“What are you working on?” I ask. The gagargi should be preparing himself already. We should be preparing ourselves. It is a mere two hours until midnight.
But the gagargi is too absorbed in his incantations to answer. I must go to him to find the answer. And so I do.
The laboratory is lit with soul beads, the harsh white light of ospreys and hawks. Black wrought-iron lanterns hang from the low ceiling and the hooks attached to the un-tapestried brick wall. I pass the small round table where his dinner lays, without doubt untouched, under the silver dome. Next to it is a candelabrum that holds five speckled soul beads. Owls, perhaps. But even in the plenitude of light, this place is haunted by shadows. The animals that enter the room leave it without their souls.
I breathe deep and unclamp my fingers from the folds of my shawl. I need not fear here, with him.
Gagargi Prataslav toured me around the house once, the second or third time I visited him on my own—I can no longer remember the details. He doesn’t entertain. He doesn’t hold servants. The rooms that aren’t occupied by his apprentices are filled with cages of domestic birds and birds of prey alike. Not all of them are white. And not all the animals are birds. In the room that always has a roaring fire he keeps big black apes imported from the south at a great cost. He has been experimenting with them a lot lately, and part of it is from my urging. I think. Our plan for the better empire has but one weakness. The Great Thinking Machine requires human souls for fuel.
“The machine needs the intelligence to calculate the results correctly, just as any other being needs their soul to guide them through their lives.” Gagargi Prataslav turns on his stool, replying to my unasked question. As I meet his gaze, I veer to a halt. Though he has never claimed so, I believe he can catch glimpses of the world beyond this one, a skill that has been lost to the empresses for centuries, a secret guarded most closely. “Look at this swan, for example.”
I can only break the eye contact upon his prompt. No matter how curious I was earlier to see what he was doing, this couldn’t compete with his undivided attention. Now, as he so told me, I look at that big white something: a swan that isn’t quite alive anymore, but not yet dead either.
The sacred messenger of my family rests on the gagargi’s lap. The bird’s webbed feet clutch at his black robes. Its neck is looped around his right arm, and its elegant head rests on his palm. The bird’s beady eyes have already glassed over, but its folded wings shift with its faltering breaths.
Why a swan? I want to ask. Why my family’s heraldic charge and not some other animal? What spell does he need the bird’s soul for? I have seen him separate a soul from the body a hundred times or more. But swans are… they are reserved for ceremonies, not for him or anyone else to practice his art. The gagargi smiles, revealing his slightly crooked teeth, and it is almost as if he were amused by my confusion.
“What is there to look at?” I avert my gaze from both him and the swan that is about to die. It annoys me that he is playing guessing games with me. There is precious little time left. Not for me to change my mind, but to prepare ourselves for the coup. Perhaps it would be better if I left now. My carriage has been waiting for me for hours already. “I…”
“You should stay,” he suggests, and it is as he says. I want to stay with him. In any case, I will be allowed entry to the palace, no matter what time I arrive. Only guards that are sympathetic to the cause man the posts tonight. With my seed, the great General Monzanov, supporting us, there was no difficulty in finding such soldiers. “Observe.”
Gagargi Prataslav hums an incantation as he gently strokes the swan’s back. The way he focuses on each caress reminds me of Merile and her dogs. My sisters… they might hate me after tonight, for having to send mother to Angefort. For a while, there won’t be balls or concerts or any of the other frivolities Elise so enjoys. Sibilia might have to settle for a less extravagant debut than the one she has been dreaming of. Merile will be fine as long as she has her dogs. The three of them will adapt, but little Alina, with her mind already so fragile… What will become of her? But this is a risk I must take. Eventually, if the Moon shines bright, they will come to see I was right to take action, that there really was no other choice. The Crescent Empire, such as it is, can’t continue to exist. I must depose mother, and eventually marry the Moon.
“Contrary to the popular belief…” The gagargi’s voice draws my attention back to him. He twirls his forefinger and middle finger back and forth in a pattern too complex to describe with mere words. The swan twitches. Its black beak parts, revealing a pale pink tongue, but no cry comes out. Instead, the thinnest of white wisps protrudes through its eyes, faint but impossibly strong at the same time. The beak clenches shut, but it is too late. The wisp coils through the air, around the gagargi’s fingers like rings spun from mist. “It is possible to extract only a part of a soul.”
This I didn’t know, and it is an honor to have such information bestowed on me. Curious now, I meet the swan’s gaze. Its eyes are dull, but the bird is still very much alive. “What does it mean for the bird?”
The gagargi gets up, rising to his full, towering height, and only a palm’s width remains between his head and the ceiling. He unloops the swan’s neck from around his arm and then offers the bird to me. “It depends.”
I glide the rest of the way to him and hold my hands out, for what else could I do? Yet nothing could have prepared me for the weight of the bird, the stiffness of its body, the oily sheen of its feathers. My knees buckle, but the neck remains looped, just as he left it, with the head perched in a perpetual tilt. How can the bird remain so still?
The gagargi plucks a down feather from the sleeve of his black robes. He raises it to the eye level of the bird, then lets go of it. The feather drifts down, finding the currents of the laboratory’s persistent draft. “Done with great skill, by taking the strands of the soul that affect autonomy, the subject becomes unresisting and obedient.”
As if suspended by an invisible string, the feather floats just above the floor. Then it touches the cold stone tiles and settles there. The swan remains unmoving in my trembling arms. The gagargi meets my gaze. His eyes bear the strangest sort of fondness, but his mouth is drawn into a… smirk?
I can’t bear the weight of the swan any longer. I lower it onto the stool, more unceremoniously than it deserves. The bird retains its unnatural position. Will it be frozen in this posture for the rest of its life? If so, I can’t imagine a crueler torture. That can’t be the purpose of this demonstration. Souls shouldn’t be played with. Not even animal ones.
“Can you…” The thought is almost too horrifying for me to voice. But we need the Great Thinking Machine to calculate the optimal decisions for us, and the Great Thinking Machine needs a constant supply of its terrible fuel. That is the weak point of our plan, something the gagargi has been working relentlessly to overcome. Is this his solution?
The gagargi grunts, or perhaps chuckles, I am not sure, and I am not sure why it occurs to me to think he might be amused. He lowers his hand on the swan’s head once more. His lips move, and he twirls his fingers. A few heartbeats later, a thicker wisp coils through the bird’s left eye. He snaps his fingers, and the bird falls limp. The neck can no longer support the weight of the delicate head. The head plunges down and ends up with the parted beak mere inches from the ground. Oblivious to this, the gagargi curls his fingers into a fist around the last wisp. He picks up from his desk an empty—I think—glass sphere no bigger than a child’s fist. He hums a short incantation, and as he opens his hand, the wisps are gone, inside the soul bead. But something must have gone wrong. A swan bead should glow white. Instead, this one bears a pale yellow hue.