forge
It was a much more shallow grave than he had expected, no more than four feet deep, the fresh dirt turned over and over like a churn. It had been a paltry showing: only Ilja, and the gravedigger tending to a nearby sepulchre, and the silence hanging between them like a convict.
For all the good that Frida Tenkrát had done in life, the world had been very quick to desert her in death. The headstone had been crudely carved into a brittle slab of stone, as grey as Ilja's eyes had become. The epitaph was generic; there were no flowers or paint or ribbons. It was a cold resting place; it was a cruel end.
In Illéa, they burned their dead. Putting Frida in the ground seemed callous by comparison.
He had come to her grave as Ilja Schovajsa. He had never been otherwise. For all that the others referred to him as a chameleon, he had camouflaged himself little; despite Frida's instructions, he had never hidden as he ought. He had clung to the name Frida had given him, and believed it, naively, to be a promise of salvation to come.
It had been an ordinary death which had taken her. Her lungs had failed her – well, he could have told her that they would. Anyone could have foreseen that. Even their Hierophant would have managed, Ilja thought, and smiled, and felt bad for smiling. Cancer: for all that Ilja had silently compared the curse in his body to a tumour, it felt like the world had rather repaid him with the hard reality of his idle thoughts. That would teach him to be dramatic, he thought, darkly – like every moment in which he had wished that Ina was a little tougher, or Azula a little more independent, or Pekka a little less wonderful.
Ilja Schovajsa was a slow learner, but even he could see a pattern beginning to form here.
The gravedigger had drifted, over time, in his direction. Ilja bristled, but said nothing, even as the man came to stand right behind the Chariot and stared at the gravestone, fixedly, from over Ilja's shoulder. His instinct was not to protest: he was, after all, Kur outside of Old Kur, with only his black armband to protect him from the treatment his burdened bloodline might deserve.
Then he saw the blue armband borne by the gravedigger, and allowed his irritation to show. He was privately glad for the excuse to snap at someone, at something, to snarl as Ina did these days. "Do you fucking mind?" he said, and felt the Illéan accent twist his voice into something strange and unfriendly sounding. He sounded more like Reiko Morozova than he did himself; he felt more like Reiko Morozova than he did himself, as though he had dressed in the lieutenant's skin that morning rather than in his uniform.
"Not even a little bit."
The gravedigger set his hand on Ilja's arm. Ilja stared at him. The rain had begun to ghost down across the cemetery, drifting across Ilja's face like a squall.
The gravedigger said, rather amiably, "have you figured out your wish yet, Schovajsa?"
It was as it always had been. Ilja said, "you know that I have."
The gravedigger rolled his eyes. It was an insouciant expression, made all the moreso by the setting: he was leaning on his shovel with the air of a man waiting for a drink at a tavern. "Don't waste it on redemption."
Ilja's voice cracked. He said, "you want to discuss this now?"
"No better time."
Ilja understood, and wished that he didn't. Cold fate was staring him hard in the face.
He said, "you know something I don't?"
"The plan is running on tracks," said the gravedigger. On such a grey day, his eyes seemed like little slices of sky. "Redemption will follow."
"Like Saturday," Ilja said, "like Sunday."
What day was it?
He leaned on the gravedigger just as the gravedigger leaned on his shovel; the gravedigger's arm went about him, soil staining his grey uniform, and the rain misted down, as gentle as ever it had.
This was a kind of tithe: he had done as he had set out to do. He could live with this. Ilja said, "what do I do now, then?"
"You will hear," he said, "in due course."
"And until then?"
A shrug. A smile. "Think of a wish."
He had stood outside the orphanage for longer than he should have. A few seconds might have been forgiveable: a few minutes were regrettable. By the time he was approaching a recognisable fraction of an hour, the soles of his shoes were beginning to burn as though coming to recognise a damned man standing on hallowed ground.
He had, in the end, retreated. He didn't think he had a choice to do otherwise; he had stood there, too long and too feebly, to feel that any good might result.
He turned from the orphanage, and retreated from it, and walked back towards the train station slowly. The fence around the playground ran along the street for several hundred yards; he could hear invisible children going about their day, laughing and shrieking and chirping with a joyous kind of freedom. Above it all, he could hear the Preacher's voice, low and mellifluous and caught, as it always was, in the rhymthic cadence of a man in the midst or on the verge of a sermon. Ilja had the sensation that if he hung about the edge of the pavement for long enough, he would hear that familiar old refrain, his own heartbeat and the heartbeat of the hundreds of children who had gone before him.
Repent. Atone. Salvation.
The woman behind the restaurant counter had bridled to see him enter, but the band around his arm forestalled the usual protest which ought to follow. Her patrons were no happier at the sight of him, but Ilja ghosted in and along the tables inoffensively enough that no individual seemed inclined to challenge him, even if the waitress did address her greeting to his collar rather than to his face.
She fortunately did not ask him to elaborate on the Warrior business which might mandate a plateful of eggs over easy and fried streaky rashers. He had never felt as scrutinised as the moment in which he began to shovel the food into his mouth, abruptly unsure of the last time he had eaten. Illéa, he thought, surely it had been Illéa. The last time for most things had been Illéa: the last time he had eaten and the last time that he had seen Ina laugh, the last time he had seen his sister alive and his brother whole, the last time he had seen Zoran with some life in his eyes and the last time he had seen the sun rise and the last time he had tasted wine and the last time he had drawn a sword and the last time he had danced and the last time that he had prayed with the fervour of the convert.
There were some lasts which had not been in Illéa. Impulsively, he called to the waitress: "do you have a phone book?"
He thought she was going to shatter the jug of water in her hands. She said, "no," and he knew that she was lying. He knew that it was under the counter, sandwiched between the employee log-book and the opened bottle of whiskey that the waitress thought that the owner didn't know about. He'd been drawing lines on the glass to keep tracking of how much disappeared each day. He might have drawn those lines a little straighter with some liquor to steady his hand.
But Ilja did not question this. He just nodded, and set down his fork. He dabbed at his face with the napkin, and stood with a flourish that he hoped would prove suitably dramatic.
He was realising, belatedly, that he had no money with him.
The train pulled into the station with the fanfare of brakes and shrieking whistle: the steam spilled, chariot-grey, across the platform. The conductor in the emerald suit and shiny shoes could have been an excubitor in another life: certainly, when Ilja peered closely at him, there was a shallow resemblance to Kane Hijikata there, in the hair and in the lips and in the fastidious way he adjusted his gloves between passengers.
He took Ilja's ticket and examined it closely before, with an approving brandish, he clipped the stub. He wielded the clipper as braver men might have wielded a blade, and there was something in the sheer competence of the gesture that simply compelled him: Ilja had the sudden, overwhelming, urge to see what Kinga had found so fascinating about his shadow, and his shadow's eyes, and his shadow's mouth.
He accepted the ticket when it was offered. Conductor Hijikata said, "have a pleasant journey."
"You too," said Ilja, and immediately winced.
The conductor smiled blandly, in the decent impression of a deaf man. Ilja ascended onto the train, and walked along the carriages until he had found an empty seat. He sank into it, and folded his legs up in a strange imitation of Khalore so that he had sunk low in his chair and pressed his knees against the seat in front of him. He screwed his eyes shut, and he thought of sleeping. He saw Frida's face. He heard Ina say, I barely felt it go by. There was the scent of Azula's red flowers in the bakery garden, and there was the rocking shudder of the train lumbering into motion down the track, and there was the spectre of sleep hanging just out of reach.
The last time he had been on this train, the eighteenth generation had been playing cards at the table across the aisle, and Decebal Nicolescu had been slowly dissolving into particulate with no redemption in sight. He had been smiling; he had been cheating, a card from the chalice suit palmed, and Esteban Jiménez had been pretending valiantly not to notice.
Sleep remained where it was, just outside of his grasp: they remained in a standoff thus for all the journey back through the rolling countryside he had never known and back into the city he had utterly forgotten, all grey and salt-air and something bitter on the tip of the tongue.
He went directly from the station to the prison. He had half-expected to see Inanna here: her father was somewhere in the bowels of these cells, languishing. Zuen had been taken before Ina had. Few of the people who still loved her had ever met the man, or knew him but for the glimpses they caught in his daughter's face now and again, quite unknowingly.
Pekka had always spoken very highly of him and Ilja had always considerd Pekka to be an astute judge of character – if, at times, naive. Rough around the edges, he had always called Kinga. He had managed to make it sound like praise. A good man, he had called Zoran, and sounded as though he had doubted even himself. Ilja wasn't sure if it was projection or hindsight which made him remember it so: so much of the world before Illéa was shrouded in a great, grey haze.
But there was no sign of Ina at the prison. The building itself was oddly beautiful at first glance, all red brick laced with white plaster like birdlime. At second glance, it was a grotesque: large black iron blocks filled each space on the facade where windows ought to have sat. The doors, too, had massive steel spikes jutting from their faces, as though the main concern of whatever demented architect had constructed this place was keeping people out at all costs. In Illéa, soldiers would have patrolled the parapet, stationed akin to gargoyles: here, there was a man at the door who asked for identification and, when Ilja produced none, having none, he glanced at the black armband, and wrenched open a door that Ilja had not seen, and permitted the Warrior to enter the gaslit reception of the central prison of Opona.
It was an airy place; Ilja thought that maybe it had been a bus station in some past life. The ceiling was high and vaulted, and the walls were tiled in pretty pale mosaics, all mint-green and cornflower-blue, unfurling stories that Ilja had never heard. These were the mythology of Irij, of which the Kur knew little; all that they had been taught was regret and guilt and horror and grief.
There was a honey-brown reception desk that Ilja thought might have been made of mahoghany. The receptionist behind it wore a starched brown suit, and eyed Ilja suspiciously as he approached. Ilja said, "is Silas Schreave being held here?"
The reception was large enough that his voice bounced around the walls several times, louder than he had realised he had spoken. Was the princeling being held somewhere he would be able to hear him? Ilja was not sure if that would be a sort of torture or not: to know that you were remembered, the first time, the second time, and then to eventually hear that people had stopped trying to come.
"You don't have clearance."
Maybe the prince was quite incapable of hearing anything at all: for all Ilja knew, he was still wracked by the horrors of initiation, still lost in the haze of whatever the Radiance was doing to his mind and body. Maybe he was somewhere in the labryinth of cells, waiting for Asenath, waiting for a rescue that would never come. Ilja found his voice tilting a little higher: "Silas Schreave," he said again, enunciating it clearly. "I'm in the Programme..."
The receptionist said, "you don't have clearance."
Ilja gestured futilely. "Of course I do." He tried to project Ina and Azula in his voice. Were they keeping Belle here as well, or had they been good enough to give her civilian accommodation?
The receptionist said, "come back with clearance."
Ilja rocked back on his heels. The man in the brown suit observed him with barely concealed contempt in his eyes.
"Well," Ilja said. The echo made his voice sound hollow, and tired, and sad. "What the fuck was any of this for, then?"
The receptionist said, "come back with –"
"I heard," said Ilja. "I heard you the first time."
He made it back to the ghetto just before the dusk fell and the gates were closed; there were a pair of Irij cadets, clad in their shit-brown uniforms, standing to attention beside the pillars and impatiently eyeing their watches.
Ilja dug his fingers beneath his armband and wrenched it free as he walked. He ravelled and unravelled it between his fingers as he walked; he wound it around his fingers, and shoved it into his pockets; he watched the shutters begin to close along the street, and wondered which house belonged now to Inanna, which house had belonged to Pekka, if any of these had ever belonged to Zoran.
The back alleys in this part of Opona were exceptionally familiar, for all that Ilja had never been here before: hemmed in by pale pastel walls and weighed down by iron lanterns overhead, freshly doused in gas as the night advanced upon them. Ilja could have named each divot in the stone steps down to the river, if he wished: for whom would he name them? There were too many to begin with – he could only think, feebly, of those it hurt less to consider: Lore and Zor and Nanna and Belle and the World, whatever his name had been and whatever his name was now.
There was a bar on Majnun Street that Ilja had passed a half-dozen times on some death march or another; the light of the neon sign spilled across the scarred sidewalk, painting it red and green in enormous slashes of colour and glow. He loosened the collar of his shirt, and he eyed himself in the reflection on the window, and he went in: it was full of Kur locals, young adults in long skirts and starched pants leaning on the bar, older men and women tucked into snugs along the wall.
He was accorded a look, and then two looks, and then three looks, and then no one took much notice of him at all. The gramophone was playing a song he had never heard before; smoke hung over the floor like a living, writhing thing.
One of the bartenders looked a little like Silas Schreave: he must have had some royal blood in his lineage, to have cheekbones like those, to have a stare like that. Ilja sidled a little closer, stranded between bravery and exhaustion, and signalled for a stein of beer. He realised belatedly that he had done it the Illéan way: two fingers upright, a counter-clockwise gesture.
When the long-lost Schreave cousin slid him two tankards, Ilja did not protest. He realised, again belatedly, that he had no money, and found himself eyeing the distance between the bar and the door. He reckoned he could make it: but could he save the beer?
Zoran would have laughed if he was here.
"I got it," said the girl beside him. She slid some coins across the counter and, before Ilja could protest, she had seized her share of the beer, throwing back her hair and grinning playfully. Ilja smiled back, quite instinctively, as the chatter around him rushed back in around him.
The girl said, "skål!"
She had lovely brown skin and glossy black hair; her eyes were green and her face was exaggeratedly delicate, as though whittled from glass. She looked familiar; she looked beautiful. Ilja found himself smiling at her a little broader than he should have, in the aftermath of the day that had preceded it.
"Skål," he said, which was how Pekka had always toasted, and clashed his glass with hers when she proferred it.
The beer was colder than he had come to expect; in Illéa, it was served luke-warm and flat. Ilja had never expected that he would miss it.
The girl leaned forward, though her friends were chattering in a group behind her and paying them no heed. She said, softly, conspiratorially, "are you a Warrior?"
Ilja smiled fixedly. He thought, repent. "What do you reckon?"
She pursed her lips; she eyed him. She looked like she was taking it more seriously than he was: she looked like she was making an honest-to-god true assessment. She said, finally, "don't tell me you're the new Tower."
Ilja cocked his head. "Ouch," he said, with a smile. The beer was settling into his stomach. He did not tell her that he was the wrong xrafstar to assault so. "I don't even know what you're implying, but it sounds… cruel."
She laughed. "It means less than you think it does." She closed one eye, like she was measuring something. "Chariot," she said, "or Wheel."
"You are good."
She smiled: sweet, saccharine. "My sister was a Warrior," she said, as though it meant anything at all.
Ilja blanched, and wondered for a moment if he had been confronted by another of Kinga's myriad relatives. He didn't reckon so: she seemed too normal for that. But she also didn't look much older than him: he struggled to do the maths involved, before settling for a simple, "oh?"
"Eighteenth Tower," she said. She smiled. "Klaara Aas."
Ilja practically choked on his beer.
"You've heard of her?"
"I've heard of you," said Ilja, and immediately regretted doing so, for Janika Aas's eyebrows had rather disappeared into her hairline as she sprouted a beauteously suspicious expression.
She said, very slowly, still sweetly, "good things?"
Pekka Hämäläinen had gone on one date with her, and Inanna Nirari had nearly murdered him over it. Pekka and Janika had danced, and Inanna had cried, and fourteen-year-old Kinga Szymańska had drank so much vodka that Matthias Kloet had slung her over his shoulder to carry her back to the barracks and sat with her while she threw up into the street.
Ilja lied. "Very good things," he said, and proferred his drink for another cheers in lieu of anything else to say.
It was like he had never gone. How could they be speaking like this? It was a brittle casualness on his part; at any moment, the thought of Illéa threatened to surge, and to overwhelm, and to drown. He drank deeply to keep the thoughts at bay, and smiled when Janika smiled at him.
God, but Inanna would kill him.
It was as though he had said those words aloud for, somewhere behind Janika, there was a muttered curse and someone glaring, and Ilja realised that Uriasz Chrzanowski, number fourteen, was glowering at him from beside the gramophone, and quite ignoring the girl trying in vain to keep his attention.
He had grown out his hair. Ilja was glad to see it – as cadets, he had always tried to mimic the effortless coolness of Pekka's scalped style, much to the derision of Ilja and Myghal. Three years and more hair looked well on him: his face had hardened into a shape that made Ilja understand a little better what had compelled him to draw so many comparisons between the petty cadet and the cursed prince.
Seeing him now was a strange moment of vertigo and nostalgia and a feeling halfway between deja vu and jamais vu and a sensation that he thought he might not have a name for. Had Khalore felt the same, when she had seen Myghal again? He had to imagine not: it hit harder without adrenaline there to blunt it.
He hadn't needed a phonebook after all. Ilja said, "you guys are here with Chrzanowski?"
Janika said, "you know him?"
He nodded. He paused. He shook his head.
"I used to," he said, and then, with the feeling that he was doing someone a great favour, he added, "he was in the Warrior Programme with us."
Janika blinked. She wasn't as impressed by this fact as Ilja had expected. "He never told me that."
"Well." Ilja smiled. "You know." So much for favours. "He didn't exactly make the cut."
"I see. Yeah... the military records office must be a great downgrade, then."
"Not at all," Ilja said. "Very honourable. And good company, clearly."
She rolled her eyes. He wondered if Pekka had been smoother, and then wondered why on earth he would ever have to wonder about that.
She identified their colleagues: icy Zhivka Zhuk and bubbly Étienne Dupont and scowling Uriasz Chrzanowski, packed into crowds of friends and friends-of-friends and people they had picked up over the course of the night. Some soldiers had drifted in, clearly closing off a shift, some of them recognisable from the offensive on Illéa. He thought that one of them might have been called Yves, the blonde one with the hardened face, like a version of Pekka that had been beaten about the face as a child.
Janika said, "you would do very much for my social standing if you could stay for another drink or ten."
Ilja stared into his beer, and took a moment to acknowledge the mistakes he was about to make. The beer had dulled the machinery of his mind; everything took a little longer to form, a little longer to sink deep. The grey haze swarmed forth, enveloping Illéa as well as Opona. He wasn't sure he could remember what Silas or Zoran looked like.
He said, "my schedule's pretty clear, actually."
"Amazing," Janika said.
They smiled at each other. It was nice. It was normal. The voice in his mind said repentrepentrepentrepentrepentrepent.
"And is there any way," she said, "that you could repeat that thing about Uriasz where everyone else can hear it?"
Ilja laughed. "I'll see what I can do."
