282 - Is it you, not us?

27 Akim 4974 – Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e file notes

This morning I was awakened at about the fifth hour after midnight by a terrified cry from Chevenga. When I got to him he was in bed still, conscious but in an obvious state of distress, as was Vriah, who has empathic tendencies, while Niku tried to comfort both of them. When he saw me, Chevenga leapt out of bed, in spite of his wounds, and steered me back into my own room, saying he must get away from his daughter as his own emotion was impinging on her. He was flushed, sweating and trembling all over.

“I had a nightmare,” he told me. I had him sit on my bed and breathe deeply, then administered calming essence. I urged him to recount it to me, if the memory was not fading, and gave him further doses of calming essence throughout.

“I don’t think I will ever forget this, as long as I live,” he said. “I was back in Vae Arahi… Assembly was debating whether to impeach me, because I… you know that letter I got from Assembly? Because I was turning into a tyrant, they were saying, having declared myself King of Yeola-e… in the dream, it was true. I had. I remember seeing my hand sign my name that way on a document… All-Spirit… I never know I am in a dream, it is always absolutely real until I wake up… It seemed to make sense, in the dream; I was thinking, it would make it easier for the foreign allies to understand my position, and they’d revere me more, and so would fight better. It seemed so innocent…”

He licked his lips, so I handed him the cup of water I had on my night-table, and he drank some of it. “I had become a second Notyere, they were saying, hardened to inhumanity with war, mad with power, headstrong from my own victories… the ones who’d been around long enough to have known me from a child were asking, ‘Where is that sincere, good-hearted boy we knew?’” He began crying here. “ ‘Who is this steel-souled stranger?’ But others, such as Sharaina and Linasika, were saying they’d seen a darkness in me from the start, something hidden, something false…” I put my arm around his back to comfort him.

“It ended a chalk vote, to impeach me. I walked away numb, nothing in my heart at all, no words, everything just oddly flat… I was going out of Assembly when this hand like a claw grabbed my arm, and this mouth came close to my sword-side ear. I froze… it was Sharaina. She said—All-Spirit, only in the most terrible nightmares could this be!—she said…” He was unable to say the words at first, struggling to master himself. When he did say them, it was in a whisper so soft I could barely hear it. “She said… ‘I will kill you.’” Now he put his unslung arm around me, leaned his head on my shoulder and clung, as if for safety, trembling again.

I gave him more drops of calming essence, and told him that dreams are often expressions of fears that we carry, in which case they should be taken as nothing more than that. The idea seemed familiar to him. With that knowledge, more essence and some time, he calmed enough to return to bed and sleep.

In the morning, when I asked him how he slept, he said “Solid.” The memory of the dream, being awakened by it and then conversing with me, he has completely lost.

I decided not to bother moving my things up to the town hall; we’d be marching back to Tinga-e the day after tomorrow anyway. It was falling dark, so we decided to do decorations tomorrow, and I cursed harder than usual Kaninjer’s forbiddance on getting drunk, as it would leave me the only one sober in my whole army. “It should be you who awards them,” I said to Emao-e, “since most of the battle for this city I didn’t even see.”

“Oh, it’s not the same, Chevenga,” she said. “I’m just an wrinkled old middling general; you are you. You know how they revere you.” Had she developed a talent for twisting the knife unknowing in the last day or two?

A runner came from Thara-e with news from Ikal. “Perisalas has been recalled and sent to an assignment on some remote western border of the Empire,” she told me. “Larianas Alpetin is promoted into his place.”

Larianas happened to be there when this news came. I’d wanted to see him, so I’d had him brought in bonds to one of the smaller offices. He was big and strongly-built, moved like a warrior and had more than one battle-scar on his square, stern face, so Krero wouldn’t leave him alone with me without tying him tightly to a chair. I had just been offering him tea before we got into conversation, though he’d have to take it from my hand. “Do you know enough Yeoli to have understood that?” I asked him. “You must have heard your name. You got a promotion.”

“Gods curse you, Shefen-kas. It should have been harder to get rid of him. I suppose you offer me your sincere congratulations?”

“Well, you get to hear the compliment, at least.”

“I am guessing you are going to kill me,” he said, with no loss of calm at all. “Am I right?”

“You know your own worth, as do I, but your Imperator does not,” I said. “He’d never pay enough to make up for the grief you’d give me.” I felt a stab of it again, thinking of the A-niah. He just did the Arkan head-nod for yes, letting me know this had been his calculation, too. “Especially as overall commander in Yeola-e.” It would be in front of the army, I decided; having heard his name as an enemy war-cry so much, they deserved this. But I didn’t tell him that yet.

“My great God wills,” he said. “But, may I ask one mercy? That will cost you nothing?” I asked him to name it, thinking it would be to let him make up his will or write a letter home. “Will you tell me how you and those brown-skins got into this fikken city?”

I would have laughed, except for what I had to tell him. “If I were going to execute you privately, here, I’d say yes. I’m planning to do it before my army. It’s a secret; I can’t risk you yelling it, or somehow squirming out of a gag.”

He sat considering, shifting very slightly to ease the aching in his shoulders. “Cut the roots of my tongue,” he said finally. There’s a way of doing it that paralyzes the tongue entirely without removing it; I’d read about it in Arko, and met a few Yeolis it had been done to. He read my mind. “Yes, I want to know that badly. My life is almost over anyway.” A general to the bone.

I only had one hand, so I called in Krero to hold his head, gripping what was left of his hair from my people hacking it off. Larianas took the cuts without a sound or a twitch. I sent Krero out, and gave him whack-weed—he couldn’t lift his tongue so I had to drop the drops on top of it—until colour came back into his face. Then I told him.

His Aitzas-blue eyes went hugely wide, whites as thick as the pupils all around, and he made a sound that seemed pleading; by his shoulders working I knew he was trying to gesture something with his bound hands. I looked; he made one of them flat, and with the other mimed writing.

It was not something I could refuse him. I held the paper for him, while he scrawled. Afterwards, I put that note, his last words, among my most valuable papers in my lap-desk, not that I would ever forget them.

By all Ten of the Blessed Gods… is it you, not us, who will return to the stars?