors involved in suspicious projects. She recognized High Tensor Gu Shimau, the oldest son of her mother’s childhood friend. He was previously a Minister of Agriculture until he was pushed out in favor of a younger man. Still, he came around the Tensorate central administration often. He met with ministers, he hosted gatherings in his sprawling mansion, but no one could ever tell me what the fucker did. Mokoya said his personal interest was the transmission of physical traits from parent to child. So, he’s the exact sort of person who might conduct bizarre, hidden experiments on children. I remember him—he could never smile properly. It always came out as a leer. A beady-eyed smirk. My skin feels infested by insects just thinking of it.
I . . . may have volunteered to break into his house and unearth all the evidence I could. I was all ready to go in by myself and fight off every obstacle with my fists. I wanted it. I didn’t care if it was a bad idea.
Instead, Rider will come with me. They’ll take me into Gu’s mansion with their unnerving Slack-folding ability, and I will quietly, unobtrusively steal his records. Hopefully, we will then return to the Grand Monastery, in one piece.
Thank goodness the Head Abbot has a cooler head than I do. Who knew that the life of an outlaw involved so much reason and sense?
Chapter Nineteen
Rider’s Writings, Part I
An elaboration on the events covered in the fragment of the interrogation that I have.
* * *
I head now across the bleeding plains. The sun seems to rise and fall faster here, and the sky alternates between blinding whiteness and the deepest crushed blue. I call this a plateau, but only because it doesn’t climb and climb like a mountain’s face. The ground here is neither easy nor flat. It goes up and down; there are ridges that rise above my head, and ditches to break an ankle in. Deep fissures split the grey stone.
Yet life clings to this inhospitable surface; there are yellow bonetrees as tall as I am, and huge spreading succulents the size of houses. Bloodgrass carpets the spongy dirt that sprouts between knuckles of stone. During the sunfall hours, it lights up with pale bioluminescence and all I can see before me are rows of silver filigree, like fingerbones of the dead.
Perhaps the landscape would be less unsettling if it were quiet, but the wind here never ceases, and it has a strangely human quality to it, like a keening widow. In the dark, I sometimes imagine real words in the high, thin sound, and then an unreasonable fear seizes me. It feels like the landscape itself is speaking to me, and it does not want me here.
I am not superstitious, I do not believe in spirits and demons like some do, but this desolate hellscape plays games with your mind. It makes you doubt your senses. Rational thought falls away. The Slack twists in strange ways here, braided in bizarre patterns that cannot be natural but surely could not be man-made. I wonder about the Tensorate laboratory and the experiments they have conducted. Are they responsible for this deformation of the Slack? What have they done to distort it so?
I do not think I am alone on this plain. I do not mean that Tensors or Machinists might be following me. No, there are animals who live in this inhospitable climate: large ones, the size of livestock. If they did not live here, they died here, leaving behind sets of bones wedged into the rocks. Narrow skulls and the knotted cords of spinal columns, desiccated and white, gristle hardened into chalk by the wind and the cold. I can’t tell what creatures these were. I am no naturalist, and the fauna of the Full Lands is still unfamiliar to me. Their empty grey eye sockets tell me nothing. Some have strange knobs like horns, others jaws full of sharp teeth. What killed them? How did their remains come to be left here? And why are there no living examples upon the plain, darting among the rocks, feeding from the bonetrees and the bloodgrass? Mysteries stack upon mysteries, and I have no explanation for any of them.
In any case, I will find proper shelter when I retire for the night. It will take me two days to cross this plain, I think. I cannot walk, and folding the warped Slack is difficult and dangerous. It has become clear to me how ill suited I am to this t
ask. I was prepared for my quest to be a struggle, but it is one thing to imagine difficulties, and another to live through them.
* * *
I traveled perhaps another fifty li today. The landscape continues to grow stranger and my head continues to grow heavier. The air here is thinner and my lungs struggle harder than ever to fill. I am not sure why. I have not climbed any higher since yesterday. Everything should be the same, yet it is not. I blame the permanent bend in the Slack here; the laws of the world behave differently. Is the Tensorate in the business of deforming reality? I shudder to think what they might do once they perfect this.
I’ve finally caught sight of one of the animals whose bones festoon the crevices of this land. It was some sort of buck in war’s colors, deep red shot through with black, antlers spread wide over its head like the branches of a dead tree. It was the antlers that made me think it was a deer: I saw it only briefly, and it was very far off. It ran when it caught sight of me across the plain, and only then did I see that it had at least six legs, thin and black and clustered. The way its body moved as it leapt away made it look segmented.
What was it? I cannot say. But I am sure it is not a natural thing; the way it was put together said that the hand of nature had not been involved. If I had to guess, I would say the wretched thing was an escapee from the secret laboratory. We have already seen what Tensors are capable of crafting out of the wreckage of a living thing. A wholly unpleasant thought, being alone on this plain with these twisted creations.
The more I see of the area the more anxious I become, thinking of what I will find at the end of my journey. My mind conjures formless, terrible ideas of what might have been done to my twin. The journal that Junhong found only detailed the early years of their life, when they were still reasonably human and reasonably normal. I dread to think what has been done to them in the decades since. What if all I find is a monster, twisted beyond recognition, physically and mentally scarred from years of being tortured by the Tensorate? What if I am too late?
That’s the worst part of it all. What if I could have saved them if I had rescued them earlier? I waited until I was safe in my own happiness before starting to look for them, and all that time, they were alone and chained to this fate.
My greatest fear is not that I will find some sort of half-animal creature, wild-eyed and untamed. It is that I will find a genuine monster: someone perfectly human but with a heart of stone, turned cruel from enduring years of cruelty. What if they are not a tool enslaved by the Protectorate but a willing blade? What if they are proof of what I should have known all along—that there is something broken inside me, only waiting for the right environment to bring it out?
* * *
I found the strange buck-creature that I saw yesterday. Or what remained of it, at least. It was the body I first came across, lying in a shallow ditch against a tall column of stone, missing its head and a good chunk of its front half. Close up, I could see that it was about the size of a horse, and it had an equine, muscular build as well. It must have been strong when it was alive. Yesterday I guessed that it had six legs, but that number was actually eight, four on each side. The poor thing was a chimera, the body mammalian and coated with a sheen of dark fur, but the limbs like crab legs, jointed and covered in a hard, iridescent shell.
By the time I reached it, the carcass was no longer warm, and the blood had congealed on the ground and on the ragged edges of the flesh, so I guessed it had been dead for a sun-cycle at least. Whatever killed it had left three deep gashes in its side, and if those were claw marks, they must have belonged to a predator around Phoenix’s size. Scavengers had gotten inside the body cavity, leaving tiny bites in the flesh and small toothmarks on the ribs. They were hiding on the edge above me, deep in the cracks in the rock. When I looked up, all I saw were the silver coins of their eyes staring at me. They made chirping noises like bilixins, but I do not think they were birds; when I tilted my head to get a better look, I saw flashes of fangs in the dark. For whatever reason, they left me alone. Perhaps they are afraid of humans.
Following the thick trail of blood led me to more of the creature, abandoned at the foot of a bonetree. Just the head and a few red lumps of upper vertebrae, possibly detached when the antlers got caught in the bonetree roots. The creature had two pointed fangs like mousedeer do, strange to see on a horse-sized head. The antlers were beautiful, though, smooth and pearlescent, each one splitting into a dozen branches that swirled and twisted around each other like a fine carving. I could see a head like this cleaned and displayed in a Tensor’s vanity cabinet, stuffed full of cotton and given glass eyes. I have no doubt Khimyan would have loved something like this; she would have cut the head off the creature herself.
I tried to lift the head to get a better look, but I thought it blinked—and in fear, I dropped it and folded as far away as I could. Now that I am safe in shelter and can call up memories of the incident with the cushion of hours in between, I am sure it was only a trick of the light, the sun playing over the glassy surface of its corpse eyes. I overreacted.
This place presses on me with all its hostility: the air like a white demon’s breath, cold and dry and thin; the alien landscape with its fruitless trees and thick fleshy grass; the unexplainable warping of the Slack that makes it as unpredictable as a wounded tiger. Fear is my constant companion, turning in my chest like a coiled snake, sliding through my limbs and poisoning my veins.
In any case, I have found the Tensorate facility, against all the odds. All this time, we had thought that the laboratories were hidden here because of the caves so that the Tensors could conceal their abhorrent activities in a natural formation. We were wrong. On the horizon I see that the plain has been cleared of brush and flattened. A series of buildings huddles flush against the flanks of the mountain, grey and square, fenced in by a Slack barrier, or the remains of one—it is so weak that I know I shall have no problem getting by it.
The Tensors built their laboratory out here, in this inhospitable place, and I have to wonder why. What was it they wanted to hide so badly they had to go to the ends of the world to do it, to a place where no human could hope to live? There is a strange stillness to the compound that I cannot explain—it seems empty of people. Perhaps the Slack is so distorted here, I can no longer tell. But I have not seen a soul since I last killed those Tensors who came after me. It does not bode well.
I suppose I will find out.
* * *
Because of the dangers ahead, from now on I will record my observations as often as I can. If I perish here, these will at least be a record of my last hours, in my own words.
* * *
I am at the gates of the compound. The place is abandoned: as far as I can tell, it is as empty of life as it appears in the Slack. But it is not long abandoned. The buildings are relatively clean, their walls mold-free, the masonry uncracked. The barrier generators that protect the compound have not yet fallen into disrepair, and the barrier has only failed because several generators have been crushed to pieces. An ominous beginning, if I may.
It turns out that the deer-creature had ten legs after all. I found the rest of it, the shoulders and the haunches, in the courtyard of the compound. It had been stripped to the gristle, the dull clay under it still damp with the blood. At least it was in good company. The courtyard was a dumping ground of bones, scattered thick enough to crunch underfoot. Some of them were from ungulates, others smaller creatures. I saw several ribcages that were clearly human. And they weren’t old—even the most dried-out specimens still had flesh clinging to the scarred yellow curves, half in the slow process of drying out.
It is clear that something catastrophic has befallen the facility, and hence the reason for its abandonment. Or was it abandoned? It’s hard to say. There are a lot of bones here. A lot of fresh bones. This is a lair.
I dread going into the buildings to see what’s left. But I must.
* * *
I entered the first building to the l
eft. These are living quarters, as far as I can tell, wooden partitions and stairs built within the stone walls. A kitchen with granite fixtures, woks and pots lying abandoned. The larder has been ransacked, and not neatly. I walked through the building to survey the wreckage. Things smashed on the floor, trinkets, blank scrolls. Food trampled and turning to mush. Occasionally, I caught the scent of deeper decay, the sharp punch of rotting meat.
I tried to find the source of this smell, which was a mistake. It led me up the main flight of stairs. I first realized something was wrong when I saw the claw marks along the banisters and on the side of the walls. The smell only grew stronger and more unpleasant as I climbed to the top of the stairs, which were a jungle of splintered wood. Between the ache in my hips and the fear in my chest, I almost turned around, but I knew that I would never solve the mysteries before me if I allowed myself to become timid. So, I went forward.
Four bodies sprawled across the head of the stairs, soft with decay, flesh ruptured, ropes of intestines melting into black mush. I don’t know who they were; I could not stare at them for too long, their hollowed faces with discolored, waxy skin. I hurried down the corridor and found two more bodies, probably cut down while fleeing. Long tears down the back, muscles peeling away from the spine. I knew the patterns of those wounds: raptors. Escaped guard animals, perhaps, or worse. I saw burn marks along the corridor, but from what I know of Tensors, they are terrible at slackcrafting under pressure. So, who scorched these? The attackers? I can only imagine the terror that these hallways have seen. Sometimes, violent deaths leave their mark on the Slack, but the Slack here is so twisted, death makes no difference.
