She put the rakwa into the sink.
Vehm raised his glass.
“To survival.”
“Don't.”
“Fine.”
Kimia turned toward the door.
“What are you doing?” Vehm asked.
“I don't know.”
“Excellent plan.”
“Go back to bed.”
“I tried. The room was spinning.”
“Zhen lie on zhe floor.”
“I am a court philosopher.”
“You are not.”
“Informally.”
“You owe fifteen zhousand dalasi.”
Vehm stared. Kimia regretted saying that immediately.
He raised one finger.
“First, rude.”
Kimia kept walking.
“Second-”
She left before second. The indrel followed.
Now what?
The palace provided possibilities.
Too many.
Library.
No. Kalgkur would almost certainly be asleep, despite evidence suggesting he sometimes required no biological maintenance.
Chapel.
No.
Her chamber.
Dangerous.
Televox again.
Too passive.
Study.
Yes.
One of the smaller studies on the second floor.
Kimia chose it because she rarely used it. This meant nothing had accumulated there.
No whiteblood. No kilcane. No memories of Vehm laughing on the carpet.
Only books. A desk. One couch, a few chairs. A window.
Safe enough.
She climbed the stairs.
The coffee traveled with her.
The indrel followed.
At the study door, Kimia waited until the bodyguard had entered behind her, then closed it.
The room smelled closed.
Paper. Wood. Dust. The faint dry odor of old upholstery.
Kimia switched on the electric lamp upon the desk.
Yellow light appeared beneath the green shade.
Enough to create a circle, not enough to illuminate the entire room.
She pulled out the chair. Sat. Drank.
The coffee had already become less hot.
Her head still felt heavy.
The quiet pressed close.
Kimia set the cup down, then immediately stood again.
She wanted a book.
Something difficult enough to occupy the machinery of thought but not practical enough to remind her of work.
She moved to the shelves.
HISTORY
No.
POLITICS AND ECONOMICS
Absolutely not.
POETRY
Dangerous in a different direction.
PHILOSOPHY
Kimia moved one claw along the spines.
Most belonged to thinkers she knew. Some she had read. Some she had pretended to read.
One narrow volume stopped her.
The author was human. Akalosi. Dead for over a century.
The title was unnecessarily long.
Dialectics of the Self, the Spirit, and the Phantasms Which Take Root in the Individual and the Surrounding World
Kimia stared.
“Zhat sounds miserable.”
The indrel did not disagree.
She took the book. The binding creaked.
It had been printed cheaply despite the seriousness of the title. Thin paper. Dense type. Someone had annotated the margins perhaps generations ago.
Kimia returned to the chair, opened it somewhere near the middle, and began reading.
At first, the language irritated her.
The philosopher wrote like a person who had never encountered a sentence he could not make longer.
Self. Spirit. Appearance. Externalized thought. The reciprocal creation of the observer and the observed.
Kimia nearly put it away, then one passage caught her attention.
She reread it.
The argument, when stripped of its decorative language, was simple enough.
A person did not encounter the world directly. They encountered the world after the self had already interpreted it, but the self itself had been formed by the world it interpreted. Therefore, the boundary between inner phantasm and outer reality was neither absolute nor safely located.