“I sense hesitation,” Farisa heard Roqon say, noticing that she had shortened her steps to a crawl.
She looked around the city. The sharp brightness of the sunlit buildings had become unsettling, and the air seemed to shimmer with heat, though it was not hot. “Qaelet will not admit the others because—?”
“They’re not dead.”
“So, am I—? Is this—? Are you—?”
Roqon chuckled. “Clearly, no.”
“You are special to us,” said Sayuna. “We need you.”
There were hundreds of people on the streets; Farisa had been in isolated surroundings for so long, she almost forgot how to conduct herself when in sight of crowds, though no one seemed to mind her.
Roqon’s finger traced an eccentric oval. “The highway of the dead passes through Qaelet, and came this way even before our city was here, so we tend to admit strangers, but only them. Do not worry. They never harm us. Ghosts are no worse in death than when alive. Few improve, in spite of their abundant time, but that is another discussion. Your companions, when they arrive, will be under our protection and, should you leave us, you will find them exactly as they were.”
“You’ve arrived on a very special day,” Sayuna said.
“It is true.” Roqon opened a wooden gate, then closed it behind them. “This evening, you will witness the Drawing of the Egg.”
Sayuna said, “When it’s my time, I’m going to draw the whitest egg there ever was.”
Roqon tousled her hair. “I am sure you will.”
They reached a two-story building, where Sayuna left them. Roqon introduced Farisa to a woman in late middle age who said, in a tone indicating that she knew what the answer would be, but was still inclined to ask out of polite deference, “Are you the new arrival?”
Farisa nodded. “I suppose I am.”
Roqon laughed. “She’s on time like love, as they say.”
“We are all excited to see you,” the woman said. “Now, may I be so bold as to give advice?”
Farisa said, “Please do.”
“Your hair is quite beautiful.”
She had to laugh. She had not seen a barber for months, and her hair was ratty; besides, its dark color was bland in comparison to the lustrous copper and silver colors Qaeleti people had. Still, she smiled. “We call that a compliment, not advice.”
“The jealous sun rages against that beautiful deep black,” the woman said. “Cover your head to keep that color.”
Farisa smiled. “I would buy a hat, but I have brought no money.”
“Don’t be silly. All your needs will be attended to. For now, go with Roqon. I don’t want to make you late.”
#
Farisa had never seen a city like Qaelet. Snowbound Tevalon, in comparison, was no more than a hamlet with a high stone wall and a massive library. Exmore was a fleet of neighborhoods that had come together around a river with no otherwise purpose. Moyenne, where she had never been, had more than a million people, but nothing she had heard about the place made her want to see it for herself. Qaelet, on the other hand, was a city that valued beauty and order. White marble walls with tall arches divided the city into sections, each about a quarter mile square, with doorways guarded by men with bronze shields and long swords, though Farisa doubted their weapons had ever been unclean. The houses, all constructed of pale-purple sandstone, ranged from well-kept bungalows with colorful vegetable gardens to four-story mansions. Gray cobblestones lined the streets; mixed in were stripes of seafoam green that radiated, like transverse sunbeams, from each city division’s central landmark, which was usually a statue or small park.
A place like this could never exist in the Company’s world. The gold of Qaelet’s spires would have been melted down into ingots and locked in a vault somewhere. The street-corner spice and fruit vendors, tenants of owned space, would have been charged such high rents as to force them into some Globbo franchise selling the same bland produce at the same uniform price. This city was rich, but one could walk a mile and not even think of the conflict or violence that otherwise attended wealth, due to its need to exist in proximity to the deprivation of which it, usually, was a cause. Was their magic advanced enough to allow prosperity without misery? She hoped so, and she hoped their magic would suffice to throw back Hampus Bell’s armies, which had leveled cities for treasures less than could be seen from any street corner here.
Roqon led her down an alley thick with the scent of roasting coffee to a hardwood pavilion where a round-faced man wearing a gold-fringed robe stood up and bowed. “Welcome to Qaelet. I am the king’s vizier.”
Farisa moved a hand, then drew it back, remembering the local custom. She bowed.
He reciprocated. “Please sit.” She and Roqon did. “Tell me what you know about our beautiful city.”
She had to admit that her only source of information about Qaelet was A History of Wytchcraft, 6500 to 8250, a tome her own world considered disreputable, but that she had nothing else to go on. She recounted all that she had read about this City of Honey, in which the talent of magic was not rare, but in fact was used to power a whole economy, allowing the populace to live mostly in leisure.
“We have a learned woman, I can tell.” The vizier looked at Roqon, then again at her. “You are every bit what has been promised. Alas, I am afraid our society is not as excellent as you have read. Our powers are great, but the need to work still exists. There is also the matter of our Problem, which you have been brought here to solve.”
Farisa looked up at the sunlit minarets. How could a city so visually perfect need anyone’s help? She worried that any problem this place faced would either be so trivial as to be a mere exercise, an insult she must endure to prove herself, or one truly arduous, like the evil that had lurked in Cait Forest, which she had been able to defeat, but at an intolerable cost.
“Until I know what your Problem is, I can make no promises. But I will try.”
“Delightful!” The vizier stood and bowed. Farisa returned the gesture. He said, “No, at this moment, only I bow to you.”
“Your response has satisfied him,” Roqon said.
“The king himself will brief you. He is outside Qaelet, but will return to the city at—do you have a word for the midpoint between noon and sundown?”
“We don’t have a precise word for it,” Farisa said. “We’d call it three o’clock.”
“Which clock?”
She explained the nuances of her world’s timekeeping.
“Ah, yes. Three o’clock. Three o’clock exactly.”
“Exactly?”
“Exactly!” The vizier clapped his hands. “The king will send for you shortly after his arrival. Until then, and for your entire stay, you will be housed and fed. I sincerely hope you find our accommodations adequate.”
Farisa said, “I’m sure they will be.”
“I have completed my duty,” said Roqon as he left. “Good luck, Farisa.”
The vizier waved his hand, and Farisa knew she was being asked to follow. They went through a series of tight alleys between buildings, but unlike in Exmore, these corridors were impeccably clean.
“How does Qaelet keep itself so... sanitary?”
“Our Problem is not plumbing.” The vizier chuckled. “No, I wish it were a simple thing like that. Our aqueducts and egresses have stood for five thousand years, and shall do so for five thousand more, regardless of Qaelet’s fate. Our issue is...”
He paused, and after she became worried he would not speak again, she said, “Your issue is what?”
“You will come to understand it, when our king explains it to you. It is not so pressing as to necessitate the distress it would cause to civilians if we discussed it in a public place. We should enjoy the beautiful day.”
They came to an open public space where hexagonal stone tiles joined seamlessly, tesselating the ground, broken only by circular oases of thick meadow grass and small indigo flowers. A young woman surrounded by children played hand drums while a gleeman sang while juggling five brightly colored balls. Most striking to Farisa’s eye was a woman, probably forty years old, tossing green jets of fire into the air.
Farisa asked, “Is she—?”
“A magician? Yes, she is.”
“But she’s not doing real magic, is she?”
“Why would it not be real magic?”
“What about—?”
“Did you think she was a fraud?”
“Of course not,” Farisa said. “Where I’m from, we use the word ‘magician’ to describe someone whose tricks and illusions appear to be magic, but are not.”
The vizier shook his head. “Fake magic?”
She nodded. “The mechanisms are usually very clever.”
“And people pay to see this?”
“They do.”
“How odd your people must be.”
“So...” Farisa stopped to squeeze the bridge of her nose. “If that’s real magic, isn’t she worried about getting sick?”
“Sick?”
“The Blue Marquessa.”
The vizier said, his tone now grave, “Be careful. Idrissa Ngazo detests that sobriquet, and we are not far from her many ears.”
#
As the sun climbed to its midday zenith, she continued to follow the vizier through Qaelet’s neighborhoods. Rather than wash colors out, the bright daylight seemed to sharpen the buildings’ crisp hues. Quartz veins ran seamlessly, continuing around corners, across polished stone walls.
The man led her to Qaelet’s open-air honey vat. “It’s solely decorative. No one would eat from it, as insects fall in all the time. A thousand years ago, honey was used as a store of wealth.”
“Is this why Qaelet is sometimes called the City of—?”
“I would not use that phrase. Although it is historically accurate, it is commonly used to refer to....” He spoke some words in a language she did not understand. “This translates as: ‘the district of the lost at night.’”
“Right,” Farisa said. Some things were the same everywhere.
She tried to guess how deep the honey vat was, but it was too cloudy to see its bottom. The man gently led her to a boulevard where the bustle was too loud and unruly for much conversation. These people, skin light but bronzed by the sun, were beautiful; even the old were slender and carried themselves with elegance. She couldn’t understand their language, but she didn’t think they were talking about work or rent.
In the middle of a public square stood an obsidian monolith, on which the sun made a blood-red reflection, same in color as she had seen behind wildfire smoke. “What’s that?”
“Ah,” said the vizier. “Fifteen years ago, we had a plague. It commemorates the victims.”
She struggled to believe, though the fact was ordinary enough to merit acceptance, that disease still existed in a place of such magic and beauty. “I’m sorry to hear of it.”
“It was a bad time, but the world heals.” A ball flew by, and children chased it. The vizier said, “To the young, it’s as distant as ‘The Tragedy of Rhyosu.’”
“Sixteen Winds? You have those stories here?”
“You’ll get along well here, little lady. As for our period of illness, our count of deaths would have gone unnoticed in the provinces, but we city people are soft. The white-egg families saw one death per three hundred people; the brown-egg side of town lost one in fifty. Let us not ruminate on that, however. I understand life is not easy where you come from.”
“It’s not.” She paused. “Is it easy anywhere?”
The vizier shook his head. “War as much as peace, pain as much as pleasure. We have viscounts who berate servants when dinner comes one minute late. We have scholars who abandon their families in the study of magic. We have priests who visit brothels.” They walked under a second-floor ebony balcony. “Worry about none of these rare events. This hotel is where you will rest. The king will summon you soon.”
“Thank you, kind sir.” She bowed.
He bowed in return, then handed her a velvet pouch. “Here’s some gold, in case you need to send someone to the market.”
She took the purse, heavier than it looked. “When the others come, I promise to pay you back.”
“You will do no such thing,” he said as he left.
A young girl emerged from a coral-colored marble doorway. “Your room is ready. I’ll take you there.”
Farisa, as she followed her upstairs, noticed that the building, with its oblique open windows at different levels, had been designed to take in wind at night, but block it during the heat of the day; thus, the stairwells and hallways were quite cool. At the end of a bright corridor, the girl opened a blackwood door to reveal a sunny, large room with a bed that could sleep six.
Farisa stepped in. “This is all mine?”
“Do you not like it?”
“I do! It’s just...” She had been sleeping in a tent—itself luxurious by the standards of campers—one-twentieth this size for hundreds of miles. “It’s bigger than most houses where I come from. I doubt I’ll use all the space, and would be pleased enough with something smaller.”
“It’s all yours, Farisa.” The girl smiled and walked away.
Sunbeams cut bright quadrangles on the smooth pale stone floor. A semicircle of upholstered chairs, where twelve people might hold a late-night discussion about literature or play a board game over drinks, faced an open window. Five tiers of bookshelves sat inside a glass cabinet; the volumes had all been bound in cloth. The wraparound balcony, made of dense dark hardwood, itself offered more space than the most coveted dorm rooms in Cait Forest.
She opened a closed door and expected to find a small closet, but the walk-in wardrobe featured a full-length mirror as well as dozens of silk robes. The reflected sight of herself made her self-conscious; she still wore the dust of travel. So, she left the closet and went into the bathroom on the other side of the suite twenty yards away, to find the bathtub. It had five levers; she tried to figure out how they worked, but after several minutes of fiddling and failing to stabilize the water temperature, she gave up and plucked one of the summoning strings by the door.
A young woman, pale with silver hair, arrived. “What do you need, Farisa?”
“I’d like to bathe. I’m trying to figure out how these levers work.”
The servant lifted the second and fifth lever, then pushed the fourth one down with the heel of her hand. “Figure out?”
“Where I’m from, we don’t have—”
“Don’t be silly. You’re too important to bother with such details. We are here to serve you. Tell me if this is the temperature you prefer.”
Farisa tested the water with two fingers. “It’s perfect.”
“Your bath will be ready in ten minutes. You can wait outside. I’ll come get you.”
“Thank you.”
Farisa walked outside; the afternoon sun warmed her face. The air, although hot, was pleasantly dry—sweat evaporated before one was aware of it being there at all. This hotel sat on a hill, so she could see most of the city. She had not expected to see, even at the scale of several miles, such order: the perpendicular walls of Qaelet’s districts intersected with a large circle, and although she did not know what it signified, if anything, she was glad to be inside it. Images of horses and eagles adorned the city’s nearest walls; farther out, domes and steeples and spiral minarets, all faintly purple, stretched to such distance they could not be told apart from hills or clouds.
The machines of commerce, she noted, did not exist here. There were no horse-drawn carriages. Kids played in the streets, undaunted by traffic. The buildings were so clean, it seemed they had been built yesterday, erected effortlessly for today’s arrival. Only one of them was less than lovely—in fact, it was notable for its defiant, stolid ugliness—a desert-colored stout edifice with no windows that sat on a field of dark gravel. Teenage boys and girls, two by two and each pair of the same sex, were flanked by armored men as they were marched inside.
One of the boys looked back. He seemed scared. Farisa nodded by reflex; for an instant, she thought she knew him... but from where? She did not have time to answer this—and, of course, there was no answer, because he disappeared in the darkness behind the building’s doorway arch.
The servant handed her a folded towel. “Your bath is ready.”
Farisa pointed to the menacing building. “What’s that?”
“Worry not. You will never be taken there.”
“But what is it?”
“It is a place where the sick are restored to wellness,” said the servant. “A hospital. However, if you were to need medicine, we would have it brought to you.”
“Right,” Farisa said as she went into the bathroom.
After closing the door, she undressed and entered the water, finding the temperature ideal. The odors and grime of hundreds of hours under the sun washed away. The oils added to the water gave it a silky texture, leaving her cognizant of little but her weightlessness in it. She slipped into the timeless womb of the world; only when exquisitely clean, relaxed in mind and muscle—might have been half an hour, might have been three—did she get out and dry herself off. Her servant had left clean undergarments, as well as a silk robe and a pair of wooden sandals.
When she returned to her bedroom, the servant was still there.
“I’m sorry,” Farisa said, embarrassed. “Were you waiting on me this whole time?”
“You didn’t dismiss me.” The woman smiled. “I suppose you’re not used to being cared for so well.”
“I’m used to doing a lot of things for myself.”
“You must prefer it that way, but I implore you not to worry about anyone but yourself as you take rest. We need you at your best, as you shall meet our king soon. Are you hungry?”
“I wouldn’t mind an apple or two from the market.” Farisa reached into the coin purse she’d been given. The coins were all the same size, so she handed one over.
The attendant looked back, dismayed.
“Is that not enough?”
“We consider it impolite to pay in gold for what copper affords.”
“Do they not make change here?”
“What is ‘make change’?”
Farisa looked around the room. “I don’t think I have any copper coins. I’ll tell you what: get as much fresh fruit, for the both of us, as this will buy.”
“This time of year, we have cherries, grapes, and white melons. Will those be satisfactory?”
“That would be exquisite.”
The girl left. Farisa walked into the wardrobe to decide what she would wear before her audience with Qaelet’s king.
Farisa had always considered herself best suited by plain denim pants and a dark-colored tank top—her Cait Forest experience had left her with a negative view of those who wore finery, but in this place, wealth did not teem with the glow of evil—it seemed to come from talent, not exploitation—and so she supposed she would allow herself to wear something fancier. The option she preferred most was a light-green silk garment with short sleeves, but when she put it on, she realized it had side cutouts and would be too sexy to wear in front of a king unless paired with, say, a slate-gray camisole.
The servant returned with a hemp bag full of apples, a loaf of orange bread, and two of the promised white melons. In her other hand, she carried a basket of berries with a tin of nuts at the center.
Farisa found a blue dress, form-fitting but not egregious, that she liked and asked, “Do your people consider this dress appropriate to meet a king?”
“I’d wear it with jewelry.”
“Something simple like this?” She picked up a garnet pendant on a thin gold chain.
“Put it on.” The young woman, as Farisa did so, smiled. “Yes, I like it.”
“Shoes might be an issue.”
“Are there none to your liking? Do you find our shoes ugly?”
“On the contrary. They’re beautiful, but they’re all open-toed. I could wear them around women, but I’m from Loran.”
“Loran?”
“Far north of here, far like thousands of miles—”
“Nothing’s that far north but ice giants.”
“I assure you, there’s a whole world up there.”
“So you don’t want men to see your feet. Is that right?”
“Yes.”
The woman walked into the closet and moved a dark robe, exposing a cabinet. “You might find what you’re looking for in there.”
Farisa crouched and opened the latch. Inside were closed-toe wooden-soled leather shoes, dyed blue. “These are perfect. Thank you so much.”
The servant said, “Those are old-lady shoes.”
Farisa smiled. “If your king thinks of me as an old lady, I can live with that. I’m told he expects me to solve some kind of... Problem.”
“Yes,” said the servant. “We are all dependent on your success.”
#
The hot stillness of the middle afternoon was broken by the vizier’s polite knock. Farisa had nodded off. After six months in the wild, a real bed under her back had brought such sublime relaxation, the temptation had been irresistible and she had been out, dreamless void orange rather than black for the sunlight, in less than a minute.
“I’m coming,” Farisa said. She put on her shoes and walked to the door.
When she opened it, the vizier said, “The king is delayed by affairs that have emerged abruptly, and will have to move our meeting to tomorrow morning, but he wishes for you to know our culture, in order to understand our Problem. He has requested that I take you to the Drawing of the Egg.”
Farisa followed him, pulling herself quickly back to wakefulness, downstairs and out the door. Qaelet’s bustle had calmed due to the heat and high sun, though the city was still lively by any Ettasi standard. People slipped food to cats and dogs, all remarkably clean for animals that lived on the streets. The vizier led her down a hill—within sight of the ugly, squat building she had seen earlier, and she was thankful that he was not taking her there—and around a corner where two well-fed tan dogs lay in the shade. They came into a vaulted grotto, whose underground corridor led them to a chapel with high slotted windows. The floor was uneven and the air was dusty; still, the exquisite attention paid to interior detail, from the spiral-notched marble columns and brightly painted frescos to the evenly spaced warm candles, left her awestruck at the capabilities of human civilization.
“This is our most sacred place,” the vizier said.
“It’s beautiful,” Farisa said. “We have nothing like it, where I come from.”
The vizier directed her to the back aisle. The wooden pews, stretching out to the front with cushioned seats and armrests, were full of people dressed in pale gray, as she noticed the vizier also was. Up by the altar, four men in sky-blue robes were chanting with their eyes closed. The place had a faint animal odor. Farisa, in trying to discern where the scent was coming from, spotted stacked wire cages with blue-headed ducks in them.
The vizier asked, “Do you have that species where you’re from?”
“Not to my knowledge,” Farisa said.
“They are centuries removed from the wild here. Families pay fortunes for choice hens, because futures are made and lost in this building.”
“This is a gambling hall?”
“Yes, but also not quite. It is the gods, not us, who throw lots. We are pieces in the game, not players.”
She looked around for cues of mood and tone to build a sense of what was about to happen here—she hoped it would not be some gruesome animal sacrifice—but could make no certain guess.
A black-haired boy, about twelve, walked up the aisle in a white gown.
“He is nervous,” the vizier said. “They always are. But he comes from a good family, so I am sure his hen has at least a hundred years of breeding in her. The egg will be a good color.”
“What colors are good?” Farisa asked.
“Blue is best. You become king if your hen lays a blue one, but that is rare. I was happy to draw white. However, these birds are still forest ducks, so the tainted colors of the woods sometimes break through. If there is even a spot of brown or green—”
Shouts from the pews filled the chamber. “Vata! Vata!”
Farisa leaned in to ask, “What does ‘vata’ mean?”
“‘Wishes.’ Talu is a good boy. Well-liked by his peers, excellent grades. His family has drawn white for thousands of years.”
“What happens if he doesn’t?”
“He who draws a white egg gets a thousand dyirtsa per year, and is free to supplement that income in a profession. One who draws brown gets three hundred per year—understand that this is still more than it costs to feed a family—contingent on work.”
“So, is it a caste system?”
“The opposite of one. To an outsider, it might seem unfair to bet a child’s fortunes on what seems to be a chance event. What could the color of a bird’s egg possibly have to do with a person’s fitness to take an inheritance or an important role? If we did not have the Drawing, though, rich families would stay rich, and the poor would stay poor. We give the gods a say.”
The high priest, wearing a black feathered turban, opened the hen’s cage. The bird clambered to get away, so he put his hand over her eyes, then turned the animal’s rear to face the pews. The bird’s cloaca opened, its protruding eggshell as white as an eye, getting bigger and bigger until Farisa found it painful to look.
“It looks promising,” the vizier said. “Vata! Vata!”
The egg rolled into the altar basin. The crowd fell silent.
“It did not break. That is always good.”
The priest wiped the egg with a striped towel, then held it high. “Sulv.”
Farisa said, “That means?”
The vizier squinted. “What? I can barely... ah, there it is. Do you see the brown spot on—?”
Talu slammed the fresh-laid egg on the floor, causing it to break. He lunged for the duck, but two armored men grabbed him and pulled him away. He screamed and writhed. The men were strong enough to hold him, so his jerking motion only pulled his arm out of the socket, causing his screams to kick up two octaves.
“They usually take it better than this,” said the vizier. “Have you heard the phrase ‘killing the duck’?”
“I have not,” Farisa admitted.
“It means to behave distastefully. A girl who drew brown, fifteen years ago, slew her hen. This was the offense that led the gods to send us that plague.”
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
Farisa rubbed together her clammy hands. “What happens now?”
“To the duck, or the boy?”
“Both.”
“No harm comes to the bird, although”—he lowered his voice—“I would not want to be the man who sold her to the family. I am sure he is headed to Lupinia as we speak.”
“The boy?”
“I assure you that even brown-egg people live far better than those in the provinces, who still live better than those in other countries.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Farisa admitted. “For more than a thousand miles, we’ve only seen orcs.”
Puzzlement crossed the vizier’s face. “What are orcs?”
Farisa began to answer him, but her mind was pulled another way by the look of devastation on the teenage boy’s face. It seemed viciously cruel that he had lost so much due to a spot of pigment. She shook her head.
“It is never easy when the child of a white-egg family draws brown. He will be unable to sustain the way of life he is used to, but he will find work and he will adjust.”
“I have to say something.” Farisa scratched her neck. “I’m brown.”
“Don’t be silly. Your skin is brown. That is mere heredity—not the vote of the gods. It is an entirely different thing. Why do you think we have the Drawing? We must know the gods’ will. Otherwise, people would invent nonsense, and follow it instead. They would make a fetish of skin color, or family name, or even money itself. Our system is better.”
Farisa started to say something, but stopped herself.
“You mean to ask a question.”
“It would put me out of place. It would be rude.”
“I promise I will not find it so.”
“Why use an egg? You said it yourself that rich families buy hens bred to lay white eggs.”
“If we were to use the roll of dice, or lots drawn from a lottery barrel, a mage could subvert the process, as they have tried, and failed, to do with ours. If our methods offend ourselves, we must tolerate that. What we cannot afford is to offend the gods.”
Attendees left the temple with heads down. Incense was burnt—the gods were owed thanks, even when their decisions were unloved. As the vizier led Farisa back to her room, she did not much inside herself to say, and the vizier’s gait had taken on a desultory character.
The vizier said, “I had hoped Talu would see a different outcome, though it may have been didactic for you that he did not.”
Just outside the hotel, the desert air had a way of cooling off quickly as evening came on. Farisa rubbed her bare forearms.
“He seemed so... shattered.”
“Some of our best artists and engineers have drawn brown. The white-egg life makes clerics and bureaucrats, not visionaries or inventors, and certainly not warriors or heroes. I assure you, he will have the chance to make for himself a splendid life—if you can solve our Problem.” They entered the building and climbed the stairs. “We have returned to your chamber, and I will see you soon.” He bowed.
“I hope so,” she said, after returning his bow.
As soon as the door closed behind her, she felt a mix of excitement and unease. She was curious to meet these people’s king, and had no issues with the treatment she had received thus far. Twilight made Qaelet seem dusty and harsh—it did exist in a desert, even still—but the lights would come on after dark and beauty would return to the city. She wished Mazie and a bottle of wine were with her, but there were altogether worse places to spend an evening.
She scanned the books of the room’s numerous shelves. Not surprisingly, all had been written in a script she had never seen. So, instead, she walked out to the balcony. Her gaze shifted to that squat building, that only ugly one, and she saw Talu among the series of young men and women being led in there. There was no anger or fear on his face—he had either lost hope or been perversely subdued—and her dislike for whatever was about to be done to him made her consider, in spite of Qaelet’s seductive beauty, that she might leave this place after nightfall and never look back. Her real friends were elsewhere and, for all she knew, they would need her.
Around eight, by her estimation, another knock landed on her door. This time, the king’s messenger was a tall clean-shaven boy. “Our king had every intention to meet you today, and apologizes again for the postponement. Danger has come to this city.”
“Danger?”
“We pray for peace, but neighboring states take advantage of our sole weakness, our Problem. Our king will send for you tomorrow morning, to break the fast. You will have dinner here. Our liege hopes that what I have come to deliver will suffice.”
“I am sure it will.”
The young man bowed and walked away. Two others brought the food in; the platters were polished bronze, the cutlery pinkish gold. The main course was seasoned pheasant; Farisa, both ravenous and disinclined to insult her hosts, would have eaten anything other than duck—a meat she was glad to see had not been served. The lime-green vegetable puree reminded her of Cait Forest squash in high season; the purple roots over which the meat had been served tasted like buttered candy.
Darkness had fallen when she was done eating. She walked out to the balcony and watched the lights climb their way into the hills. She wondered: if the economy of this place ran on magic, then why had she seen no signs of madness? But if this place were so perfect, why did “brown-egg” people live so poorly as to cause Talu’s distress? What did such people really think of their rulers? She decided she would investigate. It would get cold enough overnight that she’d want to cover her shoulders, but she did not find a jacket in the wardrobe—only a black robe, valuable also for its color, as it would hide her if she decided to escape. She put it on.
She slowly, quietly opened the door of her room. There was no light in the hallway, so she stepped cautiously with arms out. She had counted only six paces when a lantern turned on. The armored man holding it wore a split mustache.
“I need to go for a walk,” she said as she walked beyond him. He made no motion to block her way, but her shoes slid on the floor—she neither fell nor moved forward, and there was absolutely no sound of wind, but the space around her distorted itself to disallow progress.
She said, “I’ll be back soon, I promise.”
“I cannot let you leave,” the guard said. “For that, I am very sorry, but our fate depends on your aid. Should you fail to solve our Problem, we shall all die, including you.”
“Die?”
“It is better that you not think about it. Please rest.”
She found herself resistant, but knew she would be unable to argue, so she closed her door and walked to her bed.
#
The vizier’s knock filled the morning darkness and opened Farisa’s eyes. She had no memory of getting herself into bed, but her feet and legs were bare, so she hastily dressed herself before meeting him at the door.
“Excuse the earliness of my arrival,” he said. “Our king keeps a monk’s hours. In fact, he was one—a monk, that is—for a long time. It was not easy to convince him to take the crown. Shall we go meet him?”
“Is it a matter of choice?“
“You always have a choice, Farisa.” The vizier paid the mustachioed guard a copper coin. “You make a hundred decisions, every time.”
She hurried after him downstairs. On the street a cinnabar-colored open carriage, led by two black-striped beasts that looked like half-size huskers, waited for them. The driver, a woman about forty, did not speak to them as they got into the vehicle, exchanging only a cursory nod with the vizier. The animals trotted on a two-mile road that rose gently into the eastern hills. The carriage stopped at an ordinary-looking house, two stories tall and thus dwarfed by its neighbors, on a leafy street.
“This is where our king lives,” the vizier said.
They walked the fieldstone path over a small, dark-green lawn. The front door was already open when they got there, though a drape of hardened linen kept out the dawn mist. The king, who greeted them there, was tall and thin with a nine-pointed star tattooed on the front of his bald scalp. “It is all pleasures in the world to host you, Farisa La’ewind,” he said as he bowed.
Farisa bowed in return.
“I am told you are the one who can solve our Problem.”
“I can make no promises until I know what this Problem is, Sir… uh, Sir King?”
“His Majesty,” said the vizier.
The king waved his hand. “Off with that nonsense. Call me Bill.”
“Bill?” Farisa said. “King Bill?”
“Just Bill. I would tell you my given name, but it is a burdensome beast of a moniker, with trills and clicks modern tongues have forgotten. I believe Bill is a common name where you're from. Is it so?”
“Perhaps William would be more kingly. Or you could be Wilhelm, Guillaume, Villam…”
“No, no, no.” The king blushed. “All too formal still. Just Bill. Now, is Farisa a common name where you are from?”
“Not at all.”
The king handed her white cotton socks. “One never wears shoes in a Qaeleti home, but I know your culture’s modesty rules, so you may change in the room over there.”
When she returned, socks on and warm, she found the king sitting on a purple cushion atop his marble floor. The vizier sat on a slanted stool, padded and upholstered in orange, under which he tucked his shins. Others were still seating themselves.
“Sit there,” the king said as he pointed to a turquoise pillow. A folded towel had been placed there to protect her ankles and knees from the hard floor.
“Thank the gods this is my last year as king,” Bill said with a smile that lifted his eyes. “I always felt more at home in the monastery. We had a boy draw blue six years ago. This autumn, he will turn nineteen and take my place. As far as I am concerned, it cannot come soon enough.” Three men came into the living room. A young girl brought a silver tray of biscuits, fruit, and cookies. “To be a king is not a job one should want. I suppose, now that we are under threat of war, I shall have the opportunity to hang my name upon the attention of the future, but I have always said I would prefer to live well and be utterly forgotten. What is the saying of your Far North, ‘Hell is memory’?”
“‘Hell is being remembered,’” Farisa said. “It’s only the Igna who say that, though.”
“I understand they mean it literally?”
“They do. If, after you die, living people remember you, you are stuck in that existence and cannot proceed to the real afterlife.”
“It seems like a superstition at first.” The king grabbed a small cluster of grapes from the fruit tray. “Still, I find agreement with it. You have no say in how you are remembered. The person the future constructs of you, a thousand years after you are gone, may be inimical to who you actually were.”
“That’s very true,” Farisa said.
“I look forward to my being replaced, though I fear our next king may be stuck in his position for a long time. I do not think we will see another blue egg any time soon.”
The vizier looked at a woman who had just come in and sat on a white cushion.
Bill looked at his hands, then up, and continued speaking. “Dawn has come, so we no longer need the lights.” He waved his hand; the room’s candles and lanterns went out. “We should discuss our Problem.” His eyes met Farisa’s. “Would that be your preference?”
“Very much so,” she said.
“Qaelet’s soil is poor, always has been. Two inches down, you find hardpan. The provinces around us used to be fertile, but are overdrawn. Today’s grain, tomorrow’s pain.” A servant brought coffee and food—fried green rice and mushrooms wrapped in grape leaves. The guests began eating, but all diffidently, because the king ate so little. “The abundance of food we enjoy relies on magic. Without it... there is no other way to say it: we would starve.”
More guests came in, including a tall middle-aged woman who, in spite of her striking thinness, sat on the bare floor without padding.
The king said, “Phaenys, who just arrived, is our councilor of science.” He looked at the gaunt woman. “I am explaining, for Farisa’s benefit, our Problem.” He looked back at the young mage. “I understand that, where you are from, magic is rare. Is it so?”
“Yes,” Farisa said. “No one is entirely sure how rare, but we believe less than one in a thousand has the talent at all, and it is almost never developed. One has to hide it.”
The king shook his head. “With so few people thus gifted, we would not survive.”
Phaenys sipped water from a glass. “Has she seen the Drawing of the Egg?”
“She has,” the vizier said. “I took her there yesterday afternoon.”
“Good.” The king put his hands on his knees. “Farisa, tell me what you think it is.”
Farisa’s stretched arms mirrored the king’s. “It seems to be a rite of passage. Each child’s parents provide a hen. If she lays a white egg, that’s good; if it’s brown, that’s... not good.”
“Ho!” The king chuckled. “Dear lady, you’ve got it wrong. I would put it the other way. A farmer’s or artisan’s life is more honest than a bureaucrat’s. If you hold even a one-percent belief in the afterlife, you should hope to draw brown.”
The others in attendance, though they dared not express it overtly, traded glances of mutual insult, seeming to dislike his sentiments about their social class.
The king said, “When Qaelet was founded, everyone could be trained to use magic.”
Phaenys added, “You can see the issue, right?”
Farisa said, “The Bl—the Sickness?”
“Sickness?”
Farisa, mindful to avoid the words “Blue Marquessa,” described the symptoms that mages in her world experienced.
“We have nothing like that,” said the king. “You say your mages are infertile? They have children in our world, like anyone else. This compounds our issues. The last thing we want is to have mage dynasties. Imagine the intractable injustices we would face, with such power passed through bloodlines.”
Phaenys added, “civilization becomes untenable if everyone can use magic. If a man can kill with his mind, how do you convince him to guard another man’s wealth or title, rather than take those for himself?”
Farisa scratched her upper arm. “So, you need a few magic users, as your agriculture relies on it, but not so many as to make your entire society unstable.”
“Precisely,” said the king.
“I think I understand.” Farisa leaned back to lessen the pressure on her ankle. “Those who draw white eggs are trained in it and their talents will develop. Those who draw brown—”
The king started to say something, but Phaenys spoke first. “—get the Treatment.”
“We fought a war two millennia ago against people who had lost the talents you call magic and, with it, their vulnerability to a poison called blackrue. During a siege, they burned tons of the foliage outside our walls and, of course, we became very ill—until we discovered an antidote that confers the same lifelong immunity our enemies had, the drawback being a loss of magical ability, but we discovered in time that it should not be considered so.”
Phaenys added, “The Treatment is, after three or four days, painless.”
Farisa remembered Talu, flanked by armed guards, as he was marched into the squat building, and realized the purpose of his going there. “How safe is it?”
Phaneys put a hand on her own knee. “Its record is excellent. We have administered the Treatment four hundred thousand times and seen only two hundred cases of ‘defiant mind,’ which sounds identical to the Sickness you have described. Immunity to blackrue is not gained—in fact, the subject becomes more sensitive to it. The magical capabilities remain, too. This reaction causes infertility, lethargy and—yes, in some cases—madness and early death. They—and they are few—adjust poorly to the brown-egg conditions the gods have set for them.”
“It is truly unfortunate,” said the king. “Still, it is better to sicken a few than to lose our whole society. No one wants the Treatment going into it, but almost everyone is glad for it afterward. Again, this ‘defiant mind’ disorder is of utmost rarity.”
Farisa pushed her knees with her hands and started to say something.
Phaneys said, “You should explain to her our Problem.”
“We had a spell of illness fifteen years ago,” said the king. “We strongly suspect that the miasma—the living poison—of the plague lives on in birds, although it does not sicken them. The only symptom is that it changes the color of their eggs. A white draw used to be one egg in five—today, it is one in two hundred. We lost half of our best, eldest mages in a war ten years ago; we will lose many in the war that comes to us now. We have no way to replace them.”
Farisa waited, then said, “I don’t want to be insulting, but—”
The king smiled. “You may insult me a million times if you solve our Problem.”
“Is there no way to reverse the Treatment?”
“None,” Phaenys said.
“Could you suspend it for some period of time—say, two or three years?”
“I am a king, but I am only one man. We have had so many children from prominent families draw brown over the past decade that I would fear for my life if I made that decision. I have more than a decade each in monastic and scientific study, so I know full well what the color of a bird’s egg tells us, and it is not a god’s will, but Qaelet takes its traditions seriously.”
“I understand that Qaelet’s citizens receive an annual income, and that those who draw white eggs receive more, with no contingency on work. Is this true?”
“It is. One thousand dyirtsa and no work requirement for white; three hundred and work for brown.”
“Why should brown-egg people be poor?”
The king looked down at his plate, his food mostly uneaten. “You feel as I do. My father and grandfather drew brown.”
Phaenys interjected. “It is not fair to say we make our ‘brown-egg’ people poor. Only by Qaelet’s standard are they so. One hundred miles from here, there are people who have never cooked with oil, nor tasted fruit. It is more accurate to say that we make ‘white-egg’ people rich, because if we were to let them fall into poverty, or force them to work, they would become extremely dangerous.”
“Because they are mages,” Farisa said.
“Right,” Phaenys said. “If we keep a person’s magic intact, we must ensure a certain standard of life. No one lives poorly solely because he draws a brown egg. The productive are cared-for, and some brown-egg families do attain wealth by serving the needs of the realm. It is simply a necessity that, if they wish to earn an income, they must find daily labor.”
Farisa, as enticed as she was by the notion of a society where mages ruled, as opposed to being hunted and killed in the world she had come from, found herself loathing the concept. “Slavery, designed to look like freedom.”
Phaenys looked down and the men around them made nervous gestures.
Nevertheless, the king nodded. “That is how I feel about it as well.”
Phaenys said, “Still, it works.”
“We have a system like that where I’m from,” Farisa said. “It’s called kopfismo.”
The king’s face puzzled. “Kop-fismo?”
“‘Kopf’ is an ancient word meaning ‘head.’ A head of cattle. A soldier’s head. A slave’s head. Counted heads; ‘head count’. It’s what we call our economic system, the one that led to the Global Company.”
“Head-of-cattle-ism?” The king looked puzzled. “Cattle-ism? Human cattle?”
“Precisely so.” Farisa looked around to be sure the others were following. “To survive, the poor must sell themselves ‘freely,’ on a daily or weekly basis, to the rich. To ‘employers.’ It has been in place for at least two hundred years, and it has caused our culture to wither, because no one maintains it. People are too busy, their time consumed in service to people who do not need to be served, for family or religion or the arts. Over the years, our political processes have become so corrupt that it is no longer even hidden that the Global Company and the rich select candidates for office from amongst themselves.”
The bald man leaned back. “Why don’t the poor rebel?”
“They become complicit. They are put into ranked hierarchies in which it is better to be a prisoner who also serves as a guard—a favored prisoner—than to be a regular one. So they abuse each other, just to feel a mote of power.” She described her life experiences, starting from her parents’ deaths at the hands of the Company, up to her decision to take the Mountain Road. “In spite of all it has taken for me to come here, I have no regrets. I am a refugee from kopfismo’s results. I can tell you that such a system always leads to dysfunction, slavery, and war.”
The king asked, “How do we prevent this?”
One of the men said, “Our Problem is simpler than that. Perverse northern practices do not concern us. We’ve had bad draws from good families. That is all.”
His neighbor added, “The man doesn’t say.”
Another grumbled, “If this isn’t fixed by Kora’s time, I’m going to—”
The oldest in the gathering said, “A mage of sufficient power should be able to fix this in an afternoon. She’s a fraud.”
“I never claimed to have such power,” Farisa insisted. “I never claimed to be more than what I am—”
“Every time we consult with an outsider, we get the same results. These people have no respect for our ways.”
“Quiet,” said the king, firmly but without raising his voice.
Phaenys added, “There are some who have argued for a return to an inheritance system, wherein those born to wealthy families do not take the Treatment, and those born poor do.”
“I have no desire for that,” said King Bill. “The rich of the past sixty years have given us nothing but decline.”
Phaenys said, “It would solve the Problem, numerically.”
The king looked at Farisa. “I hold the understanding that your world has hardly any magic, but supports a billion people nevertheless?”
Farisa straightened her back. “It has a billion people. I would not say it supports them.”
“That is demoralizing to hear. Still, survival of such a number is impressive. How is it achieved?”
“We have a lot of space,” Farisa started.
She explained the terrain and agriculture of her world’s Five Continents; it was strange to think she was still footed on the fifth one, because this place was so different from the Known World she found it harder than she would have expected to recall. She described, as best she could, agriculture from the Bronze Age to her world’s present day. She explained the role of soil nutrients—the scramble for guano, the dream of technological nitrogen fixation, the Global Company’s ban on the research thereof. Then she began to speak on religion and culture and science—what had been discovered, what had been lost, what had been resurrected, what had been destroyed—when one of the men interrupted her.
“She speaks absurdity,” said one of the king’s men. “I have gone as far south as she has come from the north, to find even the valleys covered in snow.”
“Not all the time,” Farisa said. “Our seasons are severe, by your standard. Still, for most of the year, produce can grow.”
“Why should we listen to her?” said the irksome seneschal. “She admits to having come from a land that has failed.”
“I concede that our economic system is a failure, but our science and agriculture do, in fact, work. They can be taught. If we could organize around principles of solidarity, rather than conquest and private prosperity, we would have a decent world for ourselves. I would be coming to you as an advocate, not as a refugee.”
The old man started to continue his objection, but the king’s hand called him off.
“Farisa,” said the king. “What would you have us do? You’re the only one here I haven’t asked twenty times about our Problem.”
“The Treatment is dispensed on the assumption that if too many people have a mage’s power, they will all commit themselves to mayhem. What if that is false?”
Phaenys said, “Violence is everywhere and always will be. Do you contest this?”
“I do not.” Farisa stilled her shaking knee. The king held active interest in what she was saying; the rest of the room ranged from bored neutrality to hostility. “No society can afford to ignore the existence of cowardice, ignorance, and covetousness—even malice. However, it leads a society to ruin to decide these vices comprise the whole of the human character. It leads a nation to kopfismo. Where I am from, the poor are imprisoned for years—often left to die—for trivial offenses against the rich. Mistakes are severely punished; virtue, if those in power find it inconvenient, is punished even more harshly than vice. Such a society sells its values off, one by one, until it has nothing to believe in, no reason to exist. The consumptive worst of human nature is all that remains. The self-indulgence of those in power is venerated. Those trusted to lead nations, instead, behave without honor. Such a world claims it is run by laws—though it never really is—while, in truth, it is run by crimes—by the offenses of those savvy or favored enough to go uncaught.
“Kopfismo claims that, unless people are disempowered through artificial scarcity, coerce labor, and ubiquitous imprisonment, the world will fall into sin, crime, and mayhem. And these things do exist—they still exist no matter what we do; kopfismo’s laws and incentives fail utterly to protect us—but I see, in your society’s requirement of the Treatment, a similar belief. Do you, the king of Qaelet, murder for sport? Your magic is intact, and you could do it without consequence, given your position. But do you? Do you rape? Do you torture stray dogs?”
The others’ faces had frozen in shock—they would not have let an outsider, a woman, speak to them in such a manner—but the king said, affably, “I do not.”
“You hold a mage’s power and more, but you do not use it for evil. I, on the other hand, come from a world where magic is nearly extinct and, nevertheless, we live in a society defined by cruelty, coercion, private possession, and violence. The rich tell the poor where they are allowed to live. The rich determine what job duties the poor must perform. They even decide what words their inferiors are allowed to use in public. They claim to be ‘leaders,’ but they would never be chosen as such by those being led. They claim they are protecting society from human nature’s worst hundredth, while failing to acknowledge that often they are exactly that worst hundredth.”
She paused for a deliberate count of three, making eye contact with each person in the room.
“The society from which I arrive is one with disempowerments stronger than the Treatment. Do not seek advice from us. We have discovered nothing but ways to fail. I understand that Qaelet relies on magic and that you shall therefore starve if you continue the Treatment, so you should suspend it. I understand that doing this will anger powerful families whose children have drawn brown eggs. I understand that the Drawing process cannot be amended in any way. Am I correct in all this?”
The king said, “You are.”
“The most moderate approach seems to be to open the professions, and the clergy, to all who are qualified. One does not need magic to be an engineer or a chemist.”
“I am fond of this idea,” said the king.
“It will never work,” Phaenys said. “To enter coveted lines of work requires years of study, not to mention the expenses involved in supporting a life of learning.”
“Can Qaelet afford to raise the brown-egg income to the white-egg level?”
“Easily,” said the king. “We would have to levy taxes on the richest landowners, but I hold no objection to this. You see how I live on less than I, as king, could afford.”
One of the seated men, who had not spoken to this point said, “The clergy will never accept it. If the stakes of the Drawing are lowered, it becomes insignificant.”
The king looked at his hands, then up, and smiled. “So?”
“If people question one divination, they may grow to question them all.”
“I have heard this refrain before,” said the king. “Remove the rituals and controls, and our religion becomes mere meditation. Maybe it sh—”
A man rushed into the room. “There is a crisis at the White Shadow.”
“Farisa,” said the king as he stood and bowed. “You have excellent ideas. I will give them serious consideration. At the moment, I am pulled away.”
The young woman gave a seated bow in return.
The living room grew noisy. Men and women headed off in all directions. As soon as Farisa stood up and put on her shoes, Phaneys took her by the arm and led her outside.
Farisa asked, “Did I convince him? Do you think I helped solve the Pro—?”
“We’ll talk.” Phaenys hurried around a corner. The peaceful chill of the tree-lined morning streets struck Farisa as incongruent with the sense of hazard in the motion toward the end of the meeting. “We’ll be picked up five minutes from here. Our king prefers to conceal where he lives, not that it matters now.” When the carriage came, Phaenys handed the driver a copper coin from outside. “I do it out of politeness.”
Farisa stepped toward the carriage’s open door, but then paused. She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to get in first or second, and etiquette was a low-ranking concern considering her confusion amidst all that had happened.
“So...?"
Phaenys said, “He is enamored by your ideas.”
“Good.”
“Not so. You have killed him. Again.”
“Killed?”
“This afternoon he will argue in front of our senate that, in the context of impending struggles—war, looming famine, internal unrest—Qaelet put the Treatment on hiatus for three years. To correct for disfavored draws, he will argue that we raise the salaries of brown-egg people to the white-egg level—in fact, he will propose that we increase both disbursements to fifteen hundred—and allow all Qaeleti citizens to enter all professions.”
“That sounds like—”
“A noble idea, but our clerics—”
“I know. The Drawing of the Egg.”
“Not that,” Phaenys said. “That will be a problem, but rituals change. The major issue is that taxes to pay for the king’s improvements will have to come from landowners. Who ranks highest in sum on Qaelet’s property register? Our clergymen. They preach compassion and forgiveness, while the daily incrementation of their fortune is achieved by rent collectors, who—you trust me on this—show neither. This is a matter all educated people know, but no one has the durn to actually say it. Our king, when he speaks this afternoon, will do so. He will rail against hypocrisy, and for doing so he will be dead by sunset.”
“How the hell do you know this?”
“Oh, Farisa.”
“We have to save him. If you suspect this—”
“I know it.”
“—we must protect him.”
“I am far too old for intrigue.”
Farisa grabbed Phaenys’s arms, pulling her away from the carriage. “No. The king means to do right, and we can’t let him die for it.”
“Everything has been tried. Insurrection. Bribery. Murder. Prostitution.”
She stamped her foot. “We are not giving up.”
“You have tried insurrection, Farisa. You have tried bribery. You have spread your legs for favor, and you have passed poison in a kiss. You burned this city down, twice. Every time, you try to save our king—to save us. It always ends the same way. We had this conversation twenty-four years ago, and we’ll have it twenty-four years hence.”
“That is absurd. I did not exist twenty-four years ago.”
“Fah: ‘other than’ or ‘without.’ Rizhens: ‘bosom’ or ‘interior.’ Fah-Rizhens. ‘Farisa.’ ‘Outsider.’ To the king, you are a brilliant woman sent from a cursed land to warn us of danger. To the rest of Qaelet, you are a harlot of hell who has corrupted his mind. None of this matters. You’ll die in two or three days—you always do—and you should be glad for it, because it gets much worse from here. The granary fire comes in four days, the siege in less than a month. We all starve—they all forget, every time, but I remember—if nothing else kills us first. Brothers kill brothers over fistfuls of seed. The vat of honey at our city’s center empties, one shaking handful at a time. The richest men who have ever lived shall spend their final days on gilded cushions, bellies twisted in hunger, screaming blasphemy at gods they assume to be deaf—but those gods were not deaf, Farisa, because they have doomed us to relive our city’s dying years, the final twenty-four, over and over, and it all goes the same way each time. You, Outsider, are one part, and you play it well. You try to save us, you do. You fail, you forget. I am the only one who remembers. Try as we might, we have done this a hundred times and nothing has worked. The king dies, you die, the granary fire is set by a fisherman’s orphan—unless you burn us down first—and then we have the siege and everything else.”
Farisa stepped back. Phaenys’s eyes were bulging. Whatever madness lived in this woman scared her more than her own Marquessa. Not a word from a person so deranged could be trusted. She bolted down the Qaeleti street, expecting it to fade like the beautiful nightmare this place had proven itself to be—she sprinted as she had out of Cait Forest’s inferno—but an invisible wall, as it had in the hotel last night, would not let her go.
“Stop that, Phaenys!”
“This is not me.”
Farisa flung her limbs forward, failing to break the barrier.
Phaenys added, “You often try this too.”
“How do I leave?”
“You cannot. I’ll take you back to your room. You’ll be safe there for now. When the king dies, I will be the only one on your side. Rest well. You face trial tomorrow.”
#
Saito’s hunch that Farisa had taken unnatural speed was increasingly confirmed by their finding no trace of her as they searched their surroundings, every mile south.
“I shouldn’t have let her do it alone,” Claes said. “I thought she could handle it.”
“It’s not your fault,” Saito said. “She didn’t leave us. She—”
“I believe you.”
After sunset, rather than sleep, Saito decided to clear his mind and listen to the night noises. He had given meditation no practice since the age of seventeen—life had arranged itself so that to be alone with thoughts and memories was often intolerable—but, if there was a time to make his mind an empty place into which insight could come, it was now. He dozed off, woke up, fell asleep again in the seated position, was later mostly awake but unsure if his eyes were open or closed, and then nodded into a deep sleep followed by what he wanted to believe was meditation but was an ordinary dream—I dream now, I always did, but I remember—and then was again half-asleep when the sun rose, and so it startled him to hear Mazie’s voice.
“Who’s Sayuna?”
The name had said itself in his mouth. He remembered hearing it. “Sayuna is....”
Hard veins stuck out on the backs of his hands stuck out like hickory roots.
He knew this name, but from where? Sayuna was... a daughter? A lover? A mother? No, none of those.
“I know exactly where Farisa is.”
“Where?” said Claes.
“She’s already in Malisse. And we have to get there as fast as we can.”
They packed hastily, leaving a few possessions behind, still hoping that Saito would be proven wrong by the sight of Farisa or some sign of her, but every step convinced them more strongly that they would not see her until they reached the City of Honey, still days away. Morning turned to high noon, high noon to afternoon; the afternoon reddened, and evening blackened.
“I don’t think we can afford sleep,” Saito said. “I spent... a past life... in that city. There is a danger there by which she may be outmatched.”
“Then we walk through the night,” said Claes.
Mazie ducked a branch. “I’d like to meet Farisa.”
Claes said, “You’d like to see her. Again.”
“Right. That’s what I meant, of course.”
Andor winced in pain with every step. Saito checked the man’s splint every two hours.
“How far away are we?” Andor asked as Saito applied a mix of ointment and herbs, speculatively chosen here for apparent similarity to northern ones, to his swollen leg.
“Three days, if the terrain’s decent. If it’s like this, four or five.”
One of the wheels on the husker’s wagon broke around midnight. Andor repaired it by lantern light while the others used that time to fall into a light doze. They were back on their feet by one fifteen. Dawn came cloudy, the fog so thick they could barely see ten yards ahead. The moisture burned off by eleven; either the weather was pleasant or they were too tired to notice they were hot or cold. At sunset, misty rain fell, and it seemed to give slight respite from the aching of shins, knees, ankles, and feet. Mazie tore a hole in the side of a boot that was her last one left; already, she was already wearing a mismatched pair. Overnight and early the next day, they lost about three thousand feet of elevation, and by noon, they were sweating themselves dry.
Mazie, for her part, felt this twisted soreness in every muscle, like she had just overcome the sort of illness that had left her bedridden. She was so sleepless her mood swept between inexplicable buoyancy and leaden fatigue—one part the former for five of the latter. A blister had developed on her ankle, and every time she stepped downhill, the pressure on it flooded the right side of her body with pain.
“Our supplies are dangerously low,” said Claes. Or was it Andor? Mazie’s exhaustion had robbed her of the ability to tell where sounds were coming from; eighteen inches outside her head, all directions were the same.
She heard herself asking, “Which ones?”
“All of them.”
“Our destiny is not far away,” Saito said.
It often seemed they were sleeping on their feet. Mazie could close her eyes and time would pass and they would all be elsewhere, but little rest had been won. Eric was complaining of the same phenomenon. Andor was fighting to hide his pain, but his strained breath and exhausted eyes told the story of a man whose body had taken too much abuse and was on the cusp of giving out.
They were coming through the jungle in the early morning of December 14—they had just turned off their lanterns—when Mazie came upon Saito, who had stopped at a tree and seemed to be conversing with it in another language. None of the others could understand what he was saying; after half a minute, he returned to himself.
“White shadows,” said Saito.
Mazie said, “What?”
“Hallucinations,” Saito said. “Sleep deprivation.”
“Eric’s been having them too,” said Andor.
Claes said, “How will we know when we’re there?”
“Farisa did,” Saito said.
Mazie’s memory swept in and out of her head; the lack of sleep wasn’t helping. She could, at times, picture Farisa’s face quite clearly; she heard the woman’s voice from time to time. They did not eat lunch—bread was running low, and nobody wanted to stop walking, because any rest at all brought a risk that their bodies would stiffen up and turn catatonic. Around three in the afternoon, Mazie noticed that the jungle had turned suddenly to sagebrush; she looked around herself, and saw not a single tree. The landscape changed discontinuously, not due to a fault in objective geography, but because her fatigued mind had become unable to stitch images together in a continuum. Minutes were eternal, but hours were disjoint and instantaneous.
“I used to live in Qaelet,” Saito said shortly after sunset as they climbed a hill that looked like every other hill. “Three thousand years ago, I did.”
Mazie looked at him. “What is Qaelet?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
It was just after dawn on December 15. They had been walking all night, but those dark moments had coalesced into one memory so far away in time and place it felt unreal. They had climbed a plateau and the only vegetation was veldt scrub, no taller than shoulder height, so one could see for miles, though it was impossible for Mazie, in her state of fatigue, to look in any one place—the sky or a rock face would be filled with bubbles and squiggles, due to her sleeplessness, and the back of her head would turn numb—so it took several minutes for to discover the gray scratch, parallel to their path and half a mile west, and what it was.
She pointed with a finger she no longer had. “That’s it. That’s the Mountain Road.”
Saito bent over with hands on his knees. “We should stop.”
“Stop? We’re so close, and it was your idea—”
“I know what we’re up against. I remember the city’s story.”
Mazie looked at Claes, who looked at Andor.
Saito continued. “Malisse—Qaelet—is cursed. It is haunted. And what is a ghost’s weapon? It has only one.”
No one said anything until Eric did. “Madness?”
“That is correct,” Saito said. “This short of sleep, we are hobbled prey.”
“I’ve been hearing my dead father’s voice since midnight,” Andor added.
“Our animals look like they’re on the cusp of giving in,” Claes said.
Mazie wanted to argue against them—that they should march on, for Farisa’s danger meant the hours it would take to get proper rest could not be afforded—but the odd sights had been pressing on her as well. The pain in her body from the pounding of lopsided boots on more than a hundred miles of often rocky terrain was now a constant throb. The sun made her skin flash hot, but the slightest wind made her shiver. She often forgot where she was, where she was headed, and why she was going there.
“We’ll rest until our minds are intact,” Saito said. “It won’t take long. We can’t afford for it to take long.”
Mazie nodded in agreement. She sat on the grass. The harsh world dropped away into dreamless oblivion. She woke up with Farisa’s cat, Ouragan, sprawled out on her chest.