SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Those cast out from the upper terraces would spurn living as I have lived, given any chance of an alternative. If the families defecting are comprised of men and women with Finagor’s education and military training, the new army would welcome them with open arms. Bigotry toward bi-genders would of necessity be suppressed or eradicated as the numbers grew.

My excitement falls to ash, however, as the implications of the message crash home. "Why celebrate knowing their location when they’re about to be destroyed?"

"I’d rather die a soldier than be ambushed by thugs in an alley." Finagor looks to his wife and she nods in agreement. "Besides, if this army is as large as rumor has it, they may have a chance. I doubt the Holy Autarch or the western cities have word of them yet."

What he says makes sense. Four of the five cities are widely spread out, standing at the corners of the land to protect the capital with the Holy Autarch in the center. Our eastern provinces would be held responsible for an army forming at our border and would likely keep quiet, hoping to deal with it before the autarch learned of its existence.

And what will you choose, Jerusha?" his wife asks me, finally speaking. "The watch will learn of the murder here and investigate before long. You had best go soon, whether it’s to the Barrier Wall or to the palace."

A short huff, nearly a laugh, escapes my chest. "I can do neither. My horse has been seen. If soldiers come and learn I haven’t gone to the palace, I’ll be hunted down. My mount is tired from the journey. I’d be captured long before I made the wall." I nod to the opened and dusty note in her hand. "My other choice is to deliver that to the tetrarch."

"You’re not trusted with your tetrarch’s seal, I suppose?" Finagor asks.

I indicate I am not.

"Bring me a light then," he says.

His tone, still that of one from the highest terrace, brooks no argument. I retrieve flint and striker and a small twig from the cookfire pit and hand them to him, wondering what he intends.

He blows what dust he can from the letter and strikes a spark to the twig. With the small flame he heats the seal and carefully begins peeling away bits of torn paper from the edges. I realize that he means to re-seal the message and hope kindles in me, catching like the dry twig.

"Wait!" his wife says, and Finagor extinguishes the tiny flame at once.

"Why deliver this message when Jerusha could deliver another in its place?" she asks.

He looks at her, then at me.

"Would you be willing to deliver a false message, Jerusha?" he asks.

It’s hard to imagine the suffering I would endure for such treachery, were it discovered. I look again to Dallu’s cold body. The conditioned obedience that broke inside me moments before remains broken.

"I would." My resolve hardens as I say the words.

"You carry stationery?" Finagor asks.

"Yes." A messenger keeps pen and ink as well as blank notes for aristocracy and a supply of stationery made especially for the tetrarch: the thick outer paper, a layer of the tetrarch’s color inside, and a fine layer for the message glued to that.

Finagor nods.

"What if the message were to urge forestalling any action?" I suggest. "I’ll likely be sent away with an answer, which would give me time to ride instead to the insurgents and warn them."

"The message could say that your tetrarch in Zasna had also discovered this army’s location as well as their leader," Finagor muses, "and has infiltrated them besides. Instead of advising a coordinated attack, we could make the message say that your tetrarch has an assassin in place and wants no action taken yet."

His wife smiles and so do I.

I remove a fresh piece of stationery backed with the tetrarch of Zasna’s deep maroon and hand it to him, then retrieve pen and ink.

Pulling the chair to the small table and sitting, Finagor rubs his sleeve across the table’s surface. He studies the original message, wipes his hands on his pants, and secures the blank message with thumb and middle finger.

"My tutor taught me my letters by having me trace the writing of scholars and then imitate it freehand. I believe I have not lost the talent."

The old gods I still pray to must have given me this man when they took Dallu from me, for even had I envisioned this course, I could never have managed what he creates.

"Sand," he says, when his artifice is complete.

I reach into the saddlebags and hand him a small pouch tied with a thin ribbon. He opens it and sprinkles a light dusting to dry the ink, then taps the paper edgewise on the table. Blowing off the excess, he holds it for the rest of us to examine. I myself would not know it for a forgery had I not witnessed the act.

He hands the message to me to fold with the ritualistic precision I have practiced since childhood. Relighting the twig, he sets to work on the original message again, this time to remove the seal entirely. Carefully prying it up with a fingernail, he shifts it to the new stationery with the delicacy of balancing a finn’s egg on the tip of his finger.

"If I press it hard I’ll distort the seal. Have a care, messenger, it won’t hold well."

Taking it from him I place the ersatz message gently inside the velvet pouch.

"Give me a blank note," he says when I am done. "I need to write a message to a friend of mine in the palace proper."

My look must convey my thought, that he has no friends there. Not anymore.

"His son and mine are of an age," Finagor explains. "They played together. Martine began binding his son’s chest two moons ago."

It doubles my risk to deliver a second note, but our fates are twined now like the roots of a mayak tree; what endangers me endangers him as well. I do as he asks.

He scratches a note in his own hand, the letters narrower and finer than the last. I catch enough to see that he is requesting horses and supplies. He folds the note in half, writes "Martine of House Saber" on the front, and uses a tiny remnant of wax on the twig to glue the two sides together.

Finagor hands it to me. "If this reaches him, perhaps both he and I will see you east of the wall. And now you must go. You have delayed too long already."

He is right, though the events since my arrival have taken less than a tick of the sun, Dallu’s death adds yet another layer of danger. I pack the additional message and sling my saddlebags over one shoulder.

"If you’re still here when I return to take Dallu’s body to the cremation pit," I say, "then you will know all went well."

"You shouldn’t come back," his wife says over Finagor’s shoulder.

"She’s right," he says. "You risk enough already. Let me see to that burden for you."

I feel guilt but no sorrow that it will be Finagor throwing the body into the sulfurous refuse pit instead of me, but I must at least make my goodbye. I cross to the pallet and kneel to kiss Dallu’s cool forehead one last time.

Finagor follows me to the door when I am done.

"Fortune to you," I say to him, as I leave my childhood home for the last time.

He surprises me by reaching out. We grip forearms in the way of equals.

I walk out into a street that is as still and quiet as the prairie at midnight. Gathering the reins of my horse, I mount and ride for the uppermost terrace.

The stillness has rippled out perhaps four streets in all directions. Beyond that perimeter of fear, Sabanach hums with its normal activity as if nothing of consequence has occurred today. Children play in the muck; a few pile round rocks until they fall, others run and scream as one pushes an inflated pig’s bladder with a stick. Laundry flutters in the light breeze, absorbing the stench of the quarter into the drying cloth.