"The Saint of Bright Doors"

[fiefoe]

Vajra Chandrasekera's world-building is one of the things I love best about this fantasy. The doors in the title however is perhaps one of the weaker elements in the story.

• The moment Fetter is born, Mother-of-Glory pins his shadow to the earth with a large brass nail and tears it from him. This is his first memory, the seed of many hours of therapy to come... Mother-of-Glory dips her hands in that mud to gather up the ropy shadow of his umbilical cord and throttles his severed shadow with a quick loop, pulled tight. The shadow goes to its end in silence—or if it cries out, if shadows can cry out, that sound is lost in the rain.
• He is even careful not to experiment with his tendency to float. There will be time for that, he tells himself, when the lightness fills his chest in the mornings like he could breathe out and float away into the endless blue of the sky. He thinks he has achieved a sublime façade of ordinariness, hidden the turmoil in his mind.
• Others are more human in shape, and he understands them as being both natural and unnatural in the same way as people: dim and elongated, their gait a strange cousin to grace, or eerily multiple, toothy and long of tongue.
• But, most of all, Fetter discovers that gravity finds him slippery, as if oiled. It is easy to fall upward, altogether too easy... He teaches himself that every step must be a conscious, willed act if it’s to pass muster as ordinary human movement... He’s also learned to think of others that way—the weighted. The shadowed.
• Murder comes even less easy to him. Mother-of-Glory all but holds his hand for his first. She says she is multitasking, combining his training with the bloody end of an old family feud.
• She has given this speech so often Fetter knows it by heart, which is the point. “They are declared to be outside the jurisdiction of any regime of restorative or retributive justice. The Five Unforgivables are, in order of severity, matricide; heresy leading to factionalism; the sancticide of votaries who have reached the fourth level of awakening; patricide;
• Even someone raised to the Unforgivables will have ingrained inhibitions against violence, which must be overcome in the heat and pressure of the moment. Mother-of-Glory has warned Fetter about this many times, but it’s still difficult. A poisoned breath pools at the bottom of his lungs; it will never come all the way out again.
• he already knows it by heart and, to his own annoyance, finds himself reciting it in the silences that it used to occupy. It helps him feel directed, that all this is aimed at something. The forgivable murders are covered by the constant violence of his extended family, Mother-of-Glory explains, timed and ordered to drift into the background noise of assassinations and funerals that structure the family calendar, feuds he doesn’t keep track of.
• a blessing, the words impatient and mumbled because she doesn’t believe in blessings, not even her own. Such things are his father’s territory. <> “Remember, son,” Mother-of-Glory says, compensating with pomposity for her deficits of piety or affection. “The only way to change the world is through intentional, directed violence.”

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• Of course, he can’t talk about the murders here in the city, but he can talk around them. He has learned how to describe them in emotional terms while leaving out the blood... He can admit now, from the safe perch of his twenties, that his childhood was spent in the thrall of a toxic, abusive parent.
• Fetter isn’t even the only feral child of a messiah in his social network. There’s a support group for unchosen ones,
• An ordinary Luriati door is always partly open or partly transparent, even if imperfectly. Only the bright doors are fully closed and opaque. From this Fetter gathers that it is the lack of transparency, the closing of doors, the unknowability of an other side, that differentiates the bright doors from mere entrances... If what’s behind the door is the outside, then does that make all of Luriat—all of the world—the inside?
• The crowdfunding page outlines their plans to hire out a major convention centre for the sixth-month monsoon season with included housing for the Perfect and Kind and his inner circle,
• The Path Behind is dangerous—Mother-of-Glory wasn’t wrong about that. He has seen enough of the world to confirm what he was taught. As a teenager in the hinterlands, he saw the aftermath of their more recent pogroms against the pathless; in Luriat, he sees their frothing, rabid demagogues on TV.
• it is possible to live in Luriat and not need to work, at least for money. Most people do work, because money buys a better class of needs.
• Caduv belongs in that unchosen community. He doesn’t have the regal bearing of a trained prophet like Koel, or the aura of otherworldly damage that marks Ulpe, or, Fetter supposes, himself. It’s only when Caduv opens his mouth to ask his question that Fetter understands. He hears it in his voice. Or even before voice, in the opening of the mouth alone, the browned and slightly uneven teeth, the furry, startling moss of his tongue, the way the ambient soundscape changes in preparation for Caduv’s voice,... The cousin is the anointed Singer of the Red, custodian of what is presumably some sort of apocalyptic or salvific event to be prevented or triggered in some distant vale... Here in Luriat, foreign prophetic visions are detritus, not destiny.
• all their tiny boxes to tick. As much as it seeks ways to identify the body, Luriat worries more about how to categorize it. Much of the application is concerned with assigning incoming citizens into their proper local hierarchies of race and caste, the grouping and typing theory inherited from the Alabi empire which ruled the entire supercontinent for a century and a half.
• (Plauges:) their prevalence in the greater world. Luriatis are well-inured to both. Their history, their calendar, is built around the succession of plague years and pogrom years... But he comes to understand that it is only cities like Luriat that can survive such things, and perhaps that it is only creating and then surviving them that creates the possibility of a Luriat. It is through the history of responding to these crises and disasters, he learns, that Luriat’s free services came into being: small hard-won victories immediately compromised by the frames of race and caste that control access to them.
• he learns slowly to read between the headlines, to understand that a riot is a pogrom, and that when a monk of the Path Behind is on TV calling for peace from both sides, that it means that the Path Behind is once again attempting to cull the hinterlands of the pathless, and of the races and castes that they consider low and other: his father’s legacy conjoined with the droppings of imperial Alab. Too, he learns there is plague abroad in the distant southeastern subcontinent of Aggiopa, where all those empire-builders came from, endlessly infecting and re-infecting the world. Fetter isn’t ready to grapple with a world so enlarged, so bloated from pain.
• He has no strong grasp of why they ignore several dozen new people and then descend in force to capture the next, and anybody that person might have known, and then anyone close to those persons, and so on, until sated. It is obvious that they fear infection, but infection by disease or ideas or identities? These intrusions too seem seasonal; he himself came to Luriat without trouble, in a balmy moment
• somewhere, his DNA will be registered in the social categories to which he has been assigned, and feed into research that reinforces those categories
• dating: Mother-of-Glory scorned such things as disruptive technologies inimical to spiritual growth and a consistent training regimen... But after the first few weeks of attempted formalism, their interactions dissolve into a pool of complex organic reactions... Hej responds to his animation in turn, and the sense of excitement, of over-oxygenation, spirals.
• In its own way, it is the perfect distillation of everything that is good about Luriat; the freedoms it gives, to those allowed to accept them; the space it creates for its citizens to make, to see, to hear, to be art, if they so desire and as long as that art does not cross the invisible lines of force that would bring down the boots and the drums.
• it turns out that she’s capable of patience too. He supposes that this is part of the shared heritage of the almost-chosen... In Acusdab, politics was simple; there was that place with its devils and doctors; in it there was the family, hating and murdering each other; and like the bitter sun, there was Mother-of-Glory. <> By comparison, Luriat has too many moving parts, too many heads, too many arms, a devilish profusion of writhing shadows and hidden blades... and the two great Courts of Summer and Storm, and their mirrored Constitutions with competing claims to supremacy.
• A slow heat washes over him, a feeling of being left out, left behind. He wonders if their group, the almost-chosen, are more susceptible to this feeling. They were groomed to be insiders, given access to the mysteries, taught the secrets. And now they, or at least he, cannot stand to be the ignorant outsider.
• He looks at the other man through the side of his eye and wonders what it would be like to be so sure of oneself—to have the song of your god in your mouth and still walk away, to choose music as your path in life as if there were no need to keep space for a destiny that might yet come crawling back, to pursue revolution in a place that hasn’t even become home yet.
• The city’s cash is traded in paper of various denominations: fanons and rupiyal for most people, and the rare varaagam, the pig note, for people like those on his committee. But in truth the city runs on credit, not cash, and he dimly senses great rivers of wealth flowing far over his head.
• The book says the devils of Acusdab are fading away, perhaps repelled by the highway and the modernity it brings, and without possession, nine-tenths of the lore are already lost.
• “The doctors will tell you it was cancer,” she repeats, as if she’s practiced this line to herself in a mirror and is determined to get it out before she hangs up. “But it’s disappointment in you.”
• Peroe’s family is lesser cultivator-caste, so Tomarin will invite you to a friendly dinner but won’t act as your patron or get involved with your fortunes. Still, it’s something—Tomarin wouldn’t have spat on Fetter if you were on fire.” <> Fetter grunts. The Luriati caste system is overly complicated. It seems like every district, every tributary township, and every village in the integrated hinterlands has its own system and hierarchy, and their multifarious points of contact are ever contested.
• “You have to be careful in the city,” she says. “They have laws against sodomy.”
  “If they do, they don’t enforce them,” Fetter says. “I see lots of people together—”
  “That’s not how laws work, son,” she says. “A visible law is a ploy, a little play. A mummery in waiting, waiting for you to become interesting. Never give them a reason to care who you are.”
• the spikes and curls of her silver hair look both expensive and militant, like precious instruments of violence.
• she probably has Aggiopan ancestors, perhaps even Alabi, and therefore is both higher-status than the others for being more Southeastern Imperial in her very meat and cells, but also lower, for not being purebred. Alabi race science, as Fetter understands it from his reading, places great value on inbreeding populations to allow racial traits to pool and thicken. Wealth works this way as well, pooling and agglutinating and breeding with itself.
• “I’ve been assuming an equal probability of translation at any moment, but if the gambler’s fallacy doesn’t hold in this case, if a longer wait does increase the likelihood of translation, then it’s worth trying again.
• He wants to ask about their relationship to their boss, but he doesn’t want to interrupt their excitement. Fetter isn’t all that excited himself, but Peroe is over the moon. It’s a strange feeling, being more than one person... Pipra, Janno, and the others are planning a series of induced translations with carefully graded increases of sensory observation and timing: cotton wool instead of ear plugs, filter goggles instead of closed eyes or blindfolds; doors reopened and reclosed to reset the timing at staggered intervals to test what Pipra is calling frustration theory, in honour of Peroe’s contribution.
• These marked prisoners are obviously being paraded as a warning, and who needs that warning more than the artists and the immigrants? All that remains to be seen is if the procession itself, the shaming, is the punishment, or whether it is only the prelude to something worse.
• The terms and conditions of free government housing prohibits even tenants’ associations. This crowd is atomized, aerosolized, no matter how dense it is; individual particles, not a massed wave.
• Long and fluted columns are interrupted and enwrapped by intricately embellished decorations: leaves, vines, explosions of fruit and flower. It is as if the pillars anticipate their eventual ruin and abandonment, the jungle that will some day claim them... So nearly all the columns are Alabi or Luriati reconstructions of the Abjesili style, some quite old in their own right, except for this one.
• “Hauntwood is how Abjesil built the world’s first global slaver empire. For centuries, they’d lived in fear of the haunted forest around their city, until they learned how to cut down those trees and carve their spears, their arrows, the stocks of their long guns, the wheels and struts of their chariots, their slave collars.
• It seems everybody who came after, for over two hundred years, literally everyone, the Alabi Empire, the postcolonial government, the Courts themselves, everyone just agreed that, you know, the Second Occupation style looks better. All those odd little fruits and flowers are just so much more elegant and charming than grim old Alabi memento mori, or worse, boring Path symbolism.”
• more for the pleasure of laughing with Fetter’s chest, not Peroe’s. <> Fetter has been feeling cramped in Peroe’s life. With Hej’s eyes on him, he feels more like himself; better yet, he feels like the him that Hej knows, the best version of himself he has made so far.
• His world gets bigger by the day, but at the cost of getting smaller and smaller at the same time. Even the wars are small—but isn’t it the same wars all the way south? The fruit of the Occupations, as much as those carved in hauntwood.
• They infected us with strange ideas from the south-west. They brought doctrines of shame and disgust for the body and the glorification of the perfected mind. They asked us to look at our bodies not as the clean and perfect instruments of living that we had known, but as bags of flesh containing the thirty-one parts of impurity:... Like this, they brought endless categorizations and subcategorizations and enumerations of being and experience. They brought, almost incidentally, the politics they knew, of centralization, of the consolidation of power, a politics of thrones.
• Once in a fight he called me ugly. Some of his closest confidants, you know, his innermost circle, his boys, they made that my name—my first name.
• While he lived with me, he first learned what was ordinary, everyday power in that time and place. The songs of sharpening, the songs of freshness, the songs of light in the dark that you can hum in your chest and belly.
• These are the mores of an elder civilization. We went naked, felt no shame for our bodies, but we had a deep sense of propriety around mystery. We would never attempt to learn the sacred mysteries of all disciplines, for the purposes of cross-indexing them and cataloguing them... We would not question the devils that lived among us for the mysteries of their being and their world; we gave them the dignity of being themselves, not objects of study... But we never saw them as a resource to be exploited.
• He waited for an hour when the sun and moon were both in the sky, such that the sky itself raised his standard for him, and then he took the miles and years in his hand and, making a fist, he smashed the island into the mainland so hard that it raised the Hanu mountains where the gulf of pearls used to be... he moved the collision of island and mainland into the distant, forgotten past, long before there were any people to see it. <> He made it so that it had always been this way. <> He made it so that I had always lived at the foot of the mountains; he made it so that I had never been a pearl diver,
• All our learning and theory carefully stored in their great libraries was wiped out, ... All our learning and theory carefully stored in their great libraries was wiped out, ... He folded time, too, in ways that to this day no one understands.
• Oh, and it’s only after we lost them that we began to call them devils. That, like so many other things, is the work of your father’s remnant cult, which ebbed and flowed but regained its power after learning and incorporating the lessons of the Occupations—the arrogance of adventurist Bbadu, the haunted lawmaking of Abjesili slavers, the monstrous race science of dead Alab.
• the story of the cataclysm makes sense in some way more fundamental than fact; it explains, if nothing else, the emotional geography of his childhood, even if it’s only a mad fantasy of his mother’s. Whether it’s real or not, this is how she sees the world, and understanding that makes his life, so heavily shaped by her, seem clearer.
• But you have to understand, while we are all unchosen together, I’m not like the rest of you.” <> Devils, Fetter thinks, the familiar curse a little flat after hearing his mother’s story. But it is uncomfortable to hear a profound truth about his own condition repeated by someone else in a way that makes the insight sound like a shallow and self-serving brag.
• Luriat’s plague years... These cycles are partly an emergent property of a long and complex history dating back to the death magic of the Occupations, and partly engineered and refreshed in the present, through the myriad great and small actions of hundreds, perhaps thousands of people in various positions of power... What I want to do, ultimately, is to break the cycle in which plague and pogrom for the segregated, disaggregated many lead to power and profit for the few. At least for a little while. I want to show people that the death and the loss we’ve learned to accept are neither a curse to be borne nor a price to be paid, but are the efficient functioning of Luriat, working as designed.”
• the power of rulers is always based on death magic, and you can’t topple that without violence.
• But he does not; the clenching and spasming eases once he’s gained a little distance, as if his gut wanted to drag him out of the devil’s way.
• it looked like the nightmare that a crocodile might have. If a giant crocodile were taken and twisted like rope in the hands of a malevolent god, made into a long reptilian braid of flesh and scales tipped by a circular saw of a mouth, teeth jutting out like a cluster of arrowheads, it might look like this.
• Fetter opens his mouth to say The world is full of holes and monsters come out of them except my mother says they may not all be monsters, and for some reason I thought I was safer from them in Luriat because it was so far away from Acusdab, but I’ve learned that Luriat is practically on top of Acusdab because the world is much bigger than I thought it was and my life so much smaller,
• He thinks about lies, and how they sit smooth and bulbous in his belly. They hardly discomfort him now. It’s just that he is full of them; he can’t add any more.
• “You’ve killed me after all,” Mother-of-Glory says. “Through heartbreak, frustration, and disappointment rather than the blade I was expecting, but oh, it hurts like a knife all the same. My congratulations to you, son: soon you will have committed the First Unforgivable... Fetter recites, the words scooped out with a jagged trowel from the deep earth of his belly despite himself.
• maybe this is not his own body’s sensitivity to significance any more, but rather because the paper discusses Relic a so intimately that it is imbued with an echo of its properties through the law of contagion.
• “It’s so delicate a balance that if Avli over there so much as twitches an eyeball in this direction it will collapse. But until then, for as long as Avli doesn’t blink, it is a bright door and not a bright door; it is neither a bright door nor not a bright door—don’t you dare blink! Are you crying? It is perfectly poised on the horns of the tetralemma. The liminal peak can be held to the limit of human will and fine motor control over the eyelids, and the incomplete translation then reversed.
• Fame, she says, is how a ruling class conditions artists to docility and incorporates their work to lesser ends.
• “Keep the boundaries of allowed speech vague, and you can claim that your enemies have crossed them whenever you need to suppress them. The Ministry of Information and Mass Media is nothing more than a blacklist-in-waiting.” <> Fetter nods tiredly. It’s the same attitude Mother-of-Glory has to the law. Fetter himself thinks of the law less as strategic or rule-based and more as a muddled, dangerous beast.
• out of a sense of well-earned pettiness.
• It’s at this point that Fetter recognizes the bones of the story. This is an adaptation of the origin story of the Perfect and Kind, from the unexpected perspective of Fetter’s father’s father... The play ends on the lone prince, swearing vengeance and ruin on the world, huddled in baffled despair under a spotlight. The invisible leopard comes up behind him and lays its trailing sleeves, its dead paws, over his shoulders. It is at once a father’s embrace, an inversion of the patricide, and his pelt as a monstrous trophy hung around the prince’s neck.
• Maybe the observers only hold the doors back from that transition by pouring in the light of their eyes, the quiet of their hearts. Perhaps the doors drain those resources from their door-keepers, who develop deficiencies.
• He found it charming at first, how unremarkable his shadowlessness is in this city, but he’s come to see it as part of a deep Luriati unwillingness to acknowledge anything that would require overturning their world, whether in physics or politics. A crowd like this wouldn’t acknowledge the fact of a hinterland pogrom or a prison camp either. To them, such things are the invisible laws and powers of the world, to be left unseen or at least not looked in the eye. They hide behind unfortunate incident or tense situation or welfare camp for internally displaced persons or a trick of the light.
• a traditional craft across the hinterlands. The young coconut leaf, fresh and pale, is a perfect medium for sculpture. It’s flexible enough to be curved and twisted around itself, but stiff enough to assert its own pressure, to contribute to the shape.
• when they made their amplifiers and containment fields for their devils—” Fetter hesitates, the word devil awkward in his mouth. In his mind’s hollow, he says laws and powers... “When they made these things, they made them like this, out of leaf and bark and wood. They built their cities to rot. They loved the smell of decaying plant matter; it was part of the song to them, the promise that the jungle would accept the sacrifice. To make things that would last: they would have considered that obscene.”
• The art of the coconut leaf is about semblance, a magic of sympathy and evocation. Everything made from them is a seeming, a mimicry of a real object that evokes its symbolic function in a fleeting, biodegradable form. A seeming-canopy evokes shelter without providing it; a seeming-spear evokes protection without the capability for violence; ..The seeming-pots, then, represent fullness and containment.
• he doesn’t think of this as a prayer and he’s not sure who he’s addressing it to. Not destiny or fate, which he still dares abjure. Perhaps just the world that surrounds him, the other to his self, the not-Fetter that has always enwrapped him, held him close when nobody else did.
• the thought he’s been pushing away since he took those irrevocable sideways steps and threw away two of his lives: both the identity of Peroe... the identity of Fetter, the Luriati Fetter, the new self he wore in the city, the one familiar to Koel and Caduv and all the people he’s met and known and helped and loved in the Sands and in the city, the life he’d truly thought of as his own. <> He thinks of Hej and he aches. He thinks of Hej’s face, his smile, his hands, the low burr of his voice, the scratching of his beard. He aches, but there is also a low shameful breathing out, release, relief. All those lies of omission, all the secrets he’s kept; he can let go of that guilt from never opening up, never sharing his truth, never loving more than he feared.
• all those people who were never chosen by anyone except the people who loved them, never tangled in any destinies except their own, the innocently shadowed, the guiltlessly weighted. By what right had he done this to them all? ... He had considered and refused the role and responsibility of a protector, even when the mantle attempted to settle on his shoulders. Hadn’t he long been bored of being the answerer of questions and the guide of lost newcomers? He tries to summon up some of that devilish, uncaring urgency again, that wilful agency, that memory of fire, but it dissipates in the quiet and enforced inaction of the train.
• He thinks of his long-unpracticed technique, the long-unsung song of sharpening. A simple arithmetic of murder: he moved south fast on the train while his father was moving slowly north on foot or in convoy. A surprise killing blow, impossible to dodge.
• Devils: They are principles of the world’s operation. They are gears and wheels; they are interlocking, grinding teeth. Or so it is supposed, at the most sophisticated level of mortal thought that he has ever encountered. There is no telling if this is any more or less true than the childhood terror of monsters that they still evoke in him.
• He took away what made us special, took away our lives and memories. But he could never cross the Hanu again as long as I held this boundary with the tooth in my possession, and so his cult fractured. The Path Behind formed from all those left behind in his absence, from the strange, fractured heresies they came up with without him.”
• There is a world where he was walking north while you came south on the train, but this is no longer that world. Now that you have attacked him, now you have struck and missed, he knows you. In this world where he knows you, he never came north over land at all, never came within range of the curse.
• Why had she never told him his father’s capabilities? But then she did, when she told him the story of the Hanu mountains. That had been a lesson but he had only thought of it as a kind of origin myth, a slightly fanciful history of himself. He had failed to account for it as a tactical reality.
• He would have no way to break his upward fall, and he has never been able to descend unassisted. The thought raised ancient childhood terrors of falling forever into the sky, of passing alone through the clouds, the eerie storms of the troposphere, choking as the air grows thin, a frozen body perhaps forever staring in the dark.
• The discrete tick tock of timepass becomes a liquid gurgle, as if he is submerged in the unending flow of a river in which the boundaries between objects dissolve into a slurry that passes into silt through his hands. No, there is no grit between his fingers, no hands, no eyes with which to not see them.
• it is frustrating to know that he is not immune to terror and manipulation. Recognizing the gramarye of dehumanization does nothing to prevent it from working its way upon his body and his mind.
• The prison camp is at least as enormous as Fetter assumed it could not possibly be... Instead of the floating, unstructured void of isolation, Fetter is faced with the choice of endless variations on structure, endless interaction.
• especially in the inner districts. Some sentry boxes don’t even have loudspeakers, so the soldiers in those areas maintain lists of local prisoners’ illegal mobile phone numbers. Phones ring often in such areas; the ringing is authorized and relatively safe.
• Fetter recalls, not without pain, conversations with Hej. “Doesn’t the Seventeenth Schedule have provisions for prisoners’ rights to representation?” he hazards. <> “Unfortunately, we do not fall under the jurisdiction of the Summer Court,” the secretary says. “This prison was established under an order from the Storm Court, so the Twentieth Schedule is ascendant.”
• The distinction between Summer and Storm as competing supreme courts dates back to an ancient unresolved power struggle between Godsfaction and Kingsfaction administrations during a coup of one by the other—who was couped by whom is lost to history—which sundered all civic authority from helm to crotch into halves that achieved a complicated détente over the generations, forming a vast nested array of entangled loops of power.
• He feels this thought push him deeper into the mire of himself. Does he think he deserves imprisonment?... He tries to sift through the heavy sediment of guilt in his heart, the one that Caduv almost seemed to lay claim to. He thinks its cause is neither parent but his own act of cruelty in throwing himself away without thinking through whether he acted out of righteous political rage or twisted filial love and hate... But he did those things, even if the world changed to undo them. He remembers his old world, like Mother-of-Glory remembered hers. His guilt outlives the world in which it was born.
• The technical answer is no, because there is no such thing in the gramarye as an exorcism: this is a confusion with superficially similar rites of the Alabi church, whose rhetorical framework became well-entrenched during the Third Occupation. This is the exact mechanism through which the invisible laws and powers became devils. What the gramarye has is not a rite of exorcism, but a rite of hostage negotiation.
• Fetter finds it within him to roll his eyes. “This isn’t death magic,” he says. “Filling in fucking citizenship forms in post-Occupation Luriat is death magic. This is just … doctoring.”
• The devil in his arms is indeed like a sleepy child. It clings tightly to him, puts its fangs against his neck, the distended lips wet against his skin, and does something with its human teeth like blowing a bubble. He feels weak, but he’s not sure if it’s blood loss or simply raw terror. He has never been so afraid in his life.
• And is he free? With the Saint-General at his back and the city flagged and burning, Luriat feels like just another district of that unending prison country.
• “The path—there is only one path, despite your mother’s unforgivable breaking of its nonduality. The path is part of the surface of things. It must act in the world, and so it must have robes and titles, events and funding, a social media strategy and political patrons.”
  “Prisons,” Fetter says. “Pogroms. War.”
  “Yes,” the Perfect and Kind says. “I’m sure your mother taught you the price of changing the world.”
• “Because you are my child, and I love you,” the Perfect and Kind says. “This feeling belongs to the surface of things, but there is no world without its surfaces. I want you to exist.
• “An empty realm is an overwritten past, a dead world of no further consequence, one of a vast array. They are themselves complicated territories with their own contested histories; your mother’s devils come from empty realms. But these realms are causally unbound to this membrane—they have fallen outside of the past we acknowledge, our light cone that narrows as it stabs deep into history’s heart—and so they are safe places to dispose of dangerous things.”... “And there is no such thing as devils. They are the people of lost histories. We see them only in translation, the only way they can exist in this realm. They come because your city is a fraying lacework; every bright door is an open wound bleeding into the water. Once that was this whole island. I tried to contain the damage.”
• that his father only wants to make him an instrument, and yet, the vision of empowerment and knowledge is still tempting. He imagines himself chosen at last, invested with power and agency beyond his wildest dreams; he imagines a great expansion of his rib cage, bringing the island within his chest, being its gaoler instead of it being his. He imagines a long-held tightness inverted. What could he do with the power, no matter how ill-gotten, how tainted, how compromised, to undo even some of the wrongs of the world? Wouldn’t it be self-indulgence to turn down that chance?
• Fetter tries to stop worrying about the authenticity of his false new status. He reminds himself that his old status was equally false. Status is a rainbow on a proud soap bubble, inflated to its uttermost.
• He hasn’t felt physically confident since prison—no, since he walked through his mother’s pyre, as if it burned her training out of him, as if she took her gifts back when she left.
• “It’s part of the culture here,” Ulpe says. “People on the high floors live up there as much as possible. They run their own rooftop markets and pass their properties down the generations and hold their own elections for representation in local government... but here it seems that the concept of property extends into the sky.
• “I didn’t anticipate the extent to which the Perfect and Kind could centralize moral and temporal authority under himself once he arrived,” Koel says, after thinking for a moment, as if he had asked What was your mistake? “And I didn’t anticipate how much worse that would make the White Year. All our tactics relied on pitting the factions of Luriat against each other, but we had a far briefer window of productive chaos than I hoped for. We barely managed to pull off the prison break.”
• he has that feeling again of things ending. This second life in Luriat, as a shackled ghost haunting the ruins of his first, is a mockery; he understands that now, the insult of it.
• It’s not speed or precision that he’s using to catch Magellan. It’s not even surprise—it’s curiosity.
• “Fetter?” she says, and in that moment he knows he made a mistake, though he can’t tell whether the mistake was coming here now or not coming here before.... “Well, you’d better get inside,” the Envoy Extraordinary says,
• “I’d been in Luriat for years—I was living in the Pediment by then. She got in touch and did not, in fact, apologize even a little. She said you’d left home and offered to fund an embassy if I would go register myself with the Summer Court, and well, I like having a title and a nice house and a budget that’s just about enough to buy the imported fruit. But we both knew she was asking me to look out for you when you got here.”
• “You are wrong,” Ordinary says. “On all counts. The boy is nobody’s heir—she is not gone while that which she set in motion remains in motion—and Luriat’s rulers may have bent at the neck and the knee, but so what? Rulers love to submit, and the Path has always paid too much attention to thrones and not enough to people.”... “You make the same mistake again and again,” Ordinary says. “The sin of metonymy. I say people and you hear the people. I say power and you think of thrones and parliaments.”
• Fetter doesn’t recognize her either, though he knows who she is. It’s just that he feels no recognition in him, no echo of his own life in hers. This is her long before she was the Mother-of-Glory; this is her unnamed and young, shard of a lost past, queen of an empty realm. <> “Will you go?” he asks, uselessly. He’s speaking to Ordinary, not to his mother. But she is already following the young woman toward the bright door with urgent steps.
• I did persuade much of the world of the merits of my system, but only, at best, as an alternative to both older and younger powers. The Path Above found a comfortable last place among the world’s great organizing systems.” He shrugs. “It decayed further under the repression of the Occupations—another consequence I did not see coming. I can redirect the river of time, but it pays me back with floods, with driftwood and wreckage and dangerous undercurrents. I hoped to build a systematic engine for the salvation of billions, but at this point, the Path Above is essentially a massive umbrella coalition of imitation poperies, strange cults, and personal development seminars, dispersed across a wide territory.
• Rather than diffusing, the Path Behind adapted to the Occupations by becoming concentrated. By distilling and refining Occupier ideologies and world-systems and incorporating them. Alabi race science, for example... Perhaps they were inspired. Consider the Five Unforgivables.” The Perfect and Kind looks back over his shoulder at Fetter, and then at me. “They are based on the moral stratification of people into lesser and greater categories. The mother is less than the father; the saint is less than the chosen. The Path is greater than the pathless. Kin is greater than the stranger. It is a simple, circular logic, and one that hews close to the natural prejudices of the human animal: we care more for the ones we love than we do for those we hate, and as for those we don’t know, their lives and deaths mean nothing to us. Alabi race science, like the Path, is a grouping and typing theory that recognizes this. The near are better than the far. The like are better than the unlike. We must know how we are fettered if we are to become free.” {!!!!!}
• Fetter’s hand remains held out even when the face he touched is gone. I feel it when his heart breaks. There is no sign of it on his face or in the world, but to me the crack is loud as the thunderbolt that broke open the glaciers at the beginning of history, when time became time for the first time, bright as the lightning that slew the dragon and freed the waters. It marks a world ending, and a birth both bloody and cold.
• I’ve used this reaction to good effect many times, to nudge Fetter or sometimes others in one direction or another. It would be impossible on Vido, though. He is shielded from my influence by his utter insensitivity. <> It doesn’t stop me from tapping into his heart, lapping at the sea of his memories with my black tongue.
• I was not named. I was garrotted at birth, nailed to the earth, and torn away. But I did not die, as Fetter always thought. A shadow cannot be killed, because a shadow isn’t alive: a shadow is only cast... I was not named, but I named myself over the years, in love and irony and helplessness. Our mother taught me without knowing that I was, our father saw me without knowing what I am; I cannot speak or sing but I can dance: call me the Unfettered... In my peculiar state of being cast and yet not cast, I can only exist within other shadows. So obscured, I move freely.
• Shining Jewel of Truth made an impassioned speech to his crowd and cameras about collective responsibility, and how these consequences demonstrated that the actions of the state are neither racist nor casteist. See, he said, the high are punished as surely as the low. <> That, from Vido’s perspective, was a wrap. Vido was not there when the fires were set.
• Fetter’s interiority remains distant. His mind is a cave in another mountain: I can see the flickering light of the fire within, but there is a chasm between us.
• The Perfect and Kind insists he is not a ruler. He has no interest in governance and considers it beneath him. The Luriati state, its fractures violently welded together with the hot metal of the Path Unitary, is at one level too cowed and at another too enmeshed in its internal rivalries to direct itself. So the various factions petition the Perfect and Kind, and power pools at Vido’s feet, .. To retain control under these circumstances, it is necessary that the White Year never end, so this is also the room from which Vido directs the pogroms and manages the camps.
• He knows the Perfect and Kind’s body by heart, every touch that ever drew a response. He remembers as he re-enacts, whispering echoes of old whispers, touching echoes of old touches. Vido remembers, and in doing so parades before me, every morning sermon preaching loathing for the body that followed every nighttime fuck. The bag of flesh with its thirty-one impure parts—the involuntary body—the disgusting body—the unreliable body—the messy, ugly, fucking body... The Perfect and Kind puts his head back and closes his all-seeing eyes at the moment of climax, and I take that opportunity to pour out of Vido’s brain into his mouth, a silky fall of shadow that enfolds the cock, that penetrates the cock, that hides underneath the foreskin in the shadow of the glans, then in the endless night of the ducts and vessels within.
• He thinks of me as his gut feeling, an oracular nausea, his luck. I suppose he is not wrong, but he has no sense of how hard I work: to surveil so many people, to spend hours reading over shoulders and eavesdropping on conversations, to scout ahead of him and find what he needs. Every time I led him to the right place at the right time, I first quietly eliminated all the places and times that were wrong. Luck is only someone else’s labour.
• His own teachings of disgust for the body betray him. The betraying body, the decaying body. I sink deeper into his tissues, into the shadows within the cells. I smother mitochondria in the dark.
• Fetter is back in his own clothes, though his hair and beard are stubble. I come up behind him and touch my heels to his in a way I haven’t done since we were children. I pretend I’m his shadow, hidden in the greater shadow of the barricade, itself submerged in night.
• “Every lost past is a world,” Fetter says. “I learned that from my … from the Perfect and Kind himself. I think it might be the only thing I learned from him that matters. Behind every bright door is a world full of lost hearts. It matters.”... “He didn’t see it that way, but it’s true. They’re our mistakes, I suppose … it’s not surprising they’re so hungry to haunt us—the histories we forgot, the crimes we buried. Devils know I’ve buried mine.