The Prophet and His General [3]

Lyle grimaced up into at the wristdial he’d tied to his tent’s spine. Morning’s sixth shadow. It was not the first mocking set of runes the dial flashed at him. Nine arduous lifts of his chin from the deep had only dragged him mark by mark through three shadows since he’d woken. Already half-sleep, bristling and haggard, was raking him back down under—his fingers twitched impotently, and he squeezed his eyes closed against the backlash. Heavy. So heavy. His lids could barely lift themselves for exhaustion. True rest only weaved with sickeningly heavy, crunching steps in and out of his skull, sapped him until he was at the mercy of waking, marish hallucinations. And what he needed in any case was to rise.

Miasma was the only way he knew to describe this. The mourning sickness carried on clouds of thought too insubstantial to grasp, clouds that collected like damp spores in his head and chest until he was pinned under the layers of his schracke, entombed beneath all Aagyre. Lyle knew what it was. He knew what he had to do to escape. But that was precisely… Everything was too shifting to grasp, to pull, to usher or rally or hone into a weapon. Impressions and memories and ideas swirled in dizzying convolutions about him, so thick and cloying he could hardly reason.

He thought of all the reports he needed to assemble together that early morning—he didn’t have the time for half of them now. They wouldn’t get done. His reputation was reliability. He had to...

Camp’s stillness constricted about him. He and a band of volunteers from various contingents had quit the Utterian outpost in a debaram to creep and crawl toward the Yggdraeli mount under the cover of metamatters. Vacteari had her own tent now; her eyes, her steadying presence weren’t there now that they’d departed. For his mission... Oh, he could see it like prophecy. Yggdraeli gripping his arms while they forced a flashstick into his mouth and electrocuted his failed tongue and stilted speech to char—should have studied more, instead of lying about. Vacteari couldn’t save… and before he died, what would he see with her? What moral torments…?

Memories churn. Hands, always such large hands they seemed in his youth, reaching for his mother and later for less willing supplicants. Hands and hard weight. Women on the streets and in the wings of barracks, and everyone laughing high and drunken at the way of things—the way? Hopeless. He knew too much of what he’d find already. Yggdraeli altars stained with women’s blood, and his own innards would desecrate their centuries of disregarded suffering because his blood would be talked about, and why? Because they called a uniform a legacy. His uniform would be… Imagining it he came up with black. Voids. Zekkar, and the keening of oblivion’s songless...

His heart palped its terror, and he jerked in his schracke. Focus. He had to focus. He was at the thoughts’ mercy so long as they shifted this way—but he was so tired. Concentrate on the work, that was his mantra. But what work? The reports he forwarded to High Command, those effected nothing, and he couldn’t prepare, not truly, for descending beneath the mountain. Beyond that, what was actually in his power?

Regardless, he could have accomplished more without the burning loins and loneliness, the night before. He should have...

He could have been thinking up some program to better integrate trencher officers. The post-conflict plan. Large, amorphous needs. He didn’t know where to begin—he couldn’t begin—the trenchers would all go home to ruin or die, cold corpses. And there would be worse than blood on the Yggdraeli altar, the heady spirits that fermented black as the blood dried. It would dry black on the unfurling Utterian banner. Black and green with sick like the khacks they wore--.

Too much. Too much. He felt his breath catch, coiled in on himself only to clench his teeth and uncurl in a spasm. No focus! Too much! Focus. But the anger sputtered and died. Anger. He always used the anger to rouse himself, and when his anger lashed outward, then who would take it, what sin would he…?

He didn’t know how much longer he lay there, with all of Aagyre rotating in a mockery about him and bearing down on his chest. Parades of thought continued in a blank procession of increasingly gory contingencies. He choked back a whimper at the thought that today would be one of those rare but mortifying days that someone had to “wake” him.

Too much, he thought again. But no, not too much that way. He had too much responsibility now to allow for this any longer. Too much, scrat and damn! This was why naïve, self-satisfied walkers possessed by the atri of their wealth or pride were the only ones who ever ran anything.

It wasn’t as bad as in the mechtrensche, at least. Nothing could be as bad as those peeling tenements haunted by the horror that he’d either stand by and watch mother eat her coin away in powders or that he’d latch up about how sick she’d been looking since she let the new tenant in her and how it made him sicker hearing her dote on lusty violen—nothing worse than lying in bed with nothing except limpid books for days—no, literal fortnights just to avoid it. Nothing worse than dodging outside into the claustrophobic expanse of a wasteland fiefdom with tyrants all the more desperate to mount it for the bare solace of molesting its inadequate promises…

No one could keep you in their power easier than if you were afraid to see. You could be holed up in the same room, the same rut for years if only the outside was violence you were afraid to see. They didn’t even have to bind you to the torture table. They could carve you up for seasons at a time if getting up meant watching your flesh slip and squirm and knowing your mutilation--.

No. Vulgar--!

Lyle surged up out of his schracke in a paroxysm. Harsh breaths scraping over frigid air whistled through his ears as he twisted—fumbled for his wristdial. Seven shadows. Khack. Pox-khacking--!

But no. Lyle was already shredding off his covers and jacket. Immediately, he threw himself to the floor. Escape. He had to find escape before it caught him again, the disease. Inertia was never felled, it always came back, always.

He threw himself at the floor and then pushed back up, and his arms burnt. Good. Pain. He could feel it clearing his head already, the stiff ache of waking muscle. His teeth gritted. Bastard! On the cusp of the most important responsibility of his life, he dared succumb to pity--! Scratted--! And all because shame made him weak, because he’d doddered away half a night trying to work through yearnin--! Self-indulgent bastard! Twenty five presses. He rolled over and tucked his feet under his heaviest bag, stiffening his abdomen and swinging up. Again. Again. How dare he? Again. Until he’d done ten dozen. Then he threw himself at the floor. And repeated. And repeated. Until his jaw ached from the clenching and his temper dwindled to embers.

The urgency of his bolt through the morning didn’t fade. The tent was stained now with the ghasts of his ill mind, practically fetid, and he could not afford to risk working there. So soon as he ran a wet rag all over and pulled on his khacks he was pushing all his files into a shoulderbag and hustling to the mess hall. People. People would keep him in discipline. Watching eyes were a better scourge than even the most iron of wills. The key, the key was always to anchor yourself to simple securities. In the mechtrensche it had been cleaning after his mother, cleaning obsessively, round after round in a patrol of the house until the men that came were unnerved even by the helplessly short and frail boy, until they noticed just how keen the glint in those effete blues of his was. At camp he’d fallen into making it Vacteari’s reassuring presence.

That morning his stomach ached, and so it would be the pleasure of a hot meal’s steady burn off while he made his rounds. Steeling himself for the endless task of laboring over trench-dreams. He tried to smile steadfastly, the expression like heroes wore on projections. The mask didn’t fit.

Fortunately, even in the ill-warmed mess tent, the porridge was Aayre-sent.

Lyle reached into one of the pouches straddling his belt and withdraw a small, ivory casing veined by cupric green circuits. His manuclip, boon of boons for those apt to travel light. A press of his fingers and it emitted a projection the size of a large canvass with all the files and missives he needed read arrayed in a circle about it. Being military issue, it did not tangle with any networks (though the military was more than capable of establishing a circuit colony anywhere and he’d heard the Yggdraeli had rigged up something by diverting a grid from the Croixation bordertowns), and he had to make a tedious trek to the records office at the end of each day to gather up new reports. Nonetheless, it spared him a great deal of paper tracking, for all that he reserved an idiosyncratic insistence upon taking notes in a great wad of manuscript.

He laid it on the low table in front of him and tried to make himself comfortable on the cushion under him as another bite of porridge flavored with rehydrated chiddarji curds and preserves melted in his mouth. Just as he was beginning to read someone covered his eyes and he rumbled aggravatedly into his bowl:

‘Shiga if y’this scratted bored why’d you volunteer for the detail?’

‘You keep askin;, but I already answered,’ Shiga trilled brightly as she released him.

‘I continue to abide in—I keep on--.’ He scowled and gave up his colloquialisms. ‘I don’t believe it.’ Or, rather, he wasn’t certain how to approach his discomfort with her reply, what to do with the urge to question it. Jarry and her new young thing are getting close, and you know she won’t abandon me. So I got out of their way, ‘course. And--.

‘That I butted out for once or that someone wanted to stick to your nettled hide?’ Shiga wondered aloud as she helped herself to a heated sweet roll. Sugar hardened the damned things to rock and they melted back well, making them a favored treat. ‘You know you’re talkin’ less like you have to prove you’re a trencher with me. That mean we’re getting to be friends, lazim?’

‘That Jarry would agree with what you thought you needed to do.’ He shot a glance at her. ‘As comforting as it might be to have someone I can rely on here.’

Shiga ignored him. ‘You’re so sweet.’

‘I’m not sweet—you’ve earned your reputation with me. Now let me read in peace, would you?’

‘You know you might be the only poxing officer who offers up your report with every round-up. Don’t you think you have excuse to skip out this onc--?’

‘I’m indolent as a Southland pet. If I let myself stop now I’ll never start again.’

Shiga was silent while they ate for a time, yet he sensed her shifting her weight at the unwelcome in his voice and repented. Contrariwise, his nerves and exhaustion were easing. He half wondered if he found her presence so comfortable because her full-fleshed breast and stomach and ruddy face filled a room the same as old teachers of his, holding down the sanctum of loer and finneschool. You didn’t stay in the mechtrensche’s schools if you didn’t care for the trial of it and your pupils. Likewise…

‘Why’d you bring old man Craut and his lackey?’ she asked of a sudden, with obvious distaste as the inseparable two swaggered into the mess tent and harassed the self-contained soldier doling portions with waggling fingers and pleas for larger portions.

‘Only seems right, they give us sun-kissed fellows more responsibility than the liches, you should sweeten our portion. And why, the old man, how’s he keepin’ his strength up at his ripe age if not with--?’

Lyle shrugged. ‘They do work hard. And if they’re showing what they think direct like that the feelings behind it can’t be too hard to live with... I’m sorry they leer at you and the others.’

‘Be angry for yourself,’ she growled back. ‘Or at least him.’

The server, a trencher, snapped back at the pair and Craut’s Illumni buddy clapped him on the back, asked what he was getting so fussed for. Northlanders, always taking everything so serious… The soldier wrenched himself from the youth’s grasp and shoved a plate at him rudely. Same pox-kissed episode every morning.

‘If I’m going to see it as a real problem then I’m going to solve it the same way I want them to talk to trenchers and do it private and with my ears open,’ Lyle returned distractedly. ‘Like I said, the ones really khacking trenchers are doing it quiet so no one can stop them.’

‘But what’s it make life like for the trenchers?’

Lyle closed his eyes. He wanted to retort that he was fairly certain trenchers had bigger problems, but it tasted petty on his tongue and he swallowed it at the last moment. He glanced down again at the files he had intended to read, and impulsively closed them by dragging the far corner of the projection back into his manuclip with a fingernail. ‘I think trenchers are forced to appreciate the fact that people like Craut and the Illumni pull through even for them. But…’ He slipped the manuclip back in his pocket.

‘Lich-im, g’morn,’ the old man wheezed. While Shiga distracted Lyle the technomancer and Illumni had begun an amble past. ‘Metamatter’s runnin’ like it got a “harmony” from Rue ‘imself yesterday. Y’won’t be payin’ me for much, this assignment. S’mebbe good, seein’ as you’re off to die with yer brothers eh?’

‘M’sprised we haven’t had to melt you off the side’ve your scratted tech cause you’ve frozen there,’ Lyle returned. ‘You Southlanders, can’t half function if’n your sun ain’t kissin’ you. No heat in your bellies.’

‘We share it all out as hot air,’ the swarthy Illumni cackled. ‘Life suckin’ atri’s the ones that suck it all in, reclusive like. S’why there’s only death in the mountain.’

They passed and Shiga raised a brow at him. Lyle had a feeling she felt faint disgust for how well he spoke their language, and while he felt there was something beneath it all she missed, he still…

‘They don’t respect you like they should,’ she accused. ‘You’re a lazim.’

‘I don’t believe in respect for rank,’ he returned simply. Yet as he rose he found himself turning to register her empty bowl. ‘…still, I would trust a report of your experience. Of them. Of our camps. If you walked with me. If you had time. During my errands.’

His stomach squirmed at the look of surprise on her face; they had debated the topic before and the conversations had ended rather more dismissively. Now, though…

‘Please,’ he grumbled quickly, and with that he turned.

Shiga pursued him through camp. His first port of call was the medic’s tent, a brisk walk indeed given that he was granted a staff of roughly twenty-five soldiers, a single unit, and given that he thought it wise any man or woman visiting the mess tent have easy recourse to assistance. Everything in his debaram worth of soldiers’ camp was clustered in a starburst like the Utterian sigil’s, with the commons tents grouped in the center, his and another superior officer’s within two dozen paces, and the rest of the staff fanning out from thence within a sharp, clear bark of one another, but distal enough to mask a soft-spoken word. From the center all were visible, and none obscured by the conifers. The medic tent was marked by a silver-tinted, argent-laced (argent was metal imported from the Roanokan isles to the West to draw out impurities in the air) tarp and an ahjiz stone, famed in the Southlands for its medicinal properties as either a hearthstone or detoxifying agent.

Shiga, apparently, found the path to the medic’s tent succinct enough for her piece.

‘Craut and his crony’s talk is degrading and it’s hard enough to hold your head up as a trencher or a woman as is. And it makes crueler men than that think it’s acceptable.’

‘Yes, I lose sleep over it. Culture here, so to speak. But why you should think authority might fix it, or, rather, how…?’ Lyle lifted the green tarp and stretched his arm out awkwardly behind him so she could catch it after him. Lifted it, and left her to compose her reply as he bowed his head to the medic.

‘You prepared? I know the shadow’s early.’

‘Yes, lazim.’

Lyle rubbed his face and sat at the edge of the tent’s lone cot whilst the medic handed him a small chitin case. He twisted it open and regarded the aqueous skins floating therein.

‘Do you--?’ The medic’s wan face was furrowed by hesitation, and Lyle tried to force his deadened face into something warmer as he shook his head at the trencher woman. It still stung him, how astonished she’d been that he personally selected her for his task.

‘They had me practice with some before we left, thank you.’ And he touched the delicate membranes, had them adhere to his fingertips and then raised them one by one to each of his eyes. It took longer than his dignity would have liked—such an abominable wincer and blinker he was. Shiga giggled at his expense. Yet she broke off when he glowered back.

‘Ah,’ she coughed.

‘Do I look like a Yggdraeli “lich”?’ he inquired sardonically, trying to distract himself from the sting as the membranes dissolved into his eye and imparted their color, trying to fix his sights on the tent pole behind Shiga. The color was supposed to distribute even regardless, but keeping still was generally advised.

‘Uncannily; you ought to eat more.’

‘You aren’t the medic in the room.’

‘Tent, lazim.’

‘You and your banalities.’

‘If I may,’ the medic (Ysola) interjected, her long jaw set, and Lyle obediently consented to having a light shone at his eyes and to roll them every which direction for her, to read a few runes and letters in the common tongue off a scroll for her.

‘How is it you mancefactor these way out here, without the heavy technomancy?’ he wondered politely, but with genuine interest.

‘If one dismisses strict sanitation and safety protocols several steps may be dismissed. It’s just mixing up the right solution and pouring it into a mould. The mould is hardest, but there are enough technomancers around that fancy themselves craftsmen in search of a challenge. It reminds me of what we used to make when we couldn’t go to medic-center, doing it without the tech…’ But she glanced at Shiga and ducked her head, frowning. She wanted to remember that part of the mechtrensche, her homeopathy and other remedies, without the impediment of a sense of deficiency. Fondly.

Silence, then: ‘It appears fine.’

‘Blessings upon your grace.’ A Reshtian saying. Most trenchers were rather adherent, in their own fashion.

Lyle nodded and, addressing Shiga through her. ‘Off with us, then to leave you to your work.’

‘The materials you gave me for some research—I’ve wanted a long time to have leave for it. I--.’

‘No sense in idling here while I dodder around in the mountain, is there Mancer Ysola?’ he demanded harshly.

The medic ducked her head, rebuked, and he swore to himself as Shiga scrutinized him. He was willing to bet she hadn’t pondered over how to answer his query from before at all. His suspicions were confirmed as he ducked out briskly with her. She began to clear the discomfort from the encounter with the medic after he had regarded her with impatience for some moments, and she began in the most…

‘When they leer like that. Yeah. Well when they do it’s just—so—well it’s disgusting first. And it’s obvious who they prefer so you keep marking and hating yourself. And it’s like they’re asking you to go away, like they can’t think about anything else if you’re there and you’re an imposing fael if you do—how are we supposed to “take initiative” and be good soldiers that way, not taken serious? And then the pay issue keeps us isolated too or else you gotta date around for some sop soft enough he’ll find a way to pay off someone for enough swill to get you pissed once in a while. Then it’s like they think the leering was right all along. And it’s so damn lonely with them acting like you want ‘em, like even that khacking pox is such an honor, and--.’

Initially, Lyle focused his whole, frank regard on her, but soon he found himself gritting his teeth as she prattled on in exasperation. He regretted pausing. His hunched shoulders and stained eyes tilted toward the next in the line of errands before him. Should have known. Should have known he hadn’t the patience today. Scrat—it was all so insignificant and petty when she complained about anything and everything at once that way, as though it all deserved solving. And hadn’t he asked for what she thought he could, or should--?

But of course she didn’t know. They never knew. No one knew. Where to carve out the bounds.

The lazim tried to remind himself to stop. He was the one who wanted answers, he had every capacity to analyze her stream-of-consciousness himself. Keeping his interpretation from wishful or arrogant deviances from the reality she was hammering in his head was his own poxed prerogativ—but honestly, complaining that they preferred shapely dark girls—no, he only wanted to dismiss it all as shallow and mean now because he was comparing sorrows, and that never—no, you were supposed to use the one to divine the structure of the other…

Even while he pleaded her mutely to sew her lips some part in the back of his mind knew it had significance. Picking and preferring that way, there was an element of proprietorship in it wasn’t there? And he knew the hungry stares, the way the intent to violate was enough. The Tome said something like it: there were atri in their hearts and, nurtured, could see to their behests.

He knew the way intent violated, reached with raking blighted fingers in until you were thrice more khacked than if you’d been touched. It was flesh that took disease, but the flesh of the mind was soft to the queer force of pattern-trammeled thoughts, dragged by their environs over and over down the same track by the merest gaze, suggestion, threat of another--. A wound impossible to communicate, to defend...

Lyle shook his head, and to his relief Shiga desisted.

‘What…?’

‘…much of all this you do more to heal by looking after yourself than I could by an order. That’s all I was thinking.’

He rolled his shoulders beneath her scrutiny and moved to press on, but she pursued.

‘…do you know something?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You could at least smile when you cut under me… you know, I understand why High Command is partial to you.’

‘They like having all their work done for them.’

‘No it’s how you are, I think.’

Lyle choked out a cynical laugh and moved on.

‘Hey--.’

I know what’s coming.

‘It’s not that you’re like them.’

‘Its because I serve them, Shiga, and don’t make the mistake of thinking that they’ll show mercy the moment I begin to pursue a trencher’s goals.’

Shiga gritted her teeth. ‘But your own goals are different. That’s what I’m saying is you’re not like other tre—people from the mechtrensche. It feels like what you try to do… like you’re some puzzle from the Tome, or an old scroll.’

Not like the other trenchers.

An accusation on the trencher’s head and eyes, as the Reshti said. Like the lazim was the scratted accusation. Petted by the teachers and would-be prophets at finneschool, officer school, and half tempted to preen. Only to come back to the mechtrensche’s choked scratmetal roads (without so much as a track for reimechs coasting down them or the newfangled spiritcages meant to stop the illness their magnetic beds otherwise bled)—scratmetal roads with lean, hungry, doglike men all flashing him looks like they’d kill him for fear. Fear, of a runt--. No, fear of shame. An accusation. No one liked to talk about bad blood anymore, but if it was a matter of morale... Other trenchers don’t try like you--. And he couldn’t deny their complicity, it would be like denying their humanity.

‘Shiga, I need to speak with Dezim Ujhan privately.’

 With his blunt dismissal her face fell, and Lyle tried to swallow the sick, bleak satisfaction he took in her perplexity. Let her work it out. Let someone else…

‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered, and shoved on away through her.

 

Lyle’s conference with his chosen communications officer was a welcome reprieve. The dezim was of mixed heritage (the sun had winked at rather than kissed him) and eminently reasonable as a consequence, because he was very confused about where he fit in the scheme of the army and very eager to focus his energies on the few islands of certainty he knew—his job, and his superiors.

‘And if you can persuade them to give the contract to Beni, not Esaine,’ Lyle was saying.

‘…it’s only, I’ve heard Esaine… and our superiors are quite fond--.’

‘Esaine is shrewd, nothing more. He knows who to give favors to, who talks, but he’s shrifted a number of quieter, humbler patrons. I’m confident he’ll do the same to us once we’re trapped in the contract and he has his land firm in hand.’

‘But he has powerful connections we may--.’

‘All the more reason to slice a few of his tendons now and nurture better options for the future. The nobleminded Illumni and Utterians may never consent to let a rising petty merchant into commerce with them but at the very least the latter can keep them enough on their toes they’re eager to please.’

‘Or to give more pliant khacks our place. Lazim you know their power is absolute.’

‘You can specifically mention it was on my insistence and you’re reluctant to put forth the suggestion. Let the landholders continue with no resistance and it’ll begin to seem natural to them, the way of the world, and then they really will trod us underheel like mice if we so much as protest. They’ll always get their way, but the more we make them dance the less arbitrarily they’ll be inspired to have desires.

‘Now, in addition I would like you to issue a reminder about checking in on the last Yggdraeli cohort we resettled, in order that we can have honest enticements for future turncoats and make all our high-minded peons sleep better and straighten up. And I know that the Zim Polani was issuing new orders to Lazim Fitte and Gezim Ollo. I told my units to make themselves available and I want feedback on who has offered and been taken up. Oh, and the northwest kitchens were beginning to look dingy. I think Gezim Madgnil could give a tactful flash to the manager’s ass if he hasn’t moved on my suggestion.’

The dezim paused. ‘That isn’t your side of camp.’

‘I only noticed frequent complaints. I don’t want anyone sick.’

He watched as Dezim Ujhan’s black-cuffed wrists rose, then rested on the glimmering runes and letters his xenocerebrate projected for his selection. The wrists were all Lyle noticed—even though xenocerebrates were common enough at officer’s school he couldn’t help a certain fascination with the amenity. More, even, than with his manuclip.

‘That should be most of it…’ Ujhan drawled slowly. ‘…perhaps you might digress and tell me then—if there’s a best place for this tooth of mine. I need it pulled.’

‘The Fourth Outpost has a medic named Rettzer who started out in the mechtrensche doing surgeries. You want safe and uninfected he’s your best--.’

‘Another outpos--?’

‘You can obtain a transfer for treatment there if you only apply through the right channels. Lazim Eruth isn’t very amenable to such requests; however--.’

‘Yes I understand.’

Lyle rose. ‘Everything clear?’

‘Remarkably--.’

An awkward cough. ‘Yes. Well then. Good. Health to your tooth.’

‘There is no tooth.’

‘Ah.’

Lyle struggled with the infantile desire to ask Ujhan what, precisely, the dezim thought he was while the officer, by far his senior, worried him with a concerned and somewhat resigned stare.

‘Please do naught but sleep tonight, Lazim.’

‘That’s impertinent.’ Hollow, rather than biting the words came.

Scowling, Lyle emerged from the tent and set off at a brisk pace for another. Stabbing, all the while, the pride threatening to well up from his gut. Not like the others. This walk was longer. The words had time to reverberate once, twice at angles through his dun and dead surroundings before he reached Vacteari’s dwelling, far beyond the aegis of her companions’, and he knew he needed to do better than put them out of mind, but he had no good answer.

He knocked on the tent pole.

‘Come.’

I hate to watch you isolate yourself in here. Lyle straightened his back and regarded Vacteari without expression. She was wearing the cast-off uniform of another Utterian soldier, little too loose on her frame, and puzzling over some simple writing he’d given her to sound out with crudely etched pictures. A flashstick, some coin, common foods… She would have a life in Utter when this was over. She would have a life. When she raised her eyes to lower at him he could see that assertion lying bald and frustrated there—her labors did not, to her, feel fruitful enough.

Oh, but he could empathize with that.

‘Are you here to practice again?’ She did not remark on the eyes he was wearing. Come to think, neither had Dezim Ujhan.

Lyle met Vacteari’s eyes with a lifted chin. It was the Yggdraeli equivalent of a nod—to have averted his gaze would have been a despondent shake of the head. For this reason, all Yggdraeli questions had to be posed in a format where “yes” signified the response that redounded more to the respondent’s honour.

Lyle was to be mute, so mastering these details was, for the moment, his very life. So literally his life…His heart squeezed, tried to pull his thoughts into the lambent, shock-and-chemical vortex of terror that had had him bristling all morning trying to lock it off with walls of firmer flesh and sinew. But he cast it aside and proceeded into Vacteari’s space with a studied disregard of her despite her scrutiny.

It was an ascetic space, schracke and heater and belongings each reservedly tucked to their own corners. The sole exception was a corner of her tent wherein she had painted some figures on a screen (black and red) and laid a wadded blanket at its base. To this Lyle proceeded. He stood, waiting with an eagerness he was surprised to find in himself.

Then Vacteari began:

‘Hark! Do not close off your heart by desire, but tend with your mind, and may these high words from beyond the gates of death, mould even the marrow of your bones and the fire in your loins. Little is your time and small your part but the end is not your enemy but your ever present companion. Ware the seed of waste and hubris, and the whispers and illusions that would lose you. Your mothers bore you in snares of blood and want, your very spirit is of flesh, and the Glkuor will not suffer but that to living dust it should decay rather than to consummate itself. Deny not Death, for in this only will you be made whole.’

Lyle painstakingly took himself through the routine Vacteari had instructed him in; she had no shortages of imprecations in store for him while she did, as attendance at religious services was by no means compulsory for the Yggdraeli, who had a rather more individualist relationship to the holy. However, he knew that she well knew what a wellspring of information such gathering places could be.

Besides, heretic he was to any and all creeds, he found it soothing—to beat his lower ribcage gently with a fist and rock back and forth and bow on cue. Vacteari told him that during an actual service those without the rather extreme vow of silence over their heads also chanted specialized responses to the service that made the cavern walls come alive.

With the overture complete, Vacteari began to recite one of many consecrated oral traditions from memory:

‘And when Wajarten’s chain (his tribe) yet warred with the then godless East (undoubtedly Ivekrainian raiding empires) there was one near to his spirit who prospered despite the indulgent, pliant flesh and soft mind he had taken at his mother’s breast…’

A story they had rehearsed before, one of the more common Vacteari said. He did not miss that she noticed he noticed the constant reference to the mother, her womb, nursing, and home in denoting the source of heroes’ flaws.

The few Southland writings on the Yggdraeli faith noticed the same. Granted, they were also penned primarily by Reshtian Miralists from the predominant sect that held Rue was a prophet (principally poor and country folk were of the opinion he was God incarnate) and so they saw themselves as above superstitions. Miralism was a faith in the design of the universe, perfectly compatible with empiricism insofar as its God was an absent one for much of the tradition—it was an unperfected empirimancy of how to be human, and it was the superiority of this sensible attitude and determination to see the universe as real and patterned, they held, that allowed the Southlands to advance so quickly. All that nonsense about human thought and spirit being different, all that doubt about whether the universe were comprehensible so prevalent in those who bothered to worry about how and what the significance could be of God visiting in human guise or the inevitability of Death and the sense one could live beyond it… so much distraction.

No matter how wont Vacteari and his homeland might be to read self-serving, glorifying, and consoling purposes into the wealth of Yggdraeli’s ecclesiastical stories; however, Lyle couldn’t hold with such an absurdly oversimplified conclusion. He was, just now, lamenting that Vacteari hadn’t chosen a new tale for him, because it seemed the “liches” had a spirit or tale tuned to the ambiguities of every social and psychomantical phenomena that beleaguered people writ large. A tale for emotions, for phenomena the Reshtian and common tongue lacked even words for…

‘You need to stop that.’

Lyle started.

‘You think too much,’ Vacteari elaborated unnecessarily, and he grimaced as he prepared to begin again. Yet she held out a hand. ‘While you were attentive, you were sufficient. If we go on you will only become anxious. There is little I can beat into you in the short time before the morrow. And I would like the time to help you rest.’

His lip twitched ironically.

‘You will rest.’

Lyle rubbed at his neck and changed the subject. ‘I—did not come… here. For breakfast. Early. You—alone. Sorry.’

‘As you will. We shall be pretending I am of your flesh in the mountain. Time enough then.’

Fair.

Lyle rubbed harder at his neck, until the skin bunched and burnt. Marks passed. There was nothing quite like marks raking across one’s mind, marks of utter silence. He fidgeted. And Vacteari considered him, opaquely. And he tried to find courage to make a guess. Always with people it was making a guess.

‘You… are scared, also. Why—for me you help… so—my thanks. But--.’

‘Softminded,’ she scowled, drawing back. A true guess. ‘Always you are distracted by whoever touches you. It is why you are so sick, always. And never finished with your tasks.’

Lyle had nowhere near the command of Yggdraeli he needed to sort through that. ‘I only—I want ask… why me? For the mountain.’

‘You need it.’ Vacteari retorted as though it were obvious. ‘You judge my purpose to be wrong. So you will see.’

‘…I do not…’ but Lyle wasn’t convinced himself.

‘Mm.’

‘—many knots.’

‘One knot. You are distracted by all the threads in it and don’t see it. But in the mountain you will see it. You will focus. You could be less soft with focus. Help us, honestly. Listen.’

‘Rue above...’

Lyle pinched the bridge of his nose. Midday was shadows away, and already he was ready to sink with weariness. Soft-minded. Focus.

He tilted his head at Vacteari; he was a stunted man, and though not considerably so she was tall for a woman. They were almost perfectly even, and if he didn’t set his shoulders straight she stood well above him.

With effort, he set them. The mountain would demand it, on the morrow.

‘I have—work. Needs… concentration. And you—make… happen. True?’

Vacteari shrugged and left him staring at her rigidly straight spine.

‘Whatever happens, I only made space for it.’

            To his chagrin, she had not made space for much. He read somewhere upward of one hundred sheaves of reports. However, he doubted if his harried mind drew half the connections between them it should have—the words of the dezims, hazims, and fizims under him were so many half-articulated concerns, mere alarms assaulting him from every direction. They roused him to a state of positive hypertension, little more.

            From his place beneath the Yggdraeli’s iconography (how starkly the dull olive green of his khacks contrasted with the vivid carmine paint) he glanced surreptitiously at Vacteari. It was a marvel of human perception that despite her discipline he could discern some hopeful expectation about her. Perhaps it was only because every other feature he could recommend of her seemed ancient—a grudge on behalf of an entire womenfolk’s history, a pale face just beginning to stretch and take on the hallmarks of middling age (he estimated that she was around thirty cycles). His own, ardent desire to aid her in nursing her hopes depressed him.

            “Cynicism itself can be naïve, can’t it? When you refuse to celebrate any but the most impossible victories.”

            One of Maura’s small sayings, half from the Treatises on Rue’s words, half eerily familiar… but it wasn’t rebuke enough. So far from a Pyrrhic or hollow victory Lyle feared that Vacteari would learn that in a subjugated land women’s lot could only get worse. He wanted desperately to plead that she didn’t know the half of the ways kin could be turnt against kin. But instead he dwelt there in lonely silence and let it play across his expression whenever he put his manuclip away from him and the dragging shadows weighed too much on him.

            Beyond even the mechtrensche, Utterian migrants squatted in huts and burrows. Driven from what might as well be called slavery in mines and logging reservations and a few agricultural lands. Starved already on arrival, and ready to work so poxed-poor cheap they put the whole mechtrensche in a furor. Even Lyle only ventured past the city once (owing not a little to his own cowardice) to see them. They were memories smeared by defensive, agonized omission. Memories that preserved only eye-popping impressions of starveling, bulging, hollow socket gazes accusing him, of bodies stained black and purpled with frostbite and fleas. And all of it overcast with the omnipresent smell, overpowering in the few summer months, of layers of piss, refuse, and misery.

            To the mechtrensche that place was Zekkar itself and its denizens were atri one and all. Only Shiga’s class, perhaps, could afford pity. For all Lyle’s life, hunger and the migrant wastes were synonymous, and hunger was the symbol of the omnipresent, feverish dread that kept the mechtrensche churning. Every time his mother lost a job or a tenant in her body, spent her pittance on powders, every time either of them fell sick, it loomed. The threat that this time that loan wouldn’t pull through she’d not (for all he loathed it) sleep her way into a new one of the meagre occupations available (for Resht and Illumn both principally wanted the mines and lumber, and for Utterians to purchase their own industrial and handicrafts goods).

            How self-righteous his youth had been, that he hated every trencher around him for screaming over very uptick in the waste’s population. Yet even now he gritted his teeth when his subordinates rained malediction on their restive peasant underlings. Why Utter expected to buy them out with service when their kin remained…

            Stop. Focus.

            But the fact that the very system of order he lauded had created--.

            Yet there was some mobility, more mobility and if only Resht and Illum would stop khacking it up then--.

            But…

            Lyle drew a shuddering breath and snapped his manuclip violently closed as he bolted to his feet. ‘Sorry.’

            Vacteari arched a brow. ‘Four shadows of your… duty.’

            ‘No—did it. No finish. No… work…?’

            ‘Ah, yes I understand.’ There was little pity in her voice, more rebuke. He took a strange solace from that. Twitching with impatience though he was. The fact of his quest in the mountain didn’t feel real yet. Would he feel better about what he was doing when it did? He didn’t know. It was too selfish, to want that of all things. He could focus if his real concern was doing well.

            Pride, nimh-minded pride--.

            Vacteari only watched him with dark eyes. There was nothing more she or anyone else could do for him. He bit his lip.

            Prior to stalking out, he didn’t bother to specify that he was going to make another restless circuit of his volunteer debaram (ensuring that they all understood their duties for whilst he was in the mountain) and berate himself for dwelling on a trauma that was little more than awareness.

            He didn’t bother, because it was too ineffectual to afford him the slightest measure of security. The most he could hope for was to innervate himself so that he could rest as they all berated him to. Rest, and settle the malignant spirits, the chemicals he’d given reign over him enough that he could conquer it again.

            Conquer it. Impose order.

            He cackled blackly at the irony.