ChaoticArmcandy

  Staring out a dusty window into the stony, winter dullness of the courtyard below, Roxa gritted her teeth. She hated waiting.

  Not an ideal trait for any hunter, and one for which she’d been chided too many times to count.

  If only she could make her mind as empty, as ft and as callously calm as the scene below her. Her anticipation curdled sourly in her stomach, reminding her that as bad as waiting was, its end was almost worse.

  Against her will, the scrape of footsteps in the hallway set her pulse racing and her skin tingling. The door creaked open.

  “These ftnders with their odd, little minds.” Mariah sounded oddly wistful, today. “Seeing what they build, it’s so obvious they want to pave the whole world just to better suit their own dead, ft insides. The pces they make for themselves can’t help but tell on them. This University just screams it.”

  “Skewered,” muttered Roxa under her breath as she turned to face her ex.

  “What’s that you say?”

  “I said, you’re dangerous for me to spend too much time around when you speak like that.”

  “You flirt,” said Mariah lightly. “Don’t tell the pickings here are that slim? Surely there are girls here sharp enough to keep your wits from going dull.” She smirked to herself. “Or your tongue.”

  “You think I have time for that? I’m not being marked by an armsmaster on the elegance of my thrusts here, Mariah.”

  “Ha.”

  “Shut up. This is no sporting arena we are in. The stakes are death, and it is a game only for the victors.”

  “You can say that again,” Mariah dragged a chair away from the wall, spun it around and sat on it backwards. “That Penelope girl likes to throw only when her dice loaded, and seems to smile only when she’s moving in for the kill.” She shook her head slowly. “You really know how to pick ‘em, Roxa. How did you get tangled up with such a cold-eyed shrike as her?”

  “I told you, she’s been trying to kill me. For all you care, it’s as simple as that.”

  “No it’s not.” Mariah frowned at her. “You’re hiding something. What did you do?”

  Roxa sighed. At all costs, she had to conceal Mi from Mariah. “I insulted her when she tried to cozy up to me. Maybe I called her a bootlicker or something. She was publicly humiliated, and she must have decided my life would restore her pride.”

  “Sounds like your fool temper talking alright.” Mariah stared at her thoughtfully. “She offered you the perfect opening to spy on the inner workings of the Imperiati upper echelon, the kind of access that any other operative would have given their right arm for, and so you spat in her face, eh?” She rolled her eyes. “Sure, that adds up.”

  Roxa gritted her teeth. “Just tell me what you’ve found on her.”

  “She’s driven—always moving, never still. Even her leisure activities are vehicles for her to be seen projecting power. She’s obsessed with how she is perceived—she never stops performing. Well, okay,” Mariah amended, “perhaps the only time it stops is when she goes hunting. Every three days she mounts up with a few of her favorites on the sleekest coursers I’ve ever seen, and rides into the preserve, north of here, trailed by a few huntsmen with horns and a pack of hounds. Comes back a few hours ter with a rack of antlers or a family of fox pelts. As far as I can tell, that’s the only time she ever steps out of the spotlight or turns off the engine. Otherwise, she’s carefully turned outwards, always in focus, always the foreground, never part of the backdrop.” She shook her head in amazement. “I don’t know where she gets the energy. Just watching her is exhausting.”

  “Come now, she must be alone sometimes. What’s her css schedule like? Where does she sleep? She’s been absent from the dormitories for months now.”

  “She sleeps in that brutal monstrosity of a Tower.”

  “Shut up.”

  “It’s true! If she still attends csses, they must all be in there, as well. She struts out of there every day, surrounded by a swarm of bootlickers and onlookers, looking like she’s just sucked off the Hierophant himself and been crowned official good girl of the Imperiat by Ministry decree.” She shuddered. “It’s a disturbing look, to be honest with you. Nothing good is happening in there, I can feel it. And I don’t know if you’re hearing the same rumors I’ve been paying good silver for, but—”

  “I have,” said Roxa grimly. “The bodies?”

  Mariah nodded.

  Roxa broke the silence. “I trust you can put together for yourself why it’s in the best interests of the Duchy that she’s dealt with quickly?”

  “I suppose I do,” said Mariah quietly, then hesitated.

  “What, then?” Roxa narrowed her eyes, then growled in frustration. “It’s my mother, isn’t it? ”

  A reluctant nod. “She approved this operation, but she wants Aralia before the move is made on Penelope.”

  Roxa cursed, and began to pace, gesturing her wildly. “Cssic. This is just a petty jab at me, you must see that, Mariah, yes? This isn’t about protecting our home. She’s trying to show me something.”

  Mariah’s lip curled. “You’re the one who tried to strike a bargain, Roxa.”

  “Because I know how she is!” Roxa hissed. “And I knew this would happen anyway. By all the dread gods!” She turned on her heel. “Fine. Fine! I’ll get you Aralia. But I want a viable strike pn—when and where, entrance and exit options, and all the materials.”

  Mariah nodded stiffly. “I should have it about dialed within a week, Midy. Be sure to bring your new asset to our next little rendezvous, so I can confirm to the Countess that she’s ours.”

  She rose and strode to the door, then paused and directed a cold look over her shoulder. “And give your mother some credit, Roxa—the news from Drago is dire, and she’s across the table from the Hierophant himself now, using every trick she has just to keep our little Duchy from being wiped off the map and sucked into the maw of this clockwork corpse empire. The least you could show is a little solidarity.”

  Then she was gone.

  ~ ~ ~

  Roxa stalked across the Allegiance courtyard, brushing against the stream of heedless students, ignoring barbed looks from the knot of sneering loyalists by the center fountain. She didn’t think they wouldn’t try anything in the open.

  At least not yet.

  Or better, let them. She could use an excuse to rip out some throats.

  Roxa ground her teeth. Up until recently, she had been able to keep up the pretense of even footing, with her weight at least nominally distributed, astride the cracking ground of her loyalties. But now, with a shaking that threatened to send her staggering, she knew the split beneath her feet had begun to widen and split apart.

  Her current position was fast growing to be utterly untenable. No one could keep one foot on either side of a growing chasm for long. She would have to pick—Mi or her mother.

  With her whole heart, she dreaded the moment she would be forced to make that choice in the sight of all. Worse, she stood no chance of saving her best friend’s life alone—if she staked out a clear position too soon, she would lose Mi either way. Only by standing astride the widening crack for a little longer could she hope to take down Penelope. Once she did, Mi would be as safe as she could be, in this pce. And perhaps then—Roxa bit her lip and shook her head, unwilling to continue the thought.

  It was getting harder and harder to keep her bance.

  The door to their shared room loomed abruptly in front of her and she paused to give herself a little shake and take a few deep breaths, to still the churning surface of her mind.

  She dropped the wards on the door, and slipped inside.

  From the couch, Mi raised her gaze. “Hey.”

  She sounded...subdued.

  “Hey yourself.”

  “Where’ve you been?”

  Roxa didn’t try to hide her awkward wince. “Just checking on our least favorite person in the world.”

  “Penelope?”

  “No, the other one.”

  Mi didn’t crack a smile, and Roxa winced again. “Sorry. Yes, Penelope. Um. Any updates on Crissa?”

  “No.” Mi looked away. “Her other friends are still checking on her, and know how to reach us, but...no.”

  “Perhaps we should visit her?”

  “No,” said Mi quickly. “If either of us is seen coming and going from the Archives, Penelope might look for her there. Crissa’s still far too weak from fighting off that revenant.”

  Roxa frowned. “I’ve been thinking more about that. Among the advanced sorcery students, I’ve heard some strange rumors tely, but nothing like what you told me. Ambushed out of nowhere by a denizen of the Sixth Abyss—Crissa said that’s what it was, right?”

  “Yes,” sighed Mi.

  “I’m beginning to think Crissa wasn’t wrong about Penelope using her blood for far more than dowsing,” muttered Roxa. “It ftly contravenes what’s considered possible, and yet…”

  Mi sat up. “Roxa, I…”

  “What is it?”

  She took a deep breath. “It’s time I shared something with you that is within the story of my people, in the same way an acorn carries memories of lightning, fire, drought and flood.” She hesitated. “But first you must promise to be worthy of this trust, do you understand? First, by not dismissing it as only a story and second, by deed, by acting without hesitation, if indeed we do find ourselves facing such a threat as this together.”

  “Um.” Roxa swallowed, and realizing her mouth was slightly ajar, closed it. “Yes? Yes of course. I promise.”

  “Very well,” Mi gave her a small smile. “Perhaps you should sit.”

  ~ ~ ~

  This telling reaches across many years and many leagues, and yet always the story is told as if it happens still, echoing even in the here-and-now, rippling in all directions through unseen waters, just across the veil.

  A great empire rules the whole known world though dire necromancies of hunger, blood and the puppeteered illusion of certainty that it has always been this way and no other, that the past must always give us to A Glorious Future.

  The past, you see, is not always experienced as a dynamic fountain of moments, a skirmish of ghouls, angels, ghosts, ancestors and spirits exploding through time, that one can sing open or plunge into for succor and strength, or draw memory forth from like water from a well, to ske one’s thirst and nourish one’s bones.

  No, in the minds of some, the past can be meant only for the Future, which can not help but be victorious over it, as one epoch ys down into the p of the next. For the rulers, the past is only a triumphal procession on its way to their present. And so those who control the present also control the past, and not even the dead are safe from their use, as marionettes in their story.

  Necromancers, indeed.

  But in this telling, however fleeting, the past according to the rulers is revealed to be one single catastrophe, a mountain of skulls growing sky-high, tumbling, pushing, drowning and trampling all those living under their feet.

  In their martialed and regimented past, ensved to an unending, unstoppable future, in a world of rubble and storm, memory itself is the war spoils.

  Memory is always in danger of being ripped away to gild their purposes. And so to conjure a counter-attack—ah, yes, I see you understand, now.

  Shall we?

  Necromancers with the power to call up and command invisible gods of dread stride the nd and y waste to entire isnds in a single night. Vast fleets of their sver ships ride the flood tide in every harbor around the rim of the whole Whistling Sea.

  In their nightmarish bor camps, overseers break up families and disperse vilges, trying by every means at their disposal to enforce alienation and weaken the sparks of rebellion. The success of their repression is devastating.

  But in this telling, we remember those who fight.

  In the here-and-now of the leap and the blow and the rip of the cw, beyond the question of hope and in defiance of the spectacle of victory, we cim our own.

  We remember them recovering and folding their own memories of their fallen comrades into their hatred of authority and, by old magics of resonance, forging and honing and spreading arts by which the living can constelte and call on the dead of their struggle as their own kin, beyond any lineage of blood.

  And our remembrance can flutter open the narrow gate of each moment, through which we ourselves can leap and cim and call on those same ones for protection against the devouring of our spirits, for ferocity in our attacks, and for company in the depths of our grief.

  This is the resonance that becomes Opali, rippling and yering a sea of limitless rhythm, returning again in each generation to settle the cim that is made on us by those who came before us—to dance our hatred for the spirit-eaters and svers in time with theirs, to be worthy inheritors of their enmity, to warm ourselves at their fires, to fly with their wings.

  ~ ~ ~

  “And that is the great need that led to the bells of Opali,” said Mi softly. “Not as clock-towers, as they use bells here, but as bridges to those we share resonance with, not those left behind but those we walk towards. Do you see?”

  “I...think so?” Roxa slumped back with a deep sigh, as if waking from a dream. “Mi, that gave me chills!”

  “That’s the way it’s told, ritually, back home. I’ve never shared it before, with anyone.” Her dark eyes were luminous. “It is a great gift of trust.”

  Another great sigh, and an inarticute gesture of amazement. “I-well…thank you,” her friend offered weakly, gncing away. “It….ah, affected me deeply, I think.”

  “I thought it important to share, now, because….” Mi took a careful breath. “Because it is no secret in my city that our ancestors cut their teeth in an uprising against sorcerers who could command Eaters to do their bidding. Since coming here, I have seen how the screeds of social peacekeeper propaganda obscure and contort any information about my people that could be subversive, and now I see…” She hesitated. “How important it is—what I have brought to these shores.”

  Roxa frowned. “You mean—”

  “I mean that those necromancers and their empire were buried, Roxa. If Penelope truly has recovered their techniques, somehow, and she’s trying them out on me just because she can, before they’re even out of the research b…”

  Roxa shuddered. “The Arcane bs are the clearinghouse for all Imperiati advancements in thanopegics. Whatever breakthrough she might develop here will get rolled out everywhere. If every cadre of sorcerers in the Imperiat learns to bind and unleash revenants, they will run roughshod over every resistance.” She swallowed, chilled by a sudden premonition of the carnage. “They will be unstoppable, on every front.”

  “Not quite,” said Mi grimly. “Listen, Roxa, I hope I’m wrong, but if I’m not and we find ourselves facing something like what came hunting Crissa, then you must promise to follow my lead and do as I say.”

  “I—ah—Mi, surely—”

  “That Eater isn’t responsible for Crissa’s current condition, Roxa.” Mi’s gaze was steely. “I am.”

  Her friend’s green eyes widened. “What—”

  “If I tell you to do something, especially if I tell you to leave me behind and get out of the River, you must do it, do you understand? It’s very important.”

  Roxa’s mouth worked. “Mi, can you at least tell me—”

  “Just promise me!”

  “Okay, I promise! Can you just give me some idea of what you’re on about?”

  Fumbling beneath her shirt, Mi drew out a fist-sized bell of clouded silver, the grip of her fingers stilling the tongue.

  “Ohhh,” Roxa’s eyes widened and she leaned forward. “I—that’s what that is?”

  Her dark-eyed roommate nodded.

  The light of a question in her eyes, Roxa took a breath, opened her mouth, and stopped, as a knock sounded on their door.

  ChaoticArmcandy