Evenings shortened as they travelled north. The sun dropped in the sky and then darkness fell with little fanfare. The hours of light grew longer.

Aching from the ride, and stinking of feathers, Lanna almost waddled towards Chowa's tent. When would her rump grow used to riding? Rubbing at her complaining buttocks, she ducked inside the tent.

Once again, Chowa read by lamplight. Lanna wiped the slight perspiration from her forehead. The tent would have been stuffy were it not for the incense Chowa burnt. The yellow resin calmed the senses and relaxed the mind, plus it drove away insects.

Lanna bowed and the chemist's near-black eyes fixed on her. Due to her new rank of assistant, Lanna no longer had to abase herself before Chowa, but she still had to show respect. At least, that was how she thought it worked.

'Good evening to you, Misra Chowa,' Lanna intoned, trying to keep her tone from becoming a drawl – difficult when she expected more lectures and monotony. 'I'm ready for instruction.'

Chowa raised a perfectly shaped black eyebrow and then inclined her head.

'Your accent is beginning to lessen,' she murmured with cool approval. 'You are not crushing your vowel sounds quite so much with your lazy Southern tongue.'

Lanna flushed. The chemist shifted slightly on her mat and fixed Lanna with her dark glare for a long moment more. Lanna felt her blush deepen under the scrutiny.

Chowa's stoic Southern slave entered the tent, a waft of evening air freshening the close atmosphere. Lanna glanced back at him and her heart squeezed. His skin was so pale it appeared to have a blueish tint and his hair was so blond it gleamed near white in the lamplight. Light blue eyes regarded her, putting her in mind of her father. More than that, his eyes reminded her of winter skies that went on forever: stark, clean and beautiful.

Lanna sighed his name by way of a greeting. 'Good evening, Frez-hem.'

Frez knelt at the table and poured tea from an ornate silver pot. Lanna guessed he was still well within breeding age, which meant he had probably left the Clanlands to escape the deepening freezes of the south.

Frez handed her a cup of tea with no word of greeting and Lanna accepted it with a silent nod, as Chowa had instructed, though her gut clenched. She hadn't forgotten that Chowa and tea couldn't be trusted.

'Tell me,' Chowa said, curious. 'Your father worked with the sea in your homeland?'

Lanna nodded, then frowned. Chowa hadn't shown interest in her background before.

'He...' She paused, struggling. 'The word... I don't know it,' Lanna admitted with a grimace.

'Clear your features,' Chowa snapped. 'We do not express our difficulties so openly. Say the word that does not translate and then describe it.'

Lanna swallowed and complied, more than a little disturbed when Chowa's tone dropped. This woman controlled her life and future. 'He would set nets on the beach at low tide, then collect what was in them at the next low tide.'

'A bayman,' Chowa sniffed. 'A menial profession, but no doubt it provided well for your family.'

'He had boats too.'

'Did you aid him?' Chowa asked over the rim of her steaming cup of tea.

'Of course,' Lanna said, trying not to frown. 'No one was idle. It wasn't tolerated.' Again, she struggled to get what was on her mind into the correct words and forms. This time she internalised the struggle and sipped her tea to give herself a moment. She found no inspiration under Chowa's impatient gaze.

'Forgive me,' she whispered, blushing. 'It doesn't translate well. I was my father's assistant. That is the best I can put it. I cleaned and preserved the fish. Or at least that's what I did until the sea wouldn't thaw.'

Chowa nodded and examined her red lacquered nails as they tapped against her cup.

'Once the ice was permanent, we turned to hunting. I wasn't good at this, but I am good with a knife so the elders put me to skinning and gutting.' Lanna felt a smile creep over her lips. Chowa insisted on speaking high Imperial, the dialect of the cities. There were commonalities of form and sentence structure, but the vocabulary twisted her mind into knots.

Her heart sank when the chemist gave her a look of open disgust, contradicting Chowa's own advice on expressing emotion in company. Probably she didn't care as only Lanna and her slaves would see. The reason for the sneer dawned on Lanna. Imperials ate no meat. Skill in gutting and skinning would never be of use.

Chowa did not bother to verbally correct Lanna and instead gestured to Frez. 'Get the box.'

Frez stiffened, his jaw clenched as he hesitated, his expression questioning the chemist.

'She can use a knife. I think she can learn.' Chowa didn't appear to mind explaining herself to her slave. She received Lanna's questions with far less patience.

Frez rose and moved to the canvas bag at the back of the tent, peeling back silk garments that shimmered in the dull light from the oil lamps. He removed a silver coloured metal box roughly the length of Lanna's forearm. Within moments, Lanna had the box, a wooden board and handful of dried, twisted roots placed before her.

The roots were small and tangled like a nest of sand eels and a faint acrid odour teased her nose. Frez opened the box. Inside a tiny knife rested on a bed of black silk. It had a small, rounded blade set into a long wooden handle. The metal thumbnail of the cutting edge winked at her, thin and lethal.

'This is a fleem blade,' Chowa said. 'Only three smiths in the Empire possess the skill to make them and they only sell to the noble servants of the Emperor. This tool costs more than it takes to feed a family for a year.' Chowa picked up the blade and let it spin in her fingers with adept ease. The metal flashed. 'This is our weapon. If ingredients are not expertly prepared, the finished product will be impure or even harmful.'

She pushed the fleem into Lanna's hand. 'You will learn to use this.'

Lanna's hand gave a slight tremble. What if she dropped it? This tiny knife must be as brittle as her mother's attempts at rice cakes.

'I am not a street peddler or even one who serves the merchant class.' Chowa again slipped into her lecturing tone. 'My formulae are proven effective and some of them can take months to prepare. I even have tools that date from before the Aug war. They are irreplaceable and to my knowledge only I own examples of them. This makes my products exclusive to me and therefore I am the palace chemist.' She gestured to the nest of roots.

So, Chowa had cheated her way to the top with pre-Aug machines? She wouldn't be the first or the last. The clan elders often warned of the dangers of such things. The ancestors died because—

'This is dried hen's bane. The skin of the root is poisonous and must be removed.' Chowa's words cut through Lanna's thoughts. 'Once stripped it must be chopped so fine that a lit candle can be seen through a slice. The slices are then pressed between sheets of filtration paper to remove the fluid. Only then is it safe.'

Lanna moistened her lips. It seemed an opportune moment for one of her riskier questions. 'Misra, may I ask you something?' she queried in a whisper. She lay the fleem on the board, making sure the wicked blade pointed away from her.

Chowa's face showed no emotion; she nodded. Lanna had asked plenty of questions, but this was different. This was not on Imperial law or custom. Her question was personal.

'Why me? Why am I here with you?'

Chowa's face still gave away nothing, though her posture stiffened slightly. 'You will have to clarify,' she said in an almost gentle undertone. 'You are here as it is my wish, though I do not think that is the answer you seek.'

Lanna shook her head and ordered her thoughts into Imperial. 'I know Clanspeople are thought of as useful, once trained. But my homeland is a place where survival is the only consideration. How can someone like me really help you? I can't even read.'

Frez snorted a laugh from where he sat, sewing in a corner of the tent. Chowa shot him a quelling glare, then gestured with a fluid motion for Lanna to continue.

'I wonder why you have chosen me? You even threatened my village to keep me with you.' Lanna's courage faltered under Chowa's gaze. 'You're investing much in me, trusting me to use things of great value. My clan were well thought of in my homeland. Strong and numerous. All were well fed. But I wasn't even considered an adult woman. My sickness meant the elders wouldn't recognise me.' She risked a glance to Chowa. 'So, I must ask, why have I been chosen by you?'

Chowa shifted on her knees and took a sip of tea. 'Southerners are useful because only the best of you can survive.' Chowa opened a scroll and her eyes raced over the characters arranged in neat vertical rows.

'The weak do not live to be of breeding age or are denied the chance to pass on a defect. The fact you have an oral history of your family interrelationships and that women choose men from outside of your home clans has minimised the genetic weakness that may otherwise plague the method you use to reproduce.'

The chemist plucked at her sleeve with ink-stained fingers and her lips quirked up as she continued her lecture. Her words bled into near nonsense for Lanna. So many new terms. What was genetics?

'These factors, over time, have strengthened your bloodlines and kept you free of many of the imperfections of affluence. Though you do still suffer from higher than average genetic abnormalities. That is mostly due to the history of your environment. You are, in effect, noble savages and that appeals to us, given that we aided each other towards the end of the Aug conflict.' Chowa glanced up from her scroll. 'How long have you been in the Empire?'

'Six months,' Lanna replied quickly. Her head ached and she wanted to rub at her ears as new, jarring words slammed into them. Had she learnt nothing?

'I can assure you, not many Imperials would be able to speak your tongue in such a short time. Your command of our language is impressive, despite learning it from peasants. This will soon be corrected, and your diction and vocabulary are already much improved.'

Chowa rolled the scroll back up, bamboo strips tapping together musically as if they'd become a wind chime. 'Before you arrive at the First City, I will have refined your diction, and your accent will fade.'

Pausing for breath Chowa reached for another scroll, flicking it open. 'I am well-travelled for one from the palace and I find many of our people are ill-educated and stupid.' She tutted at the scroll in her hand. 'The stupid breed and have many stupid children who go on to have stupid children of their own. I have proposed to the Emperor the introduction of breeding licences.'

Lanna could only listen in near shock. She wished she hadn't asked and the mad urge to cover Chowa's mouth gripped her. A moment's silence was all she needed, time to unpick the words that spewed forth from the chemist's painted lips.

'People should not be able to have children just because they can. Like your clans, it should be an earned privilege. A decision taken after careful thought and planning, not simply a duty of husband and wife.' Chowa sighed and picked up an ink brush, pulling her silk sleeve back with her free hand. 'But such laws would mean contradicting a previous Emperor's edict, which is difficult. How can a divine ruler say a previous divine ruler is wrong? Both are gods, so how can one have made an error?'

Lanna frowned at the blade on the board. None of that answered her question. Why, by the ancestor's tits, did she want her? Any Southerner would have been useful to her, so why her?

She shoved Chowa's ramble to one side and threw her efforts into her new task. Scraping the skin from the fine roots turned out to be time-consuming. Frez excused himself to prepare breakfast for the morning. The strong scent of the hen's bane irritated Lanna's nose and she sneezed.

Chowa sighed, her brushwork disturbed by the sound. She eyed her trainee assistant then a calculating smile crept over her lips.

'You are so loud. I can almost believe some of the things I have heard the city peasants call your people.'

Lanna's hand stilled on the blade.

'Urban peasants resent your kind. You take positions they deem theirs. They are jealous of the apparent preferential treatment Southerners receive. There is a rumour going around the lower city that I find intriguing.'

Chowa's cold smile grew into a smirk and she plucked at the shoulder of her garment, settling into a more comfortable position. 'I am only warning you, so you are not surprised. Even the peasants of the illustrious First City are not above referring to your people as Aug spawn.'

Lanna snarled, her heart and stomach clenching in tandem. She felt herself pale under Chowa's chilly regard, and anger rushed to fill the void. Who would dare call her kin that? She would fillet them like a grumber and eat their liver as they watched. Did they not remember how many Clanspeople had died at the hands of the Augmented?

She felt her face flush and her nose wrinkle as her lips parted in another guttural snarl. The fleem blade vibrated between her fingers as her hand gripped it in response to her raging heart.

'Quaint idea really,' Chowa chuckled, ignoring her. 'That your light colouring comes from interbreeding with those animals rather than from lack of sunlight.' Chowa laid her scroll down. 'The texts I have studied do reference a time before the war when your people and the Augmented lived in harmony.'

Lanna gritted her teeth. She would never believe that. Augs were evil. They had killed half the world. Even the mention of the creatures set fire to her blood. The histories recounted the carnage in grim detail. Lanna found herself reciting them, the clipped and rolling tones of her tongue at odds with the perfumed and humid atmosphere of the tent.

*'So, on the eve of the twenty-seventh dawn of the siege of Hieriss Peak, the Augmented brought to bear that weapon most feared. It had been thought they no longer had the ability to produce such things after Operation Nantwitch was successful. This was a miscalculation of the intelligence services. The walls of the city melted. The firestorm lasted six seconds and consumed everything for a distance of ninety kilometres. Bodies were reduced to ash. Buildings crumbled to powder through heat shock. There was seismic upheaval and thunderstorms were generated.'* Lanna's eyes glazed, her mind far from the tent and the Empire. Her blood cooled as she spoke.

*'When it was over, two and a half million lives had been eradicated, all for the crime of refusing to surrender when given the opportunity. The Augs were reported to mourn the loss of the city. There would be no resources to plunder after such an assault. The creatures moved on, leaving the land barren. It was not known how long contamination would remain. Survivors in the nearby towns died a slow death from the poisoning. Children were later born with the usual deformities. Report of Lieutenant Jane Franklin. Verses 19–32.'*

Lanna's lips stopped moving. She clanked about, swallowing, her pulse jumping to a sprint.

The histories were a reasonable account of the events of the war, but the world had been in chaos and the language had changed. Many terms no longer had meaning.

'Very impressive,' Chowa said with a smirk. 'Now tell me something that happened before the war.'

Lanna found her brows lifting. Before the war? The histories had some descriptions of cities before the conflict, but little on the people who lived in them. The accounts were analytical – population numbers, troop placements and capabilities. She had never noticed the gap before. Why were there no events recorded in detail before that time?

'You can't, it seems. The failing is not yours or even your clan's.' Chowa knelt back, ignoring her scrolls. 'Your people were nearly eradicated, everything you were destroyed. There are no events in your histories before the war because only battle reports remained.'

She tilted her head and looked Lanna over, as if assessing her reaction. Lanna felt her stomach tighten and the hair lift on her arms as she listened.

'Records degraded over time, so those who knew the reports best passed their knowledge on to others verbally.' She paused and ran her fingers through her hair, her gaze far away.

'Your entire history is now cultural memory with no recorded source. With nothing to keep it "true" to the real events. It has become a mechanism to keep you surviving and keep you hating those who brought you low. Your foe is not around to contradict you, so what you are raised with is accepted.'

Lanna tossed her head, brown curls falling in her face as she folded her arms. How dare this pampered woman think the histories were lies? Lanna's people had fought until they were using stones to crack enemy heads open, all other weapons exhausted. They had never given up and only prevailed when almost all was lost.

The Empire hadn't even aided them until the very end, when the buffer between them and the threat was so worn that they could finally see they were in danger too.

Chowa clicked her tongue and sighed, picking up another scroll. 'I would not be training you correctly if I did not point out that the stories you cling to are part fiction. You have been fed lies since you were on the breast. As my assistant, you will need to question everything. That includes your own beliefs.'

Chowa fell blessedly silent and Lanna inhaled incense-laden air to try and calm herself.

She focused on the roots before her, but her heart wasn't in the task. Lanna squeezed out the fluid from the strips of fine root and presented the finished product to Chowa.

The small woman glanced over the neatly sliced strips and nodded. She picked up an empty teacup and placed five thin ribbons in it, then added hot water from the tea kettle. The sharp smell of the root filled the tent.

Chowa handed Lanna the cup.

'Drink,' she said with a dazzlingly false smile on her deep red lips. 'Sample the fruits of your own quality work.'

Lanna showed no emotion, just as she had been instructed, and took a gulp. Refusing wasn't a luxury available to her.

Lanna grimaced; the fluid burnt the back of her throat. Was it meant to? When it hit her stomach moments later, she gasped and clutched her abdomen. Her gut churned and she doubled over, eyes watering.

A cool, delicate hand gripped her chin and pushed her head up.

'Your first lesson as my assistant,' Chowa whispered, her dark eyes snapping with victory. 'No matter what your mood, your work must be impeccable at all times. Shoddy work can harm your client.' She moved her face closer, her painted lips almost touching Lanna's trembling ones. 'We never prepare anything we would not be willing to use on ourselves.'

Lanna moaned as another cramp hit, spearing her stomach like a hot skewer. Tears poured from her eyes and she tried to nod against the hand that clamped around her jaw.

Chowa chuckled and released her. Lanna slipped to her knees, shivering, arms wrapped around her middle.

'I may be strict,' Chowa said, 'but I am not here to coddle you. I am the best at what I do and you are a reflection of me and my practice. You will work to my standard. Your work this night was sloppy because I had angered you. The Imperial Palace is unforgiving and so must I be.' Chowa moved back to her table, gliding rather than walking, head held high. She opened a scroll and resumed studying.

'The truth can hurt. Accept this. You will hear much worse and be expected to ignore your pride. Now, go to the bushes outside and push your fingers down your throat,' she said in dismissal. 'Be sure to get all the liquid back up or you will spend all night in those bushes as it runs out the other end of you.'

Lanna struggled to her feet and stumbled fromthe tent. If anyone was Aug spawn, it was Chowa.