Chapter Text
Returning to Solaara was easier than Kip Mdang expected. Far easier than his homeward journey, when he trekked through lawless lands on foot, paying his way with news of the disasters he had seen, and then sailed alone across all the width of the Wide Seas, passing through the wall of storms in his little boat, his Tui-tanata.
He had been driven by love for his family and fear for them, on that journey through the aftermath of the Fall of Astandalas, the greatest magical and physical disaster in history (to his knowledge, to the knowledge of the Keepers of the Imperial Archives). The bonds of Schooled Magic holding together an empire that spanned five worlds had snapped in a strange, endless moment, and the fabric of the worlds reverberated as they unravelled.
Kip - in his role as Cliopher Mdang, Imperial Bureaucrat - had been in his rooms in the Palace of the Stars in Astandalas the Golden, on the fabled Ysthar of the Magic, the heartlands of the old Empire. Astandalas was no more and the magic of Ysthar was so damaged that the Lord of that world had banished it more or less entirely. The Palace had, improbably, fallen right across the boundaries between worlds and landed (for reasons still poorly understood) on the little town of Solaara, on Zunidh, alongside the Necropolis of the Emperors.
Kip felt the perversity of chance in his personal ramifications from that outcome. Zunidh was his home world, but he had found himself on the other side of that world from his heart’s true home, the scattered and shining islands of the Wide Seas. The Emperor had fallen with his Empire and lay in a state like sleep in the Palace; the magic had failed and the fires gone out. Kip had not found himself able to leave, not where the hearth was cold and the government hanging by a thread. He had thrown himself into relighting the fire - into supporting Princess Indrogan, the only member of the Upper Secretariat who had both been in the Palace during the Fall and had stayed there afterwards to restore order.
Zunidh had not suffered such disintegration as Ysthar, but the world was hardly whole. Continents had fallen into the seas, new volcanoes flooded populated lands with lava. Time fractured and ran at different speeds from one land to the next. Across all the Wide Seas ships were turned back by a wall of storms, and all the letters he sent came back to him, undelivered.
The unreality of time weighed upon the Palace of Stars. A hundred years went past and he aged perhaps three or four in body, though the experience of pulling together the broken world left him feeling ancient in truth. All that endless century, government couriers went down from Solaara in a cautious chain, passing back observations, petitions, complaints, rumours and (where the time had stretched furthest) myth. And Cliopher Mdang sat in the gorgeously appointed rooms of the Minister in Chief of the world and collated the reports, weighing each specimen of destruction, each table of deaths, pulling out themes, drawing charts to show the patterns.
Each morning he sat with Princess Indrogan for half an hour and updated her on the latest understanding of the state of the world. She assigned him helpers, a team, and he set them to commissioning analysis and riding out with the couriers to collect first-hand accounts wherever possible. He would have liked to go himself, but the Princess wouldn’t hear of it: she brusquely demanded his presence every morning, and took him with her through the day to each meeting with her Ministries so that she could call on him for facts or context.
After the second time he found one of the junior secretariat crying over a report he began to insist on regular rest days for them, and rotation into less stressful assignments on a regular basis. It never occurred to him to take time off himself. Whenever he was not tallying disaster he was seeking word from the Wide Seas, writing letters to his family and sending them with anyone whose travels took them beyond the narrow re-established orderly zone around Solaara, hoping against hope.
In those days he remembered sometimes, ruefully, how much he would have given before the Fall to spend even one meeting a week working in the Minister in Chief’s Private Office. That was before he knew her, of course.
In the city and the Palace things stabilised. Week on week the couriers reached further. Cliopher noted that the time distortion seemed to be settling along the routes they travelled, as though exchanging news and mapping the world was somehow knitting back together a sense of presence. Princess Indrogran took this theory to the Ouranatha, the most senior of the magicians of the Empire-that-was. The Ouranatha advised the bureaucracy not to think too much about time, for fear of making things worse, but they also asked to be added to the circulation list for the couriers’ reports.
And then - after a hundred years - the Emperor awoke. The city celebrated.
And, at last, Cliopher Mdang came to the end of himself. There was nothing further that he could do in the Palace that the Minister in Chief's office could not do for her without him. Princess Indrogan was shaking up the Private Office, restructuring the government to support the Emperor in his new role as Lord Magus. The Ministries were being reformed. It seemed a natural moment to make a change.
The realm of good order, of consistent time, stretched a few hundred miles from Solaara in some directions, with gaps and exceptions where natural or magical features such as the Fens below the city hosted disorder closer to the Palace. Further away, all was chaos. The wall of storms still stretched around the Wide Seas. Circumnavigation had not been possible since the Fall. It had been a hundred years in Solaara; for the first time, Cliopher allowed himself to wonder how long it might have been for his family in Gorjo City.
He had, at long last, told Princess Indrogan that someone else could collate her reports. He withstood her anger, accepted that this was likely the end of any hope he had of being part of reshaping the government in the new world. Her evident disappointment in him was harder to bear.
“I just want to understand, Cliopher,” she had said, “Once you have found your family, what do you intend to do for them in the Vangavaye-ve that you cannot do here?”
He had had no answer. He did not even know if they were there to be found. That was hardly the point, he had reflected. Astandalan aristocracy had odd notions of family.
He had stacked up his less movable belongings in the Palace store so that his rooms could be handed over to someone else. One of the privileges of service had long been rooms within the Palace walls. It seemed unlikely that he would return to claim his belongings, but the staff needed to support the governable third of Zunidh was far smaller than the ranked cohorts that upheld the glories of Astandalas.
He had left a note for Kiri, the most sensible of his junior secretaries, so that she could claim his belongings if he did not come back.
Many times on his journey Kip had been convinced he would vanish, another nameless casualty of the Fall. Captive, penniless, shipwrecked, lost, he had persevered to reach home.
He had found Gorjo City - the whole Vangavaye-ve - alive beyond hope, whole beyond any expectations - and they had found him broken.
What hurt most was that they did not understand and he could not explain, and so he was ashamed that his lack of explanations led to their confusion. He had thought over Princess Indrogan’s words, on his long journey, and had had some idea of saving the Vangavaye-ve, if it could be saved. There were tales he knew, the patterns and wisdom in the Lays, and there was his new-found expertise in scraping people together to pick up the pieces. There were his practical skills. He could have rebuilt a village, a city, a world after any disaster.
He had never thought about what he would do if it turned out that he was the one out of place. The one who needed help. He spoke to his family of the wreck of the world (as they had in the Palace) in tight, light, bare phrases. Jokes, even. As he had reported, daily, to the Princess. I experienced some difficulties in the Gray Mountains, to Princess Indrogan, would have been plain enough. Somehow he could not find the words to explain to his mother, to his great uncle Buru Tovo, that it meant I barely escaped with my life, many times over.
Home did not want him, not as he was now. His family wanted their old Kip back, undaunted, ready to move past his foolish dreams of serving the Emperor, full of the energy they once knew. Full of the fire.
They did not want a work in progress, a man who struggled to meet their eyes, a man who could not explain where he had come from nor where he was going. Ghilly, the woman he had once thought that he would marry, did not want him. There was no place for him in the Vangavaye-ve.
Perhaps that was because his long journey had stripped away the illusions. He had been daunted, shaken to his core, unmade by fear. He could barely meet their eyes.
He took to sitting on the docks, considering his future. He found a strange kind of relief in gossiping with the velioi sailors. They understood, when he gave them news of Nijan, what that meant for his travels. And then, suddenly, the offer of a berth. He saw the respect in the captain’s eyes when she asked him to accompany the ship, to share his recent knowledge of the Wide Seas.
On the one hand, the endless awkward shuffling round the family circle, no foothold, no future. On the other, the chance to keep moving until he found something better. He still had the right to the robes and dignities of a fifth degree secretary; no-one could take that from him, at least. He could swallow his pride, he could ask Princess Indrogan to take him back. She would make him squirm (she had thought him a fool to leave) but he had endured many and disparate humiliations since he last received one of the Princess’s notorious critiques, and he had nowhere else to go.
He took very little. His city clothes hung loosely on his frame but would look more at home on board a Solaaran ship than his grass skirt. The doubtful best wishes of his family, and their disappointment in turn. A light folder of writing materials (the captain would want a written report of his travels to supplement her own). It was not, alas, a proper writing case. Many of his former colleagues from wealthier backgrounds had or inherited sturdy boxes with ingenious hidden pockets and soft leather fittings for inks and inkstones and sand and all the scribal paraphernalia. He had once thought that he would buy one when he reached the Upper Secretariat (he had once thought that he would reach the Upper Secretariat in his late thirties, reckoning on two to three years a grade, in his ignorance and pride).
He paid for his berth, as agreed, in navigation and reckoning. The weather grew fierce, once or twice, but the wall of storms was breaking, as though each ship that forced passage weakened its power. The tall ship scudded under a couple of small topsails across the long, steel-coloured breakers, cutting white foam from their peaks, under a tight-pressing steel-coloured sky. Sometimes the wind shifted gaps into the towering clouds and let low shafts of dirty yellow grey light through at the start or the end of the day.
Then, one evening, the skies cleared. The stars returned. The watch below came up, one after another, alerted by the change in the ship’s motion. Kip tasted the air, felt the shift in the wind, the direction of the waves. He consulted with the captain and her navigator over their maps and instruments, and then stood staring at the stars while she went to give orders and susurration of news passed between the sailors. We’ve made it. We’re here, on the other side of the storms. On course for the New Sea, to approach Solaara by way of Woodlark and the Azilint, to complete the first circumnavigation of Zunidh since the Fall.
He turned to congratulate the navigator, a pale-skinned man with features that suggested he hailed from Amboloyo, and saw him gasp and point. Up above them a golden viau flashed across the skies. Then another, and another.
Kip, again, came to the end of himself. He thought fiercely, as he shouldered his way back past the ship’s crew, that he should have expected this. He plunged down the hatch, almost falling, desperate to get away from their excited voices, from the laughter and exultation at the gleaming light show above.
All that long journey home he had learned and re-learned the lore of his people, singing the Lays that taught him the way. He had followed the ke’ea, the star paths where one sign followed another in sequence until the sun rose. But he had also been following something else, hadn’t he? His people located their islands, the homes of their heart, by the ke’e, the stars that anchored them. The fixed stars that would always without fail rise above that island at a certain time.
Kip had never had a ke’e. He had thought - he had imagined, once upon a time, that there was a bright future in the Ring with Ghilly by his side. But somehow that had not been enough, and she had known it was not enough for him and had told him so. And that was because his heart was divided, because there was another bright future that called to him, made up of his dreams to change the world, of his desire to take all his store of wisdom and insight and pour it out at the feet of the shining young Emperor.
His people had a saying, of those who sought something bright and fleeting and too far away. They said (his mother said) that he was chasing a viau, a light that dashed across the sky and vanished. Too fast and too far for mortals.
His berth was a crooked cabin curled in by the side of the ship, shared with the second lieutenant, airless and stinking of bilge water. He had grown accustomed to the smell and found the constrained horizon comforting. It felt like the right shape for his thoughts, the ship’s sides holding him in, the motion of the waves comforting as it bore him along.
Kip did not go back up to watch the viau fall, though he knew it for one of the most spectacular sights in the wide world of Zunidh. It would bring back too many memories. Basil and Dimiter, his cousins who had set out into the world with him, long lost. Ghilly and his other friends, Toucan and Bertie and Cora, who looked at him and saw - a ghost, a failure, a nobody. The gleaming figure of the Emperor, whose face in a small state portrait (serene, golden) had seemed to summon Kip, back in the days when the seat of government was Astandalas the Golden on the fabulously exotic Ysthar of the Magic. Kip had seen that shimmering man in person precisely once in all his time in the Service.
The future associated with Ghilly, that place in Gorjo City full of friends and family and laughter, that recognition as the tanà of his people - it had not been the ke’e he imagined. He had crossed the wide seas in a boat of his own hands’ making to find it and it was not there. Perhaps it was also a viau that he had been chasing. Perhaps that was why he felt so unreal in the Vangavaye-ve, why the spaces all seemed too large and the people too painfully distinct to look at.
The future associated with the Emperor was all he had left, though it was not (could not be) what he had once dreamed. If Princess Indrogan would take him back he could keep - pulling things together - working to make some small part of the machinery of government function for the whole of the wide world. It was a useful vision, he told himself, of honourable service. Perhaps one day he would get another chance to see the Sun-on-Earth, the light slanting through the clouds of the taboos, and the tangle of courtiers, and the foolishness of senior officials.
Over the creak of timbers he could still hear voices crying out in wonder at the heavens. Kip turned his face to the wooden wall that kept out the waves and waited for sleep.
It was a long time coming.