Cast In Fury by Michelle Sagara

perfect memories. I can’t remember clearly what I was doing eight years ago—but if you wanted to, you could. I can construct what I was probably doing eight years ago. And if it was utterly necessary, I could ask Ybelline to actually sort through my memories and tell me what I was doing—but without the help of the Tha’alani, if my twelve-year-old self wasn’t doing something in easy reach of Records, there’s no way for me to be certain.”
    Scoros nodded; clearly this was nothing new to him.
    “This is especially true of people who have had no sleep for a few years.”
    Scoros frowned and Ybelline said, “She is not being literal.”
    His frown deepened slightly, and then eased. Ybelline was speaking Elantran for their benefit, but, clearly, was speaking in other ways as well.
    “The oldest of our stories are probably religious stories,” Kaylin continued. “Stories about the gods.”
    “These are the ones you remember?”
    “Me? Not exactly. When I say oldest, I mean, the oldest ones that anyone knows about.” She winced and gave up. “The earliest stories we’re told, we’re told as children, usually by our parents, sometimes by our friends. Children don’t always have enough experience to understand very, very complicated things, and stories are a way of explaining the world to them.”
    “But they’re not true.”
    “Well, not exactly.”
    “We do not understand what you are explaining, then.”
    Scoros looked at Ybelline. Ybelline looked at Kaylin. Kaylin looked at the tabletop.
    And Rennick stood up with a disgusted snort.
    “Rennick, sit down,” Kaylin told him.
    Rennick didn’t appear to hear her. Given the color he was turning, it might not have been an act.
    “Castelord,” he said, managing somehow to be polite and icy at the same time. “Do you have no art, here?”
    She frowned. “Art?”
    “Paintings. Sculptures. Tapestries. Art.”
    “We have,” Scoros answered. His voice had dropped a few degrees as well.
    “If what I’ve heard today is true, the Tha’alani have perfect memory. Anything, at any time, that any of you have experienced, you can recall. True?”
    “Rennick—”
    “No, Private. If I am to do my job, as you so quaintly call it, I need to understand what I’m working with, or working against. You aren’t even asking the right questions.”
    “Rennick—”
    “Kaylin, no,” Severn said, his quiet voice still audible over the echoes of Rennick’s much louder tirade. “He’s right. My apologies for the interruption, Mr. Rennick. Please continue.”
    “Is it true?”
    Scoros was silent for a moment. Kaylin imagined that he was trying to figure out what Rennick’s game was. She could sympathize. “It is as you say,” Scoros said.
    “What is the purpose of your art?”
    “Pardon?”
    “Why do you make it? The sculptures? The paintings? The tapestries?”
    “What does this have to do with your stories?”
    “Everything.”
    “I am not an artist,” Scoros replied. “But I will attempt to answer. We create these things because they are beautiful.”
    “Beautiful? More beautiful than life? More beautiful than what’s real?”
    Scoros’s silence was longer and quieter. When he spoke again, the chill in the words was gone. “Yes. And no. They are not the same.” The tail end of what might have been a question colored the last word.
    “But you could find beautiful things, surely, in the—what did you call it? The Tha’alaan?”
    “Yes. That is what it is called.”
    “Can you?”
    “Yes. But it is not a simple matter of demanding beauty and having it surrendered to us. We are not the same person. No two of us think exactly the same way, although to the deaf—”
    “Scoros,” Ybelline said softly.
    “To the humans,” Scoros corrected himself. “To your kin, we might seem thus. We do not have the range of…differences. Even so, some memories will strike different Tha’alani as beautiful but not all.”
    “Yes, well. You can find