They all looked up at her approach. It wasn't her scars, she realised, but the clear skin between them. There was little of that amongst the tavern's usual clientele. It was clear that they viewed it with suspicion.
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"It's funny," the newly crowned Emperor said, though there was not a trace of humour in his voice. "I have control over a dozen realms, the strength of their armies, and of course my own innate abilities, which allow me to keep them in check."
"I am blessed with all this power... but still I cannot find the strength... to forgive."
The view improved the less she could see. By daylight, she looked down upon a grey mosaic of parking lots and building sites, her middle distance packed with identical office blocks. But at night that mundane reality was shrouded in shadow, and only the lights of the skyline remained.
In a multi-planet civilisation, every town was coastal: the place where the sands of home met the lapping void of space. The shoreline between land and nothing, between here and everywhere.
Din had lived there all her life, and perhaps it was strange that she had never found herself aboard a ship - not even to wade into the shallows of the lower atmosphere, to dip her toes into the great beyond.
Din became a Farrier because of the noise. It was audible throughout the city, an insufferable clanking and clattering that made Parasuela tap to its tarantella beat. It wasn't just the hammering and welding in the docks, working hard to outfit the ships, but the heavy drills they used to pulverise the Citrogen in the first place; a constant low-level thrum, like the droning of an ibisfly, or her calling card vibrating on the table. It was the sound of constant stress.
There was no escape, at least not on Citroline-C. The thing about a multi-planet system was that every town was coastal: the place where the sands of home met the lapping void of space. Every city was a port, a docks, their fate governed by the inky seas above them. Din had grown up in Parasuela, but she'd travelled enough to know that all the towns around them were the same. They crawled upon a thin strip of crust, gazing up at the vacuous beyond. She walked the shoreline between everything and nothing; between here and everywhere.
Citroline-C was a rocky expanse, blessed only in its minerals, mined from vast quarries in the eastern hemisphere. For everything else, they relied on deliveries from lusher climes a dozen worlds away. It was the Farriers who paid for that. It was their work that lured the distant ships to land, trading treasures from the bowels of the mines for other wonders from the fathoms of space. In a sense, the ships were returning from a mine of their own; every bit as dark, and every bit as dangerous. Depth was just a matter of perspective.
Citrogen was their primary export. Once it had been extracted from the mines, the Farriers worked it into a tough, malleable substance, and built it into the bulkheads ships needed to pass through the Ibson Belt. It was important work, for what it gave the ships as much as for what it brought their planet in return. None in Parasuela could begrudge them the noise of their labour. But that didn't stop Din loathing it with every fibre of her being. She hated that she could never breathe, never rest, without that rattling still ringing in her head. It was bad enough that she could hear the drills vibrating all day long, even in the moments when they stopped.
That was why she'd chosen to join them. If Din couldn't beat them, she felt she may as well join in with the beating and the battering. It was the only way she'd found to bear the noise: to be part of it, joining in, and thereby trick her brain into thinking it was hers. Sounds were never as bothersome when she was the one making them. It was a play she'd learnt from an early age, growing up with three younger siblings. If her sister wouldn't stop whistling, she found it helped to hum along. If her brother kept tapping his chopsticks on the table, she tapped her foot in harmony. It co-opted their noise as her own, and then it didn't drive her up the wall.
She'd also heard that those who worked close to the noise developed a sort of immunity called deafness. Their eardrums could only take so much pounding before they gave up the ghost, opening the door for the only peace and quiet to be found in Parasuela's streets. In a choice between total silence and total cacophony, Din had to admit a little numbness sounded tempting. If she had to make the problem worse in order for it to get better, she could tolerate a bit of darkness before the dawn.
To be a Farrier was a master's role. Din did not necessarily want to ascend to those giddy heights, but she hoped to become at least a roughneck, respected in her role, established in her own groove, and it would still be a long journey through the docks until then. She had to start out as a roustabout, at the bottom of the pecking order; picking up the odd jobs no-one else wanted to do, anyone's to order around as they saw fit. But it was better than being a bystander, a passive victim to the noise pollution they churned out. Better to be inside the tent, clashing the cymbals for herself.
It had seemed a sound plan at the time. But it left her as the most junior roustabout on deck when the Hogert craft came spiralling into port, as roughshod as the day she was forged, careening in a pirouette of smoke until collapsing in their dock. Din assumed the landing was intentional, if unorthodox. The ship certainly seemed to need their assistance; its bulkhead was wholly eaten through, showing the sheen of raw metal underneath. It wouldn't be surviving another trip across the galaxy. It looked to have barely survived its last.
"What do you make of that?" Tas, one of the older roughnecks, had come to watch the show.
"I don't know," Din admitted. Despite growing up in the hubbub of a port, she'd never been aboard a ship, or at least not one in flight. Not even to wade into the shallows of the lower atmosphere; to dip her toes into the great beyond. "There's coming in hot, and then whatever this is."
They waited for the craft to spin to a stop, and then waited some more, but there were no further signs of life. No pilot emerged. No explanation was forthcoming. The ship was in a worse state than Din had initially thought: not just raw and smoking, but as twisted as its flight path. It had contorted inwards on itself, like dying animals do.
"Right, rookie, you're up." Tas slapped her across the shoulders. "Start with the Gazti drill. That'll punch right through the hull."
"What?"
"Are you deaf, girl?" It was a genuine question.
"No."
"Someone's got to get in there and root around. Find out what's what. You're someone, aren't you?"
"I guess," Din conceded. It was just that she'd planned on keeping that going. She quite liked being alive, on the whole; it was only the noise that she hated, and things there had just started to look up. But it seemed looking up had been her mistake.
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It was always bad. There were a thousand things that couldn't come to pass, and Ruth's role was to change the course of the present. To make rewrites to fate's shoddy script.
At one point, it had been fashionable to believe that the the arc of human history bent towards progress. But the world was so messy - there were too many things which could collide and spark a war. So much could go wrong, and it was her job to hold it all in place.
The gift of prophesy was a heavy mantle to bear. Ruth could see the disasters to come, and it was a constant balancing act to stave them off. She never told the future, because she was the reason it was never set. She was seer, steerer, and preventer. Forewarned was forearmed.
Those who don't learn from the future are doomed to enact it.
A younger, more optimistic Ruth had tried to be direct. Phone calls in the night to influential people, alerting journalists with anonymous tips about impending disasters, even the odd midnight raid with friends.
She had quickly learned the folly of that. Some few people listened, briefly, but when the disaster did not manifest on the precise foretold date, they went straight back to the action that would bring it about. Or a very similar rival would step in and destroy the economy. More often she was ignored.
So now she takes a different approach. You can't stop the avalanch by removing the pebbles, so you have to level the mountain instead.
She's a hunter of futures, laying carefully crafted traps of paper, she ensnares the dystopias on pages, pinning them in place like butterflies. She writes the futures down binding them with ink and toner, baits them with a likeable protagonist, wraps it in an inoffensive cover and waits.
She has a trophy shelf above her desk flanked by newspaper clippings. 12 novels, 12 futures that will never again haunt her nightmares filled with plagues, wars and death. It's not enough, but it's a start.
This is great - levelling the mountain and pinning the futures like butterflies are wonderful images.
It was always bad. There were a thousand things that couldn't come to pass, and Ruth's role was to change the course of the present. To make rewrites to fate's shoddily drafted script.
At one point, it had been fashionable to believe that the the arc of human history bent towards progress. But the world was so messy - there were too many things which could collide and spark a war. So much could go wrong, and it was her job to hold it all in place.
The gift of prophesy was a heavy mantle to bear. Ruth could see the disasters to come, and it was a constant balancing act to stave them off. She never told the future, because she was the reason it was never set. She was seer, steerer, and preventer. Forewarned was forearmed.
Those who don't learn from the future are doomed to enact it.
The carving had been in the shape of a key, but time had filled it with mulch.
The mist clung between the trees, shaggy firs and hemlocks cloaked again with moss. Forests within forests; life upon life. Ferns formed a mirror canopy beneath, whilst golden arum rose like arrow heads.
Amongst it all lurked a broad yellow slug, also in the shape of a key.
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They pulled out all the stops. That was the new initiative for traffic calming - all part of the pro-go agenda. No red tape and no red lights. They'd promised to get the country moving again.
People were more cautious drivers now. More careful voters, too.
They'd taken shelter in a church. It had felt like the most secure option available, with thick stone walls that had stood for centuries. It had probably been a place of refuge in the past, in times of raids or civil war. But none of those assailants had arrived by helicopter.
They felt them before they saw them. The ground trembled under the propellers, and even the old church bell began to rattle in its housing, joining the onslaught of noise. Genid climbed the stairs to muffle it, lest it draw the pilots' attention, but it was far too late for that. His position in the steeple just afforded him a better view. He was about level with the chinooks in the sky, and the first to see the missiles fired their way.
"Here comes the candle to light you to bed," he whispered. "Here comes the chopper to chop off your head."
The delay makes everything worse. Her seat vibrates with the bouncing leg two rows behind, but it's impossible to move; other legs are strewn across seats and aisles, a minefield of manspreading that pins her in her place.
The carriage is restless, a boredom relieved by sighs, tuts, and videos played aloud, a release which only serves to feed their frustration. A stuck train is not a pleasant place to be.
Especially when they all know what's trapped them here together.
In a multi-planet civilisation, every town was coastal: the place where the sands of home met the lapping void of space. The shoreline between land and nothing, between here and everywhere.
Din had lived there all her life, and perhaps it was strange that she had never found herself aboard a ship - not even to wade into the shallows of the lower atmosphere, to dip her toes into the great beyond.
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"My husband left me the villa overlooking Sasco Bay, on the north side of the island. It's a steep descent, but the views along the way are wonderful."
"On that, I believe you," the detective replied. "Of course, I am sure that the same is written of Hell."
"I'm sorry?"
He turned his heavy-lidded eyes to her. "Perhaps it is not me you should be asking for forgiveness."
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