“I miss it,” said Ana, a while after they arrived at the abandoned butchery. It had been well-abandoned and plundered. While some of the furniture had been left behind not a scrap of viable metal could be seen in the entire place. She was almost certain that there was not a single pipe left in the building, lead or otherwise. On closer inspection, the remaining rickety furniture was made solely of glue, wicker and wood joinery. Ana figured if there were any nails in them they would have been taken a long time ago and if they had come a few months later they would have been taken and broken down for firewood. She could imagine it without all the furniture – then without the heavy table in the corner stained ruddy and covered with countless knife-marks and the well-worn chairs downstairs there would not be not much sign of this place once being a butchery at all. Even the floorboards and foundations seemed totally ready to give up as they moaned ominously with every step that Ana took.
“Miss what?” Asked Sol, leaning back on the table. He had the luxury of being able to go relatively undisguised, even as a criminal element. He had a certain way about him that made him very unassuming where he went; a quick but steady pace, aware look and clear determination that gave the overall impression of a respectable man with places to be. Ana, for her part, had doubled down on the bandages, leaving only her eyes and nose uncovered. She made a good show of coughing and though once a guard inquired about the matter, Sol quickly intervened to explain that she was severely disfigured by an injury at sea, and quite ill besides. Not wanting to catch whatever she had, they let her be and they went on their way.
“I miss the kind of filled bread they make back home,” Ana said, “Back in Tyeka, they made filled bread, with cheese and herbs and such. They don’t make it the same down river. And I miss that.”
“You’ve been thinking about home often? Maybe you want to skip town back upriver?” Asked Sol.
“Nah,” said Ana, “Home is awful. The only thing that was even remotely nice to me there were the orphanages, and that wasn’t nice, that was mercy on my body and soul. That was giving bread to the starving and education to the uneducated. But Edam sometimes mentions that she misses home, even though it’s awful. And I miss that filled bread, the way they made it in the late summer and fall. I’d have to spend weeks saving up my paychecks from the butchery and working as a porter to actually afford a loaf. And it was worth it. You ever feel like that?”
It wasn’t actually worth it, but at that moment she really felt that way.
“Well, Duva is mostly a mosquito-filled swamp in the northwest of what might be called Gveert land with terrible, small-minded people,” he said blithely, “But yes, I miss it. I miss rice more than anything – the wild rice that grew down near my old home that we would help cultivate. Nobody grows it around here. I suppose it’s too cold even if you could get it here. It fades with time, though.”
Ana nodded.
“Has Varna mentioned anything about home? Missing it?”
“No,” said Sol, chuckling, “I think for now she’s caught up in finally enjoying being in Koletya. I was that way too at first. It’s a different world, different food, different people. She did encounter some of the more, uh., ignorant sections of the populace a few weeks back in a bar. Nothing major, just some people getting into a heated argument with her about alligators.”
Ana leaned back and tried not to groan.
“She was very confused by it all. I said I couldn’t explain it to her why, but I’ve met nine people now who have insisted to me that no reptile could be that big. Most of the interactions have been too short to get why they’d disbelieve such a thing.”
“It’s… not as common a problem as it used to be,” said Ana, suddenly very embarrassed on the behalf of her nation, “It’s not even a particularly long story, just difficult to trace. The old nobility had to do a lot to legitimize their rule, so they said that they were descendants of dragon-gods, made to prey on bulls. It fit into the rulers that came before, the Horned Lords, who mostly derived their legitimacy from their wealth and ownership of cattle and that wealth coming from cattle-gods. Among other things, they made fake taxidermies of ‘antlered dragons’ to show off to the peasants, cobbled from snakes and deer. After the revolution, the pendulum swings in the opposite direction, because obviously there aren’t any dragons around here, and then the government starts publishing pamphlets, even further clarifying for anyone who still believed. Then it swings all the way up to the other direction, and it somehow got into people’s heads that no reptile that size could exist.”
Ana intentionally left out the part that she herself was quite skeptical of the idea of large reptiles until a little after someone in the Inquisition corrected her. She sighed again, and continued thinking of home. Then a thought occurred to her.
“Sol,” she asked, “I’ve never really asked you. Do you have any family?”
“Yes,” he said, “Two brothers. Both older than I.”
“Really?” Asked Ana. Sol was so far from home that she had doubted he had any family to hold him back.
“Sure. I don’t have any love for them, exactly, and they don’t have any love for me. I suppose they’d still think I stole the inheritance out from under them.”
Ana paused, looking at him. She racked her brain – she had never really had a friend who could lay claim to an actual inheritance, wealth that was passed down hand to hand. Edam had once mentioned that she had been cut out of a dowry, which in retrospect was probably because of the awkward position of her birth. It was another on a long list of injustices thrown at her.
“Did you?”
“Legally? No. They know ii dvalo is fairly clear and binding in these cases.”
“I’ve never heard of this.”
“It’s rather obscure outside of legal circles and those that are well traveled among Gveert lands. It’s… a complicated bit of history. It means ‘the count.’ There must be half a dozen different origins for ii dvalo, and I’d suspect almost none of them are true. At any rate, it’s just an inheritance law. Basically, instead of the Agoran style – dowries for daughters, inheritances for sons – ii dvalo is an attempt at a meritocracy. Every child starts off with a count, a number representing their portion of the inheritance. So in my case, my two older brothers started off with a count of three and two, and I with one.”
“I see,” said Ana, “And judging by your tone, you can change the count.”
“Sure enough. My brothers received counts of five and six, respectively. I had, by the time of my father’s death, a count of ten – three for service in a military campaign, one for voluntary service, three for becoming a priest, three for becoming a respected doctor-sorcerer. They both received a quarter of the inheritance; I received a half. I offered to sell most of it back to them at a discount; they wouldn’t have it. They thought I had achieved, left my father’s trade and served as a chaplain purely to cheat them, and now I was leaving my home country of Duva to abandon them. I sold most of my father’s property to a merchant since they refused to take it. Then I gave up the cloth, and sailed for brighter shores.”
He sighed.
“I didn’t mean to, but I suppose they were right about me abandoning them. I needed a clean break and the law was clear as to whose property was whose. Our last discussions weren’t pleasant.”
“Never easy to be in an argument with someone you love,” Ana said quietly, “Not that I’m casting aspersions, Sol.”
Sol nodded, then paused.
“Everything alright in the Miaza-Metremte household?”
“Can I be honest?”
“Sure.”
“I think my girl hates me, and I don’t know how to feel about it.”
“I wouldn’t worry that much,” said Sol kindly, “Most couples go through their disagreements. You’re only human, and every honeymoon has to end eventually. You’ll just have to talk it out, and by the end you’ll probably be wondering why you two were even arguing. That’s just the way it goes.”
Ana grimaced, bracing herself for the conversation she was about to have. She was fairly certain that Sol would be able to handle this, but she could never know.
“I think she thinks I’m a transvestite, and I think she hates me for it. She says I’m not, but she’s doubting. I can tell. She sometimes does this thing – like a prayer without mentioning the sacred – where she’ll say something she really wants or needs to be true as if it already is true.”
She remembered the first time that Edam did it. There was a rumor of children being kidnapped by a witch, one of the most common complaints an inquisitor could get. One in a hundred cases, a witch really was kidnapping some children; Ana had read of such cases. The rest of the time were far easier and often sadder explanations. The simplest and happiest was that the child was missing quite innocently – they thought their parents knew that they were with a relative or friend, and then before checking the parent became hysterical about the matter, certain that the supernatural must have been involved. Then there were the worse cases – she had encountered this a few times. The child ran because they had a legitimate grievance, a beating or worse. The worst were the accidents. A child goes into the woods for a short walk and never leaves after a widowmaker branch hits them. Ana hated those most of all. It was early into their assignment that they got a similar missive from a rural hamlet. When she heard it, Edam immediately said that the two children and their uncle were alive before correcting herself and saying that they ought to proceed as if they were still alive out there. By the time they arrived to investigate, of course, it turned out that they merely got sidetracked with another relative, and the uncle was merely eccentric, not a witch.
“And is she right?”
“I don’t know,” said Ana, “You tell me what I am, and I’ll give you my answer then.”
Sol shifted his weight on his feet and smiled.
“You’re a woman who wears men’s clothes, which is what most people would call a transvestite – but I don’t think you’re carrying that label gladly. When you came to me, that was my first impression of you – some kind of military woman who had been thrown out for transvestism.”
“And what does that make you think of me?”
“Not much,” said Sol, almost guiltily, “I’ve met a lot of honest thieves and unkind priests. That you, a mostly-decent woman, ended up liking wearing men’s clothes does not surprise me or particularly indicate much about you at all.”
Ana paused.
“I don’t think Edam thinks like that. She seems to care an awful lot about it, and I’m worried that she’s finally seeing me. She saw me as an inquisitor who happened to love her, and a witch who was trying to seduce her, and neither of those was quite accurate to her because she really loved me. But me and her – you could take us out of the Inquisition. By now, we might well be excommunicated fully. But the Church is still in us for better and for worse, and investigation, the want for truth, that’s still in us as well. And when she finally gets to the truth of me, I think she’ll hate me.”
Her words started coming out bitter.
“This is the truth: I’m unwomanly, and I can’t stand to not be unwomanly. When I try, it only becomes more obvious what I am. Dresses, skirts, women’s robes, none of these things fit me right and they never have and as far as I can tell they never will, they make my skin crawl and everyone can tell that I hate it and I’d rather be in men’s clothes because they make me happy, even if that’s a damnable sin. They tried to beat it out of me and they failed. And the truth is that I’m fine with that. I can exist like that, if I don’t think too long on it, too long on damnation, too long on the guilt. It isn’t just the regular guilt, it’s the maddening guilt; the guilt of being the daughter of back-water people from a back-water nation that cannot stand upright, the latest in a long line of crypto-pagan transvestite freaks that fill up pamphlets and diatribes. I saw them all the time upriver and I suspect it isn’t much different around here if I went to the sort of place where people would hand out pamphlets. That guilt of failed potential, stillborn, shambling moon-calf hermaphroditism that fails to touch the divine like the old pagans said it did or the what I’m ‘supposed’ to be, the ill-fitting mold which I have to melt into to appear a normal ‘woman.’”
By the end she was gripping strongly into the rotten wood. She loosened her grip, picking off shards and chunks of the stuff with her bandaged fingers. She stared out the window towards the guards on the opposite street. They bustled about – they were trying and completely failing at being inconspicuous that something major was happening in the opposite building. In the long distance she could hear the sounds of a city under night curfew setting in. There was a sort of uneven but constant sound of the tramp of horses and men running from place to place, and in the far distance she even thought she could hear the men at the barricades, fighting and scrapping with their billy clubs and saps and keeping their territory on that fall-back line on the map. There was no sign of their quarry yet. She turned back to Sol to address him again, trying to find the words for what she felt.
“I mean, for the sake of all that is divine and all that is simple, can’t I just be…”
“A man?” Suggested Sol.
It wasn’t the word that she was looking for, but he was genuinely curious in a way that struck her. If she had asked the same question to a suspect as an inquisitor, it would have been a severe accusation, a strategy as part of an interrogation. He looked unworried by what she had said, calm and collected in a way that she felt like Edam wouldn’t or couldn’t be if she had said the same thing to her face.
“Ha,” said Ana, letting her breath out, “I’d never be a man. I’m too stubborn.”
He gestured for her to go on.
“I have too much momentum to be a man. I – I’m fine with people looking at me, and saying I’m a woman. I’m fine if they look at me and see a man. I’m fine, frankly, if they saw me as a transvestite, which I suppose I am. And if they say I am a woman, then I am a woman, and if I am a man to them I am a man. I just don’t want them to judge me for it. I just want to exist. To be. And I certainly don’t want Edam to judge me for it. I love her too much for it. I’ve had a taste of my freedom – when I walk on the street with her, people just assume we’re a regular couple, man and wife, or working-woman and girlfriend. A strange man, but a lot of them guess at me being a man nonetheless or they don’t care enough to call me on it most of the time. But Edam – it’s different with her. She can’t shake off ”
Ana went very quiet.
“So yes. I do think she hates me, in her way, even if she doesn’t want to.”
Sol smiled very gently – the sort of trained smile that came only with priests and doctors.
“I see. So what are you going to do about it?”
“Tell her the truth, I guess, when I actually get a chance. And hope she doesn’t kill me over it.”
“You think she’ll murder you?”
“No,” said Ana, “But she’ll kill me. If I walk back towards being a proper woman, what she expects me to be – what would I be? What sort of life would it be to be with the woman I love in a way that I despise? It’d be as close to death as someone could get while still having a heartbeat. I can’t say much about this whole matter of sex but I can say that with certainty. It’d be death. And I can’t refuse her. I was never strong enough to do that.”
“Well, I guess I should retract my previous advice,” said Sol, “It’s more than a usual lover’s spat. I guess my question now is what your plan might be, besides telling the truth?”
“I mean, I don’t want to leave her. She’s a just sweet, kind woman who has learned to kill what sins. I want this to work more than almost anything. For her sake and mine. I can’t stand to see her suffering. And I chose to live for her once, to risk everything for her. I want to ask her to look past it, to just love me and say that I’m alright by her side. And no woman in their right mind would want me.”
“She’s a Machevin, right?” Asked Sol.
Ana nodded sheepishly. He probably figured it out from what he saw of the scars.
“Yes, she was. Don’t bring it up with her, please? She’s really sensitive about it.”
“Oh, I was going to say that I’ve treated Machevins; most of them aren’t in their right minds anyways,” he said, “So you might have a chance.”
Ana let herself laugh and tried not to get insulted on Edam’s behalf. Edam was perfectly sensible, she just happened to have a history of beating herself half to death. Considering all the stupid and insensible things she had done over the course of her life, she was hardly in a position to call Edam out of her right mind.
“You’re probably right,” she said, “Maybe I am worrying too much. We’ve got bigger things to deal with anyways.”
The air began to chill as the night came on. Darkness inched into the alleyways at first like snakes and then altogether, swallowing vast portions into the murk. Ana kept her eyes on the guards posted up on the opposite building. Then, something beneath her shifted. She heard a creak – a low woody wail from one of the steps in the stairwell. She grasped for her sword hidden beneath the bandages and the old coat she wore. Sol nodded at her, looking towards the door.
“Guards?” She mouthed. She didn’t see any moving towards the door, but they could have taken the back entrance like she and Sol had.
Before he could answer, two figures walked through the doorway. The first looked like a man, though it was difficult to tell; he wore a long hooded coat with thick leather tassels that hung down from it. The other was, simply put, mountainous. They had to lower their head to get past the threshold. They were carrying a full-sized halberd, but it looked almost small in their hands. They must have been at least seven feet tall, perhaps more. Their face was hidden by what looked like a wicker mask, not unlike the kind a beekeeper would wear. Their uniform made them look official, with a dull metal breastplate to complete the outfit of someone ready for war. Both of them were most likely Gveert, judging by their dress and their skin. She started to analyze. The man didn’t have any obvious weapons, but that didn’t mean anything. He was clearly party to this and would be a capable combatant. She spied a handax on the woman’s hip, clearly sized for her.
Ana silently cursed herself out for not pointing out that the mercenaries might be looking for abandoned buildings to cut through and surveil from as well. The four of them stared at each other before the woman spoke. Her voice was deep and soft, almost unfitting to her appearance.
“Judalfab Gveerev?”
Sol froze. The question was directed at him, and Ana didn’t need to speak the language to know that they were asking if he was Gveert.
“Judalfab?” She repeated.
“Erudalar Sol vzõ Duva, asa eenz ki baak vzõ Haarta Bẽl,” Sol said. He brought two of his fingers together before raising his hand to his forehead in a salute.
“Oovek se mobẽv,” said the man, half-whispering.
“Listen,” said Sol, “My friend here is Kolet. She is a patient of mine. Would you be so kind as to speak her language, so she does not feel so nervous? You’re very well-armed – I think she thinks you’re with the guard.”
“Ah,” said the woman, “I am sorry to be so rude. I am Laat, captain of the fifth Dzãkiv-Dakal. Though, Sol of Duva, I thought you were a former doctor, no?”
“I am not well-accredited here, no,” he said hastily, “But she is a friend and I would gladly offer my skills to her. She was injured at work quite nastily, and I’ve been helping her.”
“Then why are you in an abandoned house?” She asked, “Not the best place to practice medicine.”
“I could ask the same of you,” said Sol, “You are soldiers a long way from home, I take it.”
“Mercenaries,” she said, “But yes. We are a long way from home.”
“I’m here because of this damned curfew,” he said, “They raided my home, kicked me out while they were ‘investigating further.’ It’s put me and her in a bit of a jam, so to speak.”
The man nodded.
“My condolences,” said Laat.
“You were under Haarta,” said the man, “You must have been in the occupation of the mangal, then.”
“Yes,” said Sol.
“We were on the advance, under Khula Bẽl, the arrows, so to speak.”
Sol paused. He looked at them again.
“Were you at the siege of Ambon?”
The man’s eyes narrowed very suddenly. He had a thin, discerning face, one that made him look almost like a strange bird as he examined Sol. Ana gripped onto the hidden sword even tighter.
“You mean Abã?”
The tone had suddenly shifted. Before both of them had been facing Sol as an equal. Now they were both at a fuller attention. Through the thin wicker slats of Laat’s strange helm she could see the narrowed whites of her eyes and perhaps the thinnest outlines of a face of cold command. Ana knew this shift well enough. It was no longer a discussion. It was an interrogation, and they were waiting for Sol to say something incriminating.
“Of course,” said Sol, “My apologies.”
“Do not talk like those mobẽ,” Laat said, “We must not become like those pagans.”
“I am eastern,” he said, “Sometimes my accent slips.”
“One of us was there,” said Laat, “Kiitan. It was before she joined our particular charge, she was with a different bẽl then. Did you have the pleasure of meeting her?”
He shook his head.
“No, I don’t think I did,” he said, “Though I think I may have caught a glimpse.”
Ana saw it in his face. He was gritting his teeth, waiting. He couldn’t act anymore, even with his orders from Temari. She met his eyes, hoping that it would help him steel himself. Neither of them wanted an out and out fight.
“No, I was in a hamlet at the time. I can’t recall the name. We were fighting a local militia – you know the kind. A lot of young damobẽ out in the hot sun and rain, nothing but spears and masks to defend themselves with. I think they had a musket for every thirty men or so. Once we’d cut down their leader, they were very disorganized – what you would expect from their kind. I had a small cadre to command, so we did what we did best. We must have cut down some hundred, hundred and twenty-five men for a loss of ten out of a cadre of seventy.”
Ana lingered on her words. She sounded very proud, but the arithmetic wasn’t adding up. Maybe Dzhate had hired incompetents after all; if she was just blustering, then maybe there was a better hope that they wouldn’t kill so many people. There’d still be the problem of Edam’s cousin, the Inquisition and the curfew, but it would make things more manageable, in theory.
“I’m sorry,” said Ana, intentionally clipping her words as if she was in great pain, “But how did you do that while outnumbered?”
“The damobẽ dropped their spears the moment they saw us charging,” said Laat, “We beat the ones who didn’t balk soundly, and then began on the rest. I must have cut down ten or twenty myself, by my own count.”
“Ten or twenty?” Asked Ana, “That’s a wide margin.”
“Hmm,” said Laat, “Well…”
She pulled from her breastplate a necklace. At first, in the low light Ana could not make out what she was showing them, and when she did see them she could not believe what she saw. They were dried, shriveled-up black things, certainly preserved by salt or some other method and most certainly human ears. She began to count on them with her fingers, whispering under her breath as she did.
“Fifteen,” she said as she came to the end, “I take it you were doubting before. Do not worry. I am a good woman of the Sepulcher. I would not lie about my prowess or my deeds. How many did you kill?”
“What?” Asked Sol, not meeting the woman’s gaze.
“How many of those,” she said, pausing and snapping her fingers together, “You. You are Kolet, you speak it. I am looking for a word for a person who acts and speaks like an animal.”
“I couldn’t say,” said Ana.
“Mobẽ it is, then. How many did you kill.”
Sol gritted his teeth again.
“One. It is not something to be proud of,” he said before clarifying himself, “I shot him. There was no good story to it.”
There was a long silence again.
“Why are you in this building, again?” Asked the man.
“The curfew,” said Ana.
“I didn’t ask you. Why?”
“It’s like she said, like I said before,” said Sol.
“You’re lying,” said the man, “About your service or why you’re here. I can tell.”
He swayed.
“I’m not lying. When I was in Ambon-”
There was another pause as each party took in the mistake.
“I shot a Sondi man. Because my wards needed protecting. Because I was a doctor.”
“An easterner would pronounce it as ‘Mbõ,” said Laat, her voice suddenly quite harsh.
“If I am being frank,” said Sol, seeming to finally break, “We never took Ambon. I will call it by a Gveert name when it is Gveert.”
The woman nodded, and laughed, and for a moment Ana loosened her grip. Her laugh was soft and melodious, almost unfitting to such a soldier, to the brutal display about her neck. Ana had no doubt that it was some kind of focus for storing mana. She turned for a moment, as if she had to recover from what Sol had said. The man did not laugh or move from his spot.
“Oh, I get it,” she said as she reached for her ax, “You’re a defeatist.”
Heresiarch 