Tales from Kalgachia - 45
A little upstream from the town of Zensemer, its namesake river - having sprung from the barren cliffs of the Octavian Massif but not yet reached the arable bocage of lower Lithead - was all but hidden from view by a steep gorge coated in thick coniferous forest. Here it was joined by other, smaller gorges carved by a dendritic host of tributary streams over the course of millennia. Amid this carpet of charcoal green the days passed much alike, differing only slowly with the season; silence prevailed except for the breath-like roar of rapids, the drilling of woodpeckers and the occasional screech of soaring eagles, the latter sometimes accompanied by gunshots as local partisans took aim at the birds which Ketherist scripture considered to be archonic totems. For want of bountiful prey or easy burrowing so far upland, tee-als were never seen here.
Along one such forested gorge, difficult to discern until one was actually in it, a single-lane road climbed steadily from the stream at the bottom to the precarious heights above, shrouded for most of its length by tunnels of pine boughs. Only the full effort of the midday sun, percolating into an ambient green glow beneath the forest canopy, negated the need for headlights by the road's only occupant at that moment - a wide black limousine from the motor pool of the Directorate of Labour and Economic Planning. It was a well-preserved 'Novoz' model built in the Minarborian era for that empire's undead elite, appointed with a walnut and leather interior complete with a small crystal chandelier that swung amusingly to the rhythm of a well-damped suspension on questionable central Benacian roads. Robust engineering aside, How so many of these machines had survived into Kalgachi service was something of a mystery; the original factory was located in Novodolorsk, a once-thriving industrial city which was now little more than a thoroughly-pillaged ruin in the ungoverned wastes east of Schlepogora. Presumably, went the theory of anyone who cared, the luck of Kalgachia's founding warbands in conducting the first such pillage had yielded them the original blueprints and tooling; possibly in the same raid that had enabled the Kalgachi arms industry to crank out the venerable Fischer-Preiss carbine by the million.
Caustifer Yastreb, the flame-haired and sharp-suited adolescent sprawled casually across the back seat of this particular vehicle, had more interesting things to occupy him. Having been blessed with a substantial inheritance, his amateur luck at playing foreign currency markets had brought him more paper natopo than he knew how to spend and through the chicanery of his hired 'financial advisors' he had somehow acquired an eleven percent stake in the Octavian Import-Export Corporation. Not bad for a seventeen year-old, he sometimes had the gall to remark - the fact that his father was principal numismator and de facto chairman of the Reserve Bank of Kalgachia, or that his mother was the most senior publically-appearing official of the entire Kalgachi government, were beneficial factors they had both tried to impress upon the boy lest he get the idea that such privilege was an effortless function of his mere existence. The House of Yastreb was ergatocratic in origin, they had said, and it would do the family a great dishonour if the lifestyle of its nominal heir was to diverge so egregiously from the plight of the common folk. When Caustifer had asked what his parents' own excuse was, the resulting furious argument had put them out of speaking terms with him until they solicited an intervention from his uncle Falcifer, a sharp-tongued but pensive man whose work for Kalgachia's ruling Council of Perfecti and the Troglodyti kept him incommunicado most of the time. Nonetheless, Falcifer had used the scant hour he had available for a meeting to dispense a suitably uncle-like morsel of advice, to the effect that Caustifer would be taught better by his own hubristic excess than anything his parents could say.
Empowered by this advice, which had silenced but not entirely satisfied his parents, Caustifer had already decided to finish his education upon graduation from the Gymnasium and forego any studies at Oktavyan University. His father's colleagues at the DLEP, who took him to lunch whenever he liked and gave him unlimited use of the chauffered limousine in which he presently travelled, had made it abundantly clear that a well-appointed office and a fat salary awaited him in the bowels of the Directorate whenever he wished it. There, he assured his parents, he would dedicate himself to the betterment of the common Kalgachi.
Now the limousine swung off the road and passed through a set of gates which seemed to appear from nowhere, guarded by a pair of armed and chokha-clad Laqi. Beyond them at the head of a steeply-climbing driveway, the pines parted to reveal the timber facade of a large villa, adorned with small glittering windows whose tarred frames were bleached to streaky grey by the mountain sun. The presence of a cherry-red Landfara Leopard indicated that Caustifer's mother Rubina was already there - now in her sixties, her lithe Nezeni frame had nonetheless aged gracefully and she sprang from the villa, barefooted and clad in a short summer dress, as Caustifer was getting out of the car.
"Stiff!" she squeaked quietly as she dropped her arms around him, the rancour of their previous arguments seemingly forgotten.
"Hello Mama," said Caustifer, a lungful of his mother's pheromonal perfume briefly displacing the sharp scent of the surrounding pines. He looked over her shoulder at the villa behind. "So this is another one of your little bolt holes... how does the Lieutenant of Oktavyan get a villa in Lithead?"
"Oh no, little one," said Rubina, "this is my KDF house." She bumped her green-skinned heels together in imitation of a soldier at attention. "Remember when they made me Honourary Commandant General of the Fire Division? I get an Honourary Commandant General's accomodation with it."
"I thought the Fire Division was sent to fight the Gubs down in Black Laqi country... shouldn't you be touring the battlefield?"
"Your jealousy is as ugly as ever, young man," muttered Rubina with a flutter of the eyelids. She turned her bare feet in the gravel to lead Caustifer indoors. "If you must know, Brigadier Kolbaza delivers me a briefing every two days, in person. He was here just this morning."
"Kolbaza..." growled Caustifer. The Brigadier had been hanging around his mother for some years, seemingly more often since the temporal haemorrhaging had put a geriatric brake on his father's capacity for physical affection. Some of Caustifer's less sympathetic peers at the Gymnasium had learned of the situation - the Shrub alone knew how - and delighted in throwing around the implication that this moustachioed Laqi Brigadier was Caustifer's real father. "Is Papa here?" he asked pointedly. "He said he was coming."
"He couldn't make it, I'm afraid," Rubina sighed. "Something came up in Oktavyan. You know how they overload him at the Directorate... if you're not going to university you should at least be aiming to replace him. He has no cultivated genes, remember... he won't have our sort of longevity, even with the telomerase therapy. He should have retired years ago."
"Can't you get uncle Fifi to fire him?"
"It's not his decision. Our Brother Sovereign the Perfectus for Labour and Economic Planning..." Rubina rattled out the title with well-worn bureaucratic elocution, "...won't dismiss him without his consent and the Council would never underrule our Brother Sovereign's position on such a matter. And your Papa won't retire by himself, as you know. I don't know why he enjoys the work so much."
"I'm not sure he does," said Caustifer. "I call at his office most days. He puts a brave face on it, but I'm starting to think the boys from Avakair have got him under the heel."
"One of these days the Prefects will have to go in there and clean house..." Rubina threw open a pair of doors to reveal a furnished outside deck, overlooking kilometres of forest canopy and the distant town of Zensemer itself. "Snotty...!" she called back indoors.
After a flurry of footsteps, a young man in a KDF steward's uniform appeared in a doorway. "Yes ma'am?"
"A tray of canapés and a bottle of Dietse Wijn, will you?"
"Yes ma'am." The man disappeared.
"Why do you call him Snotty?" said Caustifer.
"Because the first time I got him to towel me off after a shower, he sneezed all over me. He must have been nervous or something. I needed another shower to rinse it off... it was so funny."
"You got him to-" Caustifer choked on his words. "Mama, I'm not even going to ask."
"Ask what?"
"Never mind," said Caustifer, finding himself unable to look at Snotty who was now approaching with the refreshments.
"Ma'am," the steward said quietly as he set down the tray, "I've just had a call from the gate. Your other guest has arrived."
Falcifer Yastreb was walking the surface of Micras for the first time in a long time. His elder sister's feat in corraling the three living members of the Yastreb bloodline to socialise in one place, in defiance of their usually-overlapping work commitments, was rare indeed - mostly on account of Falcifer's own schedule, a whole-life effort in the manner required from most national heads of state. Even here he was accompanied by two officials, clad like himself in the black 'dentist tunics' of the Troglodyti. These waylaid Snotty before he could properly receive Falcifer and ordered the man to show them the villa's landline telephone outlet, to which they hurriedly connected two pieces of equipment unpacked from heavy-duty cases; the first a data terminal which resembled a GAHDN unit but had considerably more functionality and connected to a hardened, publically-inaccessible government network of which the GAHDN was only a partial imitation. The other piece of equipment was the encryption unit necessary to establish a direct connection with the chambers of the Council of Perfecti themselves, deep beneath Mount Octavian. After a terse enquiry about his security clearance, Snotty was ordered to vacate the awkward hallway corner in which the terminal had been connected; as it came online, Falcifer addressed the officials.
"Let me make this clear... I'm spending three hours here and I want them in peace, with my family. I am not to be interrupted for anything short of all out-war. All other matters are to be logged in detail and I'll look them over when we leave. Too many times am I treated as a single point of failure and this country does not do single points of failure. If the Council or their gutless secretaries cannot function without me for three hours then we might as well call it a day and sign the Garden over to the Gubs. Impress this on anyone who starts bleating about urgency on that little screen of yours, take their names, and tell them if they really want micromanagement then for their sins, they're going to get it. Understood?"
The two Troglodytes nodded silently.
"Hortustenam," sang Falcifer in a cantor's monotone, sharply holding up a palm with fingers splayed.
"Manetsutrokh," sang the men, returning the gesture.
"Fifi!" chirped Rubina as Snotty led Falcifer onto the deck. She wrapped one arm around him and handed him a glass of wine with the other. "Thank you so much for coming... my Shrub, when was the last time you even saw the sky?"
"The last time it saw me," said Falcifer, looking up at the villa's timber walls. "Nice place... I was unaware the KDF had this kind of estate."
"You don't know the half of it," said Rubina. "Neither does your Sovereign Brother the Commander-in-Chief, I suspect." She turned around. "Caustie, come and say hello to your uncle for Shrub's sake."
Caustifer downed the dregs of his wine glass and hauled himself out of his seat, his face adopting its usual mischievous smile. "How's it going, Uncle Fifi?" he said over the ensuing handshake.
"It certainly is going," said Falcifer. "Truth be told, this wasn't the most convenient time for me but I couldn't be sure when I'd next get the chance." He eased himself into his seat as the others did the same. "You know the Council looks unkindly on members fraternising with other state organs behind the backs of the appropriate Perfecti. I really have to play the family card to see you two at all."
"Papa had the same problem," said Rubina. "In the early days, before we were born. They kept him captive underground for a while, when he married Mama."
The mention of Rubina and Falcifer's deceased parents caused the three living heirs to pause in involuntary reflection. A sigh of wind rolling over the treetops below assumed an odd significance in the mind of each, as if their ancestors were present. Nobody spoke for some time.
Falcifer eventually broke the silence. "Still got a finger in the dee-lep, Caustifer?" he said, vocalising the DLEP's name in the colloquial manner.
"They provided my ride up here," muffled Caustifer, his mouth half full of canapé pastry. To Rubina's disapproving pout he paused to swallow. "I was just discussing with Mama, actually... we think the Assayers are leaning on my Papa to stay at work until he croaks, but we can't figure out why."
"Probably to keep you out of the job," said Falcifer without delay, picking up his own morsel of pastry. "Your Papa brought a lot of Goldshirian baggage with him. Baggage is leverage. But they've got nothing on you."
Caustifer exchanged glances with Rubina. "I had no idea I was being considered to replace Papa," he said.
"My Sovereign Brother concerned with Labour and Economic Planning was impressed by your command of the foreign exchange market. It was he who greased the gears on the purchase of your stake in the OIEC."
"Really?" said Caustifer, his jaw hanging open a little in stupefaction.
"More to the point, the whole Council - my Sovereign Brother of the Prefects in particular - is keen to reclaim sovereign control of the Reserve Bank of Kalgachia from the Norestrian cadre. Their expertise was needed in the early days and your father was right to bring them in... but the consensus among the Council is that their craft is sufficiently replicable for our purposes, their usefulness is at an end and that you are the most suitable prime agent for the coming reclamation."
"Fifi!" hissed Rubina. "This is all news to me! Is this why you talked him out of going to university?"
"That decision was his," said Falcifer laconically. "We're just trying to find the best outlet for him."
"But why get him mixed up with the Assayers? Have they not done enough to this family already?"
"They'll be doing it to the whole country if we let them get too comfortable. Listen, Caustifer," he leaned forward in his seat. "I'll be honest. We have everything we need to effect the necessary regime change at the Reserve Bank, except for you. Part of the pressure to keep your father working has actually come from us. The Council prevaricates on his removal because we haven't been able to confirm an appropriate replacement, someone who can bridge the old regime with the new. As far as we're concerned, you are that someone. But if this is going to work, you have to want it."
By now, Caustifer had assumed a pallor worthy of his undead forebears. "B-but..." he mumbled, "How can I? I'm only seventeen."
"You won't be seventeen forever," said Falcifer. "But what you can do now, if you're up to it, is gobble up all the overtures the DLEP throws at you and assist my Sovereign Brother of the Prefects in determining whose loyalties lie in Avakair and whose lie in Oktavyan. Consulting your father where possible. We've spoken to him directly but to be honest, we can't get much sense out of him."
"You're in good company on that count," said Caustifer, forcing a laugh and refilling his wine glass with a trembling hand. "I'll see what I can do, I suppose... when do you intend to make your move?"
"When we have the information we need, and you have the experience you need to step into the breach. That'll be down to you and your father."
"But how urgent is it?" said Rubina. "How soon before our economy is threatened by this Norestrian gaggle?"
"Possibly never," said Falcifer. "Their service has been exemplary so far, but we know what they're about. You said it yourself. We can't take the risk if we don't need them any more."
"And there was me thinking you were all occupied with Ҳazedinov and the Uplanders," said Rubina, gesturing to Snotty for another bottle of wine.
"The present was decided yesterday," said Falcifer. "The future is decided today. As it stands, the Council is satisfied with developments in the southwest. KDF Deep Command has woven in the advice of my occluded breathrens' counsel on the progression of the conflict, from assertive to reactive to frozen, to disarm and dismantle the archonic fixation on our side and let other conflicts take up the slack on the enemy side. My brethren liken it to removing chewing gum from one's hair.... I wouldn't know." He slid his empty wine glass aside to let Snotty refill it from a fresh bottle. "Ideally the final stage would be a codified peace, but there's still the difficulty of recognition arrangements with a power whose core ideology entails a direct claim upon our entire territory. The DTW is poring through the Nationalist-Humanist literature and examining how far they can stretch the notion of 'dignified abeyance' but I'm not holding my breath. Ultimately it's an optional luxury, like everything else the DTW does."
The hiss of a match and a puff of rich smoke appeared from Caustifer's direction as he lit a Bedricson & Hege cigar, only for Rubina to reach over and snatch it out of his mouth.
"Not at my house, young man!" she squeaked, extinguishing the offending item with a drizzle of wine and hurling it away over the deck rail. "And you can stop laughing too," she said to a giggling Falcifer. "I wet-nursed you as a baby, you know."
Falcifer threw up his hands. "Oy," he said in a theatrical Bergburg accent, "alwaysse wit di awkward anecdotes."
"Speaking of awkward," said Caustifer, "did you know she gets bathtime help from that minion back there?"
"I thought that was Brigadier Kolbaza's job," said Falcifer, burying a tongue in his cheek.
Rubina's furious glare was his victory and his warning in equal measure.
