Chapter Text
Keris cannot sleep.
The first scream of the third day of Calibration is a quiet-by-hellish-standards one. The Infernals will be making their reports next scream, and many of the dignitaries and worthies here are feeling the effects of two days of drinking, drugs and enjoyment and are taking a small chance to sober up and come down from their highs. There are places where the parties are still going on, of course, but it is generally agreed that people can take it easy for a few hours.
And yet Keris cannot sleep. She is wide awake, even if her body is a little sore and tired from exertion. No, more than that; she isn’t just wide awake, she’s honed. She doesn’t feel distractible or forgetful; her mind is working perfectly without the usual thousand little side-thoughts and dropped threads of kitten-headedness. She feels great!
Mele is asleep in the bed next to her, unable to keep up with her, his white hair sprawled all around. “Just a little nap,” he’d mumbled before he conked out, but that means Keris has a good... oh, probably about nine hours or so until she has to be at the bragging and even if an hour or two will be getting ready, she has to be doing something. Anything other than lying here, pretending to sleep and being unable to.
She tries her best to put any thoughts about how Sasi had a lot more stamina out of mind.
Restless, she rises and paces the room, pulling a knife from a hidden sheath and tossing it into the air over and over, catching it and sending it back up with quick snaps of her wrist. She needs... she needs to do something. Something useful. There are so many things she could do, so many things to attend to...
Within her mind, in Dulmea’s Tower, something clicks. And then clicks again. Click, click, click.
The puzzle box.
Keris plunges a hand into her hair, and Dulmea wordlessly deposits the Broken-Winged Crane into it. It’s not solving itself - something that she is both disappointed and relieved to see. It’s just clicking through random configurations, the tiles and pieces moving by themselves without ever reaching a conclusion. Inviting her to take over. Tempting her to bring it to completion.
She regards it for a moment, the knife held in her other hand. The one she plunged in for the puzzle box was her left, and as a result Keris can feel the strange, mingled power of the Shattered Annex beneath the cool metal and lacquered wood of the box, the turbulent, time-twisting energies that are nothing like anything else she’s ever felt. Her lips purse as she stares at it, mind churning.
Then she sheathes her knife again and tosses the Crane up, catching it in mid-air at the peak of its arc with a hair tendril. Mele’s still asleep, so she pulls on a black silk dressing gown, scrawls a quick note for him and then hops out of the window and beelines for the front of her estate, tossing a quick instruction to the gate guards to inform Mehuni she’s on her way out for a meeting as she passes.
Legs pounding, hair streaming behind her, a blasphemous puzzle-box cradled in crimson locks, Keris angles herself towards the recessed crack in the land she knows lies in a cold, barren desert-garden near the outskirts of the landscape ring. A crevasse that hides a blue glass dome. A blue glass temple that hosts a lord.
A demon lord, and a soul of her lady. The skinless dragon Iuris.
The doors are locked. The doors cannot stop her, swinging open even before she arrives, unwilling to stop lest the cold catch up with her. But then she is inside in these silk-lined chambers, filthy with blood that cannot be removed no matter what, and the air whirls with smoke.
“Well, look at this, look at this,” comes the sibilant whisper, “there are only two who can open the doors like this and only one who would come so suddenly. So, Keris? Is sweetling Iris with you again, or have you come to share the Calibration celebrations with me?”
“My lord Iuris,” Keris greets. The room she’s in is empty, but her voice carries through to the next. She doesn’t follow it, though. Not yet. “I come alone, but to continue our last conversation about the Broken-Winged Crane. May I know the rules I must follow to speak with you today? I have much to share.”
She hears him roll his shoulders, hears the wince of pain. “I am... feeling in a light mood. Calibration does that to me. Even if I cannot enjoy the festivities, the burden escapes me. But I do not wish to see the sky or be reminded of Orabilis’s censorious cruelties, so bring nothing that is kin to the hellish sky in colour or bears symbols of the tortures of the stars with you.”
Keris nods in agreement at this and doffs her dressing gown, hanging in on the wall outside the entrance to his chambers. Her tattoos ripple and spin out into a silvery chemise that falls to her mid-thigh to replace it, and she steps into Iuris’s lair.
“I like the colours of what you wear,” Iuris says, admiring the silvery cloth with those hazy azure eyes. It is the same silver as the curtains in here, a similar hue to the Desert’s sands. He is much the same as he was the last time she saw him, wrapped up in his stained bandages, sprawled out on a soft hammock-thing that lets him take the weight off his feet. He gestures at her with his pipe. “I wondered if you were ever coming back.”
Keris moves closer, pausing for his nod of permission as she approaches and then settling close enough that he can touch the tip of a bloodstained claw, raw and wet where it meets the skinless digit, and stroke it along the lustrous, satiny texture.
“I may be busy around Calibration, my lord, but I’ve been looking forward to talking to you again,” she says. “Here. I came into possession of this near the end of my time in Creation this year.” Her hair ripples and a tendril emerges, the puzzle box cradled in it. It’s still clicking away and resetting itself, though much slower now, only one lazy shift of a tile or component every ten seconds or so. “It’s a copy of the Crane. A powerful one. I solved it thrice in Fire, and each prophecy was more potent than the last.”
The laughter, the high pitched titter of inhalations and exhalations is shocking and hungry. “You did? You did? It’s moving on its own, did it always do that? Some copies turn their own pages when their threads have been cut and they wander away from what-has-happened, trying to hook themselves back into the weave of things. Others do it as a lure.”
“This one is doing it as a lure,” Keris grumbles, more exasperated than angry. “It doesn’t like that I didn’t follow its last prophecy through to its completion. It didn’t move on its own until after I solved it by myself - the second solution flowed from my actions to complete the first, and the third from the fulfilment of the second. It wants me to solve it again. To bring more of its foretellings to life.”
That draws in a suck of breath. “No, alas, alas, you have hurt it. It will never have the power it once had. To open it up, and wilfully deviate from its prophecies, maims this copy. You didn’t know, no you did not, but you have maimed it, limited its potential. This is the way that many copies work - they grow stronger the more are fulfilled, but should a prophecy be thwarted after it has been primed, the copy is forever lessened.”
Iuris waves a claw in the air, and blue glass tablets slam down in front of Keris. “Look at these,” he adds, “and lay the copy before me so I might look at it. It looks... enjoyable.”
Keris wilts - because she had suspected that deliberately averting the prophecy wouldn’t be good for the Crane, but it’s disappointing to have it confirmed - and sets the puzzle box down in front of Iuris where he can pick it up between two great claws and bring it close to a sky-blue eye to examine it.
“That’s a pity,” she mourns. “It really was powerful. And it has so many configurations and solutions. I haven’t found more than a fraction of them yet. Maybe... maybe if I feed it by bringing about more of its prophecies, I’ll be able to empower it a little more. Not to where it could have been before I maimed it, but enough to still be valuable.” She takes the first tablet in her lap, smoothing a hand across the letters carved into its glossy surface.
They are the rules of the Crane, at least as Iuris understands them, and thus they are perhaps not quite what she wants. It feels too confident, too much like Iuris wants it to work. But they... they’re maybe something she can work from.
I. The Crane wants to be completed.
II. The Crane aids its completion.
III. A perfect copy of the Crane will dictate exactly what has happened and will happen.
IV. The more of a Crane is completed, the stronger the aid it provides is.
V. The more accurate a Crane is, the stronger its aid.
VI. The more recently a copy of the Crane came to be, the more accurate it is.
VII. To understand the Crane changes the reader and the text.
VIII. A Crane is maimed when its prophecies are disproven.
IX. A maimed Crane will never recover from the lessening.
X. Meaning is not inherent, it is imposed.
XI. The Crane imposes meaning on the world around it.
XII. The Yozis can only be freed through the Crane, but only by being subjugated to its perfect understanding of the world.
Keris can’t help but smile. If Iuris is right, this slab is his own attempt to impose meaning on the Crane by understanding it. But maybe that meaning only exists within his understanding, another imposition.
“Lord Iuris,” she says, her fingers drifting up to the sixth rule and then back down to the tenth. “I think this is a recent copy. A very recent copy. That first solution I found; it featured me. Or... well, no, it was me, because I completed that prophecy, and so the woman it showed was me, because I’m the one that did it. But it was clearly me. Even before I imposed that fact on it.”
His eyes focus on her, attention burning through his narcotic haze. “Can you find that page-slide for me?” he asks, clearly wincing under his bandages as his agitation nudges his skinless form. “Show me it!”
“Of course, of course. Let me just...”
Hunching over the puzzle box, Keris wraps her hands around it, stopping its idle shifting. She closes her eyes, thinking back to last month, to her panicky realisation that the few eristrufa she’d managed to summon weren’t going to be enough, that her kitten-headedness had f*cked her plans over again. She thinks back to Jemil’s suggestion that she try looking at the puzzle box Mara had given her, to her first couple of unsuccessful attempts at solving it, to her third that had opened the box to an empty interior.
Her fingers move. Her tongue peeks out of the corner of her mouth as she frowns in concentration. The tile configuration had looked like Mercury Arising From The Waters, and she both knows that painting well from her studies of Saatan art and vividly remembers the warped, twisted version of it the puzzle box had shown. She fixes that image in her mind now, seeking it out again - calling up a prophecy that was made truth, a proof of this Crane’s validity.
Click-click-click. It is placid in her hands. And she finds the image of herself, placing it before Iuris.
The dragon tilts his head, and considers it deeply. Then;
“Catechism 73, text 5, central illustration!” Iuris calls out, and with a scuttling one of his anhule servants hurries to obey. It descends from up above, passed a book by someone out of sight, and lowers the text to before Iuris, suspended in a silk cradle. “Yes, yes, I thought that looked familiar. Look at this, Keris, look indeed at this.”
The book is turned around for her, and Keris stares at the ancient, weathered human-leather on which is etched and seared a very similar image. This book must be - dragons, maybe older than the Realm - and the language below the image is somewhere between Old Realm and High Realm. Keris cannot read it.
“It says, ‘The Scarlet Lady, calling forth the forces of Hell in the face of her child Rathara’s rebellion’,” Iuris translates for her. “And this is not the only red-haired woman standing bare ‘fore a squirming ocean of tentacled creatures. It is an iconographic symbol that occurs time and time again. And yet - you say you made it real?”
Keris nods, eyes very wide. “I tore a hole in the world and called forth an army of eristrufa,” she breathes. “Hundreds. More than a thousand. More than the Sapphire Circle should have let me summon. They filled the sea. The waters around the spit of rock I did it on are an inlet of the Great Mother now, even with the rift closed.”
“Then, ah.” A melodious sigh. “There will be more copies spawned where this is a fixed event and you are the Scarlet Lady, and copies where the Scarlet Lady is a Scarlet Empress will be further from being true. How does that feel, Keris, to don a mantle that was prophesied before the Scarlet Realm rose? A mantle that might not be always yours, but you can seek to become?”
The smile slowly growing on Keris’s face is wide and manic and gleefully obsessive, leaving no doubt as to her feelings. “My lord,” she says, shallow and breathy, then catches herself. “Ah... I have more thoughts, but can I ask you not to share them? They’re not secrets important to the Reclamation,” debatable, but not entirely a lie, “but they relate to personal matters I’d rather keep private. I normally wouldn’t mention them at all, but they have some relevance to this.”
“Oh, to think that anyone save Lilunu would listen to me,” Iuris says dismissively. “Your personal matters are safe with me, trapped in here.”
“Save his servants, listening in and reporting to Orabilis,” Dulmea observes.
Keris nods, and tilts her head back, swallowing her voice. In targeted Ekoese, with gestures that hold meaning only to their recipient, she turns the book around and taps the inscription, winding a lock of her hair around her finger and tossing her head with a shrug. When talking about redheaded women of great power, everyone’s first thought is obviously the Scarlet Empress, she communicates. But she’s been called the Scarlet Lady, too. By people who’ve never heard of the Realm, far out in the Threshold - people she’s carved from the Wyld herself.
And! She holds up a finger, waving it, and stabs down at what she thinks is the right section, probably. ”Her child Rathara”, it says. That might be a corruption of Ragara, yes! But Keris has a child whose name is Rathan, who Lilunu has met! He’s not rebellious at all, of course, but so old a copy is far from accurate - and because she claimed this particular mantle by fulfilling the prophecy it’s tied to, this ancient painting is probably referring to him, and not the founder of one of the Realm’s Great Houses.
Maybe, then, she can claim others. Look for similarities like this in ancient versions of the Crane where something could conceivably mean her or the Scarlet Empress - or any other Scarlet Ladies - and then go hunting newer, more accurate copies and fulfil them, locking those depictions in as being her. What might happen, she gestures excitedly, if she ties herself to as many strands of the Crane’s foretellings as she can? What might happen if she makes more of them have always been about her than not?
“Hubris,” Dulmea murmurs. Keris ignores her. Her heart is pounding and she’s biting her lip in glee, looking up at Iuris for his reaction and his approval. Her mama doesn’t know what she’s talking about. What does hubris matter next to the thrill of discovery? Of planting herself in history like this? Of stealing history like this?
“Once a thief, always a thief,” is her mother’s response.
But Iuris’s eyes are ablaze with fascination. “You will either succeed, or fail fascinatingly,” he says. “And if you understand the Crane to let you do it, aaaaaaaah. Maybe it will have no choice but to let you do this. For history is a thing of perceptions and understanding, and the Crane is a history not-yet-written.” He sighs. “I have heard there was once a mighty scholar of the Crane, and I have some of Zubin’s - for that was his name - books of analysis, but he has not been seen in a hundred years or more in Hell. If you could find more of his works in Creation, or some trace of him, that would aid your endeavour.”
Regurgitating her voice, Keris purses her lips. “Zubin... Zubin, Zubin, Zubin,” she muses, searching through memory. “I... don’t think I’ve read about a demon lord named Zubin in my studies of the gentry of Hell,” she admits. “Though if he’s been gone for so long he may just have been forgotten or omitted from the more recent texts. Do you know anything about his line of descent, or even just which Yozi his nature sprang from?”
“I have my suspicions he is tied in some way to Oramus, or possibly Cytherea,” Iuris says dryly. “I am not exactly in a position to travel wide and far and track down rumours of one who was long gone before I came into being. But one of the books of commentary that fell into my possession had sketches of the sight of the Divine Fire burning over the heath of Oramus.”
Keris bows where she sits on the silk-carpeted, bloodstained stone step beside his lounging-place. “I have contacts among the Unquestionable of both Yozis who I can ask about their kin’s souls,” she says. “I will make inquiries and bring back word to you, my lord. And if they prove fruitless, maybe the Crane can offer me a hint or two. Anything I find, I’ll share with you.” She wriggles happily. “Oh, this will be fun!”
“You may have had luck with your first efforts. Please do not give up when adversity strikes. I do enjoy your company, Keris, and would not like you to be discouraged by how hard it is to make sense of the metaphor, allegory, and conflations that make up the Crane,” Iuris says. “Though I do appreciate your enthusiasm.” He takes a puff of his pipe. “My lady Lilunu thinks I spend too much time thinking of this, but it is so fascinating...”
“It is,” Keris agrees, beaming up at him. “And if our lady isn’t in the mood to hear it, I always will be, though my duties may keep me away. Hmm.” She tilts her head thoughtfully. “Perhaps we could exchange letters? It would be difficult getting them across the Desert, but... I have a few ideas that might work.” Her painting, for one. It’s an arcane link to her that Lilunu keeps in her chambers, with a world inside it that - while it isn’t linked to Keris’s own inner world - she can still access. Accessing it from across the Endless Desert is impossible, but perhaps she can set something up so that a letter placed within the painting can make the five-day journey to her, and vice versa. That would be a way to keep in touch with Lilunu, too.
“... let me look into that as well,” she decides. “If it works, I’d love to write to you from Creation - of the Crane, and of any other puzzles or mysteries that capture your interest.”
“That would be most charming,” Iuris says. He stretches, and yawns. “Perhaps, play me off to sleep, for I have many things to think of in my dreams, and then you can go.” Those pained eyes furrow at her. “I know you have a busy time ahead of you, and you should not waste it all with a lonely soul such as I.”
“Of course, my lord,” says Keris. “It would be my pleasure to play for you.” Rolling up into a perfect seiza, she begins to stroke at the air, drawing forth music from the strands of Time. The Things In Corners swell to join her song, an orchestra of shadows that back her soothing lullaby. The alien cadences of the Great Mother flow through the piece, washing across the madness that all demons possess with gentle, calming waves.
Iuris has no eyelids, and so they cannot become heavy. But his gaze becomes duller and his head dips down towards his folded claws, and Keris rises to dance him the rest of the way to slumber. Her hands never cease to stroke the air as she steps away from him into the open space of his hall, but their rippling movements through the air pair gracefully with her body’s swaying waltz. She’s captivating, evocative, and her dance and song together kindle deep and bittersweet emotions in the lonely soul that she performs for; a resigned and yet defiant hopefulness at the promise of a better tomorrow and the question of what it may look like.
She plays and dances until the dragon lies still, his bandages shifting only slightly with his breathing. His attendants carefully lower a black cloth of woven shadow over his face, to keep the light from his eyes as he rests.
From beside his claw, where it’s fallen to one side, Keris picks up the puzzle box and slips it back through her hair into her inner world.
“When he wakes,” she says softly, “please give him my thanks for his time and his conversation. And tell him I’ll ask Iris to visit him before Calibration’s end.”
And then she is off, collecting her dressing gown which streams behind her as she dashes through the cold crevasse. She needs some time with her sweet little babies.
When she thinks about it, Keris couldn’t tell anyone how many of the Infernal Exalted have families. It’s something that very few of them share with others. They don’t flaunt them in hell, and even the Keris-Sasimana-Testolagh extended family is fairly discreet when not among themselves. Oh, Keris has seen a couple of women pregnant at Calibrations and she’s pretty sure that there’ll be bastards galore (and maybe even a few legitimate children) from the men, but it’s not something spoken about.
Of course, as far as she’s aware none of the others have Lilunu’s generous assistance. More fool them. She knows her lady would love to assist in any little families of hellspawn, but she’s not going to complain that her children get her lady’s undivided attention.
The crèche is located in the central tower, in Lilunu’s personal living quarters, and Keris is immediately shown in. Her heart turns little loops at the adorable sight she finds in the darkened sleeping area - the twins twisted together in a pile in their shared bed, and the soft sound of Aiko. And Atiya-
Where is Atiya?
“Atiya?” she calls softly. She’s not worried about Kali waking up - as long as it’s dark and nothing is within arm’s reach of her, her little feather is reliably able to sleep through a hurricane - and even if Ogin wakes up, he’ll probably stay cuddled up with his sisters. But if Aiko wakes up, she’ll insist on helping, and Keris doesn’t want her to lose sleep. “Atiya?” she whisper-calls again. “Where are you?”
It is a pointless repetition. She’s not in the crèche. Keris would be able to hear her if she was. Silver eyes gleam at Keris through the gloom, and she sneaks over to where Ogin is watching her, kneeling down next to the bed.
“Hello moonbeam,” she murmurs. “You look very comfy there. Do you know where your littlest sister is?”
Her son wriggles his arms out from under the covers, holding them up to her. “Hug,” he demands, and adds in Lilunu’s voice, “I need to recharge my Kerisium.”
Keris carefully works him out of the tangle of little limbs and slumbering bodies, holding her breath for a moment as Kali makes a distressed sound and gropes around for her cuddle-buddy. But she doesn’t wake, and there’s a quiet poof of smoke that ends with kitty-Kali wrapping four front paws around Aiko’s arm and worming her twitching nose out from under the fold of the blankets to chew on a pillow.
Wrapping Ogin up in an eight-limbed embrace, Keris kisses him on the forehead and then rubs their cheeks together - first one, then the other. “Brrrrrrrrrrrr,” she hums, and finishes off by tapping her nose against his. “Mmm! There we go. Kerisium all topped up.” She doesn’t let him go, though, rocking him gently in a cradle of arms and hair.
Ogin wiggles against her, comfortably and happily, his little arms soft and slightly furry as they wrap around her body and he buries his face in her chest. “Mama,” he mumbles. “Lili’s place is tiring. And she put Aiko in charge and Aiko is just the bossiest. Tell Lili that Aiko can’t be in charge anymore. I should be in charge.”
Keris kisses his forehead again in lieu of promising things she is absolutely not willing to promise. She knows her son, and she is even less willing to trust him with power than she is to trust Kali with it. Kali at least mostly forgets she can abuse any authority she’s given. “I’ll talk to Lili about who’s in charge,” she says noncommittally. “And I’m sorry for waking you up if you’re tired, sweetie. Do you want to go back to bed? Or nap on my shoulder while I look for Atiya?”
“I want mama time,” he grouses.
She settles him on her shoulder, reminded once again of how big he’s getting. It seems just like yesterday that she could cradle him in her arms, soft and helpless, but now he’s so big and such a little gentleman. And wicked hellion too, but that’s just a family thing.
Ogin isn’t any help in finding Atiya because he has judged that finding Atiya means he’ll be sent back to bed, but that doesn’t matter. Keris finds her youngest daughter easily, because she’s with Iris, huddled away in another room staring forcefully with tired eyes at a book of embroidery patterns.
Oh dear, thinks Keris, watching from the doorway. It’s a sign of how focused her youngest must be that she’s made absolutely no attempt to hide herself and yet Atiya hasn’t twitched. And it’s a sign of how exhausted she must be that despite her intense concentration, her blinks are long and heavy and her head keeps dipping down.
Keris can see what’s happened here. In a place like Lilunu’s residence, surrounded by so much beautiful art, after seeing so many gorgeous clothes and perfect embroidery and stitching patterns and weaves - of course Atiya went all obsessive over them. Most likely she either stubbornly refused to go to bed until her attendants gave up, or convinced the demons watching over her - who lack true understanding of human limits - that she didn’t have to.
And as a result, she’s been awake for… what? The past four screams? Probably not all four, but at least two if Keris is any judge, maybe edging towards three. Hours and hours of intent study of the fashions of Hell and Lilunu’s artistry in cloth, ignoring her body’s demands for sleep the whole time - because she knows she’s only got a few days in the Conventicle to see all of them. If Lilunu or any of her kerub maids or pages had noticed, they’d have insisted she go to bed, but it’s Calibration and so everyone is rushed off their feet.
Sighing, Keris rolls her shoulders and braces herself for a fight. Atiya is exhausted and probably hungry and almost certainly overstimulated, which means she’s going to be in a terrible mood and on the edge of a meltdown. And getting her away from pretty fashion is a struggle at the best of times.
“Okay, Ogin,” she murmurs. “You wanted to be in charge, right? Well, this can be a trial run. I’m appointing you my deputy until we get back to bed, and your very important job is to help me convince Atiya to come and get some sleep even though she wants to stay up all Calibration looking at embroidery designs and panel layouts.”
Her son gives her a betrayed look. “Aiko lost her temper with Atiya when she said she wasn’t tired and Atiya screamed at Aiko when Aiko called her a liar,” he tattles. “That’s why Aiko shouldn’t be in charge. She’s mean to Atiya.”
Keris winces. Yeah, she can see that happening. And to be fair to Aiko, she was right. She was just also less stubborn than Atiya is when she has the bit between her teeth.
(Though to be fair, most people are less stubborn than Atiya is when she’s in a mood like that. Some demon princes are less stubborn than Atiya when she’s feeling difficult.)
Well, there’s no helping it. Keris moves into the room and sits down in front of her daughter. “Atiya,” she says gently. “It’s time to go to bed now. You can read more when you’ve had some sleep. Come on.”
Atiya either simply doesn’t hear her, or is deliberately ignoring her. She has one of Linunu’s fabulously beautiful books that are hand-painted on silk, and she’s wearing a little pair of silk gloves that must have been custom-made for her so she can touch it. She isn’t stirring if she can avoid it.
“Look, arm-mama,” Iris spells out for Keris. “preti!”
“It’s very pretty, yes,” Keris agrees, and moves a hair tendril to cover the bottom half of the spread Atiya is studying, careful not to touch page or little silk glove. “Atiya,” she repeats, sterner now. “You’re very tired, and it’s past time for bed. You know the rules. When you get sleepy, you have to sleep. Come on. The book will still be there when you wake up. And you’ll feel much better, too.”
Atiya doesn’t move. She just holds on and doesn’t let go.
Keris groans. This isn’t going to be a fight, then, it’s going to be stubbornly digging her heels in. “Alright, little miss,” she says, pulling her hair back. “One more chance. You’re tired enough that you’re not paying those designs the attention they deserve. Do you really want to miss things because your eyes hurt too much to see properly?”
Atiya doesn’t say a thing in response. She just holds onto the book, eyes lowered, jaw clenched.
And maybe she can’t reply. She might have reached the point of tiredness where words don’t make sense to her; only the pictures and the patterns. Keris has seen it in herself, she’s seen it in Haneyl and Vali - and for all that she doesn’t look it, Atiya was made with Keris’s own flesh and blood and her lower soul is Keris’s mother’s own po. Sometimes, when sufficiently stressed, human language falls away from some of her family. She doesn’t know why. But it’s so cruel that this is another burden on her poor Atiya.
She sighs again. And then she sits back on her heels, letting Atiya pull the book closer protectively and go back to tracing over the patterns in it. Instead of trying to contest her for it, Keris flexes her fingers and starts to play. The gentle notes of a harp fill the room with a lullaby, and the shadow croon. Her melody matches Atiya’s own essence-song and gradually slows, wordlessly soothing and coaxing her towards slumber. Even Ogin’s eyes start to droop a little as Keris focuses all of her musical skill on lowering her daughter’s guard against the exhaustion tugging at her little body.
It takes longer than it should, but the heaviness of her eyes is not something the little girl can hold off, and she eventually falls asleep, still not letting go of the book. Ogin is conked out too, asleep against her shoulder. And Keris-
-can’t sleep. Her body is tired, and her heart is sore, and she’s wide awake and focused, fully aware of the two small bodies fast asleep against her and already considering how to raise with Lilunu that Atiya can’t just be left to admire art as if she was... well, as if she was Keris herself. Atiya is young and easily gets tired and can’t handle overstimulation at the best of times.
She blinks back tears of frustration at how... at how her stupid body is betraying her and keeping her too wired and keyed up and tense to sleep. She’s already succeeded at getting Suriani and Ixy for her Directorate! She’s going to f*cking nail the boasting tomorrow! There’s no way that she’ll be ousted as a Director, and if Ximmin gets kicked and Kasteen gets the West then she already has contingency plans for that! There’s no reason to be scared and on high alert when she’s already planned everything out and there’s nothing she can do until the bragging sessions!
But her body! Just! Won’t! Listen! And she needs her sleep, but she can’t, and... and...
Urgh. Maybe she’s getting overstimulated.
Shaking her head angrily, Keris squeezes her - kind of hurting - eyes shut. “Mama?” she asks. “What’s my schedule look like? Or, well, no; I’ve got nothing before the bragging. But what time is it? How many hours left?”
“I am keeping track of time, child, and Lady Lilunu will notify each and every Infernal when it is time. You have over four hours by,” she hears her mother’s smile, “the technically-legal clock I have here, for this place is not in Hell and thus Cecelyne’s law is not in effect.”
Keris can remember when Dulmea would never have viewed this loophole as acceptable. She smiles briefly, then bites her lip. “Okay. Okay, um...” Chewing on a hair tendril, she gathers up her two sleepy little babies and carries them back to bed, tucking them in and doing some quick mental maths.
Thanks to the gifts of the Great Mother, Keris always sleeps better and faster underwater. Four hours, if she spends it napping in a hot bath somewhere, will see her completely fresh and well-rested for the bragging.
Or she could spend the time here, with her babies, and get... maybe half the sleep - or at least rest - that her body is crying out for, but have it with her sweet adorable children who she hasn’t seen enough of in the past few days. And might get the sweet experience of being woken up by them, too.
“I have... an hour or two after the bragging, right?” she asks. “I’ve got that meeting with Anadala for the breastplate and some talk about Choson, but I should be able to get an hour or so of napping in a bath before the fourth day. Shouldn’t I?”
“I would tell you to take the rest now, if you need it,” Dulmea says, “but I suspect that you will ignore me and tell me to listen during the bragging while you meditate-nap during speeches of the people you are not interested in.”
“I...” Keris says, and wavers. On the one hand, that’s definitely what she’d do on any past Calibration. On the other... she really is trying to do better at her job now, for Lilunu. And normally thoughts like that wouldn’t be as important as what’s right in front of her, but the fear of f*cking up this delicate web of schemes and political manoeuvring is leaving her more focused than usual, and she’s painfully aware that four hours of good, solid rest now might be the difference between her part of the festivities tomorrow going perfectly or falling apart.
She bites her lip.
“... it’s fine,” she decides, trying to sound confident despite the nagging doubts. “Four hours will be enough to get the worst of the aches and pains away. I can take a couple of hours underwater in the remission break during the boasts to get a bit more rest, and then another hour or so after I deal with Anadala, before the rewards and acknowledgements. And I won’t be napping, but I can just lounge in my seat for most of the boasting and not exert myself and let my body recover from all the running around I’ve been doing.”
She settles down on the bed, curling protectively around her babies, nudging Kali to fasten her jaws on a hair tendril, Ogin to twine his tails around one arm and Aiko to snuggle into the crook of the other, Atiya to slump over her lap. She’s still alert. Her mind is still ticking over. There’s no drowsiness pulling at her thoughts, no fog of exhaustion. But lying back soothes the ache of fatigue in her muscles and bones, and the sheets are soft and the cushions firm, and her babies are warm little weights that lift her spirits. She doesn’t have the energy to meditate into her inner world and do anything there, but maybe... maybe some peace and calm and stillness is just what she needs.
“Play me something peaceful?” she asks. She’s gotten through the first couple of days, but the tasks ahead of her before she gets to go back to Creation are still very big, and in this moment of solitude, Keris feels very small and out of her depth. It’s not a feeling that comes up very often. But maybe the fear and the focus it brings is letting her appreciate the full scope of the challenges she’s chosen to tackle this year, where her kitten-headedness usually keeps the bulk of them wreathed in the fog of ignorance just out of sight. “Something I can relax to and just... rest.”
“As you wish, child,” Dulmea says, although there is doubt as she starts to play.
Keris leans her head back against the pillow, closes her eyes, and drifts.
She doesn’t sleep, and she isn’t fully rested, but she lies there in the dark with soft bodies all around and it helps. It helps remind her why she does it all.
Dulmea’s reminder comes too soon and not soon enough. Then she’s up and gets caught trying to sneak out by Ogin, which wakes up Kali, which wakes up everyone else in her very vocal range. And then the children find out she’s going to get dressed for the formal ceremony and she’s promptly addressed by four pairs of eyes (even Atiya’s) and their pleas to help her get dressed and see the pretty things she’s wearing.
(And, unspoken except by Kali, the desire to spend more time with her and be helpful in her getting-ready process.)
Keris sets the twins to combing her hair (and teases them a little by twining some of the bits they’ve already done), and hangs up three potential outfits for Atiya to study and decide between. While Atiya is focused on studying each one in turn, she beckons Aiko up to sit on the bed beside her.
“Good morning, sweetheart,” she murmurs into the little girl’s hair as she kisses her on the temple. “I hear you had some trouble getting everyone to go to bed.”
Aiko stiffens up; her pupils contract; her hands squirm in knots in her lap and her face looks so much like Sasimana’s in this moment. “N-no,” she mumbles, looking away. “I didn’t fail to do what Lady Lilunu told me to do.”
“Shhh, it’s okay,” Keris soothes. “You did your best, darling, and you’re not in trouble. You didn’t fail, we just…”
She bites her lip. Aiko should never have been left in charge at all, really. But there’s so much to do, and she and Lilunu are both rushed off their feet, and even if she leaves a Gale to look after them, it’ll get pulled away to deal with some crisis or another as soon as anyone realises it’s here.
“We just didn’t give you enough warning,” she settles on. “That’s not your fault at all, it’s ours; mine and Lilunu’s. I’m very proud of you.”
‘Mama,’ she adds internally. ‘I know childcare isn’t really your thing, but it’s the middle of Calibration and Aiko’s just a little girl. She can do some things for Lilunu as one of her maids, but riding herd on the twins and dealing with Atiya is too much. Can I summon one of your Chords to look after them just for today? Sasimana and Lilunu can take them tomorrow, and the fifth day will have things wrapping up so we’ll all have more time to spare.’
Dulmea sighs. “This would not be the first time that you have left me to care for your children - nor the sixth.”
‘Sorry mama,’ Keris thinks, not really all that shamefacedly. Then she gets herself up, congratulates Kali and Ogin on combing out her hair so well and getting it all neat and free of tangles, puts Aiko in charge of braiding it, and listens to Atiya’s recommendation of what outfit to wear for the bragging.
Fortunately, they’re very much in line with Keris’s own thoughts. All three of the outfits she hung up would have worked, but the one Atiya has chosen is her favourite of them; a black suit accented with the blues, greens and violets of Kimbery, inspired by the kind of thing Bloss wears. It’s cut to sharpen her figure, with knife-like heeled boots and a deep slash of a neckline going halfway down to her midriff, exposing the lack of any bra underneath and the silver tattoos clustered densely across her torso.
Between the sharp lines of the outfit, the poison-currents accentuating the black silk and the fat crown braid keeping her crimson locks mostly up around her temples and settled at the base of the skull, she looks sleek, swift and lethal. The perfect look for a report like the one she’s going to give today.
“You’re beautiful, Auntie Keris,” Aiko breathes, not even willing to touch the clothing for fear of mussing it. She takes a deep breath, and then curtsies to her. “M-make sure you’re nice with Mother up there. Lady Lilunu says that there will, um, be bits not suitable for us, but I do wish we could see you.”
“Sharkie,” Kali says happily, reaching up to bat at Keris’s shark-tooth necklace. But her attention is more aimed at Atiya, and so is Keris’s.
Her youngest daughter rocks back and forth on her heels, dark eyes taking in the lines of the clothing and avoiding Keris’s face. Then, “I’m hungry.”
Well, there’s no criticism there, and no demands to change it. And in fairness, Atiya has been so focused on the clothing that she must not have eaten in... longer than she should have. That she’s willing to say it now means Keris’s outfit is no longer holding her attention.
“Let’s get you all fed, then,” Keris says cheerfully. “And then grandma Dulmea will look after you for the day, okay? You’ll get to see Lili tomorrow, because mama will be busy running everything.” She’ll be cutting it a little tight to get food brought up from the kitchens for them and a Chord summoned before setting off for the Althing, but not too tight - the arena for the boasting is right at the foot of Lilunu’s residences, after all.
She wonders how the other Infernals are spending these last few moments. She doubts most of them (any of them?) are corralling a gaggle of small children to get them fed, cleaned, and shown love. But Keris gets Kali’s happy bouncing kisses, Ogin’s playful fiddling with her hair, the gap-toothed smile of Aiko and Atiya’s insistence on having exactly the right kind of plain brown rice she likes, and it... it feels good. And while it’s tiring to pull Dulmea out, it’s not the worst thing she’s ever had to do.
“Child,” the chord instructs her, echoing the words of the voice in her head. “Say farewell to the children. You do not want to be late, given we know that some people like to try to delay you.”
“Alright, darlings,” Keris calls. “Mama’s going to go boast about all the really impressive things she did this year, so everyone wish me luck! And be good for grandma while I’m gone!”
“You don’t need luck if you’re prepared,” begins Aiko.
“Good luck!” shouts Kali.
“Good luck,” says Ogin.
“... luck,” mumbles Atiya.
Silly Aiko, just wish her good luck, Prita informs her, having been here all along.
“No you weren’t,” Ogin says.
Of course Prita was, the black-and-white szel informs them all, and she definitely wasn’t selling hellgoods back home she’s picked up here and there, and bringing things from home out here. But on that note, who wants sugar-glass licks?
Keris leaves them to it, and hurries downstairs. In fact, she mostly just hurries down; stairs aren’t involved, she bails out of a window and runs down the side of the tower.
Lilunu is waiting for her by the All-Thing, an annex to Lilunu’s tower which therefore partakes of all the Yozis associated with her. It is a colossal structure, cyclopean in the scale of its basalt bones yet soaring with fine crystal towers and glass spires, covered in elegant living coral-plants of many colours, a thing whose sculptured reliefs tell the creation of Creation time and time again.
“Almost late, my Keris?” she asks, a mild smile on her lips that can’t hide the worry lines around her eyes.
“Just getting the children settled,” Keris answers. “I’ll fill you in later. For now, I have some minds to blow.” She strikes a pose with her hip co*cked and her head tilted at an angle that shows off her upper back musculature. The suit, she knows for a fact, makes her legs look both fantastic and more than a little intimidating. “How do I look?”
“You are dressed to kill, but you know that - even if those who see Strigida’s lines on you might not realise what she is,” Lilunu says, leaning over to wipe away a little sticky Kali finger-mark on Keris’s flank with a finger. She frowns, and shifts so she’s standing behind Keris. “Relax, and let me adjust your hair,” she says, running her fingers through it, hand wreathed in inconstant rainbow light.
“Aiko and the twins helped me get ready,” Keris says, barely holding back a stutter. She can feel... whatever it is that Lilunu is doing, from the slight tugs on her scalp and the tactile feedback from her hair, but it’s confusing enough that she’s not sure exactly what’s going on back there besides some rearrangement and preening. She’s certainly not changing the style; it’s still up in a thick crown braid. But there’s power dripping from Lilunu’s fingers as she runs them across the twisted braids and hairpins, and Keris can’t tell what it’s for.
She finishes with a finger trailed down the back of Keris’s neck for no reason other than to make her squeak, and then lets go. Keris quickly pulls a mirror from her inner world to check. Nothing has changed. And yet it’s different. It’s... more so. Everything about her hair has been made more than it was, in a way that...
... oh. Under the light of the green sun, it still reflects many colours. It’s redder than it should be under this light. It looks the same to her because it looks like it normally would in Creation, but in Hell it looks almost hyper-real, as red as fresh blood on a late Fire day.
“Thank you, my lady,” she beams. “Oh, I like this. I like this a lot.” She cracks her knuckles. “Right then. Time to make an entrance.”
And with a proud toss of her head, she bows low to her mistress and then strides into the Althing. Into the proving grounds of the Infernal Exalted. Into the circle of fifty Seats, each held by a prince or princess of the Green Sun.
Eyes. That’s her immediate impression. So many eyes. Not just the eyes of her peers who have mostly already arrived and taken up their place. Not just the eyes of the onlookers, the Unquestionable in the rings around the central seats and a few select trusted lesser demons in the upper rings. But there are eyes in the walls beaded across the inverted dome of the grand chamber. These almost-demons will watch the proceedings, and relay the sight outside through the censors of Orabilis so select sections can be shown to the teeming masses of Hell. So that they might know the power of their masters and betters.
And all attention is on Keris Dulmeadokht right now. Keris, Director and assassin - but that is not why they are watching her. They watch her for her fame, they watch her for the beautiful things she does for them, they watch her because they want her to notice them.
She can look over the demon princes of Hell and recognise each one who has paid to bed her - and how many of them she has scarred with envy and need. She can taste the jealous pressure of certain of her peers who wish they were looked at like this - or hate her fame for things unattached to their duties. All of them: they want her. They want to be her.
All these wan washed-out faces are so very beautiful.
There’s surprise in some of the watching expressions. Perhaps, between her time on the Street and her reputation as Mistress of Ceremonies, they were expecting her to show up in something more feminine; a beautiful gown or intricate dress. She pauses - poses - and levels a smirk at them; confident and knowing and tauntingly alluring. Let them look at her. Let them wonder why this deviation from their expectations. And to those who aren’t surprised but interested; the ones who pay attention and remember from past Althings that she wears more masculine fashions like this when she has military victories to brag about - let them wonder what she’s got up her sleeve.
She gives them all a moment to look at her, and then - with the lazy, arrogant smirk of a Director still on her face - she proceeds to her Seat, heels clicking against the mosaic floor as she models for them.
Though to call it a ‘seat’ might be stretching it. The Twenty Ninth Throne of the Infernal Althing is more of a hammock than an actual chair; a swing-seat of red silk in a filigree silver frame. There isn’t a single straight line anywhere on it; it’s all organic curves and coral-like patterns and inset gems like red pearl and cinnabar. Where most hanging chairs would have a wide flat base to support the stand, this one has a bowl - a wide shallow bowl of glittering many-coloured fire opal, full almost to the brim with seawater, that the hanging chair is suspended over. There is a bottle of wine chilling in it, and Keris fishes it out and pops it open as she settles down into the silk with one leg crossed jauntily over the other.
“Sigil,” she greets the neighbour to her right with a friendly nod. There’s still a couple of minutes before things start, and various peers are holding quiet conversations with their neighbours all around the ring. “Yala,” she continues, turning to her left. “Lovely to see you both again. A good year, I hope?”
Sigil nods, perched bird-like on their seat of bleak stone covered with origami cranes, not saying a thing as around them float around synonyms for the greeting they cannot vocalise. But they’re clearly distracted and nervous, looking for Ku Shikom who is still not here. Keris understands her peer better now, just from that meeting; they know they’re safe because they are someone - maybe the only one - who can let the demon princes out of their jail. Arriving nearly-late is a power move from them. And gets all eyes on them. But Sigil won’t understand that, and Ku Shikom won’t appreciate people giving away how they tick.
But the woman on the other side of her is far more conversational. She sits on a slab of stone too, but it’s overgrown and lushly fertile, something primal and brutal that smells faintly of blood. Or maybe that’s not the seat; maybe that’s the ever-dripping skin of a great northern fae prince of beasts that Yala wears. Keris has never seen her without it, but the rumour is that she chased down the rakska princeling, tore his skin off him, and left him to die. And that in itself is fascinating, because Keris seems to have a thing for spending time around Fiends. Orange Blossom, Magenta, Suriani, Anadala-
(Rat - not a Fiend, but the dead prince version)
-and even sort of Veil. But Yala is nothing like them. She’s huge, bigger even than Demitrea. Her thighs are the size of someone else’s waist, her arms bulge, and her hands are the size of clubs. Yet despite that, her short-cut hair is a pale pink, and her orange eyes are full of laughter. She isn’t brooding or cautious with that size, and her laughter echoes when she boomingly chortles.
She is a Fiend, not a Slayer, and Keris doesn’t understand why.
They fall into a friendly, goading conversation about which of them is going to show the other up, and Keris looks around for other Infernals she knows. Suriani is looking right at her, of course, and Keris gives her an encouraging wave from across the circle. Ixy sees it and sneers, which Keris doesn’t respond to save a glance and a nod of acknowledgement. A quarter clockwise from them, Sasimana and Testolagh are talking quietly - lucky them, getting to sit next to each other - and Bloss smirks at Keris from Testolagh’s other side.
“You don’t act like this normally,” Yala says to her, coming nearly out of nowhere. Her tongue flickers out just for a moment, as if she can smell-taste something from among all that blood. “What’s going on in that little head of yours?”
Keris bares her teeth in a feral grin. “Maybe I’m just sitting on something big this year and it’s got me in a good mood,” she teases, eyes glittering. “You’ll have to wait and see.”
“Do I, now?” Yala slaps her thighs with both hands. “You’re talking to people, makin’ yourself known at all the parties, doing things you don’t normally.”
“I’ve got more than just Testolagh under me this year,” Keris replies smugly. She leans back further in her seat and pours herself a cup of wine, then recorks the bottle and slides it back into the water beneath her swing-seat, “My Directorate’s doubled in size. Testolagh, I can pretty much leave to his own devices, but with two cute underlings... well. I have plans. Big plans. And they need some set-up.”
“But I hear you’ve been hob-nobbing with my boss.” Yala grins. “She’s super happy with your pretty silver thing, even if she don’t show it. She’s not good at communicating, so I’m telling you from her - even if she doesn’t know I’m saying it and even if she doesn’t show it, she’s happier with it than maybe I’ve ever seen her.”
The loyalty she shows to Demitrea is interesting too.
Keris’s vicious grin gentles out a little into something more of a fond smile. “Yeah,” she says. “I’d never really talked to her before she got the Director position, but she caught my interest last year with some of her ideas. I’m glad she likes the dress, even if making it wiped me out.” The smirk returns, this time smug and self-satisfied. “It’s been a while since I got to really stretch my skills and play with such high-quality materials. And she connected to it really fast.”
She looks over at Yala with an eyebrow raised and considers how to probe further. Hmm. She seems to like Demitrea, so an opportunity to gush might work. “What’s it like working under her?” she adds. “Compared to Gyrfalcon, I mean.”
“Different,” is the laconic opinion of Yala the Prince-Eater. She catches Keris’s eyes, and accepts she probably needs to provide more than that. “He was flashy. A risk-taker. He wanted all eyes on him. Strange for a Scourge. But Demitrea is a unifier. Brings groups together, builds them up, prepares them.”
“A Malefactor to the core,” Keris contributes, mirroring Yala’s point back at her to see how it lands. “She was certainly charismatic when we spoke before Calibration started.”
She tolerates Demitrea, Keris figures. Well, maybe a little more than tolerates. But she doesn’t feel particularly strongly about her, which is perhaps a better state of affairs than her narrowed eyes at the mention of Gyrfalcon. And she doesn’t want to lead herself.
But any more conversation that might have come between them comes to a sudden halt, as conversation becomes quite impossible. A grand symphony strikes up, something that Keris has never heard before but she can hear her lady’s hallmarks over it. It is not brassy and triumphalist, instead blending many different themes together in a whole which is almost cohesive, almost one thing. But never quite, because errant melodies escape and dominate for a few moments, and there is a certain ardent, twisting feel to it as it climbs and whirls through the upper octaves; a theme that is chained and contained and writhes against it.
And then the eye that is the roof opens, the inverted dome retreating until what had been a closed space is now open to the wider Conventicle. And there is a star in the sky that was not there before, one that burns with every colour of the rainbow. It falls like a gentle comet, trailing its rainbow light, and fragments of radiance break off to tie into the upper reaches of the now-open roof so that a ceiling of iridescent ribbons now covers the structure.
The falling star touches down, red hair flowing around her like a living thing, her imperial gown woven from rubies and shadows, her mantle brass and silver fingernail-sized mirrors. As her bare foot touches the ground the marble floor is transmuted, spreading out like a slow fuse until the ground is now black threaded with veins of opal.
“Welcome,” says the lady Lilunu, her voice filling the space, another instrument in her symphony. Her smile is radiant and her eyes burn; her spiritual pressure is a wind ruffling the hair of onlookers. “Honoured guests, mighty demon princes of the Reclamation, my own fair peers of Hell. Welcome to the central day of Calibration, and the Grand Recounting of the deeds of these hellish champions. Welcome one and all.”
“My lady loves to make an entrance,” Keris murmurs from her seat with a knowing smile. She’s not too worried about her speech. Not only does she have a lot to boast about, but stage fright also lost any remaining hold on her after the first couple of Calibrations as Mistress of Ceremonies. Anyway, as the Twenty Ninth Seat, she’s not speaking until the second half of the boasting. There are twenty five peers and a two-hour break before then, so right now all she has to do is lounge back in her swing chair, sip her wine and pay attention.
The Infernal who is going to speak first doesn’t look worried either, of course. But that’s because he’s a delusional idiot.
Before she’s subjected to him, though, there comes a speech from Lilunu herself. Keris listens, of course she does, but she’s not the intended audience and she knows it. It is praise for the green sun princes and flattery for the Unquestionable, and she has heard such things before. It is a speech for the audience, and thus it would never land with her like her lady’s fondly murmured words. Of course Lilunu’s praise for the brilliance of her princes and their efforts in Creation is nice to hear, and of course the layered poetical allusions aimed at major Unquestionable in the audience praising them for their talents and their actions in Creation of old matter, but it is an act - and maybe Keris knows her lady better than anyone else, but she can hear that her heart isn’t entirely in it. She’s said such things before: they don’t have her sparkle of wit or her impish nature in them.
But when she looks around her peers, the younger ones, the ones who aren’t jaded like she is - oh, they’re affected. Ixy is trying so hard to look like she’s cool and in control and just as obviously failing when Lilunu praises the fortitude and brilliance of the power of youth, and Suriani of course is in the kind of position she’s dreamed of, acclaimed and respected among the mighty of Hell. Even ones who’ve heard similar things before like First Cat - sorry, ‘Our Lady of Light’ - or Magenta are sitting more upright as the praise and expectations settle on them.
Keris... doesn’t tune out, exactly; she keeps listening. But she reclines back further in her swing-chair and slips just a little way into Iris’s senses, checking on her babies and the Dulmea-chord she summoned through her familiar’s eyes. Things seem much more peaceful-ish than they were before. Not exactly peaceful, because no room with Kali in can ever be described as peaceful especially when she’s tossing a ball to Iris, but at the very least Dulmea is clearly there and paying attention and Aiko isn’t being left in charge. Which is both for the best and also something that Aiko is much more comfortable with herself, especially when a sensible older woman is there to give the actual orders. Atiya is back in the corner with her book and her little gloves, but at least she’s sparing some attention for Ogin who has a pair of knitting needles and - praise the Dragons - is actually using them to knit rather than stabbing anyone with them or using them as impromptu fencing blades.
All in all things seem to be doing better there, and that means that she doesn’t have to worry. Maybe she can go grab some time with them during the interval.
But there’s no more time to think about her children when the music swells. The light shifts, and the rainbow focuses more on the First Seat. Kopo Three Leaf, Fourth Crown of the First Seat. This is his second Calibration and he’s strong for someone so junior, barely weaker than Keris herself, reeking of the Sea and the Boar. He’s with the Blessed Isles Directorate, she recalls, and immediately gets confirmation of that when he goes into a strident and somewhat rambling brag that compensates for a lack of rhetoric with fortitude.
“I am the lord of the Tarpan Wastes, a king upon the Blessed Isle, and salt flats and bone dry wastes are my domain! Already they are close enough to the Holy Desert that men can wander into them, but I shall bring them closer! In Air I slew a convoy of monks and hung their corpses from pillars to show reverence to the Yozis - every month I weaken the Immaculates more and more! Yes, as I tell you, the Tarpan Wastes will be how you mighty Unquestionable enter the world the gods stole from you, and I am your key!”
He goes on. And on. This lanky, wiry man with sun-tanned skin and green streaked hair and wild eyes too full of certainty for any doubt.
Keris rolls her eyes. She’s learned not to get too attached to any of her peers after losing three neighbours, but the First Seats especially tend to die off fast. They show up, they think that the fluke of their seat number just happening to correspond to the first Exaltation sent out by the Yozis has some deeper meaning, they aim high and take risks and grow fast, and then inevitably they die. It’s happened four times already, though Keris wasn’t around for the first two. She does not have high hopes for this one lasting long.
Still, she has Dulmea start taking notes on what he’s been up to and where he’s working. And if those notes include some catty commentary... well, nobody else will read these, probably, and her mama is in enough agreement with her about this crude, delusional blood ape of a man that she doesn’t scold Keris for any of her snide additions and asides as she dictates. In fact, Keris is pretty Dulmea is adding her own haughty comments in the margins.
But he was only ever the warm-up act, and everyone knows it - except for maybe Kopo Three Leaf himself. The opening Infernals are packed full of Directors, and right next to him is Demitrea, Director of the Frozen Wastes, tall and wearing the garments Keris made for her with all the confidence of an empress. Her melancholy is nowhere to be seen here and now as she provides a recounting of the state of the North. The golden lords ruling the husk of the Bull’s empire war against each other; her forces rise. The Realm has lost its hold on Clovina and the new oligarch-vojvadas do not realise that the sclavs have found her cause. The tin from their mines will no longer flow to make Realm bronze; new manses rise on the ruins sacked by the Lunar warlord Kanon Tas two decades ago. And she alludes to other actions that her people have been carrying out in the Haslanti League, but does not go further into details - only to remove an egg-shaped orb from below those silver-veined robes Keris made and toss it out between her and Lilunu, where it turns into a mechanical songbird that takes flight to settle on Lilunu’s shoulder and sing out before flying a circle over the heads of the peers.
She is smiling as she sits, and rightly so - there is applause from the Unquestionable in the stands.
“Well that’s definitely set the benchmark for the rest of us to follow,” Keris murmurs to herself. “And those clothes really are helping her. Mmm. Good. She’ll remember that I helped her with those.” Her fingers itch to sketch how her work adorns the woman she made it for, but she resists. Now isn’t the time for artwork. At least, not that kind.
But the next up is Glorious, Director of the Omphalos, and she is always one to watch. Yet maybe this year people are watching her for other reasons. The rumours Keris has heard, that she’s losing her edge - and maybe her mind too - and she’s dabbled too deep in certain Yozi-granted gifts seem to have made their way to the ears of others. Last year she came to the great director’s meeting unclad with skin of stone, but this year she (or the ones who dressed her?) is in an extravagant Realm-style imperial gown of white silk and white jade, collared and decorated in grey stone carvings. Behind her leaks out her nature as monstrous almost-draconic wings, a whole peaco*ck-fan of them which shift in pale greens and blues and pinks, never staying the same, and because of them she sits a good metre above her seat, the gown hanging down freely. And she wears a blindfold of Malfean lead - why?
She is definitely not as far gone as some have hinted. The main body of her speech is as one would expect from an experienced Director, laying out how the hands of Hell has backed the violent actions that House Sinisi have taken against the Immaculate Order, how the Scarlet-worshipping hero cults have been fanned at her orders by her underling Azure Fist, how her mystery cults are hidden in the web of masks of the Sesusu and how corrupted bureaucrats have turned the Blessed Isles into a simmering cauldron by enabling the self-interested greed of the Dynasts in evicting peasants and enclosing land.
Only... she is so rote in how she talks. And others who can’t hear the songs that come from outside the world might miss how some of her lines of logic for how certain actions will have certain consequences show mad insight, but Keris can hear the melodies of Oramus in her disjointed chains of thought. She’s following a rehearsed script and she still can’t hide exactly how deep the rabbit hole goes.
No, she’s not lost her mind, but, Keris thinks, she’s mad enough that she’s more demon than mortal. The junior peers might not know enough to see it, and the Unquestionable are too mad in their own way to see that in a human, but the senior peers, especially ones like her who’ve put so much effort into working with the human mind, they can pick it out. What happens when she acts on it, when she stops acting slowly and cautiously and makes a decision based only on a whispered whim from words echoing from outside the world? When will that happen? Where will it lead?
(Wouldn’t it be fascinating to sit down with her and see what demon bans and insanity has been cultivated in the brain of one of the two eldest surviving infernals? Orange Blossom is sane; monstrous, but sane. Glorious is a timebomb.)
‘She wasn’t like this last time I saw her,’ Keris whispers, half to herself, half to Dulmea. ‘Last Calibration, she was... leaning this way, showing signs, but not this bad. And before that, back in Water last year when I did those assassinations - she was still mostly sane, then.’ She grips the thumb of one hand with the other to stop herself from fidgeting, wishing she had some of her more esoteric alchemical creations on her. What would Glorious’s po look like, in this state? Is it just as warped as the outward whole, or is this madness solely a thing of the hun - of ideas, knowledge and the shattered, impossible logic of the Beyond, where reason no longer holds?
‘It’s Oramus that’s cracked her like this,’ she says, certainty in every syllable. ‘Is his power that bad for the human mind, then? Or is Glorious just more susceptible than most? Or did she just go too deep into it? Questions, questions.’ She glances around the circle, noting how many others have threads of impossible music in their natures. It’s not a small number. Almost a third of the fifty peers - and while it’s a weak, minor sub-melody in half of those, the rest boast stronger notes. First Cat most of all - for both she and another junior peer Keris vaguely recognises from the West have Oramus as the strongest motif in their essence-songs by far.
“A reason for you to take care around the Ancient and Firstborn’s power, then,” Dulmea says meaningfully. “Especially when you were so unstable last year. I would rather not watch you slip into heath-maddened nonsense.”
‘I’ll be careful, mama,’ Keris promises. ‘I don’t want to end up like that either.’
It’s something she has to think about while Xiachu Pho gives her speech. From everything Keris has heard, she’s genuinely who people who fall for the act think Keris is. She’s technically more dressed (and much less muddy) than she was when Keris saw her in Naan’s revelries, a small south-eastern woman with bright green hair that hints at more eastern heritage, but she flaunts herself as much as she flaunts the targets she’s taken out around the Dreaming Sea. Not very impressive targets, Keris thinks with professional pride - oh, she’s a blade running through minor nobles and anyone with power, but her targets aren’t well protected for someone powered by the Silent Wind and the Sphere of Speech, and Dulmea sniffs at the idea that quantity of kills can at all remedy for quality. She’s so desperate to prove herself that it comes across as pathetic.
Though anyone would feel it necessary to prove themselves if they were sitting between Glorious and Orange Blossom, who’s up next. Because Orange Blossom is in figure hugging maroon and cloth-of-orichalcum that perfectly plays off her darker skin, and she radiates a heart-breaking beauty born of the Demon Sea that draws all eyes to her. She doesn’t just recount the deeds she’s done; she sells a story, a narrative, of how she breaks down the powers of the East internally while keeping them strong against the Realm, how her traders and merchants spread a taste for the finer things of Hell among the mighty, how her alchemists have broken the Realm’s monopoly on certain forms of youth-restoring drug previously only sourced from the Blessed Isle, how mercenary companies she controls now serve up and down the Yanaze, how she’s installed the demon-blooded bastards of demon princes in principalities in the Hundred Kingdoms, how her agents travel from city to city selling their wares and her spies tell her so many things ripe for exploiting - and no one else can do what she can.
This is Orange Blossom’s pitch; she’s making sure that the souls of men are for sale, and those she owns are a web of influence, false prophets and real profits that is digging deep into the River Province.
Keris purses her lips and prunes her thoughts. She is a Director of the Infernal Althing, a princess of the Green Sun, a trusted servant of the demon princes. And these things are all true, but they mask the truth: that she is far less loyal than the Unquestionable would like. There’s a part of her that doesn’t want to see the Unquestionable, bar her lady, ever freed. There’s a part of her that’s compassionate and another that’s stubbornly loyal to her kin. And the Keris who those traits are part of is not comfortable with Hell having quite so much success, being quite so well served by its peers.
To chip away at the Realm is one thing, to kill the chosen of the sun or the champions of death will only keep the wheels of Creation turning, the ranks of the powerful churning. But the systematic webs of corruption and ownership that Bloss describes are tilting the Scavenger Lands into her control, and that... that’s something that might upset the tenuous balance that the powers of Creation exist in.
The Keris who is compassionate, who is rebellious, whose loyalties lie more with humanity than with demonkind at the end of the day and when all else is said and done... that Keris would be worried by what Orange Blossom says here. And so the Keris who is in the great theatre of the All-Thing doesn’t think of such concerns. She thinks only of admiration and envy, of her friendly rivalry with her ex-girlfriend and occasional lover. Because to even let thoughts of disloyalty enter her mind at a time like this would be foolish. Better to keep dangerous topics like that tucked away out of sight, and only come back to them later.
She can feel Dulmea’s attention. But her mother says nothing either, because she doesn’t want to bring thoughts Keris probably shouldn’t have to the surface. Not right now.
Next is Testolagh, armoured up in black Malfean iron, his one brazen eye gleaming in the rainbows. And he is stiff, and formal, and reports that he has laid waste to Maza on the orders of his Director, burned the sugar fields and executed every last aristocrat in the slave-commodity society, destroying what had once been a major sugar plantation island in the Anarchy - and that he has sunk trade ships and executed the slavehulk captains wherever he encountered them, further cutting the ties that keep the greatly profitable trade routes so fuelled by human misery.
He says nothing of what he has done on his own accord, only what Keris ordered him to. And it was the same last year she realises with a start, and she’d bet it was the same in all previous years. He reports only on his duties, and what does he care if he doesn’t do anything above and beyond to further the cause of Hell?
Dragons. No wonder he’s the eldest Infernal who’s never had a Director seat, and never will if he keeps on like this. He does exactly his duty, and no more - and so isn’t going to brag about whatever the f*ck he’s up to down south with the islands and nations he’s forging from the Wyld.
‘Mama, remind me to go down there and check on him sometime this coming year,’ she notes quietly. ‘Without letting him know I’m doing it.’
“Will you have time for that?” Dulmea asks. “With your two students? But I agree - it would be good for you to keep a closer eye on him. Perhaps you could find a suitable agent to put in Aiko’s company as a friend or protector who can investigate further when she is with her father, remaining in the background?”
It is a very Dulmea suggestion there, an angyalka-assassin’s solution to a problem.
‘Mmm. Good idea,’ Keris agrees. ‘I’d ask Prita - I will ask Prita - but I don’t doubt she’ll charge me for the information, and I’m not sure how much of the details I want she’ll have noticed. She is a szel, still.’
“Yes. She is.” Dulmea does not like szels, and never has. Especially a habitual smuggler, tax-evader, and chaotic influence like Prita. Which is honestly why Keris has more than a little respect for the little troublemaker, above and beyond how happy she makes Aiko. “I would suggest you not select a kerub, but that seems to go against deeply held principles of yours to use their kind whenever you can. At the very least, ensure that loyal angyalkae are stationed on the Baisha.”
‘Yes, mama. Maybe one of your students among them. I know you’ve been training more than just Teveya.’
And right after Testolagh is Sasimana, and Keris knows her, knows how worried she might be - and yeesh, even with all her control she can see the little signs. Maybe she’s the only one who recognises them for what they are, but others might be able to notice the tics. Still, it’s a minor miracle in and of itself that she has it this much together. How, though, will she handle the fact that she lost in effect half the year to an extended breakdown?
Much better, as it so happens; she dazzles with allusions to Realm politics and the Great Houses, claims credit for things that maybe she did but maybe that’s just how the Dynasty is, and makes reference to private, hidden reports passed to Lady Lilunu. She makes it sound like, for example, she spent the latter half of the year coordinating assets and working in secret in deep cover to encourage the Ragara rapacious pillaging of the satrapies to ensure they have the resources to support the Sinisi play for the throne - when Keris knows for a fact she spent most of the time trying to rebalance her state of mind after the disastrous events of Earth.
And that only poses further questions - how much of previous things she’s heard from Sasimana about what she’s been doing in the Realm were lies? How often does she deceive her bosses, knowing no one is in a place to contradict her? Or is this just a place of desperation right now?
“... it’s not that I’m opposed to lying,” she muses internally. “But f*ck, it’s risky doing it here. Creatively phrasing the truth, sure - I’m planning to do that myself. But I did attack Nagakota. She’s pushing things here.” She pauses, and looks over the rest of the circle again. “... I wonder. How many of the others have lied at the boasting like this? Just outright claimed credit for things that had nothing to do with them? Or made up victories that didn’t even happen? And, better question - can I find any evidence of anyone doing so as blackmail?”
“Making up victories? That would be extremely risky,” Dulmea opines. “One would have to be a fool to do such a thing - especially in a Directorate where others can benefit from catching someone out. But claiming credit for something when you do have allies in contact with them or have suggested such a thing? How would it ever be caught? Even asking the person who did it might not work when you have tricks such as those Ophidian suggestions that make them think it was their own idea? You would need someone like your Ney to investigate it.”
A thoughtful pause.
“And how do you not know that there might be someone serving the Unquestionable secretly who specialises in such things? Some people, indeed, might suspect you of being that spy on your fellows.”
Keris doesn’t outwardly make a face, but there’s definitely an internal grimace, both at the thought of her peers being suspicious of her - not a complication she wants to have to deal with - and the risk of someone like Ney poking into things she doesn’t think the Unquestionable need to know about how she runs her own Directorate and prioritises her time in Creation.
“No, think of it, child? How many of your peers question what a Mistress of Ceremonies really is. Does it not sound a lot like a sinecure granted to cover some deeper purpose for the demon princes?” Dulmea plays a thoughtful note. “It is what I would do with such a title.”
This time, the grimace shows for a moment. ‘Mmm. You... might be right. Well... if I can’t get rid of suspicions like that, the next best thing is to figure out who’s followed that line of thought and then use their assumptions against them. If some of my peers think my title is a cover for my spying on them and investigating their true activities... that’s fear I can use, if I ever need to.’
From lushly decadent golden-eyed Sasimana to Snowy Pine, a mousy-looking woman with spectacles and dark green hair who mumbles her way through her explanation as to what she’s done for Orange Blossom. Keris doesn’t trust the act - or if it’s not an act, she knows there’s more to the woman. She’s as much Szoreny as Oramus, and there’s a distinct note of the King underneath. There’s a lot of rage and envy there. But she’s just another filler speaker before Ximmin Cutlass, Director of the Endless Waters, and Keris can hear the change in the atmosphere as he speaks. The Unquestionable are Paying Attention. Maybe they’ve already made up their minds.
He sells it well, with his swagger and pride and confidence, but he suffers for his placement. Sasiamana is better at selling allusions and hints, and all the other Directors have managed more. And Keris has heard the rumours that he’s taken heavy losses against the fleets of Skullstone, and when she knows that the mentions of passing engagements and ‘hit and run’ sound like brushed-over losses. She winces. Poor Ximmin. It was good, but if no one else blows it it might not have been enough.
‘f*ck,’ she hisses inwardly. ‘f*ck, and I’m not going to do him any favours, either. Claiming Choson will be a slap in the face to both of my neighbours - and Deveh deserves it, but Ximmin doesn’t.’ Her eyes narrow thoughtfully. ‘Then again... he’s been up north, dealing with Skullstone. Remind me to check over the break if Kasteen’s the one assigned to the more southern parts of the West. If so, I can play up how it’s her who hasn’t done anything with Choson.’
Kasteen is speaking after her, so there’s a risk that she’ll have time to come up with some rebuttal - but maybe that’s a risk worth taking. Eloquence and rhetoric weren’t among Kasteen’s gifts last time Keris clashed with her, and while she may have gotten better since then, she’ll only have about an hour to figure out how to respond to Keris’s speech.
And then it’s Veil, Director of the Burning Sands. Probably. They’re sitting in Veil’s seat, they’re a dashingly pretty twink, and they radiate the power of the King and the Demon Sea, but it’s f*cking Veil. Unless it isn’t. Keris just wants to throttle them. Their actual presentation is interesting, and she’s particularly interested how they’re clearly building on the work she did for them - including the new Despot of Gem, who’s under their thumb and apparently has outrageous daddy issues - but if there’s one person she can’t trust the reports of, it’s Veil.
So annoying.
‘Someday,’ she grumbles, ‘I am going to figure out what’s beneath those lies. I’m gonna do it. Even if I have to pin them down and knock them out and figure out a way to strip the shadows off them by force. I’m gonna see what their stupid real face is, and then I’m gonna get Lilunu to paint it all across the side of a forty-storey building. Watch me.’
“Try not to make enemies for no reason save spite, child,” Dulmea sighs. “Even though that is your common modus operandi.”
Next is Naan, who’s Naan - loud, boorish, and funny despite it. He’s got no shortage of violent deeds which he describes in florid, pollen-laden clouds that try to captivate the mind, and if he’s just breaking things then there are plenty of Unquestionable who just want Creation savaged and ruined by a thug like him. He emphasises his words with a red jade sword he waves around, plunder from a dragonblooded he beat to death with his bare hands. And that’s a shameless crowd pleaser too.
Chimala Hainux, Director of the Boreal Forests speaks after him, his shirtless form covered with demon ink tattoos. Keris knows his Directorship is potentially under threat too, but he does well. Really well. It’s a reminder that he is in fact a Malefactor, and while he claims credit for setting up the kills of Corrusu the Crow, in truth he has no shortage of accomplishments in the satrapy of Fray - or, rather, no longer a satrapy, for it has been seized by the outcaste dragonlord Hanto Galina, newly crowned Empress of Fray and pretender to the Scarlet Throne. Chimala is not backing the pretender, though; his cult rises among the slaves and the serfs, out in the oldwoods (those that haven’t been deforested yet) and the Kiesan horse nomads who worship new gods. Or more correctly, older beings who rose long before the gods.
“Well, Ximmin’s in trouble,” Dulmea says, and Keris can see his handsome face screwed up in sullen rage.
‘Yeah,’ Keris sighs. ‘Unless Havi falls on his own sword or f*cks up his speech beyond repair, I think it’s probably going to be Ximmin. And he knows it, look at him.’ She closes her eyes in frustration. ‘f*ck. I’m going to be boxed in by Deveh and Kasteen. And you just know she’s going to be a bitch about Choson, even if she can’t do anything about it politically.’
It’s not a pleasant thought, and Chrysanthemum, Director of Heavenly Affairs doesn’t make Keris feel any better. Because that woman has the arrogance to rise to her feet, and from within her simple priestess robes draw out a crystal covered in frost. She tosses it onto the sand.
“I offer you Director-Shogun Lalabeth-Su of the Hail, God of the Fourth Rank, Bureau of Nature,” she says, orange eyes ablaze, and sits back down.
It’s not a name that Keris has ever heard before - but more than a few demon princes have, and from context Keris realises the enormity of this. This must be, f*ck, a celestial god, a major weather god, one who’s as powerful as the strongest demon lord or even a weak demon price. And she tosses that out casually and lets it stand. It’s a power move. One where she believes one sentence will secure her place - and from the reaction, it will. This is someone many Unquestionable hate of old.
‘I wonder if she made that with the Sacrifice of the Crystallised Heart,’ Keris muses, unsettled and uneasy, ‘or some other way of crushing spirits down into jewels? f*ck, she’s probably as safe as Ku Shikom after this. She’s just proven that not only has she delivered revenge for whatever he did, she can give the Unquestionable vengeance against other divine foes they’ve hated for an Age or more.’
“Are you worried?” Dulmea asks, her own melody slightly agitated.
‘About my place as a Director? No. About Chrysanthemum taking this success - and it’s going to be a success; she’ll probably get an accolade for this at the acknowledgements - as a reason to double down on being herself?’ Keris drains her glass of wine and fishes the bottle out of the ocean-bowl to refill it. ‘Yeah, kinda. Some of the older Infernals are getting really strong. And really far from human. Not all in the same way Glorious is, but in ways that are pretty worrying regardless.’
“Are you worried about Sasimana there?” A pause. “Again?”
‘... no.’ Keris’s voice is confident, but it comes after a pause. ‘I’m with Bloss on that one. The Special Directorates are safe. Most of them exist for good reasons and have the Directors they have because they’re the best ones to do the job. And Iudicavisse won’t want Sasimana removed; half the reason she’s there is to undercut Glorious. Once the whole Realm Succession thing wraps up one way or another, I don’t know what’ll happen to her then - but for now, she’s not in danger of losing her position to politics.’
“Not about her job, child. About her humanity.”
Keris’s silence is telling. She’d answered the question that was less uncomfortable to think about, and she’d been hoping her mother wouldn’t call her on it.
‘... like I said,’ she says finally. ‘All the elder Infernals are drifting away from human. Some physically, like me. Some in sanity, like Glorious. Some in ego and capacity for doubt, like Chrysanthemum. Sasimana... isn’t an exception to that. But I think this year convinced her that her humanity isn’t something she should discard so casually. We’ll see if that conclusion lasts.’
Keris is distracted, but so is everyone else. The grey, rough-faced northern hunter Hithigr Thurros doesn’t get much attention, but oddly Keris gets the feeling he prefers it that way. She’s heard almost nothing of him, even though he’s another Scourge, but he’s not a flashy one like her or Ximmin. None of his achievements are particularly major, and then they’re on to the always-smiling bland-faced Ochimos Havi, Director of the Sea of Dreams. Oh, he has references to grand plots and ploys and things his underlings have done around the Dreaming Sea and the South Eastern Inner Sea, but there’s a certain pattern to Directorial speeches and his doesn’t come across well in the wake of Chrysanthenum’s confidence. It’s in the same ballpark as Ximmin’s for selling himself, and that suddenly means things are uncertain again.
He doesn’t stop smiling, though, even as certain demon princes whisper to each other and Ximmin glares at him. Maybe he knows something else. Maybe he’s made arrangements with their bosses, just as - de facto - Keris has. Or maybe that’s just how he hides his nerves.
‘It’ll be one of them,’ Keris murmurs. ‘Either replacing Ximmin with Kasteen, or replacing Havi with someone chosen to puncture Bloss’s web of control. She owns him, and he’s supporting her left flank. If they replace him with someone else - not Naan, but one of his buddies who has reason to clash with her - it’ll weaken her position. There are definitely some Unquestionable who think she’s getting too big and too powerful.’
Ku Shikom, Director of the Storm-Wracked Tides is next, and she caught their ugly glance at Chrysanthemum. She preempted their style, Keris suspects, and is immediately proven right when they only give a cursory description of how their control has solidified over their cold towers and the cities under their domain, before they raise their palm. “And by my hand, I let Ululaya shine once more upon Creation,” they say, “for I mastered the highest secrets of sorcery.”
That is what they leave it on. Many knew already, but the revelation that they have summoned a demon prince already? That they released the Carmine Emissary, the Red Moon, to shine on the lost lands? That is not just a display at a show; that is a real promise of what they can do for the demon princes.
For a long second, all Keris can do is stare.
Then she drains another full cup of wine and tightens her grip on the bottle so much that she feels the glass start to splinter under her fingers.
‘How the f*ck did they pull that off?’ she hisses to Dulmea. ‘You can only summon Third Circles at Calibration! Salina was very clear about that! It’s the whole reason the ancient Solars had the Calibration feast! She was bitching about how some of her peers were consorting with them! They can’t have done it last Calibration, right? They were here for it!’
“I do not know, child,” and there is definitely fear and concern from Dulmea there. “I know only the stories I have heard. Perhaps they have found a loophole like you did with the Broken-Winged Crane, or they found a way to release Ululaya via ancient release clauses - or perhaps they simply broke the laws of nature with that self-same certainty and will that you saw from them when you spoke with them. When a sorcerer is so powerful, are even the rules of nature so ironclad?”
‘f*ck.’ She’s running out of wine. Keris refills her glass, emptying the bottle, and drops it back in the bowl. ‘f*ck. I thought they’d have to be granted special dispensation from the Althing to miss a Calibration if they wanted to summon an Unquestionable - and that would deadlock on who got to be summoned; they’d never actually get the permission to skip a year, locking them out of doing it. But if they’ve figured out how to reliably use the Crane to summon whenever - ah, no, not whenever,’ she interrupts herself. ‘I think... I think if they’re breaking rules like that, it’d be better not to break them all the way. The walls of the Yozi’s prison are weak enough at the new moon to summon demon lords; it’d be safer to use the Crane to lever that crack open wide enough for a demon prince than to just do it on an ordinary night. But still, that’s fourteen opportunities across the year where they can release an Unquestionable into the world. That’s way more power than I’m comfortable with them having.’
Their discussion means they miss much of what Lejine the Fox has to say, but in fairness, one of the three newcomers coming straight after a flow of Directors means the man with the smouldering looks really can’t make an impact - and Oha Luhan, the Tya geomancer from the Western Directorate who’s one of Ku Shikom’s students can’t do much better. Keris has encountered a few Tya in Saata on the trading routes - most prominently a wealthy captain running the nutmeg route up to the Makelo Empire who had the money to buy a night with Cinnamon Tenne - and she found the concepts of the Tya as a third sex escaping parts of Western patriarchy to be intriguing, as well as the way that Captain Hoto presented himself as male in public, but in her boudoir he asked her to use the name Helehanifu and treat him as a her. Oha Luhan dresses ostentatiously in silks and feathers, which might be a sign that this Tya is treating Hell as a place to present as female, but might also be the carnival atmosphere of Calibration. Or some other strangeness of how intense the Oramus-song that comes from Oha is.
Yes, in the long run Keris should check, but from the sounds of things Oha has spent most of the past year in a remote island chain working on the geomancy trying to reliably induce volcanic eruptions, so while the project sounds fascinating to her it also hasn’t had many results.
“A flaw of this method of evaluation,” Dulmea observes, considering things. “If you have to get results every year, something like this will always pass less-noticed.”
Technically, Keris’s first instinctive reaction is alarm. But the jolt of fear at the idea of reliably inducing volcanoes is almost immediately buried under fascination. Because there are other uses for that kind of capability than just destruction. If you can induce an eruption at will - even if you’re limited in where and when you can do it - then that opens up entirely new ways of creating islands without needing to Wyld-Shape them! It offers the possibility of refreshing entire regions with fresh, rich volcanic soil! Hell, with a bit of thought, you could probably even use such massive Fire- and Earth-suffused geomantic events as a means to enact regional-scale shifts to dragon lines or geomantic and ecological activity.
‘Remind me to speak to her later,’ Keris muses, stroking her chin. ‘Hmm. I wonder where she’s based? If Ximmin keeps his seat I might just petition him to hire her for a season... mm, not this coming year, I’ll be too busy. But maybe the year after. There are a few things I could probably use a really, really good geomancer’s help with.’
“Strictly speaking, there’s nothing to stop you from coming to a private arrangement with any of your peers, as long as it doesn’t interfere with their duties,” Dulmea says. “It might annoy their director if they feel like you’re poaching or taking time away from their tasks, but for all you know, Testolagh is already doing things for Sasimana during those three seasons a year he has no obligations to you.”
‘Mmm. True,’ Keris grants. ‘She might be willing to come down and play in the Anarchy for free. We’ve got more volcanoes to study. And I can Shape up more for her. Something to check, definitely.’
Geasa, Director of Ash and Sorrows, is up next, pale and red eyed, his knee-length white-blond hair hanging loose. He knows he’s safe. The special Directorate handling the Underworld is not a high prestige Directorate, and his lack of stage presence or flair doesn’t seem to matter as he mumbles his way through a description of the plans of the Dead he’s thwarted and the three Abyssals he’s slain, two serving the Walker in Darkness and one the Black Heron.
But that’s not what interests her. What interests her is the little gasp she hears that comes from Ixy. Prompted by, specifically, that mention of the Black Heron.
Keris cuts her eyes across to her newest junior, but doesn’t say anything. Now isn’t the time. After the boasting, though, after Calibration, when they’re back in Creation... oh, she’s going to be following up on that. It might be as minor as the Black Heron being known and feared in Chiaroscuro. Or it might not. Keris doubts that her similarities to Ixy go so far as them both having a lost friend turned deathknight, but... well, she did get that sense of a half-seen figure in Ixy’s past, someone she desperately wants... something for.
‘I swear,’ Keris mutters under her breath, not letting the words emerge even as a subvocal whisper. Deveh is sitting nearby, after all, and she knows his hearing is as good as her own. ‘If she has a Rat of her own, I’m going to accuse the Maidens of playing games with me. I cannot be that unlucky.’
Compared to that dark thought, Peleps Anadala is light, easy and refreshing. He has things to say about politics and the way he’s influencing the Pelepese and the cabals of well-fed, well-educated men and women in the Navy who are benefitting greatly from the way things are who welcome his false faces and his allies into their ranks. He’s a corrupt little man, but Keris likes him - and she can already see further ways to work with him weaken the Realm’s ability to project force into the Anarchy, especially once they start building on the work she did in Nagakota.
There’s a gap for the twenty first seat, that Slayer who’s never been seen, and then it’s the shaven-headed figure of the fallen Immaculate nun, Azure Fist, whose form is tattooed with iconographic images praising the Yozis and whose robes are the red-brown of old blood. She’s even more experienced than Keris, and she’s the one Glorious mentioned who’s behind the Scarlet-worshipping cults in Pangu and who’s rotting the organisation she once devoted herself to. Keris thinks of Sasimana and how her Immaculate faith has become just as firm belief in the Yozis; Azure Fist is the same, but she’s added a terrible rage and hatred towards what she once was. Keris can hear the contempt and vindictive spite as she tells the story of how she hid herself as a lost waif and let a nunnery take her in and destroyed every last one of them with the venoms and poisons of the Great Mother, letting only the ones who joined her in apostasy survive - though no less changed in mind and body.
The fact she’s survived so long with so much rage and hate in her is... surprising, and says a little of how dangerous she must be.
Someone to avoid, Keris thinks clinically. That kind of loathing is a sword without a hilt - Keris knows; she’s been there, or at least brushed up along the edges of it. Azure Fist has survived this long - longer than Keris’s own career; she remembers the woman from her first Calibration - by keeping her vengeful feelings leashed to the patient planning of the Desert and the toxic, elegant subtlety of the eroding Sea, but both Yozis have fits of rage that break their usual composure. Keris doesn’t doubt there have been times when Azure Fist has lost her temper and burst into sudden murderous violence. They’ll be rare times, and so far she’s won every time - but each burst of sudden fury is a chance for her to get in over her head. She’ll last far longer than those who charge into danger regularly, but the storm of her outrage will be her undoing someday, and Keris is quite happy staying well out of it until then.
‘I just hope Sasimana hasn’t been spending too much time around her,’ she worries. ‘She doesn’t like Glorious, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she were making quiet ties to some of her underlings. Maybe even angling to take over the Central Directorate whenever Glorious falls apart.’
“That is interesting,” Dulmea considers. “Could they be closer because they are alike, or are their differences too stark to allow such closeness?”
‘I don’t know,’ Keris muses. ‘Hmm. Might be worth just asking her. Sasimana, I mean, not Azure Fist.’
And then it’s time for Deveh, Director of Blood and Salt, and Keris’s lips can’t help but purse.
In his arch, faux-humble voice he lays out the situation in An Teng - the aristocracy of the High Lands have been brought into compliance, seeing well that they benefit from a system where they are on top and this is their place and none can breach their station. Men and women in the iron mines in the mountains divert iron without questioning their orders; hidden villages of smiths forge swords and grow no crops, relying on the food brought to them by others. An Teng is primed for a rebellion, and the Seven-Stranded Vine is primed to take control of it. When the moment comes, the Shore Lands will discover they are alone, and that a human hive of soldier-men optimised for the act of rebellion will strike. There are demon lords in party to this plan, and in secret places thaumaturgists release demons into the world through geomancy-channels built into the warped, ordered landscape.
Deveh has turned what seems like half of Tengese society into a mechanism, a trap for the Realm. A trap for the Realm because when the Realm tries to take the land back and put down the rebellion, there is a counter-counter attack waiting to close on them as they arrive on their ships. Keris isn’t sure what he’s referring to, but it might be he’s put aside his dislike of the Lintha. Or it might be something else.
It might not be this coming year - but, he promises, it will come.
So many people are going to die, Keris thinks, and if she can’t keep the loathing off her face as she looks at him, this pretend-humble pretend-compassionate madman talking about a war he’s already killed so many for by hollowing out their minds and souls, then at least it’s nothing more than everyone expects of her.
But her masters love it. He must have been working on this before this year and only revealed it all now when he wants to look good for them - or possibly it has reached a point he thinks no one can stop him. Regardless, he will be esteemed in the eyes of the demon princes for this, and only more so if he succeeds. This is not slow and incremental; this is a nation brought into the service of the Yozis through the cult made up of members of the old royal family (a different branch to the one Atiya descends from, Keris presumes) and the promise of a trap to destroy a Realm legion.
He smiles at her when he sits down; kind, benevolent, a smile to his esteemed peer. The f*cker.
Keris thinks of Choson, thinks of Rala waiting to file the paperwork as soon as the All-Thing closes for the second half of the boasting and traps everyone here for four hours as her claim on the archipelago gets pushed through the gears of bureaucracy, thinks of the slap in the face she’s going to give him in just a few hours, and smiles back like she’s slitting his throat with it. She even throws in a couple of claps of mocking applause.
There’s a gap for the Scourge next to Deveh, because that is where the assassin Fang used to sit and his successor still hasn’t been inducted to Hell. Which leaves just one more to speak before the end of this part, and it is the priest Third Leaf. Keris has heard some of their story mentioned in passing by Lilunu, and it is a sad one; a slave boy sold to the priests of a Great Forks sect, castrated to be a singer for them and hurt in worse ways too - and when chosen by the demon princes, they understood that the gods that permitted this to happen do not deserve their freedom. They’re a hulking, soft-featured eunuch, not a man or a woman but here in Hell they show the many, many soul-gems of trapped divine spirits that bead their silks. A person of terrible appetites, revenge only one of them, and with the Directorate of Heavenly Affairs they’re Chrysanthemum’s pet serial killer.
Emphasis, if the stories are true, on ‘pet’.
‘Well,’ Keris thinks to Dulmea, cracking her neck a little. ‘That wasn’t too bad for four hours of sitting still and listening. Now, do I use the intermission to grab a couple of hours sleep, or do I go talk to Oha Luhan and Sasimana and check in with Rala that everything’s ready?’ She blinks long and slow as the wrap-up speech and subtly rotates a shoulder, assessing how much her eyes hurt and her muscles ache. ‘... probably couldn’t hurt to get some more rest,’ she decides. ‘Even if I can’t actually sleep, I can go dunk myself in a bath for a while and give my body a break.’
Everyone around her seems stiff and tired, and so Lilunu’s invitation to “Eat, drink, make merry! Celebrate your great achievements and return to hear the rest of Hell’s triumphs when I call you all!” is very welcome to many. The ones who have spoken are getting attention from the demon princes and other peers who want to make contact with them, and so that gives Keris some time to escape. She catches Lilunu’s eyes on her and sees her lady’s shoulders slump, as if she’d like nothing more than to have some time with Keris, just the two of them in one of her art rooms - but then Ligier is there by her side, sweeping her into a low kiss.
Keris gets up from her seat without too much fanfare and takes the empty wine bottle with her as she leaves. She’s probably not got time to go all the way back to her estate, but Rala is waiting close to the Reclamation offices to file her claim on Choson once the second half begins; Keris can check in with her and then catch a nap in Lilunu’s rooms. Her lady will be fine with it. If anything she’ll be delighted that Keris is getting more rest.
