The world has forgotten the true fountain of this teaching
And people enslave themselves to miracles and fables.
I look for the simplest way to sow and reap my nature.
Mosses add their climbing colour to the thick bamboo;
And now comes the sun, out of mist and fog,
And everything is gone from me, speech goes, and reading,
Leaving the single unison.
Liu Zhongyan
The train shuddered its way across the tracks that ran through the spine of the nation that had been Illea, and Yegor adjusted his cuffs as he stepped into the next compartment.
He was dressed, as he was always dressed, flawlessly, with the formal, decorous mien of a man destined someday to be king.
He carried his cane with him, as he always carried his cane with him, accessorised with glimmering black cuff links, vaguely rakishly rookish in appearance, a starched white shirt and a suit that had either been tailored or stolen, so expensive the fabric. His shoes clicked, authoritatively.
He looked like his brother. He knew he looked like his brother. He looked like a Corbeau.
A New Asian man with shadowed eyes was asleep at one end of the carriage with his head cushioned from the rattle of the window by a balled-up khaki jacket, a small pale woman sipped a mug of cold tea in the seat closest to the dark-haired revolutionary, and there was naught but empty space in between. Yegor took the seat between them, sliding onto the hard wooden bench with the caution of a crow settling in to roost, and looked out the grimy half-window as the train slid and shook across the mountains at the edge of Zuni and towards the horizon of Honduragua.
Beneath the tracks of the train, rock gave way very suddenly to wide expanses of exactly nothing. The train threaded a path no wider than itself, prepared at anytime to lose its grip upon the track and plummet into the abyss below, as had happened to many before. Underneath, the mountains opened up into wide open canyons and crevasses, embroidered with strands of mist and fog, and beyond, the lights of Honduragua glowed dimly from far away, red and gold. Yegor had never liked Honduragua.
Too many rouge-cheeked girls standing on street corners offering fortune and fortunes, too many white-clad prophets selling letters to the dead, too many plague doctors with their arrays of potions and poisons lining the streets. Honduragua was a chaos of falsity and vanity; that which was real was useless, that which was false was tacky, and in between it all there was an unpleasant kind of seediness, the knowledge that despite the colour and action of the place any one of the people you passed on the street would sell you out for a single night's worth of pisco.
Yegor was fond of lying and betraying, but not of vice versa.
He had a little leather-bound book with him, but he only set it on the table and did not touch it. Yegor was content to wait. He always had been. That was what the Corbeaus did - they watched, and they waited.
Yegor was watching the king, now.
The Selection was beginning. All across the kingdom of Illea, the girls would be chosen - the beautiful, the charming, the gifted. Sometimes the Fabulist's mutilations weren't enough. Sometimes they got taken too.
Kasha would be safe. She had been beautiful, once, but she was far from charming, gifted only in that esoteric art of arson, so what would the Selection want with her? It was the other revolutionary girls he had to concern him with, those made beautiful with their passion, with the fire in their heart and the stars in their eyes and the rose-tint over their vision, those who believed, innocently, that the world could still be saved from the scourge, those would be the ones to be taken, those would be the ones lost to the Selection.
The final Selection.
If everything went according to plan.
The train shrieked its warning as it slid into the tiny wooden platform they called a border station, and the small blonde woman who had been drinking tea rose with the grace of an albatross, as though she had no need for something as human and mundane as embalance/em, and moved towards the door of the train as the enormous freighter ground to a sudden stop. She was, Yegor had noticed, clad in the red and grey uniform of a soldier - ixora and charcoal, a fire dying down to embers. War colours. The border wardens, the guards, the patrols, wore navy like ceratostigma, darkening in colour the more vital their tasks became.
The Selection watchmen, though, always wore gold and silver and white. Mourning colours.
The small soldier woman stepped off the train, and the door swung shut behind her, and Yegor wondered what poor devil, what poor soul, would suffer from her arrival in their town, here at the edge of the world. Whose home would burn tonight?
He waited until she had left the carriage, until she had disappeared from the wooden platform at the edge of eternity, until she had vanished once more into the mountains, until the train had started up its slow, ominous shudder towards the city once more. Yegor was content to wait.
Then, once the train had picked up speed and was once more defying all the laws of magic an physics that said it should not possibly be going as fast as it was going along as narrow a train track as it was going along, he stood. He had to admire the soldier - it was difficult to make movement along this car look effortless, so sudden and jolting were the turns and adjustments as it navigated the iron path through the mountains, and he was not entirely certain he accomplished that feat. Nonetheless, he approached the sleeping man.
Words, spoken quietly: "I could have sworn I told that arsonist to wake you up, and yet here you lie, dreaming."
A pause.
And then, a reluctant reply -
"I'm awake," the New Asian man said, without opening his eyes. His hair was the dark of something precious burned beyond salvage. He hadn't shaved in a few days. His cheekbones were sharp enough to draw blood.
"Kasha was as good as her word, then. Consider my suspicions aroused."
Levi Fallon might have smiled, had he been another man and this another time, but instead he just straightened himself and opened his eyes.
Yegor almost wished he had kept them shut. There was a certain degree of danger in those eyes - but then, Levi was handsome, and dangerously so, the kind of beautiful and destructive that made a voice in your head whisper that maybe self-immolation wasn't such a bad idea after all. Yegor had kissed boys like that before, and girls too, with lips like pomengranate seeds and smiles like scalpels. They always tasted of wine and gunpowder.
Levi had worn red and grey not so long ago, had worn it until the red was not dye but blood and the grey was not thread but bone-ash. That made for a good soldier, but perhaps not for a good ally.
He could not help but think about what Kasha had said about choosing his pieces carefully. Well, it wasn't like he had a wide choice to work with. This wasn't exactly the Selection.
Another man would have asked Yegor about the plan. Levi did not. He knew better. A silver ring hung and spun lazily in the hollow of his throat as he shifted his weight in the seat, silent.
Yegor placed the little leather book in front of his new soldier. Levi looked at it, but did not touch it. Yegor said, "Her name is Minette. This is her first time in Honduragua - show her the sights. Take a long walk back to the meeting place. You know the address."
He did not bother to say goodbye to Levi, nor Levi to him. Yegor departed the train at the border, and watched the train collide with the horzon, disappearing towards the capital city of the province. He stood there, well after the train had faded from view, and watched a murder gather overhead.
He still had people to shanghai, deliveries to arrange, observations to make, routes to trace, plots to plan and plans to plot. An assassination was no simple feat. Even getting close to the king was a dream, an impossibility. They would have to be ghosts, wraiths, to even catch a glimpse.
But Yegor had faith - not in his team, but in himself.
He was, after all, a Corbeau. They were content to wait.
