Chapter 83. Hands On

Chapter 83. Hands On

Saya

She silently walked behind the two domineering figures, clutching her stump close and still shaken from what had happened in the carding hall just a few moments prior.

Her day started as many other days before — she awkwardly ate her morning meal and set off to work without attracting too much attention to herself. Her meals were plain. Those were easier to eat with one hand and she had heard a rumour that Meila, the gardener of the estate, was getting a lot of compost. By now, everyone knew that meant the kitchen would be getting a new delicacy. And those delicacies weren’t given away for free.

Saya wasn’t stupid — she knew that even with daily wages it would take her decades to save enough silver to pay for her freedom, and then another half a year as an arm follower to earn that freedom. What she could do was to buy the new fruit or herb for a handful of silver cuts and then immediately sell it to a guest wermage for two or even three handfuls. For that, Saya needed to have that handful ready. A hard task when two hags, who were working on the carding machine, decided to ‘help’ her. Claiming most of her silver as pay.

Until the medicine woman showed up in the middle of the day and kicked them out to wool washing paths for theft. She also forced them to return everything they took with an additional tenth on top and give all that back to her.

And then she turned around to Saya and beckoned her to follow. She said that her new hand was ready...

“That was a very weak punishment for a theft, Yeva,” Domina said. “Are you unable to discipline your servants?”

Saya gripped her tunic and tried to keep up so that she could hear her mistress’s reply without distracting them by being too close or straying too far behind. Domina spoke the truth and those hags deserved a lot more than what they got. But the mistress was the one who kept her when she lost her hand so she would never dare to speak against her.

The medicine woman shook her head. “Why people steal, my Domina?”

The red tail of the powerful wermaje swished back and forth. “Are we talking about philosophy now?”

“Economics, I would say. It comes down to risk and reward. Most of the time, but I am not talking about individual people and groups as a whole.”

“Truly? And mere greed has nothing to do with it?”

“It does, but it is just a small part of those scales. I would say it affects how risk-averse that person is; how large of a reward there needs to be to offset the weight of the risk. There are many other variables present, specifically the risk and the reward themselves as they are perceived by the person.”

“Make an explanation vague and broad enough, Yeva, and you can explain the whole world with a single word. That does not make it useful.” Domina glanced back at Saya. “You are speaking as if the reward is large enough, all your servants would do nothing but steal.”

“I would never-” She slapped her mouth, noticing both Ladies turning toward her. Domina gestured for her to continue. “I would never dare to steal from you, mistress!”

The medicine woman shook her head. “When I speak of risk and reward, I do not mean only tangible things like gold and silver. Or the hands of thieves being chopped off. Intangible things also tip the decision scales. Things like honour and morals, status in society and pride. They all matter too. A well-respected wermage might not fear having their hand or finger getting cut off, but they do have respect to lose, for example.”

Saya hung her head and said nothing. Her mistress was enormously generous but there were plenty of wer and wermajes who stole and took all they wanted and suffered no punishments for it. Slaves spoke to each other in the evenings; they shared tales of life in Emanai and Yusuf. Mentions of thievery amongst the ‘honourable’ were common and surprised no one.

“Then this event should’ve told you that your servants aren’t as honourable as you think they are.” Domina continued her walk.

“Oh, I expected something like this to happen by now. Just as I expect more incidents in the future. All of them will be caught and punished. This is why I started this discussion with a very broad term — it is there to remind us that the problem at hand is more than simple.

“While I agree that the risk should be larger than the reward it brings when it comes to theft, excessive and cruel punishments suffer from diminishing returns as well as unintended consequences. No matter how many arms and legs I threaten to rip off, the hungry urchin on the street will still steal a loaf of bread if that means they won’t die from hunger. I am aware that the Manors of Emanai are obligated to distribute some bread among the poor, but the system is far from perfect. There is the often unspoken question of status. While I can whip a slave or even a freedmurk for an act of thievery, we both know that the Matriarch of Kiymetl wouldn’t look kindly on me if I dared to tan the hides of her granddaughters.”

Domina shook her head. “So you chose the punishment that you can equally give to servants and guests alike. While it sounds honourable and just, you don’t have the time to chase thieves around.”

“You are correct — I do not.” The medicine glanced at Saya and gestured for her to enter the usually empty healer’s building. “I will be sending Viter to deal with any further incidents. Not to investigate but to deliver my verdicts outright. And that leads us to the last group of would-be criminals that aren’t affected by the severity of the punishment. You see, many break the law not because they consider the punishment to be too light, but because they do not expect to be caught at all! They do it in darkness when no one is around, or by intimidating their victims and onlookers to stay silent. They hide their tracks so no one can discover their identity afterwards. To stop those, I can’t rely on public displays of torture and threats of further violence — I need to make it obvious that it is simply futile to try.”

The noble wermaje entered the room as well, chuckling. “Considering your light punishments, that is something they are undoubtedly going to find out soon enough. Quite devious.”

“I prefer to slap a handful of thieves and miscreants now, rather than deal with more heinous crimes later. Balancing such scales is a very delicate process and results take time to show themselves, but it is not impossible if one is aware of what influences them and how. Set them right and, with time, they will stay in balance by themselves.”

The place was frightfully empty and clean, just as she remembered it the last time she was here, but now there was a large animal bladder lying on one of the tables. And inside...

“Is it worth it? By your own words, you are limited to this estate.”

“The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, my Domina. The second best time is now. I would’ve started on this project sooner if I had the time available. I still lack the time, but the incoming apprentices from Kiymetl and Enoch forced my hand in this matter. I might be limited, but Erf exists.”

“Ah, I see. And how far can he reach?”

“His kind was bred for such tasks. Whether the ship is large or small, the Navigator must be able to maintain peace and harmony for as long as it is necessary. What is this estate if not a ship travelling through turbulent Emanai waters.”

Saya was barely listening to the two Ladies speaking on topics above her status. A hand was floating inside that animal bladder. Her hand. Not a metal hook or claw some wealthy freedmurks had so that they could continue their craft. Not a wooden carving that some mistresses gifted to their maimed Companion slaves. Her hand.

Not the mangled lump of skin, bone, and sinew she had to leave in this room the last time she was here. Her healthy hand. Saya didn’t see the scars but she would never forget that mole at the base of her thumb. She spent her entire life looking at that hand and now that she saw it again, she knew.

It was her hand.

“I am still curious about his reach. I don’t remember him being particularly direct about this topic.”

“Because such a question is irrelevant to a Navigator. You ask how large — the answer is ‘yes’. Give him a ‘ship’ and he will command it. That is his calling, even if he prefers one-person dinghies.”

Domina hummed. “I will consider your words in private as we have other matters at hand. Namely the hand of your servant.”

Saya immediately twisted toward the medicine woman, waiting for her next command.

Yeva nodded. “Of course. Saya, give me your arm.”

Her hands grasped Saya’s healed stump and quickly wiped it with a wet towel. It smelled strange but not in a bad way. She guessed that was how real alchemical concoctions smelled like. But the smell only reminded her of what was about to happen.

“Uhm, do you want me to bite a towel?” She glanced at Domina watching the healer at work. “I’ve brought my own so I won’t dirty yours.”

The medicine woman shook her head without stopping her work. “I am not a barbarian healer, Saya. Speak up if you feel pain or even discomfort.” Without waiting for her to respond, Yeva pulled the bladder closer and swiftly inserted her arm inside with a wet sound. The bladder was surprisingly warm inside. “Feel free to look away or close your eyes, but keep your arm inside for the procedure.”

Saya glanced down and wished that she hadn’t. The bladder was full of hideous crawlies that were quick to swarm around her hand! She whimpered and tried to yank her arm out, only to realise how strong the medicine woman was. “They are eating me alive!”

“They are preparing to sew both parts together without causing you any pain, Saya. Or would you prefer the bite of a rusted saw followed by the stab of a thick needle?”

She closed her eyes as her stomach lurched into her throat. Blood leeches used by other doctors were never this numerous and she only saw this many crawlies around something awfully rotten and very long dead. Neither of those things filled her heart with hope. It was better to simply not look and rely on the medicine woman.

“How much can those tiny weavers replace?” Domina asked.

“By themselves? Very little, which is why I had the hand regrown in advance. Their main and most important task is to join the parts together. A very daunting task too — there are myriad connections that link her hand to the rest of her body. Each one needs to be connected exactly right so that there are no issues with the hand’s movements. What they are doing right now is more impressive than a thousand weavers creating a thousand enormous farshat carpets only to lay them across the streets of Samat and have all of them create a single picture when they are put together. Stop squirming, Saya, I already told you that the procedure won’t cost you or any other servants of this estate a single copper cut.”

“T-thank you, mistress.”

“Regrown... tell me, Yeva, would you be able to replace a hand that was missing entirely?”

The medicine woman shrugged without letting Saya go. “That is what I did. Like most living beings, murks are designed to grow from a tiny speck into a complex body. All I had to do was use that living urge and coach it to work only on the hand itself.”

“It’s not mine? But-”

“The Rurkha shaman saw my lashes for a single heartbeat. As far as my identity goes, they think I was one of the spies that Bragge kept inside your arms.” I nodded at Albin who had summoned a couch for himself already. “Your brother has the missive I took from the body of the real whisper.”

Her knuckles cracked when I mentioned the spy. “Albin?”

“Here.”

She caught the missive and cast a quick glance my way. A near-silent pop and I was suddenly made aware that another couch was right behind me. By the time I tested its materiality with my ass, she was busy reading the scrolls. So she couldn’t stop time within the stopped time, but she was a very quick reader in general.

“So,” Sophia sighed and vanished the parchment out of existence, “you’ve kept Bragge at least partially blind to what is happening inside my arms while sowing discord amongst his troops in the process. All within the first period of the night. Teacher of math, my tail.”

“It wasn’t a mere period of the night. I’ve been observing his forces for days, even when I didn’t even know they were his in the first place, waiting for an opportune time to strike and cause as much damage as possible. This evening and the first third of the night were just the culmination of those events.” I shook my head and smiled slightly. “You could say, it was almost like a mathematical proof — I meandered around a problem, slowly developing each aspect of it until they suddenly assembled into something greater right before my eyes. And that is when I pounced on it.

“Trymr also spoke of some artefacts that weren’t Gifts. He said that Bragge’s sudden growth in status was caused by one such artefact. And he is looking for more.”

The twins stared at each other for a while.

“He was full of shit.” Sophia looked away. “Bragge is powerful because he is of the Archomilea blood, not because he found some trinket. He could have been a Great Lord a century ago if he wanted to. What else did Trymr tell you?”

“I used my lash to get close to him. Told him it was a new arusak of the Kishava that Bragge needed to see. Trymr was so certain that it was one of those artefacts that gave Bragge his power that he chose to claim it for himself and get rid of me as a witness of his crime to the Great Lord. Lies or not, Trymr believed them.”

“There is a place...”

“Albin, now is not the time.”

The Mephistopheles stretched on the couch. During the short conversation with his sister, he had shed his ‘Azhar Mesud, the Manipular of Ulastai’ shape and transformed back to “Albin Chasya, the Speaker of Shebet’. “What? He would learn about it eventually. Especially with his flyer buzzing back and forth. I wouldn’t have given him more than a century to spot something unusual before and I wouldn’t give him more than a decade after this night alone. I wouldn’t be surprised if he would know of it by the end of this campaign. Do you want him to learn about it from Bragge or from you?”

Her tail thundered across the floor. “Very well, brother, his accomplishments tonight are both praiseworthy enough and will attract Bragge’s attention anyway. No matter how well you hid yourself, Erf, he will notice that one of his chieftains is no more. And he will ask questions and seek answers.”

She summoned a large map and quickly traced our path with her finger. Compared to other land charts of Emanai, this one looked like the maps I was familiar with. Rather than straight roads with carefully marked travel times, lengths, and connections, I could see the approximate areas of mountains, plains, and the Forest. The map didn’t pull any punches when it came to the size of both ‘countries’. While my rough estimates put Emanai below one million square kilometres, Barsashahr steppes were five times larger at the very least. I wasn’t surprised — nomadic tribes needed a lot more land to sustain themselves when compared to settled societies, and the horde that was besieging Bayan Gol had to come from somewhere. Emanai itself wasn’t in a bad position either — apart from the mining city, there were no direct ‘borders’ between the two countries. The Babr Plateau itself was wide enough even for Hannibal to reconsider crossing it, leaving a heavily Forested gap in the north for footed and mounted forces to march through.

Sophia’s finger slid east from Uureg, crossed the Border Wall, then slowly curved around the northern edges of Babr Plateau heading deeper east and eventually south-east into the continent until it stopped at the red dot of ‘Bayan Gol’. The secluded city was clearly outside of the Forest zone and on the plain that would continue forever to the east. If Barsashahr saw all that land as theirs, I could see why they called us thieves. “We are here.”

Her finger jumped across the entire map and stopped at the drawing of what looked like a very angry patch of Forest on the other side of the steppe. “And this area is the Scar. The place of an ancient battle, a powerful curse lashed out by the Gods, or something else entirely — no one knows for certain and barbarians hold the area under their control. What is known, however, is that it is swarming with Creatures and the air inside is insidiously foul. To murks and wermages alike. Occasionally, someone stupid enough to go in comes out with a trinket or two. Pieces of scrap, rusted tools and the like... all of them dead to Flow. If Trymr was so adamant that whatever Bragge got is an actual Flow-less artefact, it was taken from there.”

I scratched my head; the Scar wasn’t Lif or anything that broke off during the atmospheric entry. Wrong trajectory and place. There were many possibilities of what else that could be, but this was Tana. The planet with monster-ridden coral-shaped Forests and flying castles that punched portals in the sky as their means of transportation. Considering the actual presence of local gods, it may as well be a place of an ancient battle. Or Catriona having a sneeze-fest during the ‘Dark Age of Flu’. “Is that the only place on Tana like that? Do you have one of those trinkets for me to take a look?”

“Do I look like a child that picks up garbage just because it stinks funny?” Sophia halted her incredulous tirade, sighed, and shook her head. “The trinkets themselves bear no real import, Erf. There are many places on Tana that are low or devoid of Flow without any reason or cause. If there are or were murk settlements in those areas — there will be similar trinkets and scraps. What makes the Scar different is that it is a deadly place to be in and not just some spot in the middle of nowhere where the blood grass refuses to grow.”

“The place is mysterious, Erf,” Albin joined in. “And Bragge is a trickster. It is possible that he is using the mystery of the Scar to distract others like Trymr and confuse his enemies. It is also possible that he actually found an artefact.”

“And that is why I said this wasn’t the time to talk about mysteries,” Sophia harrumphed. “Little could be discovered now, in this room.”

“I mean,” Albin gestured at me. “We now have two, maybe three, days of fast march on our hands while the enemy forces are confused and disorganised. We can push them now and they would need to step back or suffer greatly otherwise. Because we have the Spark-less murk with the listening abilities of a wind mage. Or a Barsashahr shaman. Erf, didn’t you say that the biggest challenge for you was digging through the stack of hay just to find that needle of import? Now that you know about the connection, the Scar is one of those needles. Use your flyer, of course — if that artefact actually exists, I don’t want Bragge to know that either of us are looking for it.”

I nodded. “Thank you for this lesson, Sophia, the knowledge about the Scar would narrow down the search quite significantly.”

Her tail swished as she dismissed the map. “Good. Perhaps you will continue to impress me, math tutor.”

Bragge Archomilea the Third

The hawk jumped off his paw and vanished into the sky. Immolating the missive into ash, he waved one of his chieftains closer.

The sheyda was quick to bow. “Great Lord.”

“What is the status of the siege, Rama?”

“The thieving dogs continue to dispel our earthen ramparts, thwarting our attempts to ride over their walls. But their supplies dwindle, while our horses gorge and fatten on the wheat from their granaries. I say that in thirty-” Rama glanced at him and quickly bowed again, “Twenty! In twenty suns, the city will be yours.”

Bragge hummed and twirled a small pouch on his neck. Casting a basic spell of silence, he pressed slightly on it and started counting. The pouch responded with a faint chime on the fifth heartbeat.

“How fitting,” he chuckled.

“My Lord?”

“Lift the siege. Prepare to move by tomorrow’s sun.”

His ger thrummed in loud cries.

“Great Lord!?”

“Please reconsider!”

“My Lord!” Rama didn’t know where to put his paws. “Your previous strike was swift and ruthless! The enemy didn’t even have time to move their grain into the city by the time our hooves were trampling their fields! Give us ten suns and we will bring you the heads of their General and their Domina.”

“That is what they know I will do...”

“Who?” Rama shook his head and started to plead again. “The warriors would-”

“The warriors would act as their Great Lord commands! I brought them riches before and I will bring them more. The plunder of the city will wait.”

“The warriors might,” The old shaman slowly approached him, using the heavily feathered Emanai oar as a walking stick, “But what will you tell your shamans? What vision did your spirit see?”

Bragge leaned in and stretched his paw out. They started to move and so would he. “What do you see?”

The hag picked up his paw, “I see the claws of a predator, lunging after the spry doe while leaving the fallen sheep unattended.”

He smirked and the fur on his paw burst into a cold blue flame. His claws grabbed the hag’s frozen arm. “And what do you see now?”

The ger grew silent. “Divine Raksh-” someone’s whisper was quickly shushed. One after another, all of them touched the ground under his feet with their foreheads.

“What does ‘your’ spirit tell you, shaman.”

Feathers shook on her walking oar but the old hag had enough strength and will to look him in the eyes. “It tells me of the Divine Will.”

“Then you know what to tell other shamans. My target isn’t in this city, but outside of it. Do not stand between me and my will.” He let her go and the flames immediately vanished.

“For my will be done.”