by Holly Lisle
The Sinali waited until the last of the group filed into the chamber, and until the guards outside the massive double doors had closed them with an ominous, quiet click.
Then he stood before the assembly and bowed. “In this emergency session of the full gathering of men of goodwill representing the true nations of the world, I present the Feegash representatives of the first diplomat and premier of Ba’afeegash, and their captives, the pacified Tonk, here to present their case for surrender.”
Aaran suppressed the smile he felt. The ripple of applause around the chamber, and the cold triumph in the glittering eyes of the buzzard-black–garbed Feegash diplomats, would change soon enough if he and his people did their work well.
The Sinali presenter stepped aside and Sakjin, in his role as voice of the first Diplomat and premier, stepped forward and unrolled the scroll that the Feegash and the Tonk had spent countless hours putting together with its supporting documents.
Sakjin bowed, and presented the scroll with its unbroken Seal of the first diplomat to the head diplomat of the Feegash, who had moved down to the front row center for a better view of the proceedings. The man nodded and turned to the assembly. “The seal is valid,” he said in Feegashi. “What follows are the true words of the first diplomat and premier of Ba’afeegash.”
He handed the scroll back to Sakjin and took his seat.
Sakjin stepped back and broke the seal—which Aaran had sealed with the medallion only the day before, once everyone agreed it was as close to perfect as they could make it. He lifted the scroll and read:
“Heretofore the Feegash people present to the nations of the world the treaty of the Tonk clan with the nations of the world, as negotiated with Kafrij Son of Fanbjan of the first family, first diplomat and premier of the nation of Ba’afeegash, and so spoken for all the Feegash people.
“This treaty replaces all previous treaties with all nations represented in these chambers, and claims provenance by signature over all Tonk Old Clans, all Tonk Transitional Clans, all Tonk New Clans, the Drifted Clan of Eskuu, and by proxy the still-missing Drifted Clans of Kyruu and Jiree.”
That brought gasps from the audience. Nothing like the ones that would be coming, but the idea of a signature treaty that claimed jurisdiction over all Tonks everywhere was enough to set the audience back on its heels.
Aaran kept the grin off his face, as did his men. They stood straight and looked grim, which was their job for the time being.
Sakjin read through the list of clans and the signatures beside each, as well as the list of witnesses, each with their seal. Those seals had been great fun to collect.
It made an impressive, if tedious list. And a nicely forged one, too, Aaran thought. The hands of dead men wrote poorly, but their seals spoke just as well for the dead as for the living.
Sakjin then got to the good part. “As is customary in proceedings of this nature, where the complete capitulation of one people to the peoples of the world and the dissolution of that people as a sovereign entity is assigned by treaty, we will now read into the record the cases on file by which this agreement was reached. And as is mandatory in such cases, we require that all representatives who would have this held as binding for their nations remain present for the reading-in of the records as well as for the treaty.”
It didn’t look like getting people to stay was going to be a problem. At the words “complete capitulation” and “dissolution,” emissaries had sent their runners fleeing from the chamber at full gallop, and already additional men were beginning to file in and take seats at their nations’ tables. Aaran guessed that if the trend continued, the place was going to be standing-room only by the time Sakjin reached the part with the capitulation and dissolution.
All to the good.
“We now read into the record the agreement of alliance between the Mesahaqa nation and the Feegash nation, dated first of Ereagn, hour seven, in the year Toqin 73 of the Feegash calendar.”
Up in the high seats, there was some stirring, and a ripple of distress. The Mesahaqa were not a known Feegash ally, and had been on the payroll of Ba’afeegash in exchange for making war on the Romefendags across their northern border. Aaran watched, privately amused, because the unhappy looks across tables were going to get worse. Down in front, the Feegash head diplomat shifted uncomfortably. That, too, was going to keep getting better—from Aaran’s perspective, anyway. Sakjin read in the agreement where in exchange for a supply of Bessel-made catapults and crossbows the Mesahaqa agreed to raid the Romefendags and turn over all but political captives to the Feegash.
Mild uproar from the high seats, stunned disbelief in the eyes of the first diplomat.
Sakjin said: “We now read into the record the agreement of alliance between the Romefendag nation and the Feegash nation, dated third of Ereagn, hour fourteen, in the year Toqin 73 of the Feegash calendar.”
Up in the high seats, only the fact that the Romefendags and the Mesahaqa were separated by the width of the room was keeping them from attacking each other. The head diplomat was sinking into his seat, knowing what was coming, though he clearly couldn’t begin to figure out how under-the-table Feegash alliances were going to lead to the disbanding of the Tonk clans.
And when Sakjin revealed that the Feegash were also giving the Romefendags weapons in order to get free slaves from the Mesahaqa, attention started shifting. The Feegash had been publicly working toward a peace between the warring nations; there was suddenly a certain amount of interest in those buzzard figures scattered throughout the chamber from representatives of other nations. And with good cause.
A lot of folks in that chamber knew dirty secrets. And all but the Feegash present knew only a tiny number of them.
Sakjin began calling forward his assistants, armed with the records handed over by the marines who’d lugged them in, and he read. And read. And read.
While there had been murmurs of amusement from other nations at the embarrassing situation between the Romefendags and the Mesahaqa, by the time he had read out conflicting treaties between Sinali provinces, between Franican states, between the whole of Bheki and its smaller sister island of Dhakrit, each engineered by the Feegash for the clear end benefit of the Feegash, no one was laughing anymore.
The head Feegash diplomat stood and said, “As head of the overseas Feegash diplomatic community, I question the direction of this document, and the relevance of the material you’re adding to the record in regards to the issue of Tonk surrender. I move, therefore, that we adjourn these proceedings until the Feegash field diplomats have the opportunity to confer with the Feegash voice, and go over the materials sent by the first diplomat and premier, to … better present this … testimony.”
Sakjin, with the scroll in front of him and the wall of marines with boxes of records behind him, said, “As voice of the first diplomat and premier, I do not recognize you to speak, Afirt, nor do I recognize your right to question the materials assembled by the first diplomat and premier to present this case. You will remain in chamber, and you will be seated.”
Afirt looked around. He was hemmed in by an increasingly hostile crowd. So, too, were the other Feegash diplomats.
In a dozen languages, Aaran heard other representatives telling him to sit down.
Sakjin said, “We have more supporting documents, and we will return to reading them into the record. However, at this time, we welcome the Living Goddess Oracle Hawkspar Eyes of War, of the Order of the Ossalenes, who will present the record of the first 324 years of the Feegash diplomatic plan as kept by the Order, and the future of the war and peace of the world, as a gift to the peoples of the world.”
Several of the Feegash diplomats leapt to their feet and attempted to fight their way through the crowds to the exit. The head diplomat, for some reason liking his chances across the main floor better than up through the stands, jumped over the barrier that separated him from the Feegash and Tonk presenters, fell the distance to the stone floor, and missed his footing.
The sickening crack of breaking bone reached all the way to the top seats.
While the crowd of representatives forcibly returned the Feegash diplomats above them to their seats, three Seru Moonstone marched forward to the screaming head diplomat and crouched over him. Aaran, watching their heads dip forward and seeing their translucent white eyes begin to glow, was forcibly and uncomfortably reminded of the feeding of a pack of wolves on a downed deer.
The head diplomat quickly stopped screaming, and a chill ran down Aaran’s spine. He could imagine them stepping away with nothing but dust in a man-shaped pile at their feet.
But of course that didn’t happen. When they stood, they pulled the unwilling but healed head diplomat to his feet, and handed him, on two unbroken legs, over to the Sinali guards who had materialized out of side doors.
The guards marched him out of the chamber, then brought Afirt back in through the representatives’ doors, marched him down the central aisle, where the standing audience crammed even closer together to permit him to pass, and reseated him down front. The two guards then stood behind him, and signaled that the proceedings could resume.
Aaran held his breath. He had known how every part of their presentation would go to that point, but when Hawkspar strode forward, and the marines and her own people bowed all the way to the ground as she passed, he had the sudden impression that a force of nature had stepped front and center. She was not the woman he knew. She was, instead, the creature he feared. The one she said she would become.
The woman he loved had left him—perhaps, like his sister, she no longer existed.
He bent, too, as she went past him. He had not intended to, but the force of her presence moved him. The waves of representatives above him, their foreheads going flat to the tables before them, and the audience dropping to its knees told him her power reached far beyond him.
Ageless and ancient, a goddess borrowing human skin for a visit, the Eyes of War stepped atop the small dais and from within one sleeve pulled out an arrangement of wood that she bent down and made into a tripod. She adjusted her staff within the center of the tripod so that it stood up. She rose and from the staff’s top, pulled down two small wooden arms.
All eyes focused on her, fascinated. Aaran thought she could have been calling down lightning on the lot of them and such was the magnetism of her presence that not one of them would have moved.
From somewhere within that mass of skirts, she next removed a thick roll of knotted silk wound onto two carved rods about as wide as his forearm was long.
These she attached to the crossbar by means of a cord, and let the object unroll into a hanging. Black strands of silk hung knotted in irregular patterns and rows. He could make out no overall pattern in the arrangement.
But some in the audience evidently knew what the object she had hung before them was, for he heard scattered gasps and a sudden rush of whispering.
Hawkspar rested her fingertips on the silk strands and waited for silence, staring up at the audience.
Silence came quickly.
Hawkspar
I was infinite. Eternal. Legion. I drew my strength from the same source that would feed the madness; I knew this. But I also knew that my presence and my testimony would allow everything that followed to matter to those who held the fate of the Tonk in their hands. If I did not bind my audience into my tale as I had bound the knots in my weaving, the material we presented next to the gathered representatives of nations and empires would fail to move them, and all that had gone before would be for nothing. The Feegash might be temporarily discredited, but they would regain their stature. The Tonk would be wiped out and destroyed.
So I wrapped the power of the Eyes of War around me like a cloak, and let it echo in my voice as I spoke to the gathered crowd.
“I bring before you the oracles’ record of the Feegash Five-Hundred-Year Plan, along with the paths it has woven through your own people and the prices you have so far paid to it.”
“There is no Five-Hundred-Year Plan,” one Feegash from up toward the top shouted.
I turned my gaze to him, and he froze. “In the same manner that there were no secret treaties between the Feegash and the assembled people here, there is no Five-Hundred-Year Plan,” I said. “The first diplomat and premier of Ba’afeegash has kindly offered to us a copy of the Five-Hundred-Year Plan, signed with his word and his seal, to be entered into the record of this court and studied by those interested in the careful deceptions found therein. It is not my purpose, however, to read the whole of the plan to you, but simply to acquaint you with the overall purpose of the plan, and those parts of it that have been successfully carried out.”
I wished I could see faces. With the full power of the Eyes brought to bear, I could feel the emotions of the room around me. I stood in the waters of time, submerged in the moment, and I could catch the rage and shock and betrayal in the assembled representatives, and the fear in the Feegash diplomats, and from behind me, glee and joy in vengeance long-awaited and now coming to fruition for the Tonk warriors and the Feegash who had been downtrodden and misused for so long. But being able to feel is not the same as being able to watch the eyes of those who had been responsible, as a people, for the deaths of my family.
I wanted to watch them shake, the Feegash bastards. I wanted to watch them quake and shudder as the truth poured out.
We rarely get what we want.
Sometimes, however, we still get enough.
I began running my fingers through the knots, reading the past that I had so carefully gleaned from time’s currents. “In the fifth year of the Feegash plan, because of the first treaty of Hamin, negotiated by the Feegash between the Rance-Hawe of Old North Tandinapalis and the Pelosi, also of Old North Tandinapalis, the Rance-Hawe disarmed, as did the Pelosi. The Tand Northmen, who had paid a great deal of gold to the Feegash, then were able to invade and wipe out both Rance-Hawe and Pelosi.”
The Tand Northmen later settled into cities, and became the Roshnan, who were still allies of the Feegash. There were no Pelosi or Rance-Hawe left to protest this treachery. But the Roshnan remembered how they had become who they were. And I wanted to establish the manner in which the Feegash worked. Many in that chamber would recognize the treachery, from one side or the other, but would never have made the connection before what happened to them and who was responsible for it.
So after story of the Rance-Hawe, I told of the warring Tand mountain clans who permitted the Feegash to assist them, and who found themselves subsumed by the highest bidders. And then, as the Feegash influence spread, of nation after nation pitted against one another, or disarmed in order to favor greedy third nations. Each section of knots told me of the next betrayal, and then the one after that. Every ally of the Feegash had at one point or another been on the wrong end of a deal that favored the Feegash—they were entirely happy to take secret money from all parties and then deliver only the results that favored their ends.
And the Feegash ends were quite simple. They wanted to eventually receive tribute and slaves from the whole of the world. They wanted their way to be the only way, and they made certain that anyone or anything that stood in the way of that long-term goal eventually failed.
The steadily mounting list of their treacheries drew gasps, and then angry murmurs, and finally—as all those people representing nations that had so far survived the Feegash plan heard of the dealings that would eventually destroy them—a dangerous undercurrent of whispers.
My fingers read knots in silk, and my words put forth images to my listeners that their minds could not refute, and could not shut out. They had been willing to profit by the betrayed trust of others, but had never thought that they would be made fools by the same tricks that they had so rejoiced to see used on others.
And yet, there they all sat, and among them sat the architects of their foolishness.
I began to hear murmurs that the Feegash diplomats should be taken out and executed on the stairs.
<
br /> I raised a hand—my right hand. I did not wish, after all, to mark myself Tonk. Not yet.
Some of my story still remained.
“You cannot kill the Feegash yet. That time might come, but there are some who have been treated by the Feegash as you have, but who do not have representatives in this grand chamber to speak for them. You must hear their story as well.”
And I told them the story of the Tonk, and the three hundred years of Tonk war with the Eastils in the other half of Hyre. Everyone knew this story, or at least they thought they did. However, they had heard it through the Feegash diplomats, whose people had for over three hundred years coveted Hyre. As I told the representatives of those nations allied against the Tonk about how the Feegash had negotiated a truce between the Eastil Republic and the Confederacy of Hyre, and how the Feegash diplomats had disarmed both nations with the Feegash mercenaries acting as peacekeeping troops throughout the process, and how Ba’afeegash had then turned its mercenaries on the unarmed population and enslaved both Eastils and Tonk, murmurs of recognition passed through the room. The Tonk ceased to be a swarm of madmen to those assembled, and became men standing against a common enemy.
I told of how the Tonk had been the reason the Feegash Hundred-Year Plan became the Three-Hundred-Year Plan, and finally the Five-Hundred-Year Plan. How the Tonk refusal to be pacified had kept not just the Tonk free for over three hundred years, but much of the rest of the world as well. The Feegash, not having the resources to fight the Tonk on their own, built up other nations to do their fighting for them.
“All you who stand in this assembly with nations that have strength of arms and strength of armies, all of you who call yourselves free men and allies of the Feegash, do so because the Feegash needed you for this moment. The moment when they could call your armies down upon the one people they could not conquer, could not bribe, and could not sell. You have been made the Feegash tool to hand Ba’afeegash the southern plains of Tandinapalis, the island nation of Hyre, the western islands of Velobrina, sections of Franica, and northern Tandinapalis. Their plans to betray you, disarm you, and enslave you once you have given them that which they most desire, and which they cannot obtain for themselves, are written into their Five-Hundred-Year Plan, which has been submitted for the record. The Tonk have saved you so far.”
