162 - It is ratified

It’s not inevitable, Skorsas said to me. You are forty-eight chains, and the Living Greatest. For you there is some consideration. Go speak to the Director. Remind him of all you’ve suffered.

I scratched on his office door. Ah, my boy, he smarmed, my much-improved Karas Raikas of the smouldering gaze, how kind of you to visit your master! The marble desk, the whole room, was pristine and shining as ant-picked bones, not a scrap of paper or a pen in sight, all of it pure decor. Only one thing lay before him: a palm-sized brass disk with a spinning pointer on it, and segments graven Yes, No, Maybe, Dismiss Someone and so forth, which he twirled absently with his silk-gloved finger, in wait for a decision that needed making.

I said I will not fight Mana the Wolf, die cast gates fast all go home. He said, what? I’d spoken in Yeoli. I said it again in Arkan. But if you refuse, you die, he said. I know, I said. After all you’ve suffered, he said, forty-eight fights, Riji Kli-fas, all the Mahid trouble and anything, you’d throw it all away now? I said, you heard me. Or are you deaf? I will not fight Mana the Wolf. I was afraid he’d throw my duty to my people at me, but he said I don’t understand what it was with you and Yeolis and the Marble Palace and my most brilliant fighter is my most inscrutable enigma, aigh, aigh, aigh.

I said, are you serious? Everyone above and below you knows my real name, who I was—and you don’t…? He said, you act as if you have some significance that I, and the Mezem, didn’t give you, you conceited chit; tell me your real name, then, as if it means anything. I almost fell off my chair, laughing. I’m not telling, no, master, you keep your eye on this space for the Serpent’s Tale, the Pen that Knows All: as they say, you always hear it there first! He said it must be the madness of genius, as with Riji; then turned to wheedling. Raikas, please understand, Mana is the highest chainer aside from you and think of the chip receipts!

Then the door opened, and Meras Mahid came in.

Fancy meeting you here, I said. His ancient, lizard-like eyes slid off mine to fix the Director’s, which widened like a rabbit’s. You perhaps recall the Imperator’s intentions regarding this very person, Director, Meras said. I have been sent to remind you.

Whatever the Imperator intends between sucklings, Forlanas, I said, I will not fight Mana the Wolf. So I will it, so will it be. He looked from me to Meras and back several times, the rabbit caught between two wolves.

The Mahid and I traded a look, though he showed nothing. It seemed we shared one thing, a measure of the man. I signed at the brass thing. Give that a flick; maybe you’ll find your answers there. Was that the faintest twitch of a smile, on that reptile face?

I strung them all along, for a few days more. My forty-ninth was coming up, as was Mana’s, and the match-making for our fiftieths. He would be put on suicide watch the moment we were matched; perhaps I would, too. Barely a moment before the Pages deadline, I told half the writers I would not fight my best friend no matter what it meant, and sensed by their questions what a beautiful tragedy they’d craft of it; the other half I told, actually I might, since Mana and I have had something of a falling out. You did this just to fik us up, you overrated little shit, they yelled at me the next day when they’d sorted it out. The Director summoned me to his office, to ask me precisely what my intentions were, since the Pages still had it as a mystery. I did that just to fik them up, I answered. You know my intentions; I only told you about five times, but since the sixth seems necessary: I will not fight Mana the Wolf. And yet… well, life isn’t so bad, and there was that girl we were both after when we were twelve… No. I can’t. But… he made a pass at Niku, did you know that? But, no, what am I saying, he is Yeoli, I mustn’t. But… O dear master, do you mind if I borrow that brass thing on fight-day?

He slammed his white-gloved fists on the marble, which is something for an Arkan, and yelled, How in Hayel is anyone supposed to know how much chips for this are worth, whether it’s going to be a non-fight, a drugged fight, or what? Don’t you know the price goes up and down with every wind from your noisome mouth, you young savage, and fortunes are won and lost unjustly every moment?

My heart goes out to them, I said. But, the excitement! The drama!

†

Cheng. Chevenga. Fourth Chevenga. Where are you? Come out of it, back to earth.” We were in the bath, after training. He didn’t take baths, usually, preferring just the fall of water over his body. He was thinking this was the only place we could talk. Our four Mahid stood like black pilasters in the steam, one of them holding the end of the chain attached to the collar around my neck.

“Two great Yeoli fighters, friends from childhood, tragically matched against each other! The heart weeps.... crack out the mourning dye, that washes out.”

“Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e, don’t speak to me in that shit-spitting spew of a language.”

“But these things are untranslatable, heart’s brother! You just can’t say in Yeoli or Enchian, the excitement! The drama!”

“Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e semanakraseye d’Yeola’e!” He backhanded me across the face. The sting made me notice him, fix my eyes on his. “Will you get back here and listen to me? Semana kra, your people are talking!”

“It’s all right, I have a plan,” I said, in Yeoli. I had told Skorsas, find me the best couple of assassins in Arko, price no object; in fact I’ll throw in a chip for the seats right beside my gate for my fiftieth fight. Turning green, he’d asked me who I meant to kill, afraid it was Kurkas. No, no, don’t worry, I’d said, it’s someone much easier, shouldn’t be trouble at all if they’re any kind of professionals. The Director? he guessed. What good will that do? Not Mana, can’t be. I said, do I have to handle this through someone else? Take this letter, that sets it all out.

“I do, too,” Mana said. “Difference is, you’ve told no one yours, and mine has been ratified. We went under the stands yesterday and it was unanimous chalk. I’m telling you only so it won’t be a surprise.”

“I’ve taken out a contract on myself,” I said.

“Cancel it. Semana kra, heart’s brother. Your people need you. You have to win fifty and be ransomed.”

“The grium’s killing my mind, haven’t you noticed?”

“You’re going to go to Haiu Menshir and have that cured.”

“I’ll just politely ask the Mahid transporting me to Yeola-e, ‘Mind letting me go so I can stop off on Haiu Menshir?’ And they’ll say, ‘Oh sure, Raikas! Off you go! Safe surgery!’?”

“I meant after you’re free. Besides, you’ll have a better chance of escaping from guards transporting you than out of this pit.”

“If I have any mind left. I see things like worms crawling in my porridge, now, Mana; I have nightmares when I’m not asleep; I can’t read any more, I can’t follow the arguments. My thoughts jump around to all sorts of weird places.”

“You told me Jinai saw these things, but also saw you living after. You’ve been standing by that; why stop now?”

“You know, sometimes I see tiny little Kurkas-heads. Isn’t that delicious? Yeola-e might do better with you than with me. I bet you could take Kallijas Itrean.” The man whose father had kept him out of the Mezem was assigned to Yeola-e now, and by all reports was making as much hash of us as a single champion imaginably can.

“Maybe, but I’m no chakrachaseye. You alone can do that. Heart’s brother...” He laid his hand on my shoulder. “It’s time for me to lay down my life in Yeola-e’s defense. Too many Yeolis have died to save your life already for me not to. You remember when I swore that oath, under the stands?”

I could not argue with that. I could not speak. “Semana kra,” he said, more gently. “It’s as I said; it’s ratified.”

Inevitability fell across my heart like a great gate closing. I couldn’t think of what to say, except, “If I knew exactly where my emotion is in me, I’d have hacked it out with a knife by now.”

He lifted his arms out of the churning water in which we sat to put them around my neck. “Cheng, my heart’s brother. I love you.”

“I love you, too.” He pulled my head onto his shoulder. The sobs started slight, like shivers, then turned into earthquakes all through me. I wanted to scream, so I went underwater and let them out there, coming up for air now and then, so Skorsas and Iska and boys wouldn’t come running, and guess what he’d told me, knowing us as the Mahid did not. He held me so hard it hurt.

I should not seek comfort from him, who now faced the hardest thing to face, but I spoke my heart anyway. “This is going to kyashin kill me.”

“You can’t let it.”

“So many times, I felt like I couldn’t go on, and found the strength somehow, but one of these times it’s just going to give out for good, and maybe this will be what does it. I am dying inside. I have been, the whole time.”

“You can weather it. I know you. Besides, you have to. A thousand times, semana kra. Think of the voice of every single person in Yeola-e, calling your name.”

I buried my head in his shoulder with a gasp, as if I could hide from their millions of voices there. “You will go home, to fight, Chevenga,” he said, his voice sonorous through his body. “I won’t; but I’ll have given my life to win the war as sure as if I’d fallen in a battle.”

He would never again see everyone at home, all those he loved. He had but one: me. And here I was, blubbering like a baby on his shoulder. I lifted my head, and took a deep breath, and then ducked under to cleanse my face of tears.

“What are you going to do?” I said.

“You aren’t going to be there. That’s all you need to know.” I felt sick, as many ways he might do it flashed through my mind. He’d act before we were matched and they restrained him, I saw. That was why he was telling me now. I wondered whether he just didn’t want me to see, or was afraid that at the last I wouldn’t be able to help trying to stop him.

“I will love you from All-Spirit,” he said.

Tears burned in my eyes again, but I resisted them. “I will remember that. I’ll look for you in my dreams. And, of course, when I get home, I’ll explain it all.”

He had an ebony arm-ring that he wore all the time, given to him by his mother. Under the water, he touched his finger to it, and said quietly, “Chevenga, I give this to you. Not while the four spooks are watching, too obvious; but know, that’s my intent. I’ll leave a note for Jamaias as well, but in case something goes amiss: you know.”

“All right. I know.” I took another deep breath, and lifted my head. It was time to tell him what he must hear. “Mana…” I took his hands, and fixed his eyes with mine. “Don’t worry. I will get out, I will have myself healed, I will go home, I will turn the war around. I will do it. I will do no less for you, and for the other Yeoli ring-fighters, and for all Yeola-e. My pain for what you will do, I will use to infuse myself with strength against Arko. I know your spirit will fight with me; I will feel it.”

My own words infused me with strength. I suddenly felt it, singing all through my limbs, and heard the wind and the voice of the harmonic singer, as I had not for a long time, and knew it was shining out through my eyes, that were locked with his. I saw the last thing I expected; his face lighting up into his jaunty smile. It didn’t even look forced. Tears burned again. All-Spirit, how I loved him; how could I not? I didn’t know what I’d do without him. But I must not think that now.

“Of course you’ll do it,” he said. “I never doubted, for an instant. My spirit will indeed be with you. That arm-ring will be warm with it.”

“Yes.”

He put his arms around me again. “We must not make this look too much like farewell for good,” he said. He was going to do it tonight, I saw. We would get out of the bath, towel off and go to our rooms, and I would never see him living again. I put my arms around him. “Just as if we’re doing it to give each other strength.” I didn’t know that I could feign that well. “Farewell, Chevenga,” he whispered. “Go with All-Spirit.”

“Farewell, Mana,” I whispered back, suddenly numb, so that I could make it smooth. “Go with All-Spirit, too, my heart’s brother.” I was outside myself again. It happened so easily, now, just a sliding sideways and a little dizziness, and all was well since nothing mattered. He knuckled my shoulder with his fist casually, and got out.

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161 - Only by being the other

Towards the end of his reign, the Living Greatest makes peace with his fate

By Roras Jaenenem : Watcher of the Ring, Aras 1, 57^th-to-last Year of the Present Age

Going into his last five fights before his liberation—if he wins all of them, which seems overwhelmingly likely—the raven-haired enfant terrible of the Mezem has undergone a surprising change.

Lightning Loner, it seems, has freed himself of the austere Yeoli custom forbidding the wearing of any finery made of any metal, base or precious, now constantly sporting a spectacular pair of gold bracelets that mimic his Yeoli warrior’s wristlets, and a sparkling of golden finger-rings on his naked black-furred hands.

He’s begun dressing as his boy and aspiring couturier Skorsas Trinisas wanted him to at the start, donning previously unused scarlet, black and gold outfits that magnificently push the edge of fashion and decency. An unnamed source within the Fighter’s Quarters says, “There’s half a wardrobe full that he’s never touched before. Skorsas actually doesn’t like it; he’s saying, ‘I thought these things were him, but now I really know him, they’re not.’” The formerly-modest fighter, though, has apparently decided that they are.

He’s loosened up in the area of vices, regularly drinking a cup of wine with meals and even indulging in that most decadently-unYeoli of failings, Arkanherb, now and then.

But most striking to the faithful scribes of the Ultimate Sport, Loner, who made it an iron-clad rule never to let a single quotable word to us pass his lips for his first forty-four fights, has suddenly become downright talkative.

Friendly would be too generous a term. Often he excoriates persons who may not be excoriated in these, or any, pages, with a wit as sharp as his ancient sword, but unquotably. Other times, he recounts tales of the Mezem and elsewhere, which often as not turn out to be, shall we say, exaggerated. Now and then it’s a lecture on strategy and tactics; occasionally he simply indulges in flights of plays on words, sometimes bilingually. Those who ask him a serious question (for example, “Why the change of heart?”) are always in danger of an absurd answer (“I went to the temple—yes, in chains, of course—and the light of the glory of Celestialis fell over me. I’ve felt nothing but love in my heart for you all ever since.”)

The Director is delighted. “It was always painful to my heart that Loner, now the Ring’s most precious man, seemed ill-at-ease here,” he says. “But I think he has finally settled the war in his own heart, and settled into his good fortune. I am pleased beyond pleased. What makes him happy makes me, and all of us, happy.”

“Skorsas says my clothes are not me?” says the reformed Loner, with arched brows and a quirking grin. “What is me is whatever I want. I am a thousand things. Here in the palace of death, I am grateful, loving death for one thing: it is an inexhaustible source of jokes.” He lets out a laugh.

†

I thought and dreamed as well as spoke in Arkan, and it seemed to me I could no longer speak any Yeoli but “Hold still while I brand you.” I didn’t decide any of these things, I recall, in fact I barely noticed them, aside from admiring the flash of my finger-rings, or laughing hysterically when I thought, “Hear ye, hear ye, Servants of Buzzard Assembly: he’s down, spare or kill, white or red, chalk or charcoal? Semana kra.” I decided nothing; it was more as if it slowly dawned on me that it was much easier to let the current carry me than swim upstream.

I made forty-five fights, and began to see things in my food, as Jinai had predicted, jam with worms squirming in it, maggots crawling out of the sauce to the edge of my plate. I killed more Yeolis; my fifth to second-last fights were all Yeolis. I said to Iska, “I’m mad, I know,” and it ceased bothering me. I donated money to the orphanages, wanting to do it anonymously, but Skorsas insisted on loudly announcing the Karas Raikas Beneficent Fund.

I made forty-six, and as I was coming out of the shower he said Celestialin, as if it were my name. I said, sorry? He answered, Celestialin is the divine hero of Arkan myth, who will save Arko on its day of deepest peril. It had come to him in a flash like the sun’s blinding light that I must be him. Save Arko, you’ve got to be joking, I said. I’m the last person in the world who’d be him. I will destroy Arko, if anything. Besides, how can Celestialin be Yeoli? But he was quite serious; he’d hired a scholar to check through the Book, the Arkan work they claim is the Gods’ word, and never does it explicitly say Celestialin is Arkan. It does explicitly say that the Chosen One will deny vociferously that he is the Chosen One, so that didn’t get me off.

Perhaps Arko can only be saved by a taste of fire and a bath of blood, purification, he said. You are too perfect not to be divine.

As the Mahid are trying to teach me, I thought, their will is mine; I belong in their hands, under them. Shininao came to me in my dreams.

He was big, big enough for his leather and steel wings, the ribs curved like sword-blades, to enwrap my nakedness, strong beyond imagining, to cradle my weight on onyxine gossamer. His eyes were blue and his beak had the mouth of a woman on the end, a kiss like warm roses, a long wet binding tongue. “I give myself to you,” I told him, throwing my head to the side, to open up my right ear. “We’ve always been close; let’s consummate it.” We made our pillow-talk, our jokes. I always had to remember to thank him while I could still speak, to kiss his talon for making it so merciful. It was ecstasy beyond ecstasy, the beak pressing deep into my ear, slow as a healer’s probe, his tongue sliding tenderly in through my every vein, to freeze my heart in his warmth; that would kill the grium, robbing it of its nourishment, and tear away all my cares; I could feel them smooth off my face, as the peace of stillness filled me. No matter that I was in a crypt, stuffed unburned like an Arkan into this great gaudy stone place that had eaten so many; no matter the thousand blood-dripping ghosts seeping from the walls. I threw my arms wide and came and came and came.

I made forty-seven, and read of the Arkans advancing north towards Vae Arahi. The people wills, Cheng, Mana kept saying to me, when he could. The people wills, we need you, hang on, Cheng, hang on. In the same tone, leaves rustle in courtyards. I’ll hang on like Chinisenga, I joked, but it fell flat. Celestialin, you must live to save us, said Skorsas. By ‘us,’ he meant Arkans.

I made forty-eight, and to my amazement and delight, Kurkas invited me up for dinner; in fact he honored me, entrusting me to join him in his sanctum, so many of the Empire’s greatest treasures laid out before me. There are no guards there, no spring-darts.

Once we were sitting I sprang up, and jammed a gold-leafed chair up under the doorknob. To strike him speechless I raised Sibbas’s Flying Machine in my hands, and flung it straight up against the ceiling, to smash into a rain of shards. It worked; he sat as white-faced and glass-eyed as the dead.

“It is the truth of life,” I said, as I crushed the three bird’s eggs under my heel, “that all one has can be destroyed. Those you have trusted will betray you, kill those you love, try to tear down what you are, in the deepest sense. I have learned that; you have not; you will now. I call you out: be me, Kurkas Aan, be the world that your hands touch so much, and know what they do.

“Your home will be sacked,” I said, as I drew the antique sword and slashed the paintings, “all your possessions ruined, all your slaves… ‘ I drew the bird out of its cage, screeching and flapping, by the neck, let him think for a while I meant to kill it, then thrust it out the window, and let it fly. “…freed!”

“It will die out there,” he said, in an ashen, stupid voice.

“As the old saying goes,” I said, “if it comes back, it is yours.” I have never known joy until now, I thought, shattering a row of glass figurines with one sweep of my foot, while with my hand I held his childhood drawing of a winged lion in the candle-flame. The euphoria of destruction is giddy, wild, intoxicating like a drug; its sweetness increases with the value of the things destroyed. Some warrior-turned-philosopher once said this comes in truth of the delight in throwing off the bounds of the material, in freedom, however short-lived, from the rule that everything has a cost. Perhaps; I’d thrown off all other bounds.

I remember how the miniature Hero looked with his head, then without, just a pair of godlike shoulders, while the great jawbone in my hands tingled with the stroke, and my laughter filled the air. “All you have created, burned; all you have thought inviolate, violated, all you have collected…” I paused before The Delights of Celestialis, decided I liked it, unhooked it and stood it by the door to take away later. “…looted!” With the bone shouldered, I stood over the glass city of Arko. Those blue porcelain eyes poured out silent tears now, like cracked dishes leaking, though still enthralled by horror, and disbelief of a horror so great, like the eyes of people watching a massacre.

“You who have wanted to possess me,” I said, “know nothing of me, as you are learning now. You who have such power, know nothing of power; that too, you will learn now. It’s only by being the other, what we call chiravesa, one truly can.” I raised the bone in two hands. “This is power.” He froze deeper still. “Beg me not to, Kurkas.”

His voice came out a rasping scrape. “What I will do to you for this, barbarian, what I will do to you…”

“Don’t threaten—beg! Threats won’t touch me; I am free. Threats are for the future; only this moment is now, and we are only here, now. There’s only one thing you can do: beg me.”

With a clarity like a child’s, he spoke his heart. “Shefen-kas. I don’t know how.”

“Too bad, then!” A sweet tinkling crash, the tiny glass Avenue of Statuary made. He screamed, as if I’d run him through the stomach. “And one day,” I shouted over the din, “this will be the fate of the real Arko!” Three quick hammer-blows, and the Mezem, the Marble Palace and the University were shards and glass-dust. “Hear me, All-spirit! Hear me, you Arkan gods who might be lurking around to listen, with your dog mother! I who know true power have spoken: so it will be, for the real city of Arko, for so I shall make it! Arko will die in flame and blood, will bend to the dust and have its face ground, will kneel to serve the world as it would have had the world serve it! Arko will die, and history will forever remember Kurkas Aan as the Imperator who failed to save it, and Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e as the conqueror who destroyed it! Hear me, all the world! I will kill Arko!” I left not so much as a miniature glass tying-post in one piece, eventually tossing aside the bone and doing it with my hands, though they were soon red with glass-cuts; I felt no pain. He threw his head back and screamed with abandon.

When I was tired enough to be satisfied, which because of my Mezem training was a long time, I tucked the painting under my arm and left him howling on the floor, his arms reaching for the shards and ashes and shreds as if by pure wish and tenderness he could repair them. No guards had come, for he had never called them; no one in authority must have been within earshot, and those who were near, too stunned to seek such a person, for I strolled with the painting out of the Palace and to the Mezem unhindered. In my room I hung it; from then on all who entered complimented me on having acquired such a faithful reproduction.

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160 - Skorsas's door, closed

Now they decided to use the ram, a four-handled thing short enough for two to swing in a corridor, but they called in one each from Skorsas’ room and the window, so they were four again. “Keep your feet planted,” the Mahid who was in command ordered the pair who took up the ram, so they too wouldn’t end up running in unintentionally; a dart-tube man aimed between them.

The bang of the ram shook the door on its hinges and bent the bolt so badly on the first blow that it would never slide again, but I knew it would take a few more blows at least for them to break through. With a knife in one sword-hand I went to Skorsas’s door. Did the Mahid behind it have it bolted? I unjammed the chair from the latch without being quiet about it; he whipped his dart-tube to his mouth, stood silent for a moment, then slid the bolt.

I opened the door enough to let him see a flash of my head, ducked back as the dart flew by, then sprang out and throat-thrust him, in the brain-artery so he’d pass out too fast to get off another shot. I let out a laugh just to alert the others where I was now; but the door from Skorsas’s room to the corridor was closed. I found myself staring at it, frozen; something very deep in me whispered, ‘Remember this.’

I considered going through it to flank them; but if the Mahid at the window thought to check Skorsas’s window, he’d have a clear shot at me. That gave me an idea; it was time to try my own dart-tube skills. Peeking out Skorsas’s window, so innocently unbarred, I saw the man waiting, poised, every cell in him a study in focused attention, in the obsessive Mahid mode, on my window. Luckily, considering how often I’d aimed one of these things before (never), he was one of the unarmoured ones. I aimed for his middle, and hit him in the shoulder. He managed one shot before he passed out, but, expecting it, I’d drawn my head back in.

I went back into my room, jamming the chair under the latch of Skorsas’s door again. They’d hit with the ram three or four more times; the door was starting to splinter. It seemed I’d have to tell them. “You black-clad morons, you’re down two more,” I yelled, chuckling. “Check next door!”

The ramming ceased; I could sense their indecision: ‘Never listen to the enemy!’ ‘But what if it’s true?’ One of them went into Skorsas’s room, and froze, seeing. “Now look out the window!” I yelled through Skorsas’s door. He thought better of that, rejoining the others. All four of them went away down the corridor. Now they’d inform someone higher yet.

I took another swig of water, and a katzerik, then a bite of bread and sausage. “I’m sorry,” came the faintest whisper from low down in the wardrobe. Was that the smell of fresh piss? “I couldn’t help it… I made sure none of it got on your things, just mine that I’m wearing. I’m really, really sorry, Rai… Shefen-kas.”

“It’s all right, I understand,” I said, and lit Skorsas a katzerik from my own. He poked his head and hand out to smoke it, sucking gratefully. “That’ll be easier to clean up than the scraps of me.” I’d meant it as a joke, but he made a choking sound, so I apologized.

I found out later what happened downstairs. While one Mahid ran to the Marble Palace, the other three stayed by Iska’s desk, and ordered everyone who was not Mahid, except Iska and two spare boys, to leave the quarters.

“The fik we will,” Karel the Aenir said. “This is our place.” The Mahid all tensed, and put hands on weapons; Karel leapt up and went into his typical swaying-like-a-snake fighting-stance. “Our chance to kill Arkans!” said someone else—the Black Shark, I think—seizing up a broom handle, and several others grabbed makeshift weapons, including one who snatched up the hefty stone pieces of the sha set, saying he was losing anyway. Steel necklaces and belts turned into chains whirled over heads. “They can’t kill us because we’re too valuable. Besides, we can blame it all on Raikas, saying his act inspired us.”

On a barked word from one of the Mahid, all three whipped out their dart-tubes and put them to lips. Everyone froze, chains still whirling. About then, Koree came in with a quarter-staff. “Well, well, well!” he said, grinning. “Feisty, are you, today, gentlemen? You all look in the mood for a good hard work-out! Training begins early today for the stable, starts again for the greenhands. It starts now!” He drove them all out at a run, cracking legs and butts with the staff; the boys fetched those other than me who were in their rooms, including Iliakaj, but knew to leave Mana in the cell.

That was all Koree could do. He told me later, “I said to them, ‘Why don’t you ask us, who know him? The man can see through walls, if you’re armed, did you know that? Fighting him is suicide, just ask Riji Kli-fas’s shade; talk to him!’ They just told me ‘Shut up, barbarian.’ So I did, and a couple more of them died.” He shrugged. “No great loss.”

This time, however, the Mahid took it to the highest Senior, and soon the place was crawling so thickly with Mahid they seemed like giant black roaches, by all accounts. The aged Senior—I would later learn his name was Meras—took the reports, and let Iska speak. “He’s not usually like this?” the old lizard-eyed Mahid said. “So other people mean something to him?”

“Yes, normally, Honoured Mahid.”

“Who is closest to hand who means the most to him?”

Though he knew what it would mean, and could have argued to himself that it was Iliakaj, Iska said himself.

I should have known they’d get me this way, since I valued the life of virtually anyone in the Mezem more than Meras valued Ilesias’s. At heart, I suppose, I had known it, for surrendering came easily enough, when Iska said, “Raikas, he has the point of his knife to my eye.” I took off my crystal and wisdom tooth so they wouldn’t become trophies again, before I went out. Though I offered my wrists crossed, they stun-darted me, so much I had terrified them.

†

To describe is to relive, and we can choose what we relive so much more easily than what we live. I will make it very short, what they did to me.

They wanted to kill me, and make me feel myself dying for a very long time, of course, but Kurkas didn’t want me ruined for the Ring, let alone dead. He gave them three days with me, and forbade them causing me any harm that would not heal within an eight-day.

That left plenty of leeway, though, especially when no one told me they were forbidden to kill me. I clung to Jinai’s reading and the certainty I’d had myself that I wouldn’t die in Arko, at first. Fairly soon after that I was hoping he and I had been wrong, and death would take me in the next heartbeat.

All the Mahid from whom I’d taken someone close had their turn, even the women and children. How many times they smothered me senseless, I don’t know, nor how many times I was raped one way or another, or hit, or rubbed in shit. Second Amitzas branded me, with his initials, the Arkan letters A and M, above and below my navel, scars I will wear to my pyre.

Last came Ilesias, as the one I’d made suffer most; I’d killed his uncle, as well. He’d got away, so far, with the crime of mercy. The cut on his cheek was neatly stitched. He had a vial of Mahid’s Obedience, the pain-drug they use in their own training; its effect is to make all the veins feel full of fire. No one can bear it without screaming and convulsing; one must have a gag in one’s mouth or break one’s teeth. But he committed the crime of mercy again, partly sparing me.

When they dumped me on the floor in front of Iska’s desk, he knew me only by my eyebrows, so badly they’d bruised me, and hacked my hair. Just getting me clean took a while, since I had no strength and could not bear water that was anything but the same warmth as a body; then he and Anhunem were a good bead stitching and salving me, while Skorsas held one katzerik after another to my lips. Once the drugs they filled me with finally took effect, I slept.

I was away from myself, watching it all at a distance; I didn’t truly realize I had been until I woke up after a day and a half almost solid sleep, and was back in myself. Then I could talk, a little, and Iska said I should. I wasn’t allowed a psyche-healer, he said, but he’d sent Skorsas to Sasaber to ask what I needed, and letting out what I felt was one thing (just as Mirasae had told me years before), as were many doses of several Haian medicines.

I remember saying, “You Arkans, you have pain and pleasure so mixed up you don’t even notice; it’s in your customs, your traditions, your language, everything; you’ve stopped even knowing the difference, so you calm your own confusion with herb and drink and everything else, it’s why Arko is so obsessed with and good at drugs. You see the madness in the Mahid, but you don’t see that it’s just the extreme of the madness you all have. I’m a Yeoli; I’m not used to this shit; I fight to keep it out of me because I know what I have to keep out; I let it into me and I know very well that it is madness.” They weren’t offended, but they took it all as the ranting of one who’d been tortured.

It was an eight-day before I felt as I had before, as much as I could tell, and another four days before I was cleared to fight. As I was regaining myself, the sight of Skorsas’s door, closed, kept coming to mind, with the admonishment to remember it. Now that I could think about it, I did. Who’d have thought that with my mind as bad as it was right now, I could ever get the sweet flash, with the whisper of the harmonic singer? They separate themselves, from each other and from knowledge, even inside their own minds, even when they fight. That is how they can be defeated by a smaller force. That is how I will win the war.

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159 - This suited my mood

Barbutas was holding the wrist-cuffs, expecting me to turn and let him close them around my wrists. “If you’re acting on orders,” I said, “I’m the Director’s uncle.”

“It is the will of the Imperator that you come with us,” Barbutas said, the smugness underneath the put-on marble impassiveness on his face fading a little. “If you won’t come peacefully—”

“If you lay so much as a hair of your finger on me, you black-clad cannibal, I’ll put your nose-bone through your brain,” I said. “When they truth-drug me, I’ll say I believed you were acting without orders, and when they truth-drug him”—I pointed my thumb at Ilesias—“it will be confirmed.”

“Raikas,” Ilesias began to say, the terror in his eyes not much hidden, but Barbutas cut him off with a crisp, “Silence, apprentice!” He reached for my wrist, so I put his nose-bone through his brain. He fell backwards, boneless, his skull thumping on the floor. Ilesias froze.

“I guess you are in trouble,” I said to him. “Well, you already were, anyway.” A boy just happened to come out of one of the fighter’s rooms, saw a heap of Mahid corpse, gasped, and turned and ran towards the stairs, no doubt to tell Iska. Mana’s Mahid weren’t in the corridor, as he was out of his room somewhere. I weapon-sensed two more Mahid—the ones who were supposed to take this shift on me—coming up the stairs.

What they saw, of course, was one Mahid lying dead-still, one Mahid standing, and one Yeoli fighter of utterly untamed character who must have it in even more badly for Mahid than before, also standing. Naturally enough, they both whipped out their dart-tubes, thinking to save Ilesias. I grabbed him by the shoulders—he was so tense, he was easy to move—yanked him into the line of the first dart so he took it, then pulled him back into my room as the other whistled past. I kicked the door closed as he was going lax. I’d learned the timing of Arkan stun-drug.

“Jewel of the Mezem, I was thinking a flash of vivid purple might not be too much of a departure oh my little dog mother of the Ten professional God!” Skorsas had come in through his door. I steered Ilesias’s fall so he landed sprawled on my bed, sprang to the main door and shot the bolt. The door to Skorsas’ room had no inner bolt; I’d have to jam the chair under the latch, then deal with the window. They couldn’t get through, but they could shoot between the bars.

“I’m going to hold him hostage,” I said to Skorsas. Best for Ilesias, that I seem like an unequivocal enemy; at the same time, this suited my mood. I could argue it had all been Barbutas’s fault. “Do you want to be in or out?” I asked Skorsas. “You have as long as it takes me to pick up the chair and step to your door to make up your mind.”

“Every grain of sense in me says out,” he said in a breathless whisper. “So, in. Why are you doing this? They’re going to shred you.”

“Don’t do anything to help me,” I said, as I wedged the chair firmly under the latch on the door to his room with several good kicks. “In case they truth-drug you afterwards.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he breathed. “I’ll be in here.” He climbed into the wardrobe, sliding himself in between two of my scarlet and black outfits, the most appropriate hiding place imaginable for him, and pulled the doors closed except for a crack to peek through.

One of the Mahid outside tried the main door, then banged on it and said I was required to open it. When I didn’t answer, the pair went off down the corridor, sensible enough to seek for reinforcements. “Jewel of the World, they’re going to…”

I left his entreating voice behind. If I was fast, I had time to run down to the kitchen. I weapon-sensed four Mahid in the Fighter’s Parlour, standing together; the other two must be Mana’s, and they were probably discussing what to do, as much as Mahid ever discuss anything. I slipped past into the kitchen, grabbed a big jug of water, a sackful of food that would keep without ice and two chef’s knives as sharp as swords, and slipped back again.

Iska followed me back up, saying, “Lad, don’t do this, please, this is madness, you’ve been hurt so much,” which I ignored entirely. No one else knew what was going on. I shut the door in his face after I’d plundered the corpse of its dart-tube and the rest of its Mahid kit.

They gave me time also to think about the window. The night-table was about the right size to block it off, but I could think of no way of securing it that would be enough to keep it from being rammed off through the bars fairly quickly. The curtains would stop a dart, but nothing would stop the Mahid from reaching through with a staff or the like to pull them aside, after which they could shoot.

I saw a way after a bit of thought. “Pardon me,” I said to Skorsas, who was shaking so hard the satiny shirts and kilts all quivered, and began taking the silken ones out and hanging them from the rafters, putting a good fifteen layers of them, with fair spaces between each, between the window and the front end of the room. Let them try to find their way through that with a staff and darts, or even thrown spears. “What are you doing?” he gasped through a very dry mouth.

“Shh, in case that’s interpreted as a way to help me do better,” I said.

“Raikas… I mean Shefen-kas… why… why?”

“I’m mad, just as you said, Skorsas. I won’t listen to reason so there’s no point in trying.” He dug himself further back into the clothes that remained, with a faint whimper. I spoke truer even than I knew at the time. I remember it all like a dream: vividly, and yet I wouldn’t be entirely convinced it was real, but for the scars.

I took a long swig of water, and put on my bathrobe. Being silk, it was something of a defense against darts, and I could put the knives, which of course had no sheaths, in the shield-side pocket. Then I plundered Ilesias of his dart-tube and kit, too, loaded both tubes with stun-darts and slipped them in the shield-side pocket, point-end up as you must. I handled them very carefully; it wouldn’t do to keel over from a slip. This was one skill I’d never learned; I set my mind to not rely on it as much as the knives. The Mahid were taking long enough to come back that I began to think Ilesias would wake soon, so I trussed him firmly to the bed.

They didn’t take the emergency as high up in the ranks as they should have, to my mind, for they only sent six, a number that grew to eight when someone realized Mana’s pair could lock him in one of the cells, which they did. Just as well he didn’t get involved in this, which he would in an eye-blink, given a chance. They were well-equipped, though, in full armour and carrying hooks, staves, spears, darts, a door ram and so forth.

If I had been them, I’d have broken through the main door and Skorsas’s door both at once, and so rushed me from two sides, and maybe even worked through the window to get the clothing out of the way at the same time. Perhaps they don’t teach enough strategy in Mahid school; or perhaps it’s just that Mahid training is so rigid it cripples minds into falling always into one path. I’d seen that with the old Mahid who’d asked me how Niku had got out.

At any rate, two were sent to Skorsas’s door, but did nothing, apparently ordered to make sure I didn’t go out that way, and two more were sent around to the window, as if it were possible for me to get out that way. That left four at the door. Two of them set to put their shoulders to it, though they could have asked the Mezem guards, who would have told them, that the door was built too solid for that. “I have one of yours in here,” I said to them through the door. “Where should I take the first sliver of flesh from him, do you think?”

“No matter; he is Mahid,” a cold voice answered. Meaning, expendable in an instant. I’d known this, but it was something else again to hear it. At least Ilesias couldn’t. I made up my mind to put at least one cut on him, to make it look good.

The two shouldering the door bore dart-tubes in one hand and short daggers in the other, no doubt edged with stun-drug. I let them try three times, then very quietly slid the bolt, took a chef’s knife in each hand and stood back enough that their corpses would clear the door. As soon as they found themselves charging into the room, they’d look where they were going; I positioned my hands. The door banged open, I needed only to shift one hand a little and I had them both through an eye and into the brain, by their own strength. Now I had a bare instant; sane people will be frozen by such a sight, but these were Mahid. I spun to the side and towards the door as the darts shot by the rear pair flew past, kicked it shut, sprang in and shot the bolt again.

“Raikas… Raikas…” Skorsas could remember only the first name he’d known me by, and his voice was full of tears now, as I yanked out and wiped the two knives, suspecting the cooks wouldn’t want them back after this. “You killed them… you killed Mahid… this is so not like you… what have you turned into… why aren’t you thinking of what they will do to you?”

Outside the door, the two Mahid left there talked about what they should do, and I heard Iska say, “This wretched one begs your incomparable selves, Honoured Mahid, on his reeking knees, let this miserable one speak to him...” One of them just said, “Shut up, fessas.” I dragged the two bodies back into the room, out of the way.

Ilesias’s blue eyes blinked open. Before he came to himself, I saw what was a blessing to see on a Mahid’s face: natural expressions, making him look more like the child he had been, not so long ago. A grimace of pain, then brows creased in puzzlement and the eyes flicking here and then as he tried to figure out where he was, then fear, then the pain of the headache mixed with fear. Then he remembered who he was, and it all fell off him into the inhuman Mahid blankness.

I laid a knife across his cheek, at the same angle as my scar. “Beg them to let me be and absolve me,” I said, pitching my voice to carry through the door, “if you want to keep those angelic Mahid looks.”

“I am Mahid; my will is the will of the Imperator,” he answered in a voice deader than anyone so young should ever have, and looking straight ahead, not at me. I gathered that meant what I’d expected him to say: “No.” So I made the cut, feeling the point glance across his teeth. He took it with only the flash of a grimace, and lay bleeding in impassive silence, like a reclining statue with a line of red painted across an otherwise untouched cheek. Only Skorsas sobbed. “I love you,” he whispered, quivering. “I love you, I love you, there is nothing but you for me, everyone in their right mind loves you, does that make no difference?”

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158 - Life is Everything, redux

I don’t remember the rest of my time in Arko well. It didn’t seem I was mad at the time, at least at first, but then a hand underwater doesn’t look wet. The string of thoughts follows one after the other, like days; but when you look back, imagining half a year as a whole, and you see it as the blackness it truly was, just as the thrusts of history only become apparent much later.

Kyera Shae-Lemana was my thirty-sixth fight. The falling-apart feeling came back, and this time Sasaber couldn’t get rid of it. From then, I remember some utterly trivial things, like a clasp on a belt or the fall of someone’s hair, vividly as yesterday, while major ones, such as being tortured, I remember only the skeleton of.

Some signs of madness were there, though, enough for me to notice at the time: waking up in the morning and finding my hands shaking, for instance, whether flexed or relaxed, no matter how hard I willed them steady. I went to Iska, who pressed them in his own, his palms warm and gentle, like a father’s.

“So far you’ve borne everything,” he said. “What have you clung to? Don’t tell me; ask yourself. Whatever it is, it’s worked; keep clinging to it.” I said, “I don’t know that I have the strength.” He said, “Nonsense. Certainly you do. You know you’re at”—I can’t remember the number—“fights? Better than half”—or was it two thirds?—“Take it one day, one fight at a time, for that’s how it will come at you.” In truth, I think he wasn’t sure I had the strength; but saying this might give it to me.

When spring came in Yeola-e, of course, the war began to move again. Tinga-e fell, the warriors too starved to fight, and was sacked. When I read in the Pages that the streets had run ankle-deep in blood and a hundred thousand Yeolis had died, I had no way of knowing how much it exaggerated. But I could not doubt the city had been taken; and Arkan warriors encamped for a whole Yeoli winter will be vengeful.

I had killed three Yeolis when Norii came to speak with me the last time for the book. We’d become friends; I had told him my whole life story and everything on my mind, except for one thing; of all that, about an eighth was safe for him to write. I could tell when I went beyond the pale; he’d put his noteboard down.

“We’re done, then,” he said, as he was readying to go. He was the only Arkan I’d ever met from whom the Aitzas accent actually sounded refined and intelligent, showing how it was clearly meant to. I would miss him. “Unless you have any last thing to say?”

“I do,” I said. “Once I am free, I will return with an army and sack Arko.”

His pen froze in his hand, and he put down the noteboard, looked up and quirked his eyebrows, which were copious and yet narrow at once. “How do you expect to manage that?” he asked in that delicate accent, that had the weight of centuries of empire in it.

I smiled mysteriously and said, “You expect me to give away my plans?” So Life is Everything reads; in truth, I don’t remember the exchange. I do not doubt, though, that I thrust the noteboard into his hand and said, “Go ahead! Quote me, let all Arko know and be damned!” He did.

The title came from something I’d said when he’d asked me why I thought the Mezem was evil, and this killing we did, wrong: “Life is everything to the man I kill, just as life is everything to me,” or words to that effect. It came out after my forty-first fight, and he brought me a copy, and signed it with pen as if he’d scribed it, a custom for authors whose words are passed through the machine. I hadn’t thought he’d write like the others, but even so I was not prepared for what I read. His words, and my words in his hands, spoke my life here almost more clearly, it seemed, than I had lived it.

That same day, when my Mahid changed shifts, the two new ones cuffed me and led me by the elbows, not to the Marble Palace, but under the stands, where two more waited. They stripped me and did me as only Mahid unleashed, as they call it, can. Their leader was Second Amitzas, the head Mahid torturer; young Ilesias was one of the others. They had me for a good two beads.

I will say only that if one imagines a session of torture as a story, the main thread was that Amitzas had a serrated knife covered with the Lakan ointment of pain, azan akanaja, and orders to mark me with it once, to show the Imperator’s displeasure at my vow to sack Arko. The other Mahid had their sub-plots. One of them tore a bite-sized piece of flesh out of my back with his teeth, which even other Mahid find perverse; he got in trouble for it. I still have the scar, to show anyone who doesn’t believe this. It finished with Amitzas saying, “You will remember, every time you look in a mirror,” and slashing my right cheek from nose to jawline. The stuff started eating into my flesh instantly. They left me lying in the dust for Skorsas to find.

Iska took two beads on the wound, determined that I should be disfigured as little as he could help. I remember weeping when they lowered me into the bath, more in pleasure than pain. No surprise, the bite festered; that in itself kept me in bed and in half-waking nightmares, despite the sedatives, for three days.

By the number of times Skorsas said, “You will always be beautiful,” I knew my looks were ruined. I had never seen how I took them for granted; though I’d never thought myself as well-favored by the die as my father had been, I certainly had on occasion, as people do, looked into a mirror, posed and thought, “A fine figure this one cuts, yes, not bad at all.” Never again. I’d turn my head to see myself in profile from the uncut side, and wish I could enter rooms that way; or think, “On someone else, I’d think I’d say those eyes have seen too much.”

On the first day after, a note came with a very short poem, directing me to find things of mine in a certain place in the woods, signed, “Raven.” Skorsas went. It was my crystal and my father’s wisdom tooth, both of which the Mahid had torn off and thrown into the dust under the stands, and a lock of my hair, such as they’d all cut from my head as they left, for trophies.

I wasn’t in a state to notice, still raving, when Skorsas fastened the crystal and the tooth around my neck, but when I could, I thought: Ilesias. He did what was commanded, as he must; but wanted to give me some mercy. I had no use for a curl of my hair; he’d sent it just to show he’d taken it only for appearances. A Mahid by birth but not by nature, I thought, and then wondered how long he would last.

As for how the rest of the city took Life is Everything, my discontent came as a shock, of course. The tavern-master of the House of the Mountains accosted me in the colonnade after training a day or two later, and threw himself to his knees: apparently the mood of his place had turned so glum that his livelihood was threatened. He begged me to come and say something, anything, to cheer the miserable curly-black-wigged throng, apparently not noticing the ankle-shackles.

Hard on his heels came the king of the clan, a thin man with arms of straw whom one could tell was Arkan only by his blue eyes and his speaking; his hair and eyebrows he’d somehow made indistinguishable from mine, and he wore a vein-blood-red Yeoli-style shirt. His Karas Raikas pendant, the insignia of the fellowship, was golden; probably his life savings had gone to buy it.

The only name I had ever known him by was Freniraikas, which means “Child of Raikas.” I thought his heart would fail him, just from seeing me close; he was tongue-tied for so long I started feeling awkward myself. Finally he said what he had come to say: that if he could, he would free me, this on behalf of my true followers as well as himself.

From people who’d give their hair to see me fight, I thought, that means something. On a slip of paper I wrote my name in Yeoli. “Get this tattooed on your shoulder,” I said. “Then get those you know who truly would free me if they could to do the same. In the sack, my warriors will know by that, who loved me and believed in me.” His eyes bugged; then his face took on a glow, like those of people in Arkan paintings who’d been brushed by divine grace (odd-looking under black curls), as if he’d played a part in a legend that would be told for a thousand years.

Others thought I was a poor sport, throwing this pall on Arko’s love for me; in the Watcher, they called me cynical and small-minded, in the Pages ungrateful and a coward.

The rest of the city just took it as a stunning new turn of the script, and relished the heightening of the tragedy. I had wondered about Yeoli things becoming the rage in the city that was Yeola-e’s deadliest enemy; now it came to me why. Like Kurkas’s Tinga-eni wine, we were something to devour; it was whetting its appetite for us, savoring our delights, finding this new flavorful little morsel tasty. No wonder, I thought, Kurkas always licks his lips more at me than at his dinner, even when it comes from a breast.

Then Ilesias snuck to my window at night; I woke with the half-dreaming notion that it was Niku, and learned how desperately I missed her when I saw it was not. He told me that the one who’d bit me, whose name was Barbutas, had seen him pick up my crystal and tooth, which by Mahid measure would have been treason, and was blackmailing him. He needed a Yeoli crystal and a wisdom tooth, to prove he hadn’t returned them to me.

I was not willing to give up any of the wisdom teeth I had, so suggested he retrieve one from the lion-trench, which he did, though I learned later he could have gone one much more easily from a back alley in the poor quarter. The crystal he got from a jeweler—they were getting popular enough—and likewise a gold leaf like those in my hair, when Barbutas required that of him. I hoped that would be enough.

A few days later, I was in my room when the two Mahid changed shifts. The moment the relieved pair were gone, one of the fresh pair slid the bolts and said, as they always did, “Karas Raikas, you are required.” His voice seemed unusually young.

I opened the door. One of them was Ilesias; his face was Mahid stone, but his cheeks were pale, and even a stony pair of blue eyes can emanate terror. The other one was Barbutas, and what radiated from beneath the stone of his face was a eager smugness.

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