674 - Never Do God's Work Less Than Perfectly

The Temple choir had just paused for one of the ten silences during the day, so the only sound was the whisper of wind through the ceiling vaults. Birds that found their way in and not yet caught by the priests and novices chirped distantly above.

... I pray to the Ten... Help us. Guide us. We are in trouble without You... Minis had long ceased whispering his prayers out loud, but the refrain ran through his head still, even as the sun rose in the sky. Atzana would just have to reschedule his appointments. He'd been praying, instead of sleeping, and the words were finally running into a vast, echoing hum in his head devoid of any meaning, driven only by the intense feeling of need.

Just as the choir resumed its round of hymns, a 'click' sounded but before Minis could raise his head his whole body stiffened. ## ##### STATUS FILES FOU### EMERGENCY BIOHAZARD PROTO#### FILE DAMAGED ###:::: ILE# Numb::er## It was as if all Ten gods were shouting in his head at once in the most ancient of Arkan. EMERG### He could understand perhaps one word in ten and even those made no sense.

...I can see only light, it is too bright, it is too loud. It looks like Risae's cold, white workrooms, screaming, I hear screaming. I can see bodies thrashing on a white surface. Men somehow shrunk to the size of a glass box on a table, blood flowing bright. A window into another place where stars shine stark without twinkling... A vast glass marble below... the Earthsphere turning. Above. Minis flung his arms over his head, afraid it would fall on him.

Risae is not here. There is a short, round woman with fessas cut straight hair and spectacles. Her hair is dark. She watches the glass box of men killing and torturing one another with cold eyes.

“They aren't dying fast enough, Ruth.” The voice comes from somewhere, disembodied. Muunas?

“We just need to be patient,” she answered as if the man addressing her were there.

“No. Our patience is being tried by the Almighty. You need to come up with some way of killing them off faster. We'll never get out of orbit at this rate. The apostate must be gone before the children of the Divine go home.”

“I'll see.”

“Doctor, believe that the Most High will guide your hands in this. You will create an illness of surpassing elegance and efficacy.”

The woman leans back tapping a pen against her lips. “Prophet of God, you'll get your illness. Soon. Which of the eugenics projects will you have me set aside for this?”

“Get one of your students on it. That should be sufficient.”

“I have just succeeded in making the eye-colour dominant,” she says. “I have the other physical tweaks complete and I am about to go into one of my own tanks, Murray. I won't be able to monitor any of my students as closely as necessary. Especially when setting them to build terminal illnesses for use on the damned.”

“Let them start. You can put finishing touches on it once you come out in the image of the chosen, the blessed that you are creating.”

“I suppose I could.”###$$####$ %^^#$%^* NNNNNNNNNNNNN###Ile no# #####

Then it is Risae standing in the middle of the metal room, she looks somehow uncertain in her own skin, if a God can be uncertain. It is as if She is not used to Her own skin. She regards the sealed glass vials in an open metal box. It clearly has a curse mark painted on the side.

“Now, Charlotte, very nice work. The cure for this is where?” The girl next to Risae looks like a fessas and wrings her hands as if she were panicked at being less than perfect.

“Um... Doctor... I just did the one.”

“Idiot girl. You never, ever bioengineer an illness without its cure, it is part of its construction or you are no proper biotech. Go back into your notes and do it. Never do God's work less than perfectly.”

“I am chastened.” The girl;!%$@###### #### ### FILE DAMAGED casts her eyes down as she says this. Then she takes up the box and bows out. “Praise the Lor##.”

Minis blinked his eyes open, staring at the bottom step before Muunas. There was so much noise in his head he could almost not hear the choir. He felt bruised inside and out. “Praise the Ten,” he finally managed to whisper. His mouth was dry and his whole body, still stretched on the tile, ached and stank of dry sweat. Was that my answer? The Ten ordered this plague to be created?

673 - I'm Just Going to DIE

“... as is set out in the infant Arkan constitution. The Assembly of Arko sits five times per year, thirty-six days each, so as to allow sufficient time for the work of the Empire as a whole, and to allow sufficient time for each member to spend working time in their constituency. This also a/l/l/o/w/s/ permits the government to not interfere with the Arkan religious calendar.”

Ilesias put his pen down and wiped his inky fingers on his kilt, and took a drink of juice. Then he stared longingly out the window where he couldn't see anything but tree-tops anyway. “Gian... Most honourable teacher... my essay isn't due until tomorrow. Perhaps I could take advantage of the daylight and go riding?”

The young man at his own desk in the Heir's schoolroom, where Ailadas had sat presiding over his older brother Minis and the pack of boys around him. He looked up as the rest of his class tried not to be too obvious in their pausing. “Ili,” he said mildly. “How many pages do you have completed in rough?”

“Um... nine. And a bit.”

“And your assignment for the Senior tutor?” Ailadas still critiqued Ili's work, though Gian did the bulk of the daily lesson grind. It was a major coup that the older man would take time from his busy professorship at the University to assist in the Heir's training, despite his age and infirmity.

“Um.” Ili looked down. “Ten pages. But I have a whole page of references!”

Gian got up and picked up the much-despised essay as the others in class returned to their own work, still listening even as they pretended industry. “Hmmm. Hmmm? Hmmm.” I just hate it when teachers make that noise. It means so many things you can never guess what this hmmm means! I want to go out and ride. Or skate. Or run with the kennel dogs. Or practice my sword-work or--

“Spend another tenth on this section that explains what the House Whip's job is and the House Cudgel. Then you will be able to re-write it perfectly this evening after dinner.”

“Yes, teacher.” A whole tenth of a bead. I am just going to DIE.

The Desk of the Imperator's Private Secretary

http://www.youtube.com/embed/MKikHxKeodA?rel=0

672 - Hit the Cascade!

Inensa leaned down to adjust her left faib skate. The fans of the Onyxine Razors sat raptly in the stands, watching the Mahid girls team warm up. In her whites, with her hair braided tight, she looked like every other Mahid woman on the team. She was sitting as second back up, the seventh woman on the team.

She wasn’t truly up to the skill that the girls had cultivated with all the focus and dedication of Mahid men, but sitting on the bench supporting them made her feel good. It was so unlikely for the 'mysterious seventh Mahid woman' to be the proper and decorous Dowager Imperatrix that no one had even been close when guessing who this new player might be.

Jorasa soared up out of the bowl and settled next to her on the bench. “Go in, 'Nesa!” She tapped the back of her glove on Inensa's shoulder.

She swooped down into the bowl, doubled braid whipping out under her helmet, thumping against her back. She found her face stretching in what charitably might be called a grin as she fitted herself into the pattern of passing and weaving and firing the disc at the goal, swooping up and back and between, ducking one disc, jumping a second, catching the third, darting between Amitza and Borasa.

She missed her first shot on goal and her second, but by the third she soared up, over the edge, feet higher than her head faster than she'd made it before and somehow clawed the air and felt the goal behind her as if it glowed. She made her shot and the fans cheered, even if it was just practice.

The team needed three more players. Four if she was truthful with herself. She knew she was the least, but Goddess Selinae it felt good. It felt good to be moving and moving so fast, stretching her muscles as hard as the precision dances hammered into her as a girl. Her self-made wind felt as though she had wings.

“'Nesa!” Coach whistled her out and she turned herself out of the practice pattern, onto the edge for several slow laps to cool down, before settling back to her place on the bench.

The coach was pressing her to allow other aitzas girls and some solas to try out for the Onyxine Razors, ad she knew she would allow it. Her father had, in effect, given over the management of the women to her.

Her father sat in the stands, up and back, to one side of her. He watched the practice, letting his bespectacled gaze slide over her as any other of the team members. She didn't do more than glance at him with the usual Mahid impassiveness.

She was shocked at how tired he looked to her. He was a very old man but he usually didn't show it so openly. A faint thread of words came to her ear from him, pitched exactly to reach her and go no further in the noisy, rumbling, cat-calling whistle filled, echoing bowl. “See me, after. You do well, First, to so stay ahead of your charges.”

“I hear,” she said, her lips barely moving, looking straight ahead. “Have you slept?”

“Irrelevant. Duty,” he said.

There is trouble enough to worry him, to keep him awake, possibly for a full night or more.

She stood up, flexing her shoulder. “Coach! Minor injury!”

“You're out, 'Nesa. Hit the cascade!”

“Yes, coach!” She gathered up her helmet and the towel she'd used and glided around to the door under the stands. No more playtime.

671 - Muunas, All Father of the Ten Gods

For the longest time, there was only the sound of his own breathing, and the pressure of the floor against his body.  His forehead pressed on the wood and actual chill spread into his body.   

The Marble Palace, that huge pile of stone and the warren in the cliff behind, hardly ever warmed. Every time he felt himself starting to doze off, his head wanting to loll to one side, his arms and legs wanting to contract to pull him into a more comfortable position, he rose, bowed before the Presence light, shook out his arms and legs and lay down again, to renew his prayer.

There was nothing.  No answer.  Barely even a sense of the Gods. There was a faint skim of sacredness, like a whiff of incense from a censer passed through a room a bead ago. From outside he could hear Bella whine.

At last, there was a faint chime, an ancient, ancient snatch of hymn on a glass instrument… just like the one in the Temple.  The glass water pipe. Minis rose to sit, and stare up at the light. “Gods… should I ask in the Temple?  Is that what you mean?”

In the silence of the Imperial chapel, there was nothing but ghostly echoes of ritual. “Ten? Muunas help us.”  His only answer was the silence.  He rose, genuflected and carefully closed the door behind himself.

He was grievously tired, but he pulled his shirt and clout out from under Bella’s nose.  She whined at him but lifted her head and let him get the rest of his clothing.  “Come on, dog,” he said, tiredly.  “Let’s go to the Temple.”

His guard, two of the Mahid girls, were ready and waiting if he should need them and they smiled as he climbed into the litter he had to use to keep his feet off the ground across the square.  “Jorasa, Amitza… good evening.”

“It’s late, You Whose Eyes Look Very Hung Over,” Amitza said quietly.

It startled a laugh out of Minis.  “I haven’t been drinking, or smoking herb. I’ve been trying to talk to the Gods.”

Both women nodded without saying anything and took up station in front of him and behind him as the bearers lifted him up.  He trusted their training, as well as the bodyguards that his guard captain, Idiesas, had assigned him, even with the terrorist who had tried to kill him on his Ascension, the self-named ‘Unomas’, still at large in the Empire.

Once in the Temple he wouldn’t need bodyguards, though the Mahid women would go with him.  The Temple, or the Ten Gods, or both had made it pretty clear that he was – so far – Their choice when he’d been saved from a lethal dart at the moment of his anointing as Imperator.

He alighted on the upper steps of the Temple, thanked his bearers, and stood for a moment looking out over Presentation square.  Lamp lights glowed all around the perimeter and along the fountains separating the Marble palace from the square, and in every planter through the entire area.  Shade trees and fountain trees helped keep people cool and were carefully maintained despite their blocking of views.  The sun was just too brutal in Arko to have a perfectly bare stone square.  In this unseasonal heat… very much like a heat wave he remembered as a child, it was still sticky hot and thick though it was the middle of the night.

He rinsed his hands just inside the door and went to lie down before Muunas’s statue and repeat his prayers for assistance, his Mahid waiting just inside the doors, where all Imperator’s guard had waited, traditionally.  The only difference, and it was enough to make traditionalists’ heads spin was that they were female Mahid, not male. The dog curled up at Jorasa's feet, huffing that she was not allowed to follow Minis into the sanctuary.

The gold tiles under my hands are even more cool than in the Marble Palace.  Muunas, All Father of the Ten, Husband, Creator, give leave for the Artificer and the Vivisectionist to help us.  We are in trouble. Help us.

670 - Without Using a Word Like 'Plague'

“Thank you, Atzana,” Minis said and handed her the last letters he had just added personal notes to, notifying every head of state around Arko, and the letter to Haiu Menshir giving his notification of the medical problem… all without used the words ‘plague’ or ‘emergency’.  He didn’t want to cause a panic, and he trusted Intharas’s good sense and years of experience to put out his special edition, notifying the Empire that there was an illness stalking the streets, without causing riots or people mobbing Haians or Maskers.

“I’ve put your speech to Assembly here,” Atzana said, taping the top sheet, looking incredibly tired.  It was so late that all the city chimes but the one were silent.

“I’ll go over it, why don’t you get some rest?  This will hit the streets and Assembly and everyone tomorrow, but you should sleep in.”

“I’m fine, thank you, Minis.  Good night.”  If he knew her she’d be at her desk next morning at the usual time.  His eyes felt gritty.  He’d arranged to have the city water cleaning department heads come into a meeting next morning, just after his intended address to Assembly, something that the Imperator couldn’t just do anymore… he’d had to wake the House Speaker and request an emergency point of information time to be officially read out and voted on, so his speech could jump the queue.  

Everyone would be wild with curiosity of why he needed to make a speech, and it was unlikely that they’d deny him time.  They’d just begun sitting this session and hadn’t yet gotten into the really long, drawn out wrangles that tended to wait until the middle of the sitting.

He needed to find out if the water protocols had changed somehow in the past year, or if anything was different about the Risaen commands in the city that might have caused this.  The weather had been so hot and wet.  He put both hands flat on the desk and levered himself to his feet like a much older man.  Doof didn’t pull her head out from under her wing at all, though Bella sighed up and clattered out at his heels.

He told her firmly ‘sit’ at the door to the Imperial chapel. Then he hesitated at the threshold.  He turned away from the door and leaned against the wall to pull off his slippers, then all the rest of his clothes.  He did fold them so his master of intimate apparel wouldn’t have fits about wrinkles and having things ruined. Bella lay down, with her muzzle on the neatly folded clothes and watched him as he opened the door.

Minis prostrated himself before the presence light, his fears and his prayers a jumble in his head, that the cool wooden floor failed to calm.

Gods, I come before you and am most humbly begging You for help, or for answers, or something.  There are no children being born in the city of Arko, and haven’t been for moons.  Women are bleeding more heavily and the Haians say they were possibly pregnant, but could not carry it.  Goddesses, your Fenjitza tells me this.

Your Fenjitzae tell me that You would not punish us this way, certainly not without enormous fanfare of how and why it is being done. I feel You would not do this.  This must be a natural disaster of some kind… though if I am wrong, oh Ten, then I trust You to make it clear how I err.

 Please help us.  This looks like the boy plague in a different form.  Help us, for I fear this will spread and all human kind will go down to the Summoner.

669 - I See I Shall Have to Instruct You

Sofonisba held her countenance in a remarkably Mahid way and nodded her acknowledgement as she rose.  Alaria, her face open as a book, couldn’t keep the chagrin off it entirely.  The others merely stood where they rose from their curtsies and waited.  Clearly, Sofonisba had either been chosen, or become their First of Mahid.

“Dowager Imperatrix,” Sofonisba said, her voice smooth as cream.  “We were certainly in different circumstances at the time.  We all believed that there was a life for us, outside Mahid.”

“And you were mistaken?” Inensa’s voice was dry.  “It is rather a long time to come forward to claim a name by marriage, that was so vigorously resisted, diligently hated and whose widowhoods were so unseemly joyful.  Three years?”

Alaria had not the grace to show shame.  The others… it was mixed.  All the girls that her own unlamented husband Second Amitzas had married to his rogue Mahid to begin breeding up a new cohort for the new regime he envisioned under her son, where so unlike Mahid born and bred to it that they inspired a headache almost instantly growing behind her eyes. She did not move to pinch the bridge of her nose to try and stop it.

“We… were mistaken, First Sera of the Mahid.” Alaria chimed in.  The toddlers with them were admirably quiet.  Almost as quiet as they should be but one of the boys had sneaked up on one of the palace cats and pulled its tail.  The screech and claw and follow-up howl effectively broke the tension enough to let Inensa massage her temples for a moment, unnoticed.

“Sit down.  We must at least speak of this over kaf service,” Inensa snapped.

“These women…” Sofonisba sank gracefully to the indicated chair and as the servants arrived with the kaf trays and service, as subordinate, took up the service role, setting aside her onyxine fan to take up the silver filter and sugar tongs. Inensa noted… and the woman was visibly surprised when she nodded her approval.

“We all took advantage of the assistance of the Yeolis,” she said.  “Some of us went back to what families we had left.  Some of the children… died or were given away to the House of Red Leaves when born.” Inensa noted the euphemism.  Some of the girls had killed their unwanted Mahid children.  Not surprising, especially if they were girls.  She did not interrupt but the boy who had gotten scratched, now wiggled out of his mother… or keeper’s arms and trotted over to them.  “I’m Joras Mahid,” he announced proudly, then hid his face in his hands.

Inensa held up her fan to pause the flow of Sofonisba’s story and answered him.  “An ancient and honourable name.  Who is your mama?”

“She’s in S’estialis. She was mama!”

“Amatesha Mahid,” Sofonisba broke in. “6^th Nuninibas’s wife.”

“Yes.  I recall.  A very fierce spirit.” Inensa leaned down to where Joras had sat down and begun playing with the laces of his shoes.  “Joras.  There are other Mahid children to play with.  Did you wish to go do that?”

“Can I take Tesha Mama?” One of the other girls, who had another child on her lap.

“Tesha, as Mahid have you sworn to the voted in Imperator?”

“Yes, First.”

“I will have everyone truth-drugged to check their oaths.  Sofonisba…” she raised her voice so they all could hear. “I will accept you, provisionally, since you have returned.  Mahid is not the same, which I suppose is one reason you risked returning to us.  Until your oaths are tested you will be required to remain in the Mahid quarters and have no contact with the other Mahid.  Do you understand?”

A murmur of agreement and children were gathered up.  “I will have your things brought to you. Sofonisba.” She set down the sugar tongs absolutely correctly, folded her gloves in her lap.  “I will continue to hear your report.  Joras, good boy for reporting in.” He beamed at her with a smile so like Elasha’s deceased husband that her heart ached.

“Amatesha died last year.  She was one of us… displaced ones,” Sofonisba said as the bustle of servants and guards and everyone being escorted downstairs faded.  “Many families took their girls back.  Especially since the Yeolis saw that there was funding for their ‘pain and trauma’.”

“Of being stolen or even just married into the Mahid, yes.”

“The children… the unwanted… some families would not take their widowed Mahid women back.  Alaria’s… solas boy sneered at her as a widow and ‘tainted’ by Mahid touch.  She… used one of the techniques you taught her and fled that town to find me.”

“I see. As an honourably widowed Mahid, she was certainly justified in not accepting a mere solas’s opinion of her.  They were affianced before my husband stole her?”

“Yes.”

“She has a great deal of learning to do to properly channel her rage,” Inensa said and accepted the kaf cup from Sofonisba. “Tell me the rest of it.”

“Dowager… are you not being too trusting?” Sofonisba took up her own cup.  “You made me Mahid.  Then cut me loose, or some would say set me free of all married constraints.  Or, ruined the life I had before.  Should you not have your kaf-cup checked after I have handled it?”

 “No.  I believe I would have noted if you added anything to my cup or to the sweetener, or to the milk.” She set her cup down and turned her hands over on her knees, regarding them curiously.  Their cream colour was pristine.  “I see I shall need to instruct you on the proper use of drug-detecting fabric.”  She reached a fingertip to the toxic ‘White Glow’ in its special pot, rubbed a petal gently and displayed the resultant faint blue spot to Sofonisba who smiled and sipped her kaf.