July 26, 2016

PodCastle 426: Sweeter than Lead

* Author : Benjamin C. Kinney

* Narrator : Jen R. Albert

* Host : Graeme Dunlop

* Audio Producer : Peter Wood

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PodCastle 426: Sweeter than Lead is a PodCastle original.

Rated PG

Sweeter than Lead

by Benjamin C. Kinney

I stood atop the wall and stared at the shifting black towers of the Nameless City, as if this time I might spot the shadows of its bygone masters. I flexed my toes against the rampart’s top, the basalt as cold and solid as ever. Only the wall and my vigilance held the City in check, but one of those would not last. Two months remained until my mandated retirement: the end of my prophecies, the end of my power.

My successor Taline stood beside me, well-trained yet all too ignorant. She tipped her white-veiled head, as if eager to hear my thoughts. She managed a better guise of subservience than I had in the final weeks before my investiture, but my predecessor Anahit had given me far less reason for courtesy.

Taline deserved to know about the City’s long-dead masters. Some unknown race had built the Nameless City and flourished in its char-black edifices and knotted timelines, until their inheritors built the wall and transformed metropolis into prison and tomb. That much, Taline knew; but for all the City’s empty halls and silent streets, its creators still held the power to threaten and tempt. I had considered a hundred possible lessons, a hundred tales I might tell her, but every explanation would conjure the same danger I wanted to forestall. Helplessness curdled in my stomach like sour milk. I would have to grow accustomed to futility.

Not yet. I still had two months until the autumn equinox. Two months on our little island of outpost, wall, and City. Two months to taste and wield the future.

I parted my veil, rocked forward, and drank deep of the City’s poison-sweet air, like wine rich with sugar-of-lead.

The woman wears a jeweled dress, an arkhaluk of purple and cobalt. She sprawls unmoving on a floor of mahogany and rust-stained rugs, beneath tower windows rattling in a leaf-strewn wind. The knife in her chest bears a ribbon embroidered with golden stars.

I rocked back behind the boundary, and mortal air filled my lungs like cold ash. The vision’s immediacy lingered in my mind: simple, less violent than many, easily interpreted and forestalled. Purple and cobalt for our Empress, and the golden-starred banner of Kilhima province, conquered twelve years past.

I lowered my veil. “Order the soldiers to round up anyone in our outpost who hails from Kilhima. I will have questions for them. Then write to the Empress. Ask her to reassign any Sovereign Guard members who have ties to Kilhima, and to keep any ambassadors outside the capital.”

“Of course, High Seer Yeva.” She turned away with a rustle of cotton robes, but I gestured for her to wait. She halted. The Empress would follow my advice with equal obedience. Seers ordered, advised, and suggested, but we could never explain, not without transforming the possible into the irrevocable. To describe one of our visions would pull that future out of the shifting timelines of the Nameless City, into our fixed and causal world.

I had spent thirty years without explaining my choices, and never in all that time had I so ached to share a revelation. “Do you think the Nameless City wants something?”

A seagull’s caw rose from the narrow strip of shore between wall and ocean. Taline said,

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