Chapter 1: Informant

From the Book of Valten, taken in Year 22.3.753 of the Vision of the Lady of Holy Waters:

The man craved the stir of city air, wished through the endless hours of compressed darkness to feel the oily, metallic pre-dawn eddies thrown by gargantuan black-glossed motor coaches and the ancient trains that whispered across the baleful waterfront sky on sleek but archaic elevated rails. He missed the slick southeastern wind roughened by exhaust from truck parks that abutted the shipyards behind his old flat. Over the hush imposed by the concrete and steel of Zoran Station, tonight at least, at least tonight, the man called John Valten Manegold would have welcomed even the grind of mammoth cranes, hard on task and belching their funnels of toxic smoke.

The man clung to these images and remembrances of home, his third home, which was a machination merely, a hypothetical buoyed as much by half-truths as outright lies. For instance, he had been born far from the city on the water, in a high place carved from the Goraneg Mountains in the uplands of eastern Volodya. He was nineteen before he experienced the queer rubbery smell of a truck park and felt the heat that wafted through welded manhole covers when supersonic trains sizzled through cement tunnels two stories below ground. As a boy his playground was Virog and Agotha, the dense forests of Nikusch that circled the somnolent, shadowy town of the same name, and the footpaths and horse trails that led to the family castle Petronille.

The air was not as sweet to him there at the castle as in the cities of the lower lands and the places to which he came later in life. Although he enjoyed somewhat the horse farm of the lower reaches, he considered the castle with its pale circular walls, hoary turrets, and seven busy little wings musty as the deep bottom of an old locker that kept within some decomposed artifact no one truly wanted.

When he was a little boy he had supposed all the world a moldy secret full of hushed doings discernible only to him, sadly, through an aberration of perception about which he was warned frequently and at an early age to conceal. He was special. And so he knew, at an early age, to fear not only the sordid things that he detected but also the ability that facilitated these undesired detections.

His parents lied to him.

There was no sound, you heard nothing.

There was no scream.

There was no motor car last night upon the high road, you’re making it up.

There was no sudden flare behind the stables, your eyes were playing tricks.

There was no stranger in the study with Sir last night, you imagined it. You imagine lots of things.

His parents spoke falsely by rote, thinking nothing of it.

Lies, a stream of them, and unending.

He was at first astonished and then fearful of the efficacy with which his parents told untruths. He learned, eventually, that lying was common and celebrated among Petronille adults. He was the youngest. There were two adult brothers and a sister, bred on presently deceased Manegold wives. Thus, he abandoned reliance on adults and brethren both, choosing over family the relatively happy children of the town four and a half kilometers downland. Always under the thumb of the patriarch of Petronille, he made earnest and fantastic games in which to escape. And when the little boys and girls, intuiting his gift, began to call him Val, he grew especially afraid, for it would not be long after they bestowed the grace of his gift name, a tradition among the old families of the Goraneg uplands, that his father, the old Sir, Burgolt Manegold, would call upon him to learn the meaning of it.

His namesake Val, the familiar of Valten, was a demian and a prince, albeit ancient and long departed, of the coveted race, the Volker. Valten, the Lord Valten of bygone days, had won and lost a kingdom, and then blighted himself in some ritual of which the child Val bore only the simplest comprehension, and which, albeit appealing in heroic terms, had no place in the brutal, self-serving enterprises of the Manegolds. The business of the Manegolds was Val’s birthright. Furthermore, Burgolt Manegold, head of the family, was distrustful of fine-featured things, art, weapons, women, and boys included. Sir Burgolt despised the gift-name Val and asserted his considerable might to expunge it from the child Val’s existence. But a gift-name was just that, and Burgolt had already given his child a formal one, John. Sir Burgolt could no more ignore the tradition of the gift-name than stop the wind, so the name stuck, and the child became John Valten Manegold, a prince of the mountains, and of the underworld.

It was when he stopped sleeping, around twelve or fourteen years-- the Manegolds, like most of the Volker were Amarite polytheists and as such did not celebrate or even acknowledge birthdays --it was when he stopped sleeping that Val was properly taken notice of. He was, by then, a credible mindwalker who, when intercepted by a brother or uncle, stayed mostly silent until called on to answer directly. Val was considered a boy of few words and (by those who knew no better) little thought. He was often observed in the library at his studies and otherwise among the high-bred East Ussurian horse stock in the lower paddocks or escaping the barrier walls of Petronille by some heretofore hidden hole or tunnel.

About the estate he wore a habitual frown, the emblem of a child in perpetual consternation. His elders tended to ignore him. His brothers would in general follow the example of the elders. Mud-smudges and shabby clothing notwithstanding, Val was never odious, or unclean. His teeth shone white and even. His gaze was a clear, fragile sort of eggshell blue. His fair hair, while generally in disarray, was fine and easily sorted with a sweep of determined fingers. His tutors were disposed to indulgence, given the child’s looks and aptitude. The example was not repeated among Val’s siblings.

Val liked his training terminal, which was a keyboard, flatdrive, and holographic screen. He easily mastered language and mathematics, achieving as a young boy the training level of post-secondary academy adults.

He liked, too, the big Ussurian horses bred on the adjacent family farm and could operate the family’s all-wheel, all-terrain Aiglen transports as easily as he mounted the sleek, high-hearted, half-wild purebreds.

In spite of such physical pursuits, he was sweetly and unusually fine-boned, with long limbs perfectly fashioned, arched feet, and long artist’s fingers. His mother, too, was beautiful, pale-eyed, and carved like a figurine. At a young age Val’s unique gift let him take notice of another person’s aura. His mother’s inner life was an immense, luminous, and milky butterfly. Sometimes his mother’s inner life was represented by limp wings tinged with shadow. That changed when she looked at him. When she looked at him, her aura brightened and warmed like gold-veined crystal, the occasional silver and ashen density burned away.

Seated around the big kalonice dinner table, Val would drift through his mother’s thoughts, layered like the best confection and yielding as affection, until he found himself in them. Unlike his father, she enjoyed being near him. He liked to watch her lift the silver goblet between ringed fingers, her lips parted slightly, her gaze slanted toward him. She wore sweater dresses, white and black, to dinner, and sometimes gowns with lace and jewels and bits of silk. Her shoes were slim with dainty straps. She hung gold, emerald, sapphire, and lapis lazuli from her ears. Wore diamonds on her fingers.

She was required by custom and her husband to keep her distance from male offspring but often had a sidelong glance for Val and the inclination to draw her hand along his cheek. A bubble would swell beneath her heart, which she suppressed, and which Val sensed through his endowment as other children detected the spice of cookies fresh from the oven. Val’s only full brother, Marcus, reckoned two years older, possessed none of Val’s strangeness, though he was, early on and for a short while, something of an ally. His brother Marcus was also fond of their mother. In time, though, his brother was taken by knowledge of the family business, by the magnitude and weight of it, and so Val lost Marcus, as he supposed he would one day lose himself.

And when he stopped sleeping, when he became a nightwalker, Sir Burgolt called upon Val, received him smiling faintly from the head of the great hall of stone and hand-carved wood. Sir Burgolt called Val with burly arms flung apart for the cheek to cheek kiss that signified kinship. After Val suffered this greeting, he sniffed against his will the drug his father had imbibed to excess the previous night, catching within the dull flashes of Burgolt Manegold’s brain the face of the woman his father had diddled, a face that did not resemble his mother's.

Val settled silently at his father’s side. Val’s four brothers, including Marcus, and their gold-haired sister Katherin, surrounded the high seat, which Sir Burgolt filled as a king might an ancient throne. There was applause from the siblings, grins splaying their solemn, disdainful faces as though chipped out of stone by a knife.

Val’s mother was conspicuously absent.

Shortly after this exhibition, the soldiers of Petronille, armed to the teeth, admitted an elegantly clothed middle-aged man. The man brought ledgers and other records on his flexible mobile access, a hand-held computer the size of Val’s palm. Burgolt accepted the flex with a grunt. The newcomer delivered a flowery recitation of his enterprises. While the man yammered on, Burgolt abruptly swung his large, rough-lipped mouth to Val’s ear, whispering hotly, “Does he lie?”

Val thought, You all lie. He thought this with all his body, and with his heart.

He said, “Yes.”

At which Burgolt Manegold shifted a heavy hand to his hip, drew a brute of a pistol, and fired at his guest.

It was not the first murder of which Val was aware. He had become aware that men and women were murdered on the grounds so long ago that he no longer remembered knowing otherwise. It was, however, the first death he witnessed. The ping of the ejected shell casing skipping along the bare floor accentuated the eddy of well-being that surged from his father, a pleasure response that carried with it the odor of sour internal gasses. The newcomer had stiffened with barely a breath. With his heart perforated, he was catapulted into shock. The release of the muscles that held him on his feet occurred after death, which Val understood perfectly, as he saw through his gift the departure of the man’s soul. He stared as the discarnate entity wended outward and upward, pausing-- astonishingly --to gaze back on Val, but not at Val, not really, for it seemed even to the boy Val the soul of the expired man only turned to acknowledge the thing inside Val, the unfathomable thing, the faculty that whispered and offered up without explanation all the world’s secrets.

Val felt his brothers and sister and father’s thoughts pointing his way. Felt their combined searching, their suspicion. Saw his father’s head with its swirls of dark hair and its thick, barbered beard pivot on massive shoulders to angle a look in Val’s direction. This had been his initiation rite, Val knew. They would kill him if he faltered, all of them, with the understanding of beings whose survival depended on secrecy, conspiracy, and absolute loyalty.

Val held back his horror and survived.

By daylight he did mostly as expected. At night he nightwalked the high hills. Had the moons, although hemmed in as they were by the titan walls of the Goraneg he rarely saw all three at once. The mingled moonslight, most often pale as gossamer and vivid as sapphire, illuminated Val’s nights, sunset to daybreak, night after night, and calmed him. Except every ninth night or so Val fell heavily to sleep and could not be revived. The slumber lasted twelve to eighteen hours and, once, swallowed a day entirely. The family grew accustomed to these “fits,” as Burgolt Manegold called them, and assigned Val a pair of guards who appeared at the onset of this sickness and watched over Val until the fit released the gifted Manegold prince to consciousness.

Otherwise, Val knew nothing more of childhood. He tracked the hills of his boyhood under the cover of night, solitary and alert, and with a complete absence of joy. With puberty he acquired keen eyesight. Another mystery. Under proper conditions he literally folded distance, drew to him the object of observation, so he might scrutinize its folds and creases, its essence. He saw perfectly at night. Though he perceived darkness, he was able to look through night into its supernal light and by this light see in shadow as by sunlight. These things he told no one.

He told no one of Celesta, the girl from town. She had come to Nikusch from Symon after the death of her parents. A childless aunt took her in. Celesta was fifteen. He supposed he was sixteen. Lured after twilight into the forests above the town by rumor of a man-child who nightwalked near the river, Celesta encountered Val (who allowed himself to be encountered) on the upper banks of the Agotha.

Celesta was a poet, a charmer of words, a composer of thought, an innocent.

When he looked at her, he saw fine tendrils of her inner life, her soul. Celesta’s inward being was snowy, nearly translucent, blossoming two or three times the girl’s size. There was no ash in her aura, no shadow.

He loved to look at her through the mechanism of power. He liked it, too, that Celesta believed in the Others, beings fabled to have haunted upper Volodya before the Purge: tremonas, morfran, and other sorts of demi-humans. She wrote, generally incorrectly, about such things-- she lacked proper education in certain histories.

Val happily brought for her enlightenment the leather-bound, gold-crusted antique manuscripts from the castle library. These relics, lugged about in a nylon backpack, had been inked seven hundred years ago in the age of half-humans and world-bound gods. Such was the true history of the world, he told her.

His namesake, Lord Valten, had been the real thing, let there be no doubt. Valten the Volker was a figure of indefinable ability.

Delighted, Celesta copied outright whole passages into her flexible mobile access, pinning with little white teeth her plump lower lip and breathing softly on the back of Val’s hand while he held the fragile pages of his father’s manuscripts under a flashlight.

When she spoke, which was not often, Celesta’s whispered words echoed perfectly the music of her other voice, the lyrical resonance of her inner self. Val sensed this.

Like many people in the region, Celesta believed in the Amarite way and left crumbled bread to the gods of the forest, and of the water. She knelt to shrines when they came upon them, as he did, and closed her soft brown eyes in worship. When he said he heard inside his mind the voice of a goddess she did not snicker.

“What does she sound like?” Celesta asked.

Val tried to tell her: “It is a voice that makes my body tingle,” he said.

“Tingle where?” Celesta wondered.

“All over,” Val answered.

Celesta nodded, understanding. She saw nothing improper, though others might. She was uncritical in other ways, too.

His tooled leather garb, inappropriate for proper farm work, was handsome in her eyes. She never cared that his hair was long enough to flow into his eyes or that he wore a small-frame pistol under his belt at the small of his back. She knew that he came from the castle.

She thought him a servant of the Manegolds, warned him to take care. There were rumors (correct of course) the current generation of Manegolds, following the inclination and appetite of their noblemen ancestors, beat errant servants.

He let her go on thinking of him this way, though he never spoke an untruth, and told her to call him whatever she liked.

She named him Stephen Kessler after the waif child of Bero. It was romantic, his anonymity. And when, in town, she said she had found Stephen Kessler, the country’s most famous lost boy, the towners of Nikusch laughed politely and said she possessed a fine imagination and then they left Celesta alone.

She was never too long with Val. She attended classes, she had her chores. A proper girl, she was expected indoors before the hour turned indecent. And when the snows came to the Goraneg rings, night came more swiftly and that, too, took from their time together. She marveled that he did not mind the cold, tracking four and a half kilometers through snow, over ice, without a horse (too dangerous) or a vehicle (the big ATTs drew attention) to meet her at the river for a poem, kiss, and a pot of warmed ginger cider. She told him he made her feel pretty, at which he felt some sorrow, because she was pretty and did not know it.

Near the end of winter, as he woke in his bed from the long, special sleep, the sleep of the dead, he felt Celesta’s breath pass his cheek. He screamed in panic and ran to the balcony. From his suite at Petronille the hills shone under a new and heavy mantle of snow.

He had felt, before he gave in to his affliction, the coming storm, but what was one storm among many? He was a child of winter, living so high in the hills.

Celesta, too, knew better than to go out after sunset during winter storms but gone out she had, and not returned.

Nikusch let out the dogs to find her. Long before Val fought his way through the drifts of the high mountain plains onto the unplowed roads between Petronille and Nikusch, the towners found her.

Val went as far as the town edge, where the unpaved country road intersected the paved main one, and a row of sturdy brick houses sat behind picket fences and tiny patches of yard. He met no one. The towners had all gone east toward the market, where Celesta had lived. With his special sight, he looked on the ritual of mourning, the towners crunching through the snow down the converging lanes. He wished with all his being to go among them, but then the towners would know Stephen Kessler had been real.

Towners saw nothing wholesome in Manegolds. They would think he had come down from the stronghold to corrupt the girl, that she had given herself to him when in fact he had touched nothing of Celesta but her little hand and the flower petal of her mouth.

After that he learned the uses of stit. He never smoked stit. He purchased med-injects from the stablemaster and scored his stit raw, in powder form, from stores that passed through the farm on the way duty-free to the lower cities, letting the powder soak in saline until it could be strained and absorbed into the injection device and pushed into his veins. He abhorred lies, though he would later engage in several at length. When pushed to mindwalk, Val delivered with the efficacy of a freshly stropped razor drawn against young flesh. Gladly, he laid bare whoever crossed him and so earned a wide berth. He was by this time a participant in family affairs, privy to its caches and bank accounts and international holdings, liaisons and partnerships, scope and ambition. Sometimes he remembered to be afraid.

As with Celesta, it was after the long sleep that he learned of his mother’s passing. In autumn, right before Harvest Festival. He was most likely seventeen years. He woke and dressed without speaking, then padded quietly the corridors of the residential wing.

When he entered the great hall, he felt the silence sharply.

Flickering eyes pierced his skin.

He advanced as though his legs were heavy as iron.

At the antique hearth, Burgolt lumbered to his feet, struggling, seemingly, with grief. Marc cowered at Sir’s knee, his white face sloppy with tears.

“My son,” Burgolt uttered, his eye on Val.

Val extended his hand.

Burgolt mumbled something, for some reason pleased to receive publicly Val’s token comfort. Then Burgolt coughed. Coughed and gagged. Shoulders and arms contracting, the big man doubled over in agony. Veins bulged in his neck and brow.

Dismay and alarm broke across the hall.

Val, his hand out, experienced the thrashing, failing muscle of his father’s heart. He tilted his head. In the torrent of anguish he had come upon a new ability the way an infant comes from the womb to the nipple and knows to suck. It seemed to Val that he could wrench Sir Burgolt’s heart with his power as easily as he could breathe. He went at it slowly, though. He wanted the wheezing man to suffer. He wanted death to come creeping, its maw widening slowly, so Burgolt, Sir Burgolt, might see it, fear it.

And then Val fell. Dropped like a sack, his head bouncing. His eldest brother Adam, clutching an iron poker, hovered above. Val saw two Adams, understood the world was spinning, and felt sick in his stomach. He could not make his limbs obey or stop the rolling thunder within his skull.

Burgolt shuddered violently, froze, and heaved his bulk upright. He blinked wet, wide eyes at his sons, the clobbered youth on the planking, the older man with the blood-stained poker, and patted fretfully at his chest. The pain, of course, was gone. What remained was the taste of pain, pain’s echo.

Adam lifted the poker for a second blow, looked at his father for permission.

Katherin shrieked, “No!” She bore some fondness for Val but knew better than to allow fondness to betray her into mortal danger. “This is our home,” she reminded archly. “Do it somewhere else. We do not spill family blood within the walls.”

Burgolt shoved off Marc’s arm, which was offered in support, and lurched to Adam. He spoke huskily, so even Val, writhing on the polished planking, could hear: “The wolves, give him to the wolves.”

When Val recovered his senses he lay on the stones of the main courtyard. It was shortly after nightfall. Val’s wrists had been bound behind his back and his head oozed when he tried to lift it. He observed the spinning sky, the juxtaposed turrets of the east wing with their distant windows blackened by occupants afraid of the doings below, and finally he blinked at the staring faces of his brothers Adam and Gabriel. His brother Arnulf and three of his five cousins lived near the family offices in the city Moukib of West Ussuria. Two of his six uncles lived in Hupei, and one resided in Asthrinasipal as liaison to the Eastern Union syndicates. Two uncles, three brothers, and a small host of first and second cousins circled menacingly. They waited, Val supposed, for him to turn his curse on them, though he did not come to this conclusion through his hyped sensory package. When he was hurt or tired, his abilities sank below awareness and eluded his will. In other words he had no supernal power, no otherworldly weapon with which to defend himself. Gabriel squatted, caught Val’s shirt, and dragged him to his feet. An ATT, piloted by an uncle, rolled to a stop outside the gathering. Adam gestured angrily. Gabriel and Marc hefted Val into the cargo hold, then jumped in beside him. Adam and his uncle climbed into the cab. Adam waved at the guards as the vehicle bounded past the gates of Petronille into the countryside.

The pale daughter moon and her blue sister had taken the sky. The stars hung above in a crisp void, frozen. Val tore his arm from Gabriel’s grasp, and when Gabriel seized him again, Val called him a slave, a thrall, and a bootlicker.

“Stop, no more,” Marcus snapped. In the dark of the transport, Marcus seemed strange, unknowable. He brushed the dirt from Val’s arms and side. “It’s not his fault,” Marcus barked at Gabriel. “We’ve all wanted to slit the old man’s lying throat. You know we have.”

“Shut up, Marcus,” Adam warned from the cab. One spied in him already the makings of a Manegold patriarch.

“I’m going to shut up. And we’re going to bury him. Say it here, now, or I go no further.”

Adam canted Marcus a bemused look. “I’ll dig a hole for him if you’ll use the gun.”

“I’ll do it. I’m sorry, Val, don’t look at me that way. I won’t make it hurt. And we’ll bury you, okay?” He looked around. “So let’s everyone stop yelling. We can do it at Herta, all right? Herta’s not far. The soil is soft and Sir will never know.”

“I’m not walking two kilometers for him--”

“Shut up, Gabriel,” Adam snorted. “You are and you will, because we would for you.”

After that the ATT droned on in silence. Val kept an eye on the daughter moons, called Modron and Ubel in the uplands, Prima and Secuba elsewhere, and from their cold light found the strength to draw his body upright, to stop reeling with the hammer inside skull. He considered the furtherance of his existence. His brothers were seasoned brawlers, even Marcus. He, Val, was the only one in the ATT who had not killed. He was tied up and unarmed. Perhaps it was best to let it end. No, he scolded, and shook his head to clear out such thoughts. If he had use of his abilities, well … but he did not have access to them while his hurt was fresh. He suspected his power turned inward to feed the healing process, but he was not sure. He could run, force Marcus or Adam to hole him in the back. If he ran it would not be a clean death. It might take several shots to finish up. And then his brothers might leave him as he fell, confident in the appetite of the mountain wolves. He should try anyway, his heart spoke. And if he succeeded he might have one day another opportunity to kill his father.

The instant the ATT pulled over, Val sprang over the tailgate and bolted. He dashed sideways and took off on the balls of his feet. The terrain buckled, stubbled with shrubbery and pocked by loose stone. It was rough going by moonlight but Val knew his way. He knew it by daylight and moonlight, with and without his magic eyes. Adam pivoted with a pistol in hand, took a breath of an instant to line up his sights. And Val dove. The ground swelled just where he landed, shielding him. He heard the shot, continued to roll, and paused only to draw his legs and feet through the hoop created by his bound hands. He leaped to his feet, dove again. This time there were many shots. His brothers and uncles refusing to give chase. Their weapons were trained on the horizon, their narrowed gazes awaiting movement. Val put his head down and crawled. He accomplished this as quickly and quietly as he could.

With about five hundred paces between him and pursuit he came to his knees.

They fired, all of them. And hit the ground running. His brothers and uncles knew better than to swing the big all-wheelers out onto the loose, hilly ground at night. During the day, maybe. And at a safe speed. But not in pursuit. They’d roll the vehicle or just end up crawling around when they could move faster walking backward in the snow.

The hunt was on.

Val jumped into a depression, skidded on loose stone, and then hurled his body downward, long-striding the slope. He had maybe ten seconds, maybe a little more, before his pursuers locked on him.

At the last moment, he cut west, zigging around the hill instead of going over it to put ground between him and the guns. He heard hard breaths behind, and cursing. His pursuers cursed him, cursed the gods, and they cursed the uneven, rolling land they did not know as he did. Forget the mingled moonlight. His pursuers were in danger of getting lost. Stones rained down on Val’s right, while the thud of running feet echoed to his left. His pursuers had split up. Time to abandon caution, he realized. He took off at a straight run. The hills below Herta were too open to elude gunmen attempting to flank him. If he did not pull ahead now, he never would. Shots whizzed by. His brothers and uncles stopped shooting only to reload. Gradually, they fell behind. They were older, bigger men. In many ways, they were harder men but in the way that mattered that night they were soft, they were slow, and they were blind. Val gained the tall trees of the forest above Virog River about an hour later. He had not heard a shot in twenty minutes and his pursuers were no longer visible. When the forest took him, he stopped to shred the rope on his wrists on a stone. He descended through Virog into Agotha, and then he turned north by east, away from Nikusch. The downland roads around Nikusch would not be friendly tonight, or ever again.

Just before dawn he felt the kindling of his special power. Felt the strange but well-known sweetness of it in his veins. His vision sharpened. His mind cleared and began performing calculations. He was alive and alert, his sensory net confirming he was alone. And when the helicopter swooped down from the direction of Petronille, coming in low above the treetops, Val understood it had detected him on thermal scan and meant to deploy soldiers. His father was aboard. Maybe Sir would come down, maybe he wouldn’t. Val didn’t care. He wanted to hurt the machine with his father inside it and his power told him how. With a nudge of his mind, Val touched the helicopter’s engine in the same way that he had touched his father’s heart. The engine was a living thing too and Val could mess with it, though why he could was not revealed to him. The chopper’s instruments detected the engine’s sudden instability. Its pilots veered, hauling ass, and did not bring the distressed helicopter or any other flying thing after Val again.

Val descended for seven days. He stayed clear of the towns of Aliz, Konradas, and little Armina at the base of the Goraneg foothills, did not trust the local officials, many of whom his father had seated at Petronille.

Ulka was a city, the first city he saw with his own eyes. The forest bundled up to paved and lined roads and finally the forest receded. Motor traffic was thin but steady at the fringes, where residential districts gathered around little shopping hubs and restaurants and an arena. As he drew closer to Ulka the skyline flattened and expanded, shimmering with light. The big country trucks and ATTs were replaced by small efficiency vehicles, mini-buses, and sleek luxury cars. The shopping hubs moved closer to the road, which widened further into six boldly lined lanes with concrete dividers and overhead lamps. The hubs had car parks the size of paddocks that abutted the highway and through these car parks people strolled in numbers Val could not at first comprehend.

His senses were overwhelmed. Not his five senses but the inner ones. He thought of Celesta speaking softly by the Agotha while his mind and his power extended from his core in sync with her soul, his thoughts flowing smoothly inside and around hers. He could not think now. The light of life, merging into a bright core, and the drone of minds bent inward, hurting him. He could not find his own thoughts. The engines of the cars, their electrical systems, the energy snapping along the power grid adjacent to and over the highway, the minds of the people sizzled inside his skull until he stopped moving, stopped thinking, until he pressed his hands to his temples and ordered his power, Stop.

It stopped.

Stopped sifting, burning, sampling, searching.

Stopped everything.

He began to breathe, cautiously.

There was a heavy dullness where his power had been. It was unpleasant and constricting but he knew he could survive the numbness.

Knew he had to go on with the shield between his abilities and the new world.

Ulka loomed, revealing skyscrapers, vehicles cruising overpasses, super-highways, and, finally, canyons of concrete through which avenues stretched with shops, theaters, business, and people crammed side by side careening about with no expectation of order, like animals in a controlled stampede.

They paid, collectively, no attention to Val. For all his life he had been unable to produce body odor. His gift. His body seemed to operate in a state of renewal. He was, however, filthy. His clothes were unmistakably rustic, put together to endure the rough country of Goraneg, out of fashion, now stained, torn, and unattractive. Val’s skin, where it showed, was dirty. When he stopped to ask directions, the people of Ulka artfully dodged him and kept going.

Val went into a low-end restaurant. No one looked at him but the young man operating the counter. Val located the restroom, which was a closet really, with a filthy commode and a filthier sink. He exhausted the supply of disposable towels, clearing the wildlands from his skin with thin liquid soap. He straightened his hair, which was long enough to hang behind his shoulders, with cleaned hands. He rinsed his mouth, which, too, never had any odor. His gaze in the mirror was fresh, as usual, if a bit sullen and shadowy. He had no appreciation, otherwise, for his looks.

He sat alone, silent, the clamp on his sensory package inhibiting. He faced the window, his bones reacting to the cessation of movement. He had been moving so long. He was beginning to feel hungry. Generally, he did not. He did not eat. Did not make waste, usually. Did not function as the humans across the way, in the next booth, on the street. At Petronille, they were perfectly aware. In Ulka, while he sat unserved, unspeaking, and lost, they began to stare, an entire restaurant full of people. And finally he turned his head to look at them. He let down the shield inside his mind and felt this: how beautiful.

He did not get it.

The stir of hunger meant that soon he would feel lethargic. Once the heaviness crept into his limbs he would have to lie down. Sleep would take him for twelve or eighteen hours. He would be vulnerable.

He needed a safe place.

A server edged over, bewildered, smiling awkwardly. She held a flexible mobile access and a stylus. Gazed at him as though she knew him. “May I take your order?”

Val was born to the dialect of the uplands, a dialect brought to Volodya by his Volker ancestors. He spoke, too, the common tongue, called Volodyan, as well as the common languages of five countries under the Intercontinental Treaty of Allied Nations. He steadied himself to answer and be understood. “Do you know me?”

The accent made the young server grin. “You’re from the filming down the street, right? You’re”-- and she named some film actor about whom Val knew nothing, or next to nothing. She pointed to his haggard dress. “It’s a future flick, right? The one you’re doing? I like the costume.”

“I need help,” he said. “Do not call your local police. Call the Federal Authority office. There is one in Ulka, yes? If you are unable to call the FA, tell me. If you are able to do as I ask, I will wait here.”

The girl’s smile melted. She stared, and he stared back. He saw in her mind that she would do whatever he asked, as long as she was assured that he would be grateful.

He said, “I would be forever in your debt if you would contact the Federal Authority now.”

She said, “Wait here, I’ll be right back.”

And she was.

Her customers, unaware of their exchange, returned gradually to their meals and their lives. The server, whose name he learned and then promptly forgot, sat in front of him as though to shield him with her body until the arrival of the FA agents. She’d told the Federal Authority switchboard that an international film star requested emergency assistance. She supposed the film star was being stalked or harassed in some significant manner. It was a local police matter, really, but the Federal Authority said it would send agents. Sometimes foreigners needed special handling.

She said, “They’re here. Are you going to be all right?”

He owed her kindness. The truth would not be kind. Val nodded at the girl and constructed his first lie: “Yes.”

Two bored, middle-aged FA agents in crisp autumn suits collected Val from the restaurant. The agents escorted him to a government sedan parked in the travel lane of the main thoroughfare, disdainfully, indifferently obstructing motorists. Val sank into the back seat. The agents spoke to him across a widening sea of exhaustion, asking his name.

“John. Valten. Manegold.”

The agents were perplexed. They looked at one another. And then they stopped being bored.

“Who did you say you were?”

“I am a Manegold. I come from the castle above Nikusch. I am Goranegi.”

"Do you have papers to be in Ulka?" one asked.

"No, I do not."

"That's unfortunate. We're going to arrest you for felony stupidity. Just so you know."

"Maybe knock you around a little for wasting our time," said the other.

"And then send you back."

Val closed his eyes. "I'm aware of the segregation law. Burgolt Manegold is my father. I've worked several years in the family business." They reacted. Val’s eyes were closed. He knew from years of handling weapons the sound of a semi-automatic safety clicking off. A gun was trained on his chest. “That’s right, that’s good,” Val murmured. “You aren’t on my father’s payroll, are you?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” the passenger agent, gripping the gun, demanded angrily.

“There is a contract against my life. If you will take me to a place where I can sleep, I will explain. I will tell you whatever you wish to know about who I am, my father, and the business.”

An hour after he was chauffeured to the Federal Authority complex in the Apecz district of Ulka, Val slid into the deep sleep and woke on the security medical ward inside the Authority’s complex. He was scrubbed clean and dressed in a hospital gown. A junior agent sat with him.

“Are you really a Manegold?” the agent asked.

Manegold births were attended by private physicians and local midwives. Public records in the region were unreliable.

Val said, “I have four brothers and one sister.”

“You’re going to be popular around here,” the agent predicted. “The justiciary has been after information on Burgolt Manegold and his syndicate for a long time."

Val moved to a sub-level isolation unit. The quarters were comfortable but bland. The air was recycled. The furniture was polyfiber, steel, or plastic. One wall was reinforced concrete. The rest were black polyfiber and two-way mirrors. Every centimeter of the residence was recorded every moment of every day.

The Authority fitted him with a tunic and linen trousers and introduced a case supervisor named Caspar Libing. Observed by FA hierarchy and brass from the Special Security Agency and the Chief Military Office, Caspar Libing over a period of several days debriefed Val.

The sessions were in a tight interview room adjacent to Val’s sleeping closet and toilet. A small table separated Libing and Val. The two-way mirrors were blackened to simulate polyfiber.

An experienced and intuitive interrogator, Libing had some knowledge of Goraneg culture, and he was a father. When Val said he did not know his true age, Libing moved on. Val gave the agent the names and approximate ages of his brothers, cousins, and uncles. He identified corporations posing in international industry while serving Manegold interests. He revealed bank accounts, supply stations, recruitment offices, and storage facilities.

Libing said that based on Val’s disclosures the Federal Authority had been ordered by the federal justiciary to seize Petronille and any persons occupying the castle. Libing wanted Val to suggest the best way to approach the castle.

Val said, “Fighter jets with guided missiles.”

Libing thought he was joking.

Val looked Libing in the eye. “You cannot approach Petronille undetected from the ground. There are two gunships and a fleet of ATTs. No one will be where you expect. If anyone at all is there.”

Libing said, “The warrant requires us to search Petronille for evidence to use at criminal trial.”

Val supposed the courts would want this. He had studied federal law and criminal procedure. Growing up outside such precepts, Val thought Libing’s statement seemed a bit naive. His father would not care about federal warrants and criminal procedure.

“My family has security systems on the two stit warehouses. After the gas kills your agents, the buildings will detonate. We kept nothing else at Petronille that would interest your court except the gunships and small-arms armories. I suppose if you could reach the hangars, and the gunships were there you could take them. But the armories, no, they will detonate if you do not use the correct code. And whatever code I give you is obsolete by now.”

“What about computers?”

Val frowned. “No, no, you could not access those. If they were still there, which they are not. They are terminals anyway. The hub is in Moukib, not Volodya. And the police officials in Moukib will laugh at you. To protect the hub Sir pays the Chairman of West Ussuria the equivalent of the operating budget of a small country. He’ll move it anyway, now that I am gone. As soon as he can he’ll move it. Maybe if you can find the grid, well, no, because you cannot break the encryption, you never will. And even if you find the new hub and hit it with a warhead, you will not stop business, because Sir only has to build his hub elsewhere. He can build it off the backup systems. Business will work independently a short while and upload once the matrix is initialized.”

Libing molded his spine to his backrest and sighed. In the subterranean vault Val was comfortable sampling his handler’s thoughts. Libing believed him. Val’s interaction with Libing was unconstrained.

“What exactly is the Manegold business?” Libing asked.

Val did not immediately answer. An Amarite priest, when asked to defend his belief in his gods, typically replied, “The sky is not blue because you believe it is blue. The sky is blue because it is.”

Val had lived the family business. How was something so basic, so embedded, explained to one who knew nothing, to an outsider? How did one explain the color of the sky to the blind?

Libing pressed. “What does the family do?”

Val said, “Acquire capital.”

Libing, feeling he had come to a subject of definite interest to the joint security and military observers, leaned forward. He was a tall man, lean and wiry with a creased and frowning face. His suit was well cut. His hair with its wires of gray was always in place. That was the extent of his bureaucratic persona. He seemed a man of understanding and intelligence, a study of history whose programmed antipathy toward descendants of the Volker was tempered by a wider view of the distant past.

“Acquire capital. That makes sense. But John, John, I’m trying to understand how your family went about doing that. In other words, a shopkeeper makes a profit by selling his wares at a price above the one for which he purchases his goods from the wholesaler. How does your family make profit?”

“We interface with criminal organizations that need its gains filtered into mainstream markets. We will take an organization’s profit and for a percentage run its cash through our holdings.”

“Since you are big enough to buy the governments of small countries …” Libing said. “Are you big enough?”

“Yes, but it’s harder to work with governments actually. Governments are corrupt. Politicians skim more than any other breed of man.”

Libing nodded. “What is another way?”

“Moving stit at wholesale quantities without paying import freight.”

“Stit powder or leaves?”

“Powder.”

“Do you have your own labs?”

“No, we take orders from the pharmaceuticals in Nimre and Tribries.”

“And they ship to you to get around the tariffs?”

“Annually it amounts to hundreds of millions of International Union Credits.”

Libing swallowed softly. “What else?”

“We sell weapons.”

“What kind of weapons?”

“Every kind of weapon.”

“Do you manufacture them?”

“No, that would not be cost effective. We have acquired a number of different fronts and we sell that way to governments.”

“Only to governments?”

“That was true for a long time, but no longer. We will sell to anyone.”

“What kind of weapons?”

“Small arms, shoulder assault rifles, grenades, launchers for rocket-powered grenades, machine guns, surface to air missiles, forty and fifty caliber mounteds, point four and point four-oh springers, the shells for the point four and point four-oh springers, black powder, bilton land mines, bouncers, plastics, L- and M-class attack helicopters, Aiglentine gunships, Super Warmen, armor-piercers, laser point weapons, martins, and stingrays.”

“All right,” said Libing, shifting his rump. “How are you able to get your hands on laser point weapons?”

“We bribe officials inside the Intercontinental Treaty nations just as easily as in non-allied nations, perhaps more easily. Officials in ITAN countries like their comfort.”

Libing only paused a little, considering the magnitude of Val’s revelation. Volodya was not a member nation but wanted to be. Such information, if proved, would further Volodya’s agenda. “Do you know the names of your contacts in, say, Brianovia? What about the UKSB? Aiglentina? Cobriva?”

“I recall the names of some. I did not care to learn their names. I was not allowed to meet with them and I did not manage that aspect of the family business. The family was afraid for important men in governments to see me.”

“I would like to come back to that. For now, how else does your family acquire capital?”

“We sell information.”

“What kind of information?”

“Any information that comes into our hands.”

“You will sell to bidders?”

“Somehow we would sell it. I’m not aware of the process. I never cared.”

“Did the information get people killed?”

“People died for a number of reasons because of the business. I cannot count the dead. People have died.”

“What else did you sell?”

“We sold people.”

“People, how?”

“They were given to us and we sold them. They were arranged with a buyer and price before the abduction occurred. We did not kidnap these people. We were in between. We profited from it.” Val said, “The people would be relevant to political processes, the award of a large contract, a merger that involved large blocks of capital.”

Libing sat forward, raised his hand slightly and then lowered it. “Did you kill anyone, John?” he asked, knowing what the answer would be. Nevertheless in Ulka and throughout Volodya many would hate Val. They would hate him because his ancestors had invaded Volodya, and when the Volker abandoned what they no longer wanted, Val’s ancestors had refused to surrender their perch. They would hate him because his family was wealthy and blatantly, unrepentantly lawless but immune to prosecution because of its (former) invisibility to federal officials and its hold on regional authority.

Val was grateful for Libing’s concern and the opportunity to be clear: “I have never killed.”

“Surely you had opportunity.”

“They never asked me to. I was their truthsayer, a talisman.”

“A what?”

“I was their truthsayer. I can tell the truth from a lie by being in a room with a person.”

Libing assumed this was a Goranegi quirk, a folk story, and moved on. “In what criminal enterprises did you have a hand?”

“There’s stit in my bloodstream. I am a user.”

“A user? Why not just smoke stit? Rolled stit is legal.”

“I have an unusual constitution. Smoking stit doesn’t affect me.”

“Are you addicted?”

“No.”

“You’re a heavy sleeper.”

“Stit injections did not cause that.”

“All right, I’m not that interested right now in your drug problem.” Val had already discerned this was not true. “What else did you do?”

Though he proceeded with his emotions firmly under his heel, Libing possessed contrasting feelings about an adolescent who mainlined stit and spoke levelly of murders.

“I managed our investments,” Val said. “Using algorithms and derivative math, I wrote the program we used to invest in the market.”

“You’re a bit young for that.”

“Code and math come easily to me.”

“Who was your source?”

“No who, what. When the market-makers began to move money, we knew. We were heavily into stock manipulations. It was not my place to know what or why, just to do what the math told me to do, and at the appropriate time. I did this for many accounts, not all of them ours.”

“Were people providing your stock data in violation of trade laws?”

“Of course.”

“Did you make calls to discuss these criminal acts, and did you discuss the sale of weapons, the sale of people, did you hold down anyone, stand in a room in which an abducted person was held? Our criminal justice policy considers those acts to be criminal. To arrange immunity for you, we must know what we will be forgiving. Did you do any of those things?”

“Petronille was not a theater of violence, at least not in the way you mean. It was more like the country home of a chief executive who never went into the home office. No abducted persons were brought to Petronille. And the people who died on the grounds were accomplices, employees, and occasionally Sir Burgolt’s wives.”

“Your father’s wives?”

“Sir does not believe in divorce. When he wants a new wife, he murders the current one.”

“Does your mother know about this practice?”

“She knew. We all knew. She thought the last time was the last time. She’s dead now. When he killed her I tried to kill him. I failed. Forgive me for that.”

“For trying to kill your father?”

For failing, Val thought. “Tell your agents to reconsider a ground attack. Nothing will be there. And still the automated systems will incinerate your soldiers.”

“The compilation of offenses is essential to lawful action,” Libing recited unnecessarily. “Even if your family fled the premises, we must seize the property, sort out its effects, begin to build a case. We have systems people and we have bomb technicians”

Val inhaled, his chest contracting. He sat back.

“We know our work,” said Libing, with less conviction. “When it’s done you can go up there, help us sort it out. Meanwhile why don’t you focus on helping the case from here? What did you do with your profits?”

“Me, personally? I was not a salaried employee. Now that I have left the family I have no resources.”

“No, I meant you, the business.”

“Profit was always used to advance the objective.”

“To acquire capital, ah. Then it was re-invested. Is that what you did with your analyses and programs?”

“Yes.” Val shook his head abruptly. “No, not as you mean. The family invested to advance the objective.”

Libing compressed his lips. “The objective being to make more money.”

Val locked onto Libing’s gaze. He had come upon an explanation of the family business that Libing might understand. “All profit went to upset economically and politically everything that was stable, and on as large a scale as possible, to bring about a new world order.”

-- Next Chapter