Spook & Spell
II.III
--
For the first generation of pioneers, they were shrewd ones. Not consciously, however. It was a shrewdness born from the murder of uncles, the disappearance of cousins, the terror of parents. The generation before them had seen the Czar’s army whirl across the desert like an iconoclastic sandstorm. In the Purges mystics had been butchered, monasteries burned and shamans fed to their spirit animals. So in haste both mother and father had cast down their idols and clutched their infants closer. They killed their gods — the desert immortals — so their own flock would be spared.
Now the children were pioneers, the first in formal education, in the first decades of a secular nation. Mira’s class had watched the Edificor’s beating cane as avidly as any fetiche, knowing when it would lift and strike, when it would lower and be exchanged for an approving shoulder slap, or when it would be put aside so their edificor could write a note of commendation to the Commissariat.
They knew what was best to be caught talking about. They honed their gossip; crafted their fads. In the week since the death of General Korsch, three subjects captivated the lunch times of the pioneers (none of which was the death of General Korsch — their parents mourned him well enough).
They talked of the fight on the rooftop between Mira and Vladik. It was good to be caught talking of this, for pioneers should talk of battle. Vladik should have won, they said. His confidence was his armor; his cold blood his weapon. He always outlasted his opponents, prospered in the heat and used their rage against them. But Mira’s wrath had been volatile — a material the belgas could not shape nor consume. Vladik had felt the sting of blows in places few knew of. When his coccyx was struck his pelvic muscles slackened. He could not tense his stomach; he was forced to chest-breathe. This brought his chin up, and Mira jabbed the gullet, mashing his curled tongue against the roof of his mouth. Vladik’s second row of teeth had cut his tongue open and left him in agony for the (brief) remainder of the fight. The Edificor had ordered the other pioneers to remove Vladik from Mira’s raining victory blows.
The ghul students initially admired Mira. They fancied themselves predators, and the anatomical precision of the menagerie keeper’s daughter was commendable. But the blood-drinkers were fickle youths. Before long, they caved to peer pressure and joined the others in attributing Mira’s win to her soullessness.
She put a spook-spell on Vladikidik, the faro children chirped.
The class all agreed now. Mira’s triumph was not the emblem of Kaustiran will they had imagined. This was not an underdog standing on her feet — not a Little Czar reborn. This was a feticheless freak as dangerous as the desert cultists, clouding the mind of a good Avarathi.
This led to the second thing they spoke of: Mira’s attack. If they had believed in gods they would have called it karma. Mira had thought herself a beast tamer — treating people like animals and animals like people. The mangol cat was the Red Nation, the Scorched Land, fierce and untamed, capable of snapping if provoked. Proud Mira had rightly lost her womb and been removed from the bloodlines of the empire.
“Make sure caged monsters know their masters,” intoned the belgas children, taking nods from the Edificor, “And never let down your guard.”
But what are tragedies without a third act?
The disappearance of Vladik was a perfect end to an arc begun in battle and ended in defeat. Some imagined the Edificor had planned this — thrown the two together on the rooftop so the shrewder kids could learn their folly. Even the best cannot rest on their laurels, the pioneers declared. Vladik lost to Mira because he was arrogant, as all who forget the teachings of the Czar. And that arrogance, and his fraternizing with soulless, wombless Mira, had turned traitor the House of Etch.
“Etchery treachery ooh!” sang the nisir as they drummed their cups on the lunch table. “Vladik and Mira, gut him and spear her! Etchery treachery ooh!”
With the merchant sons in shame, and their education near-completed, there was no one in class to spin the other yarns: of how Vladik had battled the High Questor, how the belgas were wishing death upon the ghasts, and how the ghuls and belgas were snarling at each other over Mayor Gulzan’s shoulders.
If that gossip had spread perhaps more children would have turned pale when a visitor arrived four mornings after the fall of the House of Etch.
They were in the workshop, more and more their venue now that classroom instruction had ended. Their minds were drilled with the edicts of the Red Nation; and now they worked with their hands. Their final assessment before military grading — to construct a piece of technology, a device that embodied the forward march of Kaustiran culture.
The faro worked shoulder to shoulder, designing lightweight gear for an army on the move, or implements of battle surgery. Theirs were works of hollow bones, intricate and pedantic. Across from them, belgas lumbered between sparking anvils and glaring forges. These pioneers saw only transmutation in this assignment — the hardening of metals, the production of fuel sticks and dense field rations.
The nisir, meanwhile, fared the worst and grew increasingly frustrated. They could never decide on the final product, and their side of the workshop was littered with half-baked inventions and balled up blueprints. Some wore their failed works like jewelry or used one device to smash another.
Their tantrums angered the ghul children, who fashioned ambiguities in the opposite corner. The blood-drinker inventions were not readily obvious in their applications. A framed skin-membrane filled with colored sand, where shapes could be fingered. A rowboat built from modular hull sections. A wind chime of a dozen woods. These things were as bizarre as the luvian creations, which reeked of desperate individualism. The majority pioneers fashioned items that defined themselves more than the task at hand; style devouring substance.
At first they didn’t hear the visitor. His presence was made known by a stiffening, silencing, paling convulsion in their teacher. The Edificor had been by the north wall, as usual, rubbing an iron bolt between his knuckles, but when he looked up he almost dropped the fetiche.
“Ah, a thermosiphon!”
A belgas pioneer looked up from welding pipes. There was an officer beside him, dressed in a form-fitting ash black jacket, buttoned to the collar. He was unwinding a turban from his head. “Lay some glass across the heating trough when you mount it. It will quicken the convection.”
The visitor slipped off carapace gloves and moved to the next child. His dark hair was ragged until he smoothed it back into slick, insectoid perfection. “And what is this, Pioneer?”
“A chain-belt, Sir.” A nisir held up a sheet of mail links to Lut Sar, blinked through her goggles, and addressed him in the nisir cant. “The Czar’s Crusade losey-doozeys ore wagons every month to wheel and axle slummage. A belt will spread the weight and impedify the corrosionals.”
“A fine idea.” Lut Sar put his hand over the girl’s and adjusted her grip on the round-nosed pliers she used. “I hope the Governor of Dorgrad sees the wisdom of it. She likes to deliver metal — not use it to improve the lives of her workers.”
Another pioneer craved attention and ran to Lut Sar. The children didn’t know the Questor’s face, but his uniform was of the Commissariat. Surely this was a pre-grading inspection — the first of many to come. The luvian boy waved a pair of breeches. “I sewed tourniquets into the lining, so if you get injured you don’t have to tie them. Just pull one of these.”
The Questor paid no attention as the boy tugged red-thread seams. He fixed a stare on the Edificor, glanced to another child then tilted his head. The Edificor nodded. Lut Sar patted the boy’s shoulder. “Run along now.”
“Pioneers!”
the Edificor shouted.
“Form up outside. Immediately.”
Some children hesitated, loathe to interrupt their work. Others hurried to the box trays where their fetiches lay and carried them out to the yard. The Edificor crossed the room and seized one of the pioneer’s arms. “Not you, Nilofer.”
The girl had taken two steps from her worktable. Now she hovered in the aisle, watching her classmates leave the workshop in a manner neither disorderly nor polished. The Edificor hissed at them to move faster and closed the door behind him, a last look to Nilofer before he pulled the sheet metal across.
She was left alone, with the High Questor.
Nilofer stared back at him for a moment then returned to her work table. She picked up her project — a shaft from a soldier’s spear, cut with hollow sections, a wire noose looped from one end.
“A catchpole?” Lut Sar prowled behind her, a shadow between one aisle then the next. She could hear his fingers brushing the abandoned workings of her classmates, disturbing tools, shifting papers.
Nilofer depressed a catch, and a stiletto blade snapped from the other end of the pole. The noise was louder than any he had made. “Of sorts.” She did not turn.
“Your Edificor has confessed. He tells me you’re top of the class. Unusual for a luvian. Will you trial for the Third Army?” Each sentence had a different tone. He was chewing his words.
“I wouldn’t do well as an officer or commissar, Sir. No one ever listens to me.” Nilofer kept her hands steady by winding hemp around the haft grip.
“I’m listening, Nilofer.”
She said nothing. The workshop was baking with the doors closed. Yet nothing was hotter than the gaze on her spine. She glanced to the box trays by the far wall, where her fetiche lay: a bronze counterweight, forged like a tortoiseshell.
“Nilofer, daughter of Daoud, last of the Haddads. I remember your family. Twelve pretty bottles, lined on the shelf. Only two left now. We were careless with the others.”
She wrapped the wire noose in her hand, squeezing it. The action kept her voice level, when all it wanted was to scream. “The other glassblowers didn’t renounce, Sir. Father and I were spared. The Czar was merciful.”
She heard him sigh, pleasantly, ecstatically. It sounded like his head had tipped back. “It is a mercy, yes.” The moment passed. He circled the table where she worked. “Still, you must feel a little like your friend Vladik right now: your bloodline pecked apart by inquisitors.”
She met his stare for the first time as he leaned on the table. The Questor was ghul-faced, beautiful and deceptive. Straight bones like an imperial poster, enticing even as it swayed one’s thoughts. He reacted as if she had reacted, feigning apology. “I am correct, aren’t I? You were Vladik Etch’s friend? I’m told the two of you were inseparable.” He switched subjects, flippantly. “Inseparable — I always found that a presumptuous word.”
“Vladik was a little prick. He thought he was better than the other pioneers, so he hung around with me.”
“Because you’re better than the other pioneers?”
“Because Vladik was a merchant’s son. He knew that spices sold better in nice bottles.”
Lut Sar smiled on one side of his face. “Young commerce. So sweet.”
Nilofer looked down again and brushed oil on the slide springs of the catchpole. She wanted her fetiche. She wanted to feel the perfect ridges of the bronze tortoiseshell, its static mass. “I don’t know where he is, if that’s your eventual question. If he was smart enough to not watch his father die, then he’s smart enough to not come back here.”
“Haven’t you heard? We did battle on the doorstep.”
The reference won no laughs. A shiver ran through Nilofer and she looked up again, knowing for certain it was him: Lut Sar; Il Mago. The magician who could make her disappear.
The Questor tilted his head. “How many more little bottles must I knock from the shelf, Nilofer? Your father is a busy man, competing with the Austrik Glassworks. He doesn’t have time to regrow fingers.”
“I’ve told you everythi — .”
Hy! yh! yh!
She thought a faro had sneaked back in to laugh at her. It was a brief thought. A hand snaked through her curls; another seized her wrist. She was bent at the waist, her head forced down till her cheekbone struck the catchpole shaft.
It wasn’t Lut Sar though. A magician does not touch the pledge when tricks are in motion. What pinned Nilofer to the table was dark shawl and white mask, a grip at odds with hyena call and lye-scent skin.
“NO!” Lut Sar roared, the volume sudden and misplaced. He bent like she had, at the waist, bringing his eyeline to Nilofer’s as the ghast held her. “That’s not what luvians do! They never tell you everything. And I would never ask, my dear…” he delivered the word like a bludgeon, “…dear child.”
Nilofer’s eye throbbed, her arm swum with acid, her face with sweat.
Lut Sar crawled onto the table, beetle-like over the tools and trinkets. “They need only tell me one thing, then the next. Each at the proper, civilized time.”
Hy! yh! yh!
“Where is Vladik?”
“I don’t know!”
“Who will he run to?”
“I don’t know.”
“How did he print the pamphlets?”
“I DON’T KNOW!”
“When did you last see him?”
Nilofer’s eyes widened; focused. Her breath steadied. Lut Sar saw it. The silence was sudden then broken by a laugh. Not the hyena this time but its master. The magician came up into a squat and clapped his hands.
“Ah yes,” he exclaimed as he saw the look on Nilofer’s face — the decision she was making. “You really are a shrewd one.”
Now the pioneers had something else to talk about. The best thing to be caught talking about. The Questor’s inspection filled them with exuberance, and when they were let back in the workshop they took up their projects with vigor. Few questioned why their tools were disturbed or their papers spilled. The rest of the school day was burned like fuel and they ran home to tell their parents how Lut Sar was not the villain they portrayed him as.
Nilofer stayed an hour beyond the closing assembly. She welded, so the goggles would cover her bruise, and so she could be certain the ghast hadn’t damaged her catchpole. But more than that, she was slow. A piece of her had been robbed.
When she was finished she picked up the catchpole, rested it on a sore shoulder, and fetched her counterweight from the box tray.
“Haddad.”
Shadows were painful memories. When the Edificor appeared in the workshop doorway it made her start. He didn’t notice it, for he wasn’t looking her in the eye.
“Don’t come back tomorrow. Stay away till next week. Understand?”
She studied the side of his face. “Why?”
“I have a duty here, Nilofer. To see these children through to the grading. Two of your friends are scandals. Every day you’re here the class is distracted. Your presence dulls their focus.”
She could never argue with him. It made her argue all the harder with Vladik. Her friendships were owed to the teacher before her. “My studies… I’ll fall behind.”
He looked straight at her, and gave the smile he had given on the first day, when Nilofer had hidden behind her father’s leg at the edge of the schoolyard.
“That would be impossible.”
He tells me you’re top of the class.
She didn’t know if she wanted to strike him or fall against him. She settled on looking at her feet, before willing them to motion. Just as she passed through the doorway, he called out again.
“Oh, and Nilofer?”
She shifted the catchpole to her other shoulder and turned.
“Take this to Mira Tariq. A courier was looking for her this morning.”
She dropped the tortoiseshell into her pocket. Her arm ached as she extended to take the letter from the Edificor.
The parchment was sealed with imperial wax and rolled in a cylinder; like a catchpole with traps to spring.
