Pyrebound - 15.3
Author: theredsheep

Chapter 15.3 – Pyrebound

He heard singing as he approached the Palace. Not a hymn, but something stranger, sung in a duet: a deep, wordless drone, with a high female voice chanting solemnly over it in words he could not understand. It was eerily beautiful, and he followed it without hesitation. He wasn’t at all surprised, when he reached the source, to see Imbri sitting on her bed, crooning away as she ran her hands over a large glass slab laid on the table in front of her. Bal sat on the far side of it, keeping up the drone. He glanced at Imbri from time to time, but mostly looked at the hunk of bone in his hands.

As Ram came in, the big man greeted him with a nod, then flicked at the edge of the bone with one of his knives, sending a speck of it flying onto the floor. There was a small constellation of little flecks there already. Meanwhile, Imbri ran her hands over the glass. There were fine lines etched in it, Ram saw, in a pattern of concentric and overlapping circles, with tiles of baked clay arranged atop and between the lines. Imbri moved one of the tiles across the slab, then rapped her knuckles on the table, still singing. Bal promptly set down his bone and knife to study what she’d done.

Ram hated to interrupt the song—and whatever else she had going on here—but he’d come for a reason. Fortunately, Imbri stopped on her own after a few more seconds, reached out with her left hand, and found a beaker of water on the floor next to her bed. She drank, then cocked her head. “That’s not Bal’s breathing. Who’s there, and what do you need?”

“It’s just me,” Ram said. “I’d like your help with something, if you’re free. What is that, anyway? That glass … thing.”

“Tsympir. It’s a moonchild game, and the rules are a bit more complicated than I feel like explaining just now.”

Ram looked closer; the glass was good quality, with metallic accents, and the clay tiles were brilliantly glazed with stars, moons, and strange symbols. “Where’d you get the stuff from? Don’t tell me you were carrying it around this whole time. I’ve never seen you play it before.”

“Of course not. I only get a chance to play once every couple of months. Moonchildren draw maps in the sand when they want to play, and I smudge the lines trying to feel for them. But rich people in the Dominion play it too, with premade maps; the bondsmen found me a set, since Bal and I had nothing else to do at the moment. Speaking of which, you wanted help?”

“Yes. I’m headed for the Temple. Do you mind stopping your game to come with?”

“The game will keep. Whether it’s a good idea to bring me to the Temple is another question.”

“I’m Ensi. If I say you can come in, you can.”

“I’m sure you can. But is it wise? And what do you want me there for?”

“A whole lot just happened. Mannagiri’s been sabotaging the pyre. He just lured Piridur and I into a trap and killed at least a couple dozen people. I want to talk the next steps over with you.”

Imbri had been about to take another sip of her water; instead she set it back down, slowly, on the game board. “And, after that, you decided to open the conversation by asking me about the Tsympir map?”

He filled her in on the way, sotto voce. They were at the foot of the Temple stairs by the time he finished. “So, what do you think I should do next?”

“I’m not really a politician, Ram,” she said doubtfully. “No, I don’t need your hand, my cane works fine! You think I haven’t run into stairs before? Anyway, my concern is, what’s Mannagiri going after you for now?”

“I assume he’s got a grudge because Shimrun tried to kill him,” he said, looking back to confirm that Bal was standing by to help. A cane was one thing, but the stairs had no railings, and it was a long way down to the water. “Maybe he thought I put Shimrun up to it. He must know he wasn’t my favorite person.”

“He’s risking his women’s lives. His haranu should discourage that, from what you’ve told me. And you’re describing a complicated plan. He put real effort into this. Did he get really angry when Shimrun attacked him? The way you’ve described it before—”

“It was pretty pathetic, yeah. I don’t know how he thinks, or why he does the stuff he does. It might be that he wants to hurt everybody, and I’m one of the only people left who he’s met personally. I’m indwelt, too, and now I’m ensi; that makes me his equal.”

“Which points to the bigger problem that we don’t know his larger plan in general. Any news from your women?”

“Shennai and Pimna? Not in the past tetrad at least. Mannagiri’s handmaidens have gone tight-lipped, and he’s refused about twenty requests to let them stretch their legs. They’re going a little crazy in there right now.”

“We know he’s got a lot of cash built up,” Imbri recited. Her progress up the stairs was slow. “He’s liquidated most of his pyre to get money. He’s attacked his two closest neighbors, but only once. He’s sold off nearly all the women except his handmaidens, but selling the men more slowly, mostly for ransom. All the acolytes and a lot of the flamekeepers are dead. What does all that add up to?”

“No more than it did the last fifteen times we went over this. How’s it going, Nusun?”

“No intruders have passed me,” the murrush reported from the top of the stairs. “All is well within.”

“I had a brief talk with Etana while you were off knocking buildings down,” Imbri persisted. “He wanted my thoughts on it. On Mannagiri’s plans.”

“Etana wanted to know specifically about the men. Mannagiri doesn’t like men, does he?”

“Not sexually, if that’s what you mean.” It was complicated, given what he’d done with Shimrun, but he didn’t feel like getting into that. Just the memories of it made him feel queasy. “He has a kind of sick love for his own handmaidens, and despises anyone who isn’t indwelt. That’s about it. Probably he just figures that the men will ransom better than the women, or he’s saving them to sell later. Watch out for Nusun.”

“I can feel the heat,” she said patiently, and tapped her way around him. “Hello, Nusun. Is it all right if I go inside?”

“If the Ensi wishes,” Nusun rumbled back.

“Thank you. Ram, we’ve been over this. We’re past the point in the bloom where men sell best; the harvest will be done everywhere. Men need to be fed, and men can escape or cause trouble. Tanbirs just sit there and hold value. If anything, he should have kept the women.”

“Okay, fine.” They passed through the doorway of the Temple proper. Ram had no particular destination in mind, only an inchoate feeling that it was time he visited his own place. He could introduce himself properly to his handmaidens, and check on Mana and Rinti. By and by he might order a handmaiden to start burning the murals off the walls of the Painted Room. Probably all the haranu’s prompting, but he couldn’t see how it would lead to harm. “So ransom it is.”

“That’s the thing Etana was worried about. Going by what the ransomed men say, they’re all kept together, in what’s left of their lugal’s palace. All the surviving men of High Atellu. Men of all ages and conditions. Including a lot who would be totally worthless for ransom. Who’s going to pay good money for a street-sweeper, a wine-steward, or a nine-bloom-old bastard?”

“You tell me. I assume you’re going somewhere with this, since you’re bringing it up.”

“Sort of. It was just a thought I had, while we were talking. We’ve been assuming that Mannagiri was mostly concerned with us, haven’t we? Defying the outside world, making his mark. But he could send a message a different way.”

“Go on.” It was coming up on evening now, but most handmaidens ate dinner with the groups they worked with; only the underaged girls and their minders, with a few acolytes, were moving about the Temple at present. They had a reasonable chance of privacy.

“I didn’t want to say it around Etana, because he might take it badly, but what if Mannagiri’s planning on indwelling all those men?”

“You—wow. Damn me, that’s … you might be right.” If Mannagiri wanted revenge, that was one way of getting it. Condemning all those men to die in turn, for a ruined pyre, with his ghost gloating inside them? Except—“There’s too many of them, though. Aren’t there?”

“Yes, that’s a problem. I don’t know how long a haranu can prolong life. But not centuries.”

“No. Nowhere near that. At least, not for women.” Possibly it worked differently for men, but he doubted it. It wasn’t just handmaidens who aged; if the power of indwelling lasted forever they wouldn’t bother with making fresh swords for every batch of flamekeepers. It wouldn’t make sense for indwelt men to be immortal if you expected them to burn every kindling. Not that Ram would have set things up like this in the first place. “And I don’t think even he would get much out of revenge on street-sweepers and bastards, either. If it were that, I’d expect him to hold on to the most important men, not let us buy them back.”

“Still, it’s an angle we hadn’t considered before.”

“Which is why I want to pursue it a little further before giving up on it. Is there anything else you can tell me about indwelling? Anything from your memories that isn’t common knowledge? Something Mannagiri might use?”

“Nothing comes to mind. I can’t remember ever having that many men indwelt at once, to be honest. The Painted Room usually had a bunch of candidates, but the acolytes felt anxious about having too many actual ‘bulls’ to deal with. They wanted just enough of a succession locked in that they could kill a troublemaker and still have a spare.”

“So it’s never happened, that you can remember? Ever?”

“It’s not that easy combing through ten or twenty lifetimes. Hold on a sec.” He looked into the nearest room; it had a couple of big jars in the corner, and nothing else. It looked disused. “Let me go digging a bit, and see if I get more information to tell you. All right?” He didn’t wait for an answer before sitting down, shutting his eyes, and diving in.

He’d expected to remember more, now that he was in the center of his domain again. If spirits couldn’t think or remember for themselves, they had to store memories in human minds, and most indwelt Karagene minds were here. And, if he didn’t exactly remember more, he did indeed find that the details came more clearly and sharply back to him.

Still, what he’d said was true: there was a lot to dig through, much of it useless, much of it so selectively recalled as to be meaningless. The highlights of old conversations about people he never knew; impressions of special moments that had meant a lot to men who’d been dead a century; an endless and monotonous wave of unpleasant memories from troubled childhoods. And what he was looking for, if it was there to find at all, was buried quite deep.

At last he reopened his eyes. “Okay. I see two possibilities. One is that he’s going to make hearths out of them. That hadn’t occurred to me.”

“You people kill to make hearths, too? Uck. I should have expected that.”

“You didn’t know that? It doesn’t happen very often, but everyone knows that you need a member of the lineage to sacrifice himself for a hearth too.”

“So ‘everyone knows’ that. What’s the true version?”

“You need the ensi to order one of his ens to burn early, at a non-kindling bloom. I can remember a pair of acolytes discussing how they made my old hearth that way; Urapu was this nervous, whiny kid, and they didn’t like him. I don’t know how precise the timing needs to be, or if Mannagiri would be able to set them all off in time, but it might work. Indwell a bunch of men at the next bloom, kill them the bloom after, and the bloom after that is the kindling.”

Imbri chewed her lip. “How many hearths can one pyre support? He’ll never get all the towers built in time, either.”

“True. I don’t know if the pyre would fail under the load, or if the hearths would flicker out, but either way it’d be simpler to torture these men to death.”

“You said there were two possibilities, though. What’s the second?”

“That one I’m even less sure about. Really, it’s a guess, based on some fuzzy memories of memories I can’t even associate with a person. I might be misinterpreting those anyway. Mostly, it’s that … you know how all the pyres are coordinated? Every pyre has its kindling at the exact same time. They’re all in the same family, the same lineage, whatever, running on the same schedule.”

“How’s that happen, though? If I wanted to start another pyre, I’d have to do it at the next kindling. It would have to involve sacrificing an ensi, obviously. But I couldn’t do it by commanding, like with a hearth, because I’ll be burning myself at the same time. Nobody has the authority to make it happen at the exact moment it needs to happen.”

“So it has to happen automatically. The system has to take care of itself.”

“Which means what? The most senior indwelt man is ensi, right? I don’t know of any way to put it under human control; you can’t promote an en to ensi except by killing the ensi. So there has to be some way—“

“To create two ensis at once. Yes. And the most obvious way would be to indwell two men on the same bloom.”

“Two, or ten, or fifty. If they’re on the same bloom, they’re twins? Makes sense. It would be simpler than making the succession depend whose haranu got to him a half-second before the other.” Which was how he’d have assumed it worked, if he’d stopped to think about it at all.

“Which one would the pyre obey, though?”

“Who knows? Maybe all of them, so long as they didn’t issue contradictory orders at the exact same time. I have no way of figuring that out, obviously; I’m sure I’m the only en left for this pyre.”

“Say you’re right, though. What would be the point of it, for Mannagiri? He’d still burn himself before he got to see any of it happen.”

“Yeah. He’d be ten blooms gone, unless he killed himself early, and I don’t see him doing that.”

Imbri frowned. “And if he did? What would happen?”

“Assuming he doesn’t have any ens, or that he’s planning to kill them first? If we’re right about how all this works—and I’m not sure that we are—then all those men will be forced to burn at the next kindling. It’s not something you can choose not to do.” He grimaced. “I can remember that kind of sudden ‘promotion’ happening once or twice. It’s not pleasant, ramping up quickly like that.”

“Never mind that for now. Suppose they all burn. What then?”

“Assuming they were all spread out, you’d have a whole lot of gigantic fires in the middle of nowhere. No temples or buildings, just fires. Which I guess would, over the next ten blooms, turn an enormous patch of desert livable. Not totally, because you’d still need water, but you could at least shelter there and not worry about the white sun, or reshki. It’d be a miracle for the hearthless. Give it a little time and you might even solve the water problem, maybe with some tinap help.”

“I don’t think you could run a whole pyre on a wellspring. Still, he wouldn’t necessarily need to put them all in bare desert. There’s plenty of space between the existing pyres on the Teshalun.”

Ram laughed, then shook his head. “Sorry. It’s not really funny, but … shit, what a mess that would be. Thirty or fifty unclaimed fires, going off on land that’s already good to farm? Every bondservant and hearthless would run off to join, along with half the hearths. They’d all have handmaidens of their own after the first bloom. It’d turn the whole Dominion upside down.” His smile faded. “Probably there’d be food shortages, and war.”

“And piracy, and everything else Mannagiri has shown us an ensi can do when he goes bad. Dozens of bandit priest-warlords all along the river. Which would make it very attractive to him, if he could pull it off.”

“Yes. An ensi can inherit in just a couple of hours if he needs to. The bastard could wait until the day before the kindling, put them all in position where he wants them, then have a handmaiden throw him off his temple Shimrun-style. Hell of a way to go out. He’d be laughing all the way down.” He sighed. “Still, a lot of this is guesswork, isn’t it? We don’t even know for sure that it’s what he’s planning to do. No sense getting worked up over it yet.”

“Yes, we can investigate further. But I don’t think we can afford to not assume this is his plan, for the time being. The risks are too high.”

“You’re telling me. I’ve got a kid on the way; I don’t want her growing up in a world like that.”

“It’s not just that.” Ram was still sitting on the floor; Imbri knelt down and whispered in his ear, “Do you remember what we learned at the rookery?”

“Of course I do,” he muttered back. “Kind of hard to forget.”

“Then you’re not thinking it through. I’m sure Mannagiri would be delighted with this scheme if it worked like we’ve described. But I don’t think it would. If we’re right about what the abizu told us, there’s a very good reason why we don’t have all those pyres already. A reason why men make do with pathetic little hearths like the one you grew up in.”

“Sorry, still not following you.”

“The white sun is the price we pay for all this. Right? It’s how Kur and Nidriz reassert themselves, righting the balance for what we took. There are only about thirty pyres in the Dominion now, as far as I know. Something like that. Maybe forty, I’m not sure. What happens to the payment due when we suddenly start drawing two or three times as much from the account?”

Ram froze. “I … don’t know.”

“Neither do I, Ram. Neither do I. I only know that I really don’t want to find out.”