Artist of the Akshauhini - Part 4

The startling sensation of seeing an unfamiliar person in your room. The doctor’s back is turned, but the red and blue attire is unmistakable. They’re not the clan physician; she went along north with Chaemshar’s father and brothers. There’s a soft grinding noise as they work an alabaster mortar and pestle on top of her dresser. The room is filled with the heavy scent of medicine, herbaceous and bitter in equal parts.

“Wait. You’ll take this first.” They produce a pill the size of a glass marble. It’s freshly made; the dark lacquer shell is still viscous. Chameshar almost chokes getting it down her dry gullet.

The person to enter after the doctor isn’t her mother. A long gray muzzle probes through the doorway first. The Jawik-kecil it belongs to is tall and spindly. His clothing, threadbare and faded, has the Akshauhini colors. It’s hard to discern how he regards her by his slit-pupil eyes and flat white teeth. 

“Bhagyakara’s whiskers. You’re awake. Aahit was concerned you might not. Wake up, I mean. Your low soul and high soul were so far away from each other, you see.”

“My lower soul feels like it wants to crawl out of me.” Chameshar can feel the medicine sizzling in her stomach. “Have we met?”

“Oh, not directly, I suppose. We’ve seen you though. I’m Star Phaalyn.” A Dhamen name and a Dhamen accent. He was one of the masters — overseers? — of the Five Factories along with someone named Aahit. There are special telescopes on the Factories that let them see what’s happening on the ground and the Akash around them. This was how he was able to see Chaemshar through a hole in the roof of the headquarters.

Chaemshar wants to ask him about the paintings, about the Factories, but she can hardly stay awake through his words.

When she wakes up again he’s gone and the sun is setting through the drawn blinds. Her mother sits in the corner. “You’ve been leaning on Bhagyakara too hard for years now,” she says. “And now it catches up to you.”

Chaemshar tries to clear her throat of the thickness coating it. “I’m doing well, thank you.”

“To put yourself in danger over such a triviality is an insult to your ancestors and to your relations who are putting their lives at risk as we speak.”

How at risk can they be shipping spare underwear and heads of water buffalo across the Akash? “I don’t think Phraya Aruchavi would call it a triviality. Saving the work he’s paid me, us, so generously for?

“To Naraka with what that man would call it. You still believe that you were hired on your ‘merits’, and that the money is meant for you?” Her mother stands and goes to the door. “Have you not asked those dissolute friends of yours in the city about that generosity? Have you not realized that rajata is really a consolation to your suffering father? As if that child could simply issue some checks to fix the injury he’s done to all of us.”

Chameshar says nothing for what feels like forever. Her arm and a multitude of patches across her face and body are throbbing. “And yet you accept every one of them.” 

In a week she’s well enough to leave the house. Her studio is filled with canvasses stacked like planks of wood. It smells faintly of smoke. The murals are nowhere to be seen, but in the corner of one stack a patch of cyan protrudes. She tugs and Taheng slides out to greet her. The right side of the canvas has singed away; the witch and her maranhig now stare out at a jagged fringe of black erasing the right side of the composition entirely. Gata’s lower half is burned away, though the maranhig seems unfazed.

She’s still short of breath — did it ever take her this long to walk up that hill? — and the smell of burnt canvas triggers her nausea. Outside she shields her eyes against the glare and makes out a few trace plumes of smoke rising off the city.

It had been privateers hired by one of the rajanates. They had hooked around the eastern edge of Imperial territory and pose as merchant ships the rest of the way. The newsrolls allege this was facilitated by collaborators among the periphery. A handful of ships had strafed New Chelor as well.

Neither the sculptor nor the composer come to visit during her convalescence. They’re too busy. Khanor Avenue is still covered with rubble from where facades of former factories and warehouses got split down the center and blown into the street. Several of the sculptor’s family’s storefronts were damaged. When Chaemshar’s well enough to take a sampan she finds the composer in the park sitting on a piece of a fallen pillar in the strumming a Bamajayan sapeh.

”Chae, I’m sorry.” He lays aside the sapeh and jumps down, looking at the canvas sling around her arm. “I wanted to visit you, but there was so much happening…”

“It doesn’t matter.” She doubts he even knows where she lives. Not that her mother would’ve let him get past the annex anyways. “I’m glad you’re okay at least.”

He goes on at length about mutual acquaintances who were also injured. His younger brother, a sailor in the Imperial Fleet, hasn’t sent a message back home in more than a season. It doesn’t take long for it to get awkward. They aren’t sure what to say to each other anymore now, with these injuries they’ve acquired independently. 

The stipend ends abruptly. Her mother says that when she went to the narrowband tower in the city to send a message to the Sirihanok fleet, she also directed a message to the phraya, resigning on her daughter’s behalf. Chaemshar doesn’t want to be slapped so she instead spends a very long time in the studio, looking and blank burnt canvasses.

The war ends not long before the end of the year. Fireworks and lysiddhi light shows go off in the streets, but the atmosphere’s palpably different compared to the times the Akshauhini returns from a conquest. The Imperial censor relents and newsrolls begin printing more tangible information. There are more deaths and injuries, more sunken ships. The conclusion of the conflict isn’t the capitulation of an outlying island but a tangle of overlapping treaties with the rajanates. And the traces of the privateer raid still linger in the poorer quarters of the city. What energy exists is subdued.

Inspiration is in short supply. Chaemshar sees the muted celebrations, but her mind is shackled to her mother’s words. If no one values her work in and of itself then why should she? She senses that she’s pitying herself. She desperately wants to expel all of her roiling thoughts onto someone who might have some sliver of understanding. The sculptor, Khadi — but both of them are indisposed. The Akshauhini hasn’t returned yet.

Chaemshar is drifting down Khanor when she hears hard-soled boots on the cobblestones behind her. The sailor looks like she’s barely out of her teens, though her Akshauhini uniform is well tailored. She salutes, tells her there’s a ship docked at the port.

The city docks were one of the first places struck by the privateers. Builders are still on the high docking towers, crisscrossing the bamboo scaffolding like ants. There’s no red-and-black ship amidst the towers. She notices a familiar clan sigil 

“Chaemshar. It feels like it’s been decades.”

It’s dark inside the ship’s narrow bridge. It takes a moment for her eyes to adjust and to recognize the person sitting next to the helm. The person stands up with a grunt of effort and hugs Chaemshar. Their horns scrape together for a moment — the sharp sensation of something like static electricity.

“You’re back. What about the rest of the Akshauhini?”

Khadi reaches out, settling some of the sandalwood hair that got loose around her horns. “They’re still settling things with some wayang who are still fighting.”

Sweat pools at the base of her neck. She thinks of fire and broken glass.“So why are you here?”

“Garjatran insisted I return early. Ah… the phraya, I mean.” The ship carries wounded sailors and key pieces of booty to be taken back to the Five Factories as soon as possible. “And Khrotyan asked me to deliver this to you.” She reaches into the deck coat draped around her shoulders for a thick red envelope, Chaemshar’s final severance. “He asked me to send his regards too.” She smiles wryly.

Chaemshar smiles back. The sight of a friendly face is making her almost giddy. “That doesn’t explain why the phraya you specifically. You aren’t hurt are you?”

“No, by ancestors’ favor. The surgeons still insisted though.” She looks almost embarrassed as she touches a hand to her belly.

---

From the air, it feels as if the Aruchavi estate should be bigger. The house is scarcely larger than the Sirihanok ancestral home, dwarfed by the pale lake it skirts. It’s only when one gets closer that they notice the acuteness of the details. The entire structure is composed of blocks of sandstone and slim marble posts, materials almost certainly imported from Chakan. The arched facade is occluded behind the bladed leaves of the rattan palms.

The Aruchavi who designed the house had been an architect who helped build the Imperial palace. Khadi explains this in the annex, her voice echoing off the vaulted ceiling. She gestures with upturned palm at the dark wooden ancestors occupying half the floorspace. Garjatran once showed represents the architect, but she’s forgotten which one. She inclines her head to them, as if in apology.

The halls are lined with eclectic furniture — all fine but arranged hodgepodge in the way a man sometimes decorates — nothing Chakan nor Chela in their red-and-teal design. The interior even smells foreign. Traces of camphor, myrrh, oiled leather, and ginseng.

A stack of huge canvasses lies rolled up in the study near the windows. Chameshar recognizes the singe marks as soon as she crosses the doorway. It’s hard for her to believe she pulled all of them down and dragged them onto that ship in the middle of the fire.

“Star brought them here after he and Aahit were able to clear the rubble off the Perilla.” Khadi sighs as she sits, steadying herself against the side.

“I’m surprised they survived. The paintings, I mean.” Chaemshar scratches the base of her horn.

“Oh, those ships can survive just about anything. Ask Star or Aahit the next time you see them and they’ll talk your horns off.”

Over coffee, Khadi explains that she wants to commission her for a painting. A portrait of her before she delivers the new child. She wants to surprise the Phraya with it when he returns from the north with the Akshauhini. Chaemshar’s fingers hesitate on the smooth cream ceramic; she puts the cup back down and keeps her eyes on the curls of steam.

“I’m not sure if you heard, but I’m no longer employed by the Aruchavi.”

“Khrotyan informed me before I left.” She reaches over and touches her hand. “It’s going to be me hiring you this time. Under my own name, and for a single commission. Your family shouldn’t have an issue with that, right?”

The Sirihanok ships had returned earlier in the season. Somehow half of them were sunk and her younger brother had lost one of his feet, necessitating an expensive prosthetic from Dhamenthao. The mood at home is muted, sullen, regardless of the ribbons and letters of recognition stamped by the assistant vice marshal of the Empire. Her father says almost nothing about what had happened to her. There was only one exception, when she returned to her room to find him there looking as her painting of Taheng the Cyan, holding it open by its burned corners. He let it go, the light dry canvas rolling back in on itself, and only stopped on his way out to look at the traces of healed burns stippled on her neck. 

Chaemshar sighs. “Please. They’re astute enough to know you’re the phraya’s wife.”

“Your father and my grandfather were close though. Believe me, it will make a difference.”

When she returns a week later she almost drops her sketchbook in the annex. Khadi is a white presence in front of the plants in the adjoining hall. She received the baro’t saya from a Jelayan seamstress living in the outer territories — a voluminous blouse with a densely embroidered kerchief big enough to drape over the shoulders, both woven from fine translucent abaca fibers and unlike anything on the streets of New Chelor. The wraparound skirt, a thicker fabric in dark blue and red around herringbones of ticked black, goes down to her ankles. It’s the glistening thread running through her hair, however, that draws Chaemshar’s eye.

Khadi notices her expression. “I found it while on campaign.” She touches the long silvery stone that hangs on her forehead. “Apparently it used to be in the collection of one of the rajas, I forget which.”

“If that’s the case then how did it get to you?” Chaemshar asks, blithe, but Khadi just smiles.

Khadi sits for the portrait in the courtyard under the pomelo trees. At the center is a small stone hut with a tiled roof, the facade like that of the house in miniature. She calls it the pavilion of seclusion. They talk as Chaemshar works. Khadi seems wistful about the maneuvers she led, in spite of the direction of the Imperial marshal. “Needlessly complex” and “wasteful,” she says. While she talks, Chaemshar only remembers the noise of girders warping and the heat pressing against her face — almost drops her charcoal to the ground.

Near the end of the first day something rustles in the bushes by the pavilion. A child emerges with a carved wooden dha in hand. She looks around five or six, Khadi in miniature. Her eyes, flat bluish black coals, focus on Chaemshar for a moment before she walks up and hits her in the leg with the dha.

“Die.”

“Achal!” Khadi’s stool creaks. She would’ve bolted up if not for the state of her swollen belly. “That’s not how you treat a guest. And how did you get loose from Sunya again?”

More rustling. This time a jawik-besar in draping servant’s attire. “I’m sorry, khun. She gave me the slip out the bathroom window again,” she says between gasping breaths.

It’s different doing a commission for a friend. There’s the additional pressure of wanting to get it right, to not wasting the other’s time. At the same time it feels as if a dam in Chaemshar’s mind has lifted. For the first time since the start of the war she feels excited to paint, to absorb all of the image front of her and render it out onto the canvas in lines, shades, and color. She moves quickly, pushed hard by the current rushing out around her, and scared it might recede away just as quickly. Within a fortnight the essence of the thing is complete. There are refinements to be done here and there, but the time for Khadi to sit still and hold a pose long since passed. On her insistence, Chaemshar keeps visiting every day even though she could easily do the remaining work by herself. She fills in colors and corrects inconsistencies from a shaded part of the courtyard while Khadi reclines on divan nearby, trying to stay off her feet.

“Not much longer now,” Khadi says.

“Yes.” Chaemshar nods. “The light under the pomelos is lovely. I want to make sure I get it right.”

“Ah. That’s not what I meant.” She pats her distended belly. “Though it’s fortunate timing either way. A narrowband just came in. Garjatran is on his way back.”

One day Chaemshar is working alone while Khadi rests in the bedroom. She’s in the study, sheltering against the rain when she hears the sound of the front doors, the popping where the wood has swollen in the frame. An unfamiliar male voice echoing out from the annex, followed by a loud exclamation from Sunya and then Achal. It’s the first time she’s heard the child’s voice in something other than a monotone. The talking draws closer and she wonders whether she should make herself scarce, though the idea is ridiculous. Would she hide under the couches? Behind the easel?

Her back is still turned towards the entrance when they walk past. She sees reflections in the glass of the bookshelves, a tall lithe form in dark red, Achal riding on his shoulders. Sunya’s bulk walking alongside. The person following behind pauses, looks into the study.

“I recognize the smell of that paint.”

They must have come straight from the ships — Khrotyan still wears belt and harness over his uniform. The beskap’s sleeves are frayed and the collar half open. “You look well. I’m glad. Star’s narrowband was vague, as usual. It was not even clear whether…”

“I’m fine. I just wish I could have saved more of the paintings.”

He shakes his head. His hair has grown longer. “You were not even supposed to be there. We appreciate the effort, but I would have preferred you remained safe.” He steps closer and for a wild second Chaemshar thinks he might embrace her.

“Did you get the other narrowband? From my mother?”

He nods. “That’s why I was surprised to see you here of all places. I take it that was Khun Khadi?”

Later, after he excuses himself to attend to something, she packs her tools. She’s organizing her brushes when the doorway fills with someone again. She looks up expecting to see Khrotyan and almost drops the brushes. The Phraya is taller and thinner than she imagined, a whittled branch of dark narra. His hair falls in waves and rests just below the slope of his shoulders.

“So this is it?” Brown eyes look past her and rest on the painting.

“I… yes, this is the portrait.” What else could it be? “I’m sorry, Phraya. I was hoping to have it complete by the time you returned.”

His expression doesn’t change. “It looks complete to me.” He walks around the divans. “It’s as if she’s in the room with us.”

Somehow the compliment burns brighter than almost any she’s received before. This is the most powerful man in Chela. She chuckles softly. “Maybe it is, Phraya. I’ve always struggled with knowing when a work of mine is done.”

“It’s never good to leave a thing unfinished.” He turns his gaze back towards her, eyes passing over her form the way they had the portrait a moment earlier. “You should keep visiting until you feel satisfied. I’m sure Khadi would be delighted.”

Artist of the Akshauhini - Part 3

People begin to return the Arsenal. It’s a trickle at first, handfuls of officers and sailors, second sons and daughters and the second sons and daughters of their tenants coming back from the fields. They arrive in sampans marked with the colors of various clans, touching down in the grass in front of the headquarters. They’re unsure how to deal with Chaemshar in the beginning, keeping a wide berth from the door on the second floor and giving her polite bows while maintaining a respectable distance in the halls and outside.

It’s not that they have any particular aversion to her, Khrotyan explains, just that these petty nobility from the rural extremities are all unsure of how to approach an artist from the city.

“You don’t seem to have a problem with it.” Chaemshar says, looking at him sidelong from the sample canvas she’s just started to daub test colors onto.

“A habit I developed a few years ago. A long story.”

The first time one of the other officers comes up to her is when she’s starting work on the first of the grand paintings in the main hall. She hears the hard soles clicking against the floor behind her.

“I think I know this one.” They point at the canvas. Chaemshar’s only filled out a fourth of it with color, but the underlying sketch is laid out.

“Ah, you were at the Battle of the Three Nagas?”

But that’s impossible. The officer looks about the same age as Chaemshar. “Oh, they’ve given it a name?”

It was the name she’d been given in the notes and errata collected by the historian, a reedy scholar who hadn’t feigned much interest when Chaemshar mentioned that she had graduated from the same university in the Imperial capital. She comes down from the ladder. “That’s what they told me at least.” She wipes her hands on the rag tied to her waist and bows. Before she can introduce herself the officer speaks again.

“Oh, I thought you must have heard the story from your father. You’re Sirihanok, correct?” She points at one of the unpainted sections of the canvas. In the background rushing through a web of rocky sky islands, a squadron of sharp-beaked ramming ships. “My grandfather, Prahon, was on the right flank next to your clan’s squadron.”

Khadi Somankar is the granddaughter of the oldest hands in the Akshauhini. She’s already captained a ship for several years and accumulated accolades. Her grandmother, like Chaemshar’s father, had campaigned with the old phraya, even in the years before the red ships came and changed everything. The Somankar clan, one of the oldest and most prestigious in the south of the Empire, had been quick to accept an allotment of the red ships and supplant all of its squadrons with them in short order. They’ve been known for airship prowess back to olden times.

“Your father. And those beautiful old ramming ships. How are they faring these days?”

More officers begin to introduce themselves to Chaemshar after that. A constellation of all the retainer clans around the Aruchavi fills out before her, generations’ worth of intermarriage, fealties sworn, and ancient favors performed. Khadi, who seems to be fascinated with her art and the craft as a whole, appears to be the catalyst to the thaw. If a Somankar is fine associating with her then it must be perfectly fine for us.

Most sailors don’t linger in the headquarters. They spend most hours of the day in the towers along the water maintaining their ships or deploying for complex practice maneuvers over the Arsenal. Dozens of narrow shadows spill and swing across the grass. They run obstacle courses and shoot rifles at distant targets. The first time they open up a volley Chaemshar almost drops her brush and palette to the floor five feet below. She’s more accustomed to the noises the officers make. Loud, assertive voices speaking in clipped but elegant Chela Imperial, taking bets on their wrestling matches and practice duels. The sharp clapping of wooden dha swords parrying each other, punctuated with the smack of flesh and roars of approval.

Chaemshar captures this too. She sits on a folding stool and refuses any offer for a sailor to prop an umbrella over her, bringing instead a wide-brimmed hat of woven palm straw the sculptor gave to her as a birthday gift years ago. She renders bodies and swords in motion, the way sweat glimmers down the side of the jaw and dirt plumes up where a fencer’s sandal twists against the earth in preparation for a strike.

Khrotyan is among the best with the dha, rivaled only by Khadi. He organizes most of the training personally, orienting the newest, youngest arrivals before sending these second and third sons and daughters careening across the square. In the hottest part of the year they remove their uniform beskaps, and Chaemshar recalls her days of anatomy drawing in the university.

“You draw him well,” Khadi says one afternoon on one of their customary visits to Chaemshar’s office. She’s seated and looking through the sketchbook she’d recently finished and replaced with another.

“Who?”

She points at a sketch of several officers sparring with spears. Khrotyan is in the foreground, the V of his back facing the viewer.

“Well, no better than anyone else,” she says. Khadi just snickers.

One day Chameshar is outside the headquarters watching a ship inch into a gap in one of the rhombuses in the sky.

“It’s best that you don’t render those,” someone says from behind her.

A glow emanates from inside as the tail of the ship disappears behind the black threshold. Chaemshar is entranced. “Why is that?” She turns around. “They’re the Five Factories, correct? Where the red ships are made.”

Khrotyan nods. “And where new components are manufactured. That’s all I’m at liberty to say, at least without the permission of the phraya and both the administrators.”

On the day before her twenty-second birthday Khadi takes her aside to where a group of officers and sailors wait. She presents her with a red lacquer box tied with fine brocade. Inside is a pair of half-length trousers and a beskap. It lacks any rank, but the Sirihanok crest is embroidered on the breast next to insignia of the Akshauhini. “For our little artist,” they say, using the name they’ve taken to calling her. The fit isn’t perfect, since the tailor had to guess at her measurements, but everyone laughs and cheers when she tries it on. She’s filled with a dumb sort of mirth, not dissimilar from when artists from the Quarter would come to her exhibitions and give her praise.

It’s only on the ride back home that she remembers herself. She tells the helmsman to take a detour to her studio. It looks like a shack framed in the sampan’s spotlight. There, she changes quickly before hurrying to the house, panting in the humid dark.

Weeks later there’s a recital of one of the composer’s new compositions in the park. He’s able to secure three seats in the front row. The quartet is segueing into a second movement when they’re drowned out by a blaring chorus of horns. Leaves rain onto the audience. The airships that fly over the city aren’t red, and the insignia they project between them is that of the Chakravartin.

******

All the wars Chaemshar can remember had been family affairs. The phrayas have always gone on adventures across the Akash to pick away at the innumerable islands and atolls that fill up the Akash to the north and east of the Empire, with the understanding that they pass on appropriate tribute to the Chakravartin. These tendrils are how the clans can still increase their revenues even when all the land on the continent is already claimed, diverting pressures that caused internecine fighting in olden times.

This one is different. Under the codes of the Chakchelam Empire, phrayas’ right to launch their own little conquests was in exchange for the right of the Chakravartin to call up the Akshauhini when need arose. The details trickle out through the newsrolls stamped out on bamboo strips every morning: The two largest rajanates to the north form an alliance and declare war against the Empire, hurling their naval ships and privateers at dozens of Imperial island territories and closing off the major trade lanes north to Dhamenthao and beyond to Gadristang. Rumors fly through the city that Dhamenthao put them up to it, that trade outposts are being razed, the Imperials stationed there being spirited away for ransom or hurled into the Akash — no one’s quite sure which. The point, according to the newsrolls, is that a response from the entire Empire is required.

Chaemshar’s job is put on hold. She’s there for the day and a half it takes for the Akshauhini to mobilize, capturing the whirl of ships undocking and floating into formations, weapons and armor and crates of provisions stacked onto sampans and ascending away, sailors running in every direction as if the enemy is right there on the shores of Chela.

“Your stipend will continue of course,” Khrotyan tells her in one of the last few moments he’s able to spare in between coordinating everything on the ground and in the air. His face is flushed and his uniform weighed down with the dha slung under his left arm and the pistol holstered across his breast. His hair is made lupine from the crosswinds of all the airships in motion.

“That wasn’t what I was going to ask about, though.” Chaemshar rubs the top button of the beskap, which she’s taken to wearing like a cloak around her shoulders against the wind. “I was going to ask if I should keep coming here. I don’t see any reason why I can’t continue working on the murals at least. They’re almost complete.”

“No.” He glances aside as a team of sailors yell at something in the distance. “That is, I don’t think it would be safe.”

It’s the first time she’s seen something like apprehension on his face. “You think a crate is going to fall on top of me?” It’s meant to be a joke. She can easily continue work on everything except the murals at home.

“If you were sufficiently distracted, yes… That was a joke.”

Her father is imbued with newfound prana. He and Chaemshar’s brothers thunder about the house, unlocking the storage where their weapons and armor have been gathering dust for years. No summon came from the phraya, but a general call was issued direct from the Imperial capital. Posters covered the walls in New Chelor and recordings played in the street. Protect the Empire! Let’s all help the Chakravartin. They aren’t entirely clear about how one would provide that help other than continuing to pay the war taxes.

Her father says that they’ll need all the military ships they can get, however, that all the Akshauhini won’t be enough. Light and noise pours through the bedroom windows at night. Old retainers, some barely able to hold their coffee cups without the help of a younger relation, fill the rooms like pieces of inherited furniture put down any which way for lack of anywhere they’d actually fit. Eventually the Sirihanok airships are taken away to an Imperial shipyard.

In New Chelor everyone has work, even the artists. The composer is commissioned for a piece based on a poem about a legendary Chela warrior from the ancient times before airships. The sculptor is given a commission from the temple of Kan-Akan for a series of busts of the god of law and justice.

It’s Chaemshar who lacks something to do. Most of the time she finds herself in the sculptor’s studio going over old sketches or reading newsrolls from the capital. The urge to sketch is strangely absent.

“So do you only paint when you’re paid to now?” The sculptor says over her shoulder. She’s been working on the bust in front of her for weeks.

“That’s typically how it works.” She hasn’t told anyone about the continuance of her stipend.

Eventually they move to the corner closest to the industrial window, sitting on the thick rug and take turns blowing pinches of kesara petals into each other’s faces. They study each other in between bouts of snickers.

“You should go back to your old work.”

Chaemshar tilts her head to one side. “That doesn’t narrow it down.”

The sculptor rolls her eyes. “You know the one. Taheng the Cyan.”

A painting Chameshar had worked on without any commission or assignment. The legendary witch of Chela, a figure who’d terrified and fascinated her as a child. She’d put away the canvas not long before being approached by Khrotyan.

“Nirmana! I don’t even know where that thing is now.”

Even through the haze, the sculptor looks shocked. “And you were so obsessed with it too. Before… this thing of yours.”

The Sirihanok ships return from the shipyards with rams shorn, replaced with featureless gray doors. Their innards are hollowed out to accommodate the cargo they’ve been retrofitted to carry. It’s a brief layover, as they’re meant to sail north as soon as possible. Chaemshar’s father speaks only about timetables and routes, says nothing about the ships, a hollow look in his eyes. By dawn they’re purplish shapes on the horizon.

After a week, Chaemshar doesn’t want to be stuck in the house with only her mother and her comments any longer. The Quarter isn’t an option; everyone is busy working on or exhibiting their new commissions. She thinks about the sculptor’s comment about the Taheng composition, realizes it might have gone to the Arsenal in one of the batches of spare canvasses she’d shipped over early on. Against her better judgment but driven by impulse she puts on the Akshauhini uniform and goes into town to summon a sampan. The driver looks skeptical, but he sees the crimson slashes on her shoulders and sleeves and decides not to argue.

The Akash around the Arsenal is devoid of airships. Flocks of birds cover the empty docking stations. The silhouettes of animals flicker through the waist-high grass. After hovering long enough for the driver to be confident there aren’t any tigers, the sampan sets down.

Chaemshar tips the driver to wait for her. No one comes out to greet her, or stop her. She hurries anyways. The five rhombuses seem to watch her from overhead. A wild thread of fear tickles the back of her neck — she briefly imagines a bright orange blur from the grass tackling her to the dirt and biting her throat open.

The headquarters is empty and unlit. She hadn’t bothered to lock the door to her office when she left. It only takes her a moment of sifting through the loose canvasses. Taheng the Cyan’s yellow agate eyes gleam, her hair a counterclockwise whirl. A rain of ballista arrows fill the space around her. Between her arms lies Gata, the first and most beloved of her maranhig. The undead woman’s eyes, yellowish like Taheng’s but milkier, are wide and bulged. The back of her head rests on Taheng’s breast, blackish blood trickling from her expressionless mouth down mouldering flesh. Two arrows protrude from her chest and extend out her back, pressing indentations into her master’s knee. Her master’s hand fingers the shaft of the closest arrow.

Something big and black zips by the windows and strikes the hills in the distance. By the time Chaemshar hears the explosion dozens more are stitching across the landscape. The windows rattle and then shatter. She throws herself to the floor, pulling the canvasses down with her. Broken glass crunches underneath her. Through the broken windows she sees the rented sampan speeding away. There should be an alarm, the one she’d heard during defense drills, but there’s no one to activate it.

The headquarters is struck directly as she leaves the office and she almost stumbles over the railing and falls. Behind the Perilla a portion of the far wall is gone, replaced with a gaping hole through which flame plunges like the face of an enraged aswang. One of the murals is already burning, going to black, already gone. Unthinking, she runs downstairs. The rosewood frames are too heavy to lift. She pulls a dha from a weapon rack and unsheathes it clumsily. As sharp as the blade is it’s hard to make even cuts, and she winces every time it slips and hacks out a chunk of one of the paintings. She can feel the heat grow against her back, the air becoming dark and acrid. The last unburned mural she cuts in half down the center to yank out of the frame faster.

Chaemshar can barely move with all the thick canvas rolled up under her arm. A segment of the overhead walkways collapses a few feet in front of her, blocking the way to the exit. She’s starting to feel delirious. The steel steps up to the Perilla are hot enough that she can hear the soles of her shoes sizzling. The ship recognizes her prana and the door slides open, a rush of cool air hitting her. She hurls the canvasses onto the bridge.

If she seals the ship now she’d be safe even if the building burned down. Instead she steps back outside and seals the door behind her. The run up to the office singes the sleeves of her beskap. She snatches Taheng and a blind handful of other canvasses. She can’t stop coughing. She regrets not being able to tune her prana as well as her brothers can; they would’ve been able to separate the smoke from the air around them, push it away from themselves.

More of the walkway falls as she goes down. She feels the floor come up to meet her, paintings tucked under her left arm where it breaks just above the elbow. Something falls on top of her, and she loses consciousness.

Artist of the Akshauhini - Part 2

Few people have a reason to go out to the Aruchavi Arsenal, the home of the Akshauhini, but everyone knows stories. The hexagonal towers spread out along the Blue Cloud Delta, covered in warships like red locusts on stalks of corn. A hundred feet overhead, the five black rhombuses that levitate in midair. They are, according to most of the stories, the source of the Akshauhini’s power. The reason why Chela became the most powerful of the Empire’s provinces within two generations.

Seeing them up close from the bow of a sampan, what look like flat matte surfaces resolve into a multitude of broken lines, ridges, and indistinct knots of machinery. Multicolored lights glow out from cracks and crevices. Drawn in by the visual complexity unfolding in front of her, Chameshar reaches under the passenger seat, groping for her bag and the sketchbook within. The sampan jolts as if struck, though, and she almost cracks her head against the steel console around the helm.

And then they’re descending, the dark shapes drop out of view and the stomach lurches and the wind whistles against the hull. After a few minutes the rubber padding along the keel presses down on the earth. A long red building is visible through the dusty windshield. The insignia of the Akshauhini is painted above the double doors. The helmsman hops off to lower a set of steps down the side of the ship and help her down. He holds an umbrella over her head as they walk.

Khrotyan meets them halfway along the path. “Welcome at last.”

Chaemshar fights the urge to focus on the diamond shadows stretching across the grass as they walk the rest of the way. A rush of cool air meets her face as the double doors open. The inside of the headquarters is a single hall. At its center is one of the crimson airships, resting within a vast and ornate scaffolding of black iron and carved wood.

“I would’ve thought it busier.”

He laughs. “It would be in any other season. At the moment most of the officers and their sailors are back home attending to their lands, harvesting and the like.” The officers would be the owners of said land and the sailors the tenants. 

She thinks of her two elder brothers fumbling about with plots of corn and rice, wrangling workers, and never missing an opportunity to complain about it. “And not you?” She glances over at Khrotyan as they walk along the starboard flank.

“My clan? We’ve very little productive holdings to speak of. For us the Akshauhini is everything. Hence why I’m here at the moment.”

There’s a metal spiral staircase up to where a room has been prepared for her. There’s not much to it at the moment. A desk and chair have been dragged in and set up in a corner. She will also be assigned a clerk who will fetch anything she might need, though she can also bring whatever materials might be appropriate from home.

“I considered collecting canvasses, brushes and the like, but I realized I’ve no idea what you preferences are on such things.”

She’s walking the floorspace, mapping out its dimensions in her mind already, sketching out a plan for what things should be where, how they should be oriented in relation to one another. In the distance through the high windows she can see the helmsman scouring deck of the sampan.

“I believe you’re the first person I’ve met outside of the craft to think of that.” She smiles wryly. “Most people assume my paints are the same as the paint your sailors roll onto your airships.”

That first day is spent becoming familiar with the work. There is to be a book, the actual history. A few past examples exist in the grave-like archive room, but they’re all of inferior quality and poorly updated, decayed fragments of the past. There is also to be a series of paintings. Khrotyan shows her the spaces on the walls of the main hall, now barren. The canvasses would be more than twice Chaemshar’s height, larger than any medium she’s worked with before. She thinks of the towering paintings she once saw in the Imperial Museum, a series depicting the foundation of the Chakchelam Empire in its various stages, and struggles to keep too much of her excitement from frothing to the surface.

The sun has almost set by the time Chaemshar returns home. No one meets her at the door except the brigade of horned and tailed figures, embodiments of various ancestors sculpted from stained teak, collected on the side of the shadowed annex. No one inquires about her day either. She bows her head to the figures, grateful for the small mercy.

******

The first season flows by like water. Her office at the Arsenal becomes an expanded, unbound version of her studio back home, filling up with paints, oils, custom easels, spare canvasses, and a multitude of lamps with different lenses installed into them to control the color and intensity of light. The initial work is split between sketching references for every piece of significant equipment and the historical images that will become the murals.

The process is more of a challenge than she anticipated. Where the outermost contours of the flowers she paints are soft and organic, gentle parabolic curves flowing into one another, the ships are hard, linear, symmetrical. In a purely objective sense the man-made forms are far simpler, but their simplicity leaves far less margin for error or artistic license. The bins in the office fill with discarded abortive sketches. The worst of them she saves for one the torches near the windows, flipping open the lens, channeling a bit of her prana to activate the coil within, and feeding the thick paper inside inch by inch until nothing is left.

At one point near the end of the season Khrotyan finds her sitting on the floor of the main hall, sketchbook in her lap. “Let me get someone to fetch you a chair.”

 “No, thank you.” She gestures up at the ship’s bow where it’s cradled on top a curved piece of scaffolding. The gaping barrel that occupies all of the ship’s fore towers over her. “I want to capture it from this angle. For reference.”

Khrotyan grants her access to the interior of the Perilla. It was the flagship of the phraya’s father, he explains. The previous phraya is the one who brought this model of warship into being. In so doing he transformed the Akshauhini into the crimson wall it is today, and funneled wealth into Chela through his subsequent adventures abroad. Chaemshar has to duck her head to get the tips of her horns under the doorframe leading from the bridge to the corridor with the crew quarters. (is she taller than the phrayas? To whose specifications were these ships designed?) Everything has been keep meticulously clean, but the air still carries the faintest hints of hydraulic fluid, engine fumes, and old cooking oil.

“Feel free to reenter any time. The Phraya would like renderings of the Perilla as well.” Khrotyan says. “You’re more surefooted moving about an airship than I assumed you would be, Khun Chaemshar.”

They’re descending a flight of narrow metallic stairs down to the deck where the cylindrical inner workings of the cannon lay. “I’ve been on my father’s ships a few times, though they’re quite different.”

There was a brief moment after her eighteenth birthday when she was being prepared to be a Sirihanok airship commander. She had watched the same process when her two elder brothers went through it. It didn’t take long for everyone involved to know it was hopeless. They should have known back when she was fitted for her focus earrings at fifteen, when she pushed her prana through them for the very first time in front of everyone and was barely able to turn a glass of water cold, much less into a block of ice.

Chaemshar’s first stipend waits on a corner of her table one afternoon. A lacquered envelope marked with the Aruchavi sigil. It would be unbecoming for two people of the nobility without blood relations to exchange money directly in the manner of street vendors or bankers. The rajatas inside the envelope are more than both her brothers’ agricultural efforts have garnered that season combined. Or the past two seasons for that matter. As with her siblings’ earnings, the majority is handed over to her parents, a fraction given back to her. Her mother is the one who takes it from her. She doesn’t say anything, but there’s a twitch when she, handling the envelope like a small dead animal, looks inside. No praise, but certain comments from her father and mother and brothers cease stop being uttered not long after.

“If I had to give that much back to my parents I’d flee to Gadristang screaming,” the sculptor says. It’s the festival of the second equinox. The composer is with his family, but she and Chaemshar are in New Chelor surrounded by the drunken, shimmering festivities. A harvest celebration in a city where little to no one cultivates much of anything.

Chameshar gives a crooked smile around the rim of her glass. “I’ve been to Gadristang. You’d starve in a month doing what you do. We all would.” She puts the glass down next to her on the stone steps. The pomelo wine burns more than she remembers from the last time she drank it. “And I don’t really care about the rajata. I want the doors this will open.”

The sculptor makes a face and performs an exaggerated bow with pressed palms. “Well cheers to you! What’s it like, not caring about rajata, Khun?” She holds up her glass. Humidity has plastered wavy locks to one side of her face. 

“Call me that again and I’ll yank your tail.”

They go down the hill to Avenue Phi, inebriated enough to be willing to hazard the crowd. Through the humanity and streams of lanterns all motorized so that they glide overhead like soaring nagas. Bhagyakara’s temple has a queue — the longest naga of them all. Children in paper axolotl masks squeeze past them as they try to go around.

The shrine of Nirmana is lit up as well, but virtually abandoned compared to the home of the neighboring god. The only people in line to make offerings are other regulars of the Artists’ Quarter. The thick hanging vines coming off the edges of the roof muffle the racket outside. It’s quiet enough to hear the coins clacking into the offering box. While they wait, Chaemshar squints in the candlelight as she fishes into her coin purse. She taps the sculptor on the shoulder.

“Here,” she whispers, handing half of the coins to her.

The sculptor looks confused at first, and then reels back, almost bumping into the couple ahead of them. “You. She hisses. “If you ever offer me rajata again I’ll yank your tail.”

Still tipsy, Chaemshar almost laughs but stops when her eyes adjust and she sees the actual expression on the sculptor’s face. They spend the rest of the queue in silence. When it’s Chameshar’s turn the shrine keeper, sitting serene near the back of the shrine, seems to flinch at the sound of her coins sliding into the box.

“Sorry,” she says to the sculptor as they leave.

“It doesn’t matter.” She doesn’t meet her eye, looking instead at the children under the banyan tree in the center of the street. With bamboo sticks they take turns whacking an effigy of a bloody-mouthed aswang dangling from one of the branches.

Artist of the Akshauhini - Part 1

Hi all, this is the first part of a short story set in Lysantara, the setting for a novel I’m currently working on. Consider it a prequel of sorts to said novel, taking place a few decades earlier in the chronology. My hope is that it can be an intro to the world and vibe of Lysantara, and, later on, an appendix to the full-length work.

More updates to come in the following weeks. Once complete I plan to compile everything into a DRM-free ebook, which will also be free.

Artist of the Akshauhini

by K Meridia

Part 1

“It’s completely inappropriate. You are entitled to your hobbies, of course, but they aren’t what our family does.” Her father says, as if their liege had not called on them in almost a decade now. As if the family airships had not been sitting dark and idle long enough that streaks of rust were starting to appear on their spear-like prows.

“It would remain my hobby and only my hobby.” Chaemshar keeps her eyes on the faded brocade rug (brought from Porumma, the last campaign her father had been part of), studying the dull bronze buckles on her parents’ house sandals. “I don’t see how a trivial little thing of mine could reflect poorly on the family.”

But it’s no use. While walking back to her room she kicks herself for her choice of words. Trivial little thing of mine. Her father would not notice, but her mother definitely would. Repurposing the man’s own words, plucking the arrow out of the dirt, knocking it, and sending it back towards its original wielder. She would of course recognize it. Where else had Chaemshar learned it from?

She stops in front of her door. Lingering in the dark hallway she already catches the scent, rubbery oils and pungent tempera, seeping out from under the door despite her having moved her canvasses to the far corner of the room and encased her paints in an airtight chest in response to complaints. It isn’t her only workspace. The family’s old foreman had built her a little one-room studio with a nipa fiber roof and louvered windows all controlled from a single switch to let air flow in and out quickly. She does not want to go there right now. She’d prefer to get on one of the house sampans and float downhill to the city, to the Artists’ Quarter. To do that now would be even more trouble, though, more than even she’d be willing to deal with.

Flicking her tail and scratching her left horn, she finds her current sketchbook and favorite charcoals under the rosewood bed frame and sets off. In the corner of her eye the house stands out on the horizon like a rotting tooth. The grass nips at her shins. Green stains start to smudge the hems of her batik trousers. No one yells after her.

It started a week ago. Chaemshar had been in town exhibiting a selection of her work, still lifes of five different flowers that blossomed along the Chela coast. The kind of painting that got attention and sold well with all the families of merchants and craftspeople. Those of middle means who wanted things of local character but also distinction to adorn the walls of their city homes. Flowers were not her favorite subject, but she wasn’t above using her skills to acquire some rajata. One had to be realistic, and anyways increasing awareness of her name and capabilities could be the first rung towards doing more of what she wished to do.

The exhibition ended late, with half of her paintings sold. She was sitting looking at the empty yellow spaces on the wall, alone save for a janitor shuffling around in one of the backrooms, when the fine glass door slid open. She turned, starting to say that the exhibit was closed, but her mouth snapped shut. The newcomer wore the red uniform of the Akshauhini, the personal forces of the phraya, the lord of the province. He was tall and decently handsome in the scarred and sinewy way some soldiers were, not like the cute airy waifs of the artists’ quarter. His upturned horns are jet black, matching the scales of his slim muscular tail. The tattoo on his forearm, three lines of characters in ancient Sanni script, indicated he was a direct retainer to the phraya of Chela like her father.

“I’m so sorry!” Chaemshar had blurted out, setting aside the weak tea the gallery owner had made for her an hour ago and hurrying to her feet. She could feel her face heating up.

He smiled. “It doesn’t matter.” He put his palms together and gave her a nod. “You are Khun Chaemshar Sirihanok?”

She returned the greeting. It felt strange to be referred to by a peer by her given name and not “daughter of Khun Sirihanok.”

He was Khrotyan Naphatia, the second-in-command in the Akshauhini. Khrotyan was also the head of his clan, despite seemingly being only a few years older than Chaemshar. As a military man would, he went straight to the point. He explained that the Akshauhini was going to draft a history of itself and had need of an illustrator.

“I’m flattered, Khun, but why me?” She watched him pace towards the display wall. “That is to say, my specialty is not in military tableau, as you can probably see.”

He smiled again and gestured at one of the paintings, a hibiscus blossom with petals curled back and dense anther-laden style pointing into the foreground like a cannon. “Your lines. Airships, kutamaya armor, armaments.” He patted the burnished handle of the dha sword slung under his arm. “All these accouterments require a great amount of detailed lines and shading to render accurately… forgive me, I am doubtless not equipped with vocabulary to describe all of this accurately.”

“And landscapes.” She heard herself say. “No doubt you’ll have need of many landscapes.”

Now, Chaemshar storms up the hill towards her studio. To her left, New Chelor stretches out white and green under the late morning sun. The sea hugs the coast, frothing water up against the sandbar and dotted with fishermen’s catamarans. All of it only irritates her further this morning. It isn’t that she has any real passion for military art. She painted a few airships and sketched the columns of mannequins in ancient kutamaya at the Imperial Museum during her tutelage, but it wasn’t a subject that set her soul alight. It’s her mother and father’s willingness to stomp on such a serendipitous opportunity for no other reason but denial shot through with idiotic pride.

She looks to her right. The shadow of the hill covers the shipyard. Two dozen warships bearing the Sirihanok crest resting in a four-by-six column. There’s supposed to be a unit of groundskeepers, but the grass is now almost the tops of the long landing struts.

The easel with the nice telescoping legs is where she left it near the entrance. She grabs it and sets it up outside, setting the sketchbook and the box of charcoals on it. She faces the shipyard. In the shade the warships resemble a squadron of napping pelicans with the layers upon layers of armor on their prows and the great jutting rams. A false start on the outermost lines of the first one, but soon after the rest starts to come naturally, eye and muscle memory working in concert.

But something feels off. There should be nothing wrong with the ship she’s drawn, and yet it’s wrong. She cannot put a finger on why, which frustrates her further. Scratching her horn, she grabs the easel again and yanks it around so it faces New Chelor. The charcoals rattle and almost fall into the waving grass. The ramming ship folds away into oblivion, revealing another blank page.

She’s about to start on the smooth organic diagonals of the shore when she notices the freckles on the horizon. In minutes they grow into maroon squares that ripple with the distortion of energy that airship engines produce in the air around them. They’re much smaller than her father’s ships, but unmistakable as warships returning from conquest abroad. Instead of rams, the ships’ prows are snub nosed, housing recessed black cylinders that must have been the muzzles of gigantic cannons. The hulls, shaped like a rolled kretek propped between two fingers, are solid red. Nets and ropes hang off the sides of many ships, all containing great iridescent lysratna crystals, limp carcasses of slain naga, slabs of marble and shorn-off gold-faced facades, and other spoils. As they start to cross over New Chelor, Chaemshar can hear their engines, a chorus of high-pitched droning.

She can make out the trio of ships at the center of the formation flying in a tight delta. They’re projecting energy in the space between them, bending it to produce a towering standard out of colored light. It is the clan sigil of Aruchavi, the phraya of Chela.

******

The Artists’ Quarter hasn’t always been the Artists’ Quarter. Two generations ago it used to be the processing district for the province’s pomelos and jackfruit. That changed around the time Chakravartin Yapitra III assumed the throne back in the imperial capital. The lion’s share of cultivation and processing was shifted out to the newly annexed regions of western Porumma, leaving the district barren and abandoned. However it didn’t take long for the derelict buildings to be reoccupied by scions of the common but well-heeled families who plied trades, the “new people” of the city. Warehouses became vast apartment hives, distilleries for pomelo liquor were hollowed out and transformed into galleries, ateliers, shops, public houses, and cafes.

Chaemshar’s favorite place is on the corner of Khanor Avenue, where elegant curved windows on the second floor overlook the square. Down below she can see the streams of levicabs speed past and the street vendors with their wok-laden pushcarts congregate under the trees. She sits at her usual table, which is not explicitly reserved for her yet always available when she arrives.

Her little group of artist friends can tell something’s amiss. The composer, son of an Irini banker from Porumma, is the one who asks her about it directly, big aquamarine eyes full of concern and feline ears twitching on the top of his mop of hair. Chaemshar says something about not being able to latest draft off the ground, some sort of creative block.

The sculptor, a daughter of a monied commoner family who owns a network of lysratna-setting shops around the province, rolls her eyes at this latest permutation of the composer’s lust and dismisses the topic. Stretching her muscular arms, she suggests they all just go back to her studio — a dank corner of a former cannery — and breathe in the new strain of kesaran she got off a merchant ship back from the northern protectorates last week. The flowers and the effects of their puffballs are her answer to everything.

But Chaemshar doesn’t want to fill her lungs with anything that might induce her tongue to slip right now. Everyone there already knows the status of her birth. It would’ve been impossible to stymy the way information sluices through New Chelor, or to conceal the jade hue of her eyes and the sandalwood of her hair. (she refused to ever submit it to any dyes) She doesn’t want to remind anyone of her status needlessly, however, to see the unconscious dampener it imposes on the way they talk and even carry themselves around her. The sculptor has a way of saying things without saying them too, especially when under the influence. Hiding a pin inside a mango.

She doesn’t want to divulge what really happened either, not knowing how they’ll react. If the phraya is a distant presence to her, he’s as lofty and abstract a concept to them as the Chakravartin themselves or the niyogin of Dhamenthao.

Someone comes up stairs from the ground floor. A sharp intake of breath and the rattling of ceramic cups on a serving tray. Khrotyan is wearing the same uniform. He’s tall enough that the tips of his horns weave through the haze of kretek and pipe smoke that hangs close to the ceiling. The other conversations stutter and fade. He spots her table and walks over. There’s no other reason for him to be in a place like this.

“I hope I’m not interrupting anything important, Khun Chaemshar?” His eyes make a brisk scan over her companions. They’re standing up before she can respond, muttering excuses and bowing their heads.

“Not at the moment.” She watches the composer and sculptor hurry off. Everyone else in the room is looking sidelong at the table. The entire quarter would know before the end of the day. “I apologize that I haven’t been able to get a response to you.”

He doesn’t spare a glance, much less a comment, towards her companions’ hasty departure.“Not a problem. I made a few additional inquiries since we last spoke. I take it you must have encountered some, ah, complications. I assume you will not be pursuing the position?”

She barely stops herself from standing up. Her hands come up from under the table, almost flipping the sketchbook onto the ash-crusted floor. “No!” More looks from around the room. “That is to say, I haven’t declined.”

Leaving the cafe with this man might cause some talk, even reach her parents, but it’s preferable to continuing the conversation in the cafe. The other tables can barely pretend to not be listening. And besides, the idea of word traveling back home now fills her with sharp and acidic pleasure. They cross under the trees, passing the vendors who call after Khrotyan, “Khun, Khun, welcome home, Khun!” There are crimson posters up all across New Chelor celebrating the return of the Akshauhini and the first campaign led by the new Phraya Aruchavi.

“There are some reservations.” Chaemshar says finally, standing under the shade of a monkey fruit tree.

He looks up through the gaps in the leaves overhead. “If you’ve concerns about conditions of your employment,” he’s genteel enough to avoid a direct mention of rajata. “I can answer any…”

“It’s not that.” She clears her throat. She’s always had a mild allergy to one of the types of trees in town, though she never determined which one it is.

“If you’ll excuse my presumptuousness, would the reservations be on the part of your father?”

The world seems to pause. Her anger from the other day still burns persistently, like the glowing orange coil at the bottom of the an oven. In spite of that there’s a vestigial fragment of something stilling her tongue. Filial piety keeping her from speaking out of turn about her parents to an outsider. She’s complained about them to her commoner friends plenty of times though. “That’s right.”

Khrotyan nods. “Understandable. Your father has reservations about the phraya, does he not?”

She hesitates again. Phraya Aruchavi can’t fine or imprison a retainer for their opinions like the Chakravartin can, but the constricted network that is the clans of Chela offer other means of retribution. “You’re aware?” How can she tell him about her father’s vaunted position under the previous Aruchavi? How Sirihanok ships were once at the heart of the Akshauhini’s left wing, a position of great prestige. How the loss of it had a cascaded onto the entire clan, depriving it of a share of the spoils, rendering it dependent wholly on paltry rents and agricultural revenues. And that’s simply in matters of finance, never mind face. He must know already. His own rank now mirrors the one once held by her father.

“May I see?”

She looks up and sees him holding out his hand towards the sketchbook. Slightly dazed, she takes it out from under her arm. He knows to open it to the latest page: New Chelor and the coast as seen from on top her hill. It’s a view she’s painted dozens of times, but this charcoal sketch also depicts the warships sailing over the city, their shadows striping the tree-lined boulevards.

Khrotyan takes a moment before handing it back to her. She can’t discern anything from the set of his face. “Khun Chaemshar, may I be direct and ask whether you’re interested in the job?” He says.

“I am.”

“Then I believe I may be able to intervene on your behalf, if you’ll let me.” His teeth are straight, white, and sharp. It’s the first time she’s seen him smile enough for his lips to part. “Your father is a man of great honor. Your clan has achieved great things in the name of the Akshauhini and the province. I’m sure I can help to address whatever concerns he may have.”

Before going home Chaemshar walks down to the Avenue Phi. She doesn’t come here often, but finds the temple to Bhagyakara, god of happenstance and luck. She puts a rajata on the marble stela and rubs burnished belly of the fat, smiling bronze axolotl napping on top of it. Next door is the shrine of Nirmana, goddess of invention, creativity, and art, among other things. She slides three more rajatas into the donation box and sits on the cool tile floor as the shrine keeper rises from a stool in the corner and burns a dried laurel leaf. Through the smoke, the goddess’ likeness looks down on her, long face half obscured under the long curved headdress that sweeps down over the eyes.

Two days later she will board a sampan that takes her to the shipyards of the Akshauhini.