It was mid-afternoon. The blistering sun dominated the clear blue sky, and in the distance beyond the north wall, the Terbulin mountains shimmered in the heat of dry season. That slanted outcropping we'd come down on was barely a line in the distant past.
I brought my new team to the practice yard with bows to face off against a line of burlap dummies.
"This is bullshit," Haron spat in the tall grass. "We're the only ones out here. I say we take the rest of the day to relax and explore the city."
He'd been on my team for five minutes and already he argued with me.
"We only have two days," I reminded him.
Haron looked among the others. "This kid been here eatin' the food, nailin' his woman, I want to know what we fightin' for. They say this place is crawlin' with pussy; I say we go get us some. Who's with me?"
Aydel, Daemon, Josha, Montus, Turic, and Vayance all stood beside him. Renou translated for Kaye, and he sided with them as well. Tenae fixed his pitch-black eyes on me, so I explained in Goloagi. "They don't want to survive out there. They just want to party."
Rolon faced me. "How about tonight, we all agree on one night, we get a taste of the city, then starting in the morning, we train hard. Fair enough?"
Tenae turned to Renou, whose translation was… less slanted than mine, and both Tenae and Rolon stood beside Haron.
I was being deserted.
"What about this guy?" Turic pointed a thumb at the man with 2-226-1447A burned into his arm, where scabs still clung to several of the numbers. He was on the shorter side of average with medium-green skin, autumn-yellow hair, and eyes of dark gray. His skin sagged over his bones, and his back bore lines of scabs all over. And she wants to send him into battle like this.
"Aye," Aydel called to him. "You got a name, man?" He switched to Goloagi, but his Goloagi was… "How namest thou, good-sir?"
The man glanced between us and said nothing.
"How about we call him Free Shipping?" the Big Fat Guy suggested.
A woman's voice came from the side. "Ke sapeé vo?"
She was about average height for a woman, Na'uhui, with long white hair in pigtails held by large, gold orchid pins with mother-of-pearl petals. She wore a burnt-orange silk yithi with silver embroidery in circle patterns, a gold armband like a snake with sapphire eyes biting its own tail, and a delicate gold chain around her neck with a crescent-moon pendant.
The runaway leered at the pendant between her generous breasts. "Ajak."
She spoke Herali with the same accent as Ahmi's. "He says his name is Ajak."
"What language is that?" Aydel asked.
"Pandrassi."
Haron lurched forward and spoke to the pendant. "Ask him—"
"Ieé veut sab si vo prefit tak nwi poor zhayazh siteé ave k iles ou travieé kum selas?"
Ajak nodded and shuffled over to Haron.
My whole team mutinied. I was alone. "Can we at least… I dunno… do a fighting bracket or something? Call it a training exercise."
Haron looked at Turic. "Fightin' and fuckin'? I'm down with that!"
Turic nodded enthusiastically. "Might even get some drinking money out of it! Ta'o would know how to set that up."
"I saw him go that way," Montus pointed, and they all went off, leaving me alone with the mystery woman beneath the sweltering sun.
I took a deep breath and shrugged. "Am I wrong?"
She smirked. "xapʌ ʒʌgu."
"The jungle decides, huh?" I nodded at that. "I didn't get your name?"
"vaŋi."
"Vani. I'm—"
"Sewa'a Nea Ane, yes. The Imperial Voice wants to speak with you."
"What does he want with me?"
"I am sure he will explain that to you. This way, please?"
What else did I have to do, train my men? I followed her for a few steps before she slowed down enough to walk side-by-side with me.
"So," I started, "that name, thing. Sewa… wa…"
"Sewa'a Nea Ane."
"Right. That."
"It is Dayuda. The One Who Got Away. You should learn to say it, given that it is your name now."
"It doesn't quite roll off the tongue."
She smiled. "It suits you."
"Why? Because I got away from Praying Mantis?"
We passed between the administration building and the medical ward. Dr. zʊɣi was in that corner office with open archways for walls. I watched her, hoping she would acknowledge my presence, but she was busy talking to two of the new recruits instead.
Like Talys back home, Vani sang her words up and down the musical register. "In 'uxuwida, sewa'a refers to an obsession you pursue, something you want to the point of desperation and total focus. But the Dayuda is more explicit. It's a lover. Not just any lover, but that lover. The one who consumes you, who wraps around your thoughts and strangles your mind."
"So…"
She smirked. "A woman with eyes gave you that name!"
We came out from between two of the large mud apartments that cooled the air just walking beside them, and turned left to go around the grandiose library with the massive stained-glass rosette above the entryway. On one side towards the rear of the building stood a thirty-foot totem painted in red, white, and black with Orca, Beaver, Rattlesnake, Elk, Salmon, Bison, Cougar, Wolf, and standing atop them all with His chin high and arms crossed, was Bear.
"So you really don't know what the Voice wants with me?"
Vani giggled lightly. "Is this your first time outside Heralia?"
"I visited Saen once."
"What was it like?"
Hills covered in yellow grass with very few trees, mostly scraggly oaks in the valleys where there's a creek small enough to step over it. "Dry. The people were friendly. We couldn't understand anything they said, though. I thought that was weird."
"Weird that people outside Heralia don't speak Herali?"
"No, I mean… we all spoke Goloagi. We're supposed to, anyway."
Vani cocked an eyebrow. "Are there not places throughout Heralia where people do not bother to learn the Imperial language? Why would it shock you that other places throughout your empire are no different?"
"It's like that any time your eyes are opened to different perspectives, new things you never imagined. It's always a shock. Father Yewan, that's the guy who ran the orphanage, he always used to say 'it's called learning. If you already knew it, it wouldn't be so shocking.'"
Vani glanced up with a warm smile. "That is a healthy attitude. Tell me, what was the most shocking thing you learned since coming to Carthia?"
"I would say…"
I had to think about that one. She led me towards the imposing towers of the inner sanctum, beneath the heavy, iron portcullzies and past two armored guards who didn't look at her twice. Except for the one guy who stole a glance at her backside. The inner courtyard was covered in fine, white gravel with several vines that crept along the stone walls leading up towards a narrow window of daylight overhead. Vani snatched a purple fruit from one of the vines and bit into it, then led me to a narrow stone passageway on the far side.
"... I would say how deeply embedded language is into everything we think, and how dramatically different one's perspective can be just by thinking in different terms."
"Like what?" She talked with her mouth full. I'd have gotten a stern lecture for that back home.
"Well, take man and woman. Man being the root, woman is the derivative word that takes the root and adds a modifier. In Uhuida it's the exact opposite—damʌðe and damʌ."
"And what is the consequence of this linguistic structure?"
"I…" I tripped on an uneven step and banged my knee on the stone. I took a moment to rub the pain out before answering. "I'm still working on that part."
Vani giggled lightly and bit into the fruit again. "As soon as you figure it out, I would like to hear your thoughts on that."
We climbed through a dark, dank staircase like a furnace that spiralled up through the tower. Between the focus needed to avoid tripping again and the grueling task of keeping up with her, I didn't have the breath to keep the conversation going.
Every so often, the stairs leveled off beside a narrow slit with a view of the city below or a passageway to some room, though the hot air coming in from outside didn't help. Vani stood beside a stone archway. A sheet of sunlight crept through an arrow slit, catching dust particles swirling through the air before glistening on the sweat over her dark-green skin. "Through here."
My own hair was soaked through and clung to my back.
The narrow passageway was filled with the hoots and murmurs of pigeons, and opened on the right to a small room with an expansive arched window and rows and rows of roosts all along the walls where the birds mingled with one another. One bird flew from one side of the room to the other, and they all fell silent when I walked by.
On the other side was another small room.
"He's here." Vani stood beside the doorway. Her amber eyes lingered on the ear pendant Miyani had given me while I entered.
"Caleb! Of! Gath!" The Imperial Voice's sharp baritone greeted me.
An arched window took up the entirety of one wall, offering a commanding view of the city below, the vita'o yard, the outer wall, the open plain that surrounded the city for a thousand yards on all sides, and the River of Unending Torment that cut through the center of it.
A small, wooden table separated two plush bag chairs. Shahel sat in the one on the left with a silk flap from his yithi over his lap. He was likely in his forties with touches of gray throughout his otherwise dark-green, curly hair, and he had the same square chin and rounded bridge that Bilal had. "Have a seat. I've longed to speak with you."
"May I know why?"
He held up a finger and grinned. "Have you had lunch?"
"Um… not yet…"
Without a word, he glanced back at the doorway. Vani bowed lightly, and his eyes followed her as she floated off. He leaned in and half-whispered, "God, I love this place!"
I raised my eyebrows. "Yeah."
In the corner was a wooden stand from which hung the silk sash of his rank. He glanced up at where I was looking and grinned. "Pomp and ceremony… so uncomfortable. Especially that thing," he pointed at the feathered headdress beside it. "It makes my scalp itch."
"I can imagine."
He leaned back and kicked his bare feet onto the stone railing of the window. He had a small line of scar on the side of his chest, just below his ribs. "You know, when they first told me to come here, I fought it. It felt like they were getting rid of me. I thought for sure…" he shook his head and smiled. "I still think someone wanted me out of the way. Little did they know!"
"Little did they know, what?"
He leaned in and tapped the ear pendant that hung at my chest. "The same thing you've figured out, my friend! This place is a paradise like no other! And… an opportunity like I never imagined. Tell me. What do you love most about Carthia?" He winked, "besides the women?"
I didn't need to think about that. "It's hope."
"Oh?" He raised his eyebrows.
"Um," I swallowed. "It's a haven for people who have nowhere else to go. I mean, we get runaway slaves in Heralia, but we're still part of the Empire, so every now and then some legal shit happens and we have to send them back. Here… it's the only place in the world where some people can even exist."
"Where they can truly be free," he nodded.
My face flushed. Some kind of feeling washed over me. I didn't know what it was, and I couldn't tell if it was good or bad.
Vani stepped behind us and lowered a silver platter onto the table. There were crispy flatbreads, each with some kind of something on it. Some had sliced vegetables, others chopped. Several had paste of one color or another, and two were piled up with termites mixed with chopped tomatoes and herbs.
Shahel picked up one with a swirl of brown and white mousse topped with a feathery green herb. "These ones are my favorite!"
Vani then set two steel chalices on the table and poured something purple into each of them.
"ŋʌvɪðisa," he bowed his chin to her, and she left once more.
I sat still, not knowing what to think.
"You have the face of a man in thought." His piercing emerald-green eyes watched me.
"It's just…" I shrugged. "I didn't expect you to understand."
"What did you expect?" Shahel grinned. Then, he held up a finger. "Wait, let me guess! We should shackle all these people and put them to work in the fields! And if they dare speak out against our beloved, oh-so-beloved God-ordained Emperor, that'll be thirty lashes! Off with his head! Something like that?"
"Something like that, I guess."
"That's weak," he leaned in for emphasis.
"Oh yeah?"
"Sure it's weak! Let me ask you. Take that book that used to be in the library, Indictment. I'm still upset about that by the way, that was my only copy—"
"Yours?" I felt my eyes widening and my mouth gape.
Shahel cocked an eyebrow. "That's not an easy book to find these days, especially around here."
"But…" I shook my head. "I don't understand."
"What don't you understand?"
"How could you… I mean… you're up there. You're… really up there."
He leaned back with a smug grin. "How could a man in my position within an empire that burns people at the stake for having such a book, then make that same book available for anyone who wants to read it, is that what you mean?"
"Yeah. That."
"Have you ever played Mao?"
"What's that?"
"Oh, it's the greatest game there is! It's actually quite simple. You take a standard, regular deck of cards and each player starts with seven. Flip over the top card, and each player takes turns matching either the color or the number. If you can't, you draw one and skip your turn, and when you're out, you win. Now here's where it gets interesting. Every time you win a round, you get to make up a new rule."
"A new rule?"
He chuckled lightly. "And you don't tell them what it is, either. But if they violate it, they get a penalty card. Sometimes it's simple, twos are wild. Only opposing colors can be played on top of a prime number—took way too long for me to figure that crap out. One time a friend of mine made the rule that all it said was, reverse the polarity of which cards can and cannot be played. Of course a previous rule said elevens were wild, which meant they could never be played, and I was stuck with two of them in my hand!"
"I see."
"Please eat," he said. "If I have to eat this all by myself, I'll never get back my girlish figure."
One flatbread crisp had a pile of white mass glistening with oil and dotted with herbs. I expected that sharp, rich drunken-goat cheese they made further east. Instead, the vaporous bite of hellroot shot through my sinuses and burned my tongue.
Shahel chuckled. "Oh yeah, those ones are hot." He picked up one of the crisps with the termites and ate that one.
I picked up the drink and immediately saturated my tongue with anything that wasn't burning. It helped for a second, but my whole brain was on fire and there was nothing I could do about it.
"Here, eat this one."
It helped. A little. Outside, not twenty yards from the outer wall was a stone bridge that spanned the river and led to the wide open plain on the other side, where patches of low-lying vegetables were fenced off from the goats. Further upstream, on our side, the hazy, crenelated wall of stone and siege artillery that was Tower Five held crops beneath its watchful eye.
"Let's go back to Indictment," he said. "Did you get a chance to read it before it was lost?"
I shook my head, unwilling to talk lest that smooth, fatty paste leave my tongue for a moment.
"Would you like to know what it's about?"
I still couldn't wrap my head around this man, but I nodded.
Shahel picked up another flatbread with some kind of yellow, cheesy paste topped with a sprig of some delicate herb and ate it. He closed his eyes and groaned at the taste, then held up a finger, finished chewing, and continued. "Indictment basically says this: each of us is responsible for our own actions."
Outside, a pigeon flew past our window carrying something in its claws and disappeared off to the side. As for what he was talking about, I waited for more, and nothing came. "That's it?"
He shot a wry grin. "That's basically it, but you see, it's not what it says, it's how it says it."
"What do you mean?"
"Let's start here," he held up a finger and surveyed the remnant of our lunch. "Did you know there are three emperors?"
I pulled my face back at that.
He grinned. "First, there's the Emperor, the man, who sits on the throne in Goloago City and wears the Imperial headdress. I know him personally. He's an idiot. But, keep his dick wet and his belly full, and he reads his lines. The second emperor is the machine. No one person, no matter how competent, no matter how brilliant, could manage a system so vast and so complex. The moron who sits on the throne is the Emperor, and the machine is also the Emperor. Do you understand?"
"I… think so?"
He waved his hand across his body and lowered his voice. "Now, the third one is the most dangerous of all. The third one is the name."
"The name?"
"It's simple. If I believe this book speaks ideas that are a threat to my wealth and position, I'm going to hunt down anyone who has this book and have them executed, publicly. Of course, that's bad. It's evil. One should not do such things. So, I don't. It's the Emperor who does it. I'm simply… preserving the Imperial order."
"But…" I grasped for words. "It's still you."
"See, now therein lies the problem. You write down an idea that when you do evil, that's evil, and you take away the name these people hide behind, and then you print a whole bunch of copies for other people to read, I mean…" he threw up his hands in mock frustration.
"I can see why that would be a problem."
Shahel picked up another crisp with the same hellroot sauce and nibbled it gently with his goblet in his other hand, alternating between bites and a sips.
"Please excuse me, this arrived for you." Vani emerged quietly from behind us and handed him a small roll of brown paper, speaking flawless Goloagi.
He unfurled it, read it silently, then gave it back to her. "Thank you."
He didn't turn to watch her backside this time. Instead, he looked out over the jungle-carpeted hills that vanished into the horizon. "It's not like that out there."
"Not like what?" I took another crisp, the one with the termites. This one was a bit salty and had a strong head of coriander.
"Human systems are designed to keep weak, incompetent men in power. Out there, in that jungle, is the truth. You consume, or you are consumed. You are strong, or you die. You are capable, or you die. There is no complex power structure to allow some incompetent boob to make all the decisions based on his father having a special name that he inherited from his father before him. That, in my opinion, is the highest degree of bullshit there is."
That made me laugh. "Didn't you come from that, though?"
"My mother was a whore." He squinted back at me, locking his emerald-green eyes on my face as if to gauge my reaction.
"What?" I stared at the man in shock.
"My father, probably, someone who had the good fortune of affording her services. But you know what? She fed me, clothed me, she kept a roof over our heads right up until the lover's pox took her from me."
"How old were you?"
At last, he pulled his unsettling gaze from me and took up another crisp—this one held a creamy paste dotted with shiny red bits. "I was seven. After that I was on my own. Luckily, I attended the finest school there was: the Streets of Golago City. The teachers were harsh: Hunger, Gangs, Slavers, my least favorite class was Cold. But, they were very educational."
"I can imagine."
"Hmm!" he grinned.
I took one with a dark purple sauce layered over a hard, white cheese.
"That has nice pepper in it, be careful."
"May I ask you something?" It was every bit as spicy as I'd anticipated, and no, I didn't go all-in like I had with the one I didn't know was hellroot.
"You may ask anything you like."
"How does a street rat from Golago City become one of the most powerful men in the Empire?"
He chuckled lightly and snuggled into his chair. "Simple. I told you about the school I went to. One of my earliest lessons was to ally myself with power. I actually learned that when I was living at the church."
I sat up straight and looked intently into the man. He gazed back at me, and a smile curled one side of his lips. "That's right," he said. "I'm an orphan who grew up in the church."
I lowered my eyes. "I didn't know that."
"Funny story that," he smiled. "That was actually my first score. There was a friend of mine who was blind. Both his eyes were burned out by some asshole. Anyway, he asked me one day to help him find the best corner in the marketplace to beg from, and even after we split the money, he had so much more than he'd ever earned before."
He leaned back and gazed out the window with a warm look on his face. "At one point I had, I think, seven beggars at once. I had a guy with no legs, had a girl, she wasn't much older than me but she had an infant; she brought in huge piles of money. I placed them all strategically and watched out for trouble."
"Trouble? Like constables, that sort of thing?"
"Oh, you don't know!" he shot me a wry grin. "There's thugs that will just walk up and take the whole pot if you let them. That lesson was called reputation management, by the way. Often, some other beggar who wasn't one of ours got too close to our territory. I gave them a choice: they could join us or go elsewhere."
"And if they refused?"
He picked up another crisp and bit into it, looking out over the waves of trees beneath the sweltering sky. He took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. "I love this place. Out there, there is only truth."
I wasn't sure if I wanted to understand what he meant, let alone whether I needed those details. "And where is this friend now? The blind kid?"
"He's one of the few people in this world whose council I trust. He does, however, hold to one point I cannot abide."
"Which is?"
"He prefers the rich texture and sharp tannins of Herali reds; I'm more of a sweet tooth."
"Well, he's right."
He scrunched his lips. "You're biased."