Mangarcu — Training Ground
The field where Alígargar trained was not a field in the conventional sense — it had none of the markings, targets, or equipment that training grounds normally accumulated through regular use.
It was a space that had been deliberately emptied, because what Alígargar did there required no equipment.
It required only enough space that what was being trained wouldn’t encounter premature obstacles.
The earth around showed the marks.
Fissures that ran across the surface in patterns that corresponded to no natural seismic activity.
Trees at the field’s periphery that had been felled not by wind but by something that had passed near them with enough force that proximity alone was devastating.
The air had a dense quality, as if the atmosphere there had been repeatedly tested by the presence of something that exceeded what normal atmosphere needed to accommodate.
Alígargar stood in the center.
Brown skin.
Black eyes.
Short black hair that the movement of training had disarranged in a way that didn’t look like carelessness but looked, rather, like the natural consequence of force being released without aesthetic containment as a priority.
The bodybuilder’s physique, trained by forces that exceeded conventional training, was covered by a thin layer of something that wasn’t exactly sweat but fulfilled a similar function.
He wasn’t moving at that moment.
He was still, with the slow breathing of someone who had just finished a sequence and was allowing his body to return to rest before the next.
Garnaice approached from the field’s edge.
His shoulder continued to have the residual stiffness from the Ice Palace, but the rest of his body had recovered enough that his posture had returned to its usual state — elegant, controlled, with his long hair again loose in the way he preferred when there was no practical reason to contain it.
“Alígargar,” Garnaice said.
Alígargar’s black eyes moved in Garnaice’s direction.
There was, in the movement, none of the qualities that human movement normally carried — neither curiosity, nor alertness, nor any of the small emotional variations that human eyes involuntarily communicated.
It was pure recognition, stripped of any additional layer, the kind of attention Alígargar reserved for very few things in the World of Naicity.
Garnaice was one of those things.
“I have a task,” Garnaice said, approaching to a distance that most people wouldn’t voluntarily choose to maintain near Alígargar, but which for Garnaice was simply the right distance for the conversation he needed to have.
Alígargar said nothing.
He waited.
“Sherpia,” Garnaice said.
“You’re going there.
With some men.”
Still silence.
But a silence different from processing silence — it was the specific silence of someone waiting for the rest of the information before forming any response, because the first part, alone, wasn’t enough to determine what came next.
“Not to cause real damage,” Garnaice continued, with the precision of someone anticipating exactly the type of misunderstanding he needed to avoid.
“Simple destruction.
Enough to activate military response.
The objective isn’t destruction.
It’s attention.
I want Mahallem’s army to mobilize to Sherpia, in force, and hold there.”
“Hold,” Alígargar said.
The first word he had spoken since Garnaice had approached.
His voice had a quality that matched everything else about him — deep, but without the vertical weight of Father Christmas, closer to something flat, without perceptible emotional inflection, as if the tonal variations that human voices normally carried had been removed in favor of a uniformity that communicated more through what it said than through how it said it.
“Hold,” Garnaice confirmed.
“You don’t need to advance.
Create enough destruction to appear as a serious threat, and then maintain that position while Mahallem reacts.”
Alígargar was still for a moment.
“You want me to restrain myself,” he said, finally.
It wasn’t a question in the sense of seeking information he lacked.
It was the articulation of an observation, spoken aloud for Garnaice to confirm or deny with precision.
“I do,” Garnaice confirmed.
Alígargar’s black eyes fixed on Garnaice with an intensity that, for anyone else present in that field, would have been enough to produce immediate physical discomfort.
Garnaice showed none.
“I can restrain myself,” Alígargar said.
“When there’s reason to restrain.”
There was, in how he said this, something approaching — not a guarantee, because Alígargar didn’t operate in guarantees the way more conventional beings did — but an affirmation of capacity.
A statement that the restraint Garnaice was asking for did not exceed what Alígargar was capable of offering, provided the reason was sufficiently clear.
“The reason,” Garnaice said, “is that Sherpia is the first piece of something larger.
If you destroy it completely now, you lose its value as a repeated distraction.
Mahallem needs to continue looking at Sherpia after today.
If you eliminate it, they cease to have reason to look.”
Alígargar processed this with the silence he used to process everything.
“I understand,” he said.
Garnaice looked at him for a moment longer, with the cold evaluation he reserved for confirming that instructions had been fully absorbed and not merely verbally acknowledged.
“When,” Alígargar said.
“Soon,” Garnaice said.
“You’ll receive notice beforehand.”
Alígargar nodded — a minimal movement, almost imperceptible, but which was, for something of his nature, complete confirmation.
Garnaice moved away, leaving Alígargar alone again in the devastated field, with the fissures in the earth and the felled trees and the air dense with the memory of force that had not yet been fully released.
Halema — The City Around the Island
Halema was not the Island.
This distinction, which any citizen of Mahallem knew instinctively but rarely needed to articulate, defined one of the most fundamental structures of the imperial territory.
The Island was the Island — separate, elevated, the place of concentrated power and direct imperial presence.
Halema was the city that spread across the mainland around it, in the low part, the original territory of the country even before the Island had acquired the meaning it held today.
It was enormous.
Larger in population than the Island, though smaller in concentration of absolute power — the difference between a place where people lived their normal lives and a place where the fate of the empire was decided.
Halema had the neighborhoods, the commercial districts, the industrial zones, all the organic complexity of a city that had grown over centuries without the deliberate architectural control the Island had received.
João was patrolling one of the main thoroughfares connecting the commercial district to the port.
Not the ceremonial patrol that generals normally conducted — planned visits, predefined routes, the political photography of visible military presence.
João did this type of patrol because he liked to know the territory directly, because the information gained from walking the streets was different from the information that arrived through reports filtered by multiple bureaucratic layers.
He had with him a small detachment — not Kialapakial, Dbajabu, and Mbiwenbiwenbe, who were occupied with another function that day, but a group of regular soldiers João knew well enough to trust and not so well that familiarity compromised discipline.
It was in this context that the agent found them.
The agent was young, with the slightly accelerated breathing of someone who had come from afar with enough urgency that running seemed the most reasonable option despite the discomfort.
“General,” he said, with the abbreviated formality that urgency permitted.
João stopped.
“What is it,” João said, with the directness he used when he recognized that the situation didn’t allow for preliminary social conversation.
“Reports from Indilá,” the agent said, still catching his breath.
“Sightings of mafia activity on a scale exceeding anything previously recorded in the area.” Find the original chapter at g.com.
“What kind of activity,” João said.
“Smuggling,” the agent said.
“Multiple organizations, operating with a coordination that suggests either a temporary alliance between rival groups or something coordinating all of them externally.
Volume of movement across the border that our current posts don’t have the capacity to adequately monitor.”
João was still.
For anyone who knew him only by reputation — the impulsive general, the man who taxed beggars on a whim, the eternal pursuer of a baker he could never catch — what followed would have been surprising.
João was processing.
The expression on his face, during those seconds, had a quality that the soldiers present recognized from previous moments when they had seen João doing exactly this — a stillness that wasn’t absence of mental activity, but was the opposite, was mental activity consuming so much processing capacity that the facial expression simply stopped updating at normal speed, creating that specific impression that the soldiers, among themselves, with the kind of affectionate humor troops developed for their commanders, had begun to call “the General loading.”
Indilá.
João knew the Indilá border the way he knew all of Mahallem’s borders — through reports, maps, regular strategic briefings that were part of the job of being a general.
He knew it was considered low-risk, that military presence there was reduced precisely because historical strategic assessment didn’t justify additional resources.
He also knew — and this was what he was processing in those seconds of apparent stillness — that low-risk patterns were exactly the type of pattern sufficiently intelligent enemies exploited, because low-risk meant low attention, and low attention meant space to operate without being noticed until the operation had already advanced too far to be easily reversed.
Sherpia had been attacked.
Garnaice had returned.
Alígargar existed.
And now Indilá — the point no one was looking at, exactly the type of point someone like Garnaice would choose precisely because no one was looking.
The “loading” lasted perhaps four full seconds.
Then João’s expression returned, with the sudden clarity of someone who had completed a calculation and was acting immediately based on the result.
“Increase the number of military personnel at the border,” João said, with the voice that had lost any trace of hesitation.
The agent, and the nearby soldiers, registered the change in tone with the attention João deserved when he spoke in that manner.
“How much,” the agent said.
“Enough,” João said, “that if there’s something coordinating this smuggling beyond simple organized crime, we discover it before it becomes something else.”
He turned to the detachment accompanying him.
“I want three things,” he said, with the direct precision he used when he was genuinely serious, in contrast to the chaotic energy he used the rest of the time.
“First, immediate reinforcement of regular troops at the Indilá border, number to triple the current.
Second, active intelligence on who is coordinating this smuggling — names, organizations, and most importantly whether there’s a connection to recent activity in Sherpia.
Third—”
He stopped.
“Third,” he continued, “I want to know if this is related to Garnaice.”
The name, spoken aloud on that Halema street, produced in the soldiers present a reaction that confirmed how much information about Garnaice had already circulated through Mahallem’s military channels since the Council meeting.
“I’ll handle this personally,” João said.
And there was, in his voice, a seriousness that contrasted deliberately with the energy he normally used — the confirmation that João, beneath all the comedy and personal chaos, was also the general who had earned the post of number three on the Island through genuine ability, and who knew, with the same clarity Liou had demonstrated in the Council chamber, that what was beginning to unfold across the World of Naicity completely exceeded anything deserving of less than total seriousness.
“Move,” João said, to the detachment.
And the detachment moved, with the urgency that João’s voice, in that specific register, always managed to inspire.
João remained still in the street for an additional moment, after the detachment had begun to execute the instructions.
He looked in the general direction where he knew Indilá lay — too distant to see physically, but close enough, in the mental geography that generals developed over their territory, that looking in that direction had its own meaning.
“Garnaice,” he said, in a low voice, to no one in particular.
He took out the small paper he had kept since Martin — the drawing of the ancient symbol he had copied from the chamber where the horse had taken him, which he still hadn’t been able to fully identify despite having shown it to several court scholars.
He looked at it.
Then put it away again.
“It’s all connected,” he said, with the calm certainty of someone who didn’t have enough formal proof to present to the Council, but who had the absolute confidence in his own instinct that twenty-one years of experience had built.
And he began walking back toward the barracks, with steps that had completely lost the casualness they had possessed at the start of the patrol.