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The Dartmouth Speculative Fiction Project paired eight faculty-members at Dartmouth College with eight veteran speculative fiction authors. Through design activities, panels, symposia and a mountain lodge retreat, they collaboratively imagined worlds that interrogate the future humanity is heading towards. These stories can be found in the anthology, Android in the Archives: Research, Creative Collaboration and our Speculative Futures (lightspeedmagazine.com/android), soon to be published by MIT Press in 2027.

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They leave Fort Hameera in the dusty light of dawn, riding their donkeys through the lower western gate. Miles sees native Bagha sentries along the scoured sandstone walls, their turbans black lumps against the rising sun, and fights the urge to duck his head. General Williams did not forbid him this expedition, only strongly urge against it. Certainly that might be because he thought Miles was voicing a whim rather than stating intent. Regardless, the general is not here now. As a Scribe, Miles exists outside the normal chain of military command, but he is sure of this much: No lowly sepoy has the authority to bar his path.

This close to the fort, the road that snakes higher into the mountains is well-trod. Their donkeys’ hooves eddy the thick yellow dust as they stomp over faint boot prints and wheel ruts, crushing the distant memory of the last rain into the parched ground. Miles fancies feeling an indefinable change in the air as he crosses from colony land into uncharted wilderness, as if the border is an invisible string pulled taut by their passage and then released to twang.

Behind him, the last Verden outpost on this edge of the continent. Before him—who knows?

He sucks air through his teeth and tastes the thrill of . . . not disobedience—again, no one forbade him this—but daring, perhaps. Of grasping one’s destiny. Throwing oneself into the great unknown. In pursuit of great truths!

His guide, a dour fellow named Rafi, clearly doesn’t share his elation. His dark, sun-weathered face is impassive under his loose headwrap. The tamped earth of the road gives way to sandier soil as their donkeys clop uphill, and he slouches in the saddle, spine curved with ease or disinterest.

Miles digs his heels into his mount’s hairy sides to spur it forward. He jounces awkwardly in the saddle but manages to catch up.

“I say, Rafi,” he says. “How long was it to the nearest village, again?”

Rafi only grunts. From any other native, Miles might have assumed incomprehension, but he knows very well that Rafi speaks fluent Verdene. That was why Miles chose him as his guide.

That, and Rafi’s half-Parbat heritage—a surpassing asset if Miles intends to seek out the secretive, unfriendly mountain folk.

“Two days,” Rafi says eventually. His narrowed eyes take in Miles, whose long legs thrust out at awkward angles past the donkey’s flanks, boots almost scraping the ground. “Maybe three.”

Miles is too buoyed by adventure to take offense. “Sorry to slow you down,” he says cheerfully. “I’ll do my best to keep up, eh?”

Another grunt.

They travel mostly in silence after that. Miles tries and fails to engage his taciturn guide in conversation, but gives up when guiding his mount’s head up a gravelly scree slope demands all his concentration. The donkeys are as surefooted as mountain goats, if much slower, and he concedes that Rafi was right to insist on this mode of travel.

To their left, the ground falls away as if raked by titanic fingers. A steep escarpment of reddish stone swoops down to the valley floor, where small towns scatter like debris and the Jhilmil River threads through patches of evergreen trees. The Tolmakar Pass is wide here, framed by twin shoulders of scarred dark brown rock, but Miles has seen enough of the general’s maps to know it narrows the further one goes from the fort, cutting through the Kush Mountains like a deadly blade.

He can see the road down to the floor of the Pass from here, looping crazily back on itself through low hills of dun-colored earth. It’s not the road they’ll be taking today.

He—and Rafi—are headed deeper into the mountains.

The Kush seem to envelop them as they ride, as if folding them into an embrace of stone and earth. The view directly before Miles’s mount’s nose is unchanging and unlovely: sparse scrub, loose shale, the ubiquitous yellow dust. If he keeps his eyes on the ground, the monotony of the scenery swallows all sense of progress. He would fear they were actually going in circles if the mountains didn’t steal his breath every time he raises his eyes to the horizon.

Ridges surge away from them like cresting waves, an ocean of rock as far as the eye can see. Overlapping bands of color, dappled lilac and umber, like a watercolor laid across the sky. Dark hollows of greenery and the shimmer of mountain lakes.

They follow the dried-out course of a riverbed for a while. The sun warms their backs with increasing intensity until it is beating down directly overhead. Rafi calls a halt for them to rest and water the donkeys in the shade of a copse of spindly trees.

Miles gropes for his own canteen with a sweaty palm. The metal is hot to the touch, but he doesn’t care. He has spent the last two months cooped up in the fort’s cramped quarters, taking dictation as General Williams drones on about troop counts and supplies, making rough drafts of the official report he will Scribe in spelled ink to send back home. The exertion of the ride is invigorating, a chance to stretch his muscles. What lies ahead will be a chance to stretch his mind.

They remount and continue on their way. The donkeys clop along. Dust swirls around them.

Miles touches his bandolier of pens and ink, safe under his coat, and smiles as he thinks about all the stories he is going to collect.

• • • •

They make camp off the well-trodden trail that passes for a road, tucked against the base of a rocky spur. Rafi kindles a fire and tends to the donkeys while Miles painstakingly lowers his saddle-sore behind to the ground and sorts through his pens, ink, and notebooks, unwrapping each in turn and examining them for creases or leaks.

Dinner is spiced lentils, simmered in a small iron pot over the fire. Miles waits until they’ve eaten before selecting a notebook and pen.

“Tell me a story, Rafi,” he says. “Not a lowlander tale—something from the Parbat side of your family. Something they tell up in these mountains.”

Across the fire, Rafi regards him strangely. He’s shed his headwrap, and his dark curls shine with sweat in the firelight. Though he says nothing, his stare somehow conveys: Why?

“It’s what I’m here for, aren’t I?” Miles reasons, amiably. He waves his notebook. “To learn. The Parbat have been a thorn in our side for years, but we scarce know a damn thing about them. I want to change that.”

The Bagha and Parbat were feuding generations before the Verden ever landed on this continent. Now that the Bagh is under Verden rule, the Parbat seem hard put to decide if the enemy of their enemy is a friend, or just another enemy. In the past decade alone, they have allied twice with Bagha insurgents in failed attempts to overthrow the Verden colonial government—all while still raiding Bagha villages in the foothills, attacking Verden outposts and convoys, and holding the Tolmakar Pass against further encroachment.

Unlike with the Bagha, the Verden don’t know enough about the Parbat to even guess at what might tempt them into compliance. Hell, it’s possible the Parbat don’t know what they wanted—all reports suggest they’re made up of a fractious series of tribes who fight each other as often as the Bagha or Verden.

Can a scholar succeed where soldiers failed? Miles isn’t above a spot of daydreaming now and then, but he doesn’t expect to return to General Williams with devastating intel on the Parbat’s vulnerabilities. Still . . . knowledge is power. Every Scribe learns that lesson early on.

He can’t explain any of this to Rafi, of course. He doubts the man would understand him if he tried, uneducated peasant that he is, with little grasp of the intricacies of border, or empire or, indeed, anything beyond the barren mountains where he has eked out a humdrum existence.

As it turns out, he doesn’t need to explain. Rafi studies him through the flickering flames for a long moment, then comes to some conclusion of his own. “Very well,” he says.

His voice changes when he begins to tell the story. Miles didn’t expect that. Rafi’s Verdene is excellent, but his accent only passable, made too sharp by the bladed syllables of his mother tongue. Now those sharp edges soften, becoming not gentler, but richer. His usual clipped tone changes to something slow and rhythmic, as if his words are a sea that rocks them both, and Miles, hand hovering above the page, has to remind himself to begin writing.

• • • •

Once there were four brothers.

The three oldest brothers were great scholars. They devoted their lives to study, and made offerings to the god of learning, who blessed them with knowledge of a great many things. The youngest brother, however, was unlike them. If he worshiped anything, it was the bottle and the lute; if he went to the temple at all, it was to beg boons of the goddess of love.

One day, the four brothers were out walking when they came upon the bones of a leopard. Seeking to test the gifts given them by the god of learning, the oldest brother used his knowledge of animals to put the bones back together. The second brother used his knowledge of the living body to restore the flesh and skin to the bones.

“Wait!” said the youngest brother before the third could take his turn. “Brother, I see what you intend to do, and must beg you to abstain. If you restore the creature to life, it will devour us all!”

His brothers rebuked him for a coward. “Having come this far, will you tell us not to use our god-given gifts? You must be jealous you have none!”

“So be it,” said the youngest brother. “Then I shall take my jealousy up this tree, and sit in its branches before you proceed.”

He did so, and then the third brother used his knowledge of life and death to revive the leopard. Springing to life, the creature set upon them at once. One by one, it killed them all—save the youngest brother, who was safe up in the tree. He waited till the creature grew hungry once more and left, then returned home, sorrowful but alive.

• • • •

Silence falls between them, broken only by the spit-crackle-snap of dry twigs in the fire. It takes Miles longer than it should to realize that’s where the story ends. He clears his throat and flexes his wrist. “Leopards can climb trees, you know,” he says.

This earns him a sharp look. Rafi lifts a bony shoulder in a shrug and pulls a cheroot from a twist of paper somewhere in his shirt, leaning forward to light it in the fire. “It is a story.”

“Oh, I know, I know. I’m just pointing out—”

“The leopard in the story is the leopard in the story.” Miles opens his mouth to protest this tautology, but Rafi exhales pungent cheroot smoke into the cold night air and keeps going. “And the leopard in the story is a leopard who cannot climb. Thus is the story’s meaning made what it is.”

“And what meaning would that be?”

Rafi’s voice is perfectly bland. “Be careful how far you pursue knowledge, lest you be eaten in the bargain.”

• • • •

A night’s sleep on hard ground puts some dents in Miles’s enthusiasm. All the same, he bundles himself gamely onto the donkey the next morning, stiff joints and bruised resolve notwithstanding, bracing himself for another day’s hard riding and stony silence from his tight-lipped companion.

He’s right about the first part. The terrain is getting steeper now, the ground rockier. Their donkeys slip and scrabble, occasionally obliging them to dismount and lead the beasts on foot for a measure before it’s safe to ride again. The path Rafi picks out seems to twist back on itself, leading them in wholly unnecessary curves, but they are gaining altitude. If Miles strains his eyes, he can spy Fort Hameera far below, small and blocky against the mountain’s flanks. The pale thread of the Jhilmil River gets thinner every time he looks, until they start climbing a wooded spur and he loses sight of it through the trees.

But midday brings with it a welcome surprise: two Parbat shepherds, leading their shambling cadre of shaggy, bleating charges down the trail. They stop and stare as Miles, delighted, rummages in his coat for his notebook and instructs Rafi to translate his questions.

The men have the scarecrow look he is beginning to associate with the Parbat, all long limbs and unkempt black beards. They wear embroidered vests over long white shirts and lean on hewn wooden staves, dark eyes darting to Rafi’s face and then away again, as if afraid to be caught looking.

They don’t meet Miles’s eyes. They do answer his questions through Rafi, if slowly and with reserve.

What is the name of their village? Is it the one he and Rafi are headed for? It’s not? Excellent, more data! How many people live there, and how far is it? Do they keep any livestock other than sheep? Oh, are there any traditional shepherding songs they might sing him? No? Ah, a shame.

The sheep mill around them and begin to wander up the slope, nibbling at the tough, twisted bushes with apparent impunity to their thorns. The donkeys whicker their displeasure. The scent of sheep dung and unwashed fur ripens in the heat. Miles reluctantly releases the men when they begin to shift their feet and glance about, in clear indication that they wish to be gone. He can talk to the mountain folk all he likes when they reach the village, and his hand is beginning to cramp from furiously scribbling notes.

Rafi says a few more words to the older of the two shepherds before they leave. The man nods, ducking his head in something that might be a gesture of respect.

He extends his arm, and Rafi leans from the saddle to clasp it. Rafi’s impassive face does not change, but Miles sees his eyes go hooded for a moment. He nods curtly, releases the shepherd’s arm, and kicks his donkey into motion.

Miles hastens to follow suit, tucking his notebook away and kneeing his mount’s hairy flanks. “Friends of yours?” he asks Rafi once he catches up.

Rafi keeps his eyes trained ahead. “No.”

“Seemed to know you, though.”

“I am known in these parts.”

Fair enough. Rafi has a reputation for being one of the most well-traveled of the gaggle of native scouts who hang around the fort, ferrying messages and trading small game. Another reason Miles chose him.

A thought occurs to him. “This village we’re headed to . . . is it where you’re from?”

“No.”

“A family member, then?”

“No.”

“Your father . . . you are Parbat on your father’s side, correct? Is he—”

“My father,” Rafi says, each word a heavy stone, “was a raider who forced himself on my mother during the sack of her village. She returned to her parents’ village afterward, where she surrendered me to a Verden orphanage at birth.”

The very dust swirling through the air seems to stand still. Miles stares at his guide’s back, aghast not so much at the words but at the fact that the man simply said them. Out loud. Cool as you please! His donkey flicks its hairy ears and snorts, as if similarly scandalized.

He grasps the beast’s reins a little tighter and clears his throat. “That’s, ah,” he says. “That’s rotten luck, old chap.”

“Quite,” Rafi says.

They ride in silence after that.

• • • •

Miles isn’t expecting to get a story out of Rafi when they make camp that night. Miles’s thoughts have been a rifled sheaf of paper all day, dog-eared and disordered. Had he been entirely misguided to assume Rafi’s sympathies lay with the Parbat? Does this help or hinder his ability to be Miles’s guide? Could the man be prevailed upon to surrender more Parbat secrets than Miles initially thought possible?

He dithers after their unappealing meal of lentils and jerky, unrolling his bandolier, touching each engraved ink bottle in turn before selecting one to fill his pen. Not the spelled ink, of course. That one stays safe in its heavy silver bottle, wrapped in soft calf hide and nestled in leather.

Finally, he opens his notebook to a blank page and raises his eyebrows at Rafi. Seated across the fire, the man releases a heavy sigh.

“Very well,” he says. “A story, then.”

His voice shifts once more, taking on that warm, whiskey-burn cadence. Miles begins to write.

• • • •

In a fertile valley in the mountains, there lived a great people. Their chief was a man known far and wide for his wisdom. Though he was advanced in years, his body remained hale and his mind keen.

This chief had five sons, each as brash as their father was wise. They chafed for a chance to rule, but their father, knowing them unfit, would not name a successor. He took his worries into the mountains instead, walking amongst the stones and crags as he pondered how to entrust his throne and people to one deserving of the responsibility.

It was in the mountains that he came upon a cave with its entrance blocked by a great boulder. A voice spoke to him from within the cave, begging him to release it. The wise chief recognized the speaker as a djinn, a great elemental spirit, and was afraid.

“No creature deserves to live imprisoned,” he said, “but the djinn are fierce and capricious. How do I know you will not set upon me and my people if I should set you free?”

“I give you my word,” said the djinn, “and my word is my bond, for I speak in the ancient tongue of magic, in which one may not lie. Release me, and I shall teach your people that ancient tongue, that they may speak to the earth and trees and have mastery over nature.”

The wise chief, who knew something of the ways of magic, recognized the spirit’s words as truth. He summoned his five sons to the mountain, and together, they rolled the rock aside to release the djinn. But having heard the djinn’s offer, his sons each thought to keep the power for themselves. They killed their father then and there, and each declared himself the new ruler of the tribe. The people fractured into five factions that warred for the throne, and the fertile soil of the valley was stained with blood.

The djinn had promised to teach the ancient tongue to the old chief’s people. With those people now split, and five tribes each claiming sole right to the reward, the spirit found itself pulled apart by the very magic of its bond. As it tore and came apart, so too did its gift, which became a curse. Each tribe received a small magic, a mean sliver of power. And their mother tongue grew corrupted in the process, splitting into five languages. Not only did they lack the mastery over nature they had been promised, but they could now no longer understand each other.

And so they have remained, fighting each other over barren soil and hard rock. It is said that if they should ever make peace and come together, the fragments of magic may be united and the djinn’s promise made whole. But that will never happen as long as their very tongues remain divided, each tribe’s words falling on the others’ uncomprehending ears.

• • • •

Rafi falls silent, but the last notes of his voice are slow to dissipate, as if the mountains themselves jealously cup and cradle them. As if the spell he spun is like smoke, still suffusing the air once the fire is snuffed. Miles keeps scribbling, the usually neat marks of his shorthand turning ragged in his haste.

“This is fascinating,” he says. “Fascinating! Tell me more about this ancient language of magic—is it an ancestor of the modern Parbat tongue? I would love to get my hands on any extant texts—ah, but your people aren’t much for writing things down, are they?”

Rafi looks at him as if he can’t decide whether Miles is mad, simple, or both. “There is no Parbat tongue. The people of these mountains speak Pokhari, Sushrut, Kaccha, and a number of dialects of Afran.”

No wonder they’ve had no success negotiating with the Parbat. What a truly embarrassing gulf in their knowledge! All the more reason Miles’s work will prove—is already proving—to be invaluable to the Verden cause.

He taps his pen on the page. “Does this mean you won’t be able to translate for every tribe we might meet?”

Rafi rocks his head infinitesimally from side to side, chin tilted slightly outward in a very Bagha gesture that Miles has come to recognize as self-effacing. “I speak every language spoken in these mountains.”

Miles whistles through his teeth, genuinely impressed. “And Bagha and Verdene, to boot. I say—I know you’ve had a rough go of it, but you can’t deny circumstance has made you a rather perfect linguistic mongrel. A regular polyglot! To think you’ve been right under General Williams’s nose all this time, and he never thought to put your talents to work!”

If he were a more observant man, he might have seen danger in the way Rafi’s expression went carefully, studiously blank. But the story has loosened something in him, as if all that talk of tongues freed his own from its constraints. The crackling campfire heats his face, while the night air sits cool on his shoulders. The darkness brims with cricket song and the velvet sweep of the sky bursts with stars.

Miles feels the mountains press in around them. It is as if he and Rafi are contained in their own little world, its borders mapped by firelight. A magical space where anything can be said, any secret revealed.

“This ancient language is fascinating to me,” he says, impulsively, “because it’s rather like what I do. As a Scribe, I mean.”

The firelight shadows the hollows of Rafi’s cheeks. “Oh?”

“A Scribe does not lie. That’s why we exist—that’s how our magic works. We guard the truth.”

“By writing it down.”

“Exactly.” Miles gives his closed notebook a little shake of triumph. “If something has been Scribed, you may trust that it is true. Thus is falsehood banished and the deceiver exposed!”

Scribing may not seem like the most significant of magics, on the face of it. It’s certainly not as showy as the windweavers who fill the sails of Verden’s mighty ships, or the farseers in their towers. It’s not even the most common form of wordcraft. If Miles ever saw fit to surrender his commission, he could find work alongside the many civilian wordsmiths who engrave spells for stability into a building’s foundation or buoyancy into a boat’s hull.

But a Scribe serves a higher purpose. A Scribe serves Crown and Country, and Truth itself.

Scribes write the royal proclamations and take minutes in parliament. Scribes send reports from Verden colonies around the world, a fleet of unerring paper arrows that never miss their mark, delivering critical information in the spell-bright ink of certainty to where it is needed most. Scribes write the textbooks that teach the nation’s brightest young minds, and give the seal of veracity to every charter, confession, treaty, verdict, or speech of any import.

Ships and towers? It is the Scribes who raised Verden up to be the bastion of progress and enlightenment she is today, and allowed her to uplift her colonies in turn. Ink runs through the empire’s veins, and clever, pen-wielding fingers protect her borders just as surely as those that clasp muskets or swords.

Miles sees it, sometimes. The known world mapped in the breadth of a page. Every dialect and blade of grass and river and bird and poem recorded, recognized, ordered. No more doubts, no more lies. Nothing but the beautiful geometry of Truth.

He wishes he could communicate to Rafi what it is like to dedicate yourself to such a calling. But only one who has burned with clarity of purpose can know its bright flame.

The fire before him in the corporeal world is burning low, dribbling thick tendrils of smoke as the last of the gathered deadfall cracks and smolders. Miles looks at Rafi and sees the man regarding him intently.

No . . . he’s looking at Miles’s notebook. At the pen he still holds loosely, and the leather bandolier that cradles his inks.

“Back at the fort,” Rafi says. “You used a different ink. The silver one. You’re not using it now.”

That jolts Miles off-balance. “You, ah . . . noticed?”

Damn, but the man is sharp. Did he ever use the spelled ink in front of Rafi? The native scouts do hang around the barracks like stray dogs in search of scraps, gambling with the sepoys and trading gossip. He could swear he never did any actual Scribing in a setting less private than the officers’ quarters . . . but after six months of traveling from fort to fort along the Jhilmil River, one heat-hazed afternoon blends into another.

“Well,” he stutters. “Well, no, of course not. I only use that ink when I’m Scribing, and I don’t Scribe everything I write down—why, that would defeat the point. A Scribe only writes down what is true. It’s our calling . . . the foundation of our magic . . . why we exist!”

“And stories are not true,” Rafi says slowly.

“They’re meaningful, certainly, I won’t deny that. But true? No.”

“How can you be sure?”

This time it is Miles who must stare at Rafi, uncomprehending. “What?”

“How can you be sure what a Scribe writes is true?” Rafi’s black eyes gleam in the firelight. Like two coals, each carrying a hidden ember at their heart. “Are Scribes not men? And do men not lie?”

“That’s not. . . Did you not hear a word I said?”

“I suppose it would not be a lie if you believed it was true,” Rafi muses, uttering each word slowly, as if to savor the sacrilege. “And if this magic works as you say . . . any who read it would be compelled to believe it true, too. So if you were to tell your king all is well in the Bagh . . .”

Horror and fury war within Miles. At first, the horror wins. The enormity of what Rafi is insinuating—the sheer perversion of the idea that Miles might doctor his report to read more favorably, as if he were some . . . some kind of . . . propagandizer! . . . is enough to make him dizzy. The cold air turns to treacle in his lungs, and the mountains seem to press in as he stares across the guttering campfire at the man.

Rafi meets his gaze without flinching. Observant Rafi, with his keen memory for detail. Rafi, who speaks at least six languages and knows these mountains like the back of his hand. Miles sees what he has failed to see all this time: the deep well of intelligence in those coal-black eyes.

A traitorous thought worms through his mind. I have underestimated this man.

Then the booted heel of anger comes down, snapping horror in half like a brittle bone. “I don’t recall paying you for your political commentary,” Miles says, voice thick with fury. “If I wanted someone to explain my own profession to me, I wouldn’t seek out some bandit’s by-blow.”

Across the fire, Rafi goes very still. It occurs to Miles then that they are alone in the wilderness very far from civilization, and that he is unarmed, while Rafi carries a long, curved knife at his belt. If the man decided to slit his throat and leave him among the rocks, no one would ever know what happened to him.

The cricket song that suffuses the night air takes on an ominous edge. For the first time on this expedition, Miles feels a trickle of fear.

Somehow, that makes him angrier still. It is a perversion of the natural order for him to fear Rafi. Miles is groping for words that will restore the balance of power, put the guide back in his place, when Rafi bows his head. “It is as you say, saheb,” he utters, voice low and bland. “I will go find more wood for the fire.”

He unfolds his long, rangy frame to stand, and departs into the dark. Miles stays where he is, breathing hard and clutching his knees.

• • • •

Miles sleeps poorly that night and rises in a peevish mood. They’re high enough in the mountains now that the air is bone-dry, but his body insists on expelling every last drop of precious moisture as sweat. They are barely an hour into the day’s journey when he is forced to finally discard vanity and strip off his coat—cut like a Verden sergeant’s, but bottle-green rather than blue, with the silver pen-nib embroidery that marks his profession—which has been reduced to a sweat-stiff, dust-smeared disgrace.

He’s partly to blame for what happened last night, of course. He got too familiar, let them both forget who was the superior and who the servant. His own damn good nature, doing him in yet again. Ah, well. It’s not too late to course correct. Miles is far from done with Rafi’s services as translator and guide. This expedition has proved what an invaluable tool the man is, and a tool is best grasped firmly.

To Miles’s irritation, he has no opportunity to put this resolve into practice. Rafi has reverted to stony-faced decorum, bland and deferential without ever crossing the line into obsequious.

Given no opportunity for reproach, Miles must direct his complaints at the inside of his own head. The charge of Scribing laying a magical compulsion on people is so ludicrous as to be cast aside without a moment’s thought. The implication that Miles might let his own biases color the report he sends home to Verden, though . . . that rankles. Yes, the draft he’s been working on is quite positive, but that’s simply the truth. The subjugation of the Bagh has been successful; the training of native sepoy cohorts promising. There have been a few hiccups along the way—not least among them the Parbat’s dogged insistence of making nuisances of themselves—but what is Miles supposed to do, let the actions of a few peasant insurgents overshadow the great work done by the colonial administrators?

They ride in silence.

The terrain has leveled out a bit. Their patient, short-legged steeds are no longer scrambling steeply uphill, but clopping over brownish dirt sprinkled with scrub. Though they can no longer see the Tolmakar Pass, Miles can guess at its direction from the way the wind-scoured shale and limestone ridges drop away in the northeast to reveal a patch of blue sky.

He wonders how near they are to the Pass’s narrowest point—the location best-defended by the Parbat, with the highest concentration of their crude hill forts.

They enter a slim defile between two flanks of rock. Miles moistens his dry, cracked lips and eyes the sky mistrustfully, recalling that the Parbat are known for being deadly snipers. They’ve taken out more than one Verden convoy that way. The Bagha sepoys at Fort Hameera told him gut-curdling tales of soldiers forced by musket fire to shelter behind a ridge, only to find a second sniper at their backs; ululating tribesmen swarming down the hills, brandishing curved swords.

Perhaps he should have brought some sepoys with him for protection . . . though that might actually increase the likelihood of violent reception by the Parbat. It certainly wouldn’t help loosen their tongues . . .

His nose picks up the tang of smoke before any of his other senses do—something ashy, with an undercurrent of spice. Miles and Rafi emerge from the narrow pass onto a broad, flat expanse of land partly sheltered by a rocky ridge. Somewhere, a dog begins to bark. The clotted haze of what Miles belatedly identifies as smoke from kitchen fires spreads over a collection of human dwellings, before rising to mingle with the mountain mist.

Rafi reins his donkey to a halt. “We are here,” he says.

• • • •

The village is fifteen, maybe twenty, long, low buildings made of baked mud. The monotony of their bare walls is broken somewhat by the geometric cutouts that serve as windows: patterns of triangles and circles. Other splashes of color emerge from the sea of khaki as Miles sweeps his eyes over the hovels: here a blue-painted roof, there the red coxcomb of a rooster pecking in the dirt.

The inhabitants come out to meet them in ones and twos as they dismount: sun-weathered matrons with gold rings in their noses, a couple of young mothers with grubby offspring clinging to their skirts, one geriatric fellow whom Rafi introduces as the village headman. Like the Bagha, the men favor grays and whites, while the womenfolk wear brightly dyed fabrics heavy with embroidery. Glass beads glint at their necks and wrists, gold clasps shine in their hair, and they pull their woven shawls shyly across their faces to cover all but a sliver of their eyes as they sneak glances at Miles and Rafi.

Miles lets the guttural jabber of conversation wash over him as Rafi talks to the headman, presumably explaining who Miles is and what he’s here for. His fatigue is sloughing away.

“Make sure to tell them I’m a scholar, not a soldier,” he reminds Rafi. “Oh, I suppose they may not know that word . . . say ‘someone who studies many things.’ Someone who reads books. Do they have books up here? Can any of them read?”

This flood of queries would normally make Rafi eye him askance. This newly punctilious Rafi dutifully translates, without a murmur of protest. At least, Miles must assume that’s what he’s doing. What language are they speaking? What tribe are these people from? Does the linguistic variation follow tribal lines, or is it more geographical in nature?

Oh, he has so much to learn.

To his lasting relief, his fears of violent reception prove unfounded. Much like the Bagha, it seems, the Parbat hold guest rights sacred. Their hospitality is rustic but adequate, and Miles soon finds himself seated on a charpoy beneath an awning that provides shade from the afternoon sun. The headman and Rafi take seats across from him on wicker stools, and a matron brings them clay cups of hot milky tea.

Miles learns that this is a Shimla village. This region of the Kush Mountains is mainly inhabited by the Shimla and Maziri people, both of whom trace their origins to ancient invasions from the lands of Assekoi to the north. Both tribes speak dialects of Afran that share enough vocabulary to allow a degree of communication, and are generally on friendly terms. This is decidedly not true of some of the other tribes, particularly the Gandhara, with whom the Maziri have a longstanding blood feud. The village headman launches into a long, quavery diatribe that Rafi translates as an exhaustive accounting of every ancestral injustice his tribe has suffered at Gandhara hands. Miles writes it all down.

Divide and conquer, as the Verden say. They’d much rather treat with the Parbat than fight them, but if the tribes won’t see reason, perhaps their infighting can be turned to Verden’s advantage.

The sun moves steadily across the sky overhead. The women of the village move around them, bringing out a battered metal stove, brewing tea, chopping vegetables. The younger ones keep stealing glances at Miles, presumably wondering at his fair skin and hair. For his part, he’s rather disappointed to find the Parbat look just like the Bagha. Same dusky skin, same blunt and unlovely features, if more marked by the vicissitudes of a harsh life.

He does note that there are remarkably few adult men present. Off raiding some hapless Bagha village or enemy tribe, perhaps? He will ask Rafi later, when they are alone.

The carnival atmosphere deepens as the night grows dark and mosquito-ridden. Lanterns are lit, foul-smelling incense brought out to banish the bloodsucking insects. More stools and stoves are brought out, and the sizzle of oil and cooking meat fills the air. The headman has begged a cheroot from Rafi and is sucking on it, watching the gathering through an amiable cloud of smoke. Miles has to conceal a cough in his sleeve.

“Do they often eat like this?” he asks Rafi once his eyes have stopped watering. “Outdoors, communally?”

“Sometimes,” Rafi says. “In the warmer months. Tonight, however, is a celebration. In honor of a special guest.”

Miles can’t help but preen a little at that. Why, the mountainfolk are more civilized than he’d expected. Perhaps they can be reasoned with, after all.

Once the cooking is done, a matron brings Rafi the first plate, which raises Miles’s eyebrows, until Rafi turns right around and makes a show of pressing the plate on the village headman instead. He passes the next plate to Miles, explaining in a low voice that it is a matter of respect that the elder eats first. The food is humble fare—flatbread and curried lamb. Miles swallows it gamely, wiping his nose discreetly when the spice makes it run.

Rafi steps away to aid with the cleanup. It’s strange, seeing him among a crowd. His habitual stillness seems to loosen, eyes alive and darting, tangled black head dipping in greeting and assent. Faces turn toward him like flowers seeking the sun.

The villagers shift and rearrange themselves in keeping with some unspoken consensus. The stoves are removed, and more lanterns lit. A gap forms in the rough center of the crowd, revealing an empty stool.

As Rafi returns to his seat beside Miles, an old woman proceeds slowly toward the stool. Her wiry gray hair is scraped back from her face, and the faded blue dots of tattoos span her soft, creased cheeks. Though she moves with arthritic care, her eyes are bright and attentive as she lowers herself onto the stool. Even Miles, an outsider, can feel the way the crowd shifts to reorient itself around her, as if she is a lodestone and they a slew of iron filings.

He looks expectantly at Rafi, who obligingly explains. “She is a mirsa,” he says. “A storyteller. Her people have kept our songs and stories alive for generations. I told her you have a bottomless appetite for foreign tales, and would be honored to receive one from her lips tonight.”

“And so I would,” says Miles, impressed. “Well done, man.”

The old mirsa places her right hand on her right knee, then does the same with the left. The movements have the slow deliberateness of ritual. Her voice, when she speaks, is cracked and sibilant, but surprisingly strong, cast forth with a trained orator’s skill. Her words do not have Rafi’s hypnotic, rolling rhythm, but are strident and impossible to ignore.

Rafi is better at this, Miles thinks without meaning to, then catches himself. It only seems that way because he actually speaks your language.

As if reading his mind, Rafi begins to translate, his voice pitched low so only Miles can hear.

• • • •

Once upon a time, there was a prince who belonged nowhere.

His life began with tragedy, as heroes’ lives often do. The kingdom his father ruled was invaded before he was born, his father slain in its defense. His mother fled the sack of the capital while heavy with child, ahead of the pursuing horde. She took to the great river to find passage southward, and it was there, on the river, that the prince was born.

For a child to be born on water rather than land was considered an ill omen, and people whispered that the boy would be rootless all his life. It seemed at first that they were right, for the prince’s mother had once defied her parents’ wishes by wedding her royal groom. Those parents now refused to give her shelter, and so the widowed queen and her babe journeyed on.

Despite it all, they were happy. The queen taught her son the tongue of her people, as well as that of his slain father’s folk, and the boy learned others from the fisherfolk and barge dwellers of the great river. They moved from town to town, the mother taking work as a seamstress where she could find it, the son doing odd jobs as soon as he was old enough. He herded goats, stoked coal fires, wove baskets, and worked the fields. Belonging nowhere, he claimed ownership of nothing in turn, and considered no task beneath him.

Years later, his father’s folk rebelled against their conquerors and came seeking their dead king’s lost heir. They were dismayed to find not a noble prince-in-exile who could inspire the rebels, but a skinny boy burned brown by the sun and calloused by hard work. Rootless indeed, he seemed to them, for he could not stay in one place long without being overcome by wanderlust. He walked the land without a care for borders, singing the songs he had learned on his travels, respecting the strictures of neither caste nor class.

But this itinerant prince had a strange power all his own, as his father’s men soon learned. When the boy spoke, people listened. He told tales in many tongues from many lands, and his words wove a spell that quickened joy or anger or hope in all who heard. Though he disdained borders and would not stay in one place for long, more and more people left their lives to walk alongside him. Old enemies abandoned their feuds, and sundered peoples found each other once more.

Together, they formed a mighty army that wandered the land, singing as they went. And the kingdom they would build would be unlike any ever seen before.

• • • •

Murmurs skim across the villagers, like wind stirring ripples on the surface of a pond, as first the mirsa and then Rafi fall silent. Miles catches a few people nodding.

He looks to Rafi and is thunderstruck to find the man actually smiling. Not wide—just the barest lift to the corners of his mouth. It’s still enough to make him look younger, as if the ravages of sun and the dust of travel were a veil that has briefly parted.

Rafi’s dark eyes are trained on the mirsa. He places his palms together at chest level, as if praying, and bows his head to her. Miles hurries to do the same, recognizing it as a show of respect. Bare feet planted in the dirt, a frail queen on a humble woven-grass throne surrounded by her ragged people, the old woman returns the gesture.

“Well,” Miles says to Rafi. “Never let it be said your people lack the capacity to dream! Was that story about uniting the Parbat tribes, you reckon? Or something loftier, like making peace with the Bagha?”

Rafi shrugs. “It is a story. It is about what it needs to be.”

Miles shakes his head at this quintessentially Rafi act of prevarication. He feels a rush of affection for the man that banishes the last vestiges of this morning’s ire. For all that Rafi is a prickly bastard, he has led Miles well and faithfully thus far. The man may be an odd duck . . . but Miles is rather odd himself. Scribes are supposed to be bastions of objectivity. It’s not uncommon for them to moonlight as ethnographers in the colonies, but it is strange for that to take such a backward and fanciful form as aspiring to publish a volume of native folklore.

Perhaps he has a secret romantic streak. One the academy couldn’t iron out of him. Perhaps one has to be a bit of a romantic, a bit of a dreamer, to accept a commission that would take you a thousand miles from home, over dangerous seas, to aid the people of a strange foreign land.

“Have it your way,” he says amiably. He rises from the charpoy, knees protesting the movement after long hours spent seated. “Now, will these fine folk put us up for the night, or must we share a barn with our faithful mounts?”

“The headman has offered us the hospitality of his roof,” Rafi says with pointed formality. “Follow me, and I will show you the way.”

They go, wending their way through the dispersing people. Though it might just be his overactive imagination, Miles thinks he feels the old woman’s gaze scalding the back of his neck all the while.

• • • •

The villagers gather to see them off at midday. Rafi translates an invitation from the headman to stay longer, and though Miles is quite certain the offer is made out of courtesy rather than sincerity, he is sorely tempted to accept. But caution wins out—the enormity of the risk he took venturing alone into these mountains has been dawning on him, and he won’t push his luck. He already expects to find General Williams stomping his feet and gnashing his teeth when he returns to the fort.

“Tell him I would be honored to return someday soon,” he tells Rafi, “and that I hope to advance the friendship between our peoples. I think there is much we can learn from each other.”

Rafi conveys this. The headman gives Miles a gap-toothed smile and bows his head, pressing his palms together.

They leave with cloth-wrapped parcels of fresh-baked bread and cheese, their waterskins and the donkeys’ feed bags refilled. Miles’s good humor is quite restored as well. In fact, he is so buoyant, so lost in planning his next foray into the mountains, that it takes him a good hour to notice they’re not riding back through the narrow defile in the rock that brought them to the village. Instead, Rafi leads them over broken, scrubby ground that seems to climb toward the distant peaks that float like blue and gray ice floes in the sky.

Rafi grunts when queried about it. “That road is too steep to safely travel downhill. We will go west and use a better trail.”

“Right,” Miles says absently. “Carry on.”

He’d hoped a night not spent sleeping on the ground might ease his saddle-sore body, but it seems to have given his many bruises time to ripen instead. His joints fairly creak, his wrists and eyes ache from four days of scribbling by firelight, and the sun blazing overhead soaks his shoulders with sweat. Miles is more than relieved when Rafi leads them into the shade of a jut of rock and calls for a short rest.

The ground here is littered with shattered rocks and rounded boulders, like some strange tribe of giants has been playing at tossing pebbles. Rafi ties the donkeys to one of the desiccated trees, and they sit on the sun-warmed rocks to slake their thirst and eat bread and cheese.

Miles is checking his inks and pens, a well-ingrained Scribe’s habit, when Rafi speaks up. “I have another story for you,” he says.

Miles cocks an eyebrow at this, but reaches obligingly for his notebook, not at all displeased by the prospect of prolonging the rest. Three days ago, he would have scoffed at the idea that his dour, taciturn guide might volunteer information of his own accord. What a difference some time and civilized company makes!

“Old lady last night got you inspired, eh?” He brushes crumbs from his trousers and thumbs a pen from his bandolier. “Go on, then.”

• • • •

Once there was a sage known across the land for his honesty. This sage lived in a small hut on the edge of the forest, and men sent their sons to him to learn his wisdom. One of these boys was a merchant’s son, shrewd and wicked in the way of young men with idle hands and deep pockets. Surely, he thought, no living man is truly incorruptible. Surely, even this great sage may be pressed into a falsehood.

Seeking to test his teacher, the merchant’s son came to the morning’s class in a state of dishevelment and distress. “Oh guruji,” he said, “my father’s rivals seek to capture and ransom me. Please do not tell them you saw me, or I will be finished!”

With that, he ran into the sage’s hut and hid himself. Sure enough, two burly men appeared in the clearing soon after, for the merchant’s son had paid his father’s retainers to assist him in his charade. “We mean you no harm, grandfather,” they said to the sage. “But we must have the boy. It is known across the land that you have sworn to never tell a lie, and so we ask you to tell us where he is.”

The sage remained silent. Seeing their teacher discomfited, the other students sought to help him with half-truths.

“Tell them you did not see where he went, guruji,” said one, for it was true that the sage sat with his back to the hut for their morning classes, and he had not looked back as the merchant’s son hid.

“Tell them he ran in the direction of the forest,” said a second, for it was true that the forest sat behind the hut.

“Tell them dharma forbids you from aiding a dishonorable deed,” said another, for that was true as well.

“Enough!” said the merchant’s men. “Did the boy enter your hut or not, grandfather? Tell us the truth, or be forsworn.”

The sage stood, then. “The truth,” he said, “is that I am an old man, and frail, and such great brutes as yourself might well kill me with a single blow. The truth is that the boy is my student, whose mind I accepted the responsibility to nurture, and whose life I will protect just the same. If you wish to take him, you must prepare to strike me down, for I stand in your way. Look in my eyes, and you will know I do not lie.”

The merchant’s son heard this from where he hid within the hut, and was filled with shame. Hanging his head, he came out and apologized to his teacher. “Forgive me, guruji,” he said, “for I have lied to you.”

• • • •

Rafi stops speaking. Miles, lulled into a kind of stupor by the hypnotic rhythm of Rafi’s voice and the scratch of his own pen on paper, takes a moment to rouse himself.

“What?” he says. “It doesn’t end there, does it?”

“No,” Rafi says slowly. “There is more.”

“Then out with it, man!”

“I must ask you something first.” Rafi shifts, uncrossing his legs and placing his hands on his knees. He looks hard at Miles. “Do your people intend to claim these mountains for their own?”

Heat surges up Miles’s neck and jaw. He opens his mouth, intending to make it clear these insolent questions will not be tolerated. Instead, his tongue moves of its own accord, like a snake within the cavern of his soft palate.

“Yes,” he says, then inhales sharply. The dusty air and his own spit catch in his throat, making him cough.

Rafi’s eyes bore into him. “Why?”

Again, Miles’s brain forms one sentence, while his lips speak another. “It’s the pass. As long as you hold the pass . . .”

“Ah,” says Rafi. “As long as we hold the pass, the Verden cannot travel through the mountains into Urchistan and Shekerai beyond. No trade—and no troops. Is that it?”

Sweat coats the back of Miles’s neck. He feels lightheaded. The sensation is a distant cousin to what he felt in the wake of Rafi’s story about the djinn, when the champagne fizz of possibility filled his blood and loosened his tongue. But if that sensation had been a tickle, this is an itch. An itch that has made a nest in his throat and will not be scratched by anything less than the truth.

It’s not unpleasant. It’s the same feeling he gets when a new idea crashes into his mind and he can’t find pen and paper soon enough. He wants to open his mouth and sing like a songbird, spinning Rafi a tale of his six-month journey along the Jhilmil River. The communiques he ferried from fort to fort. General Williams’s stubby finger moving across a map of the mountains, identifying choke points, naming strategies, listing requests for funds and manpower. Everything Miles needs to compile his report for the homeland and seal the words in the silver ink of Truth.

He knows he shouldn’t say any of that, but he has to say something. Miles settles on the simplest truth he knows, the one at the very heart of his world. “You can’t—halt—progress,” he says earnestly. “Don’t you see? This will be better for everyone, in the end.”

It is an inevitability, nothing more, that the Verden will take these mountains. It is an inevitability that they will move through the pass and expand into Urchistan. Not because the Parbat raids on outlying villages are eroding Bagha faith in their Verden overlords. Not because the pass leaves their holdings in the Bagh vulnerable to invasion from the north. Not because they need the trade route through the pass to support the colony’s growing needs, or even because they have weaponry and munitions these illiterate peasants have never seen. All of those things are factors, but they aren’t why.

It’s because greatness demands forward momentum. Because the burden of greatness is that it must be shared.

Rafi’s gaze is hooded. “I do see,” he says heavily.

He stands. Miles stays seated on the hard rock, one hand drifting unconsciously to his throat as Rafi crosses to where the donkeys are tethered. The burbling itch of enthusiasm that filled him is draining away, leaving slow-dawning horror in its wake. He breathes in the arid air, feeling dust grit against his teeth.

“What did you just do to me?” he says.

Rafi stoops to lift first one set of saddlebags, then the other, draping them across their steeds’ hairy flanks and refastening them in place. “I told you a story.”

The heat presses down on Miles’s shoulders as if reluctant to let him rise. He struggles to his feet all the same. “No, you . . . you did something. Was it the food? Did you drug—”

The absurdity of it strikes him even as he says it, not letting him finish. They ate from the same loaf, the same wheel of cheese. And what drug could both entice him to spill Verden secrets and vanish after a minute’s effect?

He laughs. Even to his own ears, it sounds a little wild. “Peasant sorcery,” he says. “Or trickery. I don’t care. General Williams will hear of—”

“No,” Rafi says calmly. “He will not.”

The stories the Bagha tell of the Parbat moving as silently as ghosts, it turns out, are not far from the mark. Miles doesn’t hear the men step out from behind the rocks. No rustle of clothing, no crunch of gravel underfoot. Only Rafi’s gaze moving to a point over Miles’s shoulder and holding steady there alerts him that they are not alone.

His own feet slide uselessly in the loose dirt as he spins to stare one way, then the other. Five pairs of dark eyes meet his. Tribesmen. Bearded, impassive, their loose white and gray clothing stark against their dun surroundings. Muskets clutched loosely in their hands, strips of bullets slung across their chests.

Miles just stares. Strangely enough, he feels no fear. His mind has stalled out at bafflement and outrage, unable to get past the improbable audacity of what he sees.

He has almost forgotten Rafi is there until the man speaks again. “The story of the merchant’s son and the sage who never lied,” Rafi says, “ends with the merchant’s son returning to his father and confessing his failure.”

He comes back into Miles’s field of view, leading the donkeys by their now-untied lead ropes, which are wrapped loosely around his hand. One of the other tribesmen steps forward to take the ropes from Rafi, who hands them off without pausing his narration. “To his surprise, his father laughs and says this proves the sage is not merely wise, but also shrewd. When the boy asks what he means, his father says, ‘Because he understands that a lie is a mask, but the truth has many faces.’”

He doesn’t speak the words with the usual singsong quality of his storytelling. He doesn’t speak them with any particular emotion at all; no triumph, no warning, no ire. His dusky features are schooled to their usual impassivity.

Miles must have made some unconscious, abortive movement, for the tribesmen draw in closer. Rafi raises a hand fractionally—nothing more—and they stop.

“I give you my word that no harm will come to you,” Rafi says. “But you will come with us.”

• • • •

They walk for hours. How many, Miles cannot say. Long enough that the sky gets bloody and the mosquitoes begin to buzz. They climb through stands of cedar and pine, where the soil gets soft and crumbly and he must dig his fingers into bark to keep his balance.

His mind spins like a waterwheel, sluicing useless denials, protestations, half-formed plans. The terrain demands full attention, and though his surly captors make no move to hurt him, they do not let him lag either. Every time his feet stall or his thoughts snarl enough to make him pause, one of them presses the butt-end of their musket into the small of his back. The message needs no translation: Keep moving.

And all the while, Rafi strides up ahead of them, straight-backed and sure-footed. He never glances back to see if they’re keeping up.

Dread creeps down Miles’s spine. He’s not even sure what separates this one particular strand of foreboding from the general mire he’s been wallowing in, but separate it does, wrapping spiderweb-sticky around the back of his neck. It intensifies as the sun dies and the light leaves the sky. It makes his blood pound in his ears as the tribesmen kindle resin-soaked rags and lead him across soft grass toward a cleft in the rock.

The cleft opens onto a meadow. No—a hidden valley, undoubtedly one of the many that vein these mountains, radiating outward from the Tolmakar Pass.

And that valley is occupied.

Tents cover the dew-wet grass, canvas blotches in the dark. They stretch all the way to the far end of the valley, speckling the retreating curve of Earth at the limits of his vision. Cookfires. Ragged flags. Clusters of men, the glint of metal. And singing—bare-throated and rhythmic, like cicadas. The sound of men singing, winding up and down the camp.

It all blends together the longer Miles looks, as if his eyes must blur the details to compensate for the awful, sharp-edged flower of clarity unfolding in his mind. There must be several hundred men here, maybe a thousand. He can’t count them all, but it doesn’t matter. He’s been in the company of soldiers long enough to recognize a war camp when he sees one.

Miles sees how the torch-bearing tribesmen arrayed behind him—blocking the way back out in a wholly unnecessary reminder that he’s going nowhere—look at Rafi with the eyes of soldiers awaiting their commander’s word. He understands where all the young men in the village had gone and why the villagers served Rafi first at dinner.

Rafi stands before him, gazing into the valley. He still holds himself with loose-limbed grace, but the ragged scout is gone. In his place is a king.

“The prince who came from nowhere,” Miles says hollowly. He would laugh, if he weren’t so exhausted.

Rafi steps closer. Miles flinches, but the man only lays a companionable hand on his shoulder and turns to look out over the army.

His army.

“The tribes are all gathered here,” Rafi says. “You may ask each about their stories in turn. I will see to it that they tell you all you want to know. In return, of course, you will tell us all we ask about your people and their plans for these mountains.”

He smiles, dark eyes alive in the night. “After all, what was it you said? We have much to learn from each other.”

---

Based on research by Professor Jane Henderson,
Department of Geography, Dartmouth College
geography.dartmouth.edu/people/jane-henderson