Nevertheless, Jebi requisitioned, and received, a small calendar of their own. It was printed on cheap paper, and the ink had already smeared, but it would let them track the passing days.
Vei introduced them one by one to the other artists (not many) and artificers, who ranged from experts in clockwork mechanisms to metallurgists, sculptors (for casting prototypes) to scholars. The scholars, Jebi gathered from Vei’s comments, researched the provenance of the artwork and artifacts that the Razanei intended to destroy. How do you live with yourselves? Jebi wanted to ask.
The only artist who seemed inclined to welcome Jebi was Shon. Jebi rapidly figured out that they’d associated themself with the one other artist that nobody else liked, although Vei treated him with a certain distant courtesy. When Jebi asked about this in private, Vei sighed and looked sideways, then said, “Shon argues with his orders too much. It’s bad for everyone when he does that, but the deputy minister puts up with it because he’s so excellent at pigment manufacture.”
The two of them were going over Issemi’s papers in Jebi’s room, mainly because Vei professed herself unwilling to distract people in the studio. Given how much the other painters gossiped while working, Jebi doubted one more conversation would make much of a difference. But they didn’t mind the chance to study Vei, either.
Despite their better judgment, Jebi had conceived a fascination with her. She smelled of salt and sweat and cedar-sandalwood incense. Jebi longed to run their hands through her hair and find out if it was as smooth as it looked, a wholly inappropriate response that they tried not to think about; but being around her made it hard to suppress their growing attraction.
“I notice that you always mention the deputy minister, but never the minister,” Jebi said cautiously as they frowned over a cryptic muddle of writing in what looked to be a personal shorthand or cipher.
Vei, who was sitting across from them, looked surprised for a moment, then laughed ruefully. The expression made her look less like a sword-saint out of Razanei legend and more like a human being with quirks and questions of her own. “I forget that you don’t know all the ins and outs of the Ministry. For all intents and purposes, the deputy minister is the head of Armor—within Administrative Territory Fourteen. The Minister of Armor lives in Razan proper; it’s from her that the deputy minister receives his directives. People in Territory Fourteen sometimes elide the difference.”
“I had no idea,” Jebi said, looking awkwardly down at their hands.
“There’s no reason why you should have known. Even people who work here sometimes slip and call Hafanden the minister.” Vei flipped to the next sheet in her own pile. “Aha—this is a schematic. Useful to you?”
“I suppose,” Jebi said, accepting the page and unfolding it carefully. Their eyes throbbed as they attempted to focus on the diagram; no such luck. “What on earth—?”
“You too?” Vei grimaced. “Issemi told me once that it was a countermeasure. She’d taken the most critical of her notes in an ink called Dragon’s Labyrinth. You’ve now experienced its effects.”
So this was what Shon had showed them on their first day. Jebi eyed the rest of their pile with dismay. “There’s no way to undo it? Like looking at the diagram through a special lens?”
“If any such device existed,” Vei said, “she never told anyone about it, and we didn’t find it in the remaining items.”
“Remaining.” Jebi remembered that Issemi’s assistant had fled. “Do you know how much of Issemi’s materials she made off with?”
“We think she left most of the documents behind, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Jebi sighed. Their hopes of staying out of convoluted Ministry politics were steadily diminishing, the more they heard about their predecessor. Since they had Vei’s attention anyway—“I think you’d better tell me more about this assistant.”
“Her name,” Vei said, her tone brisk, “is Mirhai. The deputy minister hired Issemi and Mirhai together; she’d originally been Issemi’s apprentice. The two of them produced rapid results, which the deputy minister appreciated. But Mirhai’s very closeness to Issemi proved a liability after the latter’s death.”
“Did she disappear immediately?”
“We’re not altogether certain of the timing,” Vei said. “Things were chaotic leading up to the experiment with Arazi. We had pressure from the Ministry back in the homeland.”
Homeland, Jebi thought. Not home. An interesting distinction.
“It was a full week before people realized that Mirhai wasn’t holed up in the city in some gambling den or taking solace in the arms of a lover. The deputy minister’s agents found reliable reports from the city guard that she’d headed out the West Gate just before curfew the night that we received word of the massacre.”
Jebi was starting to realize that Vei’s cool, almost glacial tones hid a persistent anger. “You knew her well?”
“Not well, no,” Vei said with a slight pause that made Jebi wonder if she was telling the truth. “But she owed her loyalty to Armor. It was cowardice for her to run.”
I’d better not do the same, Jebi thought, alarm prickling down their spine. They resolved never to forget that, for all her austere beauty, Vei was a trained killer.
THE FIRST THING Jebi did during their visits to Arazi was to sketch it from various angles. The dragon usually stopped to loom over them during their visits, and they took advantage of its statue-like stillness. They marveled at its articulations, the fiendish scythe-like claws and spiked tail. According to Vei, the dragon, with its superior mobility and magical abilities—currently disabled—had been designed as a tank-killer.
“Who has tanks but Razan?” Jebi asked. Surely everyone would have heard if Hwaguk’s rebels had managed to liberate such weapons of war.
“The Westerners do,” Vei said. “They’re the threat Hafanden fears.”
Jebi almost asked why the Westerners would show up in Hwaguk, then reconsidered. They might never have seen one of the foreigners, but even foreigners had to have uses for Hwaguk’s mines. Too bad Razan seemed determined to pick a fight with the Western nations.
Jebi also asked about the massacre at Ppalgan-Namu. To their frustration, no one wanted to talk about it. This isn’t morbid curiosity, they wanted to shout at the other artists and Armor’s own soldiers, although there was, if they were honest with themself, some of that too. They didn’t see how they were supposed to fix the dragon’s grammar without finding out what exactly had gone awry.
Arazi, for its own part, paced in those endless circles when it wasn’t looming, dragging the chains after it. It never, so far as Jebi could tell, made any attempt to escape. It might as well have been nothing more than an immense kinetic sculpture, like a bigger version of the clockwork toys that they’d seen at an exhibition a few years ago. Jebi was almost tempted to let down their guard—but they knew better.
Jebi devoted themself to studying the lexicon of mystical glyphs that, used in conjunction with the magical pigments, could be used to generate an automaton’s grammar. The grammar gave it a set of instructions to follow. A simple grammar could result in an automaton that merely walked in circles, like Arazi often did, or stood in place; more complex ones almost simulated life.