33 - in which the world finds out

In a cavern in the cliff wall of Arko, by a rivulet that runs down through the rock and turns a huge wheel as in a mill, sits the great press of Arko, the first of all such devices after the Fire, the only one for centuries. I have been there a few times, felt the sweltering heat, smelled the metallic air and the tang of ink, heard the booming and clicking and pinging of its works in rhythm more perfect than any human drummer can make. In the office where the scribes work, it is a deep thrumming that you feel through your feet more than hear, day and night, as if the Earthsphere itself had a racing heartbeat.

Here, they make the Pages, in which one can read all the news of Arko, as well as all manner of other publications penned by all manner of people.

Intharas Terren, fessas, the high editor of the Pages, keeps a personal and private journal of the events of his life, and the events of Arko with commentary too personal to publish in the Pages. It’s by his permission that I have copied his entry for the eight-day of Imbas 17-24, 51^st-last Year of the Present Age, here.

†

“So Intharas,” says Kamias. “I have one that seems completely implausible, but a Marble Palace source, usually reliable, swears on his hope of Celestialis is true.”

“Arumph,” I say without looking up, meaning go ahead.

“Shefen-kas has known since he was a kid he was going to die before thirty.”

“Oh, come on,” I say. “That’s back-alley bottom-fessas tract material. Same people who write trashy porn about him and Kallijas Itrean. Have you let us fall in arrears with the source again?”

“We are paid ahead.”

“He’s pulling your hairy skinny leg then.”

“Intharas, after twenty years working in this machine-reeking hole in a cliff and two thousand times getting fired by you—when not once have you had the decency to really mean it—I think I know whether someone’s pulling my hairy skinny leg. For instance, he won’t swear on his hope of Celestialis with both hands high. My source’s source’s source overheard Shefen-kas telling this to the people involved with that sword-accident he had—the one whose sword it was, the guard-captain, the war-master who was there, and so on.”

“Maybe you’re pulling my hairy fat leg. I mean, with something like this I’d have to be the stooge who went in and asked him, wouldn’t I? ‘It’s an incredible rumour I heard, You Whose Life is The World’s Eternity…’ Kamias, you’re fired.”

“Really mean it this time, Intharas… ple-e-e-ease?”

He is not pulling my leg. I’ve been in this hole thirty odd years. But who’s to fikken believe this?

I call together the other writers who happen to be around, ask if anyone else has heard it. Three others have. It’s just that none bothered to tell me, figuring I’d react more or less the way I have, as my usual unflappably calm self. “My little professional God, get me some booze.”

“Well, it’s Shefen-kas,” Alabrakas says. “He’s always full of surprises, you just never know what he’s going to do next. Else we wouldn’t keep having to order extra buckets of ink just for his moves.”

“You’ve got to be nuts,” says old seasoned Darmas. “I’d be more like to believe Shefen-kas pulling his backing from Kallijas for Imperator and giving it to Minis.”

I had no idea how long an eight-day it was going to be.

“I am thinking,” says Roras, “that if this bug-fik story were true... it would explain a lot about him. I mean, wouldn’t it? Why he does everything so fast, started everything so young. Why he takes all these risks and gets himself racked up as if he weren’t at all concerned about it catching up with him in old age.”

“That could just be being young and stupid,” says Foranas, who knows all about being exactly these things. “Not that I actually just said that or anything.”

Sisaria speaks up. It is still strange to me, having the high voices of girls in here, girls who can write... and too well, curse them, to get rid of them. “I am thinking, he is...” She counts on her fingers behind her desk; her arithmetic is about the same as the average man writer, which is to say, terrible. “Twenty-eight and a half. And he is making sure he and the Yeoli hawks are out of Arko, because he doesn’t trust any other Yeoli Imperator to keep them tame, and he’s put a deadline on it, such a deadline that he is working like a dog and making everyone else in the Marble Palace do the same. Why the big hurry, what for? We’ve asked him that and never got a clear answer. This... would explain that.”

“It would explain some things about his personal life.” The soft Yeoli accent of Shemeya. Weird having them here too. But a Yeoli Imperator did set us free to write what we wanted. They’re also used to being free, which is useful; they’ll just say, ‘Why don’t we publish that?’ and I’ll realize it’s my old pussy-foot-around-Imperium instincts, learned over a lifetime, that stopped me from thinking of it myself. Besides, having a few wool-hairs here helps all Arko comprehend the mysteries of the wool-hair-run Marble Palace. “His first marriage was strange.” A marriage a Yeoli thinks is strange? “It was a three, and not for love at all. He was looking for a couple who’d marry him to further their careers; he asked in each town until he found one. And they set to making heirs right away. So maybe he didn’t think he had time to wait for love before having kids. Or didn’t want to bereave a loving wife so soon.”

“What about Niku?” says Darmas.

“That was in the Mezem,” says Roras, who was working there at the time. “They were both ring-fighters. Neither of them would have been thinking about living any longer than past the next fight—”

“And how many bonks they could get in before,” Kamias cuts in.

“Right. It didn’t even occur to them that they might make a child.”

“Skorsas? Kallijas?”

“You know,” says Shemeya, “in his whole life, Chevenga’s never fallen in love with anyone he ended up staying with, in a normal way.”

“Maybe it also explains...” Alabrakas gives in to an old reflex, peeking over one shoulder, then the other. “Why he’s so, you know… crazy.”

I slam my fist down on my desk. The tale is fitting well enough together that it will be big enough in the street that we have to run something about it. “Get me some booze. I will ask him.”

†

As I touch the little image of Lukitzas that stands outside the Imperial office, I think, ‘I need you more than usual now, you fat old skull-grinning egg-pate.’ No, I need booze, booze is what I need, and none of the scratching bastards actually did get me any.

Sense did catch up with me while I walked here, though, making me realize I’m only going to have to see Shefen-kas for a moment. It will just be a quick denial, maybe an arch look with those black brows and a shrug, and, “Well, I understand you do have to ask me these things right out, Intharas; it is your calling.” Then I smartly grovel in apology, and I’m out of there and writing up his denial. He’s hardly going to say it’s true, even if it is. Nobody is that honest.

Six days after he got stuck right through the lung, and he’s not even working in bed, but at the desk. He looks a tad pale, but maybe that’s from not being in the sun so much, since he’s cut back on exercise. On the back of his sword-hand, between the golden chains joining the ring to the bracelet of the Seal, I see the pin-prick and the bruising from a Haian needle that’s been removed very recently. “Gehit,” he says. “Intharas, welcome. Saekrberk?”

I can’t believe what I hear myself do: turn it down.

What if it is true? What am I doing to him by asking? And what’s he going to do to me in return? –‘Trash-alley balderdash,’ my sense answers me. ‘What he’s going to do is laugh in your face for believing it enough to ask.’

I thank him for again allowing me time on short notice. I explain how we have to ask about these things, even if we don’t want to, as if he doesn’t know this. I beg him not to laugh too hard. I blather mealy-mouthed for a while, laying on the You-Whose’s thick, and he taps his finger on his desk pointedly, and I finally get to saying, “This lowlier-than-lowly one heard a rumour, that is barely believable though the source swore on his hope of Celestialis it was true...” How to word this? More politely than I did to Kamias, that’s for sure. “That You Whose Thought Is The World’s Command have lived all your life with the clairvoyant knowledge that You were going to die before the age of thirty… is that true?”

He doesn’t laugh; he doesn’t arch his brows. He freezes solid, the colour in his face going out of it entirely, as if he’s turned into a marble statue of himself, with an expression as if I just put a sword through his other lung.

Oh, my sweet little scribbling God—I feel my bowels suddenly wanting to squeeze out shit all through my pants. The trap-booth, the darts, are they kill-darts or just stun-darts? My head aches instinctively, my ears hear the snap and hiss echoing again, remembering shortly after I started as High Editor. A face of stone over onyxine, a flat voice through the haze of pain in my head as I woke up, “It is the opinion of the Imperator that you slightly… misunderstood his meaning.” Old Boras, whose retirement gave me the job, warned me: getting spring-darted once is traditional, with either a new High Editor or a new Imperator. Just to let you know what the risk is, keep you respectful. Of course this time it won’t be a Mahid face I wake up to; more likely the rock-cliff mug of Krero Saranyera. But, through the fog of terror, I vaguely see Shefen-kas’s bruised hand do the Yeoli hand-turned-down sign for no to the trap-booth people.

He says… nothing. He keeps staring at me with those piercing brown eyes that are usually so frighteningly, or reassuringly, depending on how you look at it, certain, now frozen in a shock like a death-blow, and his cheeks paper-white. He goes on saying nothing. Silence stretches between us like a moment stopped eternally in time, stretching for beads, days, centuries. He says nothing, like an unending scream to the ears of a deaf man. He drops his face into his two bloodless, Imperial-sealed hands as if the lava of Hayel is falling flaming all around his head. Sweet little muckraking God, not only is it true, I see—but I’m his first news that it’s out.

He says an army-load of nothing, and I want to throw up, and I want to shit, and I want so badly to be anywhere but here that I’d dive into the depths of Hayel in an instant if the gates were open. He’s going to send me there anyway, for this. He just signed no because frog-marching me is less trouble to his guards than carrying me. A trial in which I don’t get to speak… or just into the oubliette, never to be seen again… or, if my family’s lucky, my body found in the Lake. I wait for it, desperately wishing for a last drink first—why did I turn it down? Little press-printing God, it is unbelievable just seeing him like this, you’d never think he could look this way in a thousand years. It’s dizzying.

He says nothing. It must be a whole tenth-bead that passes, in vomit-inducing, intestine-wringing silence. Finally, when I can’t stand it any more, I open my mouth, to say the only thing I can think of. “Imperator... perhaps this wretchedly miserably pathetic one will take you up on that Saekrberk.”

One of his hands slowly rises. I never thought I’d ever see that hand tremble. He makes a sign to the trap-booth people. The drink-pouring sign.

After a few millennia of silence like the inside of the lowest cave of Hayel, the tray comes. He pours, lets me pick, we both say “Korukai” and knock back the first in one draught as is customary. But it seems his body is just moving, his mind in some other world. He pours the second for both of us, and knocks back his just as fast as the first. He is trying to return to this place, I see. It works, two spots of red come up on his cheeks, and, Celestialis be praised, albeit in barely more than a whisper, he says something.

“I don’t want to distract from the elections… with something personal of mine.” He’s barely managing more than a whisper, and it’s dead flat. “And it’s Yeola-e… my own people… who should have known first… But... it’s out, it’ll be distracting from the election already… who knows what wings it’s growing as a rumour…”

Right there in front of me, he calls in his secretary, gives him a series of orders in Yeoli. “I have called a meeting of writers first bead tomorrow,” he says. “I will tell everything to everyone all at once then.”

“So you want the Pages to sit on it today, You Whose Life, em, Imperator.” He nods and does the hand-turned-up Yeoli “yes” sign, at the same time. I was going to do a special edition today. No matter, I’ll do it tomorrow.

I don’t know what else to say. What do you say? “Hard luck, Shefen-kas”? “I’m sorry”? “I’m going to miss you”? “Enjoy your last year and a half”? I look at him, who is always so rock-solid, so steady, so eternal, so… there, that face that all the world knows, those arms and hands that could carve their way into the greatest power on earth, those eyes that always saw everything so clearly and never wavered from his course... and I realize I can’t even imagine him gone, I can’t imagine the world without him. That’s how he is to everyone. But you aren’t that way to yourself, Shefen-kas, and never were. Suddenly it is like he is made of mist, delicate and fleeting like the sun could burn him away in a moment, like I am seeing his ghost.

Our eyes collide, and I can see in his that he knows I am seeing him this way. My intestines writhe again, my ears straining to hear the first hiss of the spring-dart, but his eyes don’t turn angry. The sadness in them clarifies, making me see it has always been there, like an ocean you imagined might be there before, but now you see.

“The Pages will sit on it today, Imperator,” I say. “Thank you.” I bang down the last of my second cup of Saekrberk, do the prostration as fast as I can without appearing to do it fast, and get the fik out.

Everyone stares at me when I get back to the office, so I guess my face must show something.

“Get me some booze right now and then you’re ALL fired, you fikkers!”

“Good professional ink-snorking God,” they all say, or words to that effect. “Shefen-kas doom-touched, special edition!”

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