by Matt Wallace
Lexi’s aspect is imbued with a new darkness. “Of course. People no one in a position of power cares about, or even acknowledges, can be used by the corrupt in all manner of despicable ways, I suppose.”
“Yes, Te-Gen, they can.”
Lexi stops walking. She inhales deeply and exhales a long, trembling breath. Her gaze turns upward, to the sky beyond the tops of the buildings.
Taru watches her, unsure. “What is it, Te-Gen?”
When Lexi turns her eyes to the retainer, those eyes are filled with a new resolve.
“I told myself my job was only to preserve our Gen until Brio returned. All that mattered was finding him and bringing him home. Gen Stalbraid was an afterthought held against that.”
“He’s your husband, Te-Gen. Of course you—”
“We will find him. I refuse to believe otherwise. However, I will not simply preserve Gen Stalbraid’s existence. These people… this place… they need us now. No one else will even try to help them.”
Taru doesn’t respond at first. They are looking down at Lexi with a thoroughly uncustomary expression of surprise.
“That is true,” the retainer says.
“The Franchise Council will not stop us from pleading for the Bottoms, and we will return tomorrow, as I told that girl,” Lexi insists.
Taru nods. “Yes, Te-Gen. As you wish.”
“Good. Now follow me.”
Lexi begins walking again, striding forward with new purpose.
Taru rushes to catch up. “Where do you wish to go now, Te-Gen?”
“To the steamer’s,” Lexi says. “To formally request catering.”
THE FIRST WEAPON WAS A STORY TOLD BY LIARS
“I’M DONE WITH THIS, TAKE it back to the archives.”
Dyeawan thinks the man’s name is Yilik, though she’s not certain. She’s delivered to him only once or twice, but it was enough for her to understand there’s no malice in his curtness. He just seems perpetually preoccupied and oblivious to anything that isn’t vibrantly colored oil with which he can paint parchment or canvas.
From what she’s seen, he must be one of the finest artists on the drafting level, where the ideas, designs, and inventions of Edger and his kind are given their first real form. It’s also where the Planning Cadre’s architects create plans for new buildings and edifices to be erected in the Capitol. Yilik’s drafting room is covered in hand-painted images representing all these things, and each one, to Dyeawan’s eyes, is a masterpiece of color and form.
As he hands her what looks and feels like a tablet wrapped in oiled cloth, Dyeawan spies the painting on which Yilik (if that is indeed his name) is currently working.
It appears to be a new gated archway intended for the port. The ships and ocean have been intricately painted in behind it. The archway itself is composed of colorful koi fish of different patterns, all swimming upstream against an overwhelming current. It’s a very Crachian symbol and message, matching that of the hardworking, supremely efficient national ant.
“That’s beautiful,” Dyeawan remarks.
Yilik only grunts, filling in the scales of one of the fish to be rendered in stone.
A new thought distracts her from the painting, recognition of a word she’s yet to hear in the Cadre.
“The archives?”
Yilik grunts his assent.
It’s not hard to narrow down where that must be located. There’s only one level Dyeawan has yet to have occasion to visit.
“Is that at the very top of the Cadre?” she asks.
Yilik’s hands stop their intricate motions for the first time, and he looks up at her as if she’s dimmer than a lamp whose luminescent insects are nearing the end of their life cycles.
“Yes, the archives are still located on level twelve,” he says, drawing his words out slowly.
“The painting really is beautiful,” Dyeawan repeats, and proceeds to turn her wheels toward the door.
It’s a hard slog up several levels’ worth of ramps, even in her tender. Dyeawan realizes her arms have actually weakened a great deal since she began working in the Cadre. The ease of the tender’s paddles is nothing to dragging herself around by rocks on the bare street.
As she wheels herself toward the final staircase leading up to level twelve, a harsh voice calls to her from behind.
“You there, girl! Stop right now!”
Dyeawan’s first and most powerful instinct is to set her arms to moving the rest of her as fast as they possibly can, as if that voice belonged to an Aegin. Then she remembers there are no Aegins here, and even if there were, she has nowhere to run. So instead she forces calm over the hornet’s nest in her veins, and stays her hands and arms atop the paddles before they run away on their own.
Taking a deep breath, Dyeawan halts the tender and spins it around.
It’s the Man in Black, striding toward her with his black-gloved hand clutching the bone handle of his dagger.
“Do you have permission to visit the archives?” he more demands than asks.
“Not in particular,” she answers honestly, “but Edger told me to carry deliveries wherever I’m instructed to.”
He glowers down at her, his yellow eyes and close-cropped white hair seeming starker and almost otherworldly as they completely fill her gaze. She’s never been this close to him before, and Dyeawan doesn’t care for it one bit. He smells like oiled leather and death, and every line in his face seems to frown at her.
“Oisin.”
There’s no mistaking Edger’s voice-that’s-not-a-voice. The Man in Black (who must be Oisin) turns from Dyeawan, and they both watch Edger approach them calmly. He’s wearing a simple crimson tunic with a wide belt. The sticks of several of his most common silk expression masks are sheathed through that belt.
The one Edger is holding to his face at the moment is harsher than even the stern face he showed Dyeawan during their first meeting.
This expression is blatant disapproval.
“Does this one have permission to enter the archives?” Oisin asks him.
“This one’s name is Slider, and she’s one of my finest helpers. There is no part of the Cadre forbidden to her.”
This is all, of course, news to Dyeawan, though she says nothing. She imagines Edger is overstating the case simply to rebuke the Man in Black.
Oisin looks down at her, not even attempting to mask his displeasure. He looks back at Edger with the same expression.
“And I would remind you, Oisin,” Edger continues, “that it is not your place to soldier the halls of this edifice interrogating my staff. Frankly, I’d expect a high-ranking member of the Protectorate Ministry to have larger concerns.”
Oisin draws in a deep, steadying breath.
“I do,” he says through clenched teeth, then stomps away.
He strides past Edger without a further look.
Once he’s passed, Edger sheathes his disapproving mask and replaces it over his slackened face with his laughing mask.
Despite the tension and her slowly dissipating fear, Dyeawan finds herself stifling a giggle.
Edger walks over to her. “I’m sorry about him. I’m afraid even here we have to live with our version of Aegins now and then.”
“I was just told to take this back to archives by Yilik the drafter,” she explains, holding up the wrapped tablet.
“Ah yes, Yilik. He’s an immensely talented artist, but he doesn’t think much beyond his canvas.”
Rather than taking the tablet away from her, Edger reaches out and pulls back a corner of the cloth covering it.
Dyeawan can’t help but look. It is indeed a stone tablet, carved and still retaining the aspect of long-faded paint. The corner he reveals exposes the eye and gills of a fish, much like the koi Yilik was incorporating into his port archway. He must’ve been using the tablet for reference.
“Well then,” Edger says, tucking the corner of the cloth back in place. “We’d better return it as ordered.”
“Are you su
re?” Dyeawan asks, returning the bundle to her tender.
“You heard me tell Oisin there’s not a corner of this place forbidden to you. I meant that.”
Dyeawan smiles, choosing to hear the truth in his words and ignoring whatever he’s obviously leaving out.
Spinning her tender around, she waits for Edger to take the lead, and together they climb the stairs and ascend the last ramp in the Planning Cadre.
There are no corridors on the twelfth level. Neither are there the archways of the maps level. The highest plateau of the structure is one gargantuan warehouse, its ceiling stretching higher than any other in the Cadre. Panes of glass fill rectangular windows high up in that vaulted stratum, allowing sunlight to pour in over every inch of the vast space and its contents.
Dyeawan smells age and dust as the sight of enough ancient artifacts to fill ten Capitol museums immediately overwhelms her. Although one thing is apparent right away: None of these artifacts are from Crache. Nothing about her surroundings speaks of the Capitol or Crachians as a people.
She sees triptychs of mighty battles featuring dozens upon dozens of soldiers on each panel, fighting with sword and bow and arrow. There are oil paintings that tower over even Edger at full height, renderings of kings and queens resplendent in silken finery and jeweled crowns. There are stone sculptures of powerful generals in military uniforms and even full battle armor. There are rows upon rows of books, ancient volumes and tomes that could break rocks with their spines.
Dyeawan rolls past monoliths of stone and tablets ten times the size of the one on her lap. They’re all carved with characters from a language she doesn’t recognize. Though she never learned to read beyond simple wayfinding signs in the city, it’s definitely not Crachian writing. It must’ve been important to someone, however, to be immortalized in such grandeur and in such a lasting way.
It finally occurs to her that’s what she’s looking at; it’s history, the history of an entire people she’s never seen or even heard of before.
“What is all this?” she asks Edger.
“Relics from another world, that also happens to be our world.”
Dyeawan doesn’t understand, but there’s more than enough to distract her from that answer.
Two truly giant stone statues tower over the endless stacks and piles. They were obviously carved to oppose each other. The first is an armored warrior grasping a curved sword. It’s facing off against a monstrous creature with the head of a dragon, the body of a man, and the claws of an eagle. Dyeawan has never seen anything like it in the Capitol, nor artifacts as bold and full of life and death and human interaction as the rest of these.
Crachian art and architecture are touted as second-to-none, and they are undoubtedly beautiful, but they lack a quality she’s seeing here for the first time in her life. Dyeawan can’t define it for herself at first, but as she absorbs more and more of the artifacts filling the space around her she begins to realize what that quality is.
Crache never honors or immortalizes people or events, not in stone or in word or on canvas. They produce monuments only to the nation itself, never individuals, not even the Skrain, whose name is whispered in the streets among even people like Dyeawan.
She studies the images of the people in the artifacts. While the style and material changes their proportions and exaggerates their features, they’re all of one discernable race. When painted in color, they have golden skin and eyes of sharp oval. Their hair, worn long most often, is either rendered black or white with age.
“These people,” she says, pointing at a triptych of a grand feast. “They all look the same. I mean, not the same, not exactly the same, but all look… they’re the same color, their faces are the same shape.”
“Yes.”
“Who are they?”
“I like to think of them as the first architects. They designed and built an earlier, obsolete version of our society. But we owe much to them. And they had their time of innovation, some of them worth preserving. We still eat the food they taught us to cook. We’ve adopted many of their weapons of wars. And many of their names and aspects live on in our people.”
“Then… this was here? This was all from here?”
“Once, and no more. It does seem like an ancient, distant land from what we’ve built, doesn’t it? Time truly is the grandmaster of artisans in that way. It can change and create things our hands will never be capable of creating.”
“But why is this all here, locked up this way? Why did you put it here?”
“Not me, Slider,” Edger corrects her. “My predecessors, the ones who formed the first Planning Cadre, they undertook this, thousands of years ago.”
“Then why did they do this? If this is all part of us, of Crache’s history?”
“Do you know what the most dangerous thing in the world is, Slider?”
“The alley between Wan’s butcher shop and the gambling parlor in the Bottoms?”
Ku the wind dragon begins puffing air in short bursts through the spiky tubes on his back.
From the way Edger’s shoulders rise and fall, she realizes this is the way he laughs out loud.
“That may very well be the most dangerous place you know,” he says, “but what, in your unusually vast observation, is the most dangerous thing?”
“I don’t know. A really, really big sword?”
Again, that reedy puffing “laughter.”
“You are as funny as you are wise beyond your years, but no. The most dangerous thing in the world is a story.”
Dyeawan is immediately intrigued.
“Which story?” she asks right away.
“The kind of story in which people believe utterly. The kind of story they believe in so fiercely they’ll leave their lives in the mud to protect it. You see, Slider, people do not fight for nations or rulers or causes or even land they believe to be theirs by some imagined right, not really. They fight for stories, about heroes and gods and long-past ancestors who were one or the other or both. So, you have to be very careful which stories are told to the people.”
Dyeawan moves her eyes over the triptychs and statues and tableaus threatening to burst forth from their canvas and stone prisons, so vibrant and striking and alive are their images.
“And these were all stories?”
“Yes.”
“Whose stories were they?”
“People who left their lives in the mud. Far too many people. So, some very wise men and women a long, long time ago realized they had to take these stories away and put them somewhere they’d be forgotten. They knew the people needed a new story, one story in which they could all believe, a story that would end the wars being fought and bring them together, make them into a single people, a single nation. That’s what Crache is. A better story. The best story ever told, in my humble opinion.”
Something occurs to Dyeawan then. She throws her gaze all over the space, examining each piece more closely, trying to disprove the thought.
“What about the God Stars?” she asks. “Why isn’t there anything in here about them?”
Edger doesn’t answer right away, and he doesn’t have to hold up a mask with the expression painted upon it for Dyeawan to know he’s surprised.
“We have many relics of the God Star faith,” he says, almost hesitantly. “They’re not kept here. It was not the belief of these people.”
“Where are they kept, then?”
“They’re stored with the rest of the disused creations of our drafters.”
Dyeawan looks up at him, first in confusion, then in shock.
“Religion, Slider,” he continues, carefully, “is quite possibly the most dangerous of stories. A man or woman will put faith before their own families if it’s hammered into them at an early enough age. It was one of the most difficult stories to overcome for those who founded Crache.”
“How did they do it?” Dyeawan asks, though she’s already gleaned the answer.
“They created a new religion, one they
could control.”
“The God Stars.”
“Yes. As I said, they were very wise men and women. The stars are the first gods of all people, you see. When our ancestors, far back, first crawled out from some dank cave and looked to the sky for the first time, they immediately adopted that magnificence as their higher power. How could you not? There’s something… visceral in us all that reaches back to that first sense of wonder and awe and is humbled by it. So… my predecessors created a new religion around it, one… flashy enough, shall we say, to supplant the religions that came before. They used the God Stars to wean the people off their old deities and faiths.”
“But worshipping the God Stars is abolished in the Capitol.”
“In all Crache,” he corrects her. “Well, it wasn’t needed anymore. It did its job. And as I said… religion is the most dangerous of stories. It’s a wondrous method of control, to be sure, but who possesses the reins of that control? A priest? A church? What happens when people believe in that more than the state? What happens to the mind of the priest who realizes they’re seen as a living god? No, religion… it just breeds monsters, as do monarchies. We’re far better off without them.”
“I think I understand,” Dyeawan says, and she does.
She decides to keep her further thoughts on what he’s just told her to herself.
Edger seems satisfied, even pleased with her reaction.
“I’d like to show you something, Slider. Would you follow me, please?”
Dyeawan nods, pressing her arms over the tender’s paddles at the ready.
He leads her past scores of other relics, more books and art and statues. It’s impossible to commit it all to memory, or even take it all in, but Dyeawan is determined she’ll return here and study it all, every piece, up close and at length.
Eventually a clearing opens up amidst the claustrophobia of the tightly packed artifacts, and Dyeawan finds she can still be surprised, even in a cavern full of forgotten wonders.
It’s a living map much like the one of the Capitol on level six, only smaller and not built to the same meticulous scale. There are a dozen of them spread out on raised platforms throughout the space, each one with a different city built upon it. Inspecting the nearest, Dyeawan begins to see that it is the Capitol, or at least a version of it. There’s no mistaking the Spectrum, but there’s little else she recognizes. Several buildings resembling the Spectrum that don’t exist in the Capitol are erected in the model.
