Chapter 90:
Rage. Lady Nari had held it back for long enough. Now, it was all she felt. Sheer, unadulterated rage.
Her wall tapestry was on the ground, folded over itself after she’d ripped it from its hangings. The curtains around her four-poster bed were slashed through with a knife. She’d just finished hacking off the legs of her console table. But it wasn’t enough. Broken furniture didn’t scream or cry or beg. Lady Nari needed something alive.
With a fierce, furious gesture, she grabbed a beaker of rum from her cellarette. She drank, then smashed the beaker against her desk. “I need a Rajas,” she said out loud. Ajay was at once by her side. Boy or girl? she signed.
“A prince,” Lady Nari responded. She didn’t turn to watch Ajay leave the room; she didn’t need to. Ajay was one of Lady Nari’s own. She’d been converted shortly after Lady Nari had cut out her tongue. A gossip, a slanderer, and disliked for it, that was who Ajay had been, a desperately lonely girl who pushed everyone away with her sharp words. Now she was Lady Nari’s personal guardservant and extremely popular to boot. That was what Lady Nari had done for her, that was why Lady Nari had silenced her. It was because Lady Nari was for the good of the serfs, she was only ever for the good of the serfs, while Dasgu, damn him, damn him to the deepest pockets of Chudami’s carbon-dioxide traps, damn him, damn him!
He’d been playing her this entire time. Just like Anzana, playing her, pretending to be far less clever than she actually was, playing her successfully, but at least Anzana was rotting inside a Rajas cell now, while Dasgu was alive and in LakeCentral Castle, alive and out of her grasp. Just like Sukren, Dasgu was out from under her power, oh, damn them, damn them all! All of them, traitors, all of them, disloyal, all of them, fools! Did they not know their place? Did they really think they could have any sort of life outside the Free Serfs? Did they think they could want anything other than the fulfillment of the prophecy? By Matter and Intelligence, Lady Nari could kill them, she could kill them, she could kill them all!
Grabbing her hatchet again, Lady Nari brought it down on the broken shards of glass on her desk. She kept it up, sweating, until Ajay returned with a male Rajas. Good. Relishing in his cries, Lady Nari bound him as tightly as she could to the last remaining post of her four-poster bed. Not until his skin was white beneath the cords did she stop.
There. She finally felt a little better. A little calmer. Calm enough to think, at any rate.
Leaving the Rajas there to toy with later – it was a pity she couldn’t kill him, but he did need to be left reproductively-able – Lady Nari went to look out the floor-length windows behind the ruins of her desk. It was nearing the end of darkwake. Outside she could see branches and balconies, lit up with orange breathflowers, extending out from the castle’s bole.
“They want me to declare myself queen of the Chenta,” she said aloud. “All my magistrates have already come up here begging me to do so.” Lady Nari glanced over her shoulder at the Rajas boy trembling against his bonds. His ears were uncovered; she’d forgotten to tell Ajay to muffle them. Lady Nari would have to cut his tongue out too, to keep him from repeating anything he heard. Thankfully, Rajas didn’t need to talk to procreate.
She turned back to her window, to the flowers like fire against the night. “They tell me Ki is willing to abdicate to me, that she’s lost control of the Servies and Soldiers Syndicates, that they’re setting themselves up as an authority independent of her. Maybe. Maybe she set them up and lost them, or maybe she’s playing a longer game. All I know is that this, all this, is not good for the serfs.”
Slowly Lady Nari felt herself relaxing. Yes, that was it, that was the problem. It was not good for the serfs to live in fear, and that was what they lived in now, fear of her interrogation corps on the one hand, and fear of the Servies and Soldiers Syndicates on the other. It would have been one thing if Lady Nari’s interrogation corps had terrorized the rest of the bio-dome into a quick submission. A few deaths, a few disappearances, then peace, under her rule. A worthy trade-off. But that wasn’t what they had now. Instead, the serfs had hanging over them multiple competing authorities, and they didn’t know which to listen to, which could punish them, which was truly in charge.
It was not the way Lady Nari wanted her serfs to live.
“My becoming queen of the Chenta would also not be good for the serfs,” she said aloud. “I do not want the serfs to give way to the labels the Rajas imposed upon us. Serf solidarity is the only way to be free of them.”
Dasgu, fool that he was, didn’t understand that. And he was a fool! Lady Nari clenched her fists. She could feel her heart starting to race again. How did I miss his growing resistance? I thought I had him under my thumb. I thought I didn’t have to worry about him, that Ki was my only true opponent. And now I can’t bring him back, he’s too far gone, I have to let him go and let him be destroyed instead. Because he will be destroyed. If not by me directly, then by his own foolishness. For only I know what’s best for the serfs. Only I can pull the bio-dome together. Only I can enable the fulfillment of the prophecies!
Lady Nari closed her eyes. One by one she recounted each of the problems she was facing. Food stores whittling down, her Chenta patronees calling out for her to buy into ethnic nationalism, the Rajas still randomly being assassinated to the point that nobody even considered it abnormal anymore, murder and theft rates among the serfs themselves continuing to rise, the litter that was literally everywhere, and oh, of course, now that Dasgu had control over Industrilia, he would probably cut her electricity off! And all this on top of the Syndicates seeding doubt in the hearts and minds of even her most loyal serfs…
Her mouth tightened. What had Op told her the other day? Vek skipped his last assigned interrogation. He was supposed to report to me that night, and he never showed up.
And here Lady Nari had thought she’d brought Vek around. She’d assessed his situation and recognized that instead of the usual call to glory, reassurance was what Vek needed. That in itself wasn’t new. Each serf needed to be handled differently at different times; where one serf might require distance, another would need comfort. But usually she got it right.
Anger flared up inside her. Inhaling deeply, she opened her eyes. She was very much going to enjoy expelling her rage on the Rajas boy behind her.
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But not yet. First, she had to come up with a solution.
Looking out her window, Lady Nari stood, and thought. How was she going to get out of this? What lessons from her life could she draw upon? Well, to start, she’d become a full-fledged regent at age twenty, which was a little early, but not by that much. Her patron had been the type to assign positions of authority by appointment, and she’d given Lady Nari no appointment because of Lady Nari’s focus, up to that point, on the little ones, the powerless, those who had nothing. That had been Lady Nari’s mother’s idea. Draw them into our net, her mother had said, and wait for them to grow up.
Lady Nari’s mother had been nothing but a servie. But she’d been wise, and most importantly, she’d been a Matterist. She’d held onto her Matterist religion even after being drafted to a castle at the age of ten. Other Matterist castle serfs found her and helped her; she helped other Matterist castle serfs in turn; together they created a network that stretched from castle to castle and even back to the villages.
It was that network Lady Nari had built upon. For a decade after becoming a regent, Lady Nari remained without appointment, focused on her goal, on pulling both low status non-Matterist serfs and her mother’s Matterist connections together into a broader serf liberation movement. Just thinking about it made Lady Nari smile. Who knew what could have happened if she had been allowed to continue that steady, satisfying work? But it was not to be. A decade, that was all she’d been given, and then her patron had been assassinated by her second-in-command, a magistrate who declared that positions would be procured no longer by appointment but rather by might.
That the magistrate had changed the rules in order to justify his own patronucide was lost, apparently on everyone. The entire patronage was torn apart as serfs, without consequence, began killing each other in order to advance. Nobody became a shadow member unless forced to by someone more powerful. For fifteen years, the patronage remained thus. For fifteen years, the serfs of Lady Nari’s patronage suffered, and suffered deeply.
Their pain had ended only at Lady Nari’s hand. After fifteen years, Lady Nari stood over the body of the third patron of that period, buzzing serf prod in hand, and declared in one breath both an end to the lawlessness and the beginning of her own patroncy.
Her mother was gone by then, as were many of Lady Nari’s siblings. But her serf liberation movement, the serfs who made up the network, they were still there. Many of the little ones were now adults, strong and disciplined, made crafty by the violence they’d survived. With their help, the Free Serf movement was launched. With their help, the Uprising had happened.
And Lady Nari had learned: never show anyone mercy in public.
Yes. Yes, that was what she had learned. Fifteen years of anarchy, of pulling together her reputation, had taught her to never let anyone go unpunished, to never let anyone get away with anything. Matterist theology highly emphasized mercy to other serfs, to not make serfs pay for behavior that the Golden Castle had compelled them to do, but Lady Nari had quickly learned that any demonstration of mercy in an environment like the one in which she rose to power would lead to her own death. So there it was. Public ruthlessness, private mercy. And private meant private. Not even the serf receiving the mercy necessarily needed to know that that was what she was getting. Certainly, the serf later on might realize it, the way Ajay had, but at the moment, and to everyone else, all Lady Nari’s acts of mercy had to look like and be shaped as punishments.
That was where she had gone wrong with Vek, wasn’t it? She had not given him the mercy he needed. She had certainly not done so when he’d lost the Promised Daughter. And now he needed mercy again, for shirking his interrogation duties.
And what mercy could Lady Nari give Vek?
The answer came to her at once. Remove him from his position as interrogator. Yes. That was it. Vek didn’t want to be an interrogator, that much was clear. He certainly didn’t seem to be handling it very well. But how to remove him? And how to do it so that nobody in the know could look and think, ah, Lady Nari is letting Vek off easy, ah, she has a soft side to her after all, ah, let’s see what we ourselves can get away with?
Public ruthlessness, private mercy.
And it wasn’t just Vek who needed it either. The Servies and Soldiers Syndicates were also made up of serfs. Their ideology wasn’t even that wrong. Lady Nari had noticed a concerning trend of indifference and self-protection from many of the doctor-priests and regents she ran across. Perhaps she should allow the Syndicates to continue to operate. Perhaps she should even allow them to win. Maybe it would chasten the upper caste serfs. Certainly, the Syndicates’ anti-nationalist bent would help Lady Nari resist the Chenta currently calling for self-determination.
Then again, the reverse was also true. Lady Nari could use the Chenta ethnonationalists to defeat the Syndicates.
Lady Nari’s brow furrowed. Back and forth she went. Which was more dangerous? The ethnonationalists or the Syndicates? Which should she take care of first? Which should she show mercy to sooner? They both needed it; they both drew the circle too small. The ethnonationalists around the Chenta only, and the Syndicates around the servies and soldiers only. How, how, could Lady Nari teach them to draw the circle around all the serfs?
“I should take care of the Syndicates first,” she decided abruptly. “They’re developing much faster than I anticipated. I shouldn’t underestimate them. Besides, I am a regent. The Syndicates deny even my right to the Uprising. While the Chenta ethnonationalists, at least, see me as one of them. I’ll be able to work on them more easily, after the Syndicates are gone.”
But how to disappear the Syndicates? Maybe Lady Nari should kill them all? If it came down to it. Still, it was not as merciful a solution as she preferred. Perhaps she could aim the Chenta ethnonationalists at them? But how? Lady Nari frowned. She turned the thought over in her mind. Nothing came up. She didn’t know enough about how the ethnonationalists were organized. She’d have to research them first, then think. In the meantime, was there anything else she could do?
Well, what were the Syndicates doing? Trials. Yes, trials. That was it.
Lady Nari turned around. She pulled open the file cabinet on her desk. It had somehow managed to escape damage during her rampage; so much the better. Inside were a few Free Serf files she’d had Ajay pull from the crypts earlier. Names of Rajas tails, Free Serf agents who had turned back to the Golden Castle before the Uprising, who even now were reported to have casteist thoughts. So the Servies and Soldiers Syndicates thought the Uprising was not complete? They wanted to try the traitors who were keeping it from its fulfillment? Let them have at it. There was plenty of overlap between their enemies and hers. In fact, it would save her interrogators some work. Instead of interrogating the serfs behind these files, she would give them up to be tried by the Syndicates instead.
Lady Nari picked up the topmost file. A regent named Tepikal, who used to spy for one of the dead patrons. The file said she now lived in Woodheart Castle, technically under Ki’s authority. Perfect. Lady Nari would arrange for her file to surreptitiously end up with the Syndicates.
“Then I’ll feed more names to them,” she said aloud. “I’ll feed them good names, names that will produce trials, names that will win them clout. Then, when they’re snapping to take any name I give them, I’ll start passing them their own names, names of other Syndicate members.”
It was a good plan. One that Lady Nari was confident would succeed. After all, she was a master at infiltrating organizations and bending them to her purposes. That was how she’d pulled off the Uprising.
“I may have to give them an interrogator or two, as well,” she mused. “They seem to really dislike them. But who? Someone who needs it, someone it would rescue…”