The Void Ascendant, page 4
Because They ruled. That was what They did. They subjugated planets where They could, destroyed them where They couldn’t. And everywhere They went They were ruled by Their hungers and by a mindless, atavistic urge to dig Their claws into order and turn it into disorder, to drag it closer to the state They existed in. To eat, torture, kill, twist, change, ruin. To take anything living and turn it inside out and lick out the living spark of it and laugh. For ages They had slept in scattered places, waiting for an opportunity to wake that would be worth it somehow, a crack into which to insert Their unspeakable tentacles and push till it yawed open.
And about eight years ago, as near as I could reckon, something had cracked. On my homeworld. On Earth. The war that had begun as my old life ended and this one began, a microsecond separating them, or maybe less, separating Earth’s death and my birth, or rebirth. One blink and I had come to at the foot of the Tower of the Prophet, where the palace expected a replacement to appear for the old Prophet who had died the day before.
The war had always been moving, creeping towards Aradec, surrounding us as if we were the eye of the storm. But the eye of the storm did not last forever, because the storm was in motion.
I had escaped nothing.
Nothing.
Only for a time. And I had been fooling myself, lying with a force that verged on violence, self-mutilation. It had gone on all along, while I had been safe and pampered here.
The colourful plate of food dimmed in front of me, the shapes beginning to melt and run. The Advisor murmured something under his breath, snapping me back to attention from my daze.
“Prophet,” the Queen said, “historically there have been... doubts about our world’s loyalty to the Masters. Those doubts have long been laid to rest. We have proven ourselves to be the most dedicated of subjects.”
I nodded. Aradec had been conquered about a thousand years ago, as best I could tell from the Archive. The people then had fought back, as everyone fought back against Them; it seemed programmed into the very genes to fight back. But when offered the chance to be a thrall rather than a smudge of dust, all the kingdoms agreed to live as Their subjects, and had spent about two hundred years putting down unsanctioned rebellions against Their presence until finally all resistance crumbled. Periodic flare-ups were put down at once, either by the agents They infrequently stationed here, or by the rulers, whoever discovered it first.
Peace at last. Of course things are very peaceful when you don’t fight back.
For years all I had been able to conclude was: Earth should not have fought back.
I, we, should not have fought back. I was wrong; I see that now. We made a mistake.
“In accordance with the Book of Syrona,” the Queen said, “during a time of war, no actions shall be taken without the approval of the Masters, and all decisions must be in agreement with the augurs, revelations, and portents. Further in accordance with the Book, Prophet, you are now the Head of Royal Military Intelligence. You and the Advisor may act in conjunction with the Guards, if you like. It has been done before.”
It was the last thing I had expected; I flinched as if I had been slapped by her smile.
No. No. I don’t want to. Please don’t make me do this. Please, I have done my duty in every other respect since the moment I came here. I have watched you kill. I have reached inside bodies. I have killed animals. I have condemned men to death. Courteously, relentlessly, patiently, you have threatened me with everything short of death for noncompliance. Have I not done everything you’ve said? Have you not broken me in ways I did not think someone could be broken?
And I don’t know anything about military intelligence. And I am no spy. Not any more. I am not a military man. I am soft, and if you see how soft I am, you will declare me incompetent, and then I don’t know what will happen to me. You don’t know either. Please, ask me to do anything else. Do not involve me in this war.
Quick, say something. Your reputation but also your status, your treatment, your future, your pulse, could end right here. Quick. You have already paused too long. Look, she raises her eyebrows at you. You’ll need every single word of High Dath you’ve learned for this.
“Your Majesty,” I began, “I... do not think I will be useful to the Masters in this capacity. I know nothing of intelligence or tactics, I know nothing of war. I...”
For the first time the smooth mask of her face cracked, revealing shock so exaggerated and apparently genuine that I was shocked in turn, and the rest of my protest dribbled away and became remorse. Oh God, what was I doing, how had I dared to—?
“Prophet.” The threat light, clear. Like a gem. She was not asking for agreement. Agreement was not part of the expected response. Only acknowledgement. Because I couldn’t say no. I was no longer in a position where I could say no. The shadows flamed, shimmered. She would forgive this: once. And never again.
I nodded, and blinked sweat out of my eyes. “I am honoured, Your Majesty.”
“Yes, I know.”
As she spoke to the Advisor, I looked down at the flagstones near the edge of the table, past my trembling hands, the gleaming toes of my own boots, tipped in silver. The thin borders of the stones, fitted as closely as craft could make them, swam in my vision, seeming to form words, like subtitles, as the Queen spoke. Something about the drafted troops that had arrived this morning, where they would be stationed, who to speak to about getting them fed, where they might be stationed (anywhere the Masters needed them, for this war was hungry and both sides consumed soldiers with terrifying rapidity; and the Masters, talented as They were, could not create life, only repurpose it, move it, imitate it, and that was not always useful for war). Magical weapons, artifacts held in museums or universities. The general dearth of magical practitioners who could be trusted. Communications. Ciphers. Payment. Loyalty. Loyalty.
There would not be fighting here, I thought. At least there was that. This planet was already won; They had signed Their name upon it forever, and various of Their minions, agents, and trustees visited from other worlds to collect tribute and magic whenever They wished. We were a company town, existing only to serve Them. They would not let us suffer any harm. The invasion I had imagined this morning would never come to pass.
But everyone else in Their path was fair game. And this was what loyalty meant: to do as They said, or risk our own safety.
I knew that trade. That was a familiar trade. It was one I made every day, and it grew easier all the time.
I inhaled. Exhaled. Looked up to discover that the King’s seat was empty; I spotted him fluttering away, already far distant, his spinal spikes catching the early sun and sending rainbows sparking back at us. He would hunt for a few hours and return cleaning fish scales off his fangs, I knew. On the beach below, guards would pace nervously, watching both sea and sky. I often envied his freedom, which should have been less than mine but was more.
“Enemies are already beginning to infiltrate,” the Queen murmured, leaning forward. Her heavy gown creaked as she moved, as if to add emphasis. “Are they not, Advisor?”
I twitched, but stopped myself from turning to stare at him. His breath was light and calm at my side. Now we would come to it. What did Yalip…
“We captured six unauthorized trespassers within the royal grounds, Prophet,” the Advisor said evenly, not looking at me. The feathers along his neck had risen though, and while this happened in silence, to me it was as loud as a shout. “Five near the gates... whom we suspect to have been trying to deliberately lure us away from the sixth, who was captured inside the Archive of Ashuskroth.”
“Wait,” I said after a beat, when he seemed to be done. “Inside it? But how? It’s...”
“Correct.”
“Interrogate them,” the Queen said. “Find out what they wished to do here. Why they came into our secret places... whom they serve. They cannot be permitted to interfere with the war. Not even to attempt it.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” I said. Live through this, I told myself. Live through this and don’t look back at it ever again once it’s over. Life will be soft and easy again. It’ll be all right.
I did not dare ask for any kind of delay on my duties, not after my performance earlier. My new status felt like one of our glass tumblers balanced delicately on something, ready at the slightest nudge to fall onto the flagstones and shatter.
The walk to the seldom-used dungeons, even for the Advisor, required stopping twice to get directions, and it took so long that he insisted we also pause at one of the guard stations to get something to eat. I forced down a sweetbun and a riseb, waving away the offer of his penknife and peeling away the indigo skin with my teeth before eating the segments.
“This is good,” the Advisor said around his own fruit, neatly flayed with his foreclaws. “You did not eat properly earlier... It is better to have something in your stomach. It settles it.”
“For what?”
“You know,” he said vaguely, wiping the dark-blue juice on his ceremonial sash. “Interrogation.”
“You mean torture,” I said, after hunting around for a moment in my head for the word in Low Dath. I didn’t even know it in High, and I didn’t think I’d taught it to him in English.
“Maybe later,” he said. “Now we go this way, and we’re to turn right at the three round storehouses. No, you don’t start with torture. Initially you simply keep people awake, that’s a good start. And it’s additive; if you have to do more than that, they break more easily if they have not slept.”
“Done a lot of it, have we?”
“There’s manuals,” he admitted. “In the Guards’ Library. What they call the Shed. Handed down, not updated for twenty or thirty years. I don’t think the Guards have ever actually had anyone to interrogate beyond a good bout of yelling. Maybe Corporal Polat, she’s about seventy and she dealt with that dockyard business.”
“But you were here then,” I said. His people, the Rhaokor, lived for hundreds of years, and though I knew little about him I did know that he had been Advisor to six prophets before me.
“I was,” he said. “I did not participate.”
“I don’t want to interrogate anyone, Advisor.”
“I know,” he said. “And I wouldn’t ask you to, Prophet. Your heart is a gentle one to be in a war. It was born out of time.”
“There’s never a good time for a war.”
He shook his head. “We’re in the best possible place and time for it. You’ll see. Now as for the questioning, you can oversee the interrogation while one of the guards takes it on. I’ll choose someone reliable. Not one of your friends. Your position is important, yes, and tricky. But no one would judge you for simply managing it instead of getting your hands dirty. Your involvement is necessary, but it can be minimal in that necessity.”
Now more than ever before I felt the entire secret of my past hang between us, the truth of this war, the players in it who knew me, whose names I knew in turn, the way the Masters were so far from being a faceless indistinguishable mass of evil. I wished I knew nothing about it, so that I could easily accept the version he knew. But once you know something you cannot un-know it. “I don’t even want to oversee it. I don’t want to be involved at all.”
“I know. Don’t let anyone hear you say that. Here we are.”
Don’t make me betray you, he meant; I knew he would report me if he had to. I pushed it out of my head and looked around. We had arrived at a region of the compound I didn’t recognize. The dungeon sat higher than the buildings around it, a stocky circular building of four levels, ringed with a surprisingly deep though empty moat that even now was being filled by a long-suffering-looking junior guard manning a pump that squirted out about a bucketful of water with every heave of the lever. I wondered if he was being punished.
The entire building gave the impression of hasty repair, as if it had just been put back into service last night—which, I thought, it might have been. Valishec, the capital city near which our palace had been built, had its own prisons which we did not use, and we rarely had cause to lock someone up here. I knew a few of the guard towers had a cell for the infrequent capture of drunks or poachers (no lock on the door, only a thumb-latch on the outside, like something you might use on a garden gate). You’d be hard-pressed to find somewhere to put six people at short notice without reopening the dungeon.
The dungeon’s interior smelled faintly of old piss, but not much else; everything was dusty, from the lamps to the registry book in which we signed our titles. Everything was still, silent, except for the small creaturely noise of a guard mopping the floor somewhere. Scrape of wet rags, splash into a bucket. I realized belatedly that I had been expecting screams, prayers, curses, like before an execution or a sacrifice. Sacrificial victims weren’t even locked up, merely guarded, and you could hear their pleas from halfway across the compound.
“Where’s the spy that was arrested inside the Archive?” I whispered.
The Keeper of Dungeons, a small rattled-looking human dressed in a many-pocketed leather vest, gestured to his right. “Cell Eighteen, your Holiness. You want the keys?”
“No, no,” said the Advisor before I could reply. “We’re just going to look. And develop a strategy.”
“Will you be needing any apparatus?” The Keeper scratched his short, silvery beard. “I think we got them in storage someplace. But I don’t know that we can get the furnace going, on account of the chimney not bein’ cleaned for, uh. Probably five or six years now. Fill the whole place with smoke. Would a brazier or something do as well? I can borrow one.”
“We’ll let you know,” the Advisor said, and his hackles went up again just as they had been starting to settle flat against his short, gleaming fur.
I whispered, “By apparatus, did he mean—”
“Yes.”
“And all that’s in the manual.”
“Yes, it’s under ‘Advanced Questioning Techniques.’” He turned to his left instead of right, and I followed. As with the outside, the inside was circular, a ring of cells surrounding a deep central pit, and open to the roof via another circle that admitted daylight. Each cell was double-doored, the first set an arm’s length from the second, effectively making a second, tiny cell between them, and, the Advisor informed me, locked by a separate key. It was like stacked cartwheels, each spoke leading to a cell.
Both doors had a thickly barred grid set slightly below my eye level, allowing a view of the cell within: a stone bunk built into the wall, an exterior window about the size of a playing card, and a drain in the floor the same size. Complex, circular wards against the practice of magic shone from floor to ceiling in the dim light, glittering like broken glass.
“And it’s only the captured spies in here?” I asked the Advisor in English when we were away from the Keeper and his desk. “No one else?”
“No, no one else.” He looked down at me. “I could do this alone. With your permission, Prophet.”
I shook my head. “I appreciate it. But there’s my position to consider. And yours. During a time of war,” I added for emphasis. I peeked into the first cell: empty, as were the next two.
Cell Four held a dark-skinned middle-aged human, graying hair braided away from his face, who jumped a little when our faces appeared in the grid, but recovered to glare at us, and continue to doggedly eat a slice of thick black bread.
Cell Seven held a Turuntu woman asleep on the stone bunk, her iridescent claws fanned over her face. Cell Nine, a thin young human, head shaved bald, milk-pale, who turned from staring out the window when he became aware of us, but said nothing. Cell Thirteen, a Jokmara man, powerfully built, his face a mass of bruises and a deep, bleeding chip in his beak. He stood briskly when we paused at his door, and took a breath, but did not speak. Waiting to be spoken to, I guessed; he was not from the palace, but the protocols of status and address, while more flexible in the city, were still hard to break.
Cell Fifteen held a small Aeliphos of indeterminate gender wearing blue robes, so resembling, for a moment, the trainee I’d seen this morning under Phothenth that I paused and stared at them in horror. But no, it couldn’t be them if they’d been captured last night, and anyway, the robes were different, lacking the palace insignia, and the mandibles orange rather than yellow. It was fine.
Cell Eighteen held the most impossible and the most dangerous of all the spies: whoever had broken into the Archive of Ashuskroth, the vault which only one person in the entire palace compound could enter, locked with both the most intricate locks on the planet and the most unbreakable spells and wards, windowless, possessed of a single door which was watched by a dozen Guards at all times, one to stand in the doorway and eleven to watch that guard, and located at the top of a single staircase, also guarded, nearly two hundred feet above the ground. The architects of the place had said, quite sensibly, centuries ago: If you bury something, someone will burrow in. Put it in the sky, and keep an eye on it. Nothing can burrow through the air.
But someone had.
I peered into the cell, slightly better-lit than the others due to the angle of the reflected daylight. The spy was asleep, or pretending to sleep, clutching a half-eaten piece of bread in one human-looking hand, the left, which was missing three fingers, only index and thumb remaining; the other hand was hidden. They wore ragged black britches that only went to the knee, and a torn shirt that had probably been white once and was now spattered with what resembled black ink. Through the many tears in the cloth their skin was pale, sheened here and there with green and violet iridescence, like bad ham.
“Advisor,” I said. “What am I looking at?”
“I don’t know, Your Holiness.”
The spy stirred at our voice, turned, opening their eyes: mismatched, one green and apparently human, the other a field of blue in which blazed a narrow, red-orange iris. As it turned I saw the intermittent thick, chitinous scales on its back rippling like an unsettled dragon’s, as did the spikes along its backbone, a dorsal fin of semi-translucent insect shell. The skin along the shins was blotched with what I first took to be tattoos, but which squirmed as if black and green worms moved below the skin. Bright gray eyes, round and birdlike, peered out of two long scars on the calves, blinking. They had eyelashes.
