A week passes before a message arrives from the Phraya’s estate. They are indisposed and ask Chaemshar to refrain from returning until further notice. Her stomach churns. Did Garjatran, upon meeting her that first time, sense something in her that he dislikes? She herself told him that the portrait commission was virtually complete. Maybe he decided it was good enough as it was, that he’d prefer some trace imperfections in the shading of his wife’s kerchief to having a strange woman from a problematic clan linger in his home, filling it with jars of viscous paint and strange smells.

The sculptor finally resurfaces. The family business hasn’t been able to fully recover from the damages during the war. She’s pulled back into it inch by inch, filling in holes left by employees dead or fled. More and more of her time is diverted towards tuning the energy within talismans and etching lysratna, tasks she thought she’d left behind her. Several ateliers in New Chelor are shut, their buildings sold.

“We’re taking what liquidity’s left and throwing it at a place in the capital. The property has been sitting around for years,” she says in the middle of deconstructing her studio. It’s the first thing she’s said in an hour. Staff are there to help but she’s coated in sweat, disassembling half-finished plasters to lay the pieces down in crates.

“I’m jealous,” Chaemsar says. “I miss the capital. I still dream about going back.”

The sculptor looks up from the pieces of a chakravartin’s clavicle. “Except I’m not going there to sit in museums all day.”

Chaemshar doesn’t know where to step without risk of stepping on something fragile or sharp. She stays standing there between half-filled crates, tail lifted high off the floor. “I’m sorry. I think it’s commendable you’re helping your family business like this though.”

“Commendable. Yes. Everyone has to know when to set aside their little hobbies and put family first, do what the ancestors would want. But I’m sure you know that already, right?”

“I said I was sorry.”

The sculptor throws the chunks of plaster into the crate and slams the cover down. “And I’m sure you think that fixes everything.”

“I’m not the one who strafed New Chelor.”

“You might as well have. Your clan was eager to get in on this war, and the Aruchavi you’ve gotten so chummy with too. Small wonder the city got targeted by the enemy.”

Why doesn’t she understand? When the Chakravartin calls on their vassals it’s a command, not a request. Chaemshar remembers something her mother always said about the masses. “I was attacked too.” Her voice sounds brittler than she expected. “I almost died.”

It’s the only time the sculptor almost hesitates. “Right. You were collateral damage like the rest of us. Yet you keep sailing back to your patrons anyways, the ones who sent you in there to pry those paintings out of the fire.”

“Is that what this is about? I did that of my own volition. It was all my work after all. Wouldn’t you do the same for yours?”

“Out of love of your work, or love of your patron?”

Chaemshar begins to walk out, her hip colliding with the corner of a crate. “I’m sorry. Maybe someday you’ll be able to experience either thing.”

“And someday you’ll be able to think about someone outside of yourself.”

But she’d done nothing wrong. What was she supposed to have done instead? Thought about her family’s wishes and become an airship captain? Not taken a shining opportunity in a tiny world overcrowded with dim realities?

When the invitation to return to the estate comes it’s written by the Phraya, not Khadi. The house is strangely still when she enters, no voices and nothing to stir the motes lazing through the beams coming from the study’s easterly windows. Eventually Sunya finds her and takes her down an unfamiliar hallway to the bedroom.

“It’s not the first time this has happened.” Khadi smiles a little. “It’s happened twice. Before I had Achal.”

It’s as if she’s the one comforting Chaemshar. She doesn’t look drawn in the slightest despite sitting up in the bed wearing a rumpled shift. A row of lacquer boxes filled with medicines, both powered and encased, sits on the adjacent table. The scent reminds Chaemshar of the days after she almost burned to death under the rubble of the Arsenal.

“I’m sorry.” She keeps her eyes on the batik embroidery on the top sheet. None of the words beginning to form in her mouth feel like they’re the correct shape. “Are you… is your body fairing well at least?”

“Oh yes. The bleeding on the inside is done now.” Khadi watches her reaction and chuckles. “I can fence with a dha and lysiddhi shield for four hours and then pilot an airship through an Akashic typhoon, but my body struggles with this. Always will.”

When she steps out to let Khadi rest again she feels as if her head has hollowed out. This is outside of her domain. Unknown territory, like the floating islands miles down in the murk close to Naraka. She fights the urge the touch the shadowy wall and steady herself, walks down the hallway back towards the study. The painting waits there for her, still on its easel. Garjatran is there too.

“My deepest apologies for your loss, Khun Phraya.” She lowers her head.

“Thank you for visiting,” he says, looking back at her. “Khadi appreciates it. Her strength is immense, but her tendency is to conceal half the pain she actually feels.”

“I can’t even imagine what it must be like.” Her mouth is dry. “Forgive my asking, but this isn’t the first time it’s…”

He shakes his head. “It’s only by my ancestors’ favor she was able to have Achal.”

There’s a pause, and neither of them can avoid the painting anymore. Khadi’s likeness smiles out at Chaemshar, the dappled shadows of the courtyard on her foreign dress and swollen belly.

“If you’d like…”

“What?” It seems as if he’d momentarily forgotten Chaemshar was there. She flinches.

“If you’d like to refund the commission, I can do that. If the work isn’t satisfactory.”

Garjatran’s expression is unreadable. “Do you think I feel it is unsatisfactory?”

“I.” She struggles to not break eye contact with those elegant dark coals. “I only mean that if the work isn’t pleasing to the client I can’t in good conscience keep their rajata.”

He shakes his head. “Firstly, I did not commission you, Khadi did. Secondly, I doubt she would accept such an arrangement.” He touches the corner of the painting where it rests on the easel. “I admit I don’t share her affinity, but I know your presence does something ameliorative for her upper soul. That is sufficient reason for me to want you to stay.”

Around the same time something strange was happening in New Chelor. In the past, the aftermath of a war would coincide with a disbursement of the spoils the Akshauhini had hauled home. Nobility and gentry alike would benefit from the rajata injected into the province. This time was different. The Chakravartin hadn’t exercised their right to muster the provinces in years, further back than most anyone could remember. Whatever does come back this time goes straight to the capital. New Chelor seems to languish. Some streets never quite return what they used to be. Rubble and broken glass disappear, but many reconstituted buildings remain empty. Some people leave, going either the same direction as the sculptor or across the Akash and past the belt ocean towards Porumma. The ones who stay stew in a soup of thwarted expectations. Discontent simmers in the streets and the verandas.

The composer mentions that he’s considering moving to the capital. A junior position at one of the conservatories has opened, and the works he put out during the Rajas’ War (as people now call it) has garnered attention.

“I’ve never been. Not since school, I mean.” He seems more embarrassed by the whole situation than anything.

Chaemshar nods along, her mind still filled with Khadi sitting up in her bed. “I’m sure it’s changed quite a bit since then.”

“It has. Hasn’t she told you about it?”

“Ah. I haven’t had the chance to send her a narrowband since she left.” She hasn’t received any either.

“Well, on a related note, I was thinking.” That’s to his according, the sculptor would have said. “If I go, would you maybe want to come along as well?”

She can’t remember the last time the composer has actually surprised her before now. “To the capital? I don’t… Why?”

His tail lowers, feline ears droop. “I figured you might be thinking about it. Things here being the way they are. I know you’ve just had those side jobs with the Phraya’s people. You must want to do more than that, right?”

She’s cycled through a series of different roles that year. More portraits, sketches of gardens and fields for the landscaper, even a handful of art classes for Achal upon Khadi’s insistence.

“More? I have plenty in my bowl these days, honestly.”

“I mean more, uh, ambitious?”

She’d been unsure whether he’d actually say it. “What do you mean?”

He actually holds his hands up. “Commissions. Exhibitions. You haven’t done an exhibition since the war. Uh, not that it’s your fault — I mean…”

“So you think I’m languishing.” It takes her significant effort not to walk away immediately. “You think I’m not doing anything important.”

Chaemshar doesn’t see the composer again after that. She spends less time in New Chelor altogether. There’s plenty to do elsewhere. The annoyance keeps throbbing at the back of her head for some time though, during the quiet moments in between work or conversation with Khadi or people from the Akshauhini.

Soon enough, Garjatran summons her back to the Arsenal. No reason is given. She’s hasn’t been there since the attack. From afar, the rebuilt headquarters looks identical to the old. It’s only when they cross the threshold of the entrance that the differences in the varnish upon the lumber and where the seams in the dark metal panels come together become apparent. She pauses. The walls are hung with the surviving pieces of her work. She lingers on the tableau of a squadron landing on the bluffs of a beach somewhere in northern Itak. Slivers of crimson hanging over the ivory white sandbar. The burns on the upper left side are obvious. Water stains ghosting down the horizon. No attempt has been made at restoration. She can smell a trace of the burnt canvas and paint.

Everyone wears the same uniforms, but most of the faces are different. She gets only a few looks of recognition among the officers conversing around the Perilla. Khadi is there in a circle of Somankar officers. She looks completely different back in the uniform with the long waves of her hair tied back, to the point of resembling a different person.

The room that used to be the empty room that became her office is now a conference chamber. Garjatran and Khrotyan are there. There’s new work that Chaemshar must be entrusted with. She’s never been “entrusted” with anything until now.

The door slides open again and a familiar figure shuffles in.

“I’m not certain if you remember.” Garjatran is saying, but Chaemshar is already lurching forward, arms rising up.

She wraps her arms around the Jawik-kecil. “I’d be dead without you,” she says. “But you disappeared before I could say anything.” Fur tickles the bridge of her nose.

Awkward laughter around the room. Star Phaalyn smiles, showing that wall of teeth. “It’s hard for me to leave my station unattended for too long, Khun. Ah, and I’d already confirmed you were intact and likely to survive.”

They want her to sketch the components of the Five Factories. The goal is to have a full set of schematics to commit to the Akshauhini’s archives. Chaemshar doesn’t know much about military affairs, but knows enough to be surprised such a thing doesn’t exist yet. Star explains to her later, as the two of them take their first sampan ride up to the floating prisms: the Factories aren’t like the lysiddhi tuners’ ateliers in New Chelor. They are ancient through and through, plucked from the violent Akash close to the center of Lysantara, a bent and vivisected continent encased in an eternal storm.

Even the air tastes different inside the rhombus. The lysiddhi flowing through the pipes along the walls and ceilings makes her skin tingle, hair on the back of her neck standing as if brushed by an aswang’s fingertips. At first she assumes it will be a dungeon of claustrophobic corridors. Instead the entrance opens into a vast atrium whose angled walls somehow transmit a dim rust red light despite their total opacity from the outside. The towers of machinery within are like nothing Chaemshar has ever seen. It takes her days to simply get a sense, with Star’s help, of where to start.

Aahit, the other overseer, is a Jawik-besar who looks even more disheveled than his counterpart. His clothes are faded and patches dot the threadbare fabric. Plain rings of old tarnished brass jingle on the curve of his upturned horns and braids in his graying fur. He pays little mind to the newcomer, staying fixated on the chamber of unlabeled controls from which he rarely strays.

“Mind your extremities around the armor stampers,” he says idly one day after a series of machines become agitated and almost swallows her in a blast of steam.

The two of them came to the Empire at the behest of the previous Phraya. They used to be senior shipyard foremen in Dhamenthao, but they have mapped out the functions of less than half the mechanisms. The rest defies their understanding.

“How are you able to get anything to function?”

“It is easier than you might think. The way Sanni yantra works… How do I put it into words?” Star fiddles with the slitted goggles he wears. “There are certain foundational elements. Commonalities with the yantra Aahit and I oversaw before. If one can recognize, key into them and create a reaction? The rest tends to catalyze by itself.”

The factory isn’t as solid a structure as it seems from the outside. When a crimson ship comes up for refitting great seams open along the factory walls. Humid air and blinding light flood in. The roar of the westerly winds fights with the cicada drone of the machines. The rhombus reshapes itself into a dry dock into which the ship nestles itself to be enveloped by the mechanical telefactor arms.

This time it’s Khadi’s ship. A steel gangplank extends to the side of the ship, where she meets Chaemshar.

“Nirmana’s turban, you’re covered in black!”

Chaemshar blinks. “What?” But she’s touching her cheek at the same time. The fingers come away sooty, a drier onyx powder than the greasiness of her charcoal pencils.

The other woman chuckles, holding her hair down against the wind. “You look like you’ve just been through a battle, and manning the guns at that.”

Another campaign is about to begin. This time it’s not the Chakravartin in charge. This will be a smaller incursion, a return to form for the Akshauhini. Khadi’s squadron is being given a new position at the fore, just to the right of the Phraya. A position of honor.

“Is it because you’re the Phraya’s wife?”

She gives her a dry look. “I had to lobby him for this, you know. My squadron’s led the Akshauhini in ships sunk for at least two years, and yet he’s never given me the position until now.”

The arms begin to pass over the ship, tracing the scorch marks and puckered metal that mark the hull. Chaemshar’s become familiar with the angular way in which the arms move and articulate. “Maybe he just wanted to keep you safe?” She says.

Khadi’s already turned towards where the two Jawik are busy at the factory controls. She doesn’t seem to have heard. “Aahit, could you examine the reactor once more? My engineer and I are still detecting that hiccup between the reactor and the gun.”

Dozens of ships dock with the factories before heading off. By the end both Star and Aahit are on the brink of collapse, sagging in their chairs, tips of their horns scraping against the edge of the control panels. It’s always like this, they say. There’s no one else who can help with this work, no one who has the same combined abilities in lysiddhi channeling nor the decades of experience here amongst the machines.

Is Chaemshar the only person who could do what she’s doing? Doubtful. Artists are leaking away from the Artists’ Quarter by the day, but even now it would be easy to track down someone who could render line art as well as her, if not better. At every point in her life she’s been nonessential. Not useless, but replaceable in some form or another. There was nothing that hinged existentially upon her efforts, presence, or existence.

The quietude after the Akshauhini’s departure reminds her of that other summer. She’s more comfortable inside the factories than back outside amidst the tall grass and the headquarters building. She doesn’t want to return to what used to be her office in the headquarters. It’s no longer fit to purpose, and the sight of it reminds her of her hands scrabbling over oily canvases as the ceiling burned above her.

Instead, she brings her outside work to the factory. She finds a corner near the primary control center where she can lay them down just out of the way. While organizing, a shadow falls over her.

“Is that Taheng the Cyan?” Aahit looms over her. His big rheumy eyes are fixated on the painting in her hands.

“You know her?”

“Not personally.” He blasts air through his snout, nostrils flaring, rings in his ears jangling with amusement at his own joke. “On the trip down here I pulled all the books about the Empire I could find in the ship’s library. Among them was a compendium of Chela stories. She was my favorite.” It’s the first time he’s said more than a handful of words to her.

“Really?” Chaemshar eases the canvas out from the stack. Gata’s yellow corpse eyes staring up at the witch cradling her. “I was terrified of her as a child. If I was bad she’d crawl through my window and make me one of her maranhig, or so I was told.”

Aahit nods. “She creates, and doesn’t give a toss about anyone who tries to stop her. That kind of person would never get stories made about them in Dhamenthao.”

“She creates the living dead.”

He shrugs. “I make warships. With lysiddhi whose powers I understand less than half of.” He goes down to one knee next to her and holds out one of his arms. The fur on the inside of his trunk-like wrist has fallen away, exposing hide marked with old whitened scars. “I’ve been doing it since I was fifteen. I got these when I was less than a year into the job.”

Chaemshar can almost sees the pattern of an ornate rug in the scars. “Why did you… enter? Is it your family’s trade?”

“No.” His eyes flicker with surprise for a moment. “I found out I had the aptitude for yantra early. It was all Bhagyakara. And I like doing it.”

A humming noise fills the factory. Light begins to appear in the seams of the walls as they part. The Akshauhini wouldn’t return so soon. Wind begins to sweep the decks. They hurry to throw a tarp over the paintings. Taheng and Gata disappear back into the dark. Aahit lumbers away and returns with one of the stretching ropes he and Star Phaalyn use to secure sensitive equipment around the factory floor. With a speed belying his form he loops the rope underneath the tarp twice — Chaemshar winces at the sound of the rope scraping hard against the canvases’ wooden backing. Hands her one of the hooked ends and points at the closest railing.

She’s seen both of them do this enough times. When the hook clamps down around the bottom of the railing she gasps with relief and looks back. Aahit has the rope over his shoulder, stretching it taut and dragging it towards the far end of the platform. Chameshar gets up — the wind is strong enough now to almost knock her over the railing — and follows. Together they’re able to pull the end of the rope just far enough to get the hook in place. It goes taut and the bundle rattles against the platform, but paintings stay put.

The walls finish opening. Star Phaalyn’s head peeks out from the raised dais where all the controls are. “What are you two doing down there?” He cries out.

Aahit coughs violently, hand clamped over his snout. He snarls something in Dhamen. “What in Naraka are you doing up there?” He yells back.

“I… Testing the release clamps. I figured we might as well do it early!”

They stay on the platform while as Aahit catches his breath. When Chameshar asks if he’s ill he shakes his head, saying wryly that he’s just not used to fresh air anymore.

“I envy you,” she says, looking at the ragged tarp tied down against the floor.

The breaths whistle through his throat. “Why?”

“There’s nothing important about what I do, nor am I the best at it. For years I’ve kept grasping at any opportunity to grow my standing so that I could refine my work. Did I even have it the right way around?” She’s glad for the tarp, doesn’t know if she’d be able to look at any of the compositions underneath it right now. “In reality I’ve just been buffeted around by…”

His fingers close around her hand. A turn of the arm, not quite gentle but not quite hard. Her own burn scars aren’t nearly as large or livid as his, but they’re there. Dry raised veins starting at the balls of the wrists that peel and itch when the humidity decline after the monsoon season.

“You’re right, insofar as thinking about things in reverse. Your wanting to work to ‘grow standing.’ That’s your concern, and only yours.” He thumbs the largest vein. “You and I. Whom does our work benefit? Which cause and what ends? That’s what matters, and in that sense we’re the same.”

She thinks of the nets full of plunder hanging over New Chelor, weighing down the crimson ships hauling them. For what feels like a half eternity she can’t think of what to say. “They’ll always need new ships. Better ships. But what happens when they don’t need portraits of new children anymore? Or illustrations for their manuals?”

He laughs. “I thought you knew the Phraya and his people better than that.” He struggles back onto his feet, gripping her arm painfully. “Khun, when you serve a powerful person, you don’t decide how to be useful to them. They tell you what you’re useful for, and you adjust.” He pats her shoulder. “They’ll find something for you.”