The Hand of the Sun King

by J. T. Greathouse

  “Do not look so surprised,” Atar said. “There is air in the water and water in the air, is there not?”

  What Atar took for surprise was instead sudden, astonishing realization. The subtle magic woven into the Blade-of-the-Wind’s performance and the familiar silver filigree on Katiz’s bowl together answered a question that had gently nagged at me since my first sight of the Blessed Oasis. I turned toward the distant glow of An-Zabat.

  There, running down its obelisks and deep beneath the city, I saw magic, like a gentle breeze across a calm, clear pond. The wake of Naphena’s miracle was not an intrusion, but a necessary thread. The source, in fact, of the interplay of energies between the oasis, the greenbelt, and the people of the city. Only now, knowing what to look for, could I feel the wake of that old and ancient power anchored to the obelisks and the statue, keeping An-Zabat alive.

  “Firecaller?” Atar said and took me by the hand. “It is our turn to drink.”

  Chapter Twenty

  To Shape the Wind

  “I brought rice gruel and ginseng tea.”

  A tray clattered on my bedside table. Jhin crossed the room and threw open the curtain covering my window.

  “I’m not hung over,” I said, blinking against the late-morning light.

  “You did not return to your bed until dawn,” Jhin said. “For the third time this month.”

  For the past weeks Jhin had grown more and more impertinent, treating me like a self-indulgent child and not as his elder brother in the great family of Empire. Intellectually, I had become suspicious of notions like propriety and hierarchical deference, particularly after seeing how they helped to insulate the Sienese rulers of An-Zabat from the struggles of the common people. A strict adherence to propriety, after all, would have denied me any opportunity to see the things I had seen in the city. Yet after a childhood and career marinating in notions of who ought to treat whom in such-and-such a way, his tone rankled me.

  “I’ve been doing research in the city. Observing its economy first-hand, to better craft policy, as Voice Rill and I discussed.”

  “Oh?” Jhin said, while he set about preparing my meal. “And has this research been fruitful?”

  “I’ve seen children hunting rats. Mothers and fathers starving themselves to be sure that each of their children had at least a morsel.”

  “Children hunt rats in many cities, Your Excellence.”

  I tried to keep my tone level even as I gave in to my annoyance with him--and, more profoundly, with the structures of Empire he seemed determined to defend. “Did not the sage Traveler-on-the-Narrow-Way write ‘The man whose riches were borne on the backs of the wretched, and the thief who enriches himself with the wealth of others; they are alike, and should be scorned alike?’ What of the Empire, then? What of…” I waved a hand at my silk sheets, the fine art on my walls, the jade and gold and marble ornaments throughout the room. “What of all of this? How am I any better than a thief, for living in such luxury while children starve?”

  My words hung in the air, and I realized how absurd what I had said would sound to him. It would have seemed absurd to me, too, but for Iron Town, and for Atar. And my grandmother, who showed me a second way of looking at the world when I was too young to understand the value of that gift.

  He drew his mouth into a line. When he spoke, there was a note of warning I had not heard in his voice before. “Why am I your steward, and not dead like so many other urchins of Sor Cala, the City of Stone, where I was born? Paths were laid before us, Your Excellence. Not every path is the same, and not every path ends well, but all we can do is follow them as duty and propriety demand. This is a thing hard learned in Toa Alon.”

  A common enough defense for the hypocrisies of Empire, but not one that I was willing to hear. Oriole’s path had led him to death in the mud at Iron Town, but that end had not been inevitable. As every decaying leaf and growing tree helps to shape the pattern of the world, so every human act shapes the paths that we all might follow. And those in power, like Voices of the Emperor, or Ministers of Trade, can shape those paths with a motion of their will. I would not forge blindly ahead, as I had done when I brought Oriole to Iron Town, without a thought for the harm I might be doing to those around me.

  “You are exhausted from your late night, Your Excellence,” Jhin said. “I suggest you take the day and get some rest.”

  I took his advice, but that night I went out again into the city, where once more I met Atar. I told her of my bifurcated upbringing, divided between my grandmother’s lessons and my Sienese education, and in turn she taught me more of An-Zabat and its people. Though, of course, what I longed most to understand was its magic.

  “How did Naphena make the oasis?” I said, while we walked the streets by night. Atar, as winddancer, was well known and well respected in all corners of the city. Taverns where the desperate found a night of relief in wine. Harborside alleys where those with naught to sell but their own flesh found custom. Atar moved through it all, sharing coin and kindness in equal measure, and no matter where we ventured we were never far from the shadow of an obelisk.

  “It was a miracle,” she said. “A working of magic in defiance of the gods.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But how? Is it the same as your cistern bowls, only on a much grander scale? And how does the spell go on, centuries after her death?”

  Atar seemed bemused by my question. Our conversations had grown more and more complex as I became comfortable, if not entirely fluent, with the An-Zabati tongue, able to ask about concepts that she had shied away from discussing in Sienese for want of words with the right depth of meaning.

  “You may as well ask why the sun rises, or the winds stir the desert sands, or why it never rains on the waste,” she said. “She rewrote the very laws of nature in this place and fixed her will in the stone of the obelisks. She made the world other than it was.”

  I studied the obelisk that loomed above us. Old sandstone, weathered by wind, but the silver filigree was bright and untarnished as though it had been created that morning. Now that I understood the magic in the obelisks I could feel its wake--a subtle chill down my arms, evidence that the pattern was not as it would otherwise have been.

  “When I was a child, I worked magic without being taught,” I said. “My grandmother had not marked me yet, but I was able to sense the ripples of her magic, and to reach for power. I felt that every possibility was open to me. I’ve been trying to understand that feeling for my entire life.” I gestured to the obelisk. “This is the first thing I have seen that comes close to the magnitude of power I felt.”

  I did not mention the Emperor himself, whose perpetual transmission of sorcery to his Voices and Hands was a mountain jutting up through the pattern of the world. The obelisks were a wonder, but they did not shake my bones and fill my heart with terror and awe.

  Atar rubbed her forearms, where she wore the spiraling tattoos that were the mark of her magic. “You speak of a thing we encounter from time to time. Children able to feel the ripples of windshaping. Always they are chosen for windcallers, or blades-of-the-wind, and marked from a young age. To wield magic without the marks is to tread on ground the gods defend with jealousy. That is why Naphena created our pact, so that we might have power sheltered from divine wrath.”

  “In my grandmother’s stories, the gods themselves gave the Nayeni witches their marks,” I said.

  Atar considered this. “Perhaps your gods are kinder than ours. Still jealous, but willing to share some scraps of their power. In the desert, we know that the sky and the sands are at best indifferent, and at worst want our deaths.”

  I thought of the wolf gods, their snarling faces and their fiery eyes, which had long studied me from the dark corners of my nightmares. No longer, thankfully. Not since that last visit to the Temple of the Flame.

  “I don’t think they are,” I said. “Maybe the witches of Nayen had a benefactor like Naphena, but one we have forgotten.”

  “Perhap
s,” Atar said. “But if that is true, then it fills me with a deep sadness. We must not forget those who worked to better the world. Come now, Firecaller. There is much else to show you.”

  * * *

  The following months passed in a flurry. By day I continued tracking tariffs and tax records, adjusting rates of exchange, and monitoring the flow of goods in and out of the city as I had always done. On the last day of each week I slipped away from the citadel.

  Atar told me of her childhood as the daughter of windshaper parents. Her father had lost his life fighting the Empire. Her mother, badly wounded and without enough to eat, had succumbed to an illness not long after. At fourteen years old she found herself an orphan and responsible for a ten-year-old brother. Though her mother had begun to teach her to shape the wind, she had no ship, and in the chaos of the imperial crackdown on the windcallers, and the windcaller’s uprising in response, she found herself alone and on the streets.

  “I knew my own dance,” Atar told me, “and I had learned others by watching at the Valley of Rulers. It was a way for a young girl to feed herself, and by the time Katiz recognized me in the bazaar I had garnered something of a following in the city. He convinced Falma--the winddancer before me--to accept me as an apprentice. When she returned to the sand, I assumed her duties.”

  “Where is your brother now?” I said.

  She looked at the horizon. “Not long after I began to dance in the bazaar, I returned one day to find him missing. Despite Katiz’s help I have yet to find him. Perhaps, hungry and desperate, he ran off to join the crew of a windship. Perhaps he met his death at the edge of a bandit’s knife, or an imperial spear. Who can say?”

  We began to visit the Valley of Rulers on our own, and Atar taught me to dance like an An-Zabati scribe, then like a merchant. She would show me the steps and laugh when I inevitably floundered in my attempts to follow her.

  “We’ll make a dancer of you yet, Firecaller,” she would say, smiling, and correct the bend of my knee or the line of my arm with a gentle touch. More than once I fought the urge to make mistakes on purpose, to see her bemused smile, and to give her an excuse to stand close.

  On my third full moon at the circle I performed the Soldier’s Dance to much applause. After, while we walked back to the catacombs with the moon and stars for our only lanterns, I asked her to teach me to dance like a windcaller.

  She paused on the sandstone path. “That secret is not mine to share.” She went on with a gentle smile. “Do not despair, Firecaller. I will help you earn it.”

  As we neared the brass door that led back to the city, the moonlight lit in the curls of her hair. She looked back at me, and her eyes seemed deep and infinite, as though all the answers I had longed for my entire life might dwell within their depths.

  My chest filled with fire, and I acted without thinking, following an urge that seemed to strike from far beyond me.

  My hand found hers, pulled her toward me. She stiffened--which doused the fire within me and shattered a half-formed hope. Of course, she did not want me as I wanted her. Though we may have become friends, and though I had shared secrets that could see me killed, I was still Minister of Trade, Hand of the Emperor.

  I was more than Sienese, but Sienese nonetheless.

  I let go. The silver of my tetragram glimmered in the dark.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, stumbling to find words that would repair the damage I had so impulsively done. “I thought--"

  “Thought what, Firecaller?” she said. “That I could forget who you are? Some of us have learned to master our desires. They can so often lead us into danger and deceit.”

  “No, I just…” Again, words escaped me, as they never did--not at Iron Town, not when Hand Usher nearly uncovered my secret even as he elevated me to Hand of the Emperor. Lies had come easily, all my life. The truth--for I would offer her nothing less--hurt so much more to form.

  “Since I was an infant other people have had plans for me,” I said at last. “My grandmother meant for me to resist the Sienese. My father wanted me to advance our station in the Empire. When my grandmother left, I had no path but the one that led to the imperial examination and Hand Usher, who made me Hand of the Emperor--”

  “You could have refused.”

  “Could I?” I snapped, hearing an echo of Clear-River’s ultimatum in her words. I took a deep breath and spoke again, determined to keep my voice calm and measured despite the anger welling within me. Atar was not its focus. “My grandmother disappeared one night, gone to join the rebellion with hardly a word to me, let alone an offer to join her. What was I to do? Venture into the north on my own, to be captured by bandits and ransomed back to my father? So long as I lived in his house, or in the house of Voice Golden-Finch, there was no room for me to decide what I wanted to be. Only now have I found anything like such freedom.”

  “And now that you have freedom,” she said. “What will you choose?”

  “I want to stay here. With you.”

  “Oh? You would sacrifice comfort, prestige, and power to fight for a land not your own? Why?”

  “I want to fight by your side,” I said.

  She faced the city skyline, punctuated by obelisks silhouetted against the stars and the broad sweep of the desert sky. “You have given aid to the poor of our city,” she said. “And for that, I thank you. And I thank you for your tales of Nayen, for the broader sense I carry of the world, and for the knowledge that we are not alone in our struggle against the Empire. But you were always a guest here, Firecaller.”

  “Yet I have never felt more at home,” I said.

  “Truly?” she said and held my gaze for a long moment, and I dared to hope, though my heart ached and thundered. “I have seen the desire in your eyes, as I have seen it in the eyes of many other men. And I will admit, I feel an echo of it. But this thing you want…” Her voice became soft and sad, but there was a current of anger in the hard set of her shoulders. “Do you think I would be a Sienese wife, locked away in the depths of your estate?”

  “Of course not--”

  Her eyes narrowed, and I swallowed my words. “Then would you have me leave my people to fight in Nayen?” she said. “Or would you abandon yours, and crew a windship? Do you truly love me, Firecaller, or do you love the idea of a third path, neither Sienese nor Nayeni?”

  I wanted to argue, to mount a defence of my feelings as I would answer a question of Sienese doctrine. But the divide between us would not be bridged by argument. She waited for my answer, and when I met her with nothing but silence she left me there. I waited till she disappeared beyond the brass door to the tunnels beneath An-Zabat. Only then did I go on, following the echo of her steps through the catacombs, grasping for words that might convey my heart. Words I failed to find, while her last echoing footstep faded, and I emerged in the pre-dawn dark, alone.

  * * *

  That night I revisited every moment Atar and I had spent together, sifting for any strand of hope I might cling to. A glance. A lingering touch of her hand. The press of her shoulder against mine while we stood in the circle and waited for our turns to dance.

  The next day I buried myself in mercantile reports, trying to numb my heart with ledgers and over-steeped tea. As I was finishing for the day and staring down the spectre of another long, sleepless night, Hand Cinder paid a visit to the Wind Through Grass pavilion. Jhin had hardly announced him before he strutted into the room, taking it in with a blithe sweep of his gaze.

  “I haven’t seen much of you these past months,” he said, planting himself in one of my reading chairs.

  “My duties have kept me occupied,” I said.

  He nodded sagely. “I heard about that. A few new taxes, a ‘strategic reserve,’ which for some reason you saw fit to hand over to the windcallers.”

  I felt a chill, but Cinder was too dense to have seen through me completely. “People in the city are starving. Full bellies are less prone to violent revolt,” I said.

  “People in ever
y city are starving,” Cinder said. “But I suppose an Easterling would understand revolt. Anyway, you never finished your training in the canon. Isn’t it about time to correct that?”

  I no longer had any desire to study the canon, nor to fight for an Empire that might sacrifice me--as it had sacrificed Oriole. An Empire that, by the very proclamations of its sages, acted cruelly, and callously, in pursuit of little more than ostentatious gardens and gilt palaces, and left ruin and starvation in its wake.

  Yet this visit had been sudden, and unannounced, and Cinder was obviously suspicious.

  “You are right,” I said. “I could use a reprieve from paperwork.

  He clapped me on the back and led the way to the archery range. The targets were different--the straw dummies had been dressed in the vests and loose trousers common in An-Zabat, and their heads painted with long noses and curled hair. Poor caricatures of the people we ruled.

  “A nice touch, eh?” Cinder said. “I had the servants put them together this morning.”

  “It seems a waste of fabric and time,” I said.

  Cinder shrugged. “Perhaps. But it amuses me.”

  My hatred flared, and retorts burned through me, desperate to spill from my mouth. Are not the people of An-Zabat the Emperor’s children? How is this a fulfillment of your duties to them, your younger siblings in the great family of Empire?

  But this was a test. I sensed it, and though I did not know the rubric I knew that to find any but the most superficial flaws in this amusement would mean failure.

  “Very well,” I said. “We must all take what joys from life we can, however simple.”

  I opened my left hand and reached for the second channel. The first dummy burst apart in a rain of smoldering wood and cloth. Cinder barked a laugh.

  “Such enthusiasm!” he said. “But we are not here to practice battle-sorcery. It is time to advance your mastery of the canon. Close your eyes, breathe deeply, and reach for the third channel.”