came welling up and spilled burning down her face like some Kiriath etching chemical she d been careless with.
And left her emptied out, but feeling no cleaner inside.
It s the krinzanz, Archidi. She d quite consciously not packed any when she left the city this time. Two days away, three at worst how bad could it be? Now she had her answer. If you will go on these wildly optimistic cold quit jags.
She cleared her throat. Took another bite at the apple and shaded her eyes against the lowering sun. The tree branched low, not much over head height for a human, and spread intricately tangled limbs upward and out a dispersal derived not, Archeth knew, from any sculptor s observation or skill, but from certain mathematical musings her father s people had incubated in the hearts of their machines like song. She remembered swinging from those branches as a child, plucking at the emerging leaf blades one spring and being shocked to discover that they were burning hot to the touch.
She ran wailing to her mother at the time, got her burned fingers salved and bandaged, and when she asked questions, got the usual human explanation for these things.
It s magic, her mother said tranquilly. The tree is magic .
Her father let her get well into her teens before he disabused her of that notion. Maybe because he didn t want to hurt his wife s feelings, maybe just because he found it easier to discipline Archeth who was growing up tough and scrappy as long as she believed he really was a necromancer burned black by his passage through the veins of the Earth. Though, truth be told, it hadn t taken Archeth long to see through that one if, for example, Flaradnam s journey through the twisted places really had burned him black, then how did you explain her ebony skin when she d never been allowed closer than a hundred feet to a lava flow or the crater s edge at An-Monal? It made no sense, and sense was something that she clung to from an early age.
Then again, from that same early age, Archeth could also see there was something going on beneath the surface of her parents relationship, something that reminded her of the stealthy bubble and churn of the magma in the eye of An-Monal. The sporadic eruptions it occasioned scared her, and she knew that magic was one of the subjects that would invariably cause the tension to bubble over.
I have explained it to you, she heard him shouting one evening when she should have been in bed, but had crept out to read by the radiant globe on the staircase wall. No magic, no miracles, no angels or demons lying in wait for unwary human sinners. You will not fill her head with this ignorant dross. You will not chain her this way.
But the invigilators say
The invigilators say, the invigilators say! Crash of something crystal flung at a wall. The invigilators lie, Nantara, they lie to you all. Just look around you at this piece-of-shit torture chamber of a world. Does it look to you like something ruled by a benign lord of all creation? Does it look as if someone s up there watching out for you all?
The Revelation teaches us to live so that the world will become a better place.
Yeah? Tell that to the Ninth Tribe.
Oh. Will you blame me for that now, too? Her mother s own not inconsiderable temper rising to the fight. You, who helped Sabal the Conqueror fall on them, who planned the campaign and rode at the head of our armies with him to see it done? Who came home splattered head-to-foot with the blood of infants?
I killed no fucking children! We did not want
You knew. The black acid tones of mirthless laughter in her voice now Archeth, eight or nine and used to various degrees of being told off, knew the small, frightening smile that would be playing about her mother s lips, the kindled fury it signaled. Oh, you knew. You talk of lies, you knew what he would do. You dream about it still.
You weren t there, Nantara. We had no choice. You can t build an empire without
Murdered children
Civilization doesn t just grow, Nantara. You have to
You lecture me about ignorance and lies. Take one clean fucking look at yourself, Nam, and tell me who s lying.
And so forth.
So, tough common sense notwithstanding, Archeth learned early to stay away from the topic of magic, to just let it slide, and subsequently that habit proved tough to unlearn. When she started receiving her characteristically patchy and distracted tutoring in Kiriath matters from Flaradnam and Grashgal, the mark of those first fifteen or so years was on her. Magic still looked pretty much like magic to her, even when it apparently wasn t. And there was something deeply buried in her, something human maybe, inherited from her mother s side, that wanted to just accept the magic, just leave it at that rather than go through all the awkward detail of understanding. Many decades on, long after her mother had lived out her human life span and died, Archeth could sometimes still feel herself looking at Kiriath technology through Nantara s eyes. In nearly two centuries, she had never quite managed to shake the eerie sense of unnatural power it radiated.
Are you brooding, child? Or simply coping badly without your drugs?
Dark, sardonic voice without origin, snaking through the sun-split air to her ears. As if the deep-rooted stones of the An-Monal keep itself were talking to her.
She closed her eyes. Manathan.
A safe bet, wouldn t you say? As ever, the Helmsman s tones rang almost human avuncular and reassuring but for the tiny slide at the end of each syllable, the caught-breath slippage that seemed like the rising edge of a suppressed scream. As if the voice might at any given moment suddenly shift mid-sentence from intelligible sound into the shriek of steel being driven against the grindstone. Or have you started believing in angelic presence and divine revelatory grace? Are the locals getting to you, daughter of Flaradnam?
I have a name of my own, she snapped. You want to try using it occasionally?
Archeth, said the Helmsman smoothly. Would you be so good as to join me in your father s study?
The door was set in the wall at her back, almost beside the place she had chosen to sit. She rolled her head sideways to look at its black, rivet-studded bulk. Faced front and studied the declining sun for a while instead. She bit into the apple again.
If that s intended as defiance, daughter of Flaradnam, it s a pretty poor fist you re making of it. Perhaps you should abandon abstinence as a strategy for the time being. It doesn t seem to do much for you. And you are still young enough to take the damage.
She chewed down the mouthful of apple. What do you want, Manathan? It s getting late.
And your entourage at the river will not wait? That seems unlikely, my lady kir -Archeth.
Irony dripped off the title, or at least seemed to with the Helmsmen you could never quite tell. But the rest of Manathan s sentence was unquestionably the understatement of the day. Unlikely wasn t in it the imperial river frigate Sword of Justice Divine would hold station until Lady kir-Archeth of the clan Indamaninarmal chose to come back down from communing with her past at An-Monal, no matter what hour of the day or night that might be. The captain of the vessel and the commander in charge of the marine detachment aboard had both been charged by the Emperor himself to protect her life as if it were his own, and while the Holy Invigilator attached might not in theory be bound by such secular authority, this one was young and fresh to his post and quite evidently overawed by her presence. Which wasn t an uncommon stance. The Kiriath might be long gone, but their status and mystique clung to Archeth like a courtier s perfume. She d wear the rank it bought her for human generations to come.
Occasionally, she wondered how it would be when those generations had finally passed, when all those who actually remembered the Kiriath and the Departure were in their graves, and only the tomes in the imperial library spoke of her people anymore.
She wondered if she d still be sane by then.
The shadow of the iron tree reached out, touched her finally at the toe of one boot.
Daughter of Flaradnam, said Manathan sharply.
Yeah, yeah. She levered herself up off the wall and to her feet. Tossed the core of her apple away across the courtyard. I hear you.
The river frigate had been built for the occasional use of none other than his majesty Akal Khimran the Great whose original idea for the ship s name, before politics intruded, had been Crocfucker and its master s suite
