The Well of Prayers

by Anne Boles Levy

  Why drag Bugsy into this? There was no reason to trust him with anything Bugsy had said.

  “She’s a child. She doesn’t know much. Please, I want to give back this, this, talent or whatever it is.” I want to be strange, swampy Hadara again. How many other girls wanted to be me? None. Until a few six-days ago, I hadn’t wanted to be me, either. “I want to be done with all of this.”

  Instead of an answer, S’ami fished out his gold totem from his vestments. The wisdom knot shape fit comfortably in his palm. He whispered a few words in Tengali—a string of nonsense phrases about breath and wind.

  I perked up and glanced around. Nothing in the room moved, and there was still no sound. But a gentle breeze filtered through the shuttered windows. Pages flapped on an open book. Needing something to do with my hands, I closed the book. I placed it atop another stack.

  When I was good and ready, I gave his wisdom knot a sidelong glance, not trusting it or its owner.

  “Pale blue,” I said, watching the thin array of sparks rise.

  He nodded, and chanted about snow in winter. The room grew chillier, and the sparks brightened. My eyes didn’t lift from his totem.

  “Cerulean, or maybe sea blue,” I said.

  His intent wasn’t difficult to figure out. He went on this way, changing incantations, changing the hue of his magic, his eyes never leaving the gold weight in his hand. I could’ve lied or pretended I didn’t see anything, but I answered my best, even as the spells grew more complex and colors mixed together, becoming ever more subtle shades. S’ami had stumbled on the one way to keep me cooperating—give me a problem no one else can solve. I wonder if I wore that particular weakness like a hair scarf, but wrapped around my entire being.

  “We should stop,” he said at last. “Nihil, I’m sure, has already detected my casting. He will wonder what I’m up to.”

  “What will you tell him?”

  He shrugged. “Entertaining children. Or amusing myself.”

  “He’d believe that?” I was a terrible liar, and I had trouble understanding how anyone else could be good at it.

  “Nihil believes many lies, including his own.”

  That wasn’t the answer I was expecting.

  “Azwan?”

  “What if the first spell was someone’s younger sister?” he asked. “What if the more complex ones were a family? What if, by casting those spells, I silenced forever someone’s deep laugh, or halted a love song, mid-verse?”

  “I’m … I’m not sure I understand.”

  “I think, deep down, you do.”

  I shook my head. No. I did not. At all.

  “The Gek, the demon, this talk of being an undoer,” he said, waving vaguely around. “It seems you’ve been given a task from people in two separate worlds. And I join them in wanting you to complete it.”

  Two worlds? What two worlds? And he’d said that hated word.

  “Undoer.” A chill crept down my spine as I spoke it. “I wish to be a healer. You made the arrangements yourself.”

  He reached across for his water cup and raised it toward me, as if toasting me. “Of course. You were a model of compassion and decency with the soldiers after they were poisoned. And a quick study, too. As I said, reports from the sick ward are indeed satisfactory, so far.”

  No one had ever praised me like that. I was Hadara the wild girl, the lazy student, the bad influence on Amaniel. I had trouble reconciling that Hadara with what I was hearing. Was he flattering me? But Leba Mara did indeed call me her best apprentice. And, yes, Babba had said I was heroic, but parents are supposed to say things to cheer you up. But a model of compassion and decency? I was compassionate and decent and had a monster in my head, maybe. And the man raising his cup to me knew that better than anyone.

  My shoulders straightened as S’ami leaned in close again until his mouth was scarcely a finger’s width from my ear. He murmured, distinct but low. “You’ll heal what Nihil has harmed and undo nearly two millennia of tyranny and perversion.”

  “I’m to do what?” I shivered at the heat of his breath.

  “Don’t be coy. You love Nihil?”

  “Yes, yes of course I do, Azwan.” I was emphatic enough to sound convincing, I hoped. I was frantic to figure out what he wanted from me.

  “Then you’re the only one.” He gave me a self-satisfied look, but I only gaped back at him.

  I felt utterly lost. I had no compass to find my way out of this conversation or this room. I might have been a dreadful student, but these were uncertainties I’d never heard promoted as theology before. “But, I—”

  “No one loves him. Fear, yes. But not love. He’s a demon.”

  I kept sputtering in confusion. “He’s a what? No, no, he’s the Great Numen. A god. Is this a test? I did learn this in school, I—”

  Maybe one of these books held answers to this. No, no, they didn’t. I was pretty sure there was nothing anywhere about Nihil being a demon. Was there?

  “He is a demon, Hadara. You know it,” S’ami said. “You know sacrifices to him are nothing more than sanctioned rapes. He killed my daughter. She was twelve. Twelve! Just because he put her on an altar first doesn’t lessen the crime.”

  I didn’t need a conversational compass; I needed a map. I couldn’t navigate the wilderness of this man’s anger and grief, and I was all turned around by it.

  “Then this is about you,” I said, a bolt of understanding ripping through me. “About your loss, and your child. But what does this have to do with me?”

  Stupid question. It had everything to do with me. S’ami only said, “You tell me.”

  “You want me to use whatever powers you think I have. For you.”

  “For all Kuldor. Let’s be rid of that narcissistic pestilence once and for all. Join me.”

  Join him? He’d gone mad. Yes, that had to be it. His intensity gave it away with a sudden, fierce gleam in his eye. And who exactly ever had so many books? What was in them? So, yes, madness.

  Wasn’t it? Madness wasn’t in my anatomy text. Could a mind be broken?

  “This is blasphemy, isn’t it?” I said, keeping my voice measured, calm, rational. “I mean, if you really mean all this.”

  “Oh, it’s blasphemy, alright. And I mean every word.”

  I leaped to my feet. My thoughts were in a thousand places at once, from the sick ward to the warehouse to Nihil and S’ami and everything he’d said and back again, around and around. The stretch between the doorway and me looked a thousand body-lengths wide. I wanted to run the whole way.

  My thigh hit a stack of scrolls, which spilled onto the floor. My words tumbled with them.

  “You’re his priest. His highest priest. So this is just a test and I’m failing. And that’s fine.”

  I headed toward the too-far-away door, but he was on his feet faster, the scrolls kicked out of range. He lunged, intent on his point, his voice a throaty growl. His fingers wrapped around my upper arm, but I held my ground. He wasn’t going to hurt or kill me, not when there was some chance of winning me over.

  Which there wasn’t.

  “Nihil comes from the same distant realm as the demons,” he fumed. “Another world entirely, but they can’t take physical shape. That’s why they try to steal ours when they get here. They’re just minds, free-floating; souls adrift in the vast universe.”

  This—wasn’t what I’d expected. I let it sink in a moment, this idea of a free, unattached soul, finding its way to a man’s body and becoming Nihil. Finding its way to me and becoming … what? A thought bubbled free from deep inside my head, where I’d been afraid to think it. I’d come here seeking reassurances, not answers. I’d wanted the Azwan, the one who was supposed to know everything there was on the subject of demons, to tell me I was fine, that I was within some otherwise normal range of weird. I wanted to leave here feeling happily, cheerfully different, not damned.

  I plopped back onto a cushion, afraid to meet his gaze and his suddenly smug look.

 
“Demons come from the stars,” I said, as flatly as I could manage. “I’m quite sure that’s in one of these books. Maybe all of them.”

  “A simple explanation for simple minds. Which yours isn’t.”

  Nihil blast that man for flattering me again. No one in the Temple hierarchy would ever suggest I might be smart. Except him. I let him pace in front of me, mentally measuring how I could duck around him and flee, if needed, even as I felt the will to do so seeping from me. A free-floating soul in my head? I still hadn’t gotten used to the one I was born with.

  “Alright, then, what are they?” I said. “How do they live without bodies?”

  He nodded, smiling, clearly pleased with my questions, but kept up his pacing. “They’re fine in their realm, as best I can tell. They only need one when they fall to Kuldor.”

  “And that’s in these books?”

  He paused in his pacing and rummaged through a stack, tugging out a thick, leather-bound volume. “My father is the greatest astrologer who ever lived. If there had been evidence, it would’ve been in here.”

  The volume landed with a thud back on the table. Its title, in Tengali letters, meant nothing to me. Apparently, I could only understand other tongues when spoken. The written word only yielded its meaning in my native language.

  “Nihil must’ve shown them how, as they’re the same species,” he continued. “He steals one of ours, and we lovingly call it an incarnation. He’s been walking around in the current body for, oh, about a hundred and eighty years and yet it looks fresh-picked. Not a day over forty. The man who first inhabited that flesh and animated those limbs? Long dead. But the body, Nihil’s appearance—if you could see it—is flawless. Ever wonder how he does that?”

  “You’re going to tell me that magic is the simple answer.”

  “You’re learning.”

  “So the right answer is?”

  “He steals the power for it. Which you must know. Tell me you know this.”

  “What power? You mean magic itself?”

  The S’ami who answered was a different man—not the smooth, arrogant one I remembered. This one was a raging river barely concealed behind a stone dam, the controlled tone holding back roiling whitecaps of contempt. “How they must hate him. He’s a parasite. He sucks up their life-force for his magic. Every time I cast a spell it harms these invisible creatures. You can’t blame them for trying to stop him.”

  “So his magic has a source.” My mind raced, brimming with questions. “And it’s these, these spirit people?”

  “It’s one source. Not the only one. The other sources are irrelevant. This is the one that eats at me. If they are anything like Nihil, but his opposite, then they’re a magnificent race. Powerful, knowing, true. And good—which he is not.”

  His anger was real, then. S’ami was really blaspheming. I wasn’t ready to absorb it. The ghosts of all those welts on my wrists cautioned me against believing anything the Temple said too readily. Traps and lies; this was the Temple of Doubt’s currency, with which they bought obedience.

  “How do you know this?” I asked. “At the altar, you said the demon can’t be trusted.”

  “I spoke true. The demon didn’t come to help us.”

  “I knew that, Azwan, I did. But how do you know any of it?”

  Some of the tension eased out of him and the sorrow returned to his face as he stopped pacing. “You are entirely too clever. And I’ve let you slip into impertinence again. The question of trust, you see. How do I know what I know? I’m unlucky enough to be one of the better mathematicians to ever curate the Boundless Repository. Nihil’s earliest diaries are written in code. Very early, before he learned to lie even to himself.”

  “Who commits such terrible deeds to parchment?” Wonder had overcome my fear.

  S’ami scowled. “Look, this is the wrong approach with you, as I suspected. You have already seen with your own eyes what trouble Nihil causes. It’s no different anywhere he reaches. It is the price of the magic I wield on his behalf. When you don’t just see it, but understand it, you’ll beg to join me.”

  “Join you in what?”

  “You will have to imagine that answer for yourself. Now leave me be. I’ve said my piece for the day and I need time to myself.”

  He turned away at that, shoulders hunched, all the animation suddenly evaporating.

  “You’re dismissing me? You tell me all this and I’m supposed to go and, what, have a lovely Sabbath? After this?”

  I went to stammer something, anything, but S’ami waved vaguely toward the door and spoke. “Yes, do have a lovely Sabbath. It’s a magnificent day.”

  “Azwan …”

  He shrugged and gave me a nasty sidelong glare. “Look, do what you always seem to do. Gather your family around their hearth and gossip. The mad Azwan ought to be a lively tale. Don’t leave out the part about you being partly possessed.”

  My heart began pounding again, my tongue thick in my throat. “You said I wasn’t.”

  “I said no such thing.”

  “Azwan—”

  He cut me off. “Show up on time for your training and do as the healers ask. Be sure to tell me any other unusual talents you develop. And if you should think of some way to help your people, be sure it’s prudent and doesn’t leave a mess. I hear you’re handy with a mop.”

  12

  I shall tend for you a garden of fragrant blooms and fruit always ripened, that you may pluck from any tree and find succor, and expend yourself in delights unknown in life. These you shall find in death.

  There shall blossom in my garden a shade tree beyond all others that shall cast its cool shadow upon all who seek refuge beneath its perfumed boughs. There you shall rejoin loved ones and friends and people of virtue you once knew, that you may enjoy their company with no constraints of time or rivalry.

  All that is knowable shall be known; all that is doable shall be done. For my garden shall be your paradise, that you shall know a life of ease without end.

  —from Oblations 3, The Book of Unease

  I was going to have anything but a magnificent day.

  It was the Sabbath, the market stalls along Caller’s Wharf were all shuttered, and I found myself weaving around them aimlessly, sometimes stopping to lean against one, trying to ward off a sense of dizziness.

  Nihil, a demon.

  No. How?

  S’ami had told me how: our numen was another race’s demon.

  The meant every time Leba Mara healed someone, Nihil robbed some creature of its life-force. Nihil the demon.

  I thought I was alone in suspecting Nihil had limitations and that he couldn’t do everything he claimed. Perhaps a part of me had clung to the idea that all his little lies were in service to some higher truth—some noble, ultimate purpose. But S’ami didn’t believe even the doctrine he was preaching. And what S’ami had revealed meant he’d gone far, far beyond the blasphemy of doubting and into furious rebellion. Should I believe him?

  I gave my whole head a quick shake, as though dust had landed on me.

  How could I know what to believe any longer?

  After avoiding the question for so long, I was staring into the dark pit where all my faith used to be.

  Nihil, the demon—who wasn’t a god. And if Nihil wasn’t a god, then none of the rest of it was true. There was no Eternal Tree and no afterlife, not for anyone. No reason to pray or pat my heart or make the vomit-hands or any other pious sign. It wasn’t simply that the Temple of Doubt spouted lies; it was built on one.

  My surroundings blurred.

  It was all a lie.

  All the welts I’d gotten studying Scriptures that, for all I knew, were total fiction.

  My grandmother had been hanged—martyr to a lie. How far had her own doubts taken her? To the gallows. Just like Widow Reezen.

  And no hereafter; no reward or redemption or everlasting bliss for loyalty to Nihil, the spirit-thief. Only the unending blackness of death, for us and for those spirit crea
tures he killed one spell at a time. That couldn’t be. How could it?

  I leaned against a kiosk. The force knocked a gourd loose from a strand of them hanging overhead. It fell with a hollow thud and rolled at my feet. I gave the fist-sized squash a solid kick, sending it spiraling away, chips of its flesh flying in every direction as it bounced against cobblestones until it smacked against the corner of another kiosk and wedged there.

  I’d just destroyed a piece of someone’s inventory. Did I feel better now? No.

  Maybe I wasn’t ready to toss away all my most cherished beliefs. Nihil had to be god, even if he was only our god and nobody else’s, just the god of Kuldor and not the whole universe. Maybe it was a matter of perspective. He was a demon to his enemies; and they were demons to us. Yes, that must be it.

  I wasn’t ready for my personal abyss to be real.

  My legs wobbled and I clutched the side of the stall, my head against my hands. I expected my stomach to upend, but it didn’t even flutter. It wasn’t fear overtaking me, then. Something else, a mix of feelings I couldn’t sift through and pick out by name. Questions and ideas jumbled in my head, but mostly about S’ami, at the heart of this whole mess, one of the Temple’s most powerful people but plotting Nihil’s overthrow. Why do it this way, recruiting an ordinary teenager on a faraway island?

  But he hadn’t hired me on—the Gek had.

  The star comes to you as you come to it.

  The Gek chieftain had told me this. I’d gone out to the swamps to guide S’ami to the Gek. The lizardfolk had retrieved a glowing egg that held the demon. No one knew that then. All anyone knew was that a falling star had crashed into the marshes, and the Gek had gotten there first. And whatever they’d found, they’d put in that tin box.

  They had a much bigger task in mind than getting the Azwans back on their ship to the mainland. That’s all I’d wanted: for everything to go back the way it was and for people to look at me as someone who knew a few things, as someone who could muster a little respect from the Ward and my sister and everyone else.