by Yoon Ha Lee
About the Author
N. K. Jemisin is a Brooklyn author whose short fiction and novels have been multiply nominated for the Hugo and the Nebula, shortlisted for the Crawford and the Tiptree, and have won the Locus Award for Best First Novel. Her speculative works range from fantasy to science fiction to the undefinable; her themes include the intersections of race and gender, resistance to oppression, and the coolness of Stuff Blowing Up. She is a member of the Altered Fluid writing group, and a graduate of the Viable Paradise writing workshop. Her latest novel, The Shadowed Sun, was published in June 2012 from Orbit Books, and she’s hard at work on a new series due to begin in 2014.
Soul’s Bargain
Juliette Wade
A reading from the Book of Eyn the Wanderer:
In those days there were many who admired Eyn for her divine beauty, no less than for her wildness, forgetting her fierce loyalty to her lover, Sirin the Luck-Bringer. One among these was a mortal, Ruver of Meluara, renowned for his strength and speed. As many times as she rebuffed him, yet Ruver persisted in his suit, until at last, despairing of further talk, Eyn turned her back and resumed her exploration through the orbits of the dark unknown. Ruver followed running, and coming upon her from behind, cried out her name and caught in his bare hand the tips of her wild white hair. Yet Eyn had already cast off her mortal guise, and the touch of her hair struck Ruver dead.
In terrible anger did Eyn bear Ruver’s body back, and placing him before Father Varin, demanded his soul be gnashed in flame for this presumption. Yet then did Mother Elinda touch her with a gentling hand, and bid her look back across the distance to the place where Ruver had died. “He did wrong to follow you, yet see how far he reached beyond the deeds of other mortals.”
At this, Eyn relented, and gave Ruver’s soul to Mother Elinda, who placed him in the heavens as a shining star. Eyn declared, “Let his light serve as a reminder to all mortals that great things may be achieved in the name of love.”
As her assistant Irim finished his reading, Pelisma glanced instinctively toward him, but her failing vision could no longer distinguish him from the vague shadows. Even the bright electric lights on the ceiling gave nothing but a faint glimmer. She ached to think that not so long ago, limestone labyrinths had been her playgrounds. Now she had to rub the velvet of the couch she sat on to feel grounded again.
“Groundbreaker, you seem distressed,” Irim said. “I couldn’t help but think of your deeds when I read this passage this morning. Was I wrong to guess that you’re a ward of Eyn?”
Pelisma shook her head. “No, Irim; I am.” Though she’d long since lost the habit of attending chapel, her life’s work in building this cavern city had been born of love. She cherished her vivid memory of the day the river Trao changed course through a sinkhole and came thundering in at the gate. A heart-shattering, magnificent sight! She’d mustered the citizens, set explosives, and blasted a new outlet to save the city from inundation. In return, the city’s Firstmost had appointed her Groundbreaker, and renamed the city of Lake’s Gate: Pelismara, in her honor.
Now that she considered it, she hadn’t entirely left behind Eyn’s inspiration. Surely the goddess would be disappointed in her now, though—bound by her people’s adulation and her own blindness into tiny orbits that held nothing but the known.
A light brightened on her right, and she tried not to flinch.
Almost nothing.
“Irim,” she asked, “Is there a wysp nearby?”
“Don’t worry,” said Irim. “That was me; I moved out from between you and the lamp. There’s a wysp in the room, but it’s currently drifting near the window.”
She shoved down the irrational fear and tried to change the subject. “So. What do we have in today’s project updates?”
Irim’s footsteps walked nearer, while paper rustled softly. “Good news. Building the agricultural scaffolds around openings to the surface has been an unqualified success. With harvest numbers in, it looks like we can abandon those two surface fields that experienced wysp-fire disasters this year, without risking a citywide shortage.” He hesitated. “Pelisma, I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to mention wysps. I hope I haven’t alarmed you.”
“No, not really.” Wysps were a fact of life. It wasn’t their existence that filled her with dread, so much as their new unpredictable behavior—approaching her closely, for no apparent reason. She’d never felt superstitious about floating sparks she could see. “Irim,” she confessed. “I feel like they’re following me.”
Irim’s hand gently touched her forearm, a habit he’d developed for which she was unreasonably grateful. “Perhaps they follow you out of love,” he said. “As Ruver followed Eyn.”
“What?” Pelisma glanced toward him, and ended up frowning at shadows. Irim reading from the Books was no surprise—he was kind and devout, qualities she’d always appreciated. But why should he cast her wysp problem in religious terms? Unless . . . “Irim,” she said, “I hope you don’t mind me asking, but are you a sectarian?”
Irim gave a nervous laugh. “Ah, you’ve got me. Heretic, yes.”
“I don’t mean that. I’m trying to understand what you’re saying.”
The couch cushion creaked as Irim sat beside her. “Groundbreaker, I—well, you’ve saved so many lives. I believe it would be natural for souls to be drawn to you.”
Souls. Then the rumors about sectarians were true. Imagine the lonely dead, not placed in Elinda’s care where they belonged, but taking the form of wysps and drifting through people’s lives. Approaching them. Threatening and killing them? She shuddered, feeling suddenly as though a pit gaped beneath her feet.
From a rational perspective, she should ask Irim questions, and let him explain how his faith addressed her fears. But right now, she wasn’t sure she could handle a theological argument. Losing her eyesight had been difficult enough; lately it seemed she was also losing her composure.
If she couldn’t stay rational, she would no longer be worthy of her post—and if she could no longer work for her people, for Pelismara, then what would her life be worth?
“It’s kind of you to say so,” she said. “I believe I’d like to see my physician about this wysp issue.”
“Doctor Olanen?” Irim asked. “Why?”
Pelisma rubbed her fingers over the couch velvet, so solid and certain. A life of cave work had taught her the solid reliability of limestone walls, level rampways and buttresses, atmospheric lamps and ventilators. Wysps were incorporeal, and thus trickier, but they had been observed in detail. Tracking their behaviors in the mines and fields had significantly reduced the risk of wysp fires. Since she could no longer make such observations herself, she must ask someone to do it for her. How else could she banish this fear?
Not wishing to insult Irim, she said, “I’d just like to hear his opinion. Please, Irim.”
“Of course, Groundbreaker. I’ll call him at once.”
Pelisma sat still in her brass chair during her doctor’s examination, re-analyzing every wysp experience she could recall. In the city-caverns, wysps came and went without harm, and mostly without notice. In the wild cavern systems outside the city boundaries, any wysp appearance spurred quick checks of the methane detectors, but only rarely did they cause explosions. Thinking of it, she could almost feel the tremors in her bones.
Wysps were everywhere; they could appear anywhere, often emerging out of solid rock. But what might cause them to appear?
As he had for the last year, Doctor Olanen always began by shining bright lights into her eyes from various directions. Then he checked her chest, back, and neck with gentle hands—the same routine that always left her feeling old and infirm. Shouldn’t it have been different this time? She’d told him to look for wysp attraction factors, not heart murmurs!
The doctor’s hands moved away, and Irim’s breathing quickened. Pelisma sat straighter in her chair, because Groundbreakers didn’t bend with bad news.
“Yes, Doctor?”
&nb
sp; “Nothing,” said Doctor Olanen. “I can’t detect any change in your physical condition that might attract wysps. Your general health is excellent, and you’ll be happy to hear that your retinal deterioration is slowing.”
“Well.” She tried to keep her tone light. “Thank Heile for mercy.”
Irim touched her forearm, and instantly, she thought of souls. The stars kept to their orbits, so it was written; they cared for themselves far above, beyond the layers of rock and wilderness. Wysps, though, were unpredictable. Not entirely unlike the living . . .
Oh, heavenly Mother Elinda!
Doctor Olanen cleared his throat. “Groundbreaker, are you sure the wysps’ behavior changed after your vision trouble began?”
“Yes, absolutely sure. Irim would be able to tell you the precise timing. Please, Irim?”
“Of course,” said Irim. “The wysps started approaching her closely about two months after the vision loss began restricting her routines. At first we didn’t realize the phenomenon was systematic. Only recently did we think back and realize that they’d been drifting in more frequently for some time.”
“So you have witnessed this yourself,” the doctor said. “Not to suggest that our Groundbreaker is imagining things, but—”
“I most certainly have witnessed it.” Irim sounded indignant. “Haunting behaviors are well-documented. Have you spoken with the survivors of wysp incidents, Doctor?”
“I’ve treated plenty of wysp burns,” Doctor Olanen replied, brusquely. “They’re hunting behaviors, and they are well documented, but only on the surface. Underground, wysps drift randomly. You’re telling me the Groundbreaker is somehow witnessing an anomaly never recorded in more than two hundred years?”
Irim replied quietly. “In two hundred years, there has been no one like our Groundbreaker.”
Pelisma winced.
“Sorry.” Irim touched her forearm soothingly, but then hissed in a breath. Even without the faint new glimmer in her sight, she knew wysps were near.
“How many?” she asked.
“Three,” said Doctor Olanen. “They’re small, but quite—uh, bright.”
“They generally are,” she agreed. “Are they drifting, or moving closer?”
No one answered. Bodies scuffled, and someone—Irim?—yelped. Pelisma opened her mouth to ask what was happening, but impatience seized her so suddenly she held her breath.
Ridiculous, this whole thing! None of us know anything! What can I do? What do the wysps want? Can they want? I have to do something—have to, just have to figure this out!
A cold stethoscope pressed against her chest. She shuddered, gulped down the feeling and managed to say something without seeming irrational.
“What happened?”
“It’s all right,” said Irim, sounding shaken. “They’re gone now.”
Not permanently, she didn’t imagine. “Irim, are you hurt?”
“No, Groundbreaker. I tried to block one getting too close to you, and it floated straight through me—may Mother Elinda stay her hand.”
“Did any of them touch me?”
“No.”
“Then why did you assess me again, Doctor?”
“Its proximity seemed to alarm you,” Doctor Olanen replied. “Beyond a slightly elevated heart rate, though, everything is normal.”
Pelisma took a deep breath, and rubbed the cold brass of her chair. There was no question of uttering the words ‘increasing emotional instability’ in the presence of her doctor, if he already thought she was imagining things.
“Doctor Olanen, you saw that, I’m sure,” Irim said. “Do you feel inclined to alter your professional opinion?”
“I couldn’t say based on a single observation,” the doctor replied. “I confess, that’s not a behavior I’ve seen before. Wysp burns fall within my expertise, but their behaviors do not. I’d like to report it to a colleague of mine who researches wysps in Herketh. She might be able to shed more light on the problem.”
Sudden inspiration brought Pelisma to her feet. “A researcher—perfect! I’ll go speak with her.”
Irim seemed flustered by the suggestion. “Groundbreaker, why not order her to come to you? If wysps seek you out during the surface voyage, we have no idea what they might do. Caution is recommended.”
Until this moment, caution had been all she had. “Irim, it’s only five hours travel before we’ll be back underground in Herketh, and I’ve never heard of a wysp entering a moving vehicle. We’ll have no cause to clear land or build fires. Besides, I know I’ll be safe if you’re with me.”
“Pelisma—”
She smiled. “I will even let you drive.”
At last, some action! This was much better than foundering in anxiety and despair. As Eyn was her witness, she’d prefer to face danger out on the surface, if it meant she was still alive.
Irim was quieter than usual today as he led her out to their vehicle. Nervous about the surface voyage, he said—but recent advances in hover technology meant that floater travel had not been seriously dangerous for a number of years. His reticence felt weightier than that, laden with the unspoken question that now lay between them.
Unbearable. Every second made her more impatient to leave this awkwardness for the adventure of surface travel. Had he known her feelings, Irim would probably have said she was more like Eyn than ever.
Irim helped her out to the edge of the open square, and laid her left hand on the flat cold metal of the floater car while he opened the door.
“Groundbreaker,” he said, “are you sure we should be doing this?”
“We must do something, Irim. I don’t prefer to wait and see whether a wysp finally sets me on fire.”
“Mercy!” Irim said. “That’s true enough.” He guided her into the passenger’s seat.
Pelisma stroked the soft fabric of her seat, and tried to distract herself. “Could you update me on the latest construction, please? How does it look? Is our residence still so lonely?”
“Not quite,” Irim replied, with more cheer. “We’ll be neighbors with lawyers and judges soon. They’ve started on the Court columns, and it looks like they’ll match our portico. With the shinca trunk lighting up the whole square, I think it will be beautiful.”
Pelisma smiled in relief, imagining it. The shinca tree had been what first drew her to this cavern for the residence of the Firstmost and top staff: alone in the center of a flat basin, it pierced through the ceiling stalactites, reaching up toward its branches on the surface far above. Its silver-white glow sharpened everything around, while its warmth softened the chill of the deep regions.
Once Irim had engaged her seatbelt, he moved across to the driver’s side. The other seatbelt clicked, and then the vehicle hummed and lifted. They drove up the rampway to the fourth level.
“Lots of construction here, too,” Irim said. “You just wait; this will be the center of town one day.”
“Perhaps so,” she agreed, but as the vehicle angled up one rampway after another, and the sounds of life and business grew louder, she couldn’t help feeling dissatisfied. Is this all the ambition we have left? To beautify and perfect a confined existence? It was all the wysps’ doing. The fear that now pursued her was the same fear that kept all of Pelismara below ground: a terrifying vision of death by unquenchable flame.
Irim couldn’t be right. What possible wrongs could inspire the dead to visit such punishments upon the living? All her studies, and every event in her life converged upon one fundamental truth: that there was nothing so destructive, nor so implacable as nature, and that meant wysps must be a part of it.
She could feel it as they drove out. Yrindonna Forest rippled all around them, trackless except for the radio-transmitting waymarkers that allowed a driver to track direction while skirting dense thickets and enormous trees that could not be safely cleared away. The hiss of vegetation brushing against the floater’s roof and windows roused vivid memories of her last surface drive—the time they’d flushed a fl
ock of kanguan, or that graceful, muscular oryen that had leapt out so close to their path . . .
Lulled by the floater’s weaving motions, she’d been drifting in and out of sleep for probably two hours when Irim swore.
“Varin’s teeth! Oryen!”
The vehicle swerved, flinging her into her seatbelt. They hit something—a horrible crack came from Irim’s side of the floater, the vehicle rebounded at a strange angle, and suddenly they were spinning wildly. Pelisma clutched her seat.
Make it stop, make it stop, oh, make it stop!
They slammed side-first into something solid. The windshield shattered, pelting her face, body and hands with chunks of glass.
Pelisma still held on, sick and disoriented, half-choking on the pounding of her heart. Had they really stopped spinning at last? She found her voice.
“Irim?”
Irim didn’t answer.
“Irim! Oh, Elinda forbear!” Grief and fear rose as if to drown her, but she forced them down. No sentimentality, now: his side of the floater was hit twice, but he might not be dead. She fumbled for her seatbelt, and managed to release it. Reaching across the space between them, she found Irim’s leg: warm, sprinkled with chunks of glass. Carefully, she felt her way up his body. He was slumped against the far side of the floater, which had bowed inward.
“Irim, can you hear me? If you can hear me, make a sound.”
The only answer was birdsong, wafting in on a cold breeze heavy with the complex scent of invisible green. Irim’s neck was wet with blood, but when she probed with her fingers, his neck and skull seemed unbroken.
There was a pulse beneath his jawline.
Pelisma gasped in relief. She should try to bandage the cut, or cuts, on his head . . . No; first, she should radio for help so someone at least knew they were in trouble . . .
She sniffed.
Smoke?
She searched the air with her hands. Intense heat was coming from the rear of the floater, just where the fire extinguisher was supposed to be. Fire—and it was growing fast, which meant wysps would come.