Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Seven
D afyd didn’t remember his mother’s funeral.
He should have been able to; he’d been thirteen years old when she died.
He remembered her as a scattering of moments that were still perfectly vivid.
The day she’d yelled and then laughed because a strange dog wandered into their house.
Sitting on the bench beside the fountain of the Gallantist church when Dafyd had been too short for his feet to touch the ground.
The way she and his father had argued while they smiled so they could pretend that they weren’t fighting.
He could remember Aunt Dorinda telling him that she’d died, and the complication of anger and sorrow and relief that her pain was over.
Even if the memories weren’t accurate, they were clear and clean.
He could pull them out and look at them like printed pictures. But her funeral was a blank.
Sitting now at Tonner Freis’s memorial service, he wondered if that gap in his memory might be a sign that things had gone well.
Maybe he didn’t recall the trickle of people coming to stand at the front of the room because at the time, his mind had been so captured by the stories they’d told, the jokes they made.
Maybe he didn’t remember it because he hadn’t really been there.
Except that he remembered the car ride to Aunt Dorinda’s house afterward, her speech about how he’d struggle to deal with the death of a parent and how she’d try to help.
He remembered the ice cream she bought him afterward.
All the things before the funeral, and the things after, but the event itself was a blank spot for him.
He was fairly certain he’d remember Tonner’s funeral.
“I didn’t know him before we came here,” Brun was saying as he looked out, his gaze seeming to rest just above the heads of the assembled crowd. “But in the time I worked with him, I can tell you, I never knew a better, smarter, kinder man than Tonner.”
Dafyd shifted on his bench and kept his expression somber.
The common room was the same one they all ate their meals in, the one they used for religious services and community meetings.
Korham had done a good job making the space serve any number of purposes.
Dafyd made a mental note to compliment the man on it.
Farad Morse, who’d taken Jellit’s place while the spy was busy digging through the Carryx archive, seemed to be an acceptable substitute for the time being.
Dafyd was worried, though, that the turnover would slow progress.
They had to keep Ekur-Tkalal and the tower of Carryx above it happy enough to keep investing in the moiety.
None of this would matter if they lost the mandate of the Sovran.
Uuya Tomos, sitting at his side, reached over and pinched his thigh. Dafyd’s attention came back to the room, and Brun was already stepping down from the little dais at the front. He had missed the end of Brun’s speech and the reaction to it. It was his turn now.
“Thank you,” he murmured, and Uuya Tomos inclined her head in acknowledgment.
As he walked up, he felt the eyes of the crowd on him.
Thousands of human eyes and a few Soft Lothark.
And the one Rak-hund that had appeared to take the place of his dead bodyguard.
He unfolded the speech Uuya Tomos had written for him.
“You don’t really think about funerals being a good thing,” he said.
“If we’re here at a funeral, it means something bad happened.
We lost someone. We lost Tonner, and that’s a wound we’re suffering right now.
But then I also think about all the other losses.
I mean, how many people died when we were taken from Anjiin and we never got to come together and say we missed them?
Before the attack, there were eight other people in the research group with me.
People I respected. Some I loved. But five of them are dead now.
Everyone in here has lost someone, and we’ve been so busy surviving that there wasn’t time for grief.
And that’s not even considering the other things we lost. Homes, family.
The belief that we had any control over how we live our lives.
That got taken away. We didn’t have a funeral for it. Probably we should have.”
The faces were all turned toward him. A few were weeping. A handful nodded. Most of them were just looking at him. It was strange to be the focus of so much attention and still feel so alone. Dafyd cleared his throat.
“Tonner was a brilliant man…”
When the ceremony ended, Dafyd made his way to the side of the room where Uuya Tomos stood.
She was smiling and talking with a bald-headed man from Bastien Korham’s workgroup.
The murmur of conversations filled the room, dozens of knots of people, all holding on to the moment of ritual even after the ritual was complete.
When the bald man saw Dafyd, he nodded so deeply it was almost a bow and excused himself.
“I think that went well,” Uuya Tomos said through her smile. “I mean, for what it was.”
“You do good work.”
The old woman shrugged. “You want to pull attention off how Freis got killed, putting the focus back on everyone else who’s died seems like a good strategy.
Let people reflect on themselves and the state of their souls.
And I only feel a little bit dirty helping you cover up whatever it is you’re hiding. ”
At the front of the room, Korham and two of his workers were breaking down the little dais.
The common room would be back to its usual shape, and probably so quickly that some of the conversations going on now would still be finishing up in the new arrangement.
It seemed like a metaphor for something.
As Dafyd glanced around the room, half a dozen people looked away, avoiding his gaze.
Pretending that they hadn’t been watching him.
“I know it’s paranoia,” he said. “But sometimes I feel like they all hate me.”
The old woman laughed. “It’s not paranoia when it’s true.
They hate you. Of course they do. They hate the Carryx, and you’re the Carryx’s whip hand.
Every shitty thing they have to do, every policy they have to follow, it comes through you.
They hate Andermus too. That woman loves structure and law more than she loves people.
They don’t much like Korham either, but at least he’s charming and he makes things that people use. ”
“What about you?”
“They love me,” she said with a smile that seemed genuine.
“And yet here you are, talking with me.”
“I have to. They know I tried to walk away, and you wouldn’t let me.
Oh, don’t look like that. It’s true. And the story will change.
Maybe not in your lifetime, and maybe not into something you prefer, but heroes and villains change places in history all the time.
Look at your friend Tonner. He was a very clever man with a very narrow view of the universe, and now he was an open-hearted, kind, supportive teacher who gave us all food and shelter. And babies pretty soon now.”
“He can have the credit. I don’t care.”
“Don’t you? That’s good,” she said, then looked out the window. “Jellit Kaul didn’t attend.”
Dafyd stretched his hands, and Uuya Tomos watched him like he’d given something away. The spy had been on its own since the day Tonner died. The day the Deep Lothark had announced itself. The day Jellit had held him. She was right. It was a problem.
“He’s busy,” Dafyd said. “Special project.”
“Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. But people are noticing.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” Dafyd said, and he walked away.
The crowd, thinner than it had been for the ceremony, parted before him like sheep moving away from a wolf.
He passed through the archway and into the corridors that led back to his cell, his garden, the rooms of his captivity within the captivity.
Then he paused, made himself turn, and started down the path that led to Jellit’s cell.
To the spy. Better to pull that particular splinter out now while he had it in mind.
The new Rak-hund fell in behind him, knife legs tapping on the floor.
He wondered if it knew it was replacing one that had died in his service.
He wondered if Rak-hund were capable of caring about things like that.
In some other part of the world-palace, were somber Rak-hund gathered and telling stories about the friend they’d lost?
A heaviness settled just behind his sternum, weighing him down like he was exhausted. Sleep wouldn’t help.
Walking let him think. The rhythm of his steps made a kind of place in his mind where there was some simple order—one foot, then the other—that other kinds of order could cling to.
His conversations with the Deep Lothark were slow and strange.
A different Soft Lothark came each time, all of them able to pick up on the conversation from where it had left off.
They never spoke, to either him or the guards.
Apart from his agreement to keep the Lothark’s strange second valence a secret, the Deep Lothark had asked nothing of him.
The one-sided nature of the new clandestine alliance made him uneasy.
On the other hand, there was the spy and the archive.
And the growing suspicion that if he could navigate between the two new sources of insight into the structure and history of the Carryx empire, there might be a path that led to the assassination of the Sovran and the unmaking of its empire.
He had to haul himself back from the idea, make himself skeptical of it, or he’d fall into daydreams of violence and retribution and then discover he’d let hours go by without doing the real work.
“Um, excuse me,” Brun said, trotting up beside him. “Can I talk to you for a minute, sir?”