The Strength of the Few (Hierarchy, #2)

by James Islington

“Alright.” He lets out a long breath. Loose stone crunching underfoot in the vast hush of the crater. The cheerless slope is getting steeper. “I suppose the war is the easiest place to begin. It started thousands of years ago, against an enemy called the Concurrence. They were bent on enslaving everyone, and from what Veridius and I could tell, at one point they were winning.” His mouth twists. “So our side split the world into three near-identical copies. Res—where we’re from; Obiteum, which is here; and Luceum. Don’t ask me how,” he adds with a wry smile. I nod a reluctant acceptance. Unfathomable though it still seems, it fits with everything I already know. Everything I’ve seen. “How would doing that help, though?” Then I pause. “Near-identical?” It’s not what he said before, when I first arrived.

“Physically the same, down to the last detail. But the nature of Will was what they were trying to limit. The three worlds were created because they wanted to diminish it, restrict how it could be used. Split its capabilities.” He presses on before I can ask any of my myriad new questions. “People called it the Rending. Afterward, the war continued, but the resistances on the three worlds began to have their own levels of success in the fight. Different capabilities with Will. Different choices. Everything diverged.” My mind reels as I try to put the pieces together. “Obiteum is lost. Do not open the gate,” I murmur. The eerie chant of the eyeless bodies in the ruins. I remember the Rending being mentioned by Artemius and the others guarding the Labyrinth, too. “So the Concurrence won here, and were defeated on Res?” The logical conclusion, given how we’re striving to stay out of sight. Clearly in some sort of danger.

“What do you know about the Cataclysm?” I pause. “As much as anyone, I suppose?” Momentarily thrown by the apparent veer in topic. “Something happened three hundred years ago that killed almost everyone. The survivors were mostly children, and the records from before that time were lost. Civilisation collapsed. There are theories about how, and why, but no one really knows much more than that.” “That’s not quite true.” Caeror hesitates. The gentle reluctance of a man about to deliver terrible news. “Those ruins you said you visited, near the Academy? That place was built to stop a Cataclysm. One the architects knew was coming.” He rubs his face, then smiles at me in sincere, rueful apology. “They’re culls, Vis. The Cataclysms are culls by an enemy that everyone on our world has forgotten. That one those architects were trying to prevent? It was the eleventh. The eleventh in three thousand years. And even with all their knowledge, they failed.”

The terrain is more cliff than slope now, and we start to pick our way upward over boulders and exposed rock. Less than five hundred feet to the ridge. I clamber along behind Caeror, trying to grasp it. The enormity of it. No desire to believe, but it’s impossible not to, given where we are. The utter desolation around us. “So the Concurrence somehow just… killed everyone?” “From everything I understand, yes. And they will do it again. And again.” He says it softly. Pauses to lend me a hand up, then glances over my shoulder. “They didn’t just win the war here, Vis. I think they won it everywhere.”

“You said I’d been copied.” I leave it at that. Make it a question. There may be more pressing concerns, but none that have lodged themselves so disconcertingly in my mind. “Yes. That device you were in—the Gate—it takes what’s inside it on Res, and creates new versions on Luceum and Obiteum. Perfect replicas.” “So there’s another version of me—the original one—still on Res?” “Yes.” “And there’s another in some other world, too? In Luceum?” “Yes.” I shake my head. Sick. Refusing to countenance it, even if I’d concluded hours ago that this was what he’d meant. “I don’t feel like a copy.”

Caeror flits another glance at me before resuming his surveilling of the clear morning sky. “Perhaps ‘copy’ is a bit crude. It’s more like…” He scrunches up his face as he reaches for a better explanation. “We’re no less ourselves. Think of it as setting out on a branching path. It’s still you. Just travelling a different road.” I chew over his words. Kindly delivered, but I find little comfort in them. “And this whole world was copied from ours, too?” “It might be the original. I don’t know. But… yes. Thousands of years ago now, but yes. That’s my understanding of it.”

Ulciscor’s brother acknowledges the young man’s statement, waving aside the nearest of the crowd and kneeling by the corpse. He draws a strip of cloth from his pocket and binds the body’s wrists together behind its back. Gently, but he checks the strength of the knot three times. Then he uses another strip to form a blindfold over its sightless eyes. Once he’s done, Caeror breathes deep and places his hand on the corpse’s forehead. His face is a mask of concentration. His eyes flood to black. With a rasping gasp, the dead man sits up.

“I’ll allow it.”

https://youtu.be/xnU-1tLte9g?si=rCEUHtXEh1W2pCQx

“He was dead,” I observe eventually. “Djedef here is dead.” He says it sincerely, no trace of humour this time. “They’re called iunctii. They don’t need to eat, or sleep, or breathe. They don’t age or bleed. They do still remember who they were, feel things the same as you and I—but they cannot do it without the Will of the person who brought them back.”

https://www.google.com/search?q=iunctii&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS734US734&oq=iunctii&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTILCAEQABgKGA0YgAQyCQgCEAAYDRiABDIJCAMQABgNGIAEMgsIBBAAGAoYDRiABDIICAUQABgNGB4yCAgGEAAYDRgeMggIBxAAGA0YHjIICAgQABgNGB4yCAgJEAAYDRge0gEINTE0MWowajSoAgCwAgE&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

“The good news is that these Vitaeria we’re wearing are stronger than the ones back home—and thanks to Adoption, the excess doesn’t have to go to waste. They make us somewhere between a Septimus and Sextus, from what I’ve been able to tell. You could self-imbue right now, if you’re getting tired.” He means it as a comfort. I’m glad he can’t see my face. “I haven’t even been through the Aurora Columnae.” A protest, albeit a weak one. “Actually, you have, now—the Gate on Solivagus is a kind of extension of them. That’s why it won’t work on anyone who’s already been through the ceremony.”

“Ka—the Concurrence—has a way of controlling the minds of iunctii. He leaves slivers of Will in their bodies, and a command to do something if we bring them back. Sometimes escape, report back our location. Sometimes murder everyone in their sleep. No way of knowing.” His voice is filled with distaste as he checks the bindings on Djedef’s hands. “You already had a small taste of it at the Labyrinth, I assume. If Djedef isn’t infected, he can be useful to us. To everyone’s survival. But we have to check.” “Out here?” “Yes. Only one way to know for sure, but it’s too dangerous to do it in Qabr.”

“What were you… doing?” When he looks at me questioningly, I scowl. “You would not… speak.” I point to my eyes. “Black.” “It is of the draoi.” He says it firmly. “It is sacred. Not for your knowledge.” Draoi. I dredge the vaguely familiar word from my time in Letens’s Bibliotheca. What the druids of the area called themselves, before they were wiped out.

Do you remember the tempeall albios? The… white place?” He’s speaking faster and using more complex words than he was—from anger at the subject matter, I think—and it takes me a moment to catch up. “Yes. There were… two others. A man and a woman. Like you.” Memory still hazy of the bloody chaos of the white rotunda, but clearer than it was. “The Grove is intent on killing all who come to the tempeall albios in the way you did, because Ruarc has convinced them to. And they hide this shame from the other draoi. He asks them to kill without trial or explanation, and they obey, against all sacred duty.” The disgust in his voice is thick as he urges the horse beneath us to motion. “He has made them fear where you come from, what you may mean, what you may be able to do. He has made them so fearful of the unknown, of what may be, they have abandoned what should be. It is a corruption of all the draoi are meant to be. And so, I fight.”

During the second day, I learn from Caeror that most of the Qabrans remove the dead and sleep inside the sarcophagi themselves, using tattered body wrappings as bedding and detritus from the sepulchres to form makeshift coverings. I think it’s macabre. On the third night, I reluctantly try it myself. It’s significantly warmer. I sleep that way thereafter.

“Sleep alright?” He hands me a bowl of barley gruel and a cup of water as we make ourselves comfortable. I nod my thanks, carefully savouring my first bland mouthful. This will be all I get until tomorrow. The Vitaeria we all wear mean we only need a fraction of a normal meal per day to subsist. Which is fortunate, because though I haven’t seen the garden yet—where Caeror says the Qabrans have figured out how to coax some meagre life from the underground soil—I know its crops are constantly stretched to breaking point.

Inaction picks a side.

Neither of us speak for a while as we walk. I study the glyphs carved around the paintings on the tombs we pass. My initial impression was right: according to Caeror, it runs very close to the Nyripkian language back home. There are hundreds upon hundreds of different characters. “What do they say?” I ask it absently as I inspect them. Trails of sand drift down the crags and catch the fading light, shifted by some gust of wind above. My voice echoes into the gathering dim. “Names. Their lives and deeds. Their families.” He joins me in my quiet scrutiny. “The paintings show what they wish to do when they reach Aaru, the Field of Reeds. Their afterlife,” he adds, though I’d guessed that much.

Egyptian mythos.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/domitor

WILL, WE WERE TAUGHT OVER and over at the academy, is a gift. Not just in the sense that it is something good and wondrous, but that it is literally a gift: it can only ever be given, never taken. Another of the great lies of the Hierarchy. Possibly their greatest. And yet, perhaps, also their greatest truth. Like any power, it can be coerced. Fought for. Demanded. Requested under false pretences. But in the end, it is always the giving that is the important part. It can be reluctant. It can be because it is expected, pressured. It can even be a last resort against death itself. The reasons never matter. It is always a choice being made. Always a personal responsibility.

He doesn’t react. Plays absently with the Instruction Blade, takes a couple of casual swings at the air in front of him. “A Cataclysm every three hundred years, and it’s been three hundred and three now. I won’t send you off just to die, Vis. Everyone in there thinks Ka is a god, so you will only be able to depend on yourself. But I don’t think we can wait until you’re guaranteed success, either.” He exhales. “Not long.”

He nods slowly, hearing the real concern in my voice. Chews his lip as he studies me. “There’s an old saying, Vis. The young know they will die—” “But only the old believe it,” I finish.

“In a fight between two men,” he asked of me one day, “who will win?” His question was in response to my own, wondering how best to calculate the relative strength of individuals’ Will. We were walking the clifftop paths of Suus. Sun shining. Aeternum glittering below. Years before the Hierarchy’s invasion, the subject entirely academic. “That depends.” Tempted to answer with a philosophically glib “neither,” but Iniguez’s lessons always had a certain tempo to them. One that you disrupted at your own peril. “On what?” “On who has the advantage.” “And what constitutes an advantage?” “Size. Strength. Agility. Age.” He waited for more, so I gave it. “Weapons. Armour. Training. Positioning. Foreknowledge of the fight.” Still silent. “Experience with the type of opponent. Knowledge of the specific opponent. External support. Fatigue. Wits. Determination…” He finally chuckled, allowing me a nod. “And more. We see a small man and a big man; we assume the big man will win. Then we see the small man holding a blade; we think the smaller will win. Then we learn the big one has beaten a hundred likewise-armed men before this, and perhaps we change our minds again. And so on, and so on. Back and forth. Nothing changing in the variables, only our knowledge of them.”

he adds, so condescendingly that it’s all I can do to keep my hands from balling

...hand...

Half a man

Rule a man, and he will do whatever you can imagine. Befriend him, and he will do more.”

“One thing I don’t understand,” I say eventually. “If this threat—this second Cataclysm—is real, why in all rotting hells would he not tell anyone about it?” She looks across at me with amused affection. “Really? You’ve been in Caten long enough. You tell me.” I open my mouth, then shut it again. I knew the answer months ago. All I had to do was think about the powerful men and women I was busy getting to know. Imagine the chaos, the arguments. The power struggles cloaked as altruism that would result in nothing ever being achieved.

Politics

“Leathfhear.” He says the name into the silence. Half man, I have discovered it means.

“Think of the Overseers less as people, and more as limbs to the Nomarch’s mind. Appendages, rather than agents themselves.” Netiqret holds out a hand in front of her, palm out. Flexes her long fingers. “Our hands can convey to us the texture of a thing, but if we know what it should feel like, we usually don’t bother checking. To do otherwise would just be wasting time. Focusing on extra, mostly irrelevant information. Yes?” I consider the analogy. “So you’re saying the Overseers aren’t the ones who know everyone in Duat—it’s these central iunctii, this ‘Nomarch,’ who do,” I say slowly. “They’re the mind. The ones in charge. And the Overseers will only convey information to it if the Nomarch first tells them there’s a reason to?” “Exactly.” Netiqret’s nod is approving. “If an alarm were already raised, the Nomarch might instruct the Overseers to check everyone in the area. Dedicate more of its focus to verifying identities. But otherwise, it only screens people where it has to. It is always purposeful, never wasteful.” She stands, offering me a hand. “So are you coming?”

“You know something’s wrong. Something’s different. I was ill, but I’d been ill before and this felt… worse. Not in terms of the pain. It wasn’t even that painful. But I could feel my body not resisting. I could feel it giving in. I wanted it to fight, but it just wouldn’t.” He says it all in a vaguely melancholy murmur. Like it’s the first time he’s really thought about it. “Then there’s a point where you know everything is stopping and you start to panic, you want to call out and get help, but you physically can’t. And then that fades and it’s like going to sleep. You’re tired, and there’s just… nothing.” He glances up at me. “Not until you wake up again.”

Grief, my mother once told me, is love’s most honest expression. The last and hardest aspect of truly, truly caring for someone. She said it at her own mother’s funeral rites, tears in her eyes even as she tried to comfort a boy too young to understand why he was so sad, why his grandmother couldn’t be there anymore. She explained through choking sobs that without grief, love would be meaningless. Because it is impossible to truly love something that cannot be lost. I remember that day, and I remember my friend, and I weep.

“Why do you remove their heads?” I ask it quietly, not wanting to watch but unable to look away as the others start similar, grisly tasks. Tara looks at me as if it’s a strange question. “So they cannot walk again, should the boundary to the Otherworld become too thin.”

I turn my attention to the occupants of the upper level. Even here, people huddle in tight, familiar groups. Most are ignoring the entertainment. Not just actors and acrobats but three cages, lit by floating lanterns, reveal lions that prowl and snarl and snap at passersby. Some few partygoers are using Will to float scraps of meat almost within range of the creatures, only to snatch them away again at the last second to too-raucous, uneasy laughter. Diago, as if as disgusted as I feel, growls at the sight. “Rotting gods,” murmurs Relucia, disdain dripping from her tone as she watches the same thing. “Small men so desperate for power that they will take it from wherever they can. How did we get here?”

“So that’s it? All of Ka’s security, and you can just pay to get past it?” I murmur. “People, Siamun. People are always the weakest part of any system.”

Despite that, my mind is finally catching up to the madness of these events and I try to plot out their consequences. A civil war that ensures Military is divided? That seems most likely, and in fact, I suspect the senators are gradually coming to the same conclusion. See them sliding from stunned to calculating. Ostius is right; they’ll be able to leave before anyone can take action—exiles, but exiles who still command formidable loyalties. The armies swear their oaths to Exesius as much as they do the Republic. They’ll claim they were working for the good of Caten, or maybe recant and say they signed under duress. All is not lost for them. The blood drains from my fingers, I squeeze my fists so tight. I get my names, but not necessarily justice. These men killed my friends. They killed thousands. That much will soon be public. And there’s still a gods-damned chance they will get away with it.

“Why kill my family?” Exesius grimaces. Hesitates, but as he takes in my expression, he sees I will accept only the truth. “Men sometimes confide in those they trust, but they only truly unburden themselves on the ones they love,” he says softly. I close my eyes. Killed because the Hierarchy worried my father had told them something. I believe him. Not that my father would ever have used such a weapon. Not that he would have for a heartbeat considered what these men assumed he wanted to do.

“He was on your team, under your command, and you’re alive. Who is more to blame?” I don’t know why he says it. A powerful man unaccustomed to not being able to speak his mind, I suppose. So used to being immune from consequences that he cannot fathom being in danger. But he puts such a sneer into it. His voice drips disdain. Diago leaps forward. I don’t even have time to comprehend what’s happening before Quiscil’s scream is being cut short. Blood arcs in a fine red mist. There’s a terrible gurgling beneath the rabid snarl, barely audible amidst the panicked shrieks of the other senators who are scrambling away. But Diago is among them.

“I am druid to King Rónán,” corrects Lir firmly. “As Donnán was meant to be. Our mandate was to advise, and pass judgement on matters within our purview. Not to command. Not to take sides. I refused the Grove’s petition for the location of Loch Traenala not because of any authority Rónán has over me, but because they do not have the authority to demand his secrets. Our function is to complement the kings, exist in careful balance with them. Not act as their rulers or their subjects.” I process this in silence. “Then if your loyalty is not to King Rónán, or the Grove…” “My loyalty is to a Grove untainted by whatever Ruarc has used to poison them.” I think my question unintentionally hits a nerve because it’s a short, sharp answer. One that clearly closes the subject.

“When you have lived your whole life within the greatest empire of your time, it is hard to believe it will end. You think it is a thing of permanence, of immutability. Its existence contested but never truly threatened. And even if they did believe?”

“Some would agree to sacrifice.” I think of Callidus. Emissa and Eidhin and Aequa. “But not most, and not the ones who matter. The Catenan Republic is Will. To take it away from them… to them, that is the Cataclysm.”

Oil industry

“When Ysa was born, I was terrified, you know. I knew exactly what I had to do to be a king, but to be a father… I was so sure I would fail her. That being a good ruler and a good parent were incompatible. And then your mother said something.” He smiles. Eyes warm and glistening with fond, sad recollection. “She told me that a child needs to hear and truly understand only three phrases from their father as they grow up. ‘I love you.’ ‘I will help.’ And, ‘I don’t know.’

“Lapides Animarum.

Stones of Souls

FEAR IS A LACK OF control, realised. My father told me that, once. Explained that it is not the absence of control itself, but the understanding of it. The true, stomach-churning grasping of the fact that we have no significant way to affect what comes next in a given situation.

“Rotting…” I put my hand on the statue’s shoulder once more. “Bring me something I can use to prove to a draoi that I passed this gods-damned test.” The silver form doesn’t move for a second, and I sigh, assuming it’s not going to work. Then it turns. Strides through the pool and over to the body of its fallen counterpart. Reaches down and with a series of sharp, twisting motions, wrenches the body’s left arm from its shoulder joint. I watch the violence with vaguely disturbed horror, even if it’s not against flesh. The statue returns and thrusts the arm at me, an almost angry motion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuada_Airgetl%C3%A1m

“I’ve said this from the start. I am confident in the information, but I cannot tell you where I got it. I will not.” I meet their gazes. Once, I would have been terrified of this group. Would have inwardly trembled at their mere proximity. But that time has long passed. I have spent months working around them and for them. Observing and learning. They are just men. Not even particularly smart men, in many cases. Grasping and charismatic, ruthless and quick with words, but here thanks more to their bloodlines than intellect. “I understand your concerns, but the fewer people who know, the safer my contact will be.”

I WAS EIGHT WHEN THE ship my uncle was on was lost to a storm, killing all aboard. I remember my father’s immense sorrow well, but my own was a strange thing. There, certainly—but more confused, almost uncomprehending, and so something I instinctively tried to push aside until it went away. Then, weeks after, I found a toy my uncle had given me. A stone horse figurine that I had grown out of so quickly that it had sat on a shelf behind books, forgotten, until that day. And when I happened upon it, when I remembered his happiness in the giving of the gift, I wept anew. Wept more freely than I had at his funeral. Unprepared for the sudden realisation of aching, complete absence. My father found me like that, and we talked a while. About life, and death, and the way we deal with them. When I told him I didn’t want to feel sad anymore, he gave me a smile that wished it could take my pain. Grief, he explained to me gently, is a process that has only a beginning. We work through it, not get over it. And so attempting to just ignore its ache is inevitably a pointless exercise.

After a few seconds, I sense the faintest of pulses. Unnoticeable if it were not so close. Right behind my eyes. And I realise that I am holding my head in my hands. Dawn’s light is burning its way down to me as I hold my left arm up in front of my face. Turn it back and forth wonderingly. Slowly, disbelievingly, flex the fingers as they glint silver in the scything rays. I can feel my hand. The weight of it is gone. It’s not just the water. I can feel it, in the same way I could feel my spear when I used the nasceann. And yet, this is even deeper. Something more. I reach across and loosen the painful leather straps that bound the arm to my shoulder. It does not fall away. I’ve imbued it. I know it’s true, can feel its certainty even as the impossibility of it staggers me. Just like in Fornax. Some distant instinct rather than knowledge, a reflex that I shouldn’t have and yet somehow do. The image of the arm locked in my mind.

The end of the tunnel appears up ahead. “Doesn’t it… get to you? Affect you?” She gives a rueful smile. Shrugs. “When you were a child, did you ever cry because you’d scraped your knee and saw you were bleeding?” “Of course.” “But now?” I process the meaning behind her words in silence, then, “It’s not the same thing.” She touches glyphs around the entrance in practiced order. “It’s not so different, either.”

He glares. “Just making certain,” he mutters to my sarcasm. “And if all this man wants is for the Cataclysm to occur, and you—perhaps our only hope of preventing it—present yourself to him for a nice easy killing?” “Then the inevitable just happens sooner, because we’re all dying anyway right now. Dying because greedy men want more. If you go out there, you will die. If I stay near Decimus, I will die. Perhaps not today, or tomorrow, but soon. And it will be for nothing.” I clench my fist. “Redivius. Decimus. Religion, Governance, Military, the Anguis. They’re burning the world, Eidhin, and they’re not stopping. If we let them, if all the good people end up dead, what’s even left worth saving?”

As we walk, the people line the way and they sing. The dirge is low and mournful and achingly beautiful. There are no tears, no wailing, but those would have been false given that they did not know the man. This display is for the living. This display is for me. It means more than I can say. It brings tears to my eyes again and again as we make our steady way down the hill and out the gate.

Funerals are for those left behind....

“Who are you?” I wasn’t sure what to expect, but this wasn’t it. “My name was Caeror.” He says it in Common, harsh to my ears after so long. “I arrived here almost eight years ago, the same way you did.” It takes me a moment to process it. To translate the words into the language I think in, now. Then, a chill. I can see the resemblance. “You are Ulciscor’s brother,” I breathe, in Common as well. Ruarc freezes. Genuinely startled. “You knew him?” The first time he has appeared anything but in control.