Chapter 10
“Your sister is an Armenta?” asked Ana. So great was her shock that she ripped off her blindfold and stared at me, her yellow eyes blinking in the dim light of her chambers.
“N-no,” I said resentfully. “Well, yes, in that she works for them. But no, as in, not ye—”
She flapped a hand at me. “I am uninterested in your flustered mutterings, boy! By hell! This must come as quite a surprise to you. I mean—to be perfectly transparent, Din, you spoke of your family so rarely that I actually felt obliged to check imperial records to confirm they had not suffered some plague, and were all long dead!”
I stood in the glimmering light of Ana’s sole mai-lantern, wishing I’d saved my report until morning. I should have left her with her tomes and her scribblings and her out-of-tune lyres. Her mood was always better after some time tinkering with her obsessions in the dark.
“You have been spying upon me, ma’am?” I asked.
“No, I confirmed that you were not an orphan of some reprehensible tragedy!” said Ana.
“Young men of such ilk are often prone to rash stupidity and make for very poor investigators.” She paused to dig a tiny, brined fish out of a pickling jar on the table beside her, then popped it into her mouth and chewed thoughtfully.
“Well! I suppose I ought to ask how you are doing. Emotionally, I mean. Besides, obviously, not very well.”
“It is a…a strange thing. I lack the training for a reunion of this nature.”
She laughed lowly. “Sadly, I do not think the Empire could ever train us on how to manage familial relations, in any capacity. Did you like the boy, at least? Did you ask him of his fortunes, his prospects, and so on?”
“N-no?” I said. “We mostly talked about the murder. And the curse, and such.”
“I see. Did you toast them, at least? Ask them what they might desire for nuptial gifts?”
I said nothing.
Ana slowly turned to me. “Did you at least offer them your blessing, boy?” she cried. “Or offer to be at their wedding? Or anything?”
I said nothing.
“By hell, Din! I do not know personally many siblings, but you certainly sound like one of the least adequate ones imaginable!”
“May we turn the subject,” I said, “back to the investigation? Death seems a simpler thing than this.”
“Yes, yes…” Ana idly chewed another tiny black fish, its bones crunching in her teeth. “You are tired, Din.”
“I thought that obvious, ma’am.”
“I was observing a failing, boy—because you have missed a connection that seems notable. Take note. Lyimo killed himself some three years ago, true?”
“True, ma’am.”
“But there was another unusual phenomenon that began three years ago, true?”
I blinked. Then, slowly, the memory swam up within the dark depths of my skull. “Oh. The lights in the forest…”
“Correct! Seriv did not provide us with a precise timeline, but it certainly sounds like the mysterious flashing lights in that ancient, altered wood began three years ago—right about when Lyimo Armenta took a deep dive in a shallow pond and never came up! Isn’t that terribly interesting?”
I struggled with this for a moment, bewildered. “But…what connection could there possibly be between the two?”
“Oh, I’ve no idea. Were I a fool, I would say it makes a crude sense—the Daljen stir in their tombs in the forest and shift their doom onto the Armentas!
But I need not reach so far for explanation.
We’ve a feud between the gentry, and money, and land—that is reason enough for me to think the genesis for these crimes is all too human.
Yet as with all things concerning that elder race… it gets rather tricky, true?”
I stayed silent. I had not wished her to broach this subject, but there seemed to be no avoiding it now.
“Most of old history gets painted with a rather broad brush,” said Ana softly.
“Folk these days know a good deal of the race of the Khanum—and yet they also know nothing at all. It is known, for example, that those fabled people emerged from the Valley of Khanum hundreds of years ago. It’s known they changed themselves drastically, making themselves strong, brilliant—and strange.
It’s known the Khanum worked many wonders, some of which still persist. And it’s known they all vanished, of course—save for one, who now inhabits the great Sanctum at the core of all the Empire, and has not been seen by mortal eyes in many a year.
” She bent lower, her yellow eyes fixed on the floor, her pale fingers tracing the curls of the fretvine.
“Yet few know they weren’t some exotic, uniform, fantastical species, but people.
They had families, houses, titles, tribes.
There were the Daavir, of course, the clan of the emperor, long may he persist. The Daljen were another house and were considered the mightiest of all the Khanum—for a fleeting moment, at least. Like all their kin, they faded and vanished…
but the Daljen vanished first, nearly a century before all others. As to why, that is not known.”
The rain rose outside, pattering over the domed roof. A few fretvine leaves along the walls trembled, as if exulting in the moisture.
“We now find ourselves in a rather queer stretch of creation, Din!” Ana continued.
“In the inner rings of the Empire, there are many old things made by the Khanum that still exist, and go unquestioned. The folk there have fashioned a manner of living with the inexplicable. Closer to the Outer Rim, people organize their lives around the wet seasons, and the horrors of the deeps—which are even less understood.” She laughed darkly.
“And here we are in the third ring! Pressed between the old works of the Khanum, and the seasonal madness of the leviathans! We’ve much unearthliness about—but no spirits, nor ghosts, nor gods.
There are none at all in the Empire, I think. ”
“No, ma’am?” I said.
“No.” A cold, nasty smile. “For if gods existed, shouldn’t the world make more sense?
Shouldn’t all feel more stable, more comprehensible?
I consider myself a wise thing, yet when I consider creation, I see little but blind hunger and the ravages of nature.
The only order to be found is what we’ve put there, boy.
” She slipped her blindfold back on, dug up a book, and began reading.
“Let us go to the Armentas tomorrow, then, and see what order can be found in the deaths of Velona’s children.
After that, we shall recruit the Orbiis to read the entrails of young Zansay Burav.
Perhaps we shall spy some glint of the future in her viscera, just like the prophets of old. ”
—
I sat on my mossbed in my chambers, listening as the rain intensified on the fretvine roof. How strange it felt to be in this place, where so much history hung over me—both personal and otherwise.
Just last year, Ana had revealed to me that her enhanced, unnatural brilliance was not like the abilities of any other imperial servant.
Rather, she’d been successfully altered to possess the powers—or at least some of the powers—of the Khanum themselves.
When and why this had been done to her of all people—why she had been chosen as the person in whom to resurrect that long-lost race—I did not know.
Nor did I know why she still seemed a small, rather skinny woman rather than the towering giants of the stories.
More, I knew I would likely never learn any answers.
Ana had also been conditioned—perhaps in the same manner that Burav conditioned his field cats—so she could not speak of any of this without inflicting great pain on herself.
This suited me fine: I did not wish to ask, and she was not able to answer.
After this revelation, my service to her had seemed a noble thing. She was a valuable, powerful being, yet a frail one, and needed protection. But sometimes I was forced to wonder.
What manner of being was Ana? Why had the Khanum, masters of so many strange arts, been unable to save themselves? And why had their line been revivified in her blood, of all people?
The rain swelled and faded about me. I lay down, shut my eyes, and tried to banish these thoughts from my mind.