"You see?" Naamen asked. "Everything he did created chaos; nothing he intended came into being as he intended. Wanting to make himself immortal he opened the door to disease. He created death the moment he thought to fear it and to escape it."
"Nobody had died before that?" Shen asked.
"No," Naamen said, "this is the time of the first generation of everything. There was first nothing, and then there was life. It might always have been so, if Elenet had not acted so wrongly."
But he had acted wrongly, and the Giver lost faith in his creatures. He turned away and abandoned his creations, fearing that any of them might be the next to betray him. In no time at all the world changed. The goodness that was the Giver went with him, and the world was left a different place. Creatures who had been friends began to squabble. Strong ones took to bullying weak ones. And it was not long before some creatures began to feast on the flesh of others. Eagles pressed their talons into the mice that had been their friends. Snakes used their stealth to hunt. Lions ate anything they wished. Fearing that they would all vanish, the hunted creatures learned how to mate and make children, but then the hunters learned these things, too. Painful and dangerous as it was, they had their own young, whom they taught to hunt as well.
Elenet fled from this chaos, though nobody knows to where. In his absence the lions announced that they were supreme of the creatures of the land. The laryx, hearing this, cackled with laughter, for they disdained the lions and thought themselves supreme. That is why lions and laryx still shout at one another today. The lions roar their supremacy; the laryx shout back in hysterics at the lions' foolishness.
"Their blood feud goes on," Naamen said, "and perhaps always will. At least until the Giver returns and sets the world right again."
The storyteller bowed his head, indicating that his tale was concluded. Shen had lain with her head in the crook of her arm. For a moment Kelis suspected she had fallen asleep, but then she said, "I thought the Santoth made the laryx with the touch of their eyes-when they were angry, I mean, because of being banished."
"That is sometimes said," Kelis admitted.
"But Naamen said laryx were there in the first days."
Naamen said, "Sometimes two things are said that don't agree. Which is true? Or are both true? I cannot say. I just speak what was spoken to me."
The girl yawned. "I will have to ask the stones. They will tell me the truth."
Shen said this with childish matter-of-factness, with no hint that any might find the notion fantastic or unlikely or frightening. It returned Kelis to the whirl of his worried thoughts. This was no normal hunting trip or ramble or night camped under the stars to tell old tales. For the second time in his life he was going in search of the banished sorcerers, the God Talkers, the Santoth-the ones Shen referred to as the stones. They were beings he had seen only once, on one furious, horrible afternoon. It was a glorious event in that it marked Hanish Mein's military defeat, but it was wrapped in the emotion of Aliver's death and remembered in scenes so terrible he prayed he would never see their like again.
Even so, he was trying now to find these same sorcerers. Nobody could say why, save that a girl swore it had to be done. He was taking that child, a woman, and a youth with him; and he was doing so covertly, so that the queen he was sworn to serve would not know of the existence of a niece, one who might challenge her own child for the throne.
Benabe's voice interrupted his thoughts. "What do they want with my girl? Can you tell me?" She lay alongside her now-sleeping daughter, propped on an elbow and gazing at Kelis. Her face was lit more by the stars than by the weak glow of the dying fire. Seen thus, in highlight and shadow, she could have been either very old or very young. Either way, she had a beauty that artists would want to capture in stone.
"Me? Cousin, I don't have that wisdom."
Benabe exhaled and looked out at the dark expanse of the plains around them. The lion had stopped its roaring, but in its place a thousand tiny creatures chirped and whirred and rustled and yapped.
"Shen hasn't trembled since we left Bocoum," Benabe said. "Usually, she falls every couple of weeks. I have always hated those moments. It can strike her anywhere, anytime. One moment she is walking; the next she is flailing on the ground, eyes back in her head and mouth sucking, sucking the air. It happens more when she is agitated."
"She doesn't seem agitated," Naamen said.
"No, she doesn't," Benabe said, sounding almost bitter, almost resigned. "We're walking across a continent into a desert to meet sorcerers who should have died two hundred years ago and she's never seemed happier, never healthier. It's like when she wakes up from trembling. Her face goes so calm, peaceful. She smiles and is… happy. Me, each time my heart is pounding. Each time I think the fit has destroyed her, but each time it fills her with more joy than I ever have. I should love them for that, but sometimes I hate them instead." She brought her gaze to study Kelis, then Naamen, and then Kelis again. "I don't know if I am doing right to let her go. Kelis, you've seen them. Tell me that they are good."
In answer, he adjusted his cloak, snugging it tighter around his torso. He forced a yawn and held it long, and then adjusted his position as if on the verge of sleeping. "There is nothing to fear," he said, hoping the lie would be enough to end the conversation.
The next afternoon Kelis noticed something strange on the southern horizon. He said nothing about it, not that day or the next. But on the third day Naamen tried to make eye contact with him as they walked. He shot concerned glances that Kelis did not return. Kelis was glad that his companion did not voice his thoughts, for he still hoped he might awake the next morning and find the shapes had been but clouds, mirages, tricks the heated vapors played.
But in the clear air of the fourth morning he could no longer avoid the truth. Near, now, so suddenly near-as if they had crept on their toes forward during the night-stood a horizon-wide wall of mountain peaks. Foothills fronted slanting slabs of granite, behind which dark slopes ramped toward the sky, fading into the haze so that one could only guess their true heights. Rank upon rank of them, shouldering their way around the curve of the world. They were a range like nothing he had seen in the Known World, and they most certainly had not been here the last time he ventured into the far south.
Benabe asked, "I see those, and you see those. We each see those, right? So I ask, why are there mountains before us? Nobody said anything about climbing mountains."
"I do not know these mountains," was all Kelis could say in answer.
"What do you mean?" Benabe asked. "You have been this way before-"
"I have, but the mountains were not there before."
He stared a long time as the others shot questions at him. What did it mean? Were they so lost as that? How can there be mountains so large that they had never heard of them? How could he not have seen them if he had really come this way before? Must they cross them, or go around them, or-
To each he shook his head and repeated, "I do not know these mountains." He glanced at Shen, who was watching him. She was the only one who was unconcerned by the massive barrier facing them. She just cocked her head and smiled, as if untroubled and seemingly ready to carry on.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
He had said her name. Mor. It rolled off his tongue like he knew her, like they were old friends or comrades, like he was a master about to chastise her for slack work, as if he had the right to know her name and to shape it in his mouth. She was not sure which of these she most heard when he spoke, but it included all of them. It was a simple thing, but so unexpected that it ignited more anger in her than she had anticipated. The moment she had waited a lifetime for… the moment when she would spit in the face of an Akaran prince. A vile, contemptible Akaran! A despot. A criminal. An abomination that deserved to live only until it understood the full extent of the crimes done in its name. She had gone to that chamber ready to revel in finally seeing one of these Akarans, one hated more even than the Auldek or the Lothan Aklun or t
he league.
Instead, she lost control of herself. And why? Maybe, she thought, as she sat in a windowless room in the maze of tunnels below the capital city, it was his accent. His damned Acacian accent! He spoke as they had all once spoken-all of them in some variation or another-before years in Ushen Brae, speaking Acacian secretly while the official language of the Auldek bent and twisted their pronunciation so that they did not recall how they were supposed to sound anymore. The language of defiance that the People spoke to one another was a sad imitation of the language of the ones who had sold them as slaves. It all held a terrible irony. It was that, now that she thought about it, that had driven her to slash him so forcefully.
Or, well, there was another thing. She hated admitting it, but the cadence of his voice shot her through with the memory of her brother. She would never have expected that. A few seconds in his presence. A few words and the weight of longing for Ravi crashed down upon her. It was not a particular memory, just the entirety of awareness of how much she missed him, how incomplete she was without him. The Akaran bastard! To have brought that on her with just a few words… It must have been some sort of Acacian magic. Who could blame her for smashing his head against the wall? He deserved worse. As far as she was concerned, he would receive worse.
She lowered her head farther and tilted the knobby implants that protruded from the tips of her fingers into her scalp, pressing them in until they were painful. She would do better next time she saw him. That was her responsibility. The elders trusted her with this and she would not let them down. Ravi would want better of her; she would not fail him, wherever in Ushen Brae his soul was.
She eased her claws from her scalp, exhaling and drawing herself upright. Her eyes drifted to the small mirror on the table across from her. It was angled away and she could not see her image in it, but she knew what she would see if she turned it toward her: the visage she had come to think of as her own. From her chest and shoulders up across her face and even into her hairline she was spotted like a shivith, ink of black and yellow and shadings in between embedded into her skin, trapped in her living tissue. Shivith. Her current visage would forever be a merging of human features and feline patterning. As with everything in Ushen Brae, the irony was that she could not imagine herself any other way. She did not know herself without the tattoos that defined, placed her, gave her station and marked her as property in this world.
She did remember Ravi as he had been. She had last seen him as a child, unaltered. Everyone had said they wore the same face. So perhaps remembering him was remembering herself as well. His eyes had been deceptively tranquil, with upper eyelids that lay heavy in the Candovian way. Beautiful, she thought. Wise eyes in a wise, rounded face. Ravi… How she had clung to him on the ship that ripped them from the Known World and brought them into slavery.
Even in the hull of the league ship, Ravi had chafed at the injustice. His eyes may have looked tranquil, but the mind behind them was sharp and brave. He had whispered schemes of escape in her ears. First one plan and then another, and revised to yet another as each was proven impossible. He sought to win others over. He left her for short periods and spoke to the other captives at night, when the guards left them alone. He tried to stir their fear and anger into something useful. There had to be a way, he had claimed. Had to be! Remember, they were thousands! Few listened. He had been marked by his outburst on the beach. Though none understood what the leagueman had in store for Ravi, all suspected it was a fate worse than theirs. Hadn't the leagueman said something about being eaten? What monster awaited him, and why let him lead them to a similar fate?
The few who had watched him with nervous eyes, hungry for escape, backed away from him after the leaguemen brought them out of the hold to show them a view of the world that only the league could offer them. The children were led up in groups, gripping one another and afraid of the sea spray and the wind whipping about and the tilting deck. The ship, massive as it was, rose and fell on even more colossal mountains of water. All around them, as far as the eye could see, nothing but the chaos of raging walls of dark gray water, as solid as stone and just as cold. Leaguemen railed at them. They were madmen, perched high up in baskets on the masts. They shouted and flailed their arms and laughed as if nothing in the world was as grand as the fury of the sea. Nothing except their mastery over it. Mor had thought that she would never see a sight more frightening. She was wrong. Horror takes many forms.
It was horror that flowed in her veins when the red-cloaked men returned for them. They came in the morning, striding through the sleeping children spread around belowdecks. They kicked and punched as they went, shouting obscenities and vile threats and finding mirth in every cringing face. They knew where Ravi was, and they came for him. For her. Ravi fought them, but it was not a fight he could win. Watching as he kicked and twisted, and as the soldiers' fists snapped out again and again, Mor wanted to shout. But not just as the vile men. At Ravi, too. Stop fighting them! Stop doing just what they want you to do!
The red-cloaked soldiers pulled Mor and Ravi away from the others, hauled them up onto the deck and shoved them here and there, led them down a long, narrow ramp from the middle of the behemoth hull of the ship to a dock. And then the cloaked men with their elongated heads and fragile bodies were beside them. She remembered that one of them had fingernails several inches long, curving things, curling back on themselves. After that they were on the strangest of boats, sleek and white and propelled by some power within it. The vessel cut against the currents and against the wind. Though she had been at sea for weeks, Mor's stomach churned and spat out her insides, splattering foulness down her front. Ravi clenched her hand all the harder, but it didn't help.
The cloaked men-leaguemen, of course-delivered them into the hands of a woman who waited for them on a stone pier. She was the first woman Mor had seen since they boarded the league ship. She walked toward them like some princess. That's what Mor had thought. Like a princess, she wore a sparkling gown, snug on her slim form, a dress that flared out around her ankles and disguised the motion of her legs. She seemed to be propelled toward them as if on wheels. Her features were delicate, pale. Only when she stopped before them did Mor realize that the shapes beside her head that she had assumed were some sort of hat were actually her ears. On both sides they stretched up into points several inches higher than the norm, curving and twisting so that at their peaks they protruded to the side.
Perhaps it was the sight of them-or maybe it was the unnerving sensation of having firm ground under her feet again, or because she had eaten so little and then vomited and was weakened by it-for whichever or all of these reasons, Mor fainted.
She awoke a moment later, with the big-eared woman huddled over her, studying her. In the years to come Mor often thought of her face looking down, the first time she made eye contact with a Lothan Aklun. The woman grinned. "I hear your thoughts," she said, in a language that was not Candovian. It was like Acacian, which Mor understood a little, but different as well. Though she heard the strange words of the language, she also understood their meaning. The Lothan Aklun cocked her head and tugged on one of her elongated ears with a thin finger. "We do this for beauty, and to hear better." It was an almost comforting memory, the woman's voice kind, her words close to whispers. It was the first thing a Lothan Aklun had ever said to her, and it was the last thing she would ever mistakenly believe was kind about them.
Then came another boat ride once the leaguemen had departed, a small vessel but so fast skimming the waves that Mor felt like screaming. It cut between islands, swaying back and forth so that within a few minutes the view behind them became a maze of land and water. They passed for some time along the coastline of one large island, thickly treed and wild looking. Eventually, the boat docked at a small pier near an outcropping of rock. The woman led them out and up a stone staircase cut into the cliff. Ravi still clenched Mor's hand, and, when the woman stopped before a darkened doorway and motioned for them to enter, they s
tepped inside together, side by side. That was how she entered the chamber that she would remember every day for the rest of her life. That's how she walked on her own two feet into the soul catcher's mouth.
Skylene appeared in the doorway. She stood there a moment, frowning at Mor, her eyes soft even as her thin lips were pursed in judgment. Beneath her pale, sky-blue face were features born of the Eilavan Woodlands of the Known World. It was unlikely that any living in that place would recognize her as their kin, not behind that unnatural hue, not behind a nose stretched by an implant that made it beaklike, not beneath the jagged plumage jutting up like a crown anchored in her hairline. She may have been Mainland born, but now she was marked as a slave of the Kern, the clan that called the southern delta their ancestral homeland and took the blue crane as their totem divinity.
More beautiful than any crane, Mor thought, and then hated the fact that she had thought that once again, just as on so many occasions before. How frustrating that the tortures the Auldek put them through were also changes they grew to love. She looked away from her.
Skylene closed the space between them. She slid her arms around Mor's neck. She pressed her small-breasted body against her lover's back. "You shouldn't have hit him like that," she said.
"I know."
"He may be useful to us. Yoen and the other elders said-"
"Are you here to chastise me?"
Skylene took Mor's chin in her fingers and turned her head around. She leaned in and kissed her full on the mouth. Mor opened to her, hungry for her, thinking, for a few moments, of nothing save the texture of her lover's lips and feel of her teeth. She drove her tongue between them and found the answering luxury beyond.
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