Our Lady of the Islands by Jay Lake, Shannon Page

powders? “Perhaps I will speak with him tomorrow.” Suddenly the prayer line seemed less obnoxious and more sinister. “Go home to the Eyot now; meet me at the townhouse in the morning, and you can take me to the priest then.”
    Pino stared at her with pleading eyes. “No!” he shouted. His gaze seemed oddly unfocused, or was he looking at someone behind her?
    Before she could turn to see, a strong blow at the back of her head sent her sprawling to the ground. She could find no voice to scream. No air. She struggled to rise, but the darkness took her.

    Factora-Consort Arian des Chances watched her husband pace, until he stopped at last before the conference chamber’s great round window to stand gazing down at Home’s distant harbor, where his family’s fleet of cargo ships sat uncharacteristically idle, though the streets around it would doubtless be clogged with marchers now. Hivat, Viktor’s chief of security — which was to say, his top spy — had been by just before this meeting to inform them of the evening’s sudden but as yet indecipherable outburst of cultist presence in the city’s streets. He was back out there now somewhere, trying to find out why.
    “They are surely here on your father’s behalf, my dear,” said Viktor. “You must know better than I what will appease them.”
    “My father? ” Arian said, astonished. “Whatever makes you —” Then she realized that he was, of course, not speaking of the cultists, but of the trade delegation, just arrived in time to see this massive display of unrest.
    “They are sent by the Trade Authority in Copper Downs, are they not?” said Viktor. “Which means —”
    “Of which my father is merely one member among many,” she interjected.
    “ — that they are sent by your father,” he continued as if she had not interrupted. “ First of many members. Who has better cause than we to know it?” He turned from the view to gaze at her. “They are here because your family is not enjoying the bride-price they had counted on.”
    Arian made no further effort to hide her incredulity. “What an absurd assumption, Viktor! We’ve been married nearly twenty years. This union has been worth my family’s trouble many times over by now.” Her husband’s paranoia still surprised her sometimes. “Has Hivat provided you any scrap at all of evidence to support such a suspicion?”
    Viktor shook his head.
    “Then this delegation has come for the same reasons such officials have always visited important trading partners: to gather first-hand information and to strategize. That is all.”
    He responded with an impatient humph, and came back to sit across from her at the room’s long, polished ebony table. “What can they expect me to tell them that they don’t already know? Does being Factor endow me with power over every vicissitude of life? Can I control the weather?”
    “The weather is not our problem.” Arian sighed. Her husband lost himself so easily in such useless theater.
    “Then what is our problem? If you know, please tell me. A nation filled with labor-hungry businesses, yet suddenly the poor choose not to work. How am I to deal with such a thing? How am I to understand it? How do they even feed themselves now?”
    “The sea is full of food. As is the jungle,” said Arian, as baffled as her husband by this senseless protest movement — if that’s what it even was. The ‘Butchered God’ cult responsible for all of this had made no demands of any kind yet; given no clear indication of what all this marching was supposed to mean at all — that she’d been told about, at least. “But those supplies of food cannot last forever under such a strain. These marchers will return to the hiring houses soon. When the monsoon season returns, at the very least. They’ll have to.”
    “This delegation requests clarification of my plans ,” Viktor said, very nearly whining. “I have no plan. They want financial forecasts . Does that not