Got to nip this in the bud, Archidi. He’ll do it, this little shit trying to fill his father’s boots, he’ll sign an order to get it done without a second thought, and you’ll watch the refugee columns form from horizon to horizon all over again . . .
“The dwenda have been gone for several thousand years, my lord.” Voice as smooth as lack of sleep and krinzanz would let it get. “I think it’s safe to say that any acolytes they may once have had among humans are now dead. And this woman Elith certainly did not herself craft the idol she owns. She refers to it as an heirloom of her clan, and it certainly has the look of something many centuries old.”
“But perhaps, Archeth,” the Emperor said softly, “Elith herself is many centuries old, as well. Did you think of that? Perhaps she’s been kept alive by the sorceries of her dwenda masters, gifted with eternal youth in return for her services. Perhaps she is a witch. Or even, a creature crafted from stone and given sorcerous life.”
Archeth sat as if poised on the edge of the An-Monal crater. Lives spun past in her head, held in a balance whose mechanism she had only the slightest influence over. She saw Elith, screaming her lungs out on the rack or pincered apart, opened and probed with red-hot steel. Thousands like her, driven from their homes, no food or water beyond what they could carry, starving on the roads, brutalized and extorted of what little they still owned by the soldiery supposed to watch over them.
She was accustomed to reading Jhiral’s face, but could make nothing of the bland expression he wore now.
“Do you believe that, my lord?” she asked with knife-edge caution. “That this woman is a . . . a witch? Or some kind of golem even?”
The Emperor studied his hands, gazed critically at his manicure for a few moments before he would meet Archeth’s eyes. He sighed.
“Oh, I suppose not. Not really, no.”
“Then—”
A sudden jabbing finger. “But—and I told you before about interrupting me, God fuck it, Archeth—what I am beginning to think is that maybe my father’s policy of resettlement after the war was a mistake. It wouldn’t be the first mistake he made, would it? You remember that god-awful mess in Vanbyr. So, the way I see it, we’ve got tens of thousands of these people living among us, refusing to convert, most of them, turning their backs on the civilized benefits the Empire offers, going on with their idolatry and who knows what else besides. I don’t want to start sounding like that little twat Menkarak, but if permitting the kind of religious freedom we do is going to bring down some millennia-old curse on us all, well, then maybe we need to rethink our values. And maybe we don’t want these people inside our borders after all.”
She sat and waited.
“Well?” he snapped.
“Do I have your majesty’s permission to speak?”
“Oh, Mother of the fucking Revelation, Archeth, don’t sulk! Yes, speak. Speak. It’s what I pay you for, isn’t it?”
She marshaled her words with care. She’d come to the palace with the avowed intention of scaring the shit out of Jhiral. Now she wasn’t so sure it was a good idea.
“My lord, according to the Helmsmen, the dwenda were a race with mastery of worlds that lie parallel to our own, worlds that in some way seem to occupy almost the same space as ours, that are no farther away than your bedchamber is from where we sit now. I can’t say I understand how this is supposed to work, but it does correspond to some of the common Aldrain legends in the north, which claim that certain places are inhabited by otherworldly creatures in a way that is hidden from human eyes. An isolated mountain crag becomes a fairy-tale castle at certain hours of the night, or in the midst of a powerful lightning storm; you can knock on a forest oak and it will be opened to you like a gate, but only on certain nights of the year; and so forth. I find in these stories an echo of the Kiriath tales of voyaging here from another world, which is why I am inclined to take them seriously, but there is one major difference. My people were forced to seek out the deepest, hottest, most pressurized places in the bowels of the earth before they could find a way to pass between worlds.” She paused, measured her tone again before she plunged on. “The dwenda, it seems, can effect this passage anywhere they choose. They can enter this world at will, at any given point.”
Her words seemed to evaporate into the quiet. Small, domestic sounds seeped in from elsewhere in the palace. Banging of doors, voices giving instructions. Behind the wall, water gurgled in pipes. The Emperor looked at his hands again.
“You’re saying this isn’t just a northern problem, then,” he muttered.
“I’m saying, my lord, that until we have a clear idea of what the dwenda want, geography as we understand it is largely meaningless. These creatures could show up anywhere from the Demlarashan wastes to the palace gardens right here in Yhelteth. We simply do not know.”
Jhiral grunted. “And this stone idol? You seemed pretty fucking convinced last night that it was the key to the incursion. Changed your mind all of a sudden?”
“No, my lord. I still believe it is important. But it’s the first of its kind that I’ve ever seen.” Though both Angfal and Kalaman recognized it from my description and nearly shit rivets when they did. But you don’t need to know that right now, my lord. “Elith brought it with her when she was resettled, but she was already at that point a deeply disturbed woman. It is heavy, bulky, and far from attractive in aspect. I think it’s safe to say such things are not a common possession of Naomic peoples, either here or in the north. A few might exist, here or there, but—”
“We could always institute a search. House-to-house, immigrant districts throughout the Empire.”
Hoiran’s fucking balls. “We could do that, my lord, but I am not convinced that it would be an efficient use of manpower. In fact, I have an equally direct but somewhat smaller-scale plan of action that perhaps my lord would—”
“Yes, all right.” Jhiral gestured wearily. “Don’t sugarcoat it to death. I already guessed you wouldn’t have come all the way up here at this time of day unless you wanted something. Come on then, let’s hear your bright idea.”
It felt like stepping off a bobbing coracle and onto a slippery but solid jetty. Archeth tried not to let her relief show. Carefully, then, very carefully:
“The woman Elith and the idol she brought with her are originally from Ennishmin, more precisely from the eastern fringes of that province.”
The imperial lip curled. “Yes, that’s a godforsaken corner of the world. You’d think she’d have been glad to get south to some decent weather.”
“Uhm—yes, my lord.”
“That was a joke, Archeth.”
“Yes, my lord.” She patched together a smile. “Ennishmin is not blessed with ideal weather.”
The look in Jhiral’s eyes hardened. “Don’t fucking humor me, woman. You really think I’d have put up with your drug-soaked insubordination and superior airs this long if I didn’t value you for something other than sycophancy? Revelation knows, I get enough of that from the rest of the court. You, Archeth, I trust to tell me the truth, even if it upsets me. So get on with it. Upset me, if that’s what you’re planning to do. What about Ennishmin?”
“Yes, my lord.” The krin was building a shrill desire to scream in his face. She held it down, barely. “When I mentioned the origins of the idol to the Helmsmen, both of them independently concluded that the Khangset incursion was probably a navigation error on the part of the dwenda. That they had intended to arrive in the east of Ennishmin and the relocation of the idol threw them off. Imagine trying to follow a map that’s thousands of years old. It would be easy enough to make mistakes.”