After a long time in which all was silent as the stone around us, Hakatri said slowly, “Always you mortals have tortured yourselves.” He blinked, and the way his face moved was so alien that I had to turn away and then look at him anew before I could understand what he said. “But you torture yourself most when you seek answers to things that have none.”
“No answers?” Sulis was still shaking. “How can that be?”
The burning man raised his long-fingered hands in what I could only guess was a gesture of peace. “Because that which is meant for mortals is not given to the Zida’ya to know, any more than you can know of our Garden, or where we go when we leave this place.
“Listen to me, mortal. What if your messiah were indeed one of the Dawn Children—would that prove somehow that your God had not chosen that to happen? Would that prove your Ransomer’s words any the less true?” Hakatri shook his head with the weird, foreign grace of a shorebird.
“Just tell me whether Usires was one of your folk,” Sulis demanded raggedly. “Spare me your philosophies and tell me! For I am burning too! I have not been free of the pain in years!” As the echoes of my stepfather’s cry faded, the fairy-lord in his ring of black flames paused, and for the first time he seemed truly to see across the gulf. When he spoke, his voice was full of sadness.
“We Zida’ya know little of the doings of mortals, and there are some of our own blood who have fallen away from us, and whose works are hidden from us as well. I do not think your Usires Aedon was one of the Dawn Children, but more than that I cannot tell you, mortal man, nor could any of my folk.” He lifted his hands again, weaving the fingers in an intricate, incomprehensible gesture. “I am sorry.”
A great shudder ran through the creature called Hakatri then—perhaps the pain of his burns returning, a pain that he had somehow held at bay while he listened to my stepfather speak. Sulis did not wait to hear more, but stepped forward and kicked the witchwood fire into a cloud of whirling sparks, then dropped to his knees with his hands over his face.
The burning man was gone.
After a march of silence that seemed endless, the witch called out, “Will you honor your bargain with me now, Lord Sulis? You said that if I brought you to one of the immortals, you would free me.” Her voice was flat, but there was still a gentleness to it that surprised me.
My stepfather’s reply, when it came, was choked and hard to understand. He waved his hand. “Take off her chains, Avalles. I want nothing more from her.”
In the midst of this great bleak wilderness of sorrow, I felt a moment of sharp happiness as I realized that despite my foreboding, the witch, my beloved, even my tortured stepfather, all would survive this terrible night. As Avalles began to unlock the witch’s shackles, shivering so that he could hardly hold the key, I had a moment to dream that my uncle would return to health, that he would reward my Tellarin for his bravery and loyalty, and that my beloved and I would make a home for ourselves somewhere far away from this ghost-riddled, windswept headland.
My stepfather let out a sudden, startling cry. I turned to see him fall forward onto his belly, his body ashake with weeping. This seizure of grief in stern, quiet Sulis was in some ways the most frightening thing I had yet seen in that long, terrifying night.
Then, even as his cry rebounded in the invisible upper reaches of the chamber and provoked a dim rustle in the leaves of the shadowy tree, something else seized my attention. Two figures were struggling where the witch had stood. At first I thought Avalles and the woman Valada were fighting, but then I saw that the witch had stepped back and was watching the battle, her bright eyes wide with surprise. Instead, it was Avalles and Tellarin who were tangled together, their torches fallen from their hands. Shocked, helpless with surprise, I watched them tumble to the ground. A moment later a dagger rose and fell, then the brief struggle was ended.
I screamed, “Tellarin!” and rushed forward.
He stood, brushing the dust from his breeks, and stared at me as I came out of the shadows. The end of his knife was blackened with blood. He had a stillness about him that might have been fear, or simply surprise.
“Breda? What are you doing here?”
“Why did he attack you?” I cried. Avalles lay twisted on the ground in a spreading puddle of black. “He was your friend!”
He said nothing, but leaned to kiss me, then turned and walked to where my stepfather still crouched on the ground in a fit of grief. My beloved put his knee in my stepfather’s back, then wrapped his hand in the hair at the back of the older man’s head and pulled until his tearstained face was tilted up into the torchlight.
“I did not want to kill Avalles,” my soldier explained, in part to me, in part to Sulis. “But he insisted on coming, fearing that I would become closer in his uncle’s favor if he were not there too.” He shook his head. “Sad. But it is only your death that was my task, Sulis, and I have been waiting long for such a perfect opportunity.”
Despite the merciless strain of his position, my stepfather smiled, a ghastly, tight-stretched grin. “Which Sancellan sent you?”
“Does it matter? You have more enemies in Nabban than you can count, Sulis Apostate. You are a heretic and a schismatic, and you are dangerous. You should have known you would not be left here, to build your power in the wilderness.”
“I did not come here to build power,” my stepfather grunted. “I came here to have my questions answered.”
“Tellarin!” I struggled to make sense where there could be none. “What are you doing?”
His voice took on a little of its former gentle tone. “This is nothing to do with you and me, Breda.”
“Did you...?” I could scarcely say it. My tears were making the chamber as blurry as the black fire ever did. “Did you...only pretend love for me? Was it all to help you kill him?”
“No! I had no need of you, girl—I was already one of his most trusted men.” He tightened his grip on Sulis then, until I feared my stepfather’s neck would break. “What you and I have, little Breda, that is good and real. I will take you back to Nabban with me—I will be rich now, and you will be my wife. You will learn what a true city is, instead of this devilish, backward pile of stone.”
“You love me? Truly, you love me?” I wanted very much to believe him. “Then let my stepfather go, Tellarin!”
He frowned. “I cannot. His death is the task I was given to do before I ever met you, and it is a task that needs doing. He is a madman, Breda! Surely after tonight’s horrors, after seeing the demon he called up with forbidden magic, you can see why he cannot be allowed to live.”
“Do not kill him, please! I beg you!”
He lifted his hand to still me. “I am sworn to my master in Nabban. This one thing I must do, and then we are both free.”
Even an appeal in the name of love could not stop him. Confused and overwhelmed, unable to argue any longer with the man who had brought me so much joy, I turned to the witch, praying that she would do something—but Valada was gone. She had taken her freedom, leaving the rest of us to murder each other if we wished. I thought I saw a movement in the shadows, but it was only some other phantom, some flying thing that drifted above the stairwell on silent wings.
Lord Sulis was silent. He did not struggle against Tellarin’s grip, but waited for slaughter like an old bull. When he swallowed, the skin on his neck pulled so tight that watching it made tears spill onto my cheeks once more. My beloved pressed his knife against my stepfather’s throat as I stumbled toward them. Sulis looked at me, but still said nothing. Whatever thought was in his eyes, it had gone so deep that I could not even guess what it might be.
“Tell me again that you love me,” I asked as I reached his side. As I looked at my soldier’s frightened but exultant face, I could not help thinking of the High Keep, a haunted place built on murder, in whose corrupted, restless depths we stood. For a moment I thought the ghost-voices had returned, for my head was full of roaring, rushing noise. “Tell me again, Tellarin,�
�� I begged him. “Please.”
My beloved did not move the blade from Sulis throat, but said, “Of course I love you, Breda. We will be married, and all of Nabban will lie at your feet. You will never be cold or lonely again.” He leaned forward, and I could feel the beautiful long muscles of his back tense beneath my hand. He hesitated when he heard the click of the glass ball as it fell to the tiles and rattled away.
“What...?” he asked, then straightened suddenly, grabbing at the spot at his waist where the claw had pricked him. I took a few staggering steps and fell, weeping. Behind me, Tellarin began to wheeze, then to choke. I heard his knife clatter to the stone.
I could not look, but the sound of his last rattling breaths will never leave me.
Now that I am old, I know that this secretive keep will be the place I die. When I have breathed my last, I suppose they will bury me on the headland beside my mother and Lord Sulis.
After that long night beneath the castle had ended, the Heron King, as the Lake People called my stepfather, came to resemble once more the man he had been. He reigned over the High Keep for many more years, and gradually even my own brawling, jealous folk acknowledged him as their ruler, although the kingship did not outlive Sulis himself.
My own mark on the world will be even smaller.
I never married, and my brother Aelfric died of a fall from his horse without fathering any children, so although the Lake People still squabble over who should carry the standard and spear of the Great Thane, none of my blood will ever lead them again. Nor, I expect, will anyone stay on in the great castle that Lord Sulis rebuilt after I am dead—there are few enough left of our household now, and those who stay only do so for love of me. When I am gone, I doubt any will remain even to tend our graves.
I cannot say why I chose to keep this bleak place as my home, any more than I could say why I chose my stepfather’s life over that of my beautiful, deceitful Tellarin. Because I feared to build something on blood that should have been founded on something better, I suppose. Because love does not do sums, but instead makes choices, and then gives its all.
Whatever the reasons, I have made those choices.
After he carried me out of the depths and back to daylight, my stepfather scarcely ever mentioned that terrible night again. He was still distant to the end of his days, still full of shadows, but at times I thought I sensed a peace in him that he had not had before. Why that might be, I could not say.
As he lay at last on his deathbed, breath growing fainter and fainter, I sat by his side for hours of every day and spoke to him of all that happened in the High Keep, talking of the rebuilding, which still continued, and of the tenants, and the herds, as if at any moment he might rise to resume his stewardship. But we both knew he would not.
When the last moment came, there was a kind of quiet expectancy on his face—no fear, but something more difficult to describe. As he strained for his final breath of air, I suddenly remembered something I had read in his book, and realized that I had made a mistake on that night so long ago.
“...She will show me the Way of Black Fire or there is no other Hope,” he had written. “Either she will answer, or Death.”
He had not meant that he would kill her if she did not give him what he needed. He had meant that if she could not help him find an answer, then he would have to wait until death came for him before he could learn the truth.
And now he would finally receive an answer to the question that had tormented him for so long.
Whatever that answer might be, Sulis did not return to share it with me. Now I am an old, old woman, and I will find it soon enough myself. It is strange, perhaps, but I find I do not much care. In one year with Tellarin, in those months of fierce love, I lived an entire lifetime. Since then I have lived another one, a long, slow life whose small pleasures largely balanced the moments of suffering. Surely two lives are enough for anyone—who needs the endless span of the immortals? After all, as the burning man made clear, an eternity of pain would be no gift.
And now that I have told my tale, even the ghosts that sometimes still startle me awake at midnight seem more like ancient friends than things to be feared.
I have made my choices.
I think I am content.
As the Wheel Turns
Aliette de Bodard
Aliette de Bodard lives in Paris. She shares a flat with more computers than warm bodies, and with two Lovecraftian plants gradually taking over the living room. She has a day job as a Computer Engineer; and writes speculative fiction in her spare time, indulging in her love of mythology and history: her trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, Obsidian and Blood, is published by Angry Robot, and her short fiction has appeared in venues such as Asimov’s and Interzone, garnering her nominations for the Hugo and Nebula Awards.
Prologue: the Wheel
In the Tenth Court of Hell, stands the Wheel of Rebirth.
Its spokes are of red lacquered wood; it creaks as demons pull it, dragging its load of souls back into the world.
And before the Wheel stands the Lady.
Every soul who goes to the Wheel must endure her gaze. Every soul must stop by her, and take from her pale hands the celadon cup, and drink.
The drink is herbs gathered from the surfaces of ponds, tears taken from the eyes of children, scales shed from old, wise dragons. To drink is to forget; for no soul can come back into the world remembering past lives, or the punishments meted out to it within the other Courts of Hell.
No soul.
Save one.
1. Yaoxin (Wen-Min Empire), 316 years after the Founding
The old beggar was a sorry sight squinting through rheumy eyes. One of his legs was missing, and he leant on his crutch to make his slow, unsteady way on the road.
Dai-Yu, in spite of herself, watched him. There was something about him that drew the eye; something that made her forget the tea leaves and spices her mother had asked her to get from the market in Yaoxin.
He seemed somehow more real, more sharply defined than the rest of the world. Dai-Yu couldn’t explain the feeling, not even to herself.
As he passed by her, she drew a string of copper coins from her sleeve, and held it out to him.
The beggar’s hand brushed hers, sending a tingle of heat up her arm. He stopped, then raised her palm to the light, staring at the darker patch on her skin.
“I’ve had it all my life,” Dai-Yu said, apologetically. “It’s just a birthmark.”
“I know that mark,” the beggar said. “So you’re the one, the child they were promised.”
“What are you talking about?”
His fingers almost distractedly traced the outline of her mark. “Choicemaker. That’s what the sign in your hand says.”
He was crazy. He had to be. “It’s just a birthmark,” Dai-Yu protested. “I’m nothing.”
He looked up at her, his face deadly serious. “You are the arbiter. You will have to choose between them.”
The worst thing about the beggar wasn’t his crazy talk; it was the single-mindedness, the way he kept tracing until Dai-Yu stared at the mark in her hand, trying to see the characters he’d spoken of. “Who—?”
“Tiger,” the beggar said. “Crane.”
The words he used weren’t the names of animals, but rather their archaic forms. Even to Dai-Yu, who at fourteen had received no education other than the arts of housekeeping, they could only mean one thing. “The Founders?” She laughed, then stopped when she saw his eyes. The rheuminess was peeling away, revealing a keen gaze trained on her.
“Yes,” the beggar said. “You will have to choose.”
“Choose between what? The Founders have been dead for centuries! Demons take you, you’ve told me nothing!”
“There is a...an argument,” the beggar said. “A question they could not solve.”
“What question?” Dai-Yu asked, but he shook his head, and began walking away.
“Wait!” she shouted, but he wasn’t shuffling any
more—he was running towards the gates of Yaoxin as fast as one leg and his crutch could carry him.
Dai-Yu ran, too, steadily catching up to him—but then he passed through the gate, and she lost him in the marketplace. She stood shaking in the midst of the crowd, knowing she should have outrun him easily.
Later that night, she crept into the shrine of her ancestors, and stared at the very earliest tablet: the one that bore, entwined, the names of the warrior philosophers who had founded the Empire. Tiger. Crane.
The beggar’s words would not leave her.
Choice-maker. You are the arbiter.
2. Yaoxin (Wen-Min Empire), 321 years after the Founding
They came a few years later. By then, Dai-Yu had married, and moved into the house of the wealthy merchant He En-Lai as his second wife. She spent her days running the household and helping to raise the three children of the first wife.
One hot, stormy summer evening, Dai-Yu was sitting alone in the wives’ quarters, playing a mournful tune on the zither, when a gust of wind sent rain into her face. Startled, she got up to close the shutters.
And, slowly, became aware she was no longer alone.
She did not move. Guards, she knew, watched the house, and every door was barred.
“Dai-Yu,” a voice chanted, and it was the lament of the wind. Another voice took up the words of her name, and whispered, “Choice-maker.”
She moved, then, trembling, to face them.
They stood in darkness, both of them: vague silhouettes whose faces she could not see. They smelled of old, musty things, books left too long untended.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
One of them smiled. Teeth glittered in the shadows. “You are the child of the promise, Dai-Yu. You must choose.”
Choose choose choose, whispered the other voice, a raucous, rhythmical chant like the calls of birds.
Epic: Legends of Fantasy Page 16