The endless sweep of jagged glacier unfurled below the autohawk, as sharp and shining as fishscale. The autohawk needed no guidance, but Zezi preferred to guide it ximself, xis piloting as swift and sure as xis thunderscourge. In the breast pocket of xis robe sat the moirai engine’s prophecy:
At Tamre xe finds four:
Fugitive, heretic, killer, saint
At Tamre
At the spire of Tamre
The autohawk fled over the ice of that remote world, and there, in the distance, rose a needle running from the horizon up to heaven, iridescent in this bluish sun: the spire of Tamre.
The autohawk nestled in its berth at the quay, four dozen furlongs up the needle, wings swept up, beak tucked down. Zezi opened the hatch and stepped out. There were perhaps threescore men in the bay, chiefly neut, as was Zezi, though some sexed male or female. But of all the bay’s inhabitants, only four were standing expectant at the bottom of the gangway. Only four had received a matching prophecy.
Zezi descended to the deck. Xis heavy dun cloak hung straight and smooth despite the intermittent frigid blasts of wind. The long sweep of enamel gangway gave xim plenty of time to regard xis four-man welcoming committee, but Zezi had never needed more than an instant to take the measure of anyone.
At the bottom of the ramp xe bowed, and the four bowed back, some swifter than others.
Xe spoke first: an introduction. “I am Zezi, a phalangite.”
The four responded with raised eyebrows and subtle blanching. Their prophecies had clearly made no mention of Zezi’s profession. Members of the Hegemonate’s elite order of wandering warriors were rare indeed, and Zezi’s unadorned cloak had concealed xis uniform. It is one thing to meet a stranger at the orders of moirai, of prophecy. How much more frightening when that stranger is a phalangite, sworn killer in the name of the Hegemonate’s justice. Fear stalked the men.
The man on the left recovered first and laid an arm across the breast of her scholar’s robe. “Aunaya, a scholar.”
This would be the heretic. Heretics were always scholars; scholars quite often heretics. Zezi would not enjoy killing her. But she would not be the first heretic xe had killed, and xe would not hesitate.
Beside Aunaya stood a man in a laborer’s tunic. “Parl,” xe said, giving no profession. Probably the fugitive.
Next, the man in a cloak of kermes vermillion spoke, giving the name “Qet Estasazi.” This one gave no profession either, but the cloak was a dead giveaway. A martial initiate, a soldier-assassin. Thus, the killer of Zezi’s prophecy.
The last of the four was the most beautiful man Zezi had seen in many years. He extended a hand, and Zezi met his fingertips. “I am Talin.”
“Thank you for meeting me,” said Zezi, to Talin, who was, perhaps, a saint. Or something else.
Zezi took the prophecy out of xis breast pocket, xis thumbs running over the enamel of the tile, the acid-scored characters of the words, and showed it to the men, face down. They in turn showed xim their prophecies, face up. Zezi read each of the other four tiles swiftly. None of them were surprising; each of the four’s tiles wrote of a stranger who would come to Tamre, and how each of the four men should meet xim. There were, as always, minor variations in the prophecies, in the working of moirai.
“Good,” said Zezi. “We’ll do this in a civilized fashion: one at a time. Take me to a salon with private rooms.” Zezi’s was the mother prophecy, which made xim the senior in this social circumstance. And as a phalangite, xe was accustomed to command, and having xis commands obeyed.
“This way,” said Qet, the soldier, the killer.
Some sensible span of time later, in a salon not far from the quay, only thirty or forty stories higher, Zezi, the phalangite, and Scholar Aunaya sat facing each other, across a table of lacquered whalebone. The walls of their private room decorated with silk drapeworks depicting the moons of the throneworld Primaq, the coursing of the gandr, the ascension of the Hegemon.
Zezi had paid for Aunaya’s goblet of shedeh: pomegranate wine, fine and strong, the color of old blood. She toasted xim and sipped, sighing elegantly with gratification. Zezi toasted back, even though xe had only a simple earthenware cup of vinegary posca. The phalangites obey many abstinences.
“Tell me of your work,” Zezi said.
Aunaya traced her finger on the condensation her glass left on the table, over the Seven Fortunate Patterns inlaid repeating around the edge. “What do you know of astrometry?”
Zezi thought of long-forgotten gymnasium classes, of marked-down examinations, of dozed-over reports.
“Nothing,” xe said.
“That’s fine,” said Aunaya. Indeed, she visibly warmed to this, smiling gently. A scholar who liked to teach, then. A rare gift indeed, in Zezi’s experience.
“I study cosmoaugury, the influence of the large-scale structure of the universe on moirai. There are over thirty myriad extragalactic objects of significance, forming one hundred and forty-seven known major signs and over two million minor signs, all of which exert influence on the events of our galaxy. Think of it as an enormous zodiac.”
Zezi nodded attentively. In truth xe followed very little of Aunaya’s description, save for the crucial word: moirai. The Hegemonate punished many heresies; but all of the major ones pertained to moirai. To moirai and to tyche: to fate and chance. Civilization stood on the moirai engines and their infallible prophecies; and the heretics of tyche, of chaos, struck at that very foundation. Little wonder Zezi was sworn to kill them.
“Tamre sits at the edge of Sparrow Path, our galaxy. From the spire we can make exceedingly precise measurements of the extragalactic objects and extrapolate the changing essences of the signs. This work, as you can imagine, has countless theoretical and practical applications.”
Zezi took a sip of posca, pushed the cup forward. Xe carefully feigned an attitude of shared secrets, hoping to lure xis quarry.
“Out here at the edge of things . . . discovering new intricacies, every day . . . it must make you wonder about the moirai. About—” xis voice dropped to a whisper “—luck.”
Scholar Aunaya leaned very slowly back in her chair and eventually produced another smile, this one more complicated. “You’re wondering if I am a heretic.”
A moment of silence; a rickety bridge of etiquette across the chasm of menace.
And then Zezi laughed. “Indeed. You’ve found me out. It seems I have little skill at subterfuge.”
“I am happy to reassure you. Because of the sensitive nature of our work, all we cosmoaugurs here at the Spire go under the psych sieve every fortnight.”
By Deu, thought Zezi. The sieve, every two weeks? The phalangites obey many abstinences, observe many mortifications—but still, this seemed gratuitous. The sieve was a most efficacious implement in weeding out heresy; but Zezi had undergone it just once, before xis vows, and xe would not care to do so again.
Aunaya continued: “My last examination was, oh, six days ago. Would the phalangite care to review the results?”
Zezi shook xis head. “No, of course that won’t be necessary.”
“Thank you.” Aunaya gave a little bow, lifted her shedeh. The cut crystal of the glassware shattered the crimson liquid within, casting shifting, blood-red lights and shadows across the walls. Zezi drank in silence, thinking of xis prophecy.
Evidently Aunaya was thinking of the same matter.
“I suppose your prophecy told you one of us was a heretic?” she asked.
Zezi nodded.
“May I see it?”
Xe considered for a moment. It would mean surrendering the element of surprise. But this was a mission of prophecy; xe was in fate’s hands, now.
Zezi laid the tile face up on the tabletop and slid it over to Aunaya.
“Thank you,” she said, absentmindedly, bending over to peer at the prophecy, reading it closely.
“Ah.”
Her finger landed on a certain character. “The fugitive, that’s me. I fled Primaq; I suppose I am still running. I am the fugitive.”
Zezi’s left hand was on the hilt of xis thunderscourge at once, xis thumb caressing the activator stud.
“From what crime are you fleeing justice?”
“I am not a fugitive from justice, but from an arranged match.”
Zezi’s hand left the weapon’s hilt. “A marriage?”
“Kismesis, actually. To a rather important child of a splendid house; the match would have guaranteed my admission to the best schools and my eventual ascension to the Collegium. But the match was not a true match and never could have been. I could not persuade my paterfamilias otherwise, and so I fled. I came here, to Tamre. And do you know, I like it better here? People may lie, but stars never do.”
“A remarkably orthodox opinion.”
Aunaya showed her third and final and most amused smile of all.
“I told you I was no heretic.”
Now Zezi stood outside of the second private room in the salon. This one contained Parl, the laborer. Zezi breathed deeply, working through the second meditation of the empty wheel, releasing all preconceptions. It had been a mistake to assume the scholar was the heretic; but the prophecy had still held true: the scholar was the fugitive. The laborer was therefore not the fugitive. The future was open. All facts were possible; all paths were bathed in light. Moirai would guide.
Once Zezi was prepared, xe knocked once and slid open the second room’s door.
Same tapestries, same furniture. Spread across the same table was Parl, face down.
A dagger in xis back.
Zezi closed the distance to the body swiftly, tenderly turned it over. There was no pulse and Parl’s lips did not fog Zezi’s mirror. Xe was dead.
Zezi was no psychopomp by calling or by profession, but the phalangites receive battlefield medical training, so Zezi knew what to do. Xe put two fingers of xis right hand up in the corpse’s armpit, on the axillary pneuma meridian, and with xis left hand xe palpated the deceased’s liver. Then Zezi closed xis eyes, breathed out, and began the meditation cycle of silence.
At first there was a certain sort of inner quiet. Then, the sounds of the salon grew louder; Zezi could hear the swish of robes, the clink of glasses, the tumbling of poured drinks in other rooms. Xe could hear the groaning of the spire’s massive generators countless furlongs below, and the howl of the wind outside. Next, all these sounds underwent a geometrical transformation and laid themselves out, not one on top of each other, but side by side as mathematical curves of sound. This was the third meditation.
Zezi took another breath, began the fourth meditation, and opened xis inner ear.
All mundane, corporeal sounds flattened away to nothing. Zezi became aware of the music of the spheres. This close to the edge of the galaxy, the celestial harmonies were quieter and more rarefied than they were on a core world such as Primaq.
Zezi took a moment to adjust to this new soundscape; the ethereal otonality of the galactic disk; the echoing microbaroms of the intergalactic void. And once Zezi had adjusted to the cosmic background, it was possible to seek out the subtle remaining vibrations still buzzing through xis hands and fingertips and hear the sound of dead Parl’s soul, so Zezi could help guide it free of its corpse to reunite with the universe.
A pregnant silence—and—there it was—
Zezi’s breath caught in xis throat. Xe wept, hot bitter tears.
Parl’s soul was beautiful; it was without flaw.
Some indecent span of time later, Talin burst through the door to find Zezi still cradling Parl’s cold corpse. The soul had sublimated, but Zezi still knelt, still wept. It was the first time in xis life that xe had attended the death of a saint.
“Gods!” Talin said, a mild oath. “Is xe dead as well?”
That last remark roused Zezi from xis ecstatic contemplation of the beauty of Parl’s departed soul.
“As well?” Zezi asked, voice half choked by hot tears.
“The assassin in the red cloak—Qet, I think xis name was? Xe is dead too!”
Zezi turned from xis private pieta, and saw that Talin was covered in blood. He was, if anything, even more beautiful for it. But Zezi had xis training, and spoke not as a lover but as a phalangite: “Tell me exactly what happened.”
Talin nodded. “I was waiting for my audience with you when the assassin came to my door. Xe said that one of the tapestries in xis room had fallen down, and could I help pin it back up? But when I entered xis room, xe attacked me. I overcame and slew xim with xis own dagger, but only barely! Xe must have slain the laborer first!”
Talin’s voice was deep, musical and utterly sincere. The arms with which he displayed the captured dagger to Zezi were perfectly formed. His eyes were piercing blue, like the portrait of a martyr. Zezi desired him very much, and in another life xe might have given ximself to him.
But the phalangites obey many abstinences.
“Is that in truth what occurred?” Zezi asked.
“I swear it!” said Talin.
Yet many thoughts were moving within Zezi, slotting into place in xis mind like oracle balls in a moirai engine, like prophecy tiles in their slot.
Zezi stood, turning xis right shoulder toward Talin. In the shadow of xis cloak, xis left hand found the handle of xis thunderscourge, and silently drew it from its holster.
“No, you lie,” said Zezi the phalangite. “For if Qet the soldier-assassin wanted you dead, xe would have slain you without difficulty, unless you are much more skilled in pankration than you seem. But if you are wise in the ways of combat, you would never have been deceived by such a foolish stratagem to lure you to xis room. And the twin daggers of the martial initiates are sacred; a soldier-assassin such as Qet Estasazi would never abandon one in the body of a victim. But I found one buried in Parl’s back.”
Throughout Zezi’s accusation, Talin’s face changed. His beauty remained impeccable but shifted into a cruel and warlike aspect. Yet he did not speak.
“So you lied. You are the killer of both these men, and hoped to deceive me, and perhaps to kill me as well.”
Talin laughed. “Such perspicacity!” He reached into his purse and drew out a prophecy tile, and he flung it into the air, flipping so that it would land on the table behind Zezi. Zezi’s eyes followed the tumbling tile—
Talin struck. With a flip of his wrist the stolen dagger expanded into a thin, flexible leafblade sword, aimed at Zezi’s heart. But Zezi had already moved, bending backward like a reed in the flood until the fingers of xis right hand brushed the floor, and with the left xe drew and triggered xis thunderscourge.
Three dozen thin, flexible wires sprouted from the scourge’s hilt, clustered together into a single tail. Then they sprung apart, surging with energy, each wire an individual lightning bolt. Zezi cracked the scourge and in that private dining room there came the crash of thunder.
Talin, darting with blinding speed, dodged left, sliced right—and then the questing wires of Zezi’s scourge struck him. Talin crashed to the floor, lay there crumpled, askew.
Zezi knelt beside the wounded killer, two fingers in the armpit, and xe kept that man alive.
“You are the killer my prophecy gave,” Zezi said. “But was Qet the heretic?”
Talin coughed. A little blood was apparent in the corner of his mouth. He did not speak.
“Was Qet, the assassin, was xe the heretic! Answer me!”
“Qet—” a rattling inhalation. A wet and phlegmy exhalation. “—was nothing.”
“How can that be? My moirai tile said I was to meet four at Tamre, and four you were!”
“Qet was nothing. Moirai only chose three. I forged Qet’s tile. I slipped it into the engine.”
Zezi spat on the dying man. “To forge a prophecy—that’s blasphemous!”
“It was moirai’s idea, not mine,” said Talin, and he died with a smile.
Zezi bent over the corpse and freed its soul. Talin was a backstabber and a blasphemer, but very few are so abased that they do not deserve this final rite. Talin’s soul was utterly ordinary, and it presented little resistance to leaving his beautiful body and rejoining the celestial orchestra.
Then Zezi went to the table and found the moirai tile that Talin had thrown there, Talin’s true fate. It read:
He counterfeits soldier’s tile
Strikes three, three die
When the stranger comes to Tamre
To the spire at Tamre
Zezi held the tile in xis hand, considering. Then xe went to the next room.
Sure enough, it held Qet the soldier’s corpse. Zezi freed the soul, then searched the body until xe found the counterfeit fate tile. This time xe examined it much more closely than xis cursory glance at the autohawk quay, peering into the details. The forgery was skillful, but Zezi was an expert in both moirai and crime, and xe could observe the telltale signs of counterfeit fate. Talin’s deathbed confession had been true.
Qet Estasazi had died a fateless man.
Zezi held two fate tiles in xis hands, one false, one true, weighing them. Xis destiny sat against xis own breast.
Zezi’s prophecy had promised four men at Tamre, and xe had met four men: the fugitive, the saint, the killer—and one fateless.
So Zezi’s prophecy was almost complete—but not yet. All that was still required was a heretic.
And there was only one possible heretic left: Zezi ximself.
All that moirai required was for one tired and heartsore phalangite to turn from the path.
And in that instant Zezi was sorely tempted.
Zezi had a heart, sick of justice’s violent demands. Xe had a whip, to scourge the true believers. Xe had a hawk, to flee from pursuit. And xe had a mind, ready for rebellion, ready to throw off the shackles of moirai, of fate. Ready to seize the reins of chance and luck. Ready to defy the heavens.
Zezi the Phalangite would be a fearsome heretic. It was, after all, xis fate.
Zezi cried out, a low and desperate moan, as the harsh demands of the prophecy began to tear xis soul in two—and then, suddenly, like an ice shelf snapping under the strain, a smile broke out across Zezi’s face.
After all, there were many rebellions available.
For if moirai demanded a heretic, Zezi could still refuse it.
To accept orthodoxy would, after all, disprove the prophecy. Only a true heretic—deep in the soul—would dare take such a bold step.
But Zezi knew: it was a free universe.
And sure enough, some sensible span of time later, an autohawk lifted from its berth and took wing over the endless ice of Tamre, bound once again for Primaq, the crown jewel of the Hegemonate. In xis pilot’s seat sat Zezi, prophetic tile hidden in a secret pocket. Xe was the phalangite who defied fate by accepting it; who by following orthodoxy perpetrated secret heresy; who with free will subsumed ximself to destiny.
Outside the cockpit, jeweled stars whirled through paths of fate, inscribing fate into the lives of mortals, and even this was the will of moirai, as the stranger departed the spire of Tamre.
Louis Evans would be the heretic. Heretics are always writers; writers quite often heretics. His work has appeared previously in Translunar Travelers Lounge, as well as Vice, F&SF, Nature: Futures, and many more. He’s on Mastodon at @louisevans@wandering.shop and online at evanslouis.com.
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