The GodSpill

by Todd Fahnestock

  He paused, then shook his head. “No, Maehka vik Kalik.”

  Her heart sank. She had hoped to find them together. “What...what happened to him?”

  “I do not know. Like you, I have come to find that out,” he said. “I...could not protect him. We were separated. When I returned to where we were attacked, he was gone.”

  “Did they eat him?” Medophae asked the question Mirolah dreaded. Her stomach fluttered. It made her sick just to think about it.

  “I think not, Rabasyvihrk,” Stavark said. “There would have been...something left. There was nothing.”

  “Do you think they took him?” Medophae pressed.

  “I do not know.”

  “We will find him,” Mirolah said.

  “Yes, Maehka vik Kalik.”

  “Please call me Mirolah,” she said.

  He paused, then nodded slowly. “If you wish. I will do that.”

  “I wish,” she said.

  Medophae chuckled. They both turned to look at him. “I knew you could work miracles, but taking the formality out of Stavark, that is a feat. Stavark, who is your friend?”

  The girl quicksilver, taller than Stavark, maybe a few years older, stood respectfully at a distance, hands at her sides. She was a willowy thing, with long, slender arms and legs. She wore nearly the same type of clothing as Stavark: an ash-gray and green shirt belted at the waist, loose pants good for running through the forest, and soft boots. Her hair was waist-length and shimmering silver. The angles of her chin and cheeks were softer compared to Stavark’s sharp features, though still far sharper than that of a human, and her pointed ears were nearly as tall as the top of her head. Her eyes were huge. Mirolah didn’t know much about quicksilvers, but she’d be willing to bet Elekkena’s eyes were larger than average for a quicksilver. They were certainly larger than Stavark’s, and they were much darker, almost a graphite color.

  “Rabasyvihrk, Maehka...” Stavark paused, then corrected himself. “Mirolah, this is Elekkena.”

  Mirolah said, “She is your sister—?”

  “No,” Stavark interrupted. “She is a syvihrk who chose to accompany me.”

  “Stavark does not like me to be here,” Elekkena said. “He is brave, and he wishes to show his courage by pretending he is an island, connected to—and needing—no one. He feels this will prove to our people, especially his mother, that he is worthy. He does not realize that his legend is already large.” She paused. “In this alone he is shortsighted, but such a quality is found in the best leaders. It is an honor to assist him.”

  Stavark looked at Elekkena, his mouth open. Mirolah had never seen him stunned before. She glanced at Medophae, feeling like she had walked into the middle of something deeply private. “Uh.” She struggled to find words.

  “You are welcome among us, Elekkena,” Medophae cut in smoothly. He came forward, towering over her, almost twice her height, and extended his hand.

  “Stavark’s legend is large among the syvihrk,” she repeated. “But everyone knows of the Rabasyvihrk.” She didn’t take his hand, but instead descended into a graceful curtsey. “It honors me to be filled with your presence.”

  Medophae hesitated, which wasn’t typical of him. He was usually as graceful as a king in these kinds of situations. She wondered what he was thinking.

  “The pleasure is mine,” he said, hesitating again, then bowing.

  Elekkena turned to Mirolah. “Stavark speaks nothing but bright truths about you, Maehka vik Kalik. He says life trails behind the tread of your feet. I am honored to meet you.” She dipped into that curtsey again, like a graceful reed bending forward in a breeze.

  Mirolah couldn’t read Elekkena’s emotions. Of course, Stavark had been difficult to read in the beginning, but he was much more transparent now. She saw his desire to find Orem like a firebrand in the dark, a twin to her own desire. She saw his excitement at Medophae’s presence, masked by diffidence to ensure Medophae didn’t know how important he was to Stavark. She felt Stavark’s surprise and newfound curiosity when he looked at his Elekkena. That, perhaps more than anything else, aroused Mirolah’s own curiosity. Stavark did not know his companion well. She wondered how they had met.

  Elekkena’s aura danced with silvery rainbow colors like Stavark’s, but it danced with something more. Mirolah could not put her finger on it, but the girl was different. Could it be that all quicksilvers looked different? This was only the second one she’d ever met.

  “It’s good to meet you,” Mirolah said.

  “You’ll want to visit the library,” Elekkena said.

  Mirolah glanced at Medophae, then back at Elekkena. Was mind-reading something that quicksilvers did? Except Mirolah had been mind-probed, mind-controlled and mind-read before, and there was no invasion of her threads at the moment. “Well...yes,” she said. “You know Denema’s Valley?”

  “I have been here before,” Elekkena said.

  “Why the library?” Medophae asked.

  “If Orem survived and wanted to leave a message for me he would leave it there. It was the first place I’d intended to check.” Orem would know that. But Elekkena wouldn’t.

  She looked at the quicksilver girl. Mirolah ached to probe that strange silver-and-rainbow aura, but the girl was watching her. She sensed that if she tried to sneak into Elekkena’s threads and figure out what was different about her, the girl would know. It also smacked of something Ethiel would do. Mirolah’s curiosity was eating her alive, but taking from another—even something as innocent as knowledge—was a violation of privacy. She kept her threadweaver “fingers” to herself.

  Stavark trusts her. I will, too.

  “Why don’t Stavark and I inspect the site of the darkling battle,” Medophae said. “It was the last place we saw him; there might be something there. You and Elekkena check the library.”

  “Okay,” Mirolah said.

  Elekkena nodded as though there was no other possible outcome.

  24

  Mirolah

  Mirolah stepped into the old library. The memories flowed over her like a river. She stood a long time in the doorway, then called the bright bridge and connected herself to the threads running throughout each object in the room. At a glance, nothing had been moved, but the place danced with GodSpill. When she had first come here with Orem weeks ago, all she had seen was books, a broken ceiling, moss on the walls and water on the floor. Now thin strands of gold and blue, red and green streaked across the room.

  Orem had wanted to see the world this way, with the vision of a threadweaver.

  Where are you, my friend?

  She thrust away from the doorjamb and walked into the center of the room. Elekkena followed her like a ghost.

  Mirolah stepped into the puddles without a care. She knew now why nothing had ever decayed here. She knew why the moss had only eaten through certain books. She had discovered many things since her rebirth at Daylan’s Fountain. So many things about Daylan Morth, Harleath Markin, and the Great Dying had come clear.

  GodSpill had never completely left the lands; it was a raging river that had been dammed, leaving only a few sad mud puddles remaining. Life and GodSpill were intertwined. It was the force of creation from which the gods had made everything. For life to exist at all, there had to be traces of GodSpill. One could not exist without the other.

  That was why this library and this city had not completely crumbled. The spells laid on this place pulled from the scant, remaining puddles of GodSpill, enough to keep some of the books safe through the ravages of time. Every tome in this great library of Denema’s Valley had some kind of preservation spell laid on it. The books with lesser spells had fallen to the ravages of time, but not the greater ones.

  She drew a finger down one of the books. How that must have confounded Orem. To know there was a supernatural reason why the books stayed, but to be unable to see it, to explain it. She closed her eyes and pressed her palm against the spine of the book. She could almost feel him here, watching h
er study, forcing her to study.

  The tears came then, and she let her hand drop as she cried.

  That was when she saw it.

  The tiny orb, clutched in a silver claw that tapered to a needle point, hovered several inches above a nearby table. An open book lay beneath the orb. The memories flooded back to her. That was Harleath Markin’s journal and that strange artifact she’d found with it the night Medophae arrived.

  She moved closer, studying the subtle threads that swirled about the item. They were primarily blue and green. A few thin tendrils of red wound through like veins. The orb had called to her back then. She awoke from a deep sleep to its whispers in her mind, but she never had a chance to study it. Medophae had arrived that same night, at almost that same instant. Then the darklings. Then Ethiel. Her life turned upside down and the thought of some relic from the GodSpill Wars was forgotten.

  She lifted the orb from its place, and it went heavy in her hand. Holding it over another part of the table, she let it go. It fell, slowed, and righted itself, hovering a few inches above the wood.

  She didn’t know how to create something so intricate. Certainly Mirolah could create things, but they were huge, crude things, like the stairway down to the portal in Keleera. She could reform something that already existed easily enough, but something like this orb wasn’t just formed, it was filled with purpose. It protected itself and served a function, though she didn’t know what that function was.

  Mirolah touched the book next to Harleath’s journal. The Ways of GodSpill by Dessil Corvayn. It was the last book he’d been reading. Orem had wanted her to read this book so badly when she first arrived. Now she knew more about the threads than Dessil Corvayn had ever learned. She flipped through each page meticulously, looking for anything that indicated Orem had been here after the darkling attack. She looked for loose notes, revisited the two chapters Orem had made her memorize.

  There was nothing in the book, no handwritten notes in the margins or slips of paper tucked between the pages. She gently shelved it, but she kept Harleath’s journal and took the orb in hand. She suspected Harleath’s ghost had vanished once his horrible mistake had been rectified, but if she ever met him again, she would give him back his musings.

  She looked at Elekkena, who had respectfully kept her distance, studying shelves on the far side of the library. The lanky quicksilver girl never made any noise at all, moving along the floor like she was floating. Mirolah wondered what it must be like to be so graceful.

  Seeming to sense her stare, Elekkena turned. “Did he leave anything for you?” she asked, moving toward Mirolah.

  “Nothing to solve the mystery of what happened to him.”

  “We will keep looking.”

  “I don’t do well with mysteries,” Mirolah said. “An unanswered question is like an itch between my shoulder blades that I can’t reach.”

  “The curse of the threadweaver,” Elekkena said.

  “So you’ve heard of it,” Mirolah said. Orem had said almost the same thing to her.

  “Yes.”

  “You know, talking with Stavark, I find that he is unfamiliar with many common sayings and phrases that humans use. You aren’t.”

  Elekkena paused on the other side of the table. Her dark silver gaze held Mirolah’s.

  “I have traveled.”

  “A lot, apparently. You’ve been to this library before?” Mirolah asked.

  “Yes.”

  The girl’s silver and rainbow aura reminded Mirolah of Medophae’s golden fire of protection. Except that with Oedandus, the protection was just sheer power, a wall she couldn’t push through with all the GodSpill in the world. With this girl, it was like the threads shifted and moved in rotation, creating and recreating a net, holding in the girl’s emotions that would otherwise leak out, and...distracting Mirolah’s threadweaver vision. Mirolah found she didn’t actually want to look at it for long, like it was somehow repulsive, like it was convincing her to look away.

  That was odd. She itched to dig into it and understand it. Without putting her threadweaver “fingers” on it, Mirolah would guess it was some highly complicated threadweaver spell. Was the girl ensorcelled?

  Elekkena’s sharp cheekbones drew shadows across her jaw line in the singular torchlight. “What I told you was true,” she said. “Stavark will be a great leader of the syvihrk someday. He must be protected. I came with him to help him find his way, to be a companion to him. But there is more to my truth...” She paused. “I came to help myself, too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I came to find you,” Elekkena said.

  Mirolah opened her mouth to respond, then found she didn’t have any words to respond to that. “We...we haven’t met before,” she said.

  “You are the Maehka vik Kalik.”

  The Maehka vik Kalik... No. Could it be that this girl was...

  Mirolah reached through the threads and took a book from the high shelves behind Elekkena. She made the book float toward Elekkena’s back, slowly and steadily.

  When it had almost reached the quicksilver, Mirolah felt another tug on the threads. She let the book go, and it floated behind Elekkena. Ponderously, it floated around her, then dropped onto the table with a thump.

  “You’re a threadweaver!” Mirolah exclaimed.

  “Yes.”

  Mirolah moved around the table and wrapped the quicksilver girl in a hug. Elekkena went stiff, skittish as a rabbit, but Mirolah held on. After a moment, Elekkena accepted the embrace and hugged her back, just like Stavark had.

  “Humans are strange,” she murmured against Mirolah’s shoulder. “This custom of grasping another... It is like beasts trying to dominate each other.”

  Mirolah laughed softly and released her. “It is meant to be comforting.”

  “It is alarming,” she said bluntly.

  “I won’t do it again.”

  “No,” she said. “It is okay. It is important to...embrace the unknown.” She smiled briefly.

  “Have you told Stavark?”

  She shook her head. “I would prefer if only you knew.”

  “Please, sit,” Mirolah said. Elekkena looked at the chair, then sat down. Mirolah joined her. “Tell me what has been happening to you. Tell me what you see.”

  “I see colors sometimes,” Elekkena said. “I noticed this library. It has colors every now and then. And sometimes, when I reach out, I can see a bright tunnel between me and other objects. And through that bright tunnel, I can...touch the colors. Or, well, not actually touch them, but touch what makes the object. There are smaller parts within an object. Smaller...colors.”

  “Those are its threads.”

  She drew in a quick breath. “This is why we are called threadweavers! Those smaller colors are threads.”

  Elekkena couldn’t see them, but she could still make a book float. That seemed so strange to Mirolah. The first time she could do anything with the GodSpill was after she’d seen the threads for the first time. “How do you move things, then?” Mirolah asked.

  “I tell them where to go, but I can only move basic things. Just holding onto the book was difficult. I could make it float, and I could drop it, but I couldn’t make it spin in place. I could not open it and move the pages.”

  “I brought it from behind you so you could not see it. When did you notice the book was floating toward you?”

  She reached out her arm behind her head. “About here.”

  So her range was not nearly as long as Mirolah’s, and she saw the bright bridge, but not the threads, though she sensed that she was manipulating smaller pieces within the objects.

  “And sometimes,” Elekkena said. “I can see what others feel. Especially for those whose feelings trample over them. Those are easiest to see. But you, I cannot see. You have shifting colors, but no feelings that sneak out. And the Rabasyvihrk, I cannot see. A golden flame surrounds him.”

  That was why Mirolah couldn’t read the girl’s emotions. It wasn’t som
e complicated spell. It was what another threadweaver looked like!

  “Well, with Medophae,” Mirolah said, smiling, “just try looking at his face. What he feels is usually right there.”

  Elekkena gave a ghost of a smile in return. “Maehka vik Kalik, will you teach me how to use the maehka?”

  “On one condition,” she said.

  Elekkena regarded her seriously.

  “Stop calling me Maehka vik Kalik and call me Mirolah.”

  Elekkena hesitated, then nodded. “I would be honored to do so...Mirolah.”

  “Then I’m happy to help you.”

  “Thank you, Mirolah.”

  “Good. Let’s start tonight, a brief lesson right now, yes?” Having a friendly threadweaver around was exciting. Every threadweaver she’d ever met, besides the ghost of Harleath Markin, had tried to kill her. There was so much Mirolah could learn from Elekkena, even as Elekkena learned from her.

  “Okay, let’s just start with—”

  A whine cut her off, and she looked up to see the skin dog standing in the doorway.

  25

  Mirolah

  Mirolah stood up, and Elekkena slid fluidly from her chair to stand with her. The skin dog’s huge frame darkened the doorway, but he did not come inside.

  “A vyrkiz,” Elekkena said.

  “It’s okay. He’s with us,” Mirolah said. “I think.”

  “He is following you?”

  “Yes.”

  “He has not attacked you.”

  “No. He seems...almost afraid of me,” Mirolah said.

  “He can smell the GodSpill on you,” Elekkena said. “It is fearsome to him. Are you bonded?”

  “Medophae asked the same thing. No,” Mirolah said. “We aren’t bonded.”

  “Interesting,” she said.

  “That we’re not bonded?”

  “No, you are bonded. It is interesting that you don’t know it.”

  “He’s just trailing us. I think he’s curious about me. I haven’t done any bonding of anything.”