Shadowplay Scene Six: Marks, and How to Hit Them
Red dye spills over her thumb, brighter than blood. Keshena tips it off her skin into a little bowl, then follows it with a dash from the bottle in her other hand, shifting her grip on the first bottle to stir the mixture with the handle of a brush. Back and forth she works, drop by drop, until the color is perfect - a deep, warm brown into which she pours a dusty powder, lighter than flour. A little spills across her knee, but she doesn't notice. She kneels naked before her mirror, avoiding a glance at the pale-skinned girl that appears in the glass until after she applies the dark brown paste she's made.
The woman who taught Keshena to make her own cosmetics had skin this color. They met in the southern desert, when Keshena lived in Morrihm, the City of the Dead. Built in the warm upper chambers of a dormant volcano known as the Cauldron, Morrihm is the only city where the dead can walk freely in the streets. Before arriving in the Citadel, Keshena had the impression that Lion's Reach prohibited undead entirely like Shiel does, but it's not so - one of the books Lin gave her makes that very clear. In fact, several major Blooded and undead families have estates in the city, so old that they take up entire towers and wings on which they haven't paid taxes in generations. The interior streets of the Basilica are good for those with sunlight sensitivities. What Keshena didn't know before she started reading is that the Blooded were created in the Reach, not in the Cauldron.
The books are stacked up next to Keshena's heap of blankets, four heavy volumes stamped along the spine with Kumani symbols. Several of them form the titles and attributions - Divine Lies: Records of the Years of Artifice, by Antoinette Kaeus; Kumani Code of Conduct, by Akal Vyr; The Discipline of Secrecy, by Villi Selannor; and Fall of the Lions: The Wars of the North Reach, by Clay Helleva. She started with the one by Villi, out of curiosity if nothing else, to see if the imp writes in the same snotty tone as she speaks.
Her writing turns out to be analytical and clear, obfuscatory only when she needs to be. The initial chapters discuss some of the same mental tricks Villi has been sharing in their lessons on illusions. With anecdotes from what appears to be centuries of public service in the Reach, she shares insights on political power as it's held and traded in the Citadel. There are copious notes in the margins, extensive annotation to the text itself, generations of Kumani students offering subsidiary detail or offhand observations, marking important passages with symbols, and of course doodling unflattering caricatures of the book's odd little author. Between these and Selannor's focus on a kind of social analysis that Keshena enjoys herself, an actor's understanding of attention and deceit, Keshena finds Villi's book fascinating. The others aren't nearly as fun.
The dark brown paste is only the beginning of her work - it forms a base for several more powders, and as Keshena brushes them across her cheeks, her shoulders, her hands, she sinks into herself, into that open, listening place where the world could be whatever she imagines it to be. Light shackled to each mote of powder and forced to linger, spread across her skin... light pushed away and silenced, bent to her will. "Do not mistake illusions for a purely visual phenomenon," Villi said in her book. "The true effect of artifice is not on the eyes, but on the mind. To project an internal conception of reality onto another person, to make your reality their reality, is the essence of artifice as practiced by our Father." Keshena liked that; it reminded her of things she was told so long ago she doesn't remember them anymore, the words of actors to a tiny child who thought one aging theater was all there was to the world.
Next there comes a drip from a different bottle of dye, this drip falling into her open eye and blurring her vision for a few blinking moments as it coats the surface. When she can see again, she tilts her head at the brown-skinned girl in the mirror, whose left eye is a black orb like a lump of onyx.
Pleased with the cosmetics work, she lays a hand on her chest and wills the illusion woven into the powder to spread, an act of drive and imagination that starts slowly and then moves like a wave, coloring her skin from the shoulders down to the fingertips, the clavicles to the hips, then the knees, then the feet. This kind of change, a mere shift of color, is easy, easier than vanishing - just a tilt of the light, not redirecting it entirely. It’s easy to maintain, too, very little concentration required.
“Does an illusion exist when it is not observed?” asked Villi’s book, and the ensuing analysis went a little above Keshena’s head, but the upshot seemed to be “yes, sort of.” An unobserved illusion remains in the state it was left until the power exerted to conjure it dissipates, but it doesn’t require concentration to maintain unless it’s observed. How long will it last unattended? Depends, evidently, on the skill of the conjurer. Keshena’s found that hers will last a few hours without attention, and the color under her clothes doesn’t dissipate enough by the end of the day to make her worry about retouching it. Half the time she changes faces before then anyway.
The kind of clothing Lin regularly wears is expensive, mostly silks from the Akir desert. But it’s not the first time Keshena has had to pretend a greater affluence than she can sustain, and she’s got enough bits and pieces from previous costumes to save a bit on accessorizing. It still costs most of her stipend for a length of sky-blue silk like the wrap Lin was wearing on the day Keshena arrived. Worth it, though. It’s gorgeous, draped over and around her shoulder and waist - it makes her feel almost naked, as if she’s not wearing the silk so much as vaguely located inside a floating cloud of it.
When she steps out of the building into the Citadel’s halls, the biting cold pours through the garment as if it’s not there. The Called don’t feel things quite the same way that mortal men do - to Keshena, it feels as if the highest peaks and lowest stabs of sensation are merely theoretical. She can see goosebumps rising on her skin, feel her body working harder to produce heat, but she feels no real urgency to warm herself, and soon she forgets about it. It does make her hungry, though, and illusions take a bit of energy too. Food first. Then we’ll go see what Villi wants.
Guilded life in Keshena’s view is about one part education to nine parts indoctrination. She’s never properly joined one before, but spent a great deal of time on the periphery of several, and decided long ago that she’d little use for them. Unaccustomed to having to explain her activities and associations, she has no intention of beginning at two hundred. But the Kumani suit her in this regard - they don’t explain themselves either, not when she meets them in the cavern complex and not out in the world, where often they pretend not to know her at all. They speak tersely to each other, and though most conversations involve more voices than she sees faces to match, there are few names. For one wishing to hide even from one’s own regard, there could be no better place.
They do train her, though. There are no classrooms she’s seen, and no formal tests. At odd hours, sometimes while she sleeps - jerked awake with her heart hammering the tattoo of an ancient war when her door rattles under a fist - they call her out to a chilly rendezvous in a copse or crossroads. At first it’s always a grey-clad functionary like those she sees in the library every day, novices training novices in the basics. Their thin hands are covered in fresh nicks and cuts. She watches their fingers move as they talk and sign simultaneously, taking her through the minutiae of stealth, ways to remain unseen in plain sight, ways to soften one’s footfalls. Some of it is familiar; an actress is half a spy already. But there’s more magic in this than the art she learned as a child.
The Kumani are not the Artificer’s army, it’s often and emphatically said around the guildhall, nor do they rule Lion’s Reach, but rather are bound to serve it. Still, lay the city Council’s records of succession against those of the guild and of the church, and the few names that don’t show up on all three don’t linger long. Slowly, in a way that always seemed accidental, the Kumani had spread their grip across the northern mountains and reaches, a region that even the Lions had struggled to effectively administrate.
It owes a great deal to the threads; their ability to arrive at any destination hours or days ahead of the competition keeps the lay people intimidated, certain they might be spied upon at any time by an invisible cabal that can be everywhere at once. Keshena finds that in practice this is largely an illusion, but the Kumani novices do foster it by practicing their stealth in the towns and outposts of the Reach. More than once, Keshena wanders into a provincial hall or hovel to find a grey-clad kid barely standing against the wall under a shroud of illusions, trying not to nod off as he surveils yet another interminable conversation about goats.
Most of the threads in the north start somewhere in Lion’s Reach proper. When they first acquire the training to perceive them, Kumani novices are often stunned by the degree to which the city is honeycombed with these metaphysical doorways. Keshena can hear them, of course, which makes some wings of the city nearly painful to occupy, the discordant ringing of multiple threads making her brain feel like it’s rattling in her skull. Deeper in the mountain it’s not so bad; the granite seems to absorb the sound.
Though Villi’s summons slid under the door before she’d finished costuming, Keshena doesn’t trouble herself to hurry. After two centuries, ‘hurry’ begins to feel superfluous. A sausage-stuffed biscuit in hand, she descends to the Complex and finds Villi in one of the reading nooks, lecturing a middle-aged novice. Glad not to be the target of the lecture for once, Keshena leans against the threshold and watches for a moment. The novice isn’t wearing the livery; he’s dressed well, in the style of Shiel, and his face is handsome, but his demeanor never strays far from prideful scorn, no matter whom he’s talking to, apparently. He’s even sneering at Villi a bit, although Villi seems to think it’s funny.
“So you can feel them, yes? There are four in this level of the Complex; point in the general direction of each from here, please.”
The man sighs extravagantly and closes his eyes. He frowns for a moment, then raises a hand and points without opening them. “There, there, there, and… behind us, back there, although I haven’t seen part of the Complex that goes back there.”
“Yes, nor will you, at this rate,” Villi snaps. Then she glances over her shoulder. “Hello, lurker. Have you met Kang?”
“I haven’t,” Keshena answers, pitching her voice a little higher than her own, and carefully matching Lin’s subtle accent. Villi scrutinizes her as she moves into the room, but doesn’t comment. When the novice gets a look at her, Keshena discovers that the contemptuous look on his face isn’t his only talent - he’s also capable of foolishness. His eyes catch again and again, on the bare brown shoulders under blue silk, the soft curve of the young woman’s cheek, the depths of her doelike eye and the glittering stone of the false one. Color comes into his cheeks, and he stands and visibly restrains the impulse to salute. Keshena snorts.
“Yes, he’s always like that,” Villi drawls. “Kang, this is… Lin al-Akir?” A sideways glance at Keshena gets her a slight nod, and she continues, “Lin, this is Lianth Kang, a new novice. He served with the Ashen in Shiel.”
“Ah, that makes sense,” Keshena says, grinning. Kang doesn’t appear as amused; having grasped that his infatuation is evident, he’s embarrassed and his scorn goes into defensive overdrive.
“And I suppose you are here to waste my time dangling more secrets I’m too junior to know?”
Keshena raises an eyebrow as Villi answers him. “She is here to assist us in maintaining the city’s threads this morning, and thus her primary function is to ensure that in addition to educating you, I also accomplish literally any worthwhile thing before lunch. Come, we’ll inspect those in the Complex first.”
They go first to the mushroom garden, where a thread opens behind the Retreat.
“You both sense this one, yes?”
Kang nods. Keshena answers, “Aye, I can hear it.”
“That’s right. Kang, the Called - I don’t have to explain that to you, do I?”
Scowling, Kang says, “I know what Called means, dammit, the Grand Templar of the Ashen is Loro’s Champion.”
“Yes, I’m aware,” Villi murmurs, smiling. “The Called, due to their heightened sensitivity to essential forces, can often hear a ringing sound in the area of threads. This can be used to determine if the thread is in working order rather quicker than inspecting it manually,” she adds, looking at Keshena. “Lin, is the sound of this thread in any way unusual? Does it seem markedly different from other threads you’ve heard?”
Keshena shakes her head. “It’s unpleasant in the usual way.”
“Good. Now, Kang, hold out your hand and inspect it as I showed you; confirm our assessment.”
With ill grace, Kang steps forward and holds out a hand toward the spot where the thread purports to be. Villi adjusts him slightly, and then his brows draw together in concentration. After a moment, he drops his hand. “It feels right. It knows where the other end is, and there are no knots or fractures along the way.”
Villi nods. “Good, I concur. The other end of this one, remember, is in the guildhall of the Engineers, in their reference stacks.”
Keshena laughs. “Really! So we spy on the other guilds as well?”
“Of course,” says Villi. “Now, the second one in the Complex is over near the hallway to the Barracks.”
The second one is also in working order - “to the Numerologists’ halls in the Indeterminate Tower,” Villi notes. “You’ll be expected to memorize them all, so you’d best begin. You don’t want to be uncertain where you’re going when you enter a thread; besides being dangerous, it can cause the ends of the thread to fray.”
The third thread starts in a weapons storeroom by the sparring ring, and ends in Shiel, and the fourth begins in the main administrative building and ends outside the Cauldron, in the caves leading to Morrihm. The third is functioning normally, but when they reach the fourth, in a neglected hallway, its ugly whine has an ugly wobble in it.
“Frayed,” Villi says. “It’s not broken, but good that we noticed this before it got worse. Kang, inspect. Here.”
Kang holds out his hand and focuses on the thread. His frown deepens. “It’s… oh, I see. This end’s location is unclear.”
Villi nods. “That’s what happens when someone with a little skill - a Kumani or an expert Numerologist - passes through the thread without a firm idea of where they’ll end up.”
“Numerologists can use the threads?” asks Keshena.
“Some can. The threads aren’t our exclusive property, remember that. While illusions are Nieran’s magic, threads are Lion technology, and technology obeys any hand that holds it. Numerologists can’t pin down the end of a thread without Kumani help, but they can sense the threads as a structure. It’s…” Villi shakes her head. “I’m no Numerologist, so this will be a very abbreviated explanation, but all things can be expressed in terms of operant numbers. The world can be seen, if you’re a Numerologist, as a continuous mathematical operation. Threads are an expression of fallo, the fourth number - it describes the property of location, a point or points in space. The Lions had thousands of operant numbers, they say, but only thirty-three are still in use. When a Numerologist novice learns to perceive properties of fallo, they begin to perceive the threads passing through the world. It can be very disorienting, I’m told.” She steps aside and gestures to Keshena. “Come, you try this one. You can do this part by sound also.”
“What is that sound?” Keshena asks. It’s already making her want to grind her teeth, like tinnitus with a tune.
“It’s what the ambient sounds at the far end of this thread sound like when they get here,” Villi answers, then grins. “Which is why you can’t look through a thread. Imagine what you would see - it’d drive you mad, most likely. But that sound is also, for us, a good indication of where we should place threads. When one thread terminates too close to another, that sound will become much louder, more discordant.”
Grimacing, Keshena says, “I’ve noticed. The upper hall by the Keymaster’s shop -”
Villi chuckles. “Oh yes, that’s a bad spot. It’s the thread in the Lazarth estate, the tower just above there - it’s a bit close to the one on the balcony by the rookery, but the Lazarths pay an exorbitant amount for it annually, so what can you do. Fortunately, it’s not likely to cause a problem to anyone but the Lazarths themselves if it gets worse.”
“Worse?” Keshena can feel the thread in front of her - like the skin of a bubble, an elusive shift in density and temperature that doesn’t seem to have a dimension she can grasp. She can also feel what Kang and Villi sensed, the way the thread is fraying, its commitment to being here unraveling like a scarf.
“You’d have to ask a Numerologist about the science, but there are places in the world that the Lions tore apart by weaving too many threads.”
Kang’s eyes light up with interest. “Tore apart? What is that like? Can we see it?”
Another chuckle from the imp. “Nothing to see. There’s no there, there, anymore. You can’t get there from here, wherever ‘here’ happens to be.”
“That sounds like the way people talk about Blackwall,” Keshena murmurs.
“Mmhm,” says Villi. “Now, from this end, you can pull the thread back into alignment with this location. You might need to use both hands.”
Keshena opens her eyes and looks down to see the imp showing her both hands, spread in a flowerlike shape, wrist to wrist. She tries to mimic the pose as she reaches for the thread again. It’s a problem of scale that’s confusing her - the thread seems to be very small, no bigger than her cupped hands, and yet the Kumani can pass through without changing size. She wiggles her fingers, like plucking at a page stuck to another page, fumbling for an edge.
“Is it supposed to be so small?”
Villi laughs. “It is, and it isn’t. What does ‘small’ mean, anyway? Size is a matter of perspective. If you can’t see what you need to see from your current perspective, you should reposition. Don’t move, no, just try to approach the thread from a different angle. Conceptually.”
This makes about as little sense as Villi usually does, but Keshena frowns and tries again. This time she imagines herself falling toward it, the thread’s tiny opening growing and growing into a looming portal. Now the edge is clear, or rather the border, the boundary between the chilly obsidian hallway and an illusory space that holds all of the same properties except that of fixed location. She doesn’t know the math, but she begins to see what the Numerologists must see in the thread - that “location” for most of the thread is a continually shifting fact, an unsettled question only resolved when one reaches an end.
The near edges aren’t dissimilar to one another, though, and they aren’t dissimilar to this location, the shiny black stone underfoot and the pressure of the air all part of what the thread knows about this spot. It’s only a little misaligned. She draws in a breath, clenching the muscles in her stomach as she would when pulling on a heavy line. Without moving her body, she sets her weight against an imaginary opponent. The tinny sound rises, filling her mind until it feels like it will shake the teeth out of her head. Then, with a kind of bendy sound, she feels it slip into alignment with her location and fix, the expected numbers showing up in all the expected places, the equation coming out cleanly to a result that can only represent this one, specific spot. It’s elegant, and somewhat physically satisfying too, and Keshena opens her eyes panting and grinning.
“That was fun.”
Villi smiles. “I’m glad you enjoy it; most people don’t, so I could use more hands to keep up with them. Kang, you can do the next one.”
Keshena extends her senses as they exit the administrative building, pushing beyond the Complex to see if she can detect any of the threads in the city above. They’re too far away - her sense of this metaphysical landscape is too limited to even extend as far as her body’s eyes can see. Then she almost stumbles, because she does detect another thread. There aren’t four in the Complex… there are five.
The fifth one is below them, evidently buried deep in the stone. Perhaps in the hidden catacomb she found over the cliff’s edge, and it’s this possibility that keeps her silent - perhaps she’s not supposed to know about that. She promises herself she’ll go look later, and follows Villi and Kang up into the city.
*******
Then it’s three hours of climbing stairs, trekking up and down alleys, and surprising students in disused corners - often sleeping, if alone; hastily adjusting clothing, if in pairs - before Villi declares the threads of the city satisfactory and dismisses them. Kang agonizes over a courteous farewell to Keshena, still flummoxed by Lin’s borrowed face, and departs in a haze of blushes. Climbing the hill to the city, Keshena feels both pleased and annoyed by his reaction.
The agony of an actor, murmurs Kelly. The glow of attention, undercut by the knowledge that though their eyes are on you, you aren’t there at all - it’s someone else they admire, the person you’ve submerged yourself in. To have so much love… and always know that none of it would remain if you took off the mask. It tastes bitter, in such a familiar way; it satisfies the perverse part of her that feels clever for accurately predicting her own misery.
Lin is on her way out when Keshena arrives, descending the stairs with a quiver and shortbow slung over one shoulder. At the bottom, she sees Keshena entering and stops abruptly, confronted at arm’s length by what appears to be her own face.
“W-what… Keshena?” Lin’s brows draw together with sudden suspicion.
Keshena watches her shifting expression with something like glee. It’s far from the first time she’s come face-to-face with a face she’s wearing, and she’s prepared for a range of responses. Confusion almost always comes first; she’s talented enough to provoke that. After the first unsteady moment, there’s no reaction that isn’t immensely revealing. This is the moment she craves, when the performance becomes more than a performance - it’s a way of understanding, of learning someone from the inside out, by testing her impression of them repeatedly against the reality.
Anger is common, and Keshena anticipated this flavor of it. Lin is young, hot-headed, thoughtless. Fear makes her angry, and both make her impulsive, but there’s no immediate danger here. Neither the strength to fight nor the confidence to punish manifests in Lin’s eye, only confused rage, as tattered and transient as a summer storm.
“What are you playing at? What is this?” She seizes Keshena’s arm - her fingers almost disappear on skin their exact shade - and shakes her hard. Hair like black silk falls into both of their faces. One Lin scowls, and the other laughs.
“What do you think? Close enough?” Keshena gently pulls free. She can see fascination warring with defensive rejection in Lin’s face. Now is the time for seduction, for openness. Keshena steps back, spreads her arms and presents herself.
Turning in place, she keeps her eyes on Lin’s face, drinking each moment, each minute movement. The black eye measures her - wasn’t she taller than Lin, when last they spoke? Yes. Hadn’t she been thinner than this? Yes. Delighted, Keshena holds her breath. She lives for this moment, but it’s so fragile… if she can only help Lin see.
“This has gone far enough, Keshena. Explain yourself. You can’t go around just… just impersonating your superiors!”
“Apparently I can, too well by the look on your face,” Keshena says. She watches the anger flare again. Crack the mask - give her a way out. She feels her mouth twist in a habitual smile. It’s one she thinks of as “Madame’s smile,” because it’s one of the tics she uses to immerse herself in that ancient face. Lin’s seen it before. And there it is - the dimming of fear in Lin’s eyes, the familiar expression forming a bridge between what she knows and this suspicious new face. The rage dissipates, and with it Lin’s brief energy. She grips the banister as lightheadedness washes over.
“Lin? Are you still -”
“I’m all right. Just… still recuperating.”
“That Wolf took you apart!”
“That’s what they’re known for,” Lin grumbles. “I want you to explain… this, but now I also have a lot of residual nerves I’d like to aim at something other than your face. Would you like to come to Tanor with me for shooting practice?”
“Absolutely, if you’ve a bow I can borrow. Or I can see if Ishin -”
“No, I have one. Actually, you can use this, it’s my second-best.” Lin runs back up the stairs and returns a moment later with another bow and quiver, finer in quality but just as well-used. Keshena takes the lesser armaments and follows Lin out.
“And while we walk, you can tell me why you look like that. Like me.”
“Well. It’s a long story, I suppose, but… trust me when I say that I don’t mean any harm by it.”
Glancing sideways at her, Lin says, “I do. I don’t know what you’re up to, but I don’t believe you’re dangerous, at least not to me.”
Keshena smiles faintly. “I’m not. I only want to understand. Not just you, but what you represent, what you do here, what the city and the guild and these people mean to you… I told you, this isn’t me trying to lie. When I create a face out of whole cloth, that’s a way of expressing myself, a way of letting part of myself out to breathe. When I make a face out of another person… that’s my way of standing in their shoes, as it were, trying to see the world from their perspective. I live here now, in Lion’s Reach, but I don’t belong here. I work with the Kumani now, but I don’t belong to them yet, either. You do. When I’m you… I can feel what it’s like, to belong here. Helps me figure out how I might get there myself.”
Lin listens with great interest. “That makes sense, I understand that. I came here when I was about nine, and I still remember how lost I felt for the first year or so.” She smiles. “I suppose that’s fine then, so long as you don’t impersonate me in any context that matters. Do I need to worry about you spying on people in my face, or sneaking into my bedroom?”
Keshena snorts. “I might spy on people in your face, but nobody you wouldn’t spy on yourself. And as for your bedroom, trust me, your husband isn’t my type.”
“I’m sure he would know, anyway,” Lin says. They pass through the Inner Gate, out into the teeth of the highland wind, and Lin pulls her coat closer around her. It’s brightly colored, as is her wont, but at least she’s put on something more substantial than silk today.
“You’d be surprised. I impersonated a woman’s husband for five years, once.”
Lin gapes at her. “I… I have so many questions!”
Laughing, Keshena says, “Ask me another time, and I’ll answer them. It’s an indoor conversation.”
“I just bet.” Lin gives her what Keshena would, if she didn’t know better, call a flirtatious glance. Flustered, Keshena changes the subject.
“You look cold; are you sure you want to walk to Tanor? We could take the thread.”
“I need the exercise, I’ve been laying around for a week! Come on, the walking will warm me up.” She pokes Keshena. “Already worn out for the day? What took you out this morning?”
“Repairing threads with Villi and Kang.”
“Kang?”
“New novice.” Smiling, Keshena adds, “You might have trouble on your hands with that one. He was very taken with this face.”
“Eugh, just what I need.” Lin rubs her brow. “I’ll have Brynn beat him up; she’s had a little talk with a few novices on my behalf.”
“It must be exhausting, being so beautiful,” Keshena says. She’s still smiling, but there’s no teasing in her tone, which makes Lin flustered herself.
“Shut up, or I’ll make you endure his woo-pitching for me.”
“It might not be so bad. He used to be a knight, it seems. Ashen. I always liked knights. Only men I’ve ever met worth a damn.”
Lin chuckles. “I think they’re a bit stuffy, but that’s good - knights are easy to retrain, they’re already in shape. Did you all check the whole city?”
Keshena nods. “Three threads fraying, total, and we fixed them. Nothing broken, nothing new that shouldn’t be there.” Except… She hesitates, and looks back over her shoulder at the city, for all the good that would do in spotting stealthy surveillance. Then she asks, “How many threads are there supposed to be in the Complex?”
“Fi - four.” Lin looks at her, and grins. “Oh, it’s no good, is it, you’ve already spotted the other one.”
“Yes! What is that? Does nobody else know about it?”
“Novices don’t, but everyone else does.” Lowering her voice, Lin says, “There’s more to the Complex than you’ve seen. A lot of catacombs and laboratories down there, and the Champion’s office - you’ll be taken there when you pass your second test, so Hanna can offer you a proper contract. There’s another thread that leads to an old shipwreck far up north on the western coast, north of where Blackwall was. It’s important to the Kumani for some reason, but I haven’t gotten a clear answer on that. I think it’s sentimental value.”
A wrecked ship… is it the same one from the thread in Capria? How many accessible ancient shipwrecks can there be?
“There might be artifacts there that the Council doesn’t want to lose, or technology,” Lin continues. “In the past, it might have been destroyed - public opinion has swung against use of the Lions’ technology several times over the centuries. And then swung back.” Squinting down the hill at the train station, Lin murmurs, “People can always be tempted by ease…”
Chuckling, Keshena says, “True. Were the Lions so bad? What’s the worst thing they’ve pulled out of the catacombs?”
Lin shakes her head. “I’m not the person to ask. Nat could tell you, the Numerologists work down there more than we do. Hadall’s people are always digging deeper, as long as the Council allows. They find new things all the time. But… well, people have good intentions, right? The Lions probably started out trying to make the world better, trying to protect their citizens and learn new things. I don’t think anybody gets up in the morning and sets out to pillage and enslave. Things get out of hand, is all.”
Keshena raises an eyebrow. “You just said ‘enslave’ and then ‘things get out of hand.’ Just so you heard yourself.”
Glancing at her, Lin sighs. “Okay, well, I’m not saying that makes it better. I’m just saying it’s more complicated than ‘bad’ or ‘not so bad.’”
“I agree with that,” Keshena answers.
Tanor is the richest little town in the region, owing to the train station and its proximity to the Reach. Workers and students, engineers and teachers, anyone who can’t afford to live in the city lives down the mountain in Tanor, making it essentially a quieter, open-air version of the Citadel. Fewer explosions here, and fewer spiders in the snacks, but they still sell wondrous machinery, and at night, the town is fully lit by electric street-lamps, so it’s safer than the Reach as well.
Lin doesn’t lead Keshena all the way into town. She slows down as they move from the terraced fields of the foothills to the farmland below, and hops over a fence into a disused field alongside a weary-looking herd of sheep. “The man who owns this land barely uses it, so I come here to practice when I don’t want Ishin making fun of me.”
“And yet you brought me,” Keshena says, grinning, and leans on the fencepost as Lin gathers up a handful of what looks like trash at the foot of the field’s one, twisted tree. There’s a few bottles, a tin cup, a lidless jewelry box, and Lin lines them up an arm’s length apart on top of the fence. Then she steps back by the tree and begins limbering up her bow.
“Looks like it might snow, but it should be a couple hours at least,” she says, peering at the sky. “Have you used a reflex bow before?”
Keshena nods. “A bit, during the Quiet War. Not in combat, just for hunting. Aren’t these usually for mounted archers?”
“That’s why we like ‘em,” says Lin, bouncing to her feet. “A smart Kumani doesn’t fight fair. These have most of the power of a longbow in a smaller frame, so they’re easier to conceal. And if you can get a height advantage on your prey, you should. Bow like that is good for shooting from trees, roofs, windows…” The Speaker grins. “You know, urban hunting.”
Keshena lets out a bark of laughter. “Just when I’m starting to think you’re a good little administrator, you say something adorably vicious like that. There’s a beast cooped up somewhere in that skin, isn’t there?”
Lin looks at her with a bright, wild eye that cuts to Keshena’s stomach like a hot knife. “Maybe.” Then she turns and draws down on the fence-top targets. She sights for all of two seconds before firing, and the tin cup flies off the fence as if blown from a cannon. It hasn’t hit the ground yet when Lin reaches over her shoulder for another arrow and nocks it in one smooth motion that leads her clean into her next shot. She gets off four quick shots like this in the time it takes Keshena to fold her arms, and then turns to look at Keshena with a young woman’s unabashed pride.
“Good gods, you thought I might be a danger to you? I didn’t realize what high praise that was,” Keshena says.
Lin blushes and grins. “I won our guild shooting tournament last fall.”
“Did anyone else survive it?”
“Yes. Some.” Lin snickers and jogs off to retrieve the targets. She lines them up again - the tin cup is badly bent now, and the jewelry box can probably take one more hit like that before it falls to pieces. She replaces one of the bottles - shattered by a direct hit - with a fist-sized stone.
“Okay, let’s see you!” she calls as she returns.
“I’m not fast like you,” Keshena says, gently testing the pull on the bow and flexing her fingers. “And I’m rusty, it’s been about eighty years since I did this.”
“It’s fine!” Lin leans against the tree. “That kind of speed-shooting isn’t usually practical anyway, you don’t get that many easy targets in the real world. Ishin doesn’t even teach it to the novices anymore, since it’s more flashy than useful. Exo Vyr taught me before he retired.”
“Oh damn you, of course he did,” Keshena says, laughing. “Even I’ve heard of Exo Vyr; there’s not a war in the past two centuries he wasn’t involved in whether he was invited or not.”
Lin nods. “The biggest problem the Kumani ever had was keeping Exo entertained! When there wasn’t a war going on, that was when he got himself in trouble. Once, during Akal’s tenure as Champion, there was a thief in the city, a boy who got novice-level training from us and started using it to knock over shops in the Citadel. It being a slow day in the Complex… Akal and Exo both went after him.”
With a snort, Keshena squares off with the fencepost. The grey afternoon is getting darker, the sun swallowed up long before sunset behind the black teeth of the mountains. Another hour and she can start blaming poor visibility for her bad shooting!
“Ah, so that’s when the word ‘overkill’ was coined.”
“Bored Kumani are dangerous! It’s like… well, top of the list has got to be a bored Engineer. An Engineer without work to do can end the world.”
Keshena grins and looks at Lin, spinning an arrow between her fingers. “This is math I understand. So one unemployed Engineer is roughly equivalent to… two unemployed Kumani, or one bored Kumani and two unemployed Numerologists, or three bored Numerologists. Or four Numerologists who have an assignment but don’t want to do it.”
Barely keeping a straight face, Lin nods. “Yep, that sounds about right. So they trapped the thief in a canyon - you know the spot on the Southern Road past Bleeding Rock?”
Keshena, drawing the bowstring past her face, holds her breath until she lets the arrow go. Then she claps her hand to her cheek, swearing, as the arrow goes wild into the neighboring field. When she takes her hand away, there’s a streak swiped clean of both cosmetics and a layer of skin by the bowstring as it passed.
Lin winces. “Ahh, yeah, I’ve done that. Your elbow’s too far back.” She stands and steps behind Keshena to adjust her form. “Pull it again. No, with an arrow, never dry-fire a bow! Okay, yeah, roll your elbow more this way. And let it in a little bit.” Lin taps the corner of her mouth. “I anchor here, not even as far as the cheek. You don’t need to pull it that far back; power isn’t as important as technique, especially at the range we usually work. And the recurve in this does some of the work for you.” She steps back again. “Try it like that.”
Keshena has no trouble holding the position Lin put her in. Actresses and archers, all about hitting their marks. This time when she narrows in on the rock and releases the string, though she feels herself flinch away from its lash, it doesn’t harm her aim too much. The arrow strikes the rock and both break, a tracery of wood like a bird’s wing flying off in one direction, a spray of stone chips and the glittering arrowhead twirling into the grass.
Lin applauds. “Good shot! That was great.”
“‘Great’ is generous, but thank you,” Keshena murmurs, sighting at the next target. “So they trapped him in the canyon near Bleeding Rock…” she prompts. “Finish your story; I can’t aim and talk.”
“Oh yes! So they trapped the thief in the canyon on the Southern Road, Akal at the south end and Exo at the north end, but before they separated, Akal gave Exo the Champion’s Bow, and he took Exo’s. Then Akal didn’t even try to hit the kid, just kept him penned in at the south end.” Lin grinned. “He always let Exo have his fun. Exo worked his way forward, leaving snares behind him so the thief couldn’t stealth out, until he hit the curve around the rock and could see all the way down the canyon to Akal at the other end. Of course they couldn’t see the thief between them… but he was still there.”
“What did they do?”
“Exo filled the canyon. You couldn’t breathe for forty cubic feet without inhaling an arrow. When they went in to clean up, the shafts were so thick on the ground they brought a plow. And halfway down the hill, pinned to the rock, they found the thief. Pincushioned. The arrows went in the coffin with him - if they’d pulled them out, there wouldn’t have been enough of him left to bury.”
Keshena holds her breath, trying to steady the swaying of her elbow. Her release doesn’t cut her this time, and the shot is cleaner, hitting the dented tin cup and sending it across the road with a loud clink! She throws up a fist in triumph.
“I’m getting this now. It’s not that different from a shortbow, just takes more pulling.”
Lin nods. “We also have crossbows if that suits you better.”
“It might. No chances I’ll pincushion anybody, but lower chance I’ll pincushion myself as well. So that’s how they treat shop thieves in the Reach? No wonder crime’s so low.”
Another nod. “Hasn’t been a major robbery since, and that was a hundred-eighty years ago.”
“How did Exo carry that many arrows with him? Did he bring a cart?”
Lin stops. “You know… I never thought about that.” She laughs. “The story’s probably embellished some. But Exo really was a terror. We had a few people he was hunting turn themselves in to avoid him. Apparently he referred to that as ‘the Exo Effect.’”
Keshena rolls her eyes. “Boys are the same everywhere.”
“Yeah, they are.” Keshena’s tone is dismissive; Lin’s is affectionate. She looks up at Keshena with amusement. “You’re not a big fan of men, huh?”
The expression on Keshena’s Lin-like face is, for a moment, incongruously Den Roth-ian. “The fact that I don’t have the option to avoid men in spite of being ‘not a big fan’ is the primary reason I’m not. Men love to have an ‘effect’ on things, on people. They care a whole terrible lot about their ‘effect,’ and they want to calibrate it, and make sure everyone knows about it. It’s unconscionable to them that there might exist any creature on whom they have no effect. When they find such a creature, they usually kill it.”
Ruefully, Lin shrugs. “Can’t argue with you. Apart from Nat, I haven’t met too many men I’d call grown. I’ve only been with women since we married, and honestly it’s been so much less hassle.”
With a sideways look, Keshena says, “Does your husband know about that?”
“Of course!” Lin smiles. “He seems to think it’s cute. He calls them my shavora - Reach word for ‘companion,’ as I understand it.”
“Uh...huh.” A peculiar quiet storm of feelings arises in Keshena’s belly. As with everything inside her, they quickly acquire voices, the layers of conflicting impulse making her gorge rise.
Cute, is it, because no relationship is real if it doesn’t have a cock in it, eh?
…but she… well, maybe…
Were you hoping…?
No. I don’t know. I don’t remember hope.
She makes me feel… real. Like a real person. It’s been so long.
...she’s married. They might have a fucking ‘understanding,’ but she’s still married.
...why do you have to own everything you like? Why isn’t this enough?
Isn’t this enough?
