Sarnai Hsia Dhomo

Sarnai Hsia, generally called Sarnai the Honeybee or the Honeybee, was the leader of a non-familial criminal faction in Seong from approximately 95 SE to 119 SE, when she was executed for attempting to overthrow the Kuan Empire and assassinate Tsenbai Saj.

## Early Life

Sarnai is a genetic tripler, with a Kuan father, Ju mother, and Dhi wither. Born in Seong, she actually spent most of her childhood in the lowlands of Dhi, where her wither wanted her to train as a healer and enrolled her in an expensive and private school in Bhatan. She learned a great deal by sneaking out of her lessons without any of her parents noticing, none of it healing related. At age thirteen, her father, Geran Hsia Mera, took her to Aksai to get her spiral tattoo and she entered the spiral for the only time.

### Capture by Bandits

On the way back, her party was attacked and Sarnai and her mother were captured by Diao bandits who recognized their horses and clothes as expensive and intended to demand a ransom from the Kuan Empire. Sarnai convinced them that her mother was actually a chef who spoke limited Diao and Zakhesh and who was being sent back to Ju because the saj did not favor her cooking. Sarnai, in her telling, was but her humble cooking apprentice. They traveled with guards because Sarnai was a distant relation of Min Sooju. Killing her would cause a minor diplomatic incident but she was worth little in a ransom.

Initially, the bandits believed her, and her mother played along, pretending not to understand their language, but Sarnai knew her tattoo—in the Kuan style—would give her away. She stole a knife from one of the bandit cooks, a young boy who believed her story about being a chef's apprentice, and used it to cut and brand her own tattoo until it was unrecognizable.

The bandits resolved to sell Sarnai and her mother to a nearby Diao magistrate and continue searching for more valuable prey. As soon as they did, Sarnai begged an audience with the magistrate himself, finally revealing her own identity, only for the magistrate not to believe her. To prove her story, she convinced a stableboy to let her borrow a horse—he believed she had been assigned to brush them—and stole a decorative repeating crossbow from the estate, shooting the hat off the magistrate's head as he went for an afternoon constitutional. No one but a Kuan could ride and shoot with such accuracy, and Diao were forbidden from keeping Kuan serfs.

Sarnai threatened to have the magistrate executed unless he agreed to pay for a messenger to Aksai, informing her father Geran Mera that he and his soldiers were needed in the south immediately, and a fully staffed and provisioned party to escort them back to Dhi. In fact, as soon as they left the magistrate's estate, Sarnai told the leader of their guard that the magistrate had given her secret orders to capture the bandits before they could attack anyone. When challenged, she produced a letter, written in Diao, to attest as much, suspecting that none of the guards could actually read. None called her bluff; they went after the bandits.

### Capturing the Bandits

Sarnai had memorized the faces of the bandits and was able to describe them in the towns they passed through that, at last, someone made mention of someone who looked similar to the leader. Based on this lead alone, they scoured the desert at the base of the Aleya Range until they found the bandit camp. There were more of them than expected, more like a band or rebels than bandits. Sarnai ordered the guards to buy her new clothing—a sari and lengha, in the colors of a Dhi healer—and approached the camp alone.

Though she saw bandits involved in her capture, they had captured someone they thought to be Kuan and who turned out to be Ju—she had not once spoken a Dhi language in front of them or worn Dhi clothing. This healer's apprentice appeared to them as an entirely new person, unknown. She told a tale of a plague outbreak in a nearby town, asking if any bandits had been there recently and begging them for permission to quarantine them before the plague spread further. Impressed by her gall, and worried about her story, the leader of the bandits, Lin Jingyi, invited her into her presence, seemingly to discuss quarantine.

In actuality, Jingyi had a Dhi healer in his employ and he ordered him to verify Sarnai was who she claimed. Sarnai took offense, saying in fluent Gaon, "I do not know where in Dhi they train men to be healers, but surely, if he is one, he knows the only three questions a proper healer needs to identify one of her—or *his*—own."

The healer's pride overtook his sense and he agreed that he could determine her profession in three questions. First, he asked her the two ways to kill someone. Sarnai knew this from her early studies, but responded that, while all healers knew that the body could be starved of oxygen or of blood, most modern healers agreed certain toxins, such as those from the mona fish, killed in a third, unique way, not encompassed by the other two, and so the question was impossible to answer.

Angrier, the healer asked his next question in Misyu, a lesser-known Dhi language: could she name the twelve body systems and their corresponding acupuncture points? Recognizing him as from Ma from his accent, Sarnai rattled off a list of nonsense, then claimed they were the proper Aleyan systems, not something a lowlander would learn. If he wanted to call her bluff, she'd happily explain to Jingyi where he'd gone wrong in a language the bandit leader spoke.

Finally, the healer demanded she list every possible cause of swelling in the brain. Sarnai responded, "Surely, the great healer can see I am but an apprentice. If I tried to answer such a question, it would prove as sure as anything that I was not who I claimed to be." Jingyi found her answer humorous and agreed to discuss quarantine further that evening at dinner.

Over the course of a single dinner, Sarnai described the terrors of the plague in great detail and convinced Jingyi to quarantine almost a third of his fighters. Sarnai sent word to her small party of guards, who slaughtered the quarantined men while they traveled to a hastily constructed plague house. By the time Jingyi realized he'd been tricked, Sarnai had let slip to one of his seconds—Chang—that she was the daughter of a Kuan mera, pretending to be a healer to avoid a ransom demand. Jingyi went to find and kill Sarnai but his second had already taken her captive and, with much fewer men to enforce his will, Jingyi was helpless to free and kill her. He was too embarrassed to admit his mistake and allowed the ransom to stand.

The next day, Sarnai's father arrived, and intercepted a messenger from the bandit camp that claimed his daughter was held within. Enraged, Geran Mera surrounded the camp. Chang saw defense was hopeless and Sarnai talked one of her guards into letting her speak with him, claiming she could talk her father down. Instead, she told Chang that the only hope was to defect, claim that Jingyi had been responsible for her capture, and ask for mercy from the mera. Sarnai promised she would speak highly of them if they did so.

Chang agreed and some third of Jingyi's remaining forces surrendered to Geran Mera. Sarnai ordered they be kept alive so that she could execute the leaders herself, when the campaign was over, a common Kuan request, and her father agreed. The next day, the majority of Jingyi's bandits surrendered and Geran Mera captured Jingyi easily, burning the camp to the ground.

### Mercenaries

At this point, Sarnai's wrist wound had become infected and the arm had to be amputated. Distraught, she fell into her father's tent, wondering if she would ever be able to ride or shoot a bow again. He granted that she would be able to ride one handed if she dedicated herself to her task but that shooting would forever be beyond her. She begged him for a favor in exchange for telling her such a terrible truth and, upset that she'd been kidnapped without his knowing, he granted it to her. She wanted to spare the men who agreed to serve her instead of executing them, as was proper punishment for bandits and, helpless to resist, Geran Meras agreed.

The next day, Sarnai called Chang out in front of his men and made to cut his throat, sparing him at the last moment in exchange for a vow of loyalty, which he gave her and, crucially, not her father, who was forbidden by the saj from commanding ex-bandit troops. Using Chang's leverage with the men, and threatening to kill those who did not follow her, Sarnai gained a large contingent of trained and armed men to use for her own private purposes.

Sarnai had little love for Dhi, where, she claimed, "nothing ever happened," so she took her escort to Seong, which she'd read was the most exciting city in Ju.

### Time in Seong

By the time she reached Seong, she had run out of most of the money her father had given her. Some third of her new mercenaries were staunch Minjuists, who would never break the life debt they now owned Sarnai. These, she knew, would be loyal for life, Chang among them. The remaining two thirds, however, would want money and if they did not receive it, they would turn on her.

Under the guise of separating her guard into contingents in the tradition of Tsasi Saj, Sarnai created six arbans of loyal troops and twelve arbans of those whose loyalty she could not trust. She sent half the disloyal troops on a journey of vital importance to Bhatan, knowing they would disband on the way there and not have the organization required to make it back to her as a fighting force. The other half, she ordered to kidnap the child of a high-ranking member of the Seong Syndicate, claiming their ransom would be worth two years' salary and make them all rich.

When they returned the child to Sarnai's safe house, however, Sarnai already tipped off members of the Syndicate, and planted herself inside as a fellow prisoner, the daughter of a wealthy Mera. When Syndicate mercenaries arrived, they slaughtered her disloyal soldiers and freed her and the child, taking her to the Aunt, leader of the Syndicate in Seong. Sarnai pretended to be overcome by her kidnap and rescue, bawling at the Aunt's feet, and the Aunt ordered her released before she could cause any trouble with the Kuan. Content with only her loyal troops remaining, Sarnai found herself a job as a translator, which paid only enough for her to afford her own apartment. She helped her soldiers find appropriate jobs and told them to stand by.

## Confrontation with the Syndicate

### Joining the Syndicate

Interviews with those close to Sarnai at this time of her life claim she wanted to join the Syndicate, perhaps eventually run a small segment of it, not tear it down. She admired and respected the Aunt's power, going so far as to tell one of her mercenaries that she wished her own mother were more like the Aunt instead of a "frilly little thing without sense in her brain." This changed before she turned seventeen. At some point, a Syndicate member using her for information about Kuan movements in Ju and the desert took her to visit a brothel, where Sarnai was confronted, for the first time, with the extensive human trafficking network that provided the Syndicate with most of its money.

### Differences

She wrote of her visit in a personal diary:

> The men had no life in them. They were fed like prized horses, to keep them fit enough, but to make the muscles show. Twice a day, those called 'caretakers' used riding crops, dueling staves, or the blunt edges of weapons to rouse them from their haunted stupor and force them to run, dance, perform balancing acts, or lift and throw heavy sacks of rice. Each month, a caretaker carefully took measurements of their arms, necks, and waists to advertise to patrons, mostly aristocratic women and wifere, though some men frequented the brothel too.
>
>

> A spiromancer visited twice a decan, casting upon the men spells that would render them infertile so there was no chance they might impregnate one of the patrons. On these days, a caretaker told me, the men were often downtrodden, as the spell caused fatigue, headaches, and depression. If a man tried to escape, he was beaten with a bag filled with coins or with a thick book, as these left no lasting marks. If necessary, caretakers could call in Dhi healers to treat any wounds that might scar, especially on the face or chest. The youngest boy there was perhaps ten.
>
>

Some time near this first visit, Sarnai decided she would destroy the Syndicate entirely.

Some claim that Sarnai turned against the Syndicate to protect Ea Pema from retaliation for freeing petty criminals who operated in Syndicate-claimed venues. Evidence for this theory is at the very least mixed. Pema herself often told others as such, including in letters that survive to the present day. Sarnai's closest confidants, including Thian himself. She strongly disliked the sex trade and sex trafficking, and seems to have also disliked the devastation opium left behind in poorer communities. Dedicated, as she was, to protecting and cultivating her own personal image, it's entirely possible that she spread the rumor herself.

### Infiltration

After her faked kidnapping, the protection racket segment of Seong's Syndicate found it easy to 'recruit' her, promising protection in exchange for a decanal payment. She ingratiated herself into the good graces of her handlers, proving to them that she could be of some small use for surveillance, since, with subtle uses of clothing and make up, she had an almost uncanny ability to pass as Kuan, Dhi, or Ju, depending on what the situation called for. She began to foster specific personas, each with their own unique style of dressing, speaking, and walking and with their own accents and backstories. She kept copious notes on what each of her personas knew, though most of her notes are still in unbroken ciphers.

When she proved adept at spotting undercover knights, monks, or other servants of the aristocracy, her handler agreed to waive her protection payments in favor of more work. She quickly convinced her handler's case worker that she deserved a small stipend, which she did not use to improve her quality of life. Instead, she funneled most of the money she earned from Syndicate work through Rian [chef] Min-so and his restaurant, the Lyre. Min-so was nominally related to the Syndicate, but his laundering services were useful enough that the Aunt often turned a blind eye if he helped other clients. He had a relatively open relationship with his lover, Jung, who acted as his keeper of secrets, with blackmail on most of the important people in Seong, including the majority of lower-class informants for the aristocracy.

Min-so and Jung served to be powerful allies, and both were open to the possibility of new leadership in the city. Using the Lyre as a cover, Sarnai recruited other friendlies. Her loyal mercenaries, unassociated with her in the eyes of the Syndicate, carried out a few choice assassination, leaving the line of succession in Seong unclear, were the Aunt to lose control. Two factions began to form: those still loyal to the Aunt and those who feared she was losing control and supported Auntie Ko. Neither faction supported Sarnai or her allies. Sarnai happily infiltrated both, telling each side she was a double agent for them and feeding them often true, sometimes selectively false information to keep them satiated.

At last, in 94 SE, she deemed herself ready to spring her trap. She use Jung's blackmail to keep knights and soldiers off the tail of the growing crisis in the Syndicate. Then, she set up a meeting between the Aunt and Auntie Ko. At a key moment during their negotiations, a street ruffian Sarnai often gave food to threw a rock through the window of their den. Convinced the other had reneged on the promise of peace, the three soldiers each the Aunt and Auntie Injo had brought to the meeting turned on one another. One guard survived, dragging out the wounded body of the Aunt, and Sarnai's mercenaries outside took care of them.

Suddenly, the Syndicate found itself in need of leadership. Sarnai had no interest in reporting to higher members in other cities, nor was she eligible for city-wide leadership because she was not part of the Injo family. So, she made her move before another Aunt could arrive in Seong, seeking out the remaining Syndicate power centers and giving them a blunt choice: swear loyalty to her, or die before Syndicate help could arrive. Perhaps the Syndicate would take revenge on Sarnai, but they'd be dead regardless. Almost all accepted her as a new leader.

### Honeybee

Sarnai spurned the name Aunt because she had no interest in emulating the Syndicate. She could not use her real name—Hsia Dhomo was too memorable, and marked her as Kuan, not always an advantageous position—and different people in Seong knew her by different personas. So, she settled on the nickname Honeybee and called her network the Hive, which they eventually adopted as an affectionate nickname. Everyone knew the Honeybee was responsible for the city—most did not know that Sarnai and the honeybee were the same person.

The first thing she did was murder or frame all the caretakers in Seong's brothels, uninterested in their stories or backgrounds, though in point of fact, some were once sex workers themselves who had become caretakers when they'd grown too old to attract patrons. She created the Love Guild and insisted anyone who wanted to practice sex work in the city join. The guild set rates, taking fifteen percent of the worker's wages. A third went into a communal pot to pay for infertility treatment and healers for any injuries or diseases and two thirds went to the salaries of a new position: the harem, named after the Makkadi harem, which, in Tak, meant *protection* or *safe house*. Harems checked in with the men each night they intended to work, verifying contacts and checking for injuries afterwards. Patrons who harmed sex workers were swiftly dealt with.

In a clever move, Sarnai never targeted non-guild sex workers. Instead, she went after their clients, starving them of patrons until they had no choice but to join the guild or seek other work. When sex workers grew too old, Sarnai often placed them in harem positions, or other positions in the Hive. Her care for employees who could no longer serve in their original roles, for whatever reason, won her great respect. The Syndicate looked after family members, but often left ken to starve when they had no further utility.

## Hive

During It's twenty-five years of operation, the Hive reduced the negative effects of crime across Seong. Loan sharks, assassins, muggers, killers, and rapists, who the Syndicate had often allowed to operate unbothered or in exchange for small protection fees, were slowly weeded out. Sarnai was not afraid to kill, or make a statement with a body, and she frequently ordered her mercenaries to torture or mutilate people before their death, branding them on the forehead with the Sokan word for *sting*.

In addition to reorganizing the brothels, Sarnai all but eliminated opium trade for non-aristocrats in Seong, and took heavy cuts from opium dealers who sold to the rich to pay for rehabilitation. She took a much smaller cut of Hive profits than the Aunt and channeled most of it into food and shelter for the poor. Though she never explicitly asked non-criminals to pay back her favors, she did not hesitate to call them in, and often used those she'd helped—especially those whose positions improved afterwards—to traffic goods and people throughout the city, as surveillance networks, and or for other skills, such as healing or cipher cracking. In her diary, Sarnai often reports that seeing suffering makes her uncomfortable, but she lavishes much more attention on the way power makes her feel. While she undoubtable did a lot of good for the less fortunate in the city, her motivations were such that she may have continued, even if she could do no good at all.

She maintained power in three ways. Her anonymity—only her inner circle knew who she was—meant she could infiltrate up and coming organizations with relative ease, and made assassinating her difficult. Because she kept less money from business than any other reasonable crime leader would, her underlings were only ever incentivized to eliminate her if they could guarantee that *they* would end up in her position, not someone else who would squeeze more money from her underlings. And, finally, many of her followers reported feeling genuine respect, awe, and loyalty to her and her cause. She did not promote the ambitious if she could avoid it, preferring those with an ideological or moral compass.

## Radicalization

### Introduction to Liminals

When Batar Kuan Ahn, a renowned dealer in jewels and antiquities, enter Seong with a mysterious package, Sarnai's interests were piqued. She sent a spy—she had a vast network of them amongst the city's homeless children—to investigate and discovered that Batar carried with her an urn, pointers carved into the sides. Sarnai guessed something liminal was trapped inside, perhaps a djinni or a ghost. The urn was guarded at all times by a silent guard, a man with skin so pale, it was almost blue, and long, wiry hair.

Sarnai arranged for Batar and the guard to receive an invitation to the Lyre, one of the most prestigious restaurants in the city, an offer Batar could hardly refuse. During the meal, Sarnai had one of the waiters swap out the urn, sending the original back to Sarnai's room. When she opened, smoke escaped, though it did not take on any form as it fled. Disappointed, Sarnai made plans to get the original back to Batar, but the guard showed up outside her rooms before she could leave to give orders to her people. He accused her of stealing the vase, though connecting the theft to her was almost impossible. Sure he was bluffing, Sarnai played the ignorant and scared child. The man attacked her nonetheless.

A mercenary, tipped off by one in her network of children, saved her, scaring the man off with an iron poker. As he fled, he called out to her, "She knows my name. I must server her, for she knows my name." Oddly, he spoke said it in Lingua.

Sarnai had Seprum contacts in Seong and she contacted them about her encounter. Most suggested she had seen a moirai—they were scared of pure iron, which was why the poker had chased it off when her guard's knife had barely phased it. They recommended she avoid the thing, as moirai almost always led people to their doom. Sarnai was hooked, though, and over the next week, she planned for Batar's assassination. It was risky, given how important Batar was to the Kuan, and how many allies she had in the aristocracy, but Sarnai had set her sights on a goal. Furthermore, she needed to be nearby for her death in order to see the moirai again.

The assassination was successful. As expected, an iron amulets kept the assassin safe from the moirai's attacks. With Batar dead, the moirai wandered out of the house of a wealthy aristocrat where she'd been staying and found Sarnai almost immediately to thank her. She suggested the moirai join the Hive and it agreed. Sarnai had learned, at this point, that moirai had to answer truthfully any question asked three times. Some argue she must have asked the moirai its name three times too quickly for it to escape. Others claim she never enslaved it and, if she knew its true name, she took it to her grave.

### Thian

Sarnai took to calling her moirai helper Thian, for unknown reasons, and he quickly became one of her most useful assets, able to move great distances almost instantly and knowledgeable about many topics. He explained that the urn had contained a djinni, one of six that exist, and that Batar had captured it for a buyer in Kyong who wanted to study it. Though Thian did not consider moirai and djinn natural allies, he was pleased she had freed it, and that it had not killed her in its rage.

Starting in perhaps 115 SE, Thian began to radicalize Sarnai against both the Kuan Empire, where djinn and other liminals were mistreated, and the ciphra rebels, who despised djinn. Sarnai compares the plight of liminals like Thian many times in her diary to the plight of the sex workers, forced to do things they did not wish to, and she considered it an obvious next step to help them, though in point of fact, liminals kill many more humans each year than humans harm liminals. To that end, Sarnai first snuffed out rebel operations in Seong, then turned her attention to building an army to overthrow Tsenbai Saj.

### Discovery

Jung revealed Sarnai's plot to Ju and Kuan leadership, likely under duress due to the capture and torture of Rian Min-so. Sarnai wrote in her diary at the time of Min-so's capture "This is the end of my reign. I had a good run of it, I reckon" and burned the names and contact information of every member of the Hive in the city before freeing her mercenaries from their life debt and ordering them to spend the rest of their lives keeping the Love Guild safe. She sent Jung a simple note saying, "Tell them anything they wish to know about me" and waited for her death to arrive.

Her last diary entry explains some of her relationship with Thian:

> I told him to leave, of course. He refused. I asked his name twice. He refused to tell me. 'I can ask a third time,' I explained to him, 'and take control of you and order you to leave, or you may leave of your own volition and there is no chance the soldiers will torture it out of me. Which would you prefer?' For a moment, I feared her would not leave. He accused me of hypocrisy, saying if I truly cared about beings like him, I would not even threaten what I had. I calmly explained the difference between a threat and a promise. He left some minutes ago. The room is colder without him, somehow. I wonder how it is possible to live a life like mine, thinking I didn't understand love because I have never felt the urge to kiss or woo someone, only to realize in my final free moments that I am just as capable of love as anyone else, and that my love is reciprocated, and that I will never him again. Strange. Footsteps now. When the historians explain why I did what I did, don't let them say it was for power.
>
>

### Torture and Execution

Sarnai revealed the names and addresses of important members of the Hive some twenty-eight hours into her captivity, when she knew all had had enough time to get to safety. She made no effort to hide anything else and answered every question asked of her frankly, including to explain some of her motivation. Seeking to make an example of her, Tsenbai Saj ordered her brought back to Aksai, where he planned to have her slowly skinned alive. Instead, he found her dead in her cage, her lungs filled with water, though she had been nowhere near a river. Someone had branded the Sokan character for *honeybee* onto her forehead.

## Symbolism

Sarnai cultivated her image with great zest throughout her life, commenting once in her diary, "My power comes not from magic, for I have no tattoo, nor from the strength of my shoulders and fists, for I am weak compared to those who would kill me. Instead, it comes from loyalty, not to me, but to the idea of me I have planted in the minds of those around me."

### Mona Fish

The mona fish came to represent the network of lies, intelligence, and informants that Sarnai controlled. She used it to great effect to convince Jingyi she was, indeed, a Dhi healer, but mona fish are large, docile, and harmless, not toxic, as she'd suggested.

### Honeybee

Jingyi was the first to call Sarnai the honeybee when he compared her to a flower during their meal together and she retorted, "a flower, perhaps, but one with a bee in it, or perhaps a wasp." He reportedly responded by laughing and saying, "If you are a bee, you are a honeybee, for your sting is hardly painful and your beauty is alluring." She may have told the story to Chang. It's also possible he stumbled on the nickname independently, or through careful nudging. By the time she rode with her mercenaries to Seong, they had all taken to calling her the Honeybee, and they her stingers.