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General Tarcquet removed his hand from his arquebus. “Fair enough.”
The Hesperians looked far too pleased. Rin’s stomach twisted.
Oh, gods. What had she agreed to?
“Excellent.” The gray-eyed woman rose from her chair. “Come with me. We’ll begin now.”
The Hesperians had already occupied the entire block of buildings just west of the palace, furnished residences that Rin suspected Vaisra must have prepared long ago. Blue flags bearing an insignia that looked like the gears of a clock hung from the windows. The gray-eyed woman motioned for Rin to follow her into a small, windowless square room on the first floor of the center building.
“What do you call yourself?” asked the woman. “Fang Runin, they said?”
“Just Rin,” Rin muttered, glancing around the room. It was bare except for two long, narrow stone tables that had recently been dragged there, judging from the skid marks on the stone floor. One table was empty. The other was covered with an array of instruments, some made of steel and some of wood, few of which Rin recognized or could guess the function of.
The Hesperians had been preparing this room since they got here.
A Hesperian soldier stood in the corner, arquebus slung over his shoulder. His eyes tracked Rin every time she moved. She made a face at him. He didn’t react.
“You may call me Sister Petra,” said the woman. “Why don’t you come over here?”
She spoke truly excellent Nikara. Rin would have been impressed, but something felt off. Petra’s sentences were perfectly smooth and fluent, perhaps more grammatically perfect than those of most native speakers, but her words came out sounding all wrong. The tones were just the slightest bit off, and she inflected everything with the same flat clip that made her sound utterly inhuman.
Petra picked a cup off the edge of the table and offered it to her. “Laudanum?”
Rin recoiled, surprised. “For what?”
“It might calm you down. I’ve been told you react badly to lab environments.” Petra pursed her lips. “I know opiates dampen the phenomena you manifest, but for a first observation that won’t matter. Today I’m interested only in baseline measurements.”
Rin eyed the cup, considering. The last thing she wanted was to be off her guard for a full hour with the Hesperians. But she knew she had no choice but to comply with whatever Petra asked of her. She could reasonably expect that they wouldn’t kill her. She had no control over the rest. The only thing she could control was her own discomfort.
She took the cup and emptied it.
“Excellent.” Petra gestured to the bed. “Up there, please.
Rin took a deep breath and sat down at the edge.
One hour. That was it. All she had to do was survive the next sixty minutes.
Petra began by taking an endless series of measurements. With a notched string she recorded Rin’s height, wingspan, and the length of her feet. She measured the circumference around Rin’s waist, wrists, ankles, and thighs. Then with a smaller string she took a series of smaller measurements that seemed utterly pointless. The width of Rin’s eyes. Their distance from her nose. The length of each one of her fingernails.
This went on forever. Rin managed not to flinch too hard from Petra’s touch. The laudanum was working well; a lead weight had settled comfortably in her bloodstream and kept her numb, torpid, and docile.
Petra wrapped the string around the base of Rin’s thumb. “Tell me about the first time you communed with, ah, this entity you claim to be your god. How would you describe the experience?”
Rin said nothing. She had to present her body for examination. That didn’t mean she had to entertain small talk.
Petra repeated her question. Again Rin kept silent.
“You should know,” Petra said as she put the tape measure away, “that verbal cooperation is a condition of our agreement.”
Rin gave her a wary look. “What do you want from me?”
“Only your honest responses. I am not solely interested in the stock of your body. I’m curious about the possibilities for the redemption of your soul.”
If Rin’s mind had been working any faster she would have managed some clever retort. Instead she rolled her eyes.
“You seem confident our religion is false,” Petra said.
“I know it’s false.” The laudanum had loosened Rin’s tongue, and she found herself spilling the first thoughts that came to her mind. “I’ve seen evidence of my gods.”
“Have you?”
“Yes, and I know that the universe is not the doing of a single man.”
“A single man? Is that what you think we believe?” Petra tilted her head. “What do you know about our theology?”
“That it’s stupid,” Rin said, which was the extent of what she’d ever been taught.
They’d studied Hesperian religion—Makerism, they called it—briefly at Sinegard, back when none of them thought the Hesperians would return to the Empire’s shores during their lifetime. None of them had taken their studies of Hesperian culture seriously, not even the instructors. Makerism was only ever a footnote. A joke. Those foolish westerners.
Rin remembered idyllic walks down the mountainside with Jiang during the first year of her apprenticeship, when he’d made her research differences between eastern and western religions and hypothesize the reasons they existed. She remembered sinking hours into this question at the library. She’d discovered that the vast and varied religions of the Empire tended to be polytheistic, disordered, and irregular, lacking consistency even across villages. But the Hesperians liked to invest their worship in a single entity, typically represented as a man.
“Why do you think that is?” Rin had asked Jiang.
“Hubris,” he’d said. “They already like to think they are lords of the world. They’d like to think something in their own image created the universe.”
The question that Rin had never entertained, of course, was how the Hesperians had become so vastly technologically advanced if their approach to religion was so laughably wrong. Until now, it had never been relevant.
Petra plucked a round metal device about the size of her palm off the table and held it in front of Rin. She clicked a button at the side, and its lid popped off. “Do you know what this is?”
It was a clock of some sort. She recognized Hesperian numbers, twelve in a circle, with two needles moving slowly in rotation. But Nikara clocks, powered by dripping water, were installations that took up entire corners of rooms. This thing was so small it could have fit in her pocket.
“Is it a timepiece?”
“Very good,” Petra said. “Appreciate this design. See the intricate gears, perfectly shaped to form, that keep it ticking on its own. Now imagine that you found this on the ground. You don’t know what it is. You don’t know who put it there. What is your conclusion? Does it have a designer, or is it an accident of nature, like a rock?”
Rin’s mind moved sluggishly around Petra’s questions, but she knew the conclusion Petra wanted her to reach.
“There exists a creator,” she said after a pause.
“Very good,” Petra said again. “Now imagine the world as a clock. Consider the sea, the clouds, the skies, the stars, all working in perfect harmony to keep our world turning and breathing as it does. Think of the life cycles of forests and the animals that live in them. This is no accident. This could not have been forged through primordial chaos, as your theology tends to argue. This was deliberate creation by a greater entity, perfectly benevolent and rational.
