113 - So easy to destroy, so hard to create or repair

Inodem deaths were caused by female attempt to kidnap ring-fighter

The Pages, Aras 4, 58^th-last YPA [Enchian version]

The mysterious deaths of ten guards at the Lefaetas Inodem, it turns out, were the result of an elaborate plot by female Yeoli darkworkers to seize and remove the ring-fighter Karas Raikas from Arko, which was foiled due to the demonic miscreants being arrested on suspicion of simple burglary.

About midnight on the night of Selinae 26, the same night of the Inodem deaths, two people who were not Mezem residents were spotted in the Mezem courtyard, now being refurbished into an enlarged bath, by alert Mezem guards. The guards’ complement has been doubled since a burglar, who still remains at large, stole six-hundred gold chains from the Mezem a month ago.

Though they turned out to be women, the intruders resisted arrest at first by claiming to be avid Mezem fans desperate to visit their heart-throb among the fighters, then by fighting their way free. A Mezem guard was killed and two more wounded, and one of the intruders died by cutting herself with a poisoned knife she was carrying. The other was captured alive after being struck on the head from behind.

Both women, who were blond, blue-eyed, fluent in Arkan and wearing their hair fessas-length, were each found to be equipped with a personal arsenal of swords, daggers and throwing-knives, and three sets of forged identity papers. On examination, both proved to be unpurified. Under truth-drugging, the one survivor revealed that they were actually Yeoli and working for the nation’s spy and assassination service, Ikal.

The questioning further revealed that the women were two of a party of twenty men and women, all of whom were able to pass as Arkans, who had been sent by Yeola-e to remove Karas Raikas, whose own truth-drugging has revealed that he is Fourth Siefenkas Siaeranoas, the missing head of state of Yeola-e, from the city. The Marble Palace has been aware since he arrived of his true identity.

Eighteen Yeoli darkworkers were assigned to kill the lefaetas guards on the Rim and lower the platform, while the two women were to fetch Raikas from his Mezem room, after entering the Mezem quietly during the day amidst the usual crowd of hangers-on, observing him training and concealing themselves under the stands until an appointed time at night.

The fiendish plan went awry due to the women being unaware that Raikas had been taken to the Marble Palace for further truth-drugging after the fighters’ afternoon training session. After searching his room, they were spotted scaling a wall inside the Mezem. The darkworkers who had seized the lefaetas, in the meantime, fled the scene.

Under truth-drug, the witch-like female revealed that she and her cohorts had been in Arko several eight-days, and the plan had been aborted several times already due to Raikas being elsewhere than he habitually was, including on the Presentation Platform, being corrected after a bungled escape attempt of his own. The conspirators never informed Raikas himself of the plan, for fear of him being truth-drugged.

The surviving barbarian predicted that her eighteen partners in crime, who remain at large under different Arkan identities, would likely make a second attempt.

“We advise citizens to be on the alert and report anyone who behaves, speaks or moves in a suspicious manner,” says Morrilas Tekam, solas, of the Ministry of Internal Serenity. “Anyone, that is, of either sex. It is the most savage and inhuman barbarism to permit and train women to engage in such perfidy, but nonetheless, peoples like the Yeolis do it, so that Arkans should not merely beware of suspicious men.

“We also point out how this incident confirms the futility of escape forays for Mezem fighters, and caution against any and all attempts. Concerning Karas Raikas in particular, he has now been injected with the grium sefalian at the orders of the Marble Palace, and only the Marble Palace holds the antidote, so anyone who removes him sentences him to a slow and agonizing death.”

The surviving female Ikal agent remains in Marble Palace custody undergoing further procedures before her execution.

†

I wondered if I knew her, from the School of No Name. None of us knew each other’s real names—except mine, which everyone knew —but we did know faces. I turned my mind away from imagining what she was suffering, since it would accomplish nothing but causing me more pain.

So they were trying to rescue me. Of course they’d try again. How, All-Spirit, how, could I somehow get word to them, “They’re done truth-drugging me; try again but this time get me in on it!”? Trust, I told myself. As Mana kept saying, my people were not weaklings or cowards.

I had to laugh, though, at the claim that Kurkas had known who I was from the start, when he had for only three eight-days.

For my part, I could keep looking for chances to escape, and meanwhile seek a Haian’s knowledge of the grium. (Minis had sent to me a bit of a scholarly piece on it, which said that it had originally been invented to cure killing growths; trust Arkans to make it into what it was meant to relieve. But the excerpt said only that the Marble Palace claimed to have an antidote.)

After what I’d seen done to Erilas, I dared not even ask Skorsas to cast about among the city Haians, but Mana was willing. There were two or three-hundred Haians practicing in the City Itself then—all men, of course, since Arkans wouldn’t trust a woman—but only twenty or so were held to have any knowledge of the grium sefalian. I went to the five who were held by all to know the most; three said if there was an antidote, they didn’t know it and knew of no incidences of successful antidoting; the other two said there definitely was not, and there were only two possible cures. The Haian who was most confident in his knowledge, Nemonden, laid them out for me, in gentle tones.

Drastic goes without saying, I thought, to brace myself as he began to explain. The first cure was a long regimen of rest and extremely strict dieting, including long fasts, “which,” he said, “makes strenuous physical exertion impossible.” So much for that. The other was quick, but dangerous, and could only be done on Haiu Menshir: surgery.

“Surgery?” I asked him. “In my head? I didn’t think it was possible to do that, and leave the patient alive.” He assured me it was done by several healers on the island, usually to remove growths in the brain, though, being the most extreme of treatments, it was used only when death would otherwise be certain. People were sometimes saved, though some came out of it brain-addled, which in my case would be as bad as death, or worse. I remembered how little time the Imperial Pharmacist had needed to afflict me with it. The shudders came, as they sometimes did when I thought about the grium, bad enough that Nemonden put his arm round my shoulders. So easy to destroy, I thought, so hard to create, or repair.

So that way was closed too; I could hardly beg permission of the Marble Palace to go to Haiu Menshir to get its own expedient eliminated, promising I’d be right back to fulfil my role as hostage, and finish my fifty fights while I was at it. My chances depended on my escaping. Needless to say, the further advanced the grium was, the less the patient’s likelihood of cure.

But in the meantime, Nemonden told me, I could slow the grium’s growth by keeping the diet he laid out, taking a Haian remedy he made up for me, daily, and frequently ingesting a certain drug that he did not make up for me. “You already take it,” he said. “Not here, since I disallow it, but elsewhere, constantly, by what you have told me. What is in truth a noxious habit, that I would normally urge you to stop, will stand you in good stead, it turns out.” The stuff was in katzeriks, so I was taking a dose every time I smoked one. Some part of me felt vindicated.

“You should go to a psyche-healer, too,” he said, quickly adding as polite people, as opposed to commanders in armies, always do when recommending psyche-healers, “I know you are not mad. But your circumstances impose the most extreme strain on you, and Persahis—that’s the one I’d recommend—can help when you need it, which you do.” I didn’t try to deny it.

I had one more mainstay than most ring-fighters have, in Mana; but he was in the maelstrom with me, while this Haian, outside it, could be a rock. I went to his office next.

His method was both touch and talk at once; he’d have me lie on his table, usually face-down, and pour out my heart. Feelings that are severe beyond expressing, as in extreme circumstances, stay festering in the body and will in time act as poison; so Haians say, and I already believed in a vague way, but never so vividly as when Persahis, by pressing his fingers into some exact part of my back or neck or head, seemed to slip them straight into my heart.

I would lose myself in anguish or terror or shame or rage or all of them at once, as purely and wholly as a baby does, and afterwards feel relaxed as a wrung-out cloth, and much better. He also reminded me, by his very Haian-ness, that the world was much bigger than Arko, which helped. I scheduled visits with him for every four days. But it would be no cure; the only cure, we both knew, was freedom from my situation, which he could not give me.

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