He stood up to gesture more freely, and showed the back of his Ducal Crest. “This thing—the charm that I was given to protect my thoughts. It’s helped me survive here, in a way that they probably didn’t intend. I think into it, about Valdemar. About what I love about Valdemar. And then, sometimes, I imagine Valdemar as I’ve described it to you, becoming like this place. The quirks we love could be interpreted as seditious. Something like playing a war game on a table and having the Empire lose might be interpreted by a scrying mage as a sign of incipient revolt. The order comes from on high that the games are illegal now. Punishable. The inspiration of musicians and poets could be blunted by decree. The courting rituals we laugh over could be shut down because they are inefficient.” He picked at the loose paint and plaster around the window. “When a ruler gives up on empathy and sentiment, it is a sign of desperation. It means they’re paring away emotion in favor of efficiency and numbers and a twisted fantasy of a better life without the joys and burdens of caring about something outside of themselves. Contempt for kindness and generosity is the surest sign there is that someone has nothing else left to them but a horrible emptiness much worse than weakness. It’s an—anti-strength. And the dying monster plods along, unaware it’s rotting.”
Kordas faced Star fully again. “No one lives forever, but—in a very real way, everyone in that Court but me is already dead. It’s just a matter of degrees of dead. And I’m their fool, mocked for actually feeling. I amuse them with my trite and naive love of things. They see my talk as a display of an idiot’s weakness. But I’m more alive than all of them. That’s why we have to get our people out of here. Out of the Empire, your people and mine. I don’t say it lightly that, if it is a decision between what this system would make of us, and living with joy—the Empire will die before I let them take our loves from us.”
“And this,” said Rose, “is why we will follow you, even into doom.”
18
“So . . . you’re a Doll,” Isla said, uncertainly. “Do you have a name?”
The Doll had popped out of the front door of a barge that had come through the Gate this morning, scaring the hell out of the people who were steering barges into position to be linked into a string. Delia hadn’t blamed them. The thing was utterly uncanny, a human-sized jointed canvas contraption with only a hint of features that walked . . . and talked. And even worse, so far as everyone else was concerned, as soon as it had emerged from the hatch, it had ripped off the Imperial tabard it wore and tossed it violently overboard, leaving a completely naked human-shaped canvas contraption that walked and talked. Somehow a completely naked thing was much more disturbing than one partially clothed.
Maybe because we can kind of see it as an enlarged toy when it’s clothed, or something like a scarecrow, but when it’s just . . . there . . . it’s harder to accept?
Thank the gods, Ponu had sprung up from out of nowhere, taken the Doll under his skinny wing, directed the others where to moor the barge it had come in on, and gotten clothing for it. He must have raided his own stores, or those of his fellow Circle members, because now it wore loose linen trews, an equally loose linen shirt tied at the waist with a cloth sash—and a straw hat. Delia wasn’t sure why, but the clothing somehow made it look less unsettling, and that hat made it funny rather than threatening.
“This one has no name,” the Doll said, in a pleasant whisper.
“Hold still,” said Koto, coming up from behind Delia. He had a bottle of sepia ink and a feather, and with a few deft strokes with the tip of the feather, sketched in features that suggested something harmless and childlike. That made it less unsettling too. Then he stuck the feather in the band of the straw hat. “I’m calling you Feather. Do you like that name, Feather?”
“I—think I do. It has conceptual notes of lightness, aspirations, and transience,” Feather answered. Koto capped the ink, nodded to Isla, and left, going back to whatever he had been doing before he decided to give the Doll a face.
“Kordas said that what one of you knows, all of you know,” Isla continued. “Is that still true?”
“Yes, Lady Isla,” Feather replied.
Isla gave a little crow of glee. “Do you know what this means?” she said. “It means we won’t have to risk scrying anymore!”
Feather went very quiet for a moment. “This . . . is truth,” it whispered. “You need only tell this one what you wish Kordas to know. Kordas need only tell Star or Rose or Clover what he wishes you to know.” It paused. “This one can tell you that what concerns Kordas the most, at the moment, is the repercussions that will fall on those left behind in Valdemar if they refuse to come to the refuge.”
“Well,” Ponu said after a moment of thought. “I think I have an idea. But it’s going to take a hell of a lot of power. Still! We can siphon off a fair bit from the power nexus here, and put it into storage crystals, and do it.”
“Do what?” Isla asked sharply.
“Wipe everyone’s memory,” Ponu replied. “It’s a crude spell, but effective. Take away their knowledge of the Plan and how we all left. It’ll leave holes in their memories, and that’ll disturb them all, but the Emperor’s inquisitors can’t find what isn’t there.”
Isla looked appalled. Delia felt as appalled as Isla looked.
Ponu looked from Isla to Delia and back, and snorted. “So what’s better? Lose your memory or lose your life? The Emperor’s mages will find the residuum from a spell that big all over the Duchy, and there won’t be any question that those of us who left forced it on them.”
“We need a better idea than that,” Isla said flatly. “I won’t allow it. And besides, won’t that just point the finger directly at those of us who left? And then they’ll have even more reason to try and hunt us down.”
“They’ll already have all the reasons they want to hunt us down.” Ponu shrugged. “You’re the leader here. Maybe we can think of something else. Probably we can keep them from finding our refuge here. And if we can’t think of anything else, well, you and the Duke will share responsibility for hanging the ones left behind out to dry.” And he turned on his heel and walked away.
“You’d better!” Isla shouted after him. “You’d better think of something!”
He raised his hand in a rude gesture.
“It’s not Ponu’s responsibility to come up with a ‘better’ idea,” Delia observed, earning her a glare from her older sister.
“Please come with me, Feather,” Isla said, rather than answering Delia. “I would like to find out exactly what is going on with Kordas.” And she led the Doll away—which had the immediate effect of making nearly everyone else who had been near it relax again.