Notes from the Burning Age Page 9

  Then Georg said: “Temple sends spies too.”

  I nodded, staring into the flame of the single flickering candle. Brilliant colour against the blue of night, its spilling illumination catching the otherwise smothered reds and umbers of the painted shrine.

  “Once Antti has enough support in the Assembly, we are going to declare independence from Council. Throw out Temple. Live as people should.”

  I said nothing. There didn’t seem anything worth saying.

  He straightened up, unwinding the curl of his back like a fern uncoiling its leaf. My lack of feedback seemed briefly annoying for him, which is perhaps why his next words were: “When I was fifteen, I saw the kakuy of the mountain.”

  A freezing terror twisted in my belly. I tasted it in my mouth and didn’t know why, couldn’t put my finger on what it was in this moment that robbed me of my training, my common sense. Without thinking, I reached out to cup the flame in my right hand, feeling its warmth push a little too close to burning, half-closed my eyes to enjoy the sensation.

  “My father and I were not welcome at a hearth,” he continued, turning his head as if telling an old story to an uninterested moon. “My father was a brilliant man. Difficult, angry, brilliant. He saw things that other people did not see, questioned everything. The Medj smiled their little smiles and said oh yes, how interesting, you should think about that more. But after a while they stopped smiling and said no, no, you’ve got it wrong, this is dangerous. We would try to negotiate a bed, and they’d give us a week, a month at most, then send us on our way. They couldn’t accept him because he was smarter than them, and didn’t hide it. He didn’t pretend to be happy when he was sad, or that he was content with just… dust and water. He wanted more, and if the world was run in any meaningfully intelligent way he would have had it. More than anyone else living. But he didn’t. He hit me, sometimes. The hearths were outraged. It made me a stronger man; it gave me discipline, focus, but all they saw was a grown man striking a child. He was not wrong to do it. He had a constant pain in his shoulder, all the time. We went to the clinics and they did their tests and couldn’t find anything wrong, prescribed painkillers, but they do things to your brain, make you slow. He never took them. Pain does not make a man kind. It is part of who we are, and we are scared of it.

  “We lived on charity, and when times were good the hearths said of course, of course, come in. And when times were bad they told us to wait in the door and brought us soup, said the fires were low and the batteries were empty, and perhaps we’d have better comfort if we begged at Temple. ‘Begging’. My father despised the word. It is not a word for men, he said. But we were beggars for a while – I have outgrown his dishonesty. Then, one winter, he went to the black mountains and got work in the forest, harvesting timber, but he cut down more than his pitiful share. The kakuy will be angry, they said – the kakuy knows we have taken more trees than will re-grow here, and it will be displeased at our greediness. For fear of the mountain, they punished the man – can you imagine it?

  “My father was always proud. He swore he would kill the kakuy, said they died as easily as any other living thing, that we should not fear the avalanche or the fire, that we could surpass our cowardly natures. He told me to stay behind, but I did not, and he knew he couldn’t stop me. I followed a hundred paces behind, as we climbed through the thickening snow and fading moonlight. That night it was as if the sky itself were trying to throw us back, as if the kakuy knew we were coming and what he intended. No more gods, he said. Man must decide for himself. He should have died fighting a god; should have run it through, red on white. Instead, he fell. The wind caught him and tripped him up; he lost his footing in the dark and fell into a ravine hidden beneath snow. No defiance or rage, just eaten by the darkness. They say the mountain killed him, but I lay belly-down on the edge of that cliff and called for my father, lay there until the first light of dawn and the snowstorm had passed, until my lips were white and I was starting to feel warm again inside.

  “That was when I saw it: the wolf of the mountains, taller than any man, blood in its eyes and on its jaw, tail twitching through the snow, fur of crystal ice. It watched me from the last shadows of the night, until the rising light drew a line across the snow that seemed to strike it like fire. Then it reared up, turned away, galloped back into the mist, so heavy I could feel every strike of its paws upon the earth, until suddenly it stopped mid-stride as if it had flown into the air. A few minutes later, I heard the sounds of people from the hearth below, calling out for us, climbing up the mountain in search of me and my father. I didn’t call back, but they found us anyway, led upwards as if pulled by the rising sun towards the summit. They wrapped me in blankets and put me on the back of a sledge and said it must have been the kakuy’s blessing that saved my life, must have been a miracle. Humans are hard-wired to find the worst in a situation, did you know that? It was how our ancestors survived, expecting tigers when there were none, expecting disaster so that when disaster finally came, they were prepared. So we have always blamed ourselves for the very worst that the world must offer – blamed our sin, our wickedness, our evil ways. But when there is good in this world – when our hearts keep beating because they are strong, when our limbs return to life because we are young and vibrant and want to live – we say it is a blessing. We thank anyone but ourselves and dismiss pride as arrogance, ability as hubris. We even know this about ourselves, can recognise our own genetic traits. And yet knowledge, it seems, does not yet triumph over instinct.”

  He grunted, an almost-laugh, and lapsed back into silence, head turning towards the floor, hands pressed together in his lap. I pulled my fingers back from the flame, turned to examine him, felt for the very first time like his equal and wondered how the forest grew.

  He let out a breath, half-shook his head, rose to his feet. I stepped away instinctively, then hesitated, stepped forward again, holding my ground. He was taller than me, broader across the chest and back, but I had options which were unbecoming of a temple-trained renegade. “Council sends spies. Temple too,” he said.

  I shrugged. “If you think I’m a spy, you should probably have killed me a while ago.”

  “I have spent several nights thinking the same thing.”

  “Why don’t you just torture me, like the other guy?”

  “Torture makes people say what you want to hear.”

  “Is he a spy?”

  “Oh, absolutely. That is certain.”

  “How can you be so sure?” He didn’t answer, eyes bright in reflected candlelight. I sighed, leaned back on the altar, feeling suddenly old, cold. “Council sends spies against you – I understand that. You send spies back. You have always enjoyed the game. Winning is how you know you’re better, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you didn’t bring me here to kill me.”

  “No.”

  “Then why am I here? You aren’t one for indecision. Sack me or kill me; if not, I’ve got a train to catch.”

  “The kakuy of the river is dying.” He gestured loosely towards the water, towards the guttering light and slithering mud. “The fishermen’s offerings are rotten, we take what we need, the kakuy dies but the river flows. The river will still flow, as long as people need it to. Do you understand?”

  I shrugged. “Am I dead? Am I at least sacked?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then why bother with all this?”

  “Because a spy, embedded for as long as you have been, would not simply have walked away. Maybe you wouldn’t have killed another agent; maybe you would have tried to talk your way out of it. Maybe you would have killed him too, or called your handler, or the guardia – done something. You should have done something, to protect your cover or your colleague. Otherwise, all this would have been for nothing. But you walked away.”

  I felt sickness in my belly, warmth on my face, heard the sea in my ears. I reached out again for the candle, spun my fingers round the flame like a spider weaving
a web, listened to the slow sludgy groan of the dying river, to the steady breathing of Georg beside me, then pinched the candle out.

  “There’s a spare room above my office,” he said. “You will move in there tonight.”

  “I want a pay rise.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “No more bullshit. If you want to kill people in your cellar, that’s your business. But I don’t know if your little revolution is going to succeed, so I need plausible deniability. I’m not some hired killer. You’ve got Klem for that, or Sohrab. They can deal with it.”

  “I agree.” He held out his hand. “Settled, then?”

  I shook it, his fingers hot against my frozen skin.

  Chapter 15

  From that day forth, I became Georg’s shadow. As the Brotherhood cemented its control of the Assembly, as heresy clawed deeper into the very fabric of the state and the kakuy of the river died, I was there, foam tossed in Georg’s wake. I translated profanity, ran errands, organised his laundry, met forgers, spies and generals at his behest, made sure there was always the good stuff to drink in the cabinet. I learned his taste, his moods, his inclination. When he got a cold, resentful and furious at nature for slowing him down when there was so much to do, so so much, I made him lemon tea and stood over him until it was drained, tutting at his faces and his snarls. When he went to the bathhouse, I read to him out loud from the edge of the tub, so that even when scrubbing soap into his hair he could still be thinking on the day’s events.

  I did all this as the kakuy stirred in the mountains and the Provinces slipped ever closer to war. I did it, because I was a traitor.

  Three weeks after the blood had been cleaned from the cellar floor, Georg and the Brotherhood leaders retired to a mountain chalet of timber and fresh fire above the snow. The easiest way up the mountain was by cable car: the first up a steep slope of a sheer black cliff which in the sunset turned bloody scarlet; the second a string between two peaks, which clunked and rattled on its spinning cogs and swayed in the high, whistling breeze. It was a good place to plot heresy, far from prying eyes. I wondered if in these mountains Georg had seen his wolf, and if his habit of walking barefoot upon the snow reminded him of that kakuy darting from the light.

  While the great and the good settled in for a night of drinking and planning the overthrow of the old order of things, I was left with fetching and carrying baggage. There was more than could fit into a single cable car up the mountain with their guests, and so up and down again I went alone, peering out over the whistling void from the gloom of the swaying compartment.

  It was while struggling to load a moving car with these goods at the bottom of the mountain that Nadira approached. She wore a knitted red hat and thick brown mittens, black boots and a padded blue coat that made her look significantly rounder than her build. She sidled up to me as I worked my way round the arc of belongings I had piled up at the base of the cable car’s turning red wheel, bowed politely and said: “Is there room for another, sky-kin?”

  “The chalet at the top has been reserved for a private function.”

  “I didn’t realise you could reserve mountains for yourself.”

  “Members of the Assembly are there.”

  “Ah – men of influence.”

  “Brotherhood,” I replied with a little smile. “They like having things to themselves.”

  “How very strange,” she mused. “But what if I just stay on the car and do not get off? I would love the ride.”

  “I’m sure that is fine. There is an interchange at the top, and as no one is helping me— Ah, quickly, step on board!”

  She slipped into the approaching car as it swung round the clunking wheel on its rolled carbon cable, pulling her knees up to avoid the cases I slung in behind her. “This is a lot to carry,” she mused, as I hopped unevenly in over the welt of luggage I had created, slamming the door shut as we began to ascend.

  “It’s a working vacation,” I muttered, the words sour in my mouth as I considered the amount of work this had given me, relative to how little vacation. We picked up speed as we transitioned from the slower cable of the station to the long line heading skywards, lurching as we shifted tracks. “You know all about those, Nadira.”

  She grinned, tiny teeth in a plum face. Her hat was pulled low over bushy black eyebrows, her lips were almost the same soft pinky-beige as her cheeks, and her age had always been hard to deduce through the tight, sun-baked impermeability of her skin. “How do the Brotherhood feel about holiday pay?” she asked.

  “Is this a professional question, or are you just curious?”

  “Curiosity; holidays are not as heretical as strip mining or cluster munitions or jet fuel.”

  “You read my reports.”

  “Devoured them.”

  “Then what in the name of fire and ash are you doing about it?” I snarled. “I have given the inquisition everything. Every theft, every assault, every bribe and blackmail, every murder the Brotherhood has committed. They have information on oil rigs. They have information about machine guns. Where in the name of sun and moon are they getting it? How are they getting it? Classified Temple reports, sealed heresies on my desk! Last week I got a document on forced sterilisation with a hand-written note from a damn inquisitor on it. ‘Bad stuff, send to anthropology.’ They are stripping the forests, they are building tanks. They talk about… about ‘social engineering’ and the rights of wealth, about free market and geoengineering. They are… What the hell are you doing about it?”

  My hands were shaking, my throat suddenly so tight I wondered if I’d swallowed down too much of the cold, if the wolf of the mountains would find my blood turned to ice, my heart a stone in my chest. I pressed my head against the walls of the car as we swayed upwards, and she watched, eyebrows drawn, hands relaxed.

  Finally Nadira said: “The inquisition does not have the same powers as a Council operation. Temple is not meant to interfere politically – our remit is tracking and cataloguing heretical material.”

  “Fuck that. This is political.”

  “Do you need out? We can get you out, Ven.”

  The words – the first time I had heard these words in so long – sank into my gut like tar. I sat down on a rickety wall of luggage, pressed one hand against the wall to stop myself slipping, stared into her eyes and realised that, a lot like Georg, I couldn’t tell when she was lying.

  “They killed a man,” I mumbled, surprised to find the words coming from my lips. “They said he was a spy.”

  “I know.”

  “Was he?”

  “Almost certainly. A Council agent – one of Krima’s.”

  “The last few weeks they’ve rolled up whole networks.”

  “I know. Krima came to us.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She wanted to know if Temple had any assets in Vien. She knows the Brotherhood would be an inquisition target. She was as close to desperate as I’ve ever seen her.”

  I nodded dully, curling up tight against the thin cold of the mountain. “She tried to recruit me, when Jia was in town. It was… it seemed a somewhat reckless play. Nadira – how does Georg have access to so much heresy? How did he find the Council spy?”

  Nadira half-closed her eyes, and there was for an instant a hint of the Medj she had been before she joined the inquisition, a drawing in of breath and a settling into the frosty air that did not recoil from cold but rather gave thanks for it, thanks for the heat of her body. I wondered if I did that – if Georg sometimes saw my gratitude for the touch of rain.

  “Georg has a spy in the Council,” she said, eyes still a little closed, fingers uncurling in her lap as if she might cradle these words, uttered in the shaking cabin of our ride. “The inquisition is almost certain of it.”

  “How?”

  “The connection between Temple and Council has always been… complicated. The one has always supported the other, but so very much of the heresy we uncover is political. And there have alwa
ys been accusations that the inquisition oversteps the mark. ‘Dabbling’, as they say. Every Province has a secular review board to oversee Temple classification of heresies, to ensure that we are not, as they put it, keeping humankind in the dark. In Damasc, the secular boards are if anything even harsher in their censorship than Temple inquisitors. In Maze, the board has long ceased being anything other than an oppositional body determined to unclassify as much material as possible. Council also has a review board, to oversee the most dangerous, most sensitive material in Temple archives – the kind of material no one Province should have access to. Over time the relationship has become… more than strictly academic. The kakuy must sleep. Council must keep the peace, no matter what the Provinces do. To aid this, the Temple sometimes shares intelligence of… political relevance, you might say.”

  In Bukarest, there are still protesters chanting at the gates of the temple, calling out for freedom from the chains of the Medj. I wondered if Lah still served them tea. “That sounds profoundly illegal – and unethical.”

  Nadira smiled. “I think perhaps it is. It is also sometimes necessary. Lah has written a great deal of highly classified and stunningly tedious philosophical tracts on the subject. You should read them some day.” I didn’t answer, and finally her eyes opened again, head tilted to one side, a curious bird. Softly in the hush of the passing sky: “There must be peace, Ven. Can you imagine what would happen if war wakes the kakuy?”