Gerrard Cowan - The Strategist

Brandione shook his head.

‘No,’ said the Queen. ‘But the Old Place does.’ She sighed. ‘Do you know what it is?’

‘The home of the Machinery.’

The Queen laughed. ‘Yes, yes.’ She pinched three forefingers and three thumbs tightly together, and raised them to her eyes. ‘But only for a sliver of its lifespan: the most recent moments in its long years.’

Brandione blinked, and suddenly the three bodies surrounded him, her faces inches from his own.

‘Everything in this place is a memory,’ she said. She gestured at the beach around them. ‘Memories have power, because humanity was made to die, to burn in beauty and flutter out, in wave after glorious wave.’ She pointed to the sea. ‘The creator hated that: how could he not, when he would live forever?’

‘The creator?’ He thought of the endless chasm, and the intelligence he had felt there, that sense of conflict.

She ignored him.

‘He wanted something to remain: something of each of them, something that would not die. He took mortal memories, and gave them power to make them last forever, so he would always have them to play with.’ She smiled. ‘It was his great mistake. The immortal power he placed in memories grew beyond even his control. Something new emerged: a thing that could rival even him.’ She glanced around, with a blend of love and fear in her eyes. ‘This place.’

She sighed. The three young women flickered into something else: old creatures, balding and stooped, their skin lined and fragile. But the moment passed, and the young Dust Queen returned, staring sadly at the sands.

Brandione looked from this creature of three bodies, to the red sun, then down to the black sand at his feet. Thoughts of the past appeared in his mind, unbidden memories rushing through him in a flood. He thought of his days in the College, and then the army. He looked back on his unrelenting ascent to the top of the Overland’s military hierarchy, his role as Strategist Kane’s senior advisor, and all the things that once seemed weighty in his mind. He was a man of many parts, someone had once told him. He was ambitious, but not boastful: popular with those above and below him, but not a craver of adulation. He had seemed a quiet and modest man, but, in truth, he revelled in his complexity. They never saw him coming, because they did not know what to make of him. A soldier and a scholar.

He looked to his left, and for a moment he caught a glimpse of a figure from his past: Provost Hone, the head of the College. The old man was standing far away, beside a towering black dune. He smiled, and Brandione was reminded of all the love he had been shown by men like that, all the counsel they had given him, all the ways they had lifted him up, and propelled him to glory.

But Hone began to fade away, until only his smile was left, hanging ludicrously in the air. It disappeared, and Brandione was reminded that the past was dead, and he was here now, with a three-bodied creature from ancient times, on a beach from a memory, and that none of the things he had accomplished mattered any more.

‘Memories,’ the Queen said. She shook her three heads.

Something new had appeared at the Queen’s side. It was a table, a circular thing formed of a dark green stone, surrounded by great wooden chairs that seemed to have grown straight out of the sand. Brandione approached it, and looked upon its surface. A vortex of shapes and symbols twisted before him, dancing across the stone, laughing at his ignorance in an ancient and unknowable tongue.

Five figurines had been spread across the table’s surface. They were formed of different materials – wood, glass, stone – but they each were shaped into a person. He went through them, one after the other, lifting them up and examining them carefully. One of them was oddly familiar, though he could not think why: a plump woman, wearing a Watcher’s mask that had been formed into the face of a cat. Another figurine meant nothing to him: a young girl, slight, but displaying a kind of defiant bravery. The girl held a parchment, on which tiny letters had been written. Brandione held it to his eye and read the meaningless words: House of Thonn.

‘I saw that girl, long ago,’ the Dust Queen whispered. ‘She is not a citizen of your Overland. She has never set foot on your Plateau. But she will help to reshape your world. She will fall, and she will rise again. The Fallen Girl.’

Brandione studied the figurine for a moment longer, then placed her back on the table, near the plump woman. He knew the other figurines only too well. He lifted one of them, formed of painted glass: a youngish man with narrow features, his hair painted a garish yellow. His hands were steepled, the tips of his fingers resting at the base of his chin. He wore an aquamarine cloak.

Brandione glanced at the Queen, whose eyes sparkled at him.

‘This is Aranfal,’ he said. ‘A Watcher of the Overland.’ He sighed. ‘A torturer, like all the rest of them. But he was the worst.’ He raised the figurine to his eye. ‘In the … olden times, he took me on a journey to a museum in the Far Below. Him and Squatstout.’ The thought of the little man sent a shudder through him.

The Queen laughed. ‘Squatstout!’

Brandione looked up at her. ‘Yes. He’s an assistant to the Watchers. Do you know him?’

The Dust Queen shook her three heads. ‘He is not an assistant to the Watchers. He is a thing of the oldest ages. He is a creature of the shadows, though he longs for the light. He is a glory of the world.’

‘He is like you?’

The Queen favoured him with three faint smiles.

Brandione placed Aranfal back on the table, and lifted another figurine. The marble was formed into the shape of a fat man, clad in a shawl. He was bald, and even in this form, a heavy sadness clouded his eyes.

‘Canning,’ Brandione said, placing the last Expansion Tactician back into his place upon the swirling board. ‘He was always a good man, though he was weak.’

‘A strange man,’ the Queen said. ‘He is complex, though he sees no good in himself. He has been suppressed by others, through his life; the higher he climbed, the worse it all became.’

‘He was not a bad person,’ Brandione said, ‘but he was not a good Tactician.’

Three sets of shoulders shrugged. ‘He was Selected by the Machinery. You all followed it blindly, yet you loathed one of its choices.’

Brandione nodded. ‘Perhaps. But it’s too late now. We will never know what he could have achieved.’

The Queen laughed. ‘Never know? The game has not even begun, Brandione.’ She pointed one of her fingers at the last figurine. ‘Pick that one up.’

Brandione lifted the final piece, and held it before him.

‘I know this man better than all the others,’ he said. ‘Or perhaps I only thought I did.’

The figure of Brandione was carved of wood. It showed the one-time General as he once had been, clad in his leather armour, upright and proud. He thought of himself now, still wearing the rags of a prisoner. Am I still a General, with my army of dust? No. The old Brandione was dead; he had died with the Overland. They all had. He began to long for this person, and for all the things he had worn, all the things he had been, when he was Charls Brandione, leader of the Overland’s armies, at the right hand of the Strategist …

The Dust Queen coughed. The rags disappeared, and his armour returned. A handcannon hung from his left side, and a sword from the other. He nodded at her, but his mind was elsewhere.

‘Question,’ she said.

His mind swirled with possibilities. He could ask her about this game, perhaps. He could ask her what his role was to be in the future. But strangely, these did not seem to matter.