by Segoy Sands
“A heart doesn’t weigh much. Not an ounce more than an ugly, bloody pump ought, to do its job. It’s an important job. It’s a fight to live, in every moment. The heart and the brain are smarter than we are. The one never stops beating and the other never stops thinking. A bear that isn’t too hungry will go after the sweetmeat in the skull. It’s grey and grooved, with a line down the center like a chestnut, with an inch of hard shell around it. Skeleton on the outside, like a crab. Two eyeballs attached by long stalks.
“In the ring, we have rules. Don’t hit the vitals. On a battlefield, it’s another thing. You crack skulls to hurt the brain. You punch through ribcages to puncture the heart. It’s your heart and brain against theirs, looking through eyes, using arms and legs, muscles and mollusks at war with each other. But you don’t really win fights with your heart or your brain. You win with your mind. Mind doesn’t belong to muscles and mollusks. Mind doesn’t weigh anything at all. When you fight in the ring the first time, you glimpse the fact that the mollusk and the mind aren’t identical. Your mind gets shocked out of your body, and it’s like death. You never fear death the same again. You can stop living as a mollusk, but it’s up to each of us to decide for ourselves.”
“I hurt the Darad,” Dillan said.
He crinkled his nose. “No. You taught him the lesson that only warriors learn. And he taught you.” Je stood up, crossed the room, and paused at the door. “Don’t run back to your uncle.”
5 The undertower
As she headed down the stairs, Dema shook her head. It had all been a charade, from the day they quietly ushered a waif from Paidrin into La Sierrellä, pretending to pay her little more than the usual attentions. Standing near her, Dema had felt something. What did it mean to be an avä? That question hadn’t occurred to her before. Even in the presence of an aksa, one felt spontaneous devotion. Gáire had drilled into her the importance of resisting the impulse to serve the aksas. The Calyx was useless if it could be influenced by the sweetness, a sham if the aksas, even the ama, stood above it. The Calyx served only the Lady.
But where to draw the line? What was the line between an avä and the Lady? And which avä was closer to the Calyx than La Teine, who saw no deed as impure, and taught that passion, even in its excess, was closer to wisdom than reason? To follow La Teine was to seek to see, with one’s own eyes, how passion infused everything. She had climbed a few short stairs with an avä. Was she devoted now, without even knowing it? Would Gáire have anticipated just that?
She hadn’t felt this way about the three viaisas locked up there in the tower. The twins hadn’t even known that the warmth, the tummo, would rise in them all of its own. For a month or two, they’d cried their eyes out about being rare lakeshas of the red wind, so naive they couldn’t sleep for fear of traveling la narañanye into the Ignis to become unwilling demon consorts. Once they discovered the warmth, though, they’d taken to strolling their apartments naked, even in the dead of winter, filled with the bliss, like they didn’t feel their imprisonment. Like demons. What of this girl, Ashe, though? Did she really not know her connection to La Teine? Did she think she was just another red naalöyö from Paidrin?
La Teine or no, she grew giddy as any novissi on the seven-hued stair. The apartments of the tower might seem opulent to her, but they might lose their charm if she ever laid eyes on the Opal, the upper levels of La Sierrellä, where the ambas and aksas lived, or even the comparatively modest rooms of the undertower. Of the five Calyx petals distributed throughout the Sierrellä, the one beneath ‘the tower’ was the most envied, mainly for its windows. She didn’t have a window in her room (and liked to sleep in darkness), but Gáire certainly did have a window, not to mention the extravagance of stained glass in the common honoring the exploits of the Calyx down the swift-running centuries. The windows weren’t for fresh air. One couldn’t smell the desert in La Sierrellä, where conings in thirteen different nodal points produced sweet air. Light was the good of a window, and light was only for the turning back, when one had already walked in the inward path of the Spiral and was ready for the outward path. But no one asked sisters of the Calyx to be sannya. Gáire’s propensities, toward food, wine, music, fine fabrics, and other sensory delights made the the undertower a place more of conversation and mutual understanding than a place of self-denial.
Dema was headed to the undertower, where she knew there would be intense curiosity about La Teine avä. Outside the Calyx, no one would know of her, except for the Spiral Mother and a few of her confidantes. At home with her Calyx sisters, though, she could tongue-wag as she willed. And today she willed. She wanted to see the looks on her sisters faces when she told them the exalted personage for whom the Tower had been designed, absent from residence for at least a generation, vital to the survival of the Spiral, was painfully naive. Passing under the familiar lintel with the bright green Calyx insignia, and strolling through the doors, she found Clymene, Céilí, and Olivia lounging on the floor, where rainbow light streamed into the room. They were eating minced olive and garlic with limes and maize flatbread, laughing like wild birds. Of course it was all an act. They were dying to hear about La Teine. She flopped down among them, poe-faced.
“Gáire wants to see you,” Olivia said, curtly.
“Now?” She had not expected that. Céilí and Clymene had hardly acknowledged her presence.
“Now,” Olivia nodded.
Dema let her eyes widen dramatically, but there was nothing to say. She crossed the room to her terä's private door and knocked. There was a rather long silence before Gáire’s voice mildly entreated her to come in.
“I’m sending you to Tercera, Demaretta,” she said. At her desk, amid the greenery of potted vines, her face was pure Calyx mask, the one she showed everyone in the outer Sierrellä and in the outer world. Dark haired and smooth cheeked, she could be anyone’s mother. She could blend in anywhere, become anyone’s friend. If someone was going to kill you, you wanted it to be her. You would never feel a thing.
“Lord Xander is receiving a gift that does not belong to him.”
Dema did not allow herself to show emotion. A mission outside was always welcome, and Ojeida was her birthplace. She’d very likely see her flamboyant brother, Alastor. Even if she didn’t, Tercera would be amusing. It was the first place, as a little girl, that she’d ever seen sisters of the Spiral, coming and going to the summer palace on the hill as if they owned it. Surely they still did, even if Lord Xander was the official rapier-in-residence. Every signal Gáire was sending her said that this was going to be mortally interesting.
“It would please me to visit him,” she said.
Her terä looked bored. “Thank me later.”
6 the sionach
At first he imagined some excited creature of inconstant size, a small white dog or large white bear, was licking him. When he opened his eyes, though, it was only leathery old Merb sprinkling the last warm droplets from his gourd, backwash no doubt, in his face. Burnt was standing a few feet behind Merb, looking staggered. The horses were up on the rim of the crater.
“Heat got to you, son,” Merb said. His sharp eyes, nested in creases, were like blue tarns in a rugose expanse of volcanic basalt. He wiped sweat off his splotchy brow with the back of his hand. “You were like a baby dreaming of its mammy’s teat, so apologies for waking you. But we’d best get out of this infernal hot hole. ”
It took both the men to stand him up. A little while later, he was standing next to the horses, though he couldn’t remember scrambling back up the blue-powdered slope. Burnt was pushing a flaccid gourd into his hands. His throat was so dry he nearly choked on the water. He was still hearing and seeing countless bright radiances. If he paid attention to them, they seemed to grow more insistent and intense. He tried to talk instead.
“I saw something. A silverfox.”
Merb raised a jagged eyebrow, but Burnt looked anxious and preoccupied. Nightmare, Cole realized. The huge black creature was slick with sweat and ha
d a visible case of thumps, its flanks twitching in time to its heartbeat. His head was lowered, his nostrils flaring, and his breathing much too fast. At this time of day, with the sun high, the heat hadn’t yet even peaked. Here they were, three fools hours away from their only known water source, with three overheated horses, none fit for riding, particularly the destrier.
“Save that story for when we get back to the Tourmaline,” Merb said. “It’s a damned sight hotter than I reckoned. We ride slow for now. Cole, let’s put you on Nightmare, to spare him Burnt’s weight. Birds, rodents, dry stream beds, bottoms of hills, they can all mean water. Eyes open. I seen some rock to shade beneath, south of here, if it comes to that. We can wait the sun out.”
“Let’s find that shade, now,” Burnt said.
They were outwardly calm, but it was clear they were deeply worried about being caught on the scree after dark. Wolves would have their scent for certain. For now, though, there was little choice but to find a shady spot under a barren outcropping and sit there glumly, swatting away the fat flies that buzzed around ready to deliver a painful bite to the slow or unwary. Nightmare kept twitching and looked like his name, and the other two horses were sunken eyed and low spirited. The slow hours passed. They didn’t wait for the sun to get so low that it was actually cool, but at least missed the worst heat. They still had a shot of getting close to the Tourmaline, and maybe finding water before night and its familiars closed around them. The only hitch was that Nightmare would no longer take a rider. They each had to take turns jogging alongside the others as they rode.
Cole found some of his strength had returned, and that he could jog along fine despite his thirst. If he had to be in an awkward situation like this, Merb and Burnt were the ones to be in it with. Once they realized he wasn’t much worse off than they were, they relaxed. He’d fainted, but the temperature in that blue scorch had been murderous. He was probably crazier in their eyes for going in there than for rambling about silverfoxes. There must have been volcanic vents. The place had actually steamed. The heat had knocked him out and he’d had an interesting dream, maybe even a true dream, but if it had been real in any way, where was the kila? Waking up empty-handed was a shame, but it wasn’t the first time he’d woken from a dream feeling like he’d lost something. That’s what he was, a dreamer, the kind with kingdoms in his pockets, and all the invisible forces of the world at his disposal, but holes in his shoes and dirt on his face.
For now he was enjoying the two older men’s tense survival mode. He could learn something useful from that. It was all in the details. Instead of taking it for granted that Nightmare would hold out, and that the wolves would keep at bay, they stayed on high alert, like taut bow strings, scrupulous about keeping their bearings and reading the slightest seam or wrinkle in the terrain. Three men with heat exhaustion could easily lose their sense of direction. Attention to details made the difference between life and death.
When they actually started down out of the scree, in early twilight, and began to see signs of vegetation and quick little rodents, the horses grew nervous. If anything, they should have scented the river and been eager to get down, but Nightmare stopped, nostrils flaring, ears twitching, tail swishing, and the other two horses stayed close to him. It might have been wolves or scree cats, but there was also a faint tang of smoke on the air.
“Something’s wrong,” Merb said.
Merb had been howling all the past week about the rashness of marching so close to the Tourmaline. In that arid territory between Welen and Rune, tempting as it might be, shooting right through the ravine made ambush easy and retreat difficult, penning men and horses up against a river infested with neree, snake fish four feet long with vicious hooked fangs. Merb had been trying to get Burnt to convey this to Hayden, only Hayden wasn’t listening. He rode with his coterie, with small regard for a gap-toothed old timer like Merb, which naturally made Merb’s griping worse. He kept going on and on about how it was high time some of the men broke off and followed Cole, because it wasn’t any good, a hero like Cole in Hayden’s roth iarann. It drove Hayden to acts of bravado, stunts that would get them ambushed and killed, such as marching block-headedly along the Tourmaline. Merb didn’t seem to care that the last thing Cole wanted was to lead his own band, and, if bravado was Hayden’s worst failing, Cole had that particular fault in spades. Still, something did feel wrong tonight.
“Horses spook,” Burnt pointed out.
“That Grael high-horse of yours is thirstier than you are,” Merb rejoined, “but he isn’t stupid enough to ride another step. He knows something ain’t right. We want water bad, but thirst won’t kill us tonight.”
“Alright, we stop,” Burnt said. “But I’m scouting for water.”
As soon as they had a small fire going, and the horses were reasonably calm, Cole found himself praying for Burnt to come back with the gourds full. Merb sat with his back against a rock, his body almost slack but his old eyes alert to the gathering shadows. Facing him across the fire, Cole tried not to think about water.
Merb’s voice was dry and slow. “I knew a fella once stepped into the Nog and met the Sí. Most wouldn’t credit it, but there are signs. This particular fella, his hair turned white overnight. He lost his taste for certain things, too. Spirits. Arachuan. Wouldn’t touch ‘em. He had a keen sense for danger, too, after that. I been in the Cora that long I seen many a man take injury, but not this fella. Always kept out of harm’s way.”
“Where’s he now?” Cole asked.
“Out of harm’s way,” Merb said. “Point is, some of the Si’ll give you a boon, others’ll get inside your head and change you. Mebbe it amounts to the same thing,” he coughed. “That blue scorch was a sior, but not for me and Burnt. We couldn’t even find it, two feet in front of us. Then the air clears and there you are, curled up like a baby at the center of a blast furnace.” Merb smiled sourly. “Thing is, if a man talks about it, well, folks don’t believe him. He seems a fool, and soon enough, he can’t touch anything without bungling it. Every day he seems to fall a little lower in the estimation of the world, and sure enough in his own, too. A fella’s met a silverfox, everything around him gets lucky, or unlucky, tenfold.”
“Did your friend talk?” Cole asked.
“Well, that’s hard to say.”
Cole listened to the fire crackle. “You’re a strange one, Merb.”
“Mebbe I am.”
Night sounds gathered around them. Cole added wood to the fire, to keep the horses enough in the light to discourage wolves without announcing their presence too loudly. Just as true dark was settling, they heard hollow-sounding hoots, three in a row, Burnt’s signal. It meant danger. Cole sat up in a low crouch out of the light, his blade drawn. Merb stepped back into shadow, too, and for a few minutes all was quiet, until he heard the two older men murmuring, and then a third voice.
They moved into the light and Cole could see that Burnt had brought Uilliam, one of the bands handful of Uxurians. Cultured, intellectual, and vain, they were suspected by some to ride in the Cora only to impress each other, or to pretend that their advanced ideas had let them beyond abstraction to action. Short, with a receding hair line, and a long, sharp nose, usually Uilliam was the picture of self-involved urbanity, but right now he looked desperately vulnerable. His eyes were bloodshot, his hair was matted, and there was dirt, smoke, and blood in his face. Somehow, in addition to finding Uilliam, Burnt had managed to fill two gourds. Cole accepted one eagerly, took several shallow swallows in quick succession, then passed it to Merb. Uilliam’s face was gaunt and haunted.
“Binturongs,” he shuddered.
Merb spat and shook his head.
“Came on us after dusk, from the hills. Took Hayden by surprise.”
“How many?” Merb asked.
“A mounted horde, three times our number. Near four hundred bows.”
Burnt confirmed. “The tents are razed.”
“Some broke for the river,” Uilliam said, kneeling i
n front of the small campfire. “But there was something there. Coils in the water. It came walking out onto the sand, long and scaly and whiter than a drowned soul, a woman so shapely I couldn’t take my eyes off her.”
“Rusalka,” Merb said.
“She’s out there, luring them down that are holed up in the rocks.”
Cole gave an involuntary shudder. Binturongs were more than enough. A rusalka was something he’d never hoped to see. They called her the butcher’s wife. Probably they meant the charnel ground kind of butcher. They also called her the smooth-bellied woman. They said men went willingly into her arms, urgent to conjoin with her, though they knew what she was.
“We came out closer to camp than I’d have guessed,” Burnt said, tending to Nightmare. “Not far from here.” He was breathing heavily. “We were lucky to be out of it.”
“Hayden?” Merb asked.
“He’s up in the rocks,” Uilliam said, with a long rattling breath, “with those that broke through the front. Some of us tried to climb this way. Not many made it.”
“Can Hayden hold? How many are with him?” Burnt asked.
“Maybe fifty.”
Merb stroked his goatee then took a swig of water and swished it in his mouth, disgustedly. He looked into the live coals. “I say we get closer.”
“Not me,” Uilliam paled. “Sorry.”
“Ferals in the brush have better night vision than we have,” Burnt nodded.
“So?” Merb glared at all of them.
They threw dirt on the embers and led the horses single file on the dry slope under the star crowded void. Twisted azazia and diarana shrubs gave them scant cover, but they went quietly and soon came to a rivulet where the horses bent their heads to drink and graze on crocus grasses. The scale of the engagement had Cole thinking. He’d heard of ferals waylaying Cora men, but when the men were off from the band on a supply run, or on countless other errands that passed for a supply run. Usually, if they saw a dozen or more men, they’d slink away. They’d been harassing the Cora like that for months, with increasing frequency, but never in an open place like this, and never in such numbers. Was it just their ill luck to pass too close to one of their warrens, or was this a well-laid trap? He couldn’t hear what Burnt and Merb were discussing up front, but something in their muted voices told him they were even more enlivened now than they’d been a few hours back, up in the scree. Danger was one of their needs. They’d done so much butchery on the field that nothing else suited them. Soon, he’d be like that, too. The prospect of taking some grisly wound would be irrelevant, when closing his eyes meant allowing the faces of those he’d wounded or killed to swim up from his memories, crying out to him.