which
They went through it, over and again, until her fingers bled and her eyes ached. There was no detail too small, no aspect too quotidian, to go uninterrogated. Sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, they had each drawn maps: it had felt like a childhood test. She had fought the urge to sneak a peek to the right or left, to see what the others were scrawling down, to check if she was doing it right. The pencil circles of each wall came out crooked; she had started writing the labels in the old Kur characters before she had remembered, and scratched it out, and started over again.
There was a simple struggle: what had once been so strange had now been made so mundane. It was impossible to remember whether 'normal' was how things were done here or there, hither or thither, in Irij or in Illéa. What had been learned, and what had been unlearned?
It was a dull litany, over and again, until her head spun: how did they carry their flowers? How did they tie their shoes? Which foot crossed the threshold first, in which hand would they carry their umbrella, did they have umbrellas? Bicycles? Phonographs? Cursive? Did they call themselves Kur or did they consider themselves Illéan? Did they wear black or white or red for mourning? Did they mourn? Could devils mourn? They could die – that much went unquestioned. And they could bleed.
Khalore remembered thinking that they did not bleed black, that they bled as red as any saint. The Irij brass did not ask her whether they did. They must have known, she thought. They must have known from the start.
Inanna was staring at her map, tracing her pencil around each wall, again and again, until it was destroyed with overlapping lead lines, starting with Alliette and working her way inwards. Ilja was staring at the panel of three commanders sitting opposite them, his hands folded over his meticulous, workman-like diagram, flicking his gaze from one to the next to the next.
Khalore kept writing labels, long after the map looked complete, marking out where the bakery had been, where the workshop had been, where the Schools had been – or perhaps where they were still. How impossible it was to imagine it all still stood exactly as it had been. Was the world still continuing there, day in and out, even withou the Warriors there to witness it? Would Lorencio still be hosting his dinners? Would Bartolo Sartore still be waking early each day to fetch his mother's bread? Would the Watchers still patrol those ruined walls, and would the excubitors be burning the men Khalore had killed, and would the Scholars be studying the carcasses of those they had left behind: Nez and Mielikki and Azula and Pekka and Kinga and Hyacinth and Eero-who-had-not-been-Eero?
It was the mental equivalent of Ina's scrawled circles: around and around and around Khalore found herself going.
The maps had been collected, and stapled together, and placed into a black briefcase beside the commander with the most seniority. He had introduced himself as Adem, which Khalore did not think was his real name, and he had spoken the least of all three: only to tell the others to chase onwards, and stop probing for irrelevant, repetitive detail. His second-in-command was Bashkim, who had spoken the most, and who spoke now: "have the threads changed?"
Ina did not look up from her grip on her pencil. "What?"
She paused. Ilja had leaned over the table to look past Khalore, to peer at her, to give her a look Khal could only describe as ominous. The Lover glanced at him, and sighed, and heeded him.
"Sir," she added dully.
"Have the threads changed," Bashkim said, "since you came into the room?"
Their explanations of their curses had been brief: Khalore had found them hard to explain without sounding speculative, without sounding trite. The curses were intrisinsically abstract and esoteric: how could she look this military man in the face and say, without smiling, that she fed her weapons with her blood? All three had stared back, stone and stoic: there had been no laughing matter in this debrief, so far as they were concerned. It only pulled at Khalore's lips all the more, their solemn expressions, this gravity like a living thing in the room alongside them.
Inanna said, "they have not."
Khalore found that she could not tell if her sister was lying. Inanna's golden eyes were strong and steady when she raised them to meet Bashkim's. All three of the Irij commanders seemed impervious to her particular charm, even thus cursedly bolstered. Bashkim said, "alright, then," and made a note on his notepad, and Ina looked back at her pencil. Its tip was exceptionally dull, so that all of the letters came out thick and blurred. They had not even trusted their wonderful Warriors with pens, Khalore thought delightedly – delighted, because it was such a strangely overt display of fear. She had seen it as disrespect before, but now she found herself wondering if this pencil, blunt as it was, could open a vein if she needed it to.
The mental image of these serious, well-dressed men grinding down the tips of these pencils was enough to make her smile. She was smiling at too much these days. The third commander, Casey, was staring at her like he thought she might be a bit demented.
"Do they change?" Bashkim asked.
"The threads?" Ina stared at him. "They change."
"Can you change them?"
Ina glanced at Ilja and Khalore, as though debating whether they would rat her out should she lie. Her teeth ground; she set her jaw. "Yes," she said. "I can change them."
"That will be useful," Casey said.
Khalore wasn't sure why the future tense caught her so by surprise. She had assumed that this was the beginning of the end. She had pictured being led from this room and shot like a horse with a broken leg. Future tense, she thought, will and will not. There were to be other missions, she thought. There were to be other battles. A new front in another war. They had spent three years of their cursed existences; they could give three times that again, if it was asked of them. It would be asked of them. She was quite certain of that.
"I'm still having trouble," said Bashkim, "following exactly how the Chariot's curse has manifested."
Ilja said, "I share your trouble."
"It has not manifested?"
"It has its subtleties."
"That sounds inefficient," said Casey. "That sounds…"
Useless.
Khalore caught Ilja's eye, and raised an eyebrow. He mirrored her. She wasn't sure what he thought she was trying to say; she wasn't sure what she had been trying to say.
Ina said, "look at his map."
Bashkim looked at her, and acqueisced, though Khalore could not tell whether he did so from curiosity or curse: he reached towards the black briefcase, and looked at Ilja's carefully written diagram of Illéa and the palace.
Commander Adem said, "that's my father's handwriting."
Khalore looked down at her blunt pencil, and smiled again.
The tram gasped out a long finger of steam as it sliced through the streets; standing on the platform outside the Security Bureau, Khalore took in a deep breath and glanced down at the red-stubbed paper Halkias had handed her. A two-way ticket to anywhere in Opona or Old Kur, stapled to a card which stated the date and time of her next debrief; she stuffed it into the pocket of her trousers, and eyed Ilja and Ina uncertainly.
"Heading home?"
Ina nodded. "Immediately," she said.
Ilja nodded. "Train out to New Baryz," he said. "I have to see Frida."
Khal nodded. Would Zoran be going home as well? She wanted to see him; she wanted to make sure he was not entirely lost, as he had seemed when they had stepped down from the ship. But perhaps he had finished his debrief before they had: perhaps he was already in Opona, upon the docks, watching the tides come in.
"Enjoy," she said.
The word sounded hollow. It was entirely the wrong word. What else could she say?
"Come back," she said.
Ina looked at her, and smiled weakly. Ilja put a hand onto her shoulder and then, finding that lacking, slipped it around her shoulders, so that he could pull her close, so that she could put her head on his shoulder and close her eyes and imagine they were back… well, where?
The tram was pulling up to their platform, heading west. The windows were all warped from long age, so that everything could only be seen in long, thin lines, removed from their totality. When the doors slid open, Myghal Enys was waiting behind them, wearing his civilian clothes: a soft blue jumper and black trousers, a red armband tied around his arm. Khalore wasn't sure how she could have missed the signs before: how tired the skin around his eyes, how much broader and taller he had become, how much deeper his voice and calm his demeanour. He had grown up in her absence. It was horrific, like encountering a stranger wearing her friend's face.
Maybe he felt similarly.
To his credit, he did not show it. He said, "plans for lunch, Khalore?"
"None at all," Khal said. Lunch was simple. She could do lunch. Where would they go? This was a small spark of excitement: where did New Myghal go for lunch? He was an old man now. Would they bistro together, like a pair of geriatrics, or would he take her to one of the pretty cafés on one of the pretty, broad plazas, where they started spiking the coffees as soon as the clocks struck six? Maybe he would have new friends waiting there, sophisticated, whole. Maybe he wouldn't. Did he still sleep in a dorm, bed-to-bed? Was he courting? Did he still opt to spar over playing chess, to eat rather than to study?
He stepped off the tram; Ina and Ilja stepped onto the tram. There were no goodbyes. The doors slid closed. The tram coughed out more steam and smoke, and pulled away slowly. Khalore stared at the thing strands of black hair and gold eyes and grey and grey and grey until she could see them no longer.
"Where were you today?"
"Debrief. It was..." She glanced at Myghal. "Oh, you know. And you?"
Myghal grimaced, just slightly. "I went to see the Mannazzus."
Oh. She felt like she had lost every bit of breath in her body. How are they? She could not bring herself to ask; it would have felt as empty as that little, ironic, horrific, enjoy. He should have brought flowers, she thought, but did not say so. He had gone. She had not. She could not. So she didn't say anything. They just stood on that platform for a long, empty, moment.
Myghal said, "lunch?"
"Please," she said. "Please, let's."
She took his arm as they went. It was not something she had ever done before: he would not have permitted her to live it down if she had. But he did not protest it, and, in fact, seemed a little glad for it. They stepped down off the platform, and they went forward into the city, and she held onto him very, very, tightly, as though afraid that someone would call his name and take him away forever.
It was, in the end, one of the cafés: it was red-themed, so far as she could tell, everything a slightly different shade of that colour, so that the whole tableau clashed unspeakably and stood out in the square like a visual wound. Myghal had insisted on a table outside, so that he could smoke; Khalore accepted a cigarette when he offered one, and a light when he offered one, and relished the scorch and ache it rose up in her lungs. She wondered whether her lungs were bleeding. She wondered whether it meant that she could cause mischief with this smouldering cigarette.
The table set they had been assigned was made out of something only slightly more sturdy than wire; Myghal still swung his chair back on its rear two legs when he was trying to think of something to say. Khalore curled up, legs tucked beneath her, and smiled at the waiter as he set the bread down on their table. Myghal ordered for both of them. The waiter did not write it down, but eyed Khalore's armband, and beat a hasty retreat. She took another drag on her cigarette, and smiled again.
"So," she said.
Myghal looked at her. His hair was somehow flatter than it had been; it didn't stick up as wildly as it once had. That did a lot to mature him; he had always had a soft face, with baby fat that Commandant's sadistic drills had done little to harden, but in his new fine clothes, with his new neat hair, he was a credible adult. She could believe in this.
"So," he said.
She cocked her head. It was the middle of the work day, and the plaza was quieter than it would have been otherwise: the trees that lined the avenue were newly blooming, and the man who had followed them from the Security Bureau thought that she had not noticed him. "What have I missed?"
He laughed. "Fuck, Khal – where do I start?"
"From the beginning."
She leaned forward, and picked up a piece of bread. Each chunk was overlaced with haphazard, flaking braids, some a little burnt along their plaited edge. She could see the steam still rising from their faces; she could see the raisins lying beneath their skin, fattened with warmth and sweetness.
She said, "it's been three years. You must have something."
"It's just been..." He cast about, looking helpless. "Life, you know?"
"You stayed in the army." It was an accusation, practically barked at him.
"Wouldn't you have?"
She drew on her cigarette to delay an answer.
He moved on smoothly, clearly smug at having made his point. "They deployed me to New Asia for most of the first year. Clean-up, you know. The occupation."
He gestured. She understood.
He had bullied Azula all the more fiercely for their shared ancestry in that place. Khalore said, "how did you find it?"
"Strange," he said.
She nodded. She tore the pastry in two, and watched the steam waft beautously into the smoke-stained air. She offered him the other part; he accepted it good-naturedly.
"It should have felt stranger," he said.
She laughed. "Yeah," she said. "I can relate."
He bit back a question she would not have been able to answer, and nodded firmly. The waiter had reappeared, bearing a small maroon tray upon which he had set a scarlet cup and a blood orange cup. Myghal slung one towards her, seemingly quite at random. The scent of coffee wavered temptingly upon the air, laced through with something sweeter and stronger. She did not question it, and drank deeply.
He started to say something. She cut him off. "Are you courting?"
"Am I...?" He laughed. "I'm a young man yet, Angelo, I'm not... is that the kind of language they use in Illéa, courting?"
"Well, what would you say?"
"Not suitable for company."
"We aren't in company," she pointed out.
He shifted in his seat, and he smiled. He hadn't minded about language when he had shouted at the young ensign: not our Khal, you dumb cunt!
She was still their Khal. Things could never be so lost, so long as that remained true.
"What about the others? Ragnar, Uriasz, Eifion, Commandant?"
"I see Uriasz every often," Myghal said, "he's a clerk in the Security Bureau –"
Khalore choked on her coffee. "No."
"I don't know who is stupider: Chrzanowski or the man who hired him."
"Good god," Khalore said. "Civil security means nothing anymore."
"I think we're safe. He's still Kur. They'll only let him climb so high."
He would spend the rest of his life typing up notes and fetching coffee, and think himself lucky to do so. Only a former Warrior candidate would be permitted to overcome the simple misfortune of his birth thus: Commandant must have written a letter of recommendation.
That thought was veritable anathema. The man must have fallen unwell.
"Eifion's hitched," Myghal added, "moved out to Old Kur. The air is better for his lungs there."
"God," Khalore said. "Married."
"Child on the way."
Fodder, she thought. "Well, then," she said. She raised her cup. "Health to them."
"Health," Myghal echoed, "and long life."
She smiled, and she drank. The wind gusted across the tiles of the plaza. There were some old women browsing the shelves on the pavement outside the bookshop, trading newspapers back and forth. Khalore could see her own face staring back from the grey sheet, her and Ina and Ilja and Zoran frozen in grey-black-white print forever.
Myghal said, "does it hurt?"
"It did," she said. "It hurt like hell."
"Bet you whined about it."
"Like a champion."
"Poor Ghjuvan."
"Ghjuvan tried to make me keep it," she said, which wasn't quite true, but which roused a laugh from Myghal. Ghjuvan would have said it was okay to lie about him, now that he was dead, if it meant Myghal was laughing.
"Like an unwanted gift," he said.
She pointed at him, grey ash fluttering. "Just so."
He said, "and the curse?"
"It could," Khalore said, "be worse."
