by Sarah Zettel
Aria glanced around uneasily. She could see the room better now. The white lumps were obviously for sitting on. The clear lumps with legs that melted into the floor were tables, even if Teacher Hand sat on the long, low one in front of the couch she occupied. The wall to the left had three long niches and an open doorway in it. The wall to the right was smooth and unbroken. The wall behind Teacher Hand had been sectioned off into neat squares and decorated with elaborate mosaics. A fat chair stood in front of it.
But she had seen something else before she had passed out. Something formless and huge and…
She shook her head, trying to focus her thoughts on things she could understand.
“Where’s the other one?” she asked.
“The other what?” Teacher Hand’s frown deepened.
“Person. Your friend or bondsman, or whoever you called before…Before the blackness and the roar. Before I fainted.
His frown folded into a wryly amused expression. “Cam, you mean? I don’t think I’ll let you meet Cam just yet.
“Let’s start over.” Teacher Hand sounded almost as tired as she felt. “Why’d you attack me?”
Aria shrugged her aching shoulders. “This despised one assumed that as she was of no further use, her Teacher would abandon her.”
Against all expectation, his expression looked pained. Aria felt taken aback. Perhaps Teacher Hand was not so much the high-house fool she had taken him for.
Don’t relax too far yet, she warned herself. You still know nothing at all about what’s going on, and he still has your stones.
“How did you end up in the…that room?” asked Teacher Hand.
She measured him again. If only she had enough strength to fight. She could kick for his head. She could find the door to the outside. If only she knew something, anything about this place she was in, about this “Cam” who lurked out of sight. If only she wasn’t so dizzy and thirsty…
Stop whining and think of something you can tell him that he might believe.
“I was following you, Teacher,” Aria said.
“You were what?” His voice broke on the last word.
“When your Lordship vanished, a lot of rumors started ’round First City. You’d been caught thieving. Your older brother’d killed you to save the family later embarrassment. Teacher Fire in the Dark had finally caught you sleeping with his wife…”
“Where in the Realm of the Nameless did you hear that!” Teacher Hand roared.
“There’s very little the Notouch don’t hear.” Her mouth twitched. “The rumor that stuck was that you’d decided adultery and misusing your power gift were too small a set of heresies and that you’d gone with a gaggle of the Skymen over the World’s Wall.” That part, at least, was true. “This despised one chose to believe that rumor and wanted to find out how your Lordship had managed it. She succeeded.” Aria hoped he couldn’t tell how much that idea unsettled her.
He looked at his naked hands, then at her, then at his hands again. His face went sick and angry about something he didn’t voice.
“Would your Lordship be so merciful as to give this despised one a drink of water?” Aria bowed her head.
“You are free to stop that crap any time.” Teacher Hand stood up. “I do not know where you got the nerve, Notouch. It doesn’t go with your hand marks.” He paused. “You never did tell me your call name.”
“Aria,” she answered, hoping civility might speed up the process of getting her water.
He snorted. “It would be. Listen, Aria, Teacher Hand is dead and washed away. I am called Eric Born.”
“Eric Born” crossed the room with a careful sideways step that never completely turned his back to her. He drummed his fingers against some mosaic tiles on the far wall. A hole opened underneath his hand. Out of the hole, he pulled out a clear cup of water.
Despite her best intentions, Aria felt her jaw flap open.
Eric Born’s mouth spread in a sharp grin. He seated himself back on the table and held out the cup to her.
Waiting to see how I’ll react, she told herself. Keep it reined in, Aria.
As smoothly as possible, she swallowed the water. It swished uncomfortably in her empty stomach, but she drained the cup anyway. She needed it, badly.
“Thank you.” She added neither honorific or insult.
He set the cup down. “What did they, the Rhudolant Vitae, do after they put you in that room?”
“Kept me there, mainly. Every now and then one of them would come in with a box of some sort and wave it around in the air and babble at me. It sounded like they were trying to talk. I thought they were insane. Then I thought I’d been wrong and they were Aunorante Sangh. Then"—she shrugged—"I started to wonder if I would be stuck in a single room for the rest of my life. Then they brought you to me.
“Is there anything to eat?”
Teacher…Eric Born made a gurgling sound as if he was trying to keep down a laugh.
“You do not have any idea what you have gotten yourself into, do you know that?” He looked down into the empty cup. “No matter. I suppose I had better feed you.” He rubbed his chin. “But I had better show you something first.”
“What?” New fear squeezed against the water in her stomach as she watched Eric approach the room’s far wall.
“Where you really are.” He laid his long hand against the tan surface.
The wall vanished. Where it used to be hung a formless blackness streaked with minute rainbow lights. It stretched up, down, and on all sides. Her eyes strained to find an end, a boundary, anything to give it shape and sense, but there was nothing. Endless, it yawned at her. An open mouth waiting to engulf her mind and soul.
She screamed. She threw herself backward and curled up into a tight little ball, knees pressed tight against her forehead, her belly muffling her shrieks. A voice gibbered at her, said her name, and finally shouted at her, but she could not look up. The blackness waited to swallow her whole. There was no end. No end.
“Aria Born of the Black Wall!” A hand jerked her collar back. The fabric dug into her neck and hauled her head up. “You blasted Notouch, look up!” The Teacher’s open hand crashed against her cheek. “Look up! It’s gone! LOOK!”
Through the tears of pain, she saw the solid wall back in place.
“Wha…Wha…” Her whole body shook like leaves in the wind as he let her sag back against the couch.
Eric folded his arms. “That is the space between the worlds. There is no Black Wall and no arias in it. It’s all emptiness. There are other worlds in it, though. Other places where people, like those in the Realm of the Nameless Powers, live. We are flying between them, like insects flying from grass to flower. Do you understand this?”
Aria did not, but she nodded. She could sort the explanation out later. What was important now was hearing it.
She tried to stop the trembling in her limbs and completely failed.
“Why show me this!” At least I’ve quit stammering.
“So you wouldn’t get any ideas about trying to attack me when I let you loose.”
She thought about herself left alone in this place with no one but a corpse and an unseen presence, lost in the middle of infinite blackness. She bit her lip and humiliation came on the heels of the fear. This was worse than being tied up.
“Turn around,” Eric ordered.
Aria wiggled herself around and held out her wrists. She felt the bindings loosen. She pulled her wrists apart and brought her arms back around to her front in a riot of creaking, popping joints. She yanked off the remains of the sticky, clothlike stuff that still clung to her skin. She stretched her legs toward Eric. He slit the black strips neatly with one blade of an open pair of scissors. Aria kept her eyes on him as she rubbed her wrists and arms to get some feeling back. He did not look up.
Eric stepped back, keeping hold of the scissors. Aria wasn’t fool enough to try to stand. Instead, she chafed and flexed ankles and knees. She yanked the sticky strips off her leggings
and dropped them on the floor. Eric watched her for a moment before he backed toward the window-wall.
“How do you stand it?” Aria straightened her back. “Wha…what’s out there.”
He shrugged. “I got used to it. The shakes vanish fairly quickly. The rest comes with practice.
“Now, you wanted something to eat.”
He drummed the mosaic and another hole opened. Out of this one, he pulled two packets of an unfamiliar shape. He ripped something off them, made yet another hole open in the wall, and dropped both packets inside.
When he came within arm’s length again, he was carrying two plates, each topped by a palm-sized slab that might have been made out of the same stuff as the sofa.
“I know it doesn’t look like food,” he said as she took it from him, “but it will keep you going.”
She picked up the slab. Its warmth set her fingers tingling.
She bit one corner. The stuff tasted like bitter nuts and had the consistency of old paste. She made herself finish it off anyway, washed down with more water Eric conjured up from the hole in the wall.
The Nameless Powers know I’ve eaten worse.
“Tell me, what did Narroways do to finally get itself cursed?” The casual words were strained around the edges, Aria noticed.
She swallowed her mouthful of paste. “Refused to give up during the siege.”
“Siege?” he said incredulously.
For a moment, she looked at him like he was insane. “Oh, you had gone before that. It was maybe five years after you left, the Skymen made a full-scale bid for support for…For whatever it is the Skymen want from the Realm. King Sun announced he was going to make them ambassadors to his court and hear all their petitions. The Teachers kept on saying the Skymen were Aunorante Sangh. First City followed the First Teacher, of course, and sides got taken up and so did weapons. Narroways was cursed and the fighting’s been going on ever since.” She spoke the last words to her cup. She’d spent the past days trying not to worry about where Little Eye, or Roof Beam, or skinny Broken Trail were. She wasn’t getting any better at it.
She set the cup down. Eric was scowling at the backs of his strangely bare hands.
“Thank you for the food,” she said to get his attention back. When he looked up, Aria squared her shoulders. “Hear me, Eric Born kenu Teacher Hand kenu Lord Hand on the Seablade dena Enemy of the Aunorante Sangh. You don’t want me with you, and I don’t want to stay. Take me to a Skyman city, I’ll manage after that. I’ll find a way to pay you for passage and the bruised back.”
He laughed sharply at that, but then sobered. “Stone in the Wall dena Aria Born of the Black Wall,” Eric said levelly, “you couldn’t find your feet in a Skyman city if someone showed you where to look.” He shook his head. “All you have seen and Garismit’s Eyes, you still don’t understand!”
He looked at the closed window-wall. “Garismit’s Eyes,” he muttered again, “couldn’t even find her feet.”
“You’re not sure of that.”
That startled him. “What makes you think so?”
“You’ve taken my namestones, and you hid the scissors.”
He snickered. “That, Notouch, is because you haven’t got the sense to be afraid of what is happening to you. Besides, I saw the knife sheaths.” He gestured at her arms.
Aria crossed her arms, gripping her empty sheaths.
“And you wonder why I don’t want to leave sharp objects lying around.” His mouth quirked up into a tight smile before he lapsed back into high-house tones. “Follow me. I’ll show Aria where she can sleep.”
“As her Teacher commands.”
Eric ran his tongue over his lips thoughtfully as he circled the sofa to the back wall. He touched a hand-sized rectangle that was ivory instead of tan. A door-shaped section of the wall slid away as if pulled on invisible strings.
The space on the other side was so small it barely deserved the name “room.” An alcove with a slab of the chair stuff in it took up most of the back wall. “Bed” she labeled it. Lines dissected the rest of the wall space into squares. A stool with a hole in it had been welded to the floor in the far corner. That was the extent of the place.
“Two things.” Eric crowded his broad frame inside the tiny chamber. “One, the light. Touch here"—he pointed at another white square in the wall, this one above the bed alcove—"once and it goes away. Touch it again, and it comes back.
“Two"—he waved his hand at the stool—"when you need to say hello to a bush, do it in there. Touch here"—this time the square he pointed at was silver—"when you are finished. Understand that?”
“Bed, lamp, bush.” She nodded at the appropriate objects.
“Stones.”
She whirled around. Eric held out the lumpy black bundle she had made of her headcloth and her treasures.
“Thank you,” she said as she took them. This time, she really meant it.
“Sleep until you wake up.” Eric walked back out and the door slid shut behind him.
Maybe by then I’ll know what to make of you, she could practically hear him thinking. Maybe by then, Teacher Hand, Eric Born, I’ll know what to make of you.
Aria sat on the edge of the bed, and for a moment did nothing but hold the bundle of stones tightly against her chest.
“Where are you taking them, Mother?” asked Little Eye from memory. She had run one dirty, nail-bitten finger across the smooth surface of the stone.
“Mother is taking them to learn about the Skymen.” Aria tucked them into her pouch one at a time. “She and they will be back soon.”
Nameless Powers preserve me—Aria bowed her head over the stones—and do not let me have lied to my daughter.
The memory of Little Eye gave a fresh edge to Aria’s resolve. The Skymen sought power in the Realm. Silver on the Clouds, the Heretic King of Narroways, had linked that quest for power to her own. If Aria could learn what was truly going on behind the Skymen’s mysteries, if she could bring some skill or piece of knowledge to the Realm, at the very least it would help her family survive the strangeness sweeping the world. At most…Aria let her real hope surface. At most she could bargain with the Narroways lords to raise her family up from the mud and have them declared no longer Notouch. Such things had happened before, maybe only in the apocrypha, but maybe those stories would be enough.
After all, stories have been enough for me most of my life.
Don’t lie to yourself. Aria fingered her bundle. If stories had been enough, you wouldn’t be here now. You want to make the stories come true.
She undid the knotted cloth. The bundle fell open and the stones glimmered in the stark light of the glowing ceiling. They had taken no damage from her treatment of them. She had known they wouldn’t. Perfect and beautiful, they waited for her need.
Most Notouch hoped their children would grow to display the power gift. It was the one ability that could raise them out of the mud and all the way up to the rank of Teacher.
According to the Teachers in the Temples, at any rate. Aria brushed her palm across the stones’ smooth, cool surfaces. According to them, the Nameless created the Royals to rule, the Nobles to administer, the Bondless to trade and travel, the Bonded to make and mend, and the Notouch to serve all. That the power gift could arise in any child of the People was the sign that all were named by the Nameless and all were under the eyes of the Servant.
They had forgotten, or in their arrogance ignored the fact, that there was at least one other kind of person in the Realm.
She glanced at the door.
No. Not here. Not now. He could come back at any second. Sleep is one thing, but if I try a reading, I’ll never wake up in time if he decides I’m too much trouble to cart about. She shook her head. I’ll have to wait. I’ve managed this much, I can wait.
Despite her long, unimaginably strange day, she was still able to think clearly. That realization brought her almost as much comfort as the weight of the stones against her lap.
I have Teacher…Eric Born shaken. That’s good. That’ll help. Everything I do successfully, every time I get something right about this place, it’s a blow to what he thinks I ought to be. That’s important. Keeping him off-balance might be as good a weapon as my knives, if it turns out I need a weapon. She looked down at her bundle and stifled the fervent hope that this one Teacher was what he was supposed to be, a preserver of the lives of the People. Her stomach twisted when she remembered the uncontrolled burst of delight she’d felt when she’d heard him give the Teacher’s greeting in the middle of the Skyman’s chamber. She tightened her hold on the headcloth and cast around for something else to think about.
The easiest was the ship-place around her. It was a Skyman thing, there was no question about that. The Skymen were not part of the realm of the Nameless, so they could not have power-gifted among them. So this ship was meant for use by ordinary people. If that was true, anybody could learn the workings.
It’s going to be awhile before I know enough of the Skymen to find out what they want in the Realm. There’s nothing I can do about that now.
I can, however, find this Cam.
Aria slung the pouch of stones from her belt again and faced the door. On the right side, about shoulder height, hung a pale, palm-sized rectangle that matched the one she’d seen in the other room. Aria touched her fingertips to it and the door slid away.
Darkness filled the bigger room. A glimmer of light caught her eye and shifted her gaze to the right.
Her heart froze. The window-wall was open. The emptiness with its countless lights gaped at her. Aria’s knees collapsed. She tasted blood as she bit her tongue to block the scream constricting her throat. Her arms threw themselves up to shield her helpless head and eyes.
She screwed her eyelids shut and slammed her hand flat against the wall. She must have hit the right spot, because she felt the breeze as the door swished shut.
Blast him! Blast him headfirst into the Lif marshes and wash him into the Dead Sea! Nameless Powers preserve me! I thought I had him! I thought…Aria’s arms dropped and her eyelids fluttered. I thought he was going to make a stupid mistake and leave me free to wander, just because he’s a Noble facing a Notouch.