Page 83 of Vilest Things
Calla’s connection is fading. Yilas leans forward, meaning to say something about Anton’s mother and what the Crescent Societies know about her, but then the call drops, the green circle switching to a red line.
Bibi is up and moving immediately. She ejects a disk from the computer. Loops a pair of headphones around her neck.
“This was very productive,” she declares. With a swipe of her hand across the keyboard, the screen clears and she has logged out of the system. “I have some affairs to get in order. You have my number if you need me for anything else.”
Yilas and Chami let her go. Neither says anything in the affirmative; if they’re lucky, they’ll never have to be involved in this nonsense again.
“Oh!” Bibi says, spinning around before she ascends the ladder back into the main cybercafe. “It might be good to stay indoors for the next few days. Just a heads-up.”
CHAPTER 29
August thought he heard the old gods once.
He would never have admitted to it. If he did, the palace would have deemed him insane long before he could climb its ranks. But he knows he wasn’t mistaken, even if he can’t entirely explain how it happened.
He was fourteen, and his father was dying. Annic Avia didn’t offer August much as far as his lot in life went, but he taught August how to fold paper birds and took him to the city burial rooms every year, where he spent time going room to room with August, showing him which panels belonged to their ancestors. In San-Er, the respected dead are not buried; their ashes are placed into trays, and the trays slotted into the wall drawers, labeled with a two-inch panel for their name. August used to read each one with utmost care, looking closely at the color it had been engraved with. Very rarely did anything else represent a family in a city with this many people, and so their descendants printed the dead’s names in the color of their eyes, for one small piece of unique remembrance in a sea of metal drawers.
The Avias are an old family,his father said on his deathbed.Though we may not be special, we have history. That’s something you must preserve. Take care of your mother and your sister.
Later that year, Otta would get the yaisu sickness, and his mother would jump to her death by sneaking up to the top of the wall. Those two matters were not related. His mother was Annic’s second wife and couldn’t give less of a fuck about Otta, whose mother had passed in childbirth. Though he visited the two of them too, he mourned only his father regularly.
The new moon hid him slinking through the city when he went to pay his respects on the first day of every month, bringing fruit for gifts. He was nothing but a wraith, unknown by all and unknown most to himself. The kingdom owed him little, but he wanted more. August made sure his father got two drawers instead of one, purchasing both slots so the panel was larger than the rest. Still, each time he cleaned his father’s grave, the black ink seemed terribly ordinary compared with the other names. Black eyes were supposed to be a mark of nobility, commonly found in the palace. To August, that spoke of insignificance. He could easily be replaced by the next lonely boy in the north wing. Written with the same pens, if he swapped his school essays with those on the desk next to him, no teacher would be able to tell the difference.
“I would like to know,” he whispered aloud one night, polishing the drawers and helping the panels nearby with a coat of shine too, “whether there is more for me.”
Hardly anyone knew who August was when Carneli Avia married King Kasa. Though the ceremony was extravagant, nobody cared about the scrawny eight-year-old nephew who entered nobility by proxy. In the years that passed, he charmed nobles and made sure he was well-liked among the most elite crowd. It wasn’t enough. It didn’t get him close enough to what he desired.
“I want to know what more there could be.”
It was not a musing he expected to be answered. He was hardly awake at the late hour, so the echo that sounded could have been written off to his imagination. Only the flickering lights told him this wasn’t an auditory hallucination, the shrines of every deity nearby pulsing red. He turned, and he heardKing, king, kingwhispered directly from the heavens, and August made up his mind.
When he gave Aunt Carneli the cup of tea, it was supposed to damage her organs. Enough to rid the possibility of heirs, so that August could begin plotting one day. He didn’t expect her to take ill.
He didn’t expect her to die shortly thereafter.
Matters, however, worked out for him, as they tend to do. August likes to think the god of luck is particularly fond of him, and even if he can’t imagine the old gods existing as entities that walk the earth like province dwellers believe, he does know their essence remains in the kingdom. A wind blows; a die is cast. Events fall into place, and August Shenzhi is king.
Too bad he’s only lived a few hours of it thus far.
They ride into Actia Province after nightfall. It has gotten horrendously cold, and Galipei keeps glancing over from his horse, watching August urge forward faster and faster on his own. The guards have repeatedly asked August to please get into a carriage, but he refuses, preferring to ride. There’s far more sitting room now, after the councilmembers were given the opportunity to return to San-Er. The ones who left will bring the announcement into the cities that Anton Makusa and Calla Tuoleimi are criminals conspiring against the throne, having plotted from the coronation onward.
Not every councilmember wanted to return, though. They’ve heard about the Crescent Society attacks. The unrest, building and building in San-Er.
“We must slow,” Galipei calls. “We’re approaching sand.”
August nods his silent approval. As soon as they have reduced to a speed that allows it, Galipei nudges his horse closer. The other guards lag behind. They are free to speak.
“August, one moment,” Galipei says. “Do you recall—”
“No,” August interrupts. Unfairly, unrighteously, he cannot understand how Galipei didn’t see he had been invaded for weeks… if not as his guard, then surely as someone who knows him, who should be his closest confidant.
From an early age, there was nothing August resented more than beingoverlooked. He spent too many nights alone as a child, sitting in the corner of the factory his father owned and wondering why he felt no more real than one of the rubber machines running in a row. A piece could break down, and it would not matter, because dozens more on the work floor would replace it in an instant. August couldn’t bear an environment like that. He much preferred the palace afterward. He loved getting to speak with the nobility in the meeting rooms, his words rippling beyond the four walls and into written law.
August Shenzhi needs the kingdom to care about what he is doing. He needs the kingdom to know that he loves it deeply, tragically, profoundly. In return, their devotion will be real and lasting. For as long as they bear witness to the wonders he offers and think of him as their great burden bearer, he can grow larger than life. He can be their very representation of the heavens, taking mortal form.
The trouble with keeping Galipei around is that August tempts himself into believing he might have it both ways. That Galipei might truly see him, and he may receive total devotion anyway. It doesn’t work like that. It shouldn’t. Galipei was assigned to him. At the end of it all, none of it is real, and he ought to remember that.
“Don’t take that tone with me,” Galipei chides. “I knew something was wrong.”
