A Practical Guide to Evil

What else could I do but run?

I shot out of the reservoir room, sword in hand, and into the hallway beyond. A dozen strides had me at the crossroads I’d spied on the fortress plans, where I slowed for a heartbeat as my cloak swirled around me. A squad of armed guards – good mail and helmets, longswords, the calm part of me assessed – was hurrying towards me from the right side, blades bare. I was already pivoting towards the left, though, down another hall that ought to be bring me to the bastion that was our way out. The door to it was open and it looked empty, not a single rack of spears disturbed or table toppled. Archer’s head popped out with a wary look on it a heartbeat later, which at least told me the two of them had won their scrap inside.

“Bard’s here,” I hissed, rushing through the doorway.

Three corpses, cleanly killed, waited for me inside along my two companions. Archer began stringing her shortbow, a grim look on her face. Akua was leaning over the edge of a bare stone window overlooking the courtyard, the rope end of a fastened grappling hook in hand. She withdrew, cocking a questioning eyebrow at me.

“Bard,” I simply repeated. “Courtyard?”

“Unfortunate,” she said. “Seven guards. There were more but the alarm ward drew them in.”

That was a sort of silver lining, I supposed. I hesitated for a beat. Keeping the corpses in my shadow was now meaningless, since the defenders already knew there’d been intruders. Discretion was out. This could still be salvaged if we got into the streets and hit the ground running, though. Wolof was a big city and Sargon’s people couldn’t be everywhere. Besides, our arranged distraction should be starting any moment now.

“We punch through,” I ordered. “Leave the bodies.”

Akua nodded.

“Two mages,” she said, glancing at Archer.

“Got it,” Indrani easily replied.

She took the rope Akua offered her and hoisted herself atop the windowsill before dropping down.

“I’ll go after,” I said, idly closing the door into the bastion behind me. “Bring the rope when you follow, would you?”

“How very frugal of you,” she replied, eyes amused.

I toppled a table, shoving it in the way of the door, and rolled my eye at her. What, did she think this stuff grew on trees? Good rope was expensive. I sheathed my sword, hearing the sound of hurrying soldiers catching up, and headed to the window. I got to the edge just in time to see Archer leap out of a smooth slide down the rope, an arrow nocked and loosed before anyone could notice. By the time I’d begun climbing down she’d landed smoothly on the ground, having loosed a second and killed twice. There was shouting from the rest of the guards. Without the mages in the way, though, Akua could move freely. I let myself go into a controlled slide that burned at the palms of my hand, hearing the door burst open when I was barely halfway through.

Swearing, I looked up and saw Akua flow over the edge of the window. She dislodged the hook, narrowly dodging a sword blow, and I swore even louder as my slide turned into a freefall. I pulled at motes of Night, whispering a curt prayer – grant me at least a beggar’s miracle, you stingy carrion sisters – and dragging the slightest bit to me. I shaped a thin downwards panel of darkness and angled my fall, tumbling down atop it into a disastrous roll that scraped my trouser against stone. It’d shaken and almost broken: the fortress wards were disrupting it, making it unstable. I rose to my feet, bad leg burning, and even as the Night-working evaporated behind me I was forced to hurriedly unsheathe my sword.

I caught the blow at a weak angle, the side of my own blade almost biting into my shoulder, but I spun as I took a small step to the side. The pressure from the taller and larger dark-skinned soldier trying to hack at me was turned against him, making him stumble, and I finished it with a manoeuvre I must have practiced a thousand times. As he stumbled forward I finished my spin and withdrew my sword, so that when the soldier steadied his footing and began to turn I was already hacking into the exposed side of his neck. It was a quick blow, and quite lethal. Without batting an eye I moved on. Archer had killed two more before a survivor got close enough to make her drop her bow and unsheathed her longknives, I saw, and the last one was coming for me.

Brave of him not to run, I thought, but not particularly wise.

Akua landed behind me, the soft noise of it entirely on purpose, and in the moment that drew his attention I struck. He was a big man, muscled, but clearly used to fighting with a shield he didn’t currently have. When I feigned at his left he overcommitted, hacking at a blow that didn’t come, and instead I quickly stepped into his guard and slammed the side of his chin two-handed with the pommel of my sword. He dropped, stunned but still conscious. From the corner of my eye I saw movement at the window above, but the arrow that was fire was knocked off-course by the one Archer loose in answer. Too quick to even be able to tell who they’d been aiming at. Time to go.

I glanced down at the soldier below, saw the fear in his eyes and hardened my heart. No witnesses: the guards above hadn’t seen us up close and we wore cloaks, but this one would have descriptions. My arm rose, but a soft hand laid against it. I looked at Akua with surprise.

“There would be no point,” she spoke in Kharsum. “Sargon will have the corpses upstairs raised to interrogate them.”

I hid my startlement. It was not so rare a thing for her to preach mercy, not compared to the way she’d been when we were younger, but I’d not expected it here and now. I looked at the soldier, lowering my arm.

“Looks like it’s your lucky day,” I said in Mthethwa.

He grimaced, mouth bloody form my blow.

“I traded for this shift,” he replied. “So not that lucky.”

I grinned, brushing past him, and overheard him whispering something to Akua as he inclined his head. Miyetham Sahelian, or something close to it. No idea what it meant, aside the fact it looked like he’d guessed Akua’s identity even through her disguise appearance. People spoke Mthethwa differently here than they did in Ater and among the Legions, I sometimes had trouble with their pronunciation. She did not answer and we wasted no time fleeing into the street before the archer up in the bastion could start shooting at us again. The street outside the bastion was board, almost an avenue, but mostly empty of people. The two young girls carrying urns of water made themselves scarce when we came out, Akua wordlessly taking the lead.

We’d barely run ten feet when lights began pulsing in the sky above the fortress. I almost grinned. The timing was a little off, but it looked like our distraction was finally happening. Hierophant would be hammering at the city through a ritual using the waters of the aqueduct as a battering ram to smash the inside of the fortress, even as troops began emerging from the Ways in a position to capitalize on the breach should it happen. The plan was for the Wolofites to repulse the assault and blame any damage on the aqueduct grids we’d nipped coming in on Masego’s assault, but we’d strayed off path some. Still, the threat of an outright attack ought to bump us down Sargon’s priority list a bit.

At the very least we’d have fewer pursuers, since the commander there would want to avoid thinning their garrison.

Pursuit still poured out of the same gate we’d used before we’d even turned the corner. I wasn’t much of a runner these days, but I grit my teeth and pushed through the pain as we followed Akua into the neat labyrinth that was the streets of Wolof. Our enemies weren’t any slower than we were, but we could take shortcuts they couldn’t – three brave souls followed even when Archer took me by the waist and leapt atop a wall, climbing as quick as they could, but we lost them three streets down when we got to a rooftop. It was one of those gardens I’d seen from afar, a lovely little shaded enclave where flowers and cabbage grew, and the three people in it when we intruded froze.

The oldest among them, a white-haired old man, deliberately looked away from us and began to speak of the weather with the younger pair. I snorted, taking it as the tacit invitation to move on that it was. The old man ignored Archer’s friendly wave, stubbornly looking away, and Akua guided us southwards through rooftops and streets until we found a deserted corner. We paused there, catching our breaths and allowing our heartbeats to slow.

“We are near a bazaar, unless Sargon change the trade-rights for this district,” Akua said. “The two of you will be able to change clothes there.”

“You could go buy them for us,” I suggested. “It’d draw less attention.”

She shook her head.

“There are city guards at the bazaar,” she said, “and it is only a matter of time before the fortress garrison sends warning to all companies, if they haven’t already. There are scrying posts at regular intervals in the city, all with runners at hand. They will begin looking around soon, and this is not a true hiding place.”

I felt a sliver of envy at the system described. Laure was nowhere as well-organized. It wasn’t that we didn’t have the ability, at least not in principle – we had the people and the magic. Callow just didn’t have the coin to spare for something that sophisticated, not when there were a hundred other things being neglected that were arguably more important.

“I’m not keen on splitting up,” Archer said, “but in that little description you did mention that there were guards at that bazaar you want us headed to.”

“Only entrances and exits, most likely,” I noted. “She thinks it’ll be easy to disappear into the crowd and come out less conspicuously dressed.”

“My very thoughts,” Akua smiled.

It always startled me how easy it was to understand her, to think along the same lines. Hakram probably knew me better, but sometimes I wondered if I didn’t understand her better than I did him. It made him a better right hand, of course – his ability to think differently than I did, to see what I didn’t, was a priceless asset – but the ease with which I could follow Akua Sahelian’s thoughts felt oddly intimate. It made it dangerously easy to feel close to her.

“It’s boring when you two agree,” Indrani complained, then turned serious. “Let me have a look at that entrance, at least. I want to be sure they’re not already looking for us.”

“Good idea,” I admitted.

Akua offered no objection, and after she gave a brisk description of the easiest path to the bazaar Archer was gone. I leaned against a rough brick wall, earning a raised eyebrow for it. Even when it wasn’t her face it was still her mannerisms, which made it a little uncanny to look at.

“Yes?” she asked.

“Just curious,” I grunted. “The guard we spared, what was it he said? In don’t know what ‘miyetham’ means.”

“It is an archaic form of the words,” Akua said. “What he said was ‘mile thaman’.”

My brow creased.

“Always good?” I hazarded.

“Ever worthy,” she corrected, then hesitated. “It is a turn of phrase here in Wolof. It is… praise for my family, in a way.”

Ever worthy, Sahelian, I mentally completed. That was what the man had said. Considering she’d likely saved his life I wasn’t inclined to argue.

“I sometimes forget your High Seats are actually liked by the people here,” I admitted. “I’m so used to seeing them as the enemy that it’s hard to conceive of anyone looking up to them as protectors.”

“We know better than to be devils to our own, Catherine,” Akua smiled, almost ruefully. “It is why we do best with enemies. That we may pour the venom outwards, while the wonders we bring back to our homes.”

“Dragons risible

Our claws, swords

Stealing miracles

To better hoard,” I quoted, the Taghrebi stiff on my tongue for lack of practice.

Something like delight flicked across her face, gone in a wink.

“One of Sherehazad’s,” she said, approving. “Not without reason was she titled the Seer.”

A moment of comfortable silence passed.

“You ever miss it, this place?” I asked, half on a whim.

Her expression was hard to read, and not for the shade of the alley.

“Sometimes,” Akua quietly said. “Parts of it. Others I am not so sure I could suffer now that I have known the world beyond the Sererian Walls.”

I slowly nodded.

“And you?” she smiled. “Do you miss Laure?”

I clenched my fingers, then unclenched them.

“No,” I admitted. “Laure’s just a different fight to me, now. It’s the court and trying to keep Callow whole. I miss the parts I loved when I was a kid, but the city? No.”

It hadn’t been home in a long time, though it galled me to admit it even in the privacy of my own mind. I’d never felt as more than a guest in the old palace of the Fairfaxes, a child putting on adult’s clothing, and these days what I loved most in the world was condensed into the shape of a few people. I was still fond of the city, it had been my home once, but I would not weep to leave it after the war ended. The conversation ended with Archer’s sudden return, but to me it felt only half-done. Like we’d left bits of it still hanging in the air. Now was not the time, though, so when Indrani informed us that the handful of guards at the bazaar entrance looked too bored to have been warned I went with the flow.

We were waved through nonchalantly by the pair of guards standing in the shadow of the arch leading into the marketplace, neither bothering to look if we were armed. Akua noticed my surprise as we entered the bazaar and leaned close for an explanation.

“Our clothes are of fine make,” she explained. “It is expected of us to bear weapons.”

“They thought we were highborn?” I asked.

“Not that fine a make,” she laughed. “They believed us mfuasa, likely. Some lord’s retainers.”

I nodded and follower her, letting the noises of the bazaar wash over me. I’d thought it would be a strange and exotic place, somewhere out of a dream, but I found the reality of it rather more sedate. The stands were a great deal more colourful than back home, and often made with only bare bones of wood while walls and roofs were dyed cloth, but aside from that it was mostly the goods sold that made a difference. There was no food to be bought here, as sale of such goods was strictly regulated in Wolof and contained to specific markets in every district, but there were enough spices on display to make a Callowan merchant weep for the wealth.

Jewelry was terrifyingly common too, copper and silver most of all but some gold and precious stones as well. Everyone seemed able to afford it. Clothes and cloth hung everywhere, small glassworks and the kind of petty trinkets that every market in the world must sell. The other great surprise was the sale of enchanted goods, and I wasn’t talking about magic swords. For every glinting dagger there were a dozen ever-sharp kitchen knives. I saw stone coldboxes engraved with runes, prettily sculpted magelights and even alchemical brews. They were bartered over like cabbage in swift-spoken Mthethwa, like it was the most natural thing in the world to have a cure for the cold bottled in a bazaar stand. Maybe it was, I thought. There were no priests here – where else were people meant to go, when they were sick or wounded? It was still surreal, to see magic taken as something so… common. Nine in ten of those people wouldn’t be mages either, it was just that magic was utterly mundane to them.

Perhaps the bazaar was a strange place after all, under that veneer of familiarity.

Akua took the initiative to buy us clothes and cloak and I was disinclined to argue. Or particularly surprised she did not even need to press clothes against me to know whether or not they’d fit. We paid in Imperial coinage, silver denarii that Malicia herself had pushed into Callow some years past in a bid to bind us more closely to the Tower, and Akua got us bags for our old clothing too. I left in a burnished yellow cloak and matching tunic, keeping only my boots and trousers, while Indrani ended up in a nice pale green. I got the impression from some of the looks the merchant gave us that he believed us to be, uh, consorts that that a young noblewoman was dressing more to her tastes. We picked up a few tricks to hide our appearance too, cosmetics that were quickly applied.

We slipped out of the market through another entrance and took to the streets, the two of them already knowing where we needed to go without my saying: we’d come to steal two things, after all, and one would be easier to get at than the other.

—

Within moments of having a good look at the granaries, it was plain we weren’t getting into them today.

The Sahelians had their own private reserves near the palaces, according to Akua, but the ‘city’ granaries were a set of seven large interlocking warehouses surrounded by a low stone wall. There were three large avenues leading out, each large enough for two wagons to pass on them simultaneously, and a handful of smaller doors. The whole place was warded up to its neck, though it wasn’t all about keeping people out. A lot of it was mundane utility: wards against vermin, or to keep the warehouses dry and cool. The thresholds weren’t too strong, considering wagons had to be able to come in and out easily for distribution, but the walls were anchors for some pretty nasty stuff even by Praesi standards.

Still, we’d planned for this. The granary was one of the few places that’d been kept entirely intact during the mess that saw Sargon replace High Lady Tasia, so the wards there hadn’t changed in the slightest since Akua had last seen them. We’d schemed a way in a weakness, as with use of the right magical trinket we believed we could trigger the ward in very specific manner and cross before it reset, and even prepared an escape plan. It was all useless now. The entire district was on high alert, even a fool could have seen it. Hundreds of household guards had come to reinforce the garrison and what must be a staggering amount of mages with them: there were balls of light hovering ten feet above the wall, at least a hundred of them, and the spell was one known to Akua.

“The colour will change if there is movement where the light extends,” she said. “It should last for at least an hour, and if they’ve any sense they will have staggered putting the spells up so that they can be smoothly replaced.”

High Lord Sargon had been distastefully competent so far, so I’d go ahead and assume they had. I still sent out Archer to have a closer look. Even if I had my doubts she’d find a blind spot, learning more about the defences in place couldn’t hurt. There was no way to tell how long Sargon would keep the reinforcements there and we could only risk staying in the city for so long. Our foes were looking for us, and eventually our luck would run out. Archer came back after half an hour, looking displeased.

“The place is sealed up tighter than a tomb,” Indrani reported. “They’ve actually closed up all the small access doors, the only way’s in through the big gates now.”

“That’s a problem,” I admitted.

We simply did not have the strength to smash our way through here.

“Did you get close enough to eavesdrop?” Akua asked.

Archer nodded.

“Nothing too exciting, the usual whining and a bit of fear at the notion of facing us,” Indrani said. “I think I’ve figured out why the bazaar guards hadn’t been warned yet: a lot of them complained about being yanked away from other assignments in the city and sent here in a hurry. I’m thinking Sargon put his scrying stations to work sending people to this place instead of looking for us.”

My lips thinned. I did hate fighting clever opponents, they were always such a pain. Akua’s cousin was proving to be one of that breed, having correctly deduced what we’d come here for and that it was a better bet to protect it than comb through half the city looking for us.

“We’re not going to make it in there,” I finally said. “And I’m betting he’s going to be willing to keep his people here as long as it takes while he’s looking for us.”

If we were threatening an assault on his walls it might force him to pull away people, but we both knew the Army of Callow wasn’t going to try anything of the sort. He could afford to keep his mages here instead of manning the ramparts, the tricky fucker.

“He will have the treasury vaults under reinforced guard as well,” Akua quietly said. “This is something of a setback.”

It was. We’d come here for grain and gold, and now it was looking like we were going to have to leave without either. Considering Marshal Nim had torched a third of our supplies, coming out of here empty-handed was going to be a blow. Not necessarily the end of our campaign, but it’d stiffen odds that were already against us. Even aside from simple logistics, running away from Wolof with our tail tucked after we’d swaggered wasn’t going to be a good luck when we were courting allies. Some of the Clans might reconsider raiding, if it looked like Malicia was winning this war, and I needed the orcs south for more reasons than I’d admitted. I bit my lip, mind spinning in circles. I couldn’t see another way, much as retreat would be a bitter pill to swallow.

“We shouldn’t stay here,” Archer said. “Let’s find a place to settle for the day, yeah? We can figure out our next move then.”

I nodded, silent, and followed them deeper into the city. There had to be a way, right? I tried to put together another plan, another trick, yet all I could think of was the sound of an old monster tuning a lute.

The search was spreading out.

There were parties on the streets now, squads of twenty with two mages. The caster regularly stopped and cast a spell with no visible manifestation save a spinning circle of golden light, and it was magic none of us knew. Archer wandered close once or twice as we headed towards the southwest of the city, but she got nothing out of idle chatter.

“I’d wager the circle is a focus mark, not unlike a rune,” Akua mused. “The purpose remains rather more elusive.”

“It’s got to be a detection spell of some sort,” I said. “Sargon has to know finding us in a city this large will be Hells otherwise, especially when we have you guiding us around.”

“What it might detect is the question, then,” Akua said.

We had no answer, so steering clear was the best move. We were nearly at our destination anyhow. When I’d first been told that Wolof did not have slums, I’d naturally been pretty skeptical. All cities had slums, even walled ones, it was just a matter of how large they got. Wolof wasn’t as much of an exception as Akua believed it to be, but she’d not been entirely wrong either – even Scribe had agreed. The Sahelians had a pair of districts called the Yumban in the southeast of the city, where people who’d usually end up on the streets or in slums were assigned to live. Accommodations were provided, if very basic ones, and food from the city granaries regularly doled out. It all sounded very charitable, which naturally meant it wasn’t the whole story.

Any people who lived there were essentially at the mercy of the Sahelians. By law they could not refuse military service if called on, or a servant’s station, and they could even be traded to other lords so long as work was guaranteed by the receiving lord. People regularly made it out of the Yumban into higher station – mages in particular – and Wolofites were proud of such success stories, but the truth was most people didn’t. By design, presumably, so that if the Sahelians ever had an urgent need of manpower they had a source at hand that drawing on would not cause unrest. Conscription in the city would be taken badly, but who would object to the Yumban being emptied? It was clever, in a heinous sort of way, which I was coming to learn was the mark of the must successful nobles of Praes.

Most of the people in the Yumban now weren’t actually from Wolof, though. I caught the difference as we crossed into the edge of the districts. They favoured greens and dark oranges over the yellows and reds I’d seen earlier, the cadence and wording in Mthethwa was different – easier to understand for me, it was closer to the Ater-and-Legion standard I’d learned – and there were almost no weapons anywhere. Sargon had taken to raiding the northern hinterlands of Aksum on Malicia’s behalf as part of his support in the civil war, and I was looking at part of the loot he’d carried back with him: people. It wasn’t just Aksumites, of course, that was a riot waiting to happen. But I’d wager that we were looking a the ‘prizes’ who’d not had a trade he could offer them a shop for

Day labourers, farmhands, those whose trade was not lacking in Wolof.

They were not mistreated and I saw little resentment, not the kind you saw back home when a town despised their lord, but I could almost feel it from the air that Sargon Sahelian’s authority ran thinner here. Perhaps not much hatred, but not much love either. Their abductor had not delivered them unto a paradise. There was a lot of room, at least, since entire streets of the Yumban were still empty. The city had not entirely required from the brutalities of Tasia’s fall. Akua guided us carefully, keeping out of sight where we could as she explained what she was looking for.

“We’ll pick a place near a kufuna,” she said.

I knew the word, though I’d never seen one myself. Black had mentioned that sometimes people from them had trouble adapting at the War College, where the ways were rather different.

“Those are the noble-backed schools, right?” I asked.

The Tower had ‘free’ schools of its own, where people could be attend in exchange for sworn years of service – it was how Tyrants could recruit mages without asking them of High Lords or drawing on Ater – but kufuna belonged to noble houses, without anyone else having a say in their running or what they taught.

“It is more nuanced than that,” Akua murmured. “But you are not incorrect. People in those streets will be used to strangers coming and going, less likely to pay it attention.”

“Never did get to see one of those,” Archer mused. “We should have a look.”

She demurred, but I was curious myself. We settled on studying one from a distance, but it turned out to be even easier than that. Such a ‘school’ was in session on large paved open grounds between two sets of houses and we found good lodgings in a second-story place that had a window looking down over the lesson. It was little more than a large room meant for eating and two adjoining smaller nooks for people to sleep in, but the narrow stairs to the rooftops had us sold. Building were smaller in the Yumban than in the districts around it – I felt, impossibly that the rest of the city was somehow looking down on us – but within the districts themselves it’d be a good way to get around. After dark, anyway.

We dropped our packs and settled in, quickly figuring out why both stories of the building were still empty even though the convenience of closeness to the kufuna must have made it in demand: one of the nooks had been fouled by an animal pretty disgustingly. That could have been cleaned, even if it hadn’t been, but the way the light pit in the middle of the combined house had a wooden cover that moved in the wind and slammed with a bam-bam-bam sound out of nowhere sometimes would have been trickier to handle. I could already tell it was going to get on my nerves. I went into the clean nook, which had the overlooking window, and cast a curious look.

It wasn’t that large a window, so when Indrani and Akua came too we had to squeeze pretty tight.

They were doing mathematics, the poor fuckers. Maybe thirty ‘students’ whose ages looked to vary between eight-ish to fourteen were sitting on the ground, using nice writing slates and chalk. The teacher was an old woman at least into her sixties, who leaned on a cane – lucky her, hadn’t been able to bring my staff – and had cataracts in her eyes but looked pretty spry otherwise. She guided her students through the end of a lesson on multiplication, and it was when students were called on to answer questions that the difference to what I was used to came in.

“The only a kid handling with the black stone can answer,” I muttered. “Why?”

It wasn’t always the same, either. Sometimes children answered two questions in a row before passing to another, sometimes it was immediate but never once did the teacher actually order it passed.

“It is because of jino-waza,” Akua said. “I am not surprised the rules are unclear to you.”

I frowned. It was familiar, the words. I’d read them before, if only in passing.

“The clear-eyes,” Indrani snorted. “The Lady talked about it. It’s a little like the way we did thing in Refuge.”

“I can’t see them keeping score over anything,” I said. “What’s it do?”

“It is not a game, not exactly,” Akua hesitated. “It is philosophy, at least in part. To display your skills, your knowledge. To assess where you stand in regard to your peers. The stone and questions are just a tool to ease this.”

I studied the students, eyes narrowed.

“They’re all eager to answer,” I said.

Which was not my experience with studies. The tutors the orphanage made us sit in front of were used to squirming pupils wanting to be elsewhere, and they used questions as a way to keep us in line. Listen, learn, or you’ll look like an idiot in front of the others.

“So they win something by doing it,” I said. “Esteem, maybe? They can’t trade that for something useful, though, and it’s a little abstract for kids.”

“It is training for the world beyond the lessons,” Akua said. “The teacher, she will remember the one who distinguish themselves. What they are good at. And when my family – or someone with a trade and no children – sends someone, wanting a candidate for a scribe’s apprentice or kitchen attendant, she will give those names. She holds opportunities.”

I chewed my lip.

“So the stone, it’s part of the test too,” I finally said. “Jino-waza. Sure, a clever kid could keep it for a long while – but then you hog the opportunity, and no one will ever pass you the stone. They’re trading it like adults would trade favours.”

“Exactly,” Akua grinned. “A student who oversteps might even find themselves sabotaged, as it often is with those who act in such ways in higher stations. It teaches balance, to take opportunity without making enemies.”

“Teaches who’s worth making allies with, too,” Archer quietly said. “Not everyone’s good at the same things, you can scratch each other’s back in a way that everyone wins.”

She had a strange, almost fragile look on her face as she looked at the kids. Was she thinking of Refuge? I spoke up to move the conversation along, even knowing that Akua was unlikely to ever be so uncouth as to comment on the look that’d seized our friend’s face.

“Everyone you’re allied with, at least,” I scoffed. “It’s not without sense, but it’s a very Praesi way of doing things.”

“I have seen the schools of your people, dearest, what few you have,” Akua reminded me. “They are as menageries. Kufuna are a better way. Your nobles have their tutors, as we do, but learning is simply not prized west the Wasaliti the way that it should be.”

“I came out of my schooling just fine,” I replied, a tad defensive. “And orphanages gave educations even before Black stepped in, he just ensured they were good ones.”

He’d also raised the number of them tenfold, but that was another discussion entirely. It wouldn’t do to forget that my father had made a lot of Callowan orphans along with those orphanages.

“Come off it, Cat,” Indrani snorted. “How much of what you came out having learned you learned in classes? You’re like a truffle pig, you just dig into books about the stuff that you want to learn about and ignore the rest. You barely even had help when you learned Chantant.”

“Thank you for the description, woman I will never sleep with again,” I drily replied as she stuck out her tongue at me. “And I could have gotten more out of those classes if I’d cared about them. It was my choice not to gain, because I thought it was pointless – it’d be the War College that was make or break for me.”

“Failure to motivate your student to learn is very much failure,” Akua replied. “Jino-waza ensures that every student knows the worth of their lessons.”

“It also teaches your kids to always compete with each other,” I flatly said. “That they’ll need to squabble with each other to gain the attention of the highborn, that it’s the only way up. It sets in the bone that you swing at the people around you, not upwards. It teaches skills, too, I won’t pretend otherwise. But I’m not exactly surprised those schools are backed by nobles.”

“You do not understand,” Akua gently said. “Jino-waza goes beyond the schools. It is everywhere, applies to everything. The lack of a stone does meant it ceases, the stone is a teaching tool. It is how a family knows which of them should benefit if a favour is called in, whose marriage should have the most coin spent on to arrange, who gets to eat the most when the months are lean.”

“Parents do this?” I replied, aghast.

“Well, yeah,” Indrani said, brow creased. “Makes sense, I’m not sure why you’re so offended. If you get a windfall, you don’t waste it on someone who won’t do shit with it. Even parents can tell who’s going places, Cat.”

“You’re not supposed to play favorites,” I bit out. “Everyone gets a fair shot, that’s how people who aren’t obviously good at things get their chance to shine.”

Did they not realize that what they were describing, it only ever benefitted the slightest bit of the people involved? Talented people would band together and help each other up while having all the incentive to kick everyone else down. And above those games you had the highborn, playing an even more lethal take on it with each other – and the ingrained notion that they should never, ever let anyone below them come up. It could only be at their own expense.

“That’s nonsense,” Indrani bluntly replied.

“She is Callowan, Indrani,” Akua said, and when I turned on her a thunderous scowl she raised a hand in appeasement. “I mean no insult. I am only saying that it is because you come from a land of plenty that think this way, dearest.”

I blinked at her. A land of plenty? Had she seen what they sold in the bazaar. Not even the enchanted stuff, just the spices and dyes would – I stopped, elbowing aside the sharp irritation and forced myself to look at it from the Wasteland’s eyes. Food, I got almost immediately. She meant food.

“It wasn’t your nobles that made this,” I finally said. “It’s a survival teaching.”

“When is the last time Callow had a major famine?” Akua asked. “It is different here. We kill to eat, to drink – the Taghreb fight wars to steal clouds from each other and make them into water! You come from a place that has the luxury of fairness, but Wolof does not. Few parts of Praes do.”

“That’s not the way to do it, though,” I said. “You don’t claw at each other, there’s no winning that when it starts. You sit and figure it out together. Ration, share. Something like a famine, you’re all in it together.”

Splashing the mud on the others so they were deeper in wouldn’t actually get you out of the pit.

“It a pleasant sentiment,” Akua replied, “but it does not help to choose which belly should be filled by the rice bowl. Jino-waza does. It lets you make the decision with clear eyes – and they will have to make it in their lifetime, Catherine. Everyone in this city older than forty, before Callowan grain was brought in, has known hunger.”

“Not the nobles,” I sharply smiled.

“Not my kin, the Sahelians are too wealthy for it,” she agreed. “But lesser lords, ruling over poorer lands? It is not as uncommon as you think. The fields feed everyone, Catherine, and no granary lasts forever. We make many wonders, but not even we can make wheat sprout out of rock.”

It would have been a better use of their skills in magic to learn that rather than fucking diabolism, I thought, but that was unfair. Destructive magic was easier. You needed to know a lot less to toss a fireball than, say, heal a broken bone. I could see it writ in the long of history, how it would have gone: the people and places inclined to the peaceful solution, to make wheat sprout from rock, they wouldn’t last. Not when a less scrupulous rival could come in, throw a few fireballs and take everything. It wasn’t as easy as raising castle walls with this. Magic was expensive, and Praesi were rich but not with bottomless purses.

So you got better at the magics that could protect you and destroy your rivals, and then maybe if you rose high enough that you were beyond most threats you could afford to go looking for wonders. Answers beyond eating the other crabs in the bucket. It was not happenstance, I thought, that the Sahelians had the finest field rituals in Praes. But by the time you got safe enough to look for those wonders, were you still the same people who’d wanted them in the first place? I felt an unpleasant shiver of sympathy at the thought. I was not an unfamiliar tale I was spinning there.

“It doesn’t need to stay like this,” I said. “Older than forty, you said. We had two decades of peace and trade, and that changed things.”

“It did,” Akua murmured. “Mother used to think it softened us, made us lose our edge, but I disagree. It freed us to pursue different things. To consider beyond the immediate.”

I cast a long look at the kids below, fingers tight against the windowsill. The teacher had move on from mathematics, she was speaking of early Praesi history – the campaigns that brought the Grey Eyries into Praes not so long after its founding – as she regularly stopped for questions and jino-waza considered to unfold before my eyes. I couldn’t have fixed this place even if I thought it was my duty to do it, I admitted to myself. There was so much of Praes that was still unknown to me. Parts of I knew like the back of my hand, the Legions and the lore and bloody embrace with my own home, but it wasn’t enough. Akua had thought I might be Dread Empress once, climb the Tower, but it would have been madness.

I was glad I had not heard the song in years.

No, what I was meant to do out east was not put on some saviour’s cloak and pretend I had the answers. I was here to bind the Dread Empire to the Liesse Accords, to the war against Keter, and to topple the empress who’d been such a thorn in our sides. Beyond that, I must remember restraint. It was not my land here, and in some ways I just… thought differently. And did not quite understand how they did. There was more to the differences between Callow and Praes than weather and colours. I shook my head, shaking off the thoughts.

“We should plan out our next move,” I finally said, pushing away from the window. “We’ll want to move under cover of dark.”

“A shame I cannot use the family library,” Akua said. “Half an hour there and I would know the nature of the spell the patrols are using to hunt us.”

Indrani snorted.

“Yeah well, if we were in there we could just stroll up to the gold and take it,” she said.

I smiled, only half-listening.

“The library is in an entirely different wing than the treasury vaults,” Akua chided. “It is much too-”

I turned to look at her so quickly my neck almost cracked.

“Wait,” I interrupted. “The library, you told me it was over the vaults.”

“The artefact vaults, yes,” the shade said. “The treasury is nowhere near these. It is not the cleverest of notions to keep demons near one’s coinage.”

Oh, I thought. Oh. Sargon thought we were going for the grain and the treasury, so that was the parts he was protecting. But he had to be stretched tight with people, going all out on the defence of those two places and looking for us in the streets with yet more mages. He couldn’t cover everything, so he’d focused on guarding what we were after. That meant thinning the defences elsewhere. And though we could get to neither the granaries nor the treasury, what was more important than either of those things to the enduring power of the Sahelians? I met their gazes with my eye, grinning wide.

“I have a plan,” I said.

Well, I could have done without the groaning.