How, I wondered, had they shaped the pattern? Which of their choices had rippled down through history to create the world I knew?
Footsteps echoed from the mouth of the cave. The light of another torch bobbed along the stone wall and revealed Doctor Sho as he rounded the bend. His satchel bulged with the herbs and other medicines he had set out to collect.
“Seems one of us isn’t having a very productive day,” he said, noting the paper and charcoal in my hand, taken from Hissing Cat’s surprisingly robust supply. “Still can’t put the candle out, eh?”
“I could conjure a flame with the old magic, or veer, or even wield battle-sorcery,” I said. “But she won’t let me do those things. She has me trying to stop her from wielding magic but won’t tell me plainly how I’m meant to do that. She’s a witch of the old sort, is it any surprise her will is stronger than mine?”
“There were witches of the old sort who lost their sense of the pattern,” Doctor Sho said. “They nearly broke the world in their effort to save it. She wants to be sure you won’t make the same mistake.”
I glared at him. “That does not sound like something a mere doctor, no matter how skilled, could know. Do you intend to ever tell me the truth?”
“Do I owe you the truth?” Doctor Sho said. “You’ve lived a life full of secrets, Alder. You know the value in keeping them.”
“You think you cannot trust me?” I said.
“I watched you kill a dozen men at Burrow,” Doctor Sho said.
“I feared for my life,” I replied. “You are right. I know the value of a secret, and those men had uncovered mine.”
“And, in response, you took their lives, in the process revealing your secret to dozens more who did not yet know it.” He took a deep breath, and when he spoke again the edge had gone out of his voice. “Someday, perhaps you will earn my trust. For now, you are still an impulsive youth, albeit a dangerously powerful one.”
I bristled at the insult, but was too demoralized to mount any further self defense. He was correct, wasn’t he? My dozens of failures with Hissing Cat proved my lack of control.
“To the end of tempering that power, I am willing to help you learn the restraint that might make you trustworthy,” Doctor Sho went on. He set down his bags of herbs and sat beside me. “Tell me what goes awry.”
I scoffed, and thought to make a snide remark about the capacity of an ordinary doctor to help me in mastering magic. But I needed help, and Hissing Cat was unlikely to offer anything more than another round of castigation.
“Whenever I think I’m getting close, I’m flooded by old memories,” I said. “I see Oriole’s death again and again, as though the world never tires of reminding me. Or the collapse of an Obelisk, or the blood on the table at Burrow.”
I made a few lines on my sketch, as though I were still working, as though this confession of my weakness and frustration were of little consequence, and that Doctor Sho should continue with his day as though it had not happened.
“Have you told her?” he said.
I took a deep breath. “No.”
“Not even about Burrow?” He seemed surprised when I shook my head. “Boy, we’re likely to bring the whole Empire down on our heads.”
“Hissing Cat seems more than capable of fending of a Hand or two,” I said.
“That isn’t the point!” He tugged at his beard. “Gods, why haven’t you told her?”
“If I tell her of all the damage I have caused without the old magic, she will sooner kill me than help me.”
“You think so much of yourself, Foolish Cur,” he said. “She was alive before the foundations of the Empire were laid. She fought a war against the gods. You think she hasn’t caused damage that she regrets? We all leave a wake in the world, often a destructive one. At best, we can make amends.”
“How can I make amends for An-Zabat?” I demanded, as though he could speak for every person I had ever hurt. “How can I make amends for Iron Town? For Oriole? Even now, the Empire likely tortures my father and has buried my mother in some sunless dungeon. How can I make amends for that?”
“I don’t know,” he said flatly. “But if you think you can fight an Empire without hurting a few people, you’re not just foolish. You’re delusional.”
“Why are you still here?” Rather than calming my frustration, he had stirred it, and now I spat lightning without thought. “The typhoon season is over. Go back to grubbing copper coins from the margins of the Empire.”
“I was with you at Burrow.” The torches flickered, and I failed to meet his stare. He stood and walked away from me. “I can’t go back.”
I watched him, my sketch forgotten, and as his torchlight moved deeper into the cave I suffered the weight of yet another regret.
* * *
Autumn gave way to winter, and the hillside beyond the mouth of Hissing Cat’s cave became dusted with snow. We spent most of our time huddled around the brazier in Hissing Cat’s house. She had stores for the winter but grumbled that Doctor Sho and I would devour her supply well before the thaw. We laid traps throughout the nearby woods. Okara went out on his own, and always returned licking his lips, and often with a rabbit or wild turkey to fill our bellies when the traps came up empty.
Cooped up in Hissing Cat’s cave, I re-read the autobiography I had written, considering revisions that might make it more palatable to my uncle. It chronicled how dogma and doctrine had bound me and dragged me down a path I would never have otherwise chosen. Yet such an account would do little to ingratiate me with the rebellion.
“What’s the book?” Hissing Cat asked one night, while I sat by the brazier with the book, waiting for Doctor Sho to serve a stew that had filled the cave with gamey scent. “I’ve seen you writing in it before. Journaling your many, many failings?”
I set the book in its usual place beside my bedroll. “Something like that.”
She harrumphed, drained her bowl, and asked for another.
“Eat something, Cur,” she said. “There’s time for a few more failures before we sleep.”
* * *
“I thought you could veer when you were a few years off your mother’s tit?”
Hissing Cat paced the length of her house. I sat in the corner, muddling through that evening’s attempt to extinguish her flame.
“The pattern of the world is on your side, boy! Everything, and I mean--” she waved her arms erratically, making the skulls in her hair shake and clatter. “--everything wants the flame to go out, except for me. How are you so shit at this?”
“He’s trying, Cat,” Doctor Sho grumbled from his corner of the house, where he was reorganizing his chest of drawers for the hundredth time.
“If he wasn’t trying, I’d feel much better,” Hissing Cat said. “Once more, and then again, until you get it right or pass out from exhaustion.”
A spar of iron jutted into the pattern of the world as tongues of flame licked at her fingers. I shut my eyes. It was a quick thing, now, to reach out and touch her will. The problem was what came next. Her spell was as intractable as a mountain--though, as I now knew from feeling the pattern, even mountains move.
Feel the world as it wants to be, she had said. As it would have been without the rupture of her will and its conjured flame. Don’t focus on the rupture, but on what had been disrupted. The progression from one moment to the next, all that will be predicated on all that was, and the present moment only a bridge between them.
I thought of my life, each transient moment born from its predecessor, such that the whole became nonsensical without each part. There could be no Foolish Cur in the cave with Hissing Cat if not for Alder in An-Zabat. No Alder in An-Zabat if not for the Alder who watched Oriole die. I was all of them, and none of them. I was the bridge between that long, painful past and the unknown future.
As once I had observed Atar to learn the dances of An-Zabat, now I felt the rhythm of the pattern of the world and followed its steps, recognizing them as chapters in the story of
the world, like the chapters of my life, each one nonsensical without the one before. When I returned to the iron spar I knew what belonged in its place.
Yet, there was something missing.
I understood the pattern. I knew what ought to replace the iron spar of Hissing Cat’s flame, the wake her magic left in the world. I willed the pattern to push out the spar and make itself whole. But I felt resistance. Not from the spar, but from the pattern itself.
Hissing Cat’s flame went out, and not because of anything I had done.
She stood over me, her jaw set, her head tilted, and I felt not only the scrutiny of her eyes, but the empty gaze of the skulls in her hair.
“That’s enough for tonight,” she said.
I curled up on my pallet, disappointed, as I had done each night for the last two months.
* * *
I slept as deeply as I have ever slept, untroubled by dreams. I woke to a wet nose beneath my chin and Okara’s insistent whining. I ruffled the dog’s ears, but he backed away from me and yipped.
“What’s wrong?” I said and dragged myself out from under the threadbare blanket. As I did, I felt a weight dragging through the pattern of the world. A weight I would always recognize. The maze of the canon, somewhere to the north and east.
A Voice of the Emperor.
The house was empty, save for Okara and I. The brazier burned low. Doctor Sho’s medicine chest was beside his pallet, where it had been these last months. One thing was missing; the book of my life, which should have been beside my bed, was nowhere to be seen.
I heard the crackle of flames beyond the door.
Hissing Cat sat beside the fire pit. The skulls in her hair seemed to watch me as I approached. She kept her face down, buried in shadow, reading my confession.
“You’ve scrawled quite the mess of runes here, boy,” she said, her voice quiet and controlled. “What do you say? Should I jab them with my needle and see how they crack?”
What could I say? It was not enough that I had accepted my own failings. To be in the world is to be with other people.
“You’ve read the account,” I said. “What do you make of me?”
“Where you go, the world changes for the worse. People die. Cities crumble.” She twisted her face, like a mother who has lost a child, then went on. “You speak of preserving things, and the starving children of An-Zabat, as though you care. Do you think those children survived the city’s fall?”
“No,” I said. “I mourn their deaths. As did Atar, and Katiz. But their deaths were naphnet--”
“Keep that word from your tongue, or I’ll cut it out,” she snarled. “I know what you are, now. And what you want. I thought you desired truth. I see now you want only power. A weapon. The means to avenge yourself.”
“I want to learn, Hissing Cat. I do.”
“How can you, when you carry all of this?” she waved the book in the air, shook her head, and tossed it across the fire. The bamboo slats clattered at my feet. “I’ve been wondering why you came so close but could never fit your will to the pattern of the world. Well…there it is.”
I felt another shift in the distant weight of the canon. Hissing Cat felt it too, and her expression darkened. “Even now their battle distracts you. I gave you too much credit. Your first answer was the honest one. I never should have tried to teach you.”
“Can’t it be both?” I said. “Can’t I long for the truth and oppose the Empire?”
“What does it matter to the pattern of the world what king sits where, and what lines are drawn on human maps?”
“But you fought battles too! What of your war against the gods?”
“The pattern of the world was itself our battleground,” Hissing Cat said. “We fought to make the world comprehensible, livable, no longer shattered by their whims. What is at stake in this contest you would join? Surely you do not think a world under Nayeni rule would be free of death and cruelty.”
Again, I felt the wake of battle-sorcery, stirring the pattern of the world, yet I felt no answering wake of witchcraft.
“Even now, the rebellion you would fight for crumbles,” Hissing Cat said. “By your own account it has been corroded by factionalism. Frothing Wolf and Harrow Fox. The competing ambitions which have always been the corruption at the heart of Nayen. What you feel is the Empire’s magic eating away the walls of Grayfrost Keep, where your uncle kept his holdfast for a time, though whether he is there at this moment I cannot say.”
“But it is winter,” I said, as another wake of sorcery washed through the world. “They would not go to war in winter.”
But even as I spoke, I knew it for a lie. They had marched through the Batir Waste and left two of every three soldiers a corpse on the sand. The Nayeni rebellion had controlled no commerce, no wealth, no power, unlike the windcallers. They were a nuisance. One that could be safely tolerated.
Until I defected, destroyed An-Zabat, and slaughtered a dozen men at Burrow. They had given me power, and I had used it against them. Such a humiliation could not go unanswered.
“Why should you care, Foolish Cur?” Hissing Cat said. “You fought the rebellion, and by your book they killed your only friend.”
“I was wrong, then,” I said, shame and anger churning within me. “I learned what the Empire truly was in An-Zabat.”
“Didn’t your grandmother tell you the truth of them, that night she bound you to her pact? You knew all along, but you became one of them anyway, because it was easy.” The crows’ skulls clattered as she shook her head and matched their mirthless smiles. “A witch of the old sort…pfa! The gods were fools to try and use you. You’ve hardly the capacity to make a single bloody choice.”
“And what would you have me do?” I said, voice breaking. “Stand aside, and let the Empire do what it will?”
“Yes,” Hissing Cat said.
A log cracked in the fire between us. A wake of distant sorcery ripped through the pattern, and my stomach clenched, as though the truth she had spoken--bitter medicine it was--had buried itself within me.
“You cannot accept the pattern of the world until you realize what you are,” Hissing Cat said, her voice calmed, but still hard and sharp as a doctor’s knife. “And that means choosing not to live in the world as your elders would have you, or as your impulses would drive you, or as the culture of your birth would lead you. A choice to align to the pattern, apprehending it as it is, not distorted through those frames.”
I found my voice, halting though it was. “You offer such a choice?”
“I do not hate you, Foolish Cur--Alder--whatever your name should be,” she said. “You only frustrate me, and I tire of your indecisiveness. Your mind cannot apprehend the truths you seek while bound by the concerns of competing clans and warring tribes--of pact and canon.”
She held out her fingers. The iron spike of her will drove into the pattern, and a candleflame lit in her hand.
“Extinguish the flame, boy,” she said. “And let us move on to deeper things.”
I knew this for the final chance it was. I shut my eyes and let my awareness descend to the pattern of the world, became a sphere of jade resting above the ebb and flow of possibility, the ever-shifting dance of all things.
Abandon the petty war. Stand outside the frame of canon and pact, of Sien and Nayen, of conqueror and conquered, of competing constructions layered atop the deeper truths. Step back, expand my perspective, and understand the world as it truly was.
I felt the spike of Hissing Cat’s will, carving her candle flame into the swell and churn of the pattern around me. Then, pulsing heavy, I felt another wake of distant battle-sorcery. A reminder that beyond this cave a battle raged--insipid and petty it may have been--and people suffered. An-Zabat had been destroyed in the contest between conqueror and conquered. A contest that had cost Oriole his life, that had twice divided my mother from her family, and for which my grandmother had abandoned me.
That suffering had to matter. At the very least, it mat
tered to me.
I opened my eyes and retreated from the pattern. Hissing Cat’s face was a blur of shadows in the mingled light of the fire and conjured flame.
“Yet you have hardly set foot beyond this cave these last thousand years,” I said. “Who do you love? Whose suffering can touch you here, alone with your bones and your endless questions?”
“Do you seek understanding, or not?” Hissing Cat said. “It is as simple as that.”
“It isn’t,” I said. “It can’t be. As you say, to know the pattern of the world I must know what I am, and what I am is the grandson of Broken Limb. The nephew of Harrow Fox. The student of Koro Ha and Usher. The lover, however briefly, of Winddancing Atar. The friend of Oriole. And the killer of Frigid Cub. I dealt the massacre at Burrow and drew the Empire into these mountains.”
“I was once many things to many people,” Hissing Cat said.
“Perhaps you still would be, if you had not hidden away.”
She glowered over the flame. “The pact bound me.”
“As it binds the Emperor?”
She curled her lip and made as if to speak, but I pressed on.
“If the choice is between understanding some deeper truth or fighting for a chance to make good on all the harm I have done, then I choose to fight.”
Hissing Cat closed her fist and snuffed her conjured flame. The fire crackled between us, and water dripped from stalactites overhead. Okara nuzzled the back of my calf and whined. Hissing Cat fixed him with her shadowed glare.
“Then go,” she snarled. “Let yourself be a pawn of the gods. But do not seek me again.”
She lowered herself to her seat beside the fire, as though I were already forgotten. I moved automatically, first collecting the book of bamboo slats before stowing it and my few belongings into the rucksack I had fashioned from my kaftan.
I glanced back as I neared the bend toward the painted caves and saw her as I had on our first morning together, beside her fire and her pile of shoulder blades, cracking each bone for answers before tossing it into the dark.
Okara padded behind me as I moved on, bracing myself against the chill that swept in from the world outside. Doctor Sho sat hunched on a flattened stalagmite by the cave mouth, watching a few flakes of snow swirl and drift between the white-dusted pines.
The Hand of the Sun King Page 34
