The Obsidian Heart

by Mark T. Barnes

  “How long have you been able to do,” she waggled her fingers, “you know?”

  “I’ve been able to do some unexplained things since my years with the Dragons. But nothing like this. It’s gotten more pronounced since Amnon. It feels as if parts of myself are being, I don’t know, unlocked? It started slowly, after my missing years on the Spines. But I used the ahmsah a lot when we were in Amnon. A lot more than was wise. It’s changed me somehow. And my second Awakening? Ancestors only know what that’s opened up.”

  Shar took Indris’s chin in her hand. She stared into his eyes, face immobile, as if looking for something. “I’m serious. You need to speak to somebody about this.”

  He faked a look of revelation, eyes and mouth open wide. “Why don’t I just wander on up to the Sēq Chapterhouse and tell them! I’m sure that’d go well. They’d have me in front of the Suret faster than I could spit. May as well drop my trousers and bend over a barrel now.”

  She playfully slapped his cheek. “There’s no need to be snide. But I see how being dragged before the Sēq Council of Masters wouldn’t end well.”

  Indris walked down the gangway to where Ekko and Omen were seated beneath the broad canopy that made the Wanderer the centrepiece of a large pavilion. Rugs had been spread over the sand. Couches, camp chairs, braziers, and tables were scattered about. Hayden crouched near one of the Disentropy Spools, the device half dismantled, exactly how Indris had left it the day before yesterday. Hayden gave Indris a pointed look, then gestured to the dismantled device before returning to work. Indris needed to help the old man with the repairs, sooner rather than later.

  The smell of coffee was strong, where a small urn rested on a low table. Indris poured a small cup. “I don’t think the Sēq would be as interested in helping me as they’d be in helping themselves. I’ve tracked down an old friend from the early days of the Immortal Companions. She may have some insights.”

  “Want company?”

  “I wouldn’t mind,” Indris whispered in Shar’s ear as he hugged her goodbye, “but she would. She has a few trust issues.”

  “Be that way,” Shar sniffed with mock indignation, citrine eyes bright with humour. “I’ll keep these wild boys company ‘til you get back. What if Mari comes past?”

  “And what about the Spool?” Hayden said tersely. “Truth be told, I can muddle through repairing guns and the like. But this thing is a world of difference, and I figure me making a mistake, then all of us falling out of the sky because of it, ain’t so grand.”

  “This shouldn’t take long,” Indris said as he waved farewell to Shar and the others. “I’ll be back just after high sun. And Hayden—I’ll help just as soon as I get back.”

  It was a short walk through the winding lanes of the Shoals. Across the sun-bleached wood, split bollards, and knotted ropes of the Carnat-Farhi Bridge, then westward along the bustling Jahn-Markesh. He pulled the hood of his coat up, as much to keep out the glare of the sun as for anonymity. The smell of sun-warmed water faded, to be replaced by the competing odour of straw baskets piled with sea salt and pepper, saffron and turmeric, coriander and mint. Grilled fish, bent-necked ducks and thick slices of roast pork hung from hooks. Behind the waterfront stalls were the shadowed doorways of taverns and guest houses. Merchant factors. Traders and shipping companies. There were as many Humans as there were Avān on the streets, with a smattering of the nomadic felt-clad Tau-se, manes bright with polished fortune coins, and Seethe in their sky-toned vests and breeches. There was even a Seethe war-player, tall and lean in his serill cuirass and hauberk. His serill great sword was deceptively slender, almost as tall as its wielder, its scabbard hung with strands of red-tinted crystals that chimed with each step.

  After climbing a couple of terraces up Skyspear’s sheer face, the crowds gave way to the cool confines of specialised stores and studios. The blade-like towers of the War Academy jabbed the air over nearby rooftops, nestled amongst the flat roofs of the Royal University and the dirty ceramic domes of the almost defunct Alchemist’s Society, and the College of Artificers. Narrow lanes reeked of damp and urine. The sky narrowed to little more than a harsh blue-white bar overhead, as the old buildings leaned closer together as if conspiring with the shadows they made. Stairs, slumped in the middle like old saddles, were spotted with moss. Layers of fresh and faded graffiti marred the crumbling, psoriatic walls. Narrow windows with dirty glass and flaking paint squinted down. The occasional window was open, through which Indris heard students debating philosophy, history, and literature. Babies cried. Couples argued. There came the sounds of energetic sex on a creaking bed, the bed head rapped against the wall. And there was a miasma of smoke, refuse, and humidity that clung to everything.

  Indris breathed deeply when he emerging into the wider, cleaner streets of the Naktaja. It was a serpentine district, home to bookstores, stationers, scribes, sages, and the shops of mercenary librarians who had not fit in with the scholastic Orders. Most of the stores provided support to the university and its students. Streets, little more than claustrophobic laneways bordered by a wall of narrow buildings, formed a coiled maze of moss-edged cobblestones, windows dark as mirrors. Indris narrowed his eyes at the strip of sunlight that glared between the tops of the buildings. The air was musty with the smell of damp stone from the previous night’s rain.

  Set between two plain stone frontages was The Unwritten Word. It appeared an unremarkable place; tall windows shuttered more by verdigris than bronze. Set behind a fretwork cast-iron grill, the old wooden door was sturdy, scored, and scratched with use. Indris tried the grille to find it unlocked. To be on the safe side he knocked before opening the door.

  There was precious little space inside. Bookshelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling, as well as forming neat rows from front to back. Sandalwood perfumed the still air. Ilhen lamps, which gave clean white light without heat, hung like incandescent sunflowers by chains from the high ceiling.

  “Chaiya?” he asked quietly. “It’s Indris. May we talk?”

  There was no response for almost a minute. Indris stood alone in the silence and silvered light. Then his skin began to goose pimple from a sudden drop in temperature. Breath streamed from his mouth. Frost formed in tiny drifts around the window frames. It crackled as it blossomed like hundreds of tiny white flowers.

  “Indris.” The echoes of a feminine voice were everywhere and nowhere. Inside and through him. An involuntary chill trickled down his spine. The hair rose on the back of his neck. It was the effect all Nomads had on the living. Chaiya was one of the ephael—a spirit who took neither living flesh nor a simulacrum as her host. The voice came again, resonant and sepulchral. “What trouble brings the Ghost Tamer to my door? Though word is you have new names now.”

  “Chaiya. It’s been a long time. You’re not the easiest person in the world to find.” Indris looked around though could not see the Nomad. He looked to the lights above, almost as bright as daylight. Indris intoned a canto under his breath. Fingers of shadow stretched from the corners of the room, flowing like clouds reflected in a stream. Within seconds the room had darkened perceptibly.

  “I prefer not to be found. Cosmopolitan as the people of Avänweh may be, most still hate Nomads no matter what they say, or how liberal they pretend to be. Yet we were friends, you and I.”

  Chaiya materialised as the room descended into gloom. She was moonlight and shadows: a diaphanous, flowing sculpture of jade radiance etched in black. It was as if old paint had seeped into every translucent seam, line, and crease of her cassock. Between the self-realized strands of her hair. In the fine lines of her knuckles and the helixes of her ears. The Sēq Librarian from Manté was almost as Indris remembered, before she had died at his side. A triangular face with a pointed chin beneath long straight hair; high, broad cheekbones; large eyes with heavy lids; a small upturned nose. She even remembered her freckles, small black stars that floated on her spectral image.

  There were those cultures who said Nomads—gh
osts, spectres, phantoms, call them what they did—were the shapes of spirits projected by the light of the ahm. Indris could not say such was the case with any certainty. Or doubt. Yet there was a corona of light that wavered about her as if Chaiya were backlit by scores of candles. Her spectral form was much cleaner than those of vampires and ghuls, refusing to leave their rotting corpses in their desperate, degenerate, hunger for life. Better by far than liches, with their ornate, gem-worked, and scrimshawed skeletons, gifted minds always at work for personal gain at the expense of others.

  “Thanks for seeing me, Chaiya. I wouldn’t have come, but I’m in need.” As a kaj-adept, Indris could speak with Chaiya using the subtle vibrations of soul on soul spirits used to communicate. Her voice was a burr against his disentropic stain. It reminded him of the sound of the wind through pine needles.

  “There are few I’d reveal myself to. Fewer who could hear me,” the Nomad smiled. The room warmed slightly. “I owe my existence to you. What is it you need?”

  “Knowledge,” he replied honestly.

  “I take it what you’re after can’t be found in the Naqta-Avānweh?” Her smile in response to her rhetorical question about the Library of Avānweh was like a swirl of mist.

  “I need to know more about what was studied in Khenempûr. Not just the usual Esoteric Doctrines, but a wider view of all fields of study.” Indris swallowed at the mention of the name of Khenempûr. Almost three kilometres from end to end, its hyperbolic and elliptic towers, roads, and walls had almost been reclaimed by the jungles of Tanis. It was a rambling, haphazard city of strange angles and unsettling dimensions, built by those known in modern times as The Empty, razed millennia ago by the Time Masters. The Avān had eventually settled it after ousting the Seethe. It was one of the few places Indris knew of that had encouraged the complete study of the Esoteric Doctrines, regardless of ideology, or politics.

  “Khenempûr?” she asked. “There are few amongst the living or the dead who’d have memories of it. What do you need?”

  Indris chewed his lip. “What I’m looking for won’t be in any orthodox canon. I think it would need to be written in Hazhi’shi, or Maladhoring. Only the original, specific language—not a translation—would accurately express the underlying philosophies of the text. Given the source of what I need, I have an awful feeling it might be part of the Sifr Hazhi.”

  “‘The Draconic Dialectics’?” Chaiya floated forward, the hem of her cassock roiling like fine powder over the wooden floor. She reached out to touch him. A mortal gesture. Something many Nomads forgot was useless as they could no longer experience physical contact. Indris reached out to cup slightly chilled air in his hands. Comfort in the myth of touch. Her eyes, lanterns glowing out of, rather than windows in to her soul, seemed sorrowful. When she spoke again, her voiced hummed across the strings of his spirit. “What are you looking for? Come to think of it, can you even read Hazhi’shi or Maladhoring?”

  Indris shrugged awkwardly. “I never learned the language of the Dragons, or the high language of the Elemental Master mystics, though part of me knows I can read them when I see them—don’t ask me how I know that.” He continued. “My interest is in the mentalist disciplines, what the Sēq called the Mah-Psésahen.”

  “I’ve heard the name. In Maladhoring it’s the psukazha, and I can’t even pronounce it in Hazhi’shi, though it is supposedly a field of study within the Sifr Hazhi. I don’t know how useful that will be to you, given Draconic mysticism is sourced in their dreams, and their perceptions of reality. Gifted you may be, but you’re not a dreaming Dragon.” She drifted back as if caught by the breeze, her form stuttering for a moment with what Indris took to be anxiety. “Be careful, Indris. This is old power you’re looking for. It isn’t like the mental disciplines and controls you learned as a psé-adept. The Ilhennim have searched long and hard for another way to wield metaphysical power. Especially one with no side effects. Nobody has ever found one, and the Sēq still badly hunger for an answer. There were rumours of it being studied at Isenandar—the Pillars of Sand—before the school was destroyed.

  “Indris, there have always been legends of lost powers and new schools of thought. Wouldn’t they have been found by now? Have you considered such powers don’t exist?”

  “I’m pretty confident there’s some truth to the legends,” he said dryly. “And it was once believed nobody could flex disentropy to change the world around them, until somebody did it. If it was written anywhere, studied anywhere we know of, it had to have been in Khenempûr. Or the Spines, of course, but that would be a last resort.”

  “Or Isenandar—”

  “No, that would be my last resort. I think I’d take the Spines over going to the Pillars,” Indris said quickly. There were few places that elicited such thoughts of dread in a scholar as the Pillars of Sand, the very first arcane school. The Ascendents of the Great Houses were taught there, given insights into terrifying power, their eyes first opened to the consciousness of Īa. Sedefke and his chief disciples had trained them, and they had all become great—mental and spiritual giants—until they had tapped too deeply, and too quickly, into powers that had destroyed the school in a cataclysm that had become almost mythical. Even the history books did not mark Isenandar’s location, for fear of stirring into flame the destructive embers of yesterday. But of course the Sēq knew where it was, for digging amongst the bones of history was one of the things they did best.

  “It may take a while to get you an answer. The dead aren’t known for their perceptions of time. But there’s something you should know. I hear things, Indris. The dreams of the living are emanations of the spirit as much as the mind,” her voice part sighed, part echoed, ripples across his Disentropic Stain. “There’re those amongst the Sēq who’ve become very interested in you after Amnon. You need to be careful. The factions are growing as far apart as their agendas. Some of the scholars dream very dark dreams about you. Avānweh is dangerous.”

  Indris was uncomfortably reminded of his earlier conversation with Femensetri. Staying was a chance he would have to take for now. “My old sahai has mentioned as much. The Sēq are… uneasy. And that doesn’t bode well for anybody.”

  The ghost’s shape flickered, her face betraying her fear. “The barriers between worlds are collapsing, Indris. Something stirs in the deep, their dreams trouble us all. Even the dead are afraid.”

  “What do the dead fear?” But Chaiya was silent on the matter, as if to give her thoughts voice might make them real. Rather than probe further, he asked, “Would you please find out what you can about the Psésaren?”

  “Tread warily, Indris.” She drifted forward, a sculpted cloud, to occupy the same space as he. Indris smiled. Clearly she had not distanced herself from what it had been to be living quite yet. His thoughts turned to Omen. His smile faltered. It was only a matter of time before any Nomad forgot why they lingered in the physical world. Some were closer to such a fugue than others. He flexed his aura so it hummed across hers. The closest thing he could give her to physical connection.

  “Thank you, Chaiya,” he whispered. “I’ll be in your debt.”

  “Nomads need very little the living can give, Indris,” she replied as her form dimmed. Her next words were barely more than a hum in the gloom. “When I’ve an answer, I’ll find you. Until then, keep your eyes open and tread softly, if you know how to do such a thing.”

  Then she was gone.

  Indris banished the shadows he had summoned. The ilhen crystals shone bright once more. He left, closing the iron grille behind him.

  He turned at the clattering of pigeons to see a lone figure, hooded over-robe snagged by the breeze, standing at the far end of the deserted street. The person was an eclipse against sun-drenched buildings, leaning slightly, almost indolently, one hand on her hip while the other dangled, moving slowly, almost like a cat’s tail. He felt a chill in his blood at the sensation of the familiar. A posture he knew well, but should not be seeing here. Not after so long. Hi
s hearts seemed heavy in his chest, and it was difficult to catch his breath. Changeling moaned apprehensively.

  She stood for a moment before walking around the corner. Indris raced to the end of the street, yet they were gone when he arrived.

  “DISAPPOINTMENT AND ITS SHADOW, ANGER, ARE OFTEN BORN FROM DISILLUSIONMENT. DISILLUSIONMENT IS BORN OF OUR OWN EXPECTATIONS.”

  —From The Nilvedic Maxims

  DAY 348 OF THE 495TH YEAR OF THE SHRĪANESE FEDERATION

  “I sent you letters,” Nadir said as he spooned honey into a small cup of coffee. Mari leaned back in her chair so the light from the coffeehouse window was not in her eyes. Nadir became a contour limned in stark white. The other patrons became similarly spectral, anonymous cutouts against a harsh background, voices soft against the clack and clatter of porcelain cups and metallic spoons.

  Mari had not wanted to speak to Nadir at first, clinging to a resentment as comfortable as well-worn boots. His note had reached her this morning and she had intended to ignore it. Her mind had turned to the thought of languorous hours in Indris’s arms. She had even gone to the Wanderer, only to find the man she thought she may be falling in love with still asleep. She had been prepared to go on her way when her hand strayed to Nadir’s message in her pocket. Her defences had crumbled, without falling. Curiosity rose. It was a question of closure, she told herself.

  “Wouldn’t have mattered what you wrote,” she said dismissively. “You never told me much anyway. We were convenient. We’d meet—”

  “We’d love—”

  “We’d use each other, then go our separate ways until we had an itch we needed to scratch,” Mari finished. She shrugged off the sense of erotic nostalgia. “I’m as much to blame for the shallowness of what we had. I could’ve said no.”

  “Could you?” He blew across his coffee. A brief billow of steam coiled in the air. Nadir sipped, eyes half-closed in a familiar gesture of contentment. He had looked at her the same way a lifetime ago. “I couldn’t. I suppose that’s why I didn’t. But it wasn’t my choice to leave Shrīan, Mari. When Vashne exiled us we only had a few days to leave the country.”