In the Beginning Was the Doodle (3)

I now understand why people get corrupted.

Some of them have no choice. Someone they love is threatened, and they bend for that person's sake. Those are victims of a twisted system, and I don't judge them.

But there is another kind, the kind that never notices. They start small. A small lie, a small shortcut, a choice so easy to dismiss that it barely feels like a choice at all. And then another. And then another.

I had lied to Rhenii's face four times in the first twenty minutes of knowing her.

I left her by the fire with a bowl of rations from the trucks and told her to eat and gather her strength. Then I walked up the coast to the cliff, because the mask was still at ninety-five percent and because I needed to be somewhere she couldn't see me.

I planted the hilt in the pocket. The teal whirlpool began to turn. I stood at the edge and looked out at the endless sea.

"Ori."

"Young master."

"You heard all of that back there."

"I did. You asked me not to interrupt. I did not."

"Thank you. And now I need you to be honest with me." I took a breath. "I'm a fraud."

"I do not follow."

"The Emerald Astros. Lamassu. 'I sensed my apprentice would be here.' I made all of it up, Ori. On the spot. I didn't sense anything. I didn't have an order. I named it after her eyes."

"You named the order," Ori said. "That is the prerogative of the Dux."

"That's not the point."

"I believe it is precisely the point. The Right of Dux contained no further guidance. You supplied it. I have recorded the Emerald Astros and the principle of Lamassu as doctrine."

"Doctrine. Ori, I invented it thirty seconds before I said it."

"And I learned of it thirty seconds after. From where I stand, it existed, and I simply did not know it yet." A pause. "I will add that I find the principle of Lamassu admirable. Protection of those who cannot protect themselves. It is a sound foundation."

I stared at the horizon. Somewhere in there was a joke about my own AI becoming a fan of my improv, but I couldn't find it.

"You know what the heroes in my old stories do?" I said. "The ones who wake up in a new world? They use people. The locals are stepping stones. They build a power base, gather a party, collect followers, and nobody asks whether any of it is honest. Some of them don't even notice. They just drift along until one day there's a cult of personality around them and they're standing at the center of it."

"Is that what you intend?"

"No! That's what I'm afraid of. That's how it starts. One girl, one lie, one made-up order. And she believed every word, Ori. She knelt."

"She did."

"She has nothing. No name, no family, no home. She's going to build her whole life on what I told her. How am I supposed to keep teaching her when the first lesson was a lie?"

Ori was quiet for a moment. The whirlpool hummed beneath the hilt.

"Young master, may I offer an observation?"

"Go ahead."

"Neither of us knows where we are. By your account, neither of us existed here a day ago. Whatever we are doing in this world, no one has done it before. We are breaking through new horizons." Another pause. "In that position, everything is invented at first. The order did not exist yesterday. Today it has a name, a principle, and a member. What it becomes is what you decide to make of it."

"And if I decide wrong?"

"Then you will decide again. But it is not a problem for Rhenii to embrace the Emerald Astros the way you choose to develop them. That is how every order begins, I would imagine. Someone says the words before they are true, and then works to make them true."

I didn't answer for a long time.

It wasn't absolution. A lie told on the way to the truth was still a lie. But it was something I could stand on, and right then, that was enough.

MASK: 100%.

I pulled the hilt from the ground and walked back down the coast.

I smelled it before I saw the shelter. Something warm and salty, with a sharp herb underneath that I didn't recognize.

Rhenii was crouched by the fire. She had found a dented pot in one of the trucks, set it on the coals, and filled it with water, rations, and a handful of green leaves she must have picked from the hillside. When she saw me, she stood up quickly and lowered her eyes.

"I made soup," she said. "For you, Master."

Ori translated it without inflection. But I had heard that word before, an hour ago. Only what my master decides to call me.

It was the same word.

"Rhenii," I said gently. "Don't call me that."

She looked up, uncertain. "My Duke, then?"

"Better. But that's not what I mean." I crouched by the fire, so that I was no longer standing over her. "You're not a slave anymore. You don't have to cook for me. You don't have to wait for me to decide things for you. You have a name now, and it's yours. As Rhenii, you get to make your own choices."

She stared at me as if I had said something in a language the mask couldn't translate.

"Yes, I'll train you," I went on. "That's what I promised. But outside of that, I'm not your owner. Dux Cebi is your ally. Do you understand?"

She was quiet for a while. Then she looked down at the pot, and back at me.

"Then I choose to make you soup," she said. "Because I want to."

I opened my mouth and found nothing to argue with.

"Okay," I said. "Then I'll eat it."

That left one small problem. I was wearing a mask.

"Ori," I muttered. "How do I eat?"

"Allow me."

Something clicked under my chin. The lower part of the mask folded back along hidden seams, plate by plate, until my mouth and jaw were bare to the air. It was so smooth that I wondered how many times Cebi had done this before. Then I remembered there had never been a before, and I decided not to think about it.

Rhenii handed me the bowl. I took a sip.

It was good. Salty and warm, with that sharp green herb underneath. After a day of graves and a night of storm, it was the best thing I had ever tasted, in any world.

I looked up to tell her so and found her staring at me.

Not at the mask. At my mouth. At my jaw. At my skin.

"You are not Surtaur," she said.

Surtaur. Her people. I filed the word away and felt a little ashamed that I had needed her to tell me.

I set the bowl down. I had lied to her four times in twenty minutes, and I had walked all the way up a cliff and back to decide that I didn't want to make it five.

"No," I said. "I'm not. I'm human. I come from a place very far from here."

She considered that, her eyes moving over the small part of my face she could see. I waited for the fear to come back.

It didn't. She nodded slowly, like someone adding a new word to a list.

"Human," she said. Then she leaned forward a little, and the caution in her face gave way to something brighter. "Are there more of you? More Emerald Astros?"

I didn't answer right away.

Because I knew the answer. I had written it.

"No," I said. "We're the only two left."

She went very still.

"There was a Dux before me," I said. "Her name was Ra."

And I told her.

I told her what I had written at sixteen, sitting on my bedroom floor with three notebooks open around me. I did so without noticing my legs crossing and my back going full erect as I excitedly retold my tale.

"Ra was a warrior with green skin, from a world far beyond this one. She claimed to be the last Dux in existence, and she found a young Cebi and took him as her apprentice. She taught him the blade and the stances, and how to stand his ground when everything in him wanted to run."

I had to be careful. Every sentence, I checked before it left my mouth. I didn't say I remembered her. I didn't describe her voice, because I had never heard it. I said what was written, and only that. In this world, apparently, that was the same as the truth. Ori remembered serving a Cebi I had never been. Maybe somewhere, Ra had been real too.

But somewhere around the middle, I stopped checking.

"Then came Qin Ather... He was a dark lord," I said, and I could hear my own voice changing, picking up speed and severity. "The worst of them. He wanted Ra's homeworld, and he wanted it badly enough to burn everything between him and it. Ra stood against him. And she..."

I stopped.

"She died," Rhenii said quietly.

"She died," I said. "At his hands. And her apprentice was the only one left to finish it."

Rhenii was leaning so far forward now that her hair had nearly fallen into the soup.

"Did he?"

"He did. He faced Qin Ather before the dark lord could take Ra's world, and he killed him." I caught myself gesturing with the spoon and set it down. "After that, he wandered the stars, looking for an apprentice of his own. He never found one. He never invoked the Right of Dux." I looked at her. "Not until yesterday."

The fire popped. Somewhere outside, the sea breathed in and out.

Rhenii sat back slowly. Her emerald eyes were wide, and for once I couldn't read everything in them at a glance. There was wonder there. But I saw her glance at my bare jaw again, and then at the mask above it, as if she was checking the story against the face.

"The apprentice," she said carefully. "Cebi. That is you."

"That's the name I carry," I said. It was the truest answer I had.

She looked at me a moment longer. Then something in her face settled, and she smiled. It was the first time I had seen her smile, and it changed her entire face.

"I always liked the old stories," she said. "The other slaves used to tell them at night, when the masters were asleep. Spirits, monsters, heroes from before. I listened to every one." She glanced toward the road, toward the place where the Synths had come out from behind the trucks. "I did not believe them. Now I think I should have."

She reached for the pot and refilled my bowl without asking. Then she hesitated, and looked at me with her head tilted slightly, the way she had looked at the Synth wreckage: curious, and careful, and not about to let anything go.

"Tell me about Ra," she said. "Everything. From the beginning."

And sixteen-year-old me, somewhere in the back of my head, nearly cried with joy. Rhenii... Oh Rhenii, where were you my whole life?

"Her skin was green," I said. "A pale, cool green, like mint leaves."

Rhenii's eyes went wide. "Green?"

"Green."

"A whole person? Green?" She looked down at her own red arm as if checking whether skin was allowed to do that.

"A whole person," I said, and I had to stop myself from smiling. "And she had markings. Here, and here." I touched the bridge of my mask and then my forehead. "Little dark spots scattered across her nose and brow, where freckles would be. But they weren't freckles. Each one was a small broken ring, darker at the edges and lighter in the center, like the rosettes on a jaguar's coat. Up close, they looked like someone had painted them on her, one by one."

Rhenii was holding her breath.

"She wore a long coat, like mine, but finer, with armor beneath it that caught the light when she moved. And her mask..." I paused, because I could see it. I had drawn it once, carefully, with a gold pen that ran dry halfway through. "Her mask was gold. It was shaped like a bird of prey, with a sharp beak down the center and feathers sweeping back over her temples like folded wings. On anyone else, it would have looked fierce. On her, it was elegant."

"And her hair?"

"Black. Long and perfectly straight, so straight it looked combed by the wind itself. It was cut evenly across her brow, just above her eyes, and two long locks fell on either side of her face, cut level with her cheeks. The rest fell straight down her back. It made her look..." I searched for a word. "Like a priestess. Like someone who belonged in a temple, standing very still, while everyone else forgot how to breathe."

Somewhere around "forgot how to breathe," I realized what I was doing.

I was describing her. Not Ra. Her. The senior who had run the student council my freshman year, who had walked through the halls with that same perfect straight hair and that same calm, and who had never once known my name. I had drawn Ra the week after the council elections. I had given her the hair, the stillness, and the elegance, and then I had covered her face with a golden mask so that nobody, including me, would ever have to admit who she was.

I cleared my throat. Ori, thank the stars, said nothing.

Rhenii didn't notice. She was frowning at me, at my mask.

"If Ra's mask was a golden bird," she said slowly, "why is yours so plain?"

I froze.

Because Ra's mask had taken me forty minutes and an entire gold pen. Because I had drawn Cebi hundreds of times, in margins, on napkins, on the backs of math homework, and a smooth dark mask with two dots was something I could draw in four seconds flat. Because I had only ever drawn Ra once.

"I like it simple," I said. "It adds to the mystery."

She considered that. She seemed to accept it. Then her face lit up.

"Then can I make my own mask? Any shape I want?" She was already looking around the shelter, at the scraps of metal, at the copper on her own wrists. "I could make a—"

"Wait." I raised a hand. "It's not that simple. A mask isn't just a mask."

She stopped. "What do you mean?"

I hesitated. Then I decided that if I was going to keep my promise from the cliff, it had to start with the things that were actually true.

"Ori," I said. "Say hello."

"Good morning, Rhenii," said the mask.

Rhenii nearly fell backward over the pot.

She caught herself with one hand, stared at my mask with her mouth open, and then scrambled closer and stared at it some more, so close that I could see her reflection in the visor.

"It speaks," she breathed.

"I do," Ori said. "I have also been translating everything you and the young master have said to each other since yesterday. You are welcome."

"Ori is my companion," I said, before he could say anything else. "He lives in the mask. He sees what I can't see. He's actually the one who healed you." I let that land. "Every Emerald Astro is complemented by one. A combat assistant. A partner who lives in the mask and fights at your side."

That last part was new. I had never written it down. I said it anyway, because the moment I said it, I knew it was right, and I decided right there that it would be true. Ori would call it doctrine.

Rhenii looked from my mask to my bare jaw and back again, and I watched the wonder in her eyes grow until it nearly spilled over.

"Will I have one?" she asked. "A companion like Ori?"

"In time," I said. "When you're ready."

"When will I be ready?"

"When you've trained."

She stood up so fast she nearly knocked the soup over. Her hair swung behind her, and her fists were clenched at her sides, and for the first time since I had met her, she didn't look like a slave or a survivor. She looked like someone about to run.

"Then let us begin," she said. "Now. Today."

I looked at my half-finished bowl of soup.

"After breakfast," I said.

I recoiled a bit and whispered as she dove into her own bowl. "Ori... This much is okay, right?"

"You actually mentioned one of my concerns, young master," he answered, "how would we give her a new mask? And where will you find a comparable AI to me?"

"Comparable? Well, well... aren't you being too prideful, Ori?"

"I'm the most advanced tactical warrior system in the three galaxies, mind you."

"If you say so."

"So, young master, about the—"

"I know, a teacher must supply the student, right? I'll figure the mask part out." 

Ori beeped in ecstasy. "That was a wonderful quote, young master, 'the teacher must supply the student'... Saving it for posterity."

When breakfast was done,  Rhenii went by the opening of the shelter and began scrubbing the pot with sand. She had tied her hair back with a strip of cloth from one of the tarps, and she was humming something under her breath. She stopped when she saw me get closer.

I sat down on the overturned crate across from her. There was a question I had been putting off since the moment she said the word slave, and I couldn't put it off any longer.

"Rhenii. The caravan. Where were they taking you?"

Her hands slowed on the pot.

"To the fort," she said. "It is not far from here. Two days along the road, maybe less. A garrison of Surtaur warriors holds it, soldiers of the Nubatan Empire."

She glanced up and must have seen something in the tilt of my mask, because she set the pot down.

"You do not know the Nubatan Empire."

It wasn't a question.

"I'm from very far away," I said. "Remember?"

She nodded slowly, as if she were deciding how much of the world she would have to explain to me. All of it, probably.

"The Nubatan Empire is one of the strongest nations on the Southern continent," she said. "Its cities are very old, and its armies are very large. Most people here have never seen anything outside of it." She hesitated. "The fort is on the fringe of the Empire. The very edge. Beyond it, there is only wild country, and the places in the stories where no one should go."

"Where the Synths are."

She agreed quietly. "Slaves are sent to the fort to work. To build walls, haul stone, serve the soldiers. And they do not come back. Once you are sent to the fringe, you never return to the core of the Empire. Everyone knows this."

I looked at the copper bands on her wrists, at the long hair someone had brushed until it shone, at the clothes that had been chosen for display and not for travel. I thought about what I had suggested to myself the first time I saw her, and I wished, very much, that I had been wrong.

"Why were you sent?" I asked. "If you don't want to say, you don't have to."

She was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke, she kept her eyes on the pot.

"My last master wanted me," she said. "In the way that masters sometimes want their slaves. I refused him." Her jaw tightened. "More than once. So he sold me to the fringe, where no one would ever hear me refuse anyone again."

Her voice didn't break. Somehow that was worse.

I didn't know what to say. Nothing I knew from the Gray World was big enough for this. So I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, and said the only thing I was sure of.

"You were right to refuse him."

She looked up.

"You were right," I said again. "And you're never going to belong to anyone again. Not to him, not to the Empire, not to me. You hear me?"

She held my gaze for a long time. Then she nodded, once, and something in her shoulders eased.

"I hear you, my Duke."

I let out a breath. Then I made myself say the next part, because it had to be said, and I hated every word of it.

"I need to go to that fort."

The ease in her shoulders vanished.

"I don't know this land," I said quickly. "I don't know the roads, the people, the borders, anything. Ori can map it, but he needs to see it first. A fort means soldiers, maps, news, people who know what's happening out here. If I want to understand where we are, that's where I start."

"And me?" Her voice was very small.

"You're coming with me."

She went pale, or as pale as Surtaur skin could go: a deeper, duller red, like an ember losing heat.

"I can't leave you here alone," I said. "Not with Synths in these hills. And you know this world. I don't. I need you." I paused. "But listen to me. You're not going there as a slave. You're going as my student. If anything happens, if anyone so much as looks at you the wrong way, I will be standing between you and them. That's a promise. That's what the Emerald Astros do."

She stared at me. Then, slowly, she looked down at her own hands, the hands that could no longer feel the cold, and closed them into fists.

"Lamassu," she said quietly.

"Lamassu," I said. Rhenii, she was such a joy.

She nodded. She didn't look happy about it. But she didn't look afraid anymore, either.

I stood up, brushed the sand off my coat, and looked down the road toward the hills, toward a fort I had never seen, full of soldiers I didn't know, belonging to an empire I had heard of for the first time five minutes ago.

I had just promised to protect her from all of it.

I really, truly hoped it wouldn't come to that.