Farisa, returning from the void into which she had been sickened, pushed herself off the ground.
Nadia said, “I won’t insult you by asking whether it worked.”
“Too well.” Farisa shuddered.
“I made a mistake,” Nadia admitted. “I did not think it would overpower you.” She handed a small orange to Farisa. “Sometimes a scent stirs a memory, so I thought it might help.”
“I know what every corner of Exmore smells like,” Farisa said. “I’ll never go to a brothel.”
Nadia laughed. “Has anything returned to you?”
She peeled the orange and bit into it. “These are delicious.” She paused. “Something did come back. Raqel, the name? I remember her now. She was my best friend in Tevalon. We went to a perfume shop on a warm fall day—my seventeenth birthday—and....” I remember the scent of her hair, her neck. I remember.... “It’s all quite personal.”
Nadia handed Farisa a notebook and pen. “Write it all down. For yourself, not me.”
Farisa jotted what she remembered. “Raqel was supposed to be the one going to Cait Forest, not me.”
“And where is she now?”
“Married. I’ve never met the husband. The match was arranged by her father.”
“Oh. So they’re that kind of Vehu.” Nadia frowned.
“Her mother’s the religious one, and she’s one of the kindest people I know. Her father is.... It doesn’t matter. The sense I get of her husband is that he is underwhelming—neither courageous, nor handsome. Very unlike...” She scribbled a name and circled it. “I don’t know if I can ever go back north, but I’m glad to have the... reminiscence back.”
Nadia said, “So am I. I gave you a low dose of that potion, so I didn’t expect it to make you ill. It must be a foul morning somewhere.”
“The odors were tolerable until that ash scent hit me.” Farisa shuddered. “It seemed to come from the whole sky, like the entire world was a corpse on fire.”
Nadia walked to the patio’s edge. “The fires out west died weeks ago.”
“It wasn’t a forest fire. I know that scent well. It was coming from all directions, like it had wrapped around the world seven times, and it smelled faintly metallic, but also a bit like—”
“Rotten egg?”
“Precisely.”
Nadia shook her head. “That isn’t good.”
“Does that mean something?”
“It probably does,” Nadia said.
“What?”
“Have you ever heard of Alma Winter?”
“I’m sure I have, but....”
“Whenever Mount Alma erupts, we get terrible weather. We had Alma Winter in the Sixties—two years of frigid springs, rainy summers, and bad harvests. Merrick can tell you about the one in his childhood—that one was worse, with blizzards as far south as Russet Bay and Grunwind.” The old woman looked east. “The sunrise did look a bit red, did it not?”
“It did.” Farisa looked up. No clouds were in the sky, but the sun was dimmer and cooler than she would have expected it to be given its angle.
“This could be quite bad.” Nadia shook her head as she looked over the city. “Exmore’s already having food riots.”
Farisa walked up beside her. “I have to confess something.”
“What?”
Farisa sighed. “I’m very thankful to you and Merrick for taking me in, but there seems to be a case of mistaken identity. I’m not who you think I am.”
“Is that so?”
“You said my family was good to you. Unfortunately, my parents never came within a thousand miles of here. When I got sick from that—”
“Potion,” Nadia said.
“I was worried that you had found me out and—”
Nadia chuckled. “Oh, no. Vehu don’t poison. The last thing we’d want to do is confirm another libel. Regarding your identity, please tell me what you think I don’t know about you.”
“My father’s name was Dashi Zevian, and my mother was—”
“Kyana La’ewind, I know.” Nadia paused. “You took her surname, per Lorani custom. There’s been no mistake of identity at all. Your parents were never in Exmore, that’s true, but I knew your mother well.”
“You did? How?”
A large gray tabby cat, identical to the one who’d saved Farisa from Dr. Bugg in the madhouse, walked across the balcony.
“Reverie.” The old woman grabbed a pair of wooden chairs, upholstered to be more comfortable than the wrought-iron ones, and put them around one of the stone tables. “In fact, Kyana was the one who introduced me to the mage who made that potion.”
“The one that made everything stink?”
“Bloodhound Essence, it’s called. I used it in the Fifties to solve kidnappings. On the scent of a shirt, I could find a missing child from thirty miles away. I doubt I could stand the stuff at my current age.”
Farisa laughed. “I barely stood it at my age.” She paused. “Just how many mages do you know, Nadia?”
The cat jumped onto a table. Nadia petted the animal with fingers bent. “I’ve met quite a few, but none like you.”
“I can’t be that rare.”
Nadia gave her a stern look as if insulted by false humility.
“Am I?”
“I wish I could have spent more time with your mother. She and I worked together only once.”
Farisa leaned forward. “Tell me what that was like.”
“This was in the diamond mines east of Loran.”
“On the mainland?”
“That’s right.”
“The Tumbiyyr strike?”
“None other.” Nadia paused. “The Battle of the Black Mines. You probably know this, but the Globbos never bothered to bury dead workers because the caverns were so deep. They’d toss a body into so deep, no one heard it land, and that would be the fact. No funeral, get back to work.
“When Kyana and I arrived, the fighting was at its worst. The miners had been holding their ground for four months, but the Globbos had stationed a thousand fresh whiteshirts just outside, and they were ready to kill all the miners—men, women, boys, girls—and, if we hadn’t come, that’s exactly what they would have done.
“Your mother’s idea was—”
“Let me guess,” Farisa said.
“Go ahead.”
“The potion—Bloodhouse Essence, you called it—enhances one’s sense of smell. If the mines are full of corpses, then....”
“You experienced what one drop can do. We had six gallons of the stuff. We broke into the Globbo camp and spiked their food with it. The whiteshirts, as they approached the mines, began to feel sick, but none wanted to show weakness in front of their superior officers, so they marched on, until they couldn’t go another step. The miners routed them, armed with no more than rusty tools and a worker’s anger, taking only sixteen casualties on their own side to wipe out a whole squadron.”
Farisa noticed a falcon, speeding toward the city. “The dead miners, in a way, fought alongside the living ones.”
“You could say that.”
Farisa felt a mix of pride and horror; she could not shake the image of a man being torn apart by rusty mining tools. It seemed a cruel way to go, even for a Globbo. “My mother was a killer.”
“We all had to be,” Nadia said. “We believed the world could still be saved, and these were deserved deaths. We’re not talking about fourteen-year-old privattou given rifles yesterday. They were trained labor suppression troops. Those who fight for money, against workers, deserve worse.
“I know,” Farisa said. “I know she had good reasons to do it, but I’ve been told my whole life I’m a daughter of killers, and now I know it...”
“To be true.”
“Right.”
“She had a conscience. Never doubt that. Even within Reverie, she was divisive.”
“How so?”
“I wasn’t there for this, but when she was in Terosha, where the fighting got to its ugliest—the Globbos had their sights set on something deep in the jungle, and we still don’t know what it was—about a year before we met. The natives fought ferociously, but they lacked modern weaponry and tactics. Reverie wanted to help, but Kyana refused to offer aid unless the chieftain outlawed girl-cutting.”
“What’s girl-cutting?”
Nadia explained the procedure.
“If anyone tried to take a knife to my ‘little fariza’ I would boil his face off.”
“I’d cheer you on for doing it. Our religion has always forbidden the practice. Kyana wasn’t Vehu, but she had read our chorae, and some of the tsovrae, and she pulled inspiration from our scriptures in convincing the village elders to cease—”
“Mutilating women.”
“Your mother believed Reverie’s purpose was not only to take the world back, but to repair it, and that if we weren’t fixated on this as well, we would become as bad as the Company we were fighting against. That happens to often in war, that the two sides sink to the same moral standard, and she wanted to avoid it.”
Farisa looked at the ground. “I’m not sure I can live up to her example. I’m already nineteen—no, twenty—and I’ve done nothing so far to oppose the Global Company. I’ve been running, and I’ve been hiding, but I haven’t slowed them down or pushed them back in any way.”
“I don’t believe she would have thought less of you. You don’t know how young you are. You have decades of life ahead of you.”
“I hope so,” Farisa said.
A servant came to the balcony and asked the two women if they wanted coffee or tea.
“I’ll have my usual,” Nadia said.
He looked at Farisa. “As for you?”
“Yes, I’d like coffee.”
“And how do you take it?”
“Black,” said both women at the same time.
Farisa looked at Nadia, puzzled. “How’d you know?”
“A guess.” Nadia ran her hands over the tablecloth as if flattening a crease. “You’re just like her.”
#
The women’s conversation continued all morning, often moving to lighter topics like opera and local history because, after everything she had experienced, Farisa wanted to feel, for lack of a better way to put it, normal—as if the delicate knobs and dials of life could be reset to a prior, correct configuration and would never need to be touched again. She knew she could not stay here forever—she probably would not be here for very long—but she did not want to consider her departure now. An Alma Winter was coming, yes, but today the sky was blue and the noon sun was warm on Farisa’s arms. When lunch arrived, Farisa was able to eat almost all of it.
Their topic of conversation had turned to Exmore’s notorious graffiti.
“I’ve heard that people used to come to Exmore just to see it,” Farisa said.
“They did, when there were more than a few hundred people in the world who could afford travel.” Nadia got up from the table and grabbed a binocular spyglass to look over the city. “Sometimes, the chaff is more informative than the printed news.”
Farisa asked, “Can I see?”
“Of course.” Nadia handed her the glasses.
In the harsh midday light, Exmore had taken the color of a desert. A brawl had broken out on a construction site, and the brown-clad policemen nearby did not stop it, being more concerned with the obese drunkard they were stuffing into a jailbound carriage. A row of streetwalkers, sharing cigarettes, stood halfway between the two events.
The old woman asked, “Is there anything interesting?”
“Nothing seems worth repeating,” Farisa said.
Someone had written on the cement wall outside a gaudy estate: Taxxin’x mozzer Tina xhould be called Tuna—xhe xmellx like it!
Farisa said, “They use X for S, am I right?”
“A common substitution, yes.”
“So I thought.” The city walls hosted quite a number of variations on the familiar Beatrixa will arrive, interspersed with recycled bawdy poems. It became clear, from this height, that some of these lyricists copied lines from six blocks over as their own, though receptions varied considerably depending on where the contribution was put.
On the side of a postal building, someone had written in garish red: Zzhe Vyhux run the world. We juxt livex in it.
“Vehu run the world, it seems.”
Nadia chuckled. “Sometimes I wish. We’d be able to stop this whole thing where someone tries to kill us every hundred years or so. Anything else out there?”
There’s orcs in this town. They’re out on the hunt. They’ll feast for ten years if they catch Mayor Munt.
“Poor Mayor Munt.” Farisa laughed. “And do people really worry about orcs?”
“You can find believers in all things, if you look hard enough.”
Beatrice will arrive. Under it: Barixa’x here, duem-axx.
Farisa lowered the binoculars. “A B can be an F, right?”
“I believe so.”
“And they throw E’s and Y’s and T’s—?”
Nadia laughed. “Basically everywhere. Their spelling is hardly consistent.”
“Beatrice. Beatrix. Barixa. Farisa.”
Nadia walked forward and put her palms on the glass.
Farisa looked again, as if the scrawlings would change on a second glance. None did.
“Sometimes, it’s better not to read the chaff,” Nadia said.
“The pessimou know I’m here.”
“I would not say they know.”
Farisa stepped back. “You know about all this? That they’re talking about me?”
Nadia must have smoked in the past because her hand reached for a phantom cigarette.
“How would they know who I am? How do so many people know who I am?”
Nadia sighed. “You’ve never been told, have you?”
“I’ve never been told what?” She had once longed to be a normal girl. She was a mage, yes, but she did not go about town throwing fireballs in the air. She was careful; dammit, she was careful. “Do I have some kind of... reputation?”
Nadia took Farisa’s hand and walked her back to the table. “Darling, you’re going to want to sit down for this.”
A servant arrived. Nadia requested herbal tea rather than coffee, and then the old woman started telling Farisa the true story of her unwanted fame.
“You wouldn’t remember. It was the summer of ‘75, so you were—”
“Not even two.”
“Your father was a businessman in Loran—apparently, quite a successful one—and he was hosting a banquet at his home when....”
Farisa listened, with fists between her thighs so her knees wouldn’t bounce, but Nadia had barely started the story when Merrick came running up stairs.
“The southern barricades have been breached,” he said, between panting breaths. There’ll be Globbos in the District within the hour.”
Nadia said, “We can’t be out here.”
#
Time passed like the flow of cooled-off pitch. The air in the second-floor living room was stuffy and still. A chorus of shouts came from the street. Farisa, unsure what to say or do, and still too ill to offer much, looked at her hands.
A young woman knocked on the door. Wegen, the house’s chief bodyguard, answered.
“There's been an attack,” she said. “The wounded are at the temple.”
Merrick said, “I’ll get my medical kit.”
Nadia said, “I’m going with him.”
Farisa said, “Should I come?”
“No,” Nadia said. “Stay here.”
Merrick said, “Right now, this house is the safest place for you. And you still need a lot of rest.”
Farisa nodded. The old man was right, of course, but she felt that by resting in their protection, she was incurring a debt, and that it would be better to repay it as she went.
When the two of them left the house, she tested her ability to walk without support, and found that she could go for almost four minutes, which she considered an improvement. Up in her guest bedroom, she tried to read one of the dense hardbound novels, but found herself needing to take breaks because her eyes could not hold focus without mental effort.
Loud arguments and screaming matches could be heard outside. Pickpockets and purse snatchers had come into the neighborhood. Dogs barked to scare off intruders, and the high-pitched wails of police steam sirens could be heard downtown. Farisa felt both thankful to be safe inside, and embarrassed by her sense of powerlessness, for nothing she could do—she could barely walk—would help the people of this neighborhood defend themselves.
By seven o’clock, it seemed that the Vehu had driven out the worst of the bandits and Globbos, and silence had returned to the streets. It was half past nine, and Farisa had already changed into pajamas, when she next saw Nadia. She was reading by lamplight, having chosen one of the thin pastel-colored paperbacks under the nightstand.
“How’s your book?”
Farisa smiled. “Still don’t know who the killer is.”
“Which one are you reading?” Nadia squinted to look at the book as Farisa read it. “Ah, that’s a good one. The ending is quite sur—”
“Quiet!”
“Of course.”
Merrick’s voice called from the hall outside. “We have a whole library on the third floor. You’re welcome to anything you find there, but that’s for later.”
“It’s time for dinner,” said Nadia, “if you have an appetite.”
“I do.”
Farisa still struggled with stairs, needing to use the railing to get down to the third-floor landing, then to the second-floor corridor, and she used the wall for a balance as she walked to the dining room on her right. Dinner was fried rice with honey-glazed salmon and scrambled egg. She remembered having eaten something like this in Cait Forest, of which her impressions were slowly returning. She remembered that there had been two different headmasters—first the kind old woman, Katarin; second, that hideous Elior whose face had twisted into gleeful contempt as he insulted Farisa’s mother. What had he said again? Something like...
(“Your mother was a whore! A tavern archway! She’d take a man to bed at night and cut his throat at dawn.”)
Farisa, as the meal wound down, recounted this. “I’m sorry to bring it up, but I can’t get it out of my mind.”
“That was a terrible thing for him to say,” Nadia said.
Farisa looked at Merrick.
He swallowed his last bit of egg. “I agree with her.”
Farisa had hoped to hear not mere sympathy, but refutation. “Of course, none of that could be true.”
Merrick took a swig from his half-finished glass of beer. “Well, it is certainly a possibility that—”
Nadia looked ready to throw something at him.
The doctor cleared his throat. “War is complicated.”
Nadia said, “The man only said that to hurt you.”
Farisa leaned forward. “But is it true?”
Merrick said, “Not as he said it.”
“A tavern archway, absolutely not.” Nadia put a hand on Farisa’s elbow. “She loved your father, and she did have values that she did suffer for, as we have already discussed. When it comes to specifics, no one knows, but she was a spy, and espionage is rarely a clean business. It’s possible that she had to do things she would not have done in peacetime.”
Farisa lost her desire to eat. “Does this mean I could have been, could even be...?”
“Half Globbo?” Merrick said. “That I doubt.”
“I am sure you are Dashi’s,” Nadia said. “You have his color. If Kyana had done what she might have had to do, I am sure she took precautions.”
“Post-cautions as well,” said the doctor.
Farisa crossed her arms. “I see.”
Nadia added, “I never knew her as well as I would have liked, but she was the most loyal wife a man could have asked for, and both your parents loved you.”
Farisa looked aside. She could not stomach the notion of her mother, even in the line of duty, sleeping with a Globbo. It reminded her of the Company Marriage—the ultimate signifier of a man’s being a man of commerce was his wife’s carnal gathering of connections so the husband could succeed in business—but men of honor, men like Claes and Dashi, were the antipodal opposite to men of commerce.
Right?
She could not even stand that Elior had thought such a thing might be true. She made a fist but stopped herself from pounding it on the table.
Merrick put his fork on his plate. “Some things one never knows for sure.”
Nadia put her coffee cup aside. “Kyana was pure of heart. To that, I can attest.”
“And I can tell you that she saved tens of thousands of lives. She broke a Globbo cipher we thought would never be cracked.”
Nadia folded a napkin. “If she had ever been forced by circumstance to do something she detested, to save your life or to save Dashi’s, she would have done it and complained to no one.”
Farisa crossed her arms, squeezing the flesh inside her elbow. “We still lost.”
Merrick stood up and left the table.
A sense of unease filled Farisa’s body. “Merrick, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“You haven’t,” Nadia whispered. “He’s always this way, this time of year.”
“Spring?”
“May. Tomorrow is the eleventh—the anniversary of Michalo’s death.”
Farisa rubbed her temples. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. You didn’t kill him.”
“Farisa never knows the right thing to say. You should know that about me by now.”
“We had two sons, and we lost both at the same age. Thirty-one. Edgar died fighting up near Lake Va’ala in August ‘81. Globbo shotgun to the chest, bled out in a minute.”
“Yvec,” Farisa said.
“It was a hero’s death. A martyr’s death. It could have happened to me, or to my husband. It was horrible, but within the rules of combat. He knew the risks. Michalo’s was....”
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Farisa waited, until Nadia could continue.
“Even as a child, he detested violence. If he caught a ladybug, he would walk all the way across the house to let it outside, rather than kill it. God gave him the build to be a great athlete, but he hated seeing others lose. I’ve never met a boy like that. And he loved to make things, Farisa. Clay, metal, and wood were the only things he asked for when the Lifting came around.
“Architecture was a natural fit for his talents. We took him to Moyenne on his sixteenth birthday—the Vehu temples on the west side hadn’t been torn down yet. Michalo decided he would live on his own creativity, at nobody’s expense. Edgar, who had the talent for numbers, kept the books of his fledgling business, but Michalo did the designs.
“We have been without a country for centuries, but Globbos still consider us a ‘national’ people, so even our existence is of questionable legality. Whenever Michalo completed a temple or a chora school, the Globbos would buy land to its south and erect some concrete monstrosity, depriving it of sun. On days of worship, they’d blockade the streets so no one could attend. No one would hire him to build a place of business, for they risked a boycott if word got out that there had been a Vehu architect.”
Nadia set her coffee cup down and folded her hands before continuing.
“We could have bankrolled their business, to get them started at least, but they wanted to survive on their own. He built the temples for love, not to get rich, because there’s no money in it. The fees from the constant fighting over easements and permits, however, forced the brothers into residential work. If you ever get to see those beautiful brownstones on Chestnut, they’re my son’s work. However, the Globbos would bribe his workers to disobey his orders and use inferior materials, cut corners, or simply sabotage the project so that, six months later, a safety inspector could be sent in to have the building condemned. They even had one of his houses blown up, injuring ten people, then forced the Telegraph to claim it had collapsed due to structural deficits. It destroyed his reputation. He spoke out, but no one believed him.”
“Of course not,” Farisa said. “To most of the world, he was just an unsuccessful architect.”
As I am, to many now that I have been where I have been, a madwoman.
Nadia’s gray tabby cat walked into the room.
“The firm went under. That is when he started to drink. One night downtown, in the walk between two taverns, he started going on about the Global Company and what they had done to his life’s work, a little bit too loudly for outside the house, and of course everything he was saying was true, but the police came, and when they realized the nature of what he had been rambling about, they put him not in an ordinary drunk tank but a... well, you’ve been to such a place.”
“A madhouse?”
The old woman, whose face had seemed to deflate in the telling of the story, nodded.
“Yva khodro.”
“Very cursed, indeed.”
Farisa did not interrupt to offer the literal translation.
Nadia continued. “It was good that we still had some standing in the city. If you were poor and found yourself in a place like that, you were likely used for one of Smitz Bell’s experiments. They would take out sections of people’s brains in the attempt to learn which pieces did what. Our wealth prevented that fate. Still, it took three years for him to get out.”
Farisa massaged her jawbone with her thumbs. “Three years?”
“There are sixteen madhouses between here and Moyenne. When we found out where the Globbos had him, we’d go there, offering to pay whatever ransom they wanted, but they’d tell us he was dead, then transfer him to another institution. This happened five times.”
“How’d you get him out?”
“We didn’t. They released him in the middle of the night, in a village twenty miles east of here, with no explanation. In this time, his brother—they were always very close—had both gone up north, to join the fighting by the Lake, and come back, in a casket. Michalo pretended to be resilient—for us. He had no need to work, even with 90 percent of our fortune gone, but he would have taken a clerk’s job just to prove to himself that he was useful, that he—”
“Wasn’t insane,” Farisa said. “Hadn’t crossed over.”
“That exactly.
“As late as the Eighties, there were still a few small businesses—thirty, forty employees—in existence, so he sent applications everywhere, from Headless Mountain to the Crab Bucket. No response. No one wanted to hire someone who had been out of work for three years. He took the first hundred rejections well, it seemed. The next hundred seemed to affect him, and as his pile of mass-printed turndown letters grew higher and higher, he started losing weight and sleeping more.
“I don’t know what ’84 was like where you were, but we had an early and glorious spring. The flowers started to bloom in late February, twice as bright as usual. Rain came, but only at night. The days were sunny and warm from the teens of March onward. Our garden had already produced a melon crop by early May. It seemed that Michalo, who had been housebound all winter, was returning to his usual self. He began to go out and see old friends. The color returned to his face. It was good to see him so happy.
“Merrick has never forgiven himself.”
Farisa asked, “For what?”
“Missing signs. This ebullience was not that of a man who had recovered from a black mood, but of one who had already made the decision. He was saying goodbye. Merrick has had patients like this—he still does—but, when it happened in his own house, he took the hope at face value.”
The electric light over the dining table was not uniform; one could perceive a flicker if one waited for it.
“Is there anything I can say?”
Nadia stretched her wrinkled hand. “To my husband? No.” She paused. “Let him be moody. Otherwise, do nothing differently, and do not mention this.”
Farisa shook her head. “You’ve given me a lot of perspective. Sometimes I feel...”
“Alone?”
Farisa nodded.
“We all do. That is what the Globbos prefer. If people see themselves as disadvantaged or oppressed, they might join together and overthrow the master. On the other hand, if they see themselves as individually unsuccessful, as Michalo did, they’ll continue to suffer in isolation, too embarrassed to speak to their own experiences.”
“But it’s obvious that the Global Company is evil.”
“To us, it is. Still, if you asked a hundred people in Exmore—in any town—what they think of the Global Company, you’d find ten who despise it, as we do, and you’d find ten who support it. The other eighty have no opinion either way. Sure, the common folk hate their jobs, their bosses, their low wages—they hate living within a system that forces them to sell most of their life’s hours to earn back a tiny fraction of existence—but, at the the same, the Global Company is, as they see it, how things have always been and always will be.”
Farisa sat back. “I suppose that if an institution prints its name on every loaf of bread, it becomes hard to imagine a world without it.”
The gray tabby hopped on the dining room table, accepting a piece of salmon that Nadia gave her. “Here, Ouragan.”
“So, Kyana was a codebreaker?”
“She was. The Vehu District wouldn’t have survived without your mother’s work. She stole one of the Company’s code-writing machines, took it apart, figured out how it worked in a couple of hours, and put it back together to work in reverse.” She scratched the cat under the chin. “She was also good to this one.”
“How old is she?”
“Ouragan? Old. Also, young. She’s twenty-five, to be precise, but no ordinary cat. If she’s taken care of, she’ll live a long time.”
Farisa heard the bustle of servants in the adjacent hallway. She noticed that an oval-shaped mirror had been taken from its place on the wall and laid against the wainscoting. “You're leaving soon.”
“We are.”
“Where? For what?”
“We are taking the Northwest Trail. Merrick grew up on a dori, and we’d like to build one on the Yatek. Given our age, it makes sense to get through the taiga before the end of October, so we have to leave by the first of June, but given the situation in town we might not even have that.”
“Is that why Merrick hinted that I may have to leave soon?”
Nadia folded her hands. “We would never kick you out, but yes, it would be better if you could recover as fast as possible.”
#
Farisa’s body still had a million petty aches in it the next day, and she slept through most of the afternoon, even though the top floor of this house got quite hot. As Nadia had predicted, Merrick stayed in his map room, emerging only for dinner. The old couple’s resin-scented medicine still tasted terrible, but it did seem to be working, as she was able to go up and down stairs without stopping to catch her breath. The day after that—May 12—she woke for breakfast without being roused.
Merrick was busy with patients; Nadia was helping the servants pack their belongings. Farisa, feeling well enough now to think for twenty seconds without her mind resetting itself, found the need for more serious reading material than the newspaper, and wandered to the door of that third-floor library. When she opened the door, tiny dust motes floated in a beam of sun. The room, about thirty feet by fifteen with high windows, had been filled entirely with books, many of them first editions, with brown and green hardbacks matching the color and smell of their mother forest.
Farisa imagined what it must have been like to live here in a time of peace. Merrick and Nadia’s boys had probably spent endless afternoons on that plush yellow couch, reading adventure stories as afternoon sunlight filtered in.
She looked through the basket of pulp dreadfuls near the door—none struck her fancy. A two-volume dictionary sat on a table—she knew enough words. On a bottom shelf, she found an ancient, unabridged copy of Applications of Electricity and Magnetism, weighing in at twelve hundred pages and using notation from the last century, though she could still decipher the circuit diagrams and differential equations. The tome reminded her of her after-hours studies in Cait Forest. On the top shelf, near a slightly cracked window, were Ettasi translations of the Nine Tragedies as well as a full set, book jackets preserved, of the Wilstein Classics.
“Nine Years on Black Ranch,” she said as she looked over the first of the Wilstein books. The man on the front cover, though dressed for another century, reminded her of Claes Bergryn, the man whose name she had written in her notebook and circled the day before, though she could not at first remember why she had done so, unless....
She left the library and hurried to the map room.
Merrick, who had left his door open, was inside. Behind him was a detailed atlas of the world featuring all five continents; the man’s hands, however, hovered over a plain gray table where sprawled a miniature village of wires, clamps, coils, and knobs.
“Good afternoon,” he said as soon as he noticed Farisa had entered. “This here is—”
“It looks like an attempt to build a telegraph.”
Merrick laughed. “A mere attempt, you call it?”
“Is it working yet?”
“Well, not quite.”
“Then it’s an attempt.” Farisa removed a wire. “You don’t need this one. At best, it gets in the way, but it’s probably causing a short.” She unfastened a dry cell battery and put it on her tongue. “I’ll replace this one. It’s drained.” She did so, then pressed the toggle switch twice. “Good as new.”
“Thank you.” He shook his head. “How did you figure that out so fast?”
“I spent seventeen years of my life in hiding.” Farisa scratched her neck. “I had a lot of time to learn things I thought I would never use, and on rare occasions I am proven wrong. Anyway, I came here because... Nadia mentioned you were Reverie.”
Merrick’s eyes narrowed. “And?”
“Do you know Claes Bergryn?”
“Claes? I know him very well.”
“With this machine, can you reach him?”
Merrick looked around the room, causing her to become impatient. It seemed, for a moment, that he had not been ready to hear that name, but then he looked at the blinking test light and spoke.
“That, Farisa, is an excellent idea.”
#
The next day, Farisa noticed a change in the servants’ moods. They had always been polite before efficient, and now they were the reverse, not talkative at all as they continued sorting and packing Merrick and Nadia’s possessions. Most of what they owned would be donated to local charity; that which could be easily sold would fund the costs of setting up the dori, as well as supporting other travelers of lesser means. It seemed there could be no allowance for wasted motion.
Farisa joined the old couple for an early lunch—or perhaps a late breakfast—around ten thirty.
“Do you object to lamb?” Nadia asked.
“I don’t.” Farisa said, “I thought Vehu didn't eat red meat.”
Nadia said, “Most of us don't, but we won’t be able to afford to be choosy on the trail.”
Farisa cut another bite and ate it. “You cooked it well, Nadia.”
“I cooked it,” Merrick said. “There are no health reasons not to have meat once in a while.”
“I won’t tell anyone,” Farisa said as if making a joke, but no one laughed.
“We’ll have to speed up our trail schedule even more. I want us to be through Aurora Pass before the first freeze, and that’s late September.”
Nadia said, “Why?”
“The Telegraph—the newspaper—has printed a couple articles about increasing volcanic activity. They haven’t said it, and of course they won’t, but I think they’re talking about Mount Alma.”
“They are,” Farisa said.
“Do you—?”
“I smelled it.”
Nadia explained what had occurred three days ago.
“Our own reports on the East are suggestive of similar things. If true, it’s going to be a terrible winter.”
Nadia handed Farisa the day’s edition of the Exmore Telegraph. “They still say you’re dead.”
Witch Farisa No Match for Worst Fire in Decades. “Punishing headline,” Farisa noted. “Now, I’m better looking than this.” The depiction had lightened her skin, removed all waviness from her hair, and elongated her features. She folded the paper and set it aside.
“It’s cause for worry,” Merrick said.
“That they think I’m dead?”
“The Company’s lies always have some strategic purpose. A lie creates two versions of the world, and it gives advantage to he who knows which one is the real one. If they’re saying you’re dead, there is a good chance that at least some people within the Company know, or suspect, you are alive.”
Nadia asked, “Have you read below the fold?”
Farisa picked the paper up and looked at it again.
In smaller print, an article proclaimed the “Illegal Self-Governanse of Vehu North-Central Exmore” to have ended. The major, Strasse Sandhill, had announced the fact last night. The podium mostly hid sixteen thousand consecutive meals of gluttony had made of his body, but he had a round face and a double chin.
“Strasse Sandhill. What happened to Mayor Munt?”
Merrick and Nadia looked at each other and, in a moment that felt like a sunbreak in a thunderstorm, laughed.
“Oh, honey,” said Nadia. “That’s just a nickname. It refers to—”
“I think I’ve got it,” Farisa said. “It’s well-deserved, probably.”
“Oh, it is,” said Merrick. “He’s a Globbo stooge, corrupt as river sludge.”
“He’s not attractive.” In fact, his face was so ugly, Farisa suspected he had taken enough spluf on the face in boarding-school gym class to have been altered at a genetic level. “The Company’s world must be his only option.”
“He was your patient, long ago,” said Nadia.
“Munt,” Farisa said. “Did he have one?”
Merrick chuckled. “I can neither confirm nor deny.”
The world had little left on its bones, but so long as its people still deigned to refer to a corrupt official, fat on the Globbo payroll, as “Mayor Munt,” hope had not been run off the map yet.
Merrick continued. “Farisa’s intuition that he needs the Global Company to exist, for he would not fare well in a world of freedom, is not invalidated by hidden information.”
Nadia, whose eyes had been unstill all evening due to fatigue and vigilance, laughed. And then Farisa laughed. It felt, to Farisa, like a “time before” that she could not possibly truly remember, given that it had ended shortly after her birth.
“I’m so sorry,” Farisa said.
Nadia said, “For what?”
“I was born too late. I would have fought with you—and for you.”
Nadia got up and hugged Farisa.
“You may get your chance.”
#
In the late afternoon, Farisa sat on a second-floor window seat reading. She had been out of the madhouse for four days, so the imprint of illness was fading, though she doubted she would ever be as carefree as the children playing outside—to them, it must have seemed that this sunny spring day would never end.
A muscular black dog walked up the street, taking shade when it could. A leather rucksack had been strapped to the animal’s torso, the package’s heft suggested by his slow pace, but the dog’s eager expression made Farisa smile. Even in this world of war and strife, some creatures found cause for happiness. Did dogs know they had been born into a damaged world? Did they have any sense of what their companion species had lost, of entirely their own fault? She suspected they did not. On the other hand, it was possible that their exuberance was not total ignorance, but something they cultivated to cheer others up.
The dog’s tail kept wagging as it climbed the hill. Farisa returned to reading, but she had a harder time concentrating, because something had seemed wrong. Dogs had been trained to deliver letters and small packages for decades, but the bulk of that particular parcel was clearly too much for the animal, especially uphill on a hot day.
She put a finger in her book and looked outside. Perhaps someone would see the animal, take note of the address, and relieve the poor thing of its burden.
The dog kept lumbering on until a houseplant up the street blocked her view of it.
She heard a scream that caused her to lose all sense of restraint. She was outside; she was running up Andor Street; the dog had been shot, was now splayed out, limbs twitching on the road while blood poured from its mouth in a swift red river downhill.
“Who the fuck did this?” The animal’s body had stopped moving. “Show yourself, coward.”
A young boy and girl, mouths open, looked at her.
“Do you know anything about this?”
The girl shook her head and they both ran away.
“Whoever you are, I know you’re here. Come out and admit it, you fucking coward.”
She had lost all sense of proportion. The foolishness of shouting insults at an unseen armed man—a Globbo or a teenage pessimo, she pictured herself punching the dog’s killer in the throat until her hands were stumps—had not come into mind yet.
“Where’s the evil fucking bastard who killed this dog? Show your goddamn face.”
“I’m right here,” said a masked man with a rifle. He grabbed Farisa’s arms and cuffed them together at the wrists. “Come on, let go.”
#
Five minutes later, her lips were trembling and her vision blurred, but she had inexplicably been led back to the house from which she had come and set on the couch in Merrick and Nadia’s living room.
Nadia said, “Thank you.”
Once they were inside, Wegen, the bodyguard, removed his face mask.
“Thank you for both actions,” Merrick said, to clarify. “I am sure you hated what you had to do.”
Farisa looked around. Was she a captive? Was she not expected to leave soon? Why had she been forbidden to leave the house just now?
Wegen squatted to equalize his eye level with Farisa’s. “A week ago, when our barricades were up, I would not have shot the dog.”
Farisa shook her head. “He wasn’t bothering anyone.”
“She,” Wegen said. “I knew her. Every day around five, she goes up to the chora school at 171 and plays with the children.”
Farisa gritted her teeth. “So? You can’t tell when a dog is friendly?”
“My concern was not her. That package that had been put on her caught my eye. Until a bomb squad says otherwise, you must assume such a one might be hot. It is a common tactic. I waited for the dog to get far enough away from anyone else that I could pull the trigger.” Wegen rubbed his brow. “It’s a goodman shame. The kids in this neighborhood all love—loved—that dog. But I can’t put twenty children’s lives at risk.”
“I understand,” Farisa said as her gaze diffused on the hardwood floor. “I’m not mad at you, Wegen.”
“You made the right decision,” Merrick said.
Wegen nodded, slightly. “Given where the dog fell, we’re safe behind the walls of this house. What I need from you—all of you—is to stay away from the windows for the rest of the day. Assume, until we know otherwise, that the package is a live device and can go off at any time.”
“I’ll go to the kitchen and start something,” Nadia said. “Get our minds off it.”
When dinner was ready, they ate slowly, in silence. Farisa drank chamomile tea to soothe her nerves. They lingered after eating for a while, perhaps because the disorder of the house due to the impending move made it feel a cluttered place now, and this dining room was one of the few places left where a free-swinging arm wouldn’t collide with a crate. No one had finished dinner, so they declined dessert.
Wegen came about half an hour after they had finished eating. “The package has been removed.”
Farisa said, “What was it?”
“It wasn’t a bomb, although it had been dressed to look like one. A brick and some dirty rags, is all.”
Farisa made fists. “Who would do such a thing?”
“It’s a common prank down in Snake Bay. Pessimou teenagers with nothing else to do.”
Farisa nearly screamed in anger. “So senseless. So utterly fucking senseless.”
Merrick drank from a coffee mug. “You won't find disagreement here.”
“No, you won’t,” Nadia said.
“I’m very sorry that this happened,” Wegen said with the formality of a sad soldier, before leaving.
Nadia said, once the man was gone, “You, young lady, need to be less impulsive. You are very lucky.”
Merrick, who had found enough appetite to nibble, used a spoon to pile bits of rice on his fork. “It’s over. No one got hurt.”
Nadia said, “Compassion is a fariza, but it can cause trouble. Had that dog been carrying ten pounds of T-12, and had it gone off...”
Farisa finished. “You’d be washing my guts off the roof.”
“I’m glad you didn’t need me to say it.”
Farisa leaned back in her chair.
“You look like you mean to ask me something.”
“It might be impolite.”
“It would be worse at this point not to ask. So ask.”
“You have both seen... a lot. I’m sure you’ve had dozens of friends die.”
“Hundreds,” Merrick said.
“At your age, do you still fear death?”
Nadia chuckled. “Well, there are certainly deaths I don’t want to die. As for the inevitability of my departure, no. I am not racing to the finish line, but I look forward to crossing it.”
“Look forward?”
“I do. Merrick’s a few years older than me, but I grew up in the '30s. We had seen fifty years of rapid technological progress, and everyone was expecting fifty more. I grew up believing that, by ’75, no one would have to work. We’d have airships, submarines, and three-hundred-mile-an-hour trains that’d take you across the continent for five grot. Instead, we got the Global Company. All that progress stopped—it still exists, but not for anyone outside the Hundred Families. So, the rest of us have to fight each other for scraps, and technology’s role is to enforce such a regime, and make it harder for us to work together. Sadly, I won’t get to know, in this life, what’s ten miles above us in space or ten miles below in the ocean, but I will see resolved the biggest mystery of all of them, because it awaits all of us, and always has. No, I have no enmity toward it.”
“I struggle with the concept of God,” Farisa admitted.
“I do too. On this side of death, one never stops questioning.”
Merrick added, “The world seems to run on its own, like a mechanical clock, and that it can do so seems testament to God’s brilliance. Species are born, evolve, and die on what seems to be the accord of natural forces alone. God does not seem to intervene often, but if I get a chance to question Him—”
“Or Her,” Farisa said.
“—of course, fair enough… Then I intend to ask why it seems She abandoned the social aspect—the human aspect—of Her creation midway, letting this world be run by its worst people.”
“You mean the Company,” Farisa said.
“Sure, them now. But what the Globbos represent did not begin with them. I was born in Russet Bay, long before it became Alcazar territory. The towns were run by private landowners, too unimportant nowadays for you to have heard any of their names, but I can tell you that human societies have been run by their worst for a long time. Most people are born to be good at one thing—if you get two, you’re talented; if you get three, you’re one in a million—and so those who excel in climbing human social structures tend to lack even the rudiments of moral capacity. This is an infection in us that, thus far, has outrun any cure.”
“To impose our worst on us could be a test.”
Merrick gave a sad chuckle. “It could be.”
“Hardly seems a fair one, though,” Farisa said. “How do we pass this test? How do we win?”
“This must be why so many religions need devils, ifnyri, and the like. We have only one God. Chora 521 denies the existence of the evil one that exists in many other religions, and with a degree certainty that is atypical in our scriptures, but then we are left with so much that is difficult to explain. If evil comes from us, why couldn’t God have made us better?”
“Maybe—”
A servant came into the room. “Merrick, it’s eight o’clock.”
“I must take my leave.” The doctor stood up and walked toward the hall. In the doorway, he turned around and said to Farisa, “Please come to the map room before you go off to sleep.”
Once the doctor had left, Nadia said, “I think I know what you’re thinking.”
Farisa looked around. “What’s that?”
“Our radicalism must ring strange in a house of this size.”
“No, it doesn't,” said Farisa. “Merrick is a doctor.”
“He is, and he’s a very good one.”
“So it’s not surprising that he would be wealthy.”
“Never tell him I told you this, but his practice has been losing money for the last fifteen years. In our creed, if a patient cannot pay—and that is more often the case every year—the doctor is expected to work for free. ‘The physician is God’s last line.’”
“That’s from the tsovrae, isn’t it?”
“You've read them?”
“Bits and pieces. Not all five thousand pages,” Farisa admitted.
“Six thousand,” Nadia said. “And there could be thousands more, if Vehu outlive the Company.”
“Of course you will outlive the Company. You are an ancient people.”
Nadia looked out the window. “The Company tells its subjects it shall stand for ten thousand years. We’ve had a run of what, half that?”
“They won’t,” Farisa said as she finished her glass of dinner wine.
“Of course they won’t. I don’t see them holding on fifty more years. An edifice like the Company, built on nihilistic greed, forestalls its own collapse by promising expansion to its subjects, but they are running out of world to conquer. What’s left for them to take? The Antipodes?”
“The Antipodes.” Farisa chuckled. “It’s funny.”
“What is?”
“The Company and I have the same need—to expand into a place the Company is not. There are, as you note, very few of those left.” She paused. “I mentioned to Merrick that I’d like to go wherever Claes goes next and, to my surprise, he did not find the notion entirely stupid.”
“I make one request.” Nadia held up a single bony finger. “Just one. Wherever you decide to go next, don’t go alone.”
#
The lights were still on in Merrick’s map room at ten thirty. Farisa walked in and found herself transfixed by a two-hundred-year-old grandfather clock.
“Are you looking for an elixir?”
She turned her head. “A what?”
“Sorry,” Merrick said. “It’s an old joke. That is one fine piece of machinery, though. It only loses ten seconds per month. I’m afraid I won’t be much for conversation tonight, as I’m waiting for a message I had expected two and a half hours ago.” He got up from his stool. “I may have to send again in the morning.”
“Can you teach me?”
Merrick adjusted his glasses. “Teach you what?”
“How to send, how to read.”
“Sure,” Merrick said. “Do you see my papers over there? The dots and dashes correspond to long and short pulses.” He pressed the lever. “This closes the circuit and sends a signal. The dash should be three times as long as a dot.” He looked around. “Uh-oh. I think the machine’s broken again. I moved some pieces around.”
“Let me check,” Farisa said. “No, the circuit looks fine.”
“Then he’s just late, I guess.”
“I’m sure there’s a re—Oh!” A red coil, its filament duller than the message light, was flickering. “There it is.”
“Etta, wy, ter, rosz, bez,” Merrick said with a smile. “We have contact.”
“I’ll transcribe.” She grabbed a fountain pen and notebook, and began writing the dots and dashes as the message light turned on and off. “Do you think it’s Claes?”
“I’ll know shortly.”
She tore the first page off and handed it to Merrick as she began marking up the second.
“This’ll take me some time to translate,” Merrick said.
“Take us some time, and half as much,” Farisa said.
Her wrist was beginning to cramp from the rapid writing when the message light stopped. She had filled six pages.
“End of transmission,” Merrick said. “Remind me, what’s today’s date?”
“Thirteenth.”
“Five thirteen. Fifth prime is eleven, thirteenth is…”
“Forty-one,” Farisa said.
“Eleven and forty-one. The product is…”
“Four hundred and fifty-one.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Merrick said. “Now, find the Telegraph. The paper, I mean. This day last month.” He pointed to a side table in an alcove, where old newspapers lay neatly arranged in a basket.
“April 13, ’94,” Farisa read. “Salinay Chemists Close to Cure for Neurosis, Only Drawback Is—”
“Salinay, seven letters. Seventh word is—”
“Neurosis.”
“Which has eight letters.” Merrick wrote 80451 on a sheet of paper. “8-0-4-5-1 is today’s key. I’ll start deciphering this. It might take me a while, so make yourself comfortable.”
While the doctor worked, Farisa leafed through one of his almanacs, Charts and Figures of the Known World, the ’72 edition—the last one made, as it would soon thereafter be outlawed to disseminate maps covering more than fifty square miles. Farisa counted the mountain ranges of Bezelia. The infamous Mountain Road was not marked, but there were places where terrain clearly suggested a path, and she imagined herself on it, traveling south into the gridless territory below the thirtieth parallel where there was no Global Company, and...
“I'm finished,” Merrick finally said.
“What have we?”
“The message was indeed from Claes. The good news is that he knows you’re here, and has some ideas regarding where you might be safe. Unfortunately, the whole way east, between him and us, is teeming with Globbos. The prisons have long been full in these parts, so instead of jailing robbers, they offer two options—execution or employment. As few choose execution, it becomes a reasonable assumption that every common mugger is on the Company payroll. Claes’s face is well known in these parts, so he doesn’t think he can get any closer than Waystation Imka.”
Farisa found the spot on a regional map that Merrick had laid out. “That’s fifty miles away.”
“Right. If you tried to walk it, you’d be nabbed within an hour, but since our barricades are down, it’s a matter of time before they find you. We do have a few tunnels leading out of town, but the Company knows about them.” Merrick opened a drawer and withdrew a folded map of Exmore. “You should have this. Study it.”
Ouragan walked in and rubbed her gray body against Farisa’s calf.
“There’s another thing.” Merrick removed his reading glasses. “I don't want to give you false hope, but…”
“But?”
“Claes has heard a rumor—he gives it no more than a ten percent chance of being true—that your father is still alive.”
“Alive?”
He handed Farisa his handwritten transcription of Claes’s message. “Don’t misplace it. I haven't made a copy yet.”
Farisa looked over the pages. “The Mountain Road?”
“Aye,” Merrick said.
“It can’t be true, though.”
“He said he finds it unlikely, but worthy of investigation.”
“My father isn’t alive. He can’t be. He would never have abandoned me.”
“If he had no other way of keeping you safe—”
“What would he be doing on the Mountain Road, of all places? Wouldn’t he be too old for that?” She paced around the map room. “He’s at least forty-five, probably fifty. A man of that age, with a living daughter...”
“Claes will tell you more. The unresolved questions about Dashi’s disappearance are numerous, and I am not well-versed on the matter. This brings to mind something else. Claes intends to go south. He wants to see if there’s any truth in these rumors.”
“I should go with him,” Farisa said. “I have run out of places to hide.”
“If you do, be careful. There’ll be more people taking the Road than ever before, because of—”
“Mount Alma.”
“Precisely. Every time it happens, people overestimate how much relief it will bring from the equatorial heat. Half a flag of cooling here will cut three weeks off each end of the growing season, but in the Ashes, it’s the difference between ten-flag killing heat and nine-and-a-half flag killing heat. I doubt it makes a real difference. Still, once word gets out about Alma, you’re going to see five continents’ worth of idiots on the Road. Each one of them thinks they’re going to make a new southern record. Although I have found that people have a good sense of odds when facing illness, if their prospects are explained with precision and care, this is not the case when it comes to adventure, as no one puts themselves in the ninety-nine percent who do not make it.” He paused. “Still, Claes is a careful man. If I were to scour the edge of civilization in the search of a man long thought dead, I would go with him before I would choose anyone else. If you do, take this.” He handed her a book entitled Maps of the Far South.
“Thank you.” Farisa expected that Claes would find nothing—the Mountain Road was the ultimate madman’s journey, and the only thing worse than learning she had been abandoned by a living father would be to find out that he had gone mad—but she felt a strong need to be there when the nothing was found.
“So you intend to go with Claes?”
“I do.”
Merrick reached into a bowl of sea glass to grab a tiny key, which he used to open his desk’s center drawer. “Then I want you to have this,” he said as he handed her a gold-bodied pocket watch with a silver chain.
Farisa held it. The device’s heft and softness betrayed the purity of its material—fourteen-flag gold, possibly fifteen. On its back was an ornate compass star with thirty-two directional points, and engraved at the center were letters so small, Farisa used one of Merrick’s magnifying glasses to read them.
“A. Larsen, 3-22-59. Wasn’t that—?”
“The famous watchmaker, the day he died.”
She turned the watch around to look over its face. Seconds ticked. Every hour's mark was a sapphire, except for six and twelve; an amethyst lay at the bottom, and a ruby set into white-gold wings adorned the top.
“I can’t take this from you. It must be worth a fortune.”
“It is,” Merrick said. “I would hate for you to sell it, because in this world it would probably be melted down, stones and metals sold separately, but the content alone is worth five thousand.”
“I’ll guard it with my life,” she said.
“You should know that Alex Larsen was Reverie, so this timepiece has a second use. Pull the pin, twist the face a hundred and eighty degrees, and run.”
She shook her head. “Never. It’s too beautiful.”
“I would also prefer that it remain intact, and unsold, so I should mention its third use.”
“What’s that?”
“If you remember to wind it, it does an excellent job of keeping time.”