A Conspiracy of Truths Read online

  “I don’t really appreciate attempts to yank me around by my feelings,” she said. “I can leave you like that if I want to. Anyone else would. A case like yours? No one would keep it for more than a day. No one would take it up after that, after a charge like yours. Ugh.” She passed a hand over her forehead. “Everyone knows that other case. Xing Fe Hua—I was barely more than a child when it happened, and even I remember it.”

  “But why? Why? Why!”

  “Because it’d be a damn hard job! No—impossible, or nearly impossible. I’d be almost certain to lose, which would spoil my track record and put a smudge on my reputation. And you’d be dead—well, you’re all but dead either way, let’s face it, so that’s not so much of an issue—”

  “Not an issue!” I shrieked again. “Not an—Not for you, maybe, but I’m the one that’d be dead!”

  “I can’t talk to you when you’re being this emotional.” She stood up, and I thought she was leaving. My heart skipped a beat, but she was only turning the chair around, sitting in it again the right way round, and pulling her pipe and her packet of leaf out of her pockets. “I told you I haven’t decided. I might not resign.” She struck a flick-match and lit the pipe, puffing on it until the embers glowed just right. The stream of fragrant smoke she blew out did much to improve the air quality of the cell—it was an excellent variety of leaf, I could tell. Undoubtedly foreign, probably from Tash, if my nose was right. Besides the underlying richness of the natural leaf, it smelled of vanilla and unusual spices.

  I tugged on my beard and rubbed my face again. Forced the plow of my brain into the furrow of thought. “What’s the weight on the other side of the scale?”

  She puffed for a long moment. “Well,” she began slowly. “I might win.”

  “But it’s a long shot.”

  “You got it. A very long shot.” She leaned forward, just enough to tuck the packet of leaf back into its pocket. “Haven’t decided. Won’t decide for a little while, I think. It’s a slow case, espionage.”

  “I’m not a spy!”

  “That’s neither here nor there, is it? It doesn’t matter if you’re a spy or not; it matters whether they find you guilty or not. It matters whether I win the case.” Another long puff on that pipe. “I might win it,” she added thoughtfully. “But I probably won’t.”

  “Are there any advocates better than you?”

  “None that would come within twenty ells of this case,” she said in a plume of smoke. “It’s me or nobody.”

  “So . . . what, you’d take it for the gamble?” I sulked at her as hard as I could.

  “Mmm. Yes. The glory, too, if I won.”

  “We.”

  “Eh?”

  “If we won,” I said.

  She looked at me, pitying. “You’re not going to be doing much of the heavy lifting, though, are you? I. If I won. If I won the case for you. I’m not getting paid for this, you know. I am required to advocate pro bono a number of cases per year to stay licensed. And I don’t like not getting paid, but glory is close enough to coin for me. It’s got a good exchange rate.”

  “So I can’t say anything, then!” I threw my hands in the air again. “I’m just going to have to twiddle my thumbs and wait for you to decide on your own whether to hold my life in your hands or trample it under your shoes?”

  “No.”

  “No? What generosity! You mean, kind advocate, that I get to argue my case to you before you argue it to the court?”

  “Essentially.” She lowered the pipe and slouched down in the chair. “It might help if you told me the truth.”

  “I have told you the truth!”

  “You haven’t told anyone your name.”

  I scowled at her. “My name is my own. It’s a . . . religious matter. You wouldn’t tell me your stars if I asked, would you?”

  She snorted. “That’s my grandfathers’ religion. They’re the ones who came from Arjuneh, not me. I’m Nuryeven through and through. I don’t know my stars.”

  “Young people today!” I said bitterly. “Abandoning the ways of their parents. One day all this will be lost to the world, and it’ll be your fault.”

  “Spare me the grumbling, for gods’ sake. You want me to save you. I want to save you! Saving you would be a great mark for my career. It would open a lot of doors. I might even run for office later on, but probably not—too much paperwork for me, not enough glamour.” She took another slow puff on the pipe. “But I have to know who I’m saving, and what the odds are. I don’t like gambling. Well—certainly not on the long odds: I don’t like losing. I don’t like making mistakes. I’m asking you to convince me that arguing your case wouldn’t be a mistake.”

  I took a breath. I always hesitate before going into details about what I am—makes people leery. Like telling someone you’re a thief, and they start guarding all their belongings and watching you closely whenever you walk past the silver spoons. But there was nothing for it.

  “I said I was a Chant,” I began. “And that means a lot of things. It’s not my name; it’s my title, like . . . Advocate, or Doctor, or Mayor. And it marks me as a master of an order that goes back more than four thousand years.”

  THE FIRST TALE:

  The Land That Sank Beneath the Waves

  A very long time ago and half the world away, there was a vast land in the southern reaches of the Unending Ocean, and it was called Arthwend. In the height of its golden age, before it sank beneath the waves and into the shadows of faint legend, it was an empire that stretched from shore to shore, covering all the land from the lowest bog to the highest peak. That empire was the prize for generations of victories by one tribe over all the others, and that tribe grew and grew, and became more splendid, and built cities made of gold, full of gardens and silk and delicate arts. As they had grown, they had pressed the others back, and back, and back, and one of these tribes fled deep into the marshes, and there they took refuge. There, where no one could touch them, where no one cared to touch them.

  (“Sounds lovely,” said Consanza. “So what?” I ignored her. A very rude woman, as I’ve pointed out already.)

  The god of that little forgotten marsh tribe was Shuggwa, a shadow god, a trickster god, a god whose gaze you should not draw. Life in the marsh was difficult, and Shuggwa took lives and caused mischief with great merriment. Family members who went out at night were lost in the dark for following spirit lights, or taken in tragic accidents and misfortunes.

  They had long had their priests: the Chants—

  (“Finally, something beginning to resemble an answer,” she muttered. I still ignored her. One tries to keep oneself solemn. That’s what I learned from my master-Chant and what she learned from hers. Can’t be shoving too much of yourself into a story that isn’t yours. It requires some discipline, distance, humility—do you see?)

  —who were the keepers of their genealogies, their histories, their stories, ones who perhaps didn’t draw Shuggwa’s calamitous gaze in the same way as the others, ones who were perhaps the objects of his rare favor. It is said that the Chants could intervene with him, could send him messages through his servant, the bird Ksadir, and that they flouted all the mores and customs of their tribe, baring themselves to the god in an attempt to draw his attention away from the others of their tribe, who covered their heads and spoke softly. The Chants danced and sang and lit great fires at night to draw Shuggwa’s Eye.

  (Consanza was glaring at me at this part. I could tell she was bored. Don’t know how she could be! I’ve always wished we knew more about the ancient Chants—but all we know is the stories we’ve remembered, and I suppose that’s the point.)

  They painted their boats bright colors, wore metal, wore jewelry, wore bells on their ankles. They laughed and shouted and danced and swore and spat, they spoke loudly and made obscene gestures and ignored all rules of politeness. They wandered naked from time to time.

  Perhaps it helped—the empire that had pushed the Chants and their people into the sw
amps continued to grow, and as it grew, its people became arrogant. They angered their gods, and the sea came rushing across the land, drowning it in the flood. The empire sank beneath the waves. But Shuggwa deigned to warn the Chants, and they and their people climbed into their little marsh boats and floated as the waters rose, and they alone survived. They lashed their hulls together for strength and rowed across the wide sea, while the Chants danced day and night, sang all the songs they knew, recited the histories of their villages and the genealogies, and begged throughout for Shuggwa to keep the waters calm until they reached land.

  They made landfall in the Issili Islands, low and sandy. That was four thousand years ago. And the Chants led their people into that fertile place and they flourished. They flourished so they forgot their god’s power—he had little of it there. He faded away and evolved over time until Shuggwa was only Skukua, in the people’s tales a foolish trickster, a fox-god, a bumbler and yet still a clever bumbler, who could get himself out of trouble as well as he could get himself into it, though not always in a way that pleased other people.

  The Chants faded with him. Once priests, the keepers of all knowledge, the protectors, the sacred storytellers, as the centuries passed and their services were made redundant by writing, by new gods and new priests, they became wanderers, mendicants. Ones who still ceremonially sink their homeland beneath the waves and walk the earth, remembering. There are things that will never die because the Chants remember them. Your grandfather’s stars, we remember. The heroes of the cold reaches of the north, we remember. From master to apprentice, we pass on the knowledge of what once was, and it lives, and Arthwend never will be truly lost to us.

  Consanza had been puffing away all through the story and finally lowered the pipe when I finished. “Look, I didn’t ask for the history of the world here.”

  She’d be more grateful for that knowledge if she knew how few people know it these days. Or she wouldn’t. She’s an ungrateful twit. “Well, now you understand what I do.”

  “No, I understand what you’re allegedly supposed to do. I understand what men and women four thousand years ago did. You told me nothing about yourself, as usual, and as usual I’m still not convinced I should advocate for you.”

  “Fine!” I burst out. “Fine! What do you want from me? I can’t tell you my name without breaking the vows of my order. Do you want to know what homeland I threw into the sea? Kaskinen. How long I’ve been doing this? I was thirteen when I began. I’m seventy-something now, haven’t really been keeping track. Do you want to know where I was before this? Cormerra. And before that? Echaree. And before that was Johe, and Tash, and Xereccio, and Ondor-Urt, and Zobuo, and N’gaka, and before that we were sailing the Sea of Serpents with a merchant vessel from Birrabar. What? What else do you want to know?”

  “We? Who is we?”

  “My apprentice and I.”

  “And where is your apprentice now?”

  “We were at an inn in some little town—Syemna, that was the name—when I was arrested on those trumped-up witchcraft charges. He saw me arrested. I don’t know where he is.” Now, she already knew all that, but here’s what really happened: Ylfing and I had been minding our own business, see, and I was trading a story for a meal (it was “The Twelve Tasks of Tyrran”—not one of my favorites, but it gets a good reception), and out of nowhere, a couple city policemen swooped down like giant gray bats out of the maw of Qarrsi the Ravenous, and I was dragged off to the capital and thrown in jail. You see now why I was so mightily surprised about the witchcraft thing?

  Anyway, Consanza asked, “Is he safe?”

  “How should I know?” says I. “He’s a naive little thing, thinks everyone’s fundamentally kind and good. Not much street smarts; he just traipses along with his arms and his heart open to the world. Zero sense of self-preservation. He’ll be out on the streets by now—we don’t usually carry money, and I wouldn’t let him handle it anyway. Lads his age fritter it away to their friends betting on which pig will fart first. He knows a bit about surviving in the wilderness, seeing as we’ve been stomping through it all the time he’s been apprenticed to me.” And he’s Hrefni besides; he knows a bit about living close to the land. I stood up and began pacing again.

  “What do you teach him?”

  “The trade; are you dull-witted? Knowledge. How to get more knowledge. But he keeps wanting to write things down. He thinks it would be better that way. Laziness, that’s what I call it.”

  “And this knowledge he knows, it’s things that have been lost?”

  I tugged at my hair. “Not just that, it’s—stories, people. It’s the way people are in one place or another. I can’t say I much like the way people are here.”

  “What does that mean, the way people are?”

  “Customs! Manners! Languages! The ten thousand gods of ten thousand nations! The tales they tell their children when they wake from nightmares, the tales they tell their sons and daughters when they send them off to war, the tales a midwife tells a laboring mother, the tales old men tell each other in the twilight of their lives.”

  “So you are a spy—sort of.”

  “No! I don’t know secrets, I don’t look for—well, all right, sometimes I do look for secrets, but not useful secrets, not anything that could be used badly!”

  “You’re a spy.”

  “No!”

  “What kind of secrets do you know, then?”

  “The mysteries of the Faiss peoples, that whole unfortunate business with the former princess’s dowry in Avaris, the secret words of the dragon cults in Xereccio, the location of four hidden temples in Girenthal—”

  “So . . . spy things.”

  “Those aren’t spy things! They’re part of history! They’re treasures that could be lost to time—all right, except the princess, but that’s just gossip! It’s not really a secret.”

  She puffed silently on her pipe. Clearly she had made up her mind.

  “No, look, those are the least of what I know. I know the twelve runes of luck that the Hrefni ward a house with. I know sixteen languages! I know the charms that the Umakh sing when they shoe a milk-white horse. I know how to travel across the great desert, the Sea of Sun, without disturbing the beasts beneath the ground. I know—I know the stars of your grandfathers and I’ve seen the colossal temple wagons rolling through the streets in Arjuneh, all hung with tinsel and wind chimes and silk banners and garlands of flowers.”

  “Ignoring the witchcraft, then—”

  “It’s not witchcraft! It’s folk custom!”

  “Ignoring the witchcraft, you know Umakha husbandry secrets. You know how to travel undisturbed.”

  “You’re twisting my words,” I said. I felt a black wave of despair about to break over me. “I only know what others have told me when I asked. It’s not—it’s not practical knowledge.”

  “Crossing the Sea of Sun undisturbed by the beasts in the ground sounds practical to me. My grandfather went by ship along the coast when he came from Arjuneh. He says only the tribes in the walking huts can cross the desert safely.” She puffed on her pipe. “Have you seen the beasts?”

  I was startled that she asked—I really hadn’t expected her to take an interest in anything I said, and I confess that a tiny part of me was a little pleased. A very tiny part. I thought then that perhaps she wasn’t completely terrible. “Yes, once.”

  “What do they look like?”

  I shook my head to clear out some of the black fog. “Like . . . half wolf, half panther, but larger, and longer, with feet like paddles for digging in the sand, and luminous eyes, and long muzzles. They have fur, but it’s mangy, and their skin is scaly, and it’s said they drink wells and oases dry to lure their prey deeper into the desert. It is said they can hear your heartbeat through the soles of your feet, so they can find you even if you’re standing as still as stone.”

  “Can they really dig up under you without being noticed? And snatch you into the sand?”

  “You�
�d hardly even have time to scream. It’s like seeing a child fall into a deep river. One moment they’re there, and the next—just ripples. Just the sand, disturbed.”

  We shared a little shiver of delicious almost-fear, the kind all humans share, the kind that makes children beg to hear a terrifying story over and over, though they know it’ll keep them wide awake and flinching at every noise. “So how do the desert people cross?”

  Yes, she wasn’t completely terrible. “They never let their skin touch the sand. If they must walk, they wear sandals like—like snowshoes, you have snowshoes here, I suppose?” She nodded. “Wide, made of layered leather, but as thick as four fingers, and padded on the top and bottom with goat felt. Makes walking arduous. They only use those in the case of direst need. They mostly ride in their huts, which—as your grandfather rightly told you—walk. They look like delicate wooden beetles, and they go scuttling across the dunes in packs, from one oasis to another.”

  “How? Magic?”

  “Wind and sails, girl! Not all strange things are the source of magic.”

  “Here they are,” she said. “In Nuryevet.” And that seemed to be the end of that. She sat back and put her pipe back in her mouth. “See, that is practical knowledge. Do you know how to build any of those walking houses?”

  “No. I’m not a craftsman. Why? Is Nuryevet planning to invade Ondor-Urt?” I sneered. Impossible endeavor, even if they cared to—they’d have to go through a minimum of five countries first, not to mention some very thick wilderness, or else cross the mountains and fight their way over the steppe.

  “No, but we have merchants. The more knowledge a man has, the less he has to pay for it from other people. But you, with your knowledge—there are people who might pay for that. Then you would have money, and we might be able to begin doing something efficient about your charges.”

  “So that thing the other day wasn’t just coincidentally bribery,” I snapped. “I’m innocent! Why should I bribe anyone when I haven’t done anything they’ve accused me of?”