“And what exact miracle do you think someone would try to accomplish with these reagents?” she asks.
“That I can’t say. All the specific stuff was banned when Saypur enforced the Worldly Regulations. They took all those books and packed them away somewhere. I only know the general stuff, which wasn’t quite so illegal.”
“Do you know anyone who might know what miracle they could be used for?”
“Well…” He scratches his chin. “Komayd did roll back a whole lot of the Worldly Regulations when she took the crown, but so far it hasn’t trickled down to us little fellers yet. The only folk who might know are the highlanders.”
“Like, the tribes?”
“Them’s the ones. They’re old traditionalists, they are. They wouldn’t have forgotten a thing like that. Though it’s a bit hard to just sit down and have tea with them.”
Mulaghesh makes another note of this. “What do you have in the way of sleeping aids?”
“Oh, well…that depends on the sleep you need. Do you have trouble falling asleep? Or staying asleep?”
“Staying,” says Mulaghesh, rubbing her left arm.
“And what kind of sleep do you seek, ma’am? Light? Dreamy? Or deep?”
“Deep,” she says immediately. “No dreams, if you can.”
He looks at her, and there’s a curious shine to his eye that makes her think that maybe he wasn’t lying about the drangla weed. “Is it sleep you want to find?” he asks quietly. “Or dreams you wish to escape?”
She looks at him hard. “The latter.”
He reviews his shelves, then takes down a small glass jar filled with tiny brown dots. “Nickletop mushroom caps,” he says, “have a distinctly soporific effect—they make you sleepy, I mean, ma’am. Gets stronger when you steam ’em.” He carefully pours some of them into a tin and affixes the cap. “Sometimes used to put horses asleep before surgery. What this means, ma’am, is don’t take too much of ’em. Cut one in half, and put it below your tongue before bed. You can brew it in tea, too, but the effects take longer. And don’t lick your fingers or prepare any food without washing your hands. Or, ah, engage in any manual intimacy. A dusting of nickletop will render any man’s trouser eel worthless for hours.”
“Now that I’ll keep in mind.” She takes the little tin, pops the cap open, and looks inside. The mushroom caps look like tiny, flaky brown pearls. “Any side effects?”
“Just the one on your purse,” he says. “Thirty drekels, please.”
She grouses for a moment—thirty drekels would be enough for a steak dinner, if there was any beef to speak of around here—but she forks it over. She needs sleep more than she needs money.
***
Back in her room at the SDC headquarters Mulaghesh massages her arm, pulls the carousel from its holster, and sets it on her nightstand. Then she sits on the edge of her bed, alone in her sumptuous room, listening to the wind and the sea bickering outside her window.
The images of the farmhouse swirl about in her mind: bodies ravaged beyond recognition, the black smoke unscrolling from the tips of the dark trees, a human form half-concealed by a clump of clover.
She tries to tell herself that she’s just disturbed, as anyone would be. She just strolled through the scene of a brutal mass murder and abominable desecration—that’s why her heart is beating so fast. It has nothing to do with the fact that these sights, however grisly, are somewhat familiar to her.
She rummages through her coat, pulls out the little tin of nickletop mushrooms, and taps out one of the dark little buttons. She uses her combat knife to cut it in half and examines the tiny, crumpled half-circle balanced on her index finger. After a second’s hesitation she opens her mouth, sticks it under her tongue—it tastes of wood and wool—and lies down on the bed.
The effects are almost instantaneous. She feels woozy, like her brain is waterlogged, and everything is suddenly incredibly heavy. It’s as if her bones are so dense they’re about to fall through her flesh and through the bottom of the bed.
She remembers what Biswal said to her: It helps me fight the feeling that I’m a fiddly old man wondering if the past ever really happened….
Her lids grow heavy. The nickletop might keep her from dreaming, but it’s helpless to keep her from remembering so much in the few fleeting minutes before sleep.
***
If you were to bring up the Yellow March in Saypur these days, chances are you’d get a variety of reactions, none of them positive: there’d be a lot of sighs and eye-rolling—not this again—and perhaps a snicker or two. Among the more patriotic quarters such a mention would likely evoke outright hostility: you could be booted from the premises, or even struck in the face.
This is because, in Saypur, all talk of the Yellow March has long been considered either a smear campaign or a paranoid delusion, a dangerous or ludicrous conspiracy theory that only crackpots and the unpatriotic would ever entertain.
Everyone respectable agrees that the Summer of Black Rivers (called such even though it lasted nearly three years) was one of Saypur’s greatest triumphs. It was the war that defined Saypur’s modern national identity, so who would dare besmirch its reputation? Those Saypuris who wish to appear thoughtful will concede that, yes, there might have been something that inspired the wild tale of the Yellow March—war is war, after all, and full of horrors—but it was certainly far short of the events the conspiracy theorists detail.
But Mulaghesh knows it was no conspiracy. Because she remembers. Even though it was almost forty years ago, she remembers.
The Kaj captured the Continent in 1642, and Saypur pulled off the Great Censoring just eight years later, scouring the Continent of all of its sacred images and art. Shortly after that Saypur plunked down the Worldly Regulations, hoping—in futility—that outlawing mention or acknowledgment of the Divine would mean it would no longer affect modern life. Saypur was pretty strict about the WR for most of the Continent, but they tended to tiptoe around Bulikov: even in its postwar, decimated state, it was still a massive metropolis, and it still wielded a lot of power by sheer population. So, to a certain extent, the WR were enforced in Bulikov in name only, so that Saypur could remain unchallenged and keep the remainder of the Continent in check.