CHAPTER SIXTEEN

1664

YEAR OF THE CRUX

The Makala Aet

The Black Ocean

Chono is lying in bed when a knock sounds on the door. She climbs up, body stiff, the impacts of the Silt Glow Cliffs disaster still telling on her. At the door, one of Esek’s novitiates is holding a courier container.

“Forgive me, Sa. Were you asleep?”

“No,” Chono mutters. Though she should be asleep. It’s 1:00 a.m. local time in Lo-Meek. It’s 4:00 a.m. standard system time. But on Pippashap it’s already noon, and Chono, little sleep as she’s gotten in the past few days, hasn’t acclimated yet. She’s been staring at the ceiling for the past two hours, imagining her novitiates preparing a meal for the fishersaan. Sticky rice and steamed fish with vegetables. Maybe a tea cake to go with it, shaped to resemble the round-cheeked Capamame.

The novitiate says, “We rendezvoused with a courier shuttle, Burning One. This has arrived for you from Riin Kala.”

Chono, realizing what it is, goes momentarily still. She feels a surge of equal parts relief and deep uncertainty, but she doesn’t let it show. “Oh, yes. Put it in here.”

After the novitiate has gone, Chono stands a moment staring at the container on the table. When she finally opens it, looking cautiously inside, she half expects a monster to leap from within. She slides the chest out of its protective casing, which triggers a holographic message to unspool in the air. Not his voice this time, but his handwriting:

I hope you wanting it back has nothing to do with a failure of trust. But it may be just as well. Certain illustrious secretaries got wind that I was investigating this Sunstep thing, and I’ve been told categorically to drop it. Whatever is going on out there, my kin don’t want me involved. I’ve got to go quiet for a while.

I have nothing valuable to offer you. No proof of what the coin contains, or why it was advertised, or how you can get it back. But there is something dreadful about this hunt of yours, and all the Kindom’s interest in it. Something… miasmic. If I thought you could be guided by me, I would say to walk away while you still can.

And I know now why you think Liis Konye is involved. I hope you weren’t badly hurt in Siinkai. I hope you won’t let Esek be the death of you. But I suppose there’s no use in my saying it, Mysterious Chono.

Good luck, and may Kata’s Many protect you.

Chono stares at the message for long moments, every emotion from irritation to surprise to regret moving through her. There’s something weary and resolved in Ilius’s tone, not his usual excitement. The old nickname sounds like defeat. And that he’s being stonewalled by the secretaries recalls her own questions about why the Clever Hand has been missing from this operation since the beginning. She wants to write him back. To say, I’m sorry for my secrets. I’m sorry for all the things I never told you. But what would it serve? The chest doesn’t just keep secrets in. It keeps other people out.

She gently sweeps the message from the air, focusing on the chest itself. She looks at it for a long time. She doesn’t even realize she has inserted the combination until the lid lifts and—

Letters. Soft as silk under her fingertips. There are several dozen of them, haphazardly stacked, not a one folded up and all of them crinkling together like music. The words spill before her eyes, slide into her veins with the ease of hypodermic needles. Sentences she has read a thousand times, and which now come at her in bursts: I see you visited Teros again. Find anything interesting on Braemin? Do you enjoy the sweets? You always loved sweets. Does Esek mock you for your prayers? Does Esek appreciate your intrepidness?

Does Esek like the presents I send her?

Oddly enough, what she thinks of first is Lucos Alanye and the various coins Six has sent them over the years: the memories and the video journals, and the increasing desperation of a man whose high ambitions hit a deadly ceiling. When Chono thinks of Alanye, she thinks of someone small-minded and ill-equipped—a very good soldier and guardsaan, but a poor political operative. And yet, he’s Six’s forefather. Six’s origin story.

There in the letters, she reads: I once said I was Kindom in my heart. I am not. I have a different kind of heart. So do you, Chono.

Another knock on the door makes her jerk.

She slams the chest shut and barely has time to step away from the table before Esek strides in. She peruses Chono critically, and Chono’s veins run with ice.

“It’s the middle of the night. Have you slept at all?” Esek demands.

In the end it is discipline, self-control, and practice that allow her to answer as steadily as ever. “I slept a little.”

Esek frowns. “Well, you look awful. You’d better sleep more, after this.”

“Yes, Burning One.”

A low chuckle. “Ah. So, we are back to formalities, are we? I reveal one little treason, and now you’re as guarded as a female on her menarche.”

Chono merely looks at her. Esek grins. She goes to the untouched bar in the corner of Chono’s room and pours two drinks. “If you’re not going to sleep, you should have some of this. It’s not praevi, but it’s got a stimulant in it. Can’t have you passing out from exhaustion.”

Through Chono’s mind skitter the words and phrases of a hundred letters. She surprises Esek and herself by walking to the bar and accepting the outstretched glass. It’s the same clear liquor Esek was drinking last night, and it bites its way down, icy and bright. Esek is still regarding her.

“You’re dressed,” she says.

Chono glances down at herself. Besides her red coat and sidearm, she’s wearing the same clothes from last night, rumpled now. Esek, as always, looks immaculate. Beautiful in a hypnotically serpentine way, her umber eyes tracking Chono.

Esek declares, “The hunt is back on!”

She tosses back her shot of liquor, gesturing with the bottle at Chono’s empty glass. Unthinking, Chono allows her to refill it, but she doesn’t drink.

“You mean you think you’ve found Jun Ironway?” asks Chono.

“Even better!” Esek cries. “I’ve found out where the warhorse came from.”

Chono gives her a blank look. She feels… slow. Distracted. As if Esek were speaking another language and her translator hasn’t caught up yet.

“Warhorse, Sa?”

“Yes, yes—tell me, Chono: Ever heard of the Ar’tec Collective?”

“You mean the work colony on Ar’tec Island?”

“I mean… the work colony that, unbeknownst to the average citizen, operates entirely under the control of its prisoners, communicates exclusively via AI interface, and runs factories that, among other things, build toys for the Cloaksaan. Including this one.”

She flexes her fingers and casts an image into the air—a three-dimensional, rotating schematic of a warhorse. Chono, who is still processing Esek’s claims about Ar’tec, stares at the schematic without speaking. When she faces Esek again, the older cleric looks as excited as a child.

“In case you’re wondering, this is the warhorse Masar Hawks traded to the Jeveni innkeeper in Fezn. I traced the schematic to Ar’tec and told them to give me everything they knew about what happened to it. They sold it to a mercenary broker.”

Chono looks from the schematic to Esek again. “Why haven’t you reported them?”

Esek gives her a condescending look. “My dear Chono, Kindom vendors do this sort of thing all the—”

“I’m aware,” interrupts Chono with a sharpness that makes Esek’s eyebrows shoot up. “I’m not amazed that such illegal transactions occur; I’m amazed you are tacitly enabling them.”

Esek whistles. “My. Feeling spirited, aren’t we?”

Now, instead of ice, it is heat that creeps up the back of Chono’s neck.

“Let’s save the lectures for now,” Esek goes on. “As I was saying, they sent me all the information they have. It’s quite useful stuff. Let me show you.”

Esek rotates her wrist and replaces the warhorse schematic with a glut of text, documents, diagrams, and faces—including Masar Hawks. It all moves too fast for Chono to process what she’s seeing. This is probably Esek’s design.

“What we have here… is an impressively complicated game of cups.” Esek looks at Chono with one of her rakish smiles. “It all started at the end of last year, right around when the sacking at Verdant happened. The warhorse got bandied about with alacrity, first one ship, then another. Lost to pirates. Regained by traders. Disappeared from the public record. But in the end, it was sold to a fellow in Lo-Meek called Saboshi, who has an old, professional acquaintance with Masar Hawks. But Sa Hawks is a middling pirate, you may say. And all these machinations suggest something bigger at work. Think like a secretary, Chono. What would a secretary ask?”

Chono pauses, unprepared to play a part in Esek’s theater. After a moment she says flatly, “A secretary would ask who paid for it.”

“Very good! That’s where these come in.” She points at some ledgers floating amid the other holograms in the air. “When Saboshi took ownership of the warhorse, he didn’t pay for it. Instead, his bank shows a deposit of twice the warhorse’s value. Where did the money come from?” Masar Hawks’s profile momentarily takes center stage. “From Hawks. But how does our middling pirate get that kind of cash? Here we have another game of cups. Money bouncing between accounts, flung from planet to planet. All going back to one place.”

Esek rotates her hand, and a new face swims to the forefront, a man. He is Jeveni, slender and dark-haired, something vividly clever in his pale eyes.

“Nikkelo sen Rieve,” says Esek grandly. “An isolationist by birth, a collector by trade. He is the one who transferred the money to Saboshi. But, even more important, he is the one who arranged the purchase of the warhorse from Ar’tec. He’s run these deals before. Weapons, mostly, but also casting equipment and the occasional ship. Our Ar’tec contacts were kind enough to direct us to mountains of evidence against Sa Rieve.” Data begins to flow like a waterfall down the casting view. “It appears his machinations can be traced all over the Treble, to all kinds of organizations as shady as the Ar’tec Collective.”

Chono watches the data on the screen: star map coordinates and company brands and credit deposits and withdrawals, all occurring over a time span of twenty years. But there is a glaring omission.

“Who funds him?”

“I thought you’d never ask!” From amid the crowd springs a featureless outline of a person in profile. “All of sen Rieve’s purchases are traceable to one entity. And not only weapons, by the way. His employer has a taste for historical artifacts.”

Does Esek like the presents I send her?

“Artifacts?” Chono repeats.

“Mm-hmm. It seems Nikkelo sen Rieve has negotiated with hundreds of archivists over the years. He’s acquired dozens of historical records. So, what do we have before us, Chono? A link between Masar Hawks and sen Rieve’s mysterious, nameless employer, who appears to have a great deal of interest… in uncovering the past.”

Chono considers this. In the heyday of their hunt for Six, Esek often ranted about their solitariness—the fact that they only worked with others when it was necessary to complete one of their escapades. Like the firefight on K-5. And the disaster of Soye’s Reach. Esek always believed Six could not have survived this long, nor accomplished all they did, without at least one consistent confidant. Could Nikkelo sen Rieve be that person? That missing link in the picture of Six’s life?

Esek claps her hands, looking delighted with herself. “So, you see, it’s a matter of tracking down sen Rieve. He’s no doubt commissioned Hawks to locate the coin, and will rendezvous with them soon—before moving on to his employer. I’ve already got my fish scouring the casting net. Once we have him… we have his employer.”

Chono absorbs this, still silent. They have tried to track Six through their associates before—and failed. Six, always one step ahead. Six, always just out of reach. So why does Chono feel such a strange anxiety, now? Why does the prospect of finding Nikkelo sen Rieve, finding Jun Ironway, finding, somehow, a route to Six—make her light up with nerves? This is an old game. Chono played it for years, before leaving Esek’s household. Is she not prepared to play it now? Now, when the whole Treble is in uproar, and Six may threaten it more than ever?

Her silence has not escaped Esek, whose expression suddenly hardens. She regards Chono narrowly, demanding, “What’s the matter with you?”

Chono doesn’t answer her, and Esek’s eyes begin to flit about the room, as if looking for some sign. When she lands on the chest on the table, Chono feels her throat close. There was no chance to hide it, before Esek barged into the room. Hardly time to shut the lid, to reengage the lock. For a moment the silence in the room feels like a glacier—hard, massive, icy. Then Esek looks at her, reads her in an instant, and moves toward the table. She picks up the chest in both hands. Chono holds her body perfectly still, maintains her implacable facade, but she is reminded of strangers in the dark, stripping her naked, touching her body without permission and without regard.

“What’s this?” Esek asks, turning the chest this way and that, as if she can prize it open.

Chono says indifferently, “It’s one of my personal effects.”

Esek meets her eyes. She gives the chest a little shake, testing Chono’s response. Chono remains impassive. No sound emanates from the chest.

“I never noticed it before,” says Esek. “What other ‘effects’ are you hiding, Chono?”

Chono doesn’t respond, and Esek’s fishing falls flat. Carelessly, Esek drops the chest back on the table, the weight of it making a gunshot sound. Chono wishes suddenly that the chest was her own heart, that she could secret it in her body, a place no unwelcome fingers could touch.

“I take it you expect me to conceal the crimes of the Ar’tec Collective, just as you intend to conceal them?” she asks Esek in a flat voice.

Esek chuckles, but it’s humorless. “I thought we had discussed this. If I am already a traitor to the Kindom, so are you. We may as well make the best of it.”

At this, Chono’s lips turn in the barest of smiles, but it’s bitter. She feels hot, sweaty, dirty.

“So you think I’m content to remain one? A traitor?”

“Content? No, I’d never use that word to describe you. Consistent. That’s a better word for you. All these years you’ve known that I was hunting Six and killing people to do it and all these years you’ve known my family’s crimes, and did you ever tell the Kindom? Did you ever betray me? No. So why shouldn’t you carry on protecting me, as you always have?”

“You’re assuming I did all that to protect you,” Chono shoots back, reacting without thought, without caution.

Esek raises a slow eyebrow, intrigued. “Then what did you do it for?” she murmurs.

Chono doesn’t answer. Can’t answer. Esek watches her, and it’s one of those rare instances when she’s not smirking, not sneering. She raises a hand to her head and touches the grotesque scarring of her ear. It’s subtle enough one could mistake it for pressing aside some errant coil of hair, but Esek’s tight crown of braids is impeccable.

She heaves a sigh. “Do you know why I think you’ve done it?” she asks mockingly. Chono doesn’t answer. Esek’s look turns viperous. “For the same reason you killed Cleric Paan.”

It’s like having her legs taken out from under her by the unexpected sweep of a stave. It’s as if the chest on the table has exploded shrapnel everywhere, each letter a razor blade.

“What?”

“The old man who was raping children,” says Esek lightly, as if Chono doesn’t know who she means. As if Chono’s whole body hasn’t clenched with fury and fear at the mention of him. “The one you slaughtered. Brutally done, from what I heard.”

Does Esek appreciate your intrepidness?

“Why, you could have cut his throat and had it over with! You could have broken his neck. I taught you how. But no. You beat him to death.” She whistles. Nausea tightens Chono’s throat. “I keep wondering, why did you kill him like that? Why take the law into your hands? Didn’t you tell the Clerisy what was happening?”

“Of course I did.”

“And what did they do?”

Chono’s mouth closes. Esek nods at her, knowingly. Her lip curls back.

“Nothing, right? They did nothing. And you knew they would do nothing. When you caught him at it, you could have trussed him up. You could have submitted an ocular recording proving what he’d done. They would have had to at least remove him. But you knew they wouldn’t kill him. Wouldn’t even put him in a work colony—not a cleric! You knew those children wouldn’t get the justice they were owed. So, you did it yourself. For them. Just as I did it for you when I rescued you on Kator.”

Chono takes a step back from her.

“Don’t talk about that,” she says, and her voice sounds distant and dangerous.

Esek looks back at Chono with a sinister smile; it goes through her like an X-ray, seeing every part of her.

“You were always so devout. You always believed, so deeply, in the justice of the gods. In the mission of the Kindom, to make that justice manifest. Even after what your masters did to you…” A shiver rolls down Chono’s spine, and she’s convinced Esek can see its progress—that it’s a chord she wants to pluck with her fingers. “For the longest time, I thought you were in denial. That that’s how you survived it all—how you justified your vows. You told yourself the Kindom didn’t know you had corrupt teachers who sold your body for favors. Then I came along and rescued you, and it must have fit the narrative in your head. ‘See? Here comes a righteous cleric, and as soon as she learns what is happening, she rescues me, and slays my monsters.’ That must be why you’ve loved me so much.”

“Come to the point, Esek.”

Esek’s smile twists like a knife going in. She takes two, three steps closer to Chono, until they are an arm’s length apart.

“But you know the truth now, don’t you, Chono? The Kindom knew. The Kindom always knows. It let you suffer for the same reason it let the children on Pippashap suffer: To protect itself. To maintain its own order. So, a year ago, you did what I did: You took vengeance into your own hands. You decided your loyalty to the Kindom… has limits. Like mine.”

This is too much. Chono doesn’t even try to stifle the anger in her retort. “Your disloyalty is rooted in your own self-interest. What I did was to protect people. It is not the same. And don’t insult me by pretending you care about the abuse of children. You’ve made it clear many times that you’d as soon see me whored out as help me if I wasn’t going to be useful to you.”

Esek pauses, considering.

“And you don’t think all the work you’ve done with me has been a kind of whoring, Chono?”

The shiver down her spine pulls taut, and snaps. Chono’s arm moves like a whip, her closed fist cracking against Esek’s face. Esek reels, stumbles. She hits the table and barely grabs it in time to keep from falling. Hot air spills between Chono’s teeth and through her nostrils as she watches Esek hunch over, cradling the side of her face. Seconds get eaten up in the sound of their heavy breathing. Esek spits blood onto the floor, and that crescent starburst on the white rug makes Chono realize, in a stomach-plummeting shock, what she’s done.

Her cocked fist drops. Her eyes widen. Esek spits more blood onto the carpet. Then, all at once, she’s pulling herself upright. She wipes a hand across her bloody mouth, and charges at Chono—Chono, who is still too stunned at her own actions to react, to defend herself, to anticipate the lunging knife—

But Esek doesn’t stab her. Doesn’t tackle her. No. Esek grabs the back of her head, yanking her close, pressing their foreheads together. It is more intimate than anything Chono has ever experienced.

“Yes, Chono!” Esek hisses between her teeth. “Yes!”

Only now does Chono realize how hard she’s breathing, almost hyperventilating, and Esek’s breath is hot on her face.

“Don’t let anyone disrespect you! Not me. Not Six. Not anyone. If they do, fight them. Kill them if you have to, but you are not the plaything of your masters. Don’t you understand how I’ve survived all this time? Do you know how many people have wished I would die? But I refused to submit, to be small, to retreat.”

Chono remains motionless, still stunned at the anger that exploded out of her. She, who has made her well-known, constant calm a bulwark against the darker feelings inside her. She feels confused, and a little frightened, and still angry underneath it all. So furiously, overpoweringly angry at all she has seen—

Esek lets go of her, stepping away.

“I want you to survive, Chono,” she growls. The corner of her mouth and cheekbone are red, swelling. “Our Kindom grinds its people into dust. So be like me. Be like Six—be whatever you need to be. But survive!”

Chono doesn’t respond. Any comparison of the violence Esek and Six have experienced from the Kindom feels… grotesque.

The silence is crushing. All at once, Esek turns away. She heads for the door, clearly finished. It’s this abrupt departure that startles words out of Chono’s throat.

“What about Nikkelo sen Rieve?”

Esek pauses at the door but doesn’t look back.

“We find him,” she says. “We follow him. We follow him straight to his employer.”

Chono swallows.

“To Six,” she says. Not a question.

This time Esek does look at her, a look as bright as the Godfire.

“That’s our mission, isn’t it?” she asks. “Hasn’t it always been our mission?”

Our mission. Our mission.

“And we will not tell our kin about it?” asks Chono.

A cool look. Esek says with undisguised contempt, “Not if we want to succeed.”

Chono stares back at her, not answering. After a moment, the older cleric turns away. The door closes behind her.

The chest sits on the table.

The blood soaks into the carpet.

Chono looks down at her knuckles, which are already bruised. In a kind of fugue, she goes to the chest, enters the combination, and stares into the pile of letters. Her hand moves, sifting through them, knowing them as much by sight as touch, until she finds the one she’s looking for, so worn that it’s translucent. She reads—

I am sorry it is so long since I wrote you. I have been very busy refusing to die.

There were four hundred people living in Soye’s Reach, including the surrounding homesteads. Many children died, which I know will matter to you. You and I are both guilty in this. But we are not the guiltiest parties. I will have such a revenge, Chono. Gods grant you are not burned up in the process.

I enclose a gift for Esek, if you will be my courier again. Do you still do her bidding? Do you still follow in her footsteps like a shadow? If she catches me someday, and brings the ax down on my head, will you mirror her?

The letter ends. Abrupt, like all the letters. Chono puts it back and closes the chest and listens to the snick of the lock engaging, as loud in her ears as the crack of her fist on Esek’s jaw, or the strike of a missile in the Katish wilderness.

Chono breathes in. She breathes out. She casts a comm directly to the temple at Riin Cosas. Within minutes, Aver Paiye appears before her, dressed in his evening robe. It’s nine o’clock in that part of Ma’kess. He frowns, clearly surprised to see her.

“Dear Chono! What is it?”

She breathes in. She breathes out.

“Forgive the late hour, Burning One. I have news regarding Sunstep’s location.”