Ariah (48 page)

Shayat left us a sum of money large enough to pay rent and buy food until she came back to Rabatha. We gave her nothing in return but gratitude. She left, and Sorcha and I fell into old rhythms together, old ways of being with each other. I read everything. I read and reread Amran’s poetry and found it tainted with memories of the man himself. Sorcha drifted in and out, to monitor pregnancies and deliver babies and help new mothers, and I stayed curled in the bed, reading. Sometimes I wrote to my parents or to Vathorem, but mostly I read.

I was reading when the Qin Army came for me. They pounded the door with heavy hands that could only be Qin. “It’s time to repay the Exalted’s grace,” a soldier said. I’d read discarded newspapers along with all the borrowed books, and I knew why they were there for me. The military had mobilized in Ma-Halad. They needed translators. My papers said I was fluent in Droma. I had just enough time to write Sorcha a note and slip it into the hollowed-out book where he stored his pipe before they threatened me with arrest if I didn’t open the door.

There was no way out. When the Exalted comes calling, no one refuses. Avoidance of impressment is a crime punishable by death. When it happened, it felt inevitable. I opened the door fully dressed: boots on, coat on even though it was hot out. I had a pack ready and a bedroll strapped to it in less than five minutes. The soldiers were pleasantly surprised. The one in charge asked for my papers, marked this new assignment, and manacled me. “A precaution,” he said, “since you flirt with convicts.” He tucked my papers in my vest pocket and led me away. I walked through the borough flanked by Qin soldiers in full uniform, handcuffed, while the neighbors watched.

PART SEVEN:

THE GRASSLANDS

CHAPTER 32

The soldiers going to the front had their own train. It was huge, it was armed, and it was state of the art. It ran on a whisper. The metal was some alloy, something light. It was powered by steam and clockworks instead of coal, and the interior had a process that converted riders’ waste to usable water for the engines. It was a marvel. It was elf-built, but I was the only elf on the train. Each Qin soldier had his own bunk, but I was cuffed to a pipe in the bowels of the train. They tethered me to a pipe that brought the remnants of boiling water from the furnace to the cisterns. I still have burns on my hand and wrist from where I touched it when I slept. I did not sleep well. A pair of soldiers unlocked me once a day to relieve myself and eat. The rail to Ma-Halad is long, but we made good time. We stopped in no towns. We didn’t need to stop: we had fuel and provisions enough.

Two of the train’s engineers worked the furnace room. I couldn’t see them—my chains didn’t allow me enough room to peek around the corner—but I could hear them. They spoke about their orders, about the Exalted’s plan for the east. The grasslands were fertile, and the Exalted wanted Qin farmers working it so we no longer had to rely on Vilahnan wheat. There were always rumors that since it was elf-grown it was impure. That was the official story, but the engineers speculated that really the push east had more to do with the gold elves. The Empire needed slave labor. Factory lines are hard to fill with full citizens. I listened, and I seethed, and I hatched fruitless plans.

We came into Ma-Halad’s station just before midnight on an unseasonably cold spring night. The air swept down the tall, snow-capped Jalah mountains. It did more than bite; it chewed us alive. My thin coat did me little good. My only real protection from the wind was the bodies of the Qin soldiers flanking me on either side. When the train stopped, they shackled my hands and feet together, and I made my way through the station, bound like a criminal. The Qin settlers gawked at me. The displaced, indentured Chalir discreetly looked away. They were tahrqin, too, but they were beaten and corralled just like elves. They stood tall and dark, wrapped head to toe in black linen. All you could ever see of the Chalir were their tahrqin eyes, which were always large and luminous and burning with cold hatred. The only elves I saw were technicians working on a broken train, and even they were transient. The second that train was up and running, they fled back west. I had nursed a hope on the train that Sorcha and Shayat would come for me, that it was possible for them to come for me. But I was so far from home and in a place so carefully guarded that I was out of their reach. None of Sorcha’s sweet talking would work this far out. Shayat, as prodigiously mercantile as she was, could not scrape together enough coin to bribe her way to me.

The soldiers took me to the barracks, where they brought me to General Muladah al Shahjin’Diladdi, the one Qin historians lovingly call the Butcher of the East. He was a young man, then, not yet forty. He was extraordinary. He had a flashing, violent intelligence that shone like a candle in the dark. He was young but had an air of worldliness about him that made him seem timeless, like a war god. He was magnetic, effortlessly charismatic, the type that could and did lead fevered men gladly to their deaths: a siren of sorts. There was a part of me that wanted to let him lead me, too, wherever he wanted to go. He was the kind that makes a man crave to submit, to give, to follow. He had the westernmost room on the top floor of the barracks. The room held a simple cot and tables littered with maps. When I was brought in, he stood staring out at the night, at the moon, peering west like he could see all the way to the Exalted’s tower. He was a deeply religious man; when the soldier shoved me across his threshold, he performed a warding to cleanse himself of my very presence. The Butcher of the East held out his hand to my captor. “His papers.”

The soldier handed him my papers. The general took one cursory glance and threw them on a table. “Forgeries.”

“
Sir?”

“
Those papers are forgeries,” he said. “Cuff him to the chair and leave him with me.”

The soldier did as he asked. I suspected I was going to be killed. I suspected it in a removed, academic way, as if it was not really happening to me. The general pulled up a chair and sat down across from me instead. “Forged papers, and even the forgeries have precinct stamps on them. I am not surprised. All elves are criminals one way or another. All elves are trespassers on the Exalted’s lands and thieves of the Exalted’s goodwill.”

I said nothing. I stared out his window, only half-listening. It was, at least, warm in the room.

He picked up my papers again and thumbed through them. “Is your name Ariah Lirat’Mochai?”

“
Yes.”

“
Tell me why you have forged papers.”

I looked over and smiled, reckless and stupid, defiant and wallowing in what I saw as foregone conclusions. I am prone to undignified fatalism. “I am an undeclared shaper.”

I caught the tic of nerves on the general’s face. He performed another warding. “Eyes on the floor,” he said. His voice was even, unruffled, but I had felt his hackles rise. I dropped my eyes. “You speak Droma.”

“
The soldiers had me demonstrate it on a slave in Rabatha.”

“
I am aware. How did you come to learn it?”

“
From the slaves in Rabatha. From their songs.”

“
Just from songs? No one taught it to you?”

I grinned. I looked at him, then away. “Magic.”

The general sighed. “You are not loyal to the Exalted. I need no magic to see that. You will teach my captains Droma, or you will be put to death for your likely countless crimes against the Empire. Understood?”

“
Understood.”

* * *

The one thing we elves have over the tahrqin, our one greatest asset, is not our magic. It’s patience. We can outlive them, so we can afford to be patient. Time is an ally for us and a terrible foe for them. I regret to say I aided the efforts of the Exalted to take the grasslands. I bided my time, and I taught the captains Droma. They were not very good at it; it’s a strange language to someone who only knows Qin. I taught them badly, though, in that way they are used to. Lectures, just lectures. The Butcher sent them out into the grasslands on forays, or brought collected gold slaves to test their language acquisition, and grew more and more frustrated when they remained far from fluent. But I taught the way he had been taught, the way they had all always been taught, which works well for maths and spelling and history and very badly for foreign languages. He begrudgingly saw no fault in me. He demoted captains at such a rate and with such a vengeance that promotion to captaincy was met with condolences.

It took me a year and a half to get out. It was not planned, and it was not orchestrated. It was a fluke, and the only reason I got out was through luck and patience. That’s it. It was inevitable that if I stayed quiet and obedient and patient long enough that random Qin error would open a door for me.

I deserted the Qin Army on a warm night in early fall. It was the night of a day of meaning, and a number of the soldiers in Ma-Halad who were off duty had taken the opportunity to get extremely drunk. The Butcher demanded religiosity even from those who were not particularly spiritual. Soldiers faced expulsion or court martial for unseemly behavior, which included drunkenness. But wine flows on days of meaning. Wine flows and brawls happen. Wine flowed, and just after dusk a brawl broke out inside the barracks. I’m not sure how it started, but it spread like wildfire. I was chained to a pillar in a closet, which locked from the outside. I was valuable, so I was kept secure. A soldier was locking me to the chains for the night when the drunken brawlers swept through the hallway like a tidal wave, demolishing everything in their path. The soldier was taken down by a chair to the back of the head. He collapsed on top of me, knocked out cold, the key to my manacles still in his hand. The drunken soldiers did not think to check for an errant elf beneath him, and they passed through, the damage done, nothing else in the hallway to destroy. I pried the key out of his hand and unlocked my manacles. I knew the layout of the building well. I knew on the second floor there was a loose window next to a gutter. I fell unmoving on the floor whenever I heard the rumble of more drunk soldiers. Most of them never even noticed me. It was insultingly easy to get out of the barracks.

Ma-Halad, then, was a military outpost. There was not much to it besides the barracks, the train station, and a paltry market. I stayed in the dark alleys and picked my way across town to the markets. I found a tavern’s cellar door propped open with a stick, slipped down into it, and managed to steal a sackful of cheese, several loaves of flatbread, and three skins of water without anyone noticing. Under the cover of night, I ran east into the grass.

CHAPTER 33

I wandered east, endlessly east. At first I considered travelling back
west. I’d escaped—
surely I could find Sorcha and Shayat. But I travelled east instead, alone, with no company but my thoughts. And the more I thought about it, the less sense it made to travel west and seek them out. They probably thought me dead. I would probably be captured and hung to death if I tried to re-enter the Empire, even with a smuggler
’
s assistance. And if I made it, somehow, back to Rabatha in one piece, to find them and demand quarter would put them in grave danger. They would be faced with harboring a fugitive
—
a traitor
—
and the law would be as merciless on them as it would be on me when I was inevitably found out.

I escaped, and I travelled east out of cowardice and pragmatism. I left them behind for their good and my own. It was a terrible, awful thing. It left me hollow and shattered.

After three days of travel, just as my supplies began to run out, I found a river and followed it farther east. I survived mostly on edible water grasses and fish. I felt guilty about the fish until I managed to snare and eat a rabbit. I wept when I killed it and skinned it and wept again when I ate it. It was a struggle to keep the meat down; the wrongness of it was overwhelming. Still, I needed the protein badly. After that first rabbit, I became carnivorous and killed and ate whatever animals I could.

When I was deep enough in the grasslands that it was unlikely a Qin foray would stumble on me, I took to camping for a week or two in a good spot before moving on. I knew almost nothing about the gold elves besides their language, but I knew they were nomads, and I was on a riverbank. It seemed a certainty that one clan or another would stumble across me. I don’t know how long I was out there, hopping from one makeshift lean-to to another, feasting on rabbits and burrowing rats and grass snakes like a rabid wolf. I lost count of the days. I know it must have been three or four months because the seasons turned from fall to winter. The days cooled and shortened, and the grass went from gold to a dead brown. It was strange out there, but it wasn’t bad living. Unlike the maudlin days and nights in the Qin barracks, I had no time to dwell. There was too much to do—living off the land is a hard thing, a consuming thing. There is no idleness, and so I rarely thought of Sorcha or Nuri or Shayat or Dirva or my parents. I thought of my next meal and the parts of my shelter that needed fixing and how much fresh water I had stored.