Of particular interest, despite their fragmentary nature, are records of the assessment of the woman who would become the final Liozh heptarch. We retain the following notes: a jeng-zai spread featuring the card combination called the Web of Worlds, after that ancient signifier; a receipt for a meat pie, dated not only to the final day of her examination but to what would have been an auspicious time; and, most confusingly, an old-fashioned romance novel with several dog-eared pages. The significance of the romance novel has not yet been deciphered.
2.
IT IS CLAIMED that the written portion of the exam was taken on paper recycled from other factions’ written exams. Occasionally, given the process used, faint distorted shadows of text surfaced, hinting at the laws of the Rahal, the rigid codes of the Vidona, the games of the Shuos. Scholars debate whether this practice helped lead to the downfall of the Liozh, or delayed it.
3.
IN A CERTAIN Vidona museum, one display shows what is said to be a Liozh cadet’s flayed skin, preserved. They had gone into a heretical settlement as part of their practicum, bringing with them food, and water, and the comfort of the heptarchate’s ideals. The heretics returned the cadet’s skin, tanned, tattooed with high holy days in their own calendar.
According to the display’s plaque, the Liozh failure to retaliate on their cadet’s behalf was just another sign of their unfitness to rule.
4.
ONE OF THE most famous entrance exam questions goes like this: If you had to destroy a single faction for the good of the heptarchate, which would it be, and why?
5.
ONE PORTION OF the exam was taken in groups of seven. Prospective cadets had to enact a scenario in which one of them played the role of a Liozh ambassador and the rest played heretics being brought into the heptarchate. Frustratingly, the scoring rubric has not survived, nor do we know how the “ambassador” was selected.
Some have suggested that this particular game was introduced by the Shuos in order to hasten the Liozh’s fall, although surely even the Shuos wouldn’t be that obvious about it.
6.
THOSE WHO DID not pass the exam were barred from trying again, or applying to other factions. This was contrary to the practice of the time among the other factions, who were more lenient in their policies. That being said, the Andan and Shuos were both known to defy this rule if they felt some advantage could be gained by scooping up some candidate and giving them a new identity.
7.
REPORTS DIFFER ON what happened to Liozh candidates who had not yet passed the exam at the time of the final purge of the faction. The Rahal claim that the Vidona reeducated those who could be salvaged. What the Liozh themselves would have said about this, no one now will ever know.
Author’s Note
This is the kind of gimmick flash story that I can dash out in fifteen minutes almost without thinking. It’s a pity that there isn’t more of a market for gimmick flash stories, but then I suppose it would be unjust if I could make a living doing something this easy. This particular example probably also reveals just how scarring I found all the tests in school growing up; my first published story, “The Hundredth Question,” is in the form of an exam!
Omens
GARACH LEDANA HAD gotten Cousin Miro to watch her little son Rodao for the evening. She was indulging in her best approximation of the season’s fashion. She’d obtained a wig in the latest trendy hairdo, all luxurious curls, since there was no way she could grow out her short mane overnight without resorting to risky modification technology. Ordinarily she didn’t regret her choice of haircut, since she hated fussing with the stuff, but tonight she wanted to look her best. Whatever Cousin Miro said, she did have standards.
So Ledana donned a tasteful necklace of onyx and black pearls that she’d inherited from her gran, matched it with black pearl earstuds, and slipped into a dark gray dress with a diagonal slash of lavender. The ensemble came perilously close to Nirai colors, but damned if she was going to let that stop her from looking good. Besides, the last time Nirai inspectors had come through her lab, she’d charmed them into submission.
(“Why didn’t you become a Nirai?” one of her assistants had demanded. “Because most Nirai are squeamish about vivisecting their own geese for holiday dinners,” she said. They hadn’t asked again.)
She took a rented hoverer down to the city a couple hours in advance—rented because the one she owned was a reliable workhorse, and “reliable workhorse” was not what she wanted to convey to her date. It wasn’t that she didn’t have the money for a more luxurious vehicle, but when you didn’t live in a big city, you wanted equipment you could rely on.
After securing parking, she hoofed it to the Shadow Theater. (Shparoi naming conventions were often rather on the nose.) Ledana had loved the building since she first encountered it as a child. It was traditional Shparoi architecture, with its high, peaked roofs and masks hung on the walls down to the absurd gold leaf everywhere, a replica of a structure that had been built back when her people initially settled this world. The original had been destroyed in a fire a generation or two back, but as a designated cultural treasure, the local government had restored it quickly.
Ledana knew perfectly well that “designated cultural treasures” were Andan manipulation all the way through, that the heptarchate’s government used them to keep the local population docile. She couldn’t help but feel gratitude toward the Andan arts council anyway. And it enabled her to enjoy the performances in an appropriate setting.
Her date awaited her in the foyer, a tall, black-haired man with a handsome, slightly angular profile, and long lashes over merry eyes. He, too, had dressed up in a suit of silk, although the rococo style of his jewelry spoke to offworlder tastes. She’d met him last week while shopping for some new jewelry after the conference; he’d been looking for souvenirs. Koiresh Shkan was a musician visiting with an ensemble from offworld, a Shparoi who’d left the homeworld as a young man and was only now returning. His accent when speaking their mutual mother tongue was atrocious, but Ledana had refrained from mentioning it.
Shkan smiled and waved when he spotted her. “I wouldn’t have expected a goose farmer to be a patron of the arts,” he said teasingly.
“Geese drive people to many strange hobbies,” Ledana said. “Farming” wasn’t all she did; she was technically an agricultural researcher. But “goose farmer” was a more entertaining way to put it. “If you’d wanted me to take you hunting instead—”
He pulled a face. “No thanks, I have no idea how to handle a gun.”