RECAP

From the Journals of Sebastienne Goeth

The irregular length of the notebooks makes judging dates and lengths of time difficult. The seeming long intervals between some entries and the occasional missing page don’t help, but this entry appears to be just after the Gate War.

Woke to bells. Skullcracking headache. Never coming to Jade again.

When I complained about the bells the girl said “the new Dynast was enthroned. Only a couple years old, and the heir of the Suzerainty!” I think I mixed up her name with the girl from the day before.

Too much of that island liquor, my mouth tastes like mother’s herb garden.

“The ascetic teacher, he foretold this, you know.” This is the self-assured nonsense that came from her pretty mouth all night. Gods save me from iaret.

I think she needs a place to stay. I’m going to pay an extra day on the room but I’m not coming back here.

—

I will thrash that bird for telling me to come here. “You should try Jade, get some religion.” It shows how lost I am without E the War that I’d listen to a one-eyed kruk.

The bells have not stopped. Word of this “Child Dynast” is on every tongue. Everyone is speculating what it will mean for the Suzerainty and the iaret. Experience tells me it will mean being crushed under responsibility too heavy for a child to bear. It’s either that or being a pawn until becoming too willful and then dying the tragic accidental death that so afflicts young scions.

I’ll raise a bowl for them this evening. Not that I’ve needed an excuse for such lately.

—

What will this Dynast become? It’s haunted me through a half-dozen bowls of that damned island booze.

This time of year makes me moody. Even Eiiwen could tell. The Dynast is me: how could anyone have seen what I would become? And now, what am I yet to become? What would he I’ll never know.

The blessing of Geb and all the gods upon you, ruler from horizon to horizon. May your reign be long and your gifts beyond count.

For a time the entries become short, blunt records of days and miles traveled into the jungle interior, a doleful catalog of the slow depletion of bottles in her luggage and arguments with herself about the virtues of nepenthe set against the value of clarity.

I find myself in the company of this ascetic that so many talked about in Jade. He is under escort by a detachment of the Suzerain’s Strong Arms. They were subduing vast quantities of intoxicants in Jade (like most of their kind do) and seized the man for his predictions about the Child Dynast. They believe delivering him to the Court will put them in the good graces of whoever becomes the power behind the new regime.

He is both less and more impressive than I imagined. I’ve known apkallu in my childhood, but had envisioned a mad preacher, eyes huge and staring, burbling apocalyptic visions to a world tired of enduring a decade of the eschaton already. Instead he is quiet, watchful, quick to joke, at ease with his loose captivity. I asked if he was worried he’d be put to death by the Court for some political nuance in divining the enthronement of the Child Dynast.

“If I am killed, it has already happened.” A shrug. He didn’t mean it just as gallows humor, I could see he knew that he had been taken out behind a temple ziggurat and strangled with a silken scarf. It was teal, iridescent. And that also he had not.

There was something in that moment. “We should talk more.” I had just started thinking to walk with the slow-moving, slovenly procession of soldiers.

“We do,” he said, “at great length.”

—

His title is Rinpoche. It’s awarded by acclaim among abbots, so he must be known among his own kind. He’s well-read and has a quote for everything, most from suttas I only know by mention.

For all his flippance regarding his future, he believes everything can be known, that there is a state in which one can exist and experience all possibilities, all pasts and futures.

We talk every night, long past when the pickets of the Strong Arms have drank themselves to sleep.

—

The last of my liquor. The last drink they ever had. It may have been months but my arm is still solid and sure. Buriash goes one way, I another. The Strong Arms go into the bellies of jungle scavengers.

What looks like the start of another extended travelogue instead abruptly becomes fevered and almost illegible scribbling for a number of pages. It’s bookended by reference to monsoons so perhaps the Marchioness was trapped and took ill in the weather.

The bells are silent in Jade, and this is how I return.

I have had time enough since the War to think, to go over childish dreams and plans. It’s time for a new war. I’ve forces to marshal, equipment to commandeer, resources to gather.

There’s a woman in this city, the sort I think Snakewisdom would like. She’s a fixture, someone who’s always been here, always growing, gathering like-minded hedonists to herself. In each moment she triumphs, and in each moment she tumbles, both possibilities existing together in the eyes of the thing she serves. There is power in that, power that the Rinpoche knew how to take.

—

She succeeded in fighting me off, and I was rent apart, limbs scattered by her master’s power. And also I was not, and left her defeated, stripped of her puissance in the dregs of her last depraved revel. One outcome seems more real to both of us, but the other is just as possible.

What will I do with what I’ve taken from her? What will I become? All things.

—

Now that I am moving once more, things seem ordained. The one-eyed kruk was sitting on the gunwale of the galley to Pearl when I boarded. “Looks like Jade did you well,” she cackled.

Confusingly the narrative ends here in favor of sketches of a trireme galley and discussion of organization of the sailors. Skipping ahead a few pages finds the author dissecting old battles in Doven Head during the Mercantile Wars. Whatever happened in Pearl, if it’s recorded, is not in evidence.