The Unspoken Name

by A. K. Larkwood

  This was a world half swallowed by the Maze. In the basin before them, cracked obsidian stretched far into the distance, piled and shattered, like the vitrified ruin of a city. Haze swirled and banked as if moved by the wind, though the air was lifeless. Rising from the thicket of mists, still many miles away, was a coal-black tower, stark and static against the endless swirl of the sky.

  Csorwe heard a distant shrill whooping cry, and saw a flight of something like birds take off from one high turret. They kicked off into the high air, moving in formation with a precision that was almost beautiful. The hairs on the back of her neck rose.

  She brought the ship in to land near the Gate, and they disembarked.

  “I’ve just looked through the lockers again, in case we’d missed anything useful,” said Shuthmili. “But I don’t suppose we’ll have any use for chocolates or whisky.”

  “You never know,” said Csorwe. “How are you doing? You ready for this?”

  “I won’t tell you I’m fine,” said Shuthmili, “as it didn’t seem to make any impression the first ten times. Also, it would be tempting the gods to punish me for my deceitfulness, because I’m terrified.”

  “Shuthmili—”

  “I know what I’m doing,” she said. “This was my choice. I’m not going to turn back. I like to finish things once I’ve started them. And if I wanted to be safe, I could have stayed.”

  She lifted her chin, resolute. Her hood was pulled up against the chill, so her face was haloed by a circle of soft fur trim, and the wind blew escaped strands of hair across her face. Csorwe felt a terrible rush of fondness. In other circumstances it could have been a gentle feeling, a quiet warmth, a desire to tuck the stray hairs back behind her ears, to touch the back of her neck—as it was, it gripped Csorwe’s heart with the cold urgency of a threat.

  “Maybe we should bring the whisky,” she said.

  It was a long walk across the plain to the base of the tower, exposed to the cold and to the gaze of anyone who might be watching. The ground was ruffled in places with faint waves, like ripples in sand frozen into the rock.

  “Do you see that?” said Shuthmili, stopping to look at something on the ground: a feathery swirl the size of her palm, barely distinct from the rock itself. “It’s a starfish. What a beautiful thing. I think we’re at the bottom of the sea.” She smiled to herself in private delight. “Much is lost, but much lasts…”

  They needed to keep moving, but Csorwe couldn’t bear to call her away from this. She looked so happy. This was something fear couldn’t touch.

  Csorwe remembered the night they’d met, the intensity of Shuthmili’s focus on her work, the arcs the brush made in the air, the dark glitter of her eyes in the firelight, and wondered how it could have taken her so long to realise what she was feeling.

  “Oh, it would really be something to document this place,” said Shuthmili, straightening up. “But don’t worry. I know we don’t have time.”

  “It’s all right,” said Csorwe. “What does that mean? Much is lost…”

  “It’s from one of our philosophers,” said Shuthmili. “About whether it’s worth trying to preserve the past, when all worlds eventually fall into decline.”

  “They used to talk about that in the House of Silence,” said Csorwe. If it had been anybody else, she would have kept this to herself, but she found herself wanting Shuthmili to know her better. “We were just there to watch as everything slid away and got eaten up by the Maze. That was what the Unspoken One wanted. Desolation is its watchword. Think I like your version better.”

  “Well, our man also wrote a long book about how he didn’t mind dying because the state of Qarsazh would prevail, so I think he was probably a bit weird,” said Shuthmili.

  Csorwe still couldn’t help but regret leading Shuthmili into danger, but she had said it herself: this was her choice, and she had her own reasons. They could not predict what Oranna might do with the power of the Unspoken, or what the Unspoken might do once it acquired a mortal body, but Csorwe doubted anything so fragile as a dead language or an ancient sea creature would survive it.

  “What happened, in the House of Silence?” said Shuthmili. “Why did you leave?”

  Csorwe tensed, reaching instinctively for a way to brush off the question and sweep it into the far distance. Then again, she had never told anybody about it on her own terms before. Sethennai had explained her to Tal before she’d ever had a chance.

  “You remember the little girl. Tsurai,” she said. “That was me. I was her. The, uh—” She had to scrabble for the words in Qarsazhi; it was hard enough making herself explain without having to reach for vocabulary. “The—betrothed bride of the god. It’s not as bad as it sounds.”

  “It does sound…,” said Shuthmili.

  “No, it was all right. I wasn’t unhappy there. They treated me well.” She didn’t know why it seemed so important to make Shuthmili understand this. She hadn’t been raised among monsters. That wasn’t it. “They were all kind to me. Up until the last minute. I don’t blame them. It would have been hard to do anything else, when they could just let it happen and let life go on.”

  “Yes,” said Shuthmili. “I see.”

  “I mean, I just let it happen myself,” said Csorwe. “I knew what was going to happen and I still went. I could have run away myself, and I never did. If Sethennai hadn’t come for me, then—”

  She swallowed and looked away, fixing her eyes on the grey horizon. It was very quiet. In the Maze proper, you had the sound of wind and water. Here there was nothing at all: no birds, no insects, only the crunch of their footsteps in the dust.

  She told Shuthmili the whole story: she had been born in the same year the last Chosen Bride had been sent to the Shrine. She had been orphaned by plague as a baby. They had clothed and fed and educated her at the House of Silence, which was more than some plague-orphans could hope to get. After fourteen years she was to answer the summons of the Unspoken, and go up the mountain to the Shrine.

  “And then…?” said Shuthmili.

  “And then I don’t know,” said Csorwe. “Nobody knew. It was my personal mystery to unravel, but we were all pretty clear that I was going to die. And in the end I never found out how it was supposed to happen, because Sethennai got me out at the last minute. I know this sounds bad, but it was just … ordinary.”

  “No, I know,” said Shuthmili. She paused, biting her lip. “I lived at the School of Aptitude until last year, when I was assigned to Aritsa’s research group. Nobody at the School was unkind or unpleasant. And it helped to have an ambition. That’s what the Quincuriate was to me. I thought I understood what the tether would mean, and I thought I wouldn’t mind it. So I do know. Truly.”

  “Yeah,” said Csorwe. From anybody else she couldn’t have tolerated this, but there was nothing about Shuthmili’s expression that was mocking, nothing that suggested she was storing it up to use against her. Csorwe just hoped it hadn’t changed Shuthmili’s opinion of her. “That was how the world worked. I didn’t know anything else.”

  She walked on, looking at her feet. Once you started seeing the feathery little starfish they were everywhere, scattered across the rippling stone as though the sea had only just retreated. “Do you wish I’d never said anything?” she said, quietly.

  “What?” said Shuthmili.

  “Do you wish I’d just let you go? So you’d be in Qarsazh now, getting tethered or whatever?”

  “No,” said Shuthmili. “It would be good to be safe, but I’m beginning to see now that I was never safe there, not really. I’m glad to be here.” She paused, a flicker of shock in her eyes. “Do you mean you wish Sethennai had never come for you?”

  Csorwe thought about it, then smiled despite herself. She was grateful to Shuthmili for saying it out loud so that she didn’t have to, and now the thought was gone. “No. Of course not.”

  “Good,” said Shuthmili. “I, too, am glad that you survived until adulthood. Travelling with you has been fun.” Sh
e noted Csorwe’s incredulous look, and smiled. “No, I mean it. Though I’m beginning to worry that I may not be as sensible as I always thought I was. My suspicion is that I like you.”

  She gave Csorwe a curious look, not unlike the way she had looked at the starfish.

  Csorwe’s heart flapped like a moth trapped in a lantern. Shuthmili was clearly waiting for her to say something. By the time she remembered how to produce words, it was clear that she had paused too long and it would be better to pretend she’d never meant to say anything. She shoved her hands in her pockets, stared at the ground, and kept walking.

  Idiot! she thought to herself. It shouldn’t have been so hard. Not after she’d already gone on about the House of Silence.

  Shuthmili started up again, in what Csorwe recognised as a heroic effort to break the silence. “What’s it like, working for Belthandros Sethennai?” she said. She always called him by his full name, as if he were a figure of legend.

  For once Csorwe was glad to make conversation, but this was almost as hard to answer as the proposition that Shuthmili liked her. She didn’t know how to explain the last eight years. The work, the weariness, the isolation, and the way it was all made bearable when Sethennai seemed pleased with you.

  “It’s all right. I mean, it’s pretty good. He’s not bad to work for.”

  “Giving me the hard sell, as always,” said Shuthmili. “Do you like him?”

  Shuthmili seemed to think this, too, was something a reasonable person could answer.

  “He’s not the kind of person you can like or dislike,” she said eventually. “We’re not friends. He doesn’t confide in me, or anyone. He’s never expected me to tell him my secrets. But, you know. He didn’t have to save my life. He didn’t have to do anything for me. And he never wanted me to go on about how grateful I am either.”

  “I’m just trying to imagine what it’ll be like to meet him properly, if we can pull this thing off,” said Shuthmili. “If I’m going to be working for him.”

  “You’ll like him,” said Csorwe. “He’s funny.”

  Sethennai had little tolerance for failure, and none for disobedience, but he believed in results. If she returned with the Reliquary, he would forgive her. At least, she had to hope so. And he would see how useful Shuthmili could be, how smart and how brave—they could work together …

  She had been so focused on their immediate survival that she hadn’t had much time to imagine what it would be like, if Shuthmili worked for Sethennai. It was almost painful to acknowledge what a difference it might make to have someone to talk to on the road who was friendlier than Tal.

  “When you work for him we can travel together, if you’d want that,” said Csorwe. “You could try all the bad station food. There’s a lot, especially if you don’t mind eating mealworms.”

  “My goodness,” said Shuthmili. “No. In fact I think I insist upon it. A mealworm tour of the Echo Maze.” She beamed. “How glamorous.”

  “And when we get back we can see Tlaanthothe properly,” said Csorwe. It felt dangerous to speak this out loud. She had imagined a bright future in Tlaanthothe once before, and the city had disappointed her, so slowly that she’d scarcely noticed her hopes diminishing.

  “It does have good parts,” she went on. Showing Shuthmili around would be different. “We could have dinner at Kethaalo’s. And Sethennai’s got a big library, you’ll like that.”

  Csorwe waited for Shuthmili to say something, unable to look at her directly. It had been pleasant to imagine all these things in the quiet of her own head, but somehow the prospect that Shuthmili might actually be interested made them seem further away. She had always been so bad at this. She should have figured out how to deal with it when she was sixteen instead of learning how to kill people.

  And then Shuthmili took Csorwe’s hand in hers. Csorwe could feel the warmth of her skin even through the gloves. She squeezed Shuthmili’s hand lightly and released it.

  They went on in a curious silence. Without looking, Csorwe was very aware of Shuthmili’s presence beside her: each footstep, the fluttering of her skirts in the wind, the way she chewed her lip when she was thinking … she wondered, for the first time, whether Shuthmili was thinking the same thing about her. It made her self-conscious, but not uncomfortably so, just very aware of all her limbs and the startling possibility that there was something to admire about them.

  They didn’t stop walking, and the tower on the horizon came closer. Too soon the ground began to slope upward, from dry seabed onto pebbly shore, and they came into the shadow of the tower. Though ruinous, the Spire was enormous; taller and broader even than the Gate-fortress in Tlaanthothe. On one face, turned slightly away from the seabed, was a doorway, fully thirty feet high. A broad flight of steps led up to the door, flanked on each side by statues on plinths.

  Csorwe edged along the shoreline, trying to get a better look at the door. Some instinct told her to keep low. The light here was strange—misty, flickering with shadows—but it was too bright to rely on darkness for cover.

  The still air shifted, and like a buoy moving with the tide, the shape of a mazeship drifted out from the side of the tower, several stories above.

  “That’s Oranna’s ship,” said Csorwe. Despite herself she had to stop and take a breath.

  Shuthmili slipped her hand through the crook of Csorwe’s elbow. Even through the many layers of shirt and jacket, the pressure was comforting.

  “When she spoke to me, in the Hollow Monument,” said Shuthmili, “I think I was more frightened than I’d ever been in my life. Obviously, my life’s got a lot more exciting since then,” she added, glancing up at Csorwe with a brief flash of amusement. “But she’s just a person. At least for now.”

  “I hope so,” said Csorwe. “But now she’s here, she could get the Reliquary open. D’you think—”

  Shuthmili bit her lip. “I don’t know,” she said, after a second’s thought. “I would guess she’d need to return to the Shrine of the Unspoken before it could manifest in her—but—I really don’t know. I’m breaking doctrine even imagining whether it would be possible.”

  Csorwe took another breath and shut her eyes. The air tasted faintly of salt, as though the memory of the lost sea lived on in the atmosphere.

  “Well,” said Shuthmili. “If we do meet the Unspoken One I wouldn’t mind the opportunity to give it a piece of my mind.”

  She tightened her grip on Csorwe’s arm, then released it, and they crept closer to the tower. The masonry had once been intricately carved, set with many niches, buttresses, balconies—now most of this detail had fallen or been eroded away, as though the tower had spent long years underwater. The statues on either side of the steps were shaped vaguely like people, but it was hard to tell what they had been; in most cases there was nothing left but a crumbling pillar or fragmentary torso.

  The doorway they had seen was empty. There was nothing to stop them walking straight into the tower. Beyond the doorway, Csorwe glimpsed a passageway, which seemed to broaden into a larger hall. She glanced back at the broken landscape, thinking again how small they were, how exposed, and how little they knew about what they were getting into. Shuthmili followed her gaze.

  It wasn’t going to get any easier. There was no use hesitating. She stepped into the doorway.

  The interior of the tower didn’t bear any resemblance to the outside. Shuthmili started murmuring about lenition as soon as they entered.

  There were colonnades, staircases winding upward, great galleries stacked upon galleries. Ornate scrolls of stone trailed in the air like pondweed. Sometimes it felt as though they were struggling through a submerged garden, sometimes as though they were navigating the slums and rooftops of a ruinous city. It was as though someone had killed a palace by stabbing it through with another palace.

  Csorwe felt what she had sensed before, in the crypts of the House of Silence and the depths of the Hollow Monument. This was the place of something ancient and knowing, which tolerate
d their intrusion because they were insignificant.

  What she couldn’t spell out, and didn’t want to admit anyway, was that the place was enticing. However cold and dark and bewildering, there was a terrible rightness about its angles. She had been born for places like this. There was something familiar, like a long-healed injury, about returning to the domain of an old god.

  * * *

  Tal had been pleased with himself at first. If you couldn’t get to the Reliquary on your own two feet, there were worse ways to travel than going by Imperial warship.

  He had actually enjoyed the first few days on the frigate. He should have recognised this for the bad sign that it was. Everyone on board Tranquillity hated each other, they had hated each other for a long time, and they were barely trying to hide it. Buttoned-up Qarsazhi resentment bubbled all around him, and he slipped blissfully into it, as if into a hot spring. The naval officers and crewmen who belonged to the ship loathed the Inquisitors. Inquisitor Qanwa disliked the ship people and plainly despised Inquisitor Tsaldu, who distrusted her in return.

  The Adepts of Vigil Quincury were the only ones who didn’t seem to hate anyone. Their silent omnipresence gave Tal the crawling shivers, which got worse once Inquisitor Qanwa gave orders that one of them was to follow Tal wherever he went. The way their soft slippers hushed after him made him want to scream.

  After three days on board, Inquisitor Qanwa summoned him back to her stateroom. Four Vigil Adepts were standing before her desk along with a group of four Wardens. Tal’s babysitter showed him into the cabin, then took its place beside them. Tal had the choice of making eye contact with Qanwa or looking at the Adepts. The Adepts were creepy, but whenever he looked at Qanwa he had to bat away an unwelcome recollection of how General Psamag had looked whenever he’d had the opportunity to feed someone to the snake. All that bright mad enthusiasm.

  “We are now one Gate away from the Domain of the Lignite Spire, which, according to the testimony of Mr. Charossa, is where we will find our missing Adept,” said Inquisitor Qanwa, acknowledging Tal with a smile that made it clear there would be hell to pay if he had lied. Even knowing that he hadn’t, it made Tal uneasy.