Way Walkers: Tangled Paths (The Tazu Saga)

by Leigh, J.

  Hatori held his silence a moment, staring hard at his reflection. “No, he didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s personal.” He sniffed. “So if you want to know, you’ll have to ask Jephue. Just do me the courtesy of doing so when I am not around. I hear it enough as it is.”

  “If you knew he didn’t want to come, why did you force him to?”

  “I didn’t force him to do anything. He came along because this was what I was doing. And after being together for nearly thirty years, he’d rather be with me than not, despite his whining.”

  “Why even make this journey if he was so against it?”

  “I told you my reasoning at the beginning of this. If you want to know Jephue’s reasons, then ask him.”

  “Fine,” Jathen said. “There’s an academic downstairs seeking a moment of your time.”

  “Why?”

  “Heard you were a charm master. Anyway, he seems harmless.”

  “Bah! Jathen, you are the worst person to ask if someone ‘seems harmless.’” He raised the towel to rub at his hair. “Still, I should see him. If he’s a problem, it’s better to know.”

  “What kind of problem could he possibly be?”

  “Boy, for someone so pleasingly cynical, your ignorance astounds me.” After flattening his rumpled hair, he opened his trunk. “Spies, Jathen. Spies and cutthroats and all sorts of other undesirables.”

  “In that case, allow me to defend myself. I am not ignorant, just reasonably cynical with regard to your legendary paranoia about ‘agents in the wings.’ Not everyone is out to get you, Hatori Chann.”

  “Not necessarily out to get me, or even you for that matter, be it for moot or Monortith.” Finding a sage-green shirt, he donned it, talking as he buttoned. “But out to get the best advantage for themselves? Oh yes, little prince, to some extent or another, everyone is out for that.”

  “Well, this one says he’s out to write a book on Artifacts.” Jathen removed the puzzle box from his pack. “And apparently, every time he sees a Clan charm master, he asks after Yvette Ashton.”

  “Oh, glorious.” Tucking his shirt into black pants, Hatori rolled his eyes. “Even if he is harmless, I might still kill him.”

  A shiver went through Jathen as he remembered the image of the second thief shattered upon the ground. “Don’t joke about that.”

  “Stop being such a soft-shell.” Hatori patted Jathen’s shoulder. “Try and relax, boy. Spirit knows all this idle time is enough to make anyone think too much.” Hatori headed out, closing the door behind him.

  Jathen got comfortable on the bed, sitting cross-legged with the puzzle box in his lap. He dumped the box’s contents out on the mattress, and the array of tawny thumbnail-sized pieces shimmered against the white bedsheets. Each was smooth on at least one side and grooved or notched on the others.

  Definitely some poor-quality quartz. He held one up to the light, observing thin, rust-colored lines running through it. Maybe with some rutilation to them, too. Odd choice for a puzzle, but perhaps that’s what will make solving it a challenge. He arranged the pieces by similar shapes until a pattern emerged.

  Disappointed in how easy the puzzle had been to solve, Jathen held the palm-sized shape in his hand. The coppery sheen of the three-dimensional twelve-point star was unimpressive. Such things were usually given to small children to amuse themselves with during complex temple rites or ceremonies. Annoyed, he returned the puzzle to its box. Leave it for an adolescent to give an adolescent gift. He locked the lid and tossed the thing back into his bag.

  He picked up Lost in the Landscape and read the section where Cyaone D. Ja’han first encountered the Msāfryan—“travelers.” Ja’han had been fascinated by the Zo’den natives and their desert-adapted skin, as well as the partial shape-shifting nature of a portion of their population.

  The Msāfryan revere the Drannic in a manner I have not yet encountered. They speak of them as if they rove the wild, searching for unAwakened Incarnations to find and Ascend to Avatar, almost as if the Drannic themselves are the source of the Twelve’s corporeal power. While this is, in reality, an unlikely, even impossible, notion, I do feel the Msāfryan hold some real truth to their reasoning. There are great tales amid the Msāfryan of the Drannic, and I believe them to be some of the few in history to have witnessed the true power of these mysterious Way masters.

  Next came a number of translated stories about the Drannic, but after skimming a few, Jathen mostly found the same repetitive morals that had been drilled into him as a child. So many tales and Drannic sightings, and as far as anyone knows, she never encountered one. After about an hour, he headed back downstairs and found Hatori and Jephue sitting together, seemingly patched up, and thankfully, no sign of the Artifact hunter.

  Jathen took a seat at their table. “So was Dumas an enemy spy from your invisible rival faction?”

  Hatori curled his lip. “Ugh, the man was a ruddy long-winded bastard.”

  Jathen smirked. “I didn’t think there was someone in this world who could out-talk you.”

  “There’s out-talking, and then there’s running one over with a stampede of droning chatter. Half of his jabbering and conclusions were complete idiocies that I, of course, felt the need to rectify, but his gleefulness over being proven wrong on ‘theories held near and dear’ was too syrupy for my tastes.”

  “You mean he was uninsultable as well?”

  “Utterly.”

  “I told him,” Jephue put in with a grin. “He’s met his nemesis.”

  “He asked about every single piece I’ve ever made, ever seen or heard of, and each one we have on!” Hatori looked ready to spit. “You know how that annoys me!”

  “Be grateful he didn’t corner you about your watch, Jath,” Jephue said, fingering his vertigo charm. “After the fuss he made over this simple thing, if he’d seen that brilliant example of an exquisite charm master’s ingenuity and genius, you’d never have gotten rid of him. We barely did.”

  “My watch? What about Hatori’s watch? Now that’s a beautiful piece.”

  “Which I didn’t make, and it doesn’t do anything,” Hatori growled. “Now can we move off this ruddy subject?”

  In the hour after they’d eaten and before the next carriage was due, Jathen finished penning the letter to Thee.

  Despite its shortcomings, I think you would like the road, as it holds the promise with each stop of someone new and interesting to talk to. So interesting that even I take notice, which I’m certain you know is saying something.

  After a brief consideration, he added, Tell Serendibiss I solved her puzzle, and thank her again for me.

  Chapter 15

  “We can’t stop.”

  “We aren’t going to make it to the Furōrin-Iki before the late-spring rains,” Jephue told Hatori. “Not at this pace. We need to wait here for a few months or risk killing ourselves.”

  Though Jathen could have told him such weeks ago, he’d kept his peace. Jephue, however, finally snapped at the last stage station before the border, after Hatori had spoken of purchasing a cart and supplies for the remaining trek to Antqāl Mdynh.

  Drumming Clan-quick fingers across his cane’s amber eye, Hatori replied, “We have to push through. Once past the border, we won’t have to endure the damnable stage schedule, and we can move during evening hours to make up the time.”

  “With bandits and wild animals and Spirit knows what else to swallow us all whole? I knew it!” Jephue threw his hands in the air. “He’s trying to kill us.”

  “Why can’t we stop?” Jathen asked.

  “Much as I would love to spend a few months waiting it out here”—Hatori gestured to the uninspiring interior of the station’s lodging house—“we haven’t the money to cover the expense of sitting on our asses for week
s on end.”

  Jathen sniffed. “I would think I’ve got more than enough. Or have I not mentioned my finances?”

  “Not so loud, boy.” Hatori warily eyed some passing human travelers. “And no, you don’t.” He looked over at Jephue and sighed. “I shall compromise. We’ll go past the border into Zo’den and see where we are once we make it to Antqāl Mdynh. At this point the Msāfryan are starting to migrate. If we’re too late in the season, we’ll wait out the spring rains there and try for the Furōrin-Iki come summer.”

  Jephue turned to Jathen. “He’s just going to talk us into pushing on once we get there. I don’t know why I even bother.”

  Hatori offered his services to an enterprising half Msāfryan, half Tazu named Ahalteke and his family in exchange for a ride. Ahalteke had smaller, rust-colored scales like a Tazu, but he wore his black hair in dozens of bead-and-feather-supplemented braids like the Msāfryan. Jathen spied a deeply tanned Msāfryan child peeking around her father’s beige clothing.

  Sable eyes hopeful, Ahalteke asked about a water-purification charm. “I know a processor charm is a bit much of a request, but I could stand to have a few smaller charms to sell. Something that could fit in a water skin or canteen would be good.”

  “How about barrel sized?” Hatori offered. “If you’ve the stones, I can manage a few of them en route.”

  Ahalteke grinned, displaying his sharp Tazu teeth. “That would be ideal.”

  They clasped wrists on the venture, and Jathen was thrust firsthand into the culture of Bree’s chosen, starting with their primary mode of transport.

  The flightless ryml were prized among the Msāfryan for meat, oil, and leather. They look as if someone tried to cross-breed the elegant ostriches we’ve seen running wild on the plains with a proper dragon, Jathen scribbled to his sister, but failed miserably, gaining instead a long-legged, long-necked, squat-bodied creature more in keeping with a slaga someone decided to glue garish feathers on. Though faster than they appeared and undaunted by his Tazu scent, the beasts were as moody as they were ugly, making Jathen’s daily efforts to drive the little cart an exhausting battle of wills.

  “Oh, come on, you ruddy, Red-tainted excuse for a beast of burden!” he yelled as one of the pair sat and began to preen the feathers on its short tail. “I’m shocked your dim-witted species has survived at all! Considering your stupidity and bright feathers, you’re a literal sitting target!”

  “Jathen, don’t yell things like that,” Jephue said from atop the cart. “The ryml are naturally gray and black feathered. The Msāfryan dye them for spiritual creativity and tribal reasons. If they hear you speaking ill of their colors, you’re liable to insult someone.” Jephue had adopted native fashion, wearing fewer braids and sporting a Msāfryan leave-little-to-the-imagination ensemble. Jathen thought the man looked silly, but he also couldn’t argue the style’s efficiency in the rising heat.

  “Ruddy hell,” Jathen griped at the ryml. “Dumb and diplomatic immunity.”

  The comment garnered a barking laugh from Hatori, who fared only slightly better when driving.

  Jathen later discovered Ahalteke’s “little” family boasted eight full-grown men and nearly two dozen women and children.

  “They travel in extended family groups,” Hatori explained.

  “Very extended,” Jathen murmured, eyeing the variant of the pure-blooded Msāfryan compared to Ahalteke’s tight scales and then his own pale skin. Msāfryan hide is something of a wonder, he wrote. Ja’han wrote that it was warm and almost fuzzy to the touch, with more give than first appeared. I wish I could get up the courage to try to touch one.

  Jathen had neither the gumption nor the desire to touch the legs of the Tghyyr’sāqyn, the “other half” of the Msāfryan. According to Cyaone D. Ja’han, one out of every four Msāfryan was born with lower bodies that could shift to adapt to the terrain beneath their feet without conscious will. The conversion transpired slowly over the course of a few minutes, as opposed to the almost instantaneous change of Tazu. The first time Jathen witnessed one of Ahalteke’s kin shift, he gaped in wonder. The man’s four-toed, bird-like feet hardened into cloven hooves when he stepped onto the paved road. After being chastised by Jephue for staring, Jathen managed to be more discreet when the colorful feathers on the Tghyyr’sāqyn’s calves and thighs morphed into fur.

  Jathen also had a hard time pronouncing Tghyyr’sāqyn. They called themselves by a shortened version of the name—Tg’sāqyn—which Jathen kept remembering halfway through trying to say the full one. So the word came out mangled into: “Tigg-here…umm…sat-in,” which he soon discovered resembled a humorous combination of words involving a hidden ferret in his pants.

  “Just use the Tar’cil word, Tyr’sat,” Jephue told him after another failed pronunciation that had a group of Ahalteke’s daughters and nieces squealing in laugher.

  “Just don’t use Jephue’s accent to do it,” Hatori added.

  The company shared tales as they rode, providing Jathen an opportunity to train his ear. He already knew many of the stories, such as the one about the Great Fall, when the Veil between worlds had thinned enough that the Red was able to whisper into Prothidian’s ear. The narrative continued with how the Mad Mage had brought about the end of the world, and the Children created their current continent in the wake of his defeat. Hatori added clarifying comments whenever Rhean’s battles with Prothidian came up or when the Protector Child threw the Red back into the Pit.

  However, he didn’t know the tales from the Msāfryan culture, which mostly were about Bree and Bron.

  “Bron?” Jathen asked upon hearing the name the first time.

  “Aspect,” Master Hatori said. “Bron is the Aspect of Bree! Learn your Aspects, boy!”

  Flipping through Lost in the Landscape, Jathen read:

  Every one of the Twelve had made a claim to a race to hold up as their own during the time of expansion, but Bree and Bron took a set of humans and the Tghyyr’sāqyn, calling them all the Msāfryan, despite humans having already been the chosen race of Angani and the Way of Purity. The Walkers amid the Msāfryan say, “One is inspiration and the other is application. Together they are creativity. They just simply are—unity and division.”

  Flipping a few more pages, Jathen found a translated version of the tale. He read Ja’han’s version, observing that Shr’Ālm was what the Tghyyr’sāqyn called Prothidian Altar. Apparently, the Mad Mage had enslaved them in the time after the Great Fall.

  After the people escaped the Shr’Ālm, the Tghyyr’sāqyn fled south. One day, they came to a vast desert. There, the Shr’Ālm would not follow. So they went into Whydā Shrā and wandered for many years. When they rested too long, death came.

  Death, Jathen wondered. They die if they stay in one place too long? Flipping through the pages, he found Ja’han had inquired after the same, only to receive no real answer.

  Generations passed, and the Tghyyr’sāqyn dwindled. But that was the time of the Expansion, and travelers came to the land beneath Whydā Shrā, where the last of the Tghyyr’sāqyn huddled, waiting for death.

  Bree came to them and said, “Let me see you, let me hear your tale.”

  The Tghyyr’sāqyn told their story of how they wandered out of fear of Shr’Ālm, but when the fear passed, they found they still could not rest.

  Bree responded, “I understand you are as the instrument that lays unplayed. You must be plucked and strummed to make music. If left alone for too long, you fall out of tune, but if played too much, the strings break. Movement is in your blood. You cannot stop, but you must rest, or you cannot survive. I must teach you to move without moving, rest without stopping.” Then Bree called to her Aspect and the other Children, “These Ishim I claim as my own. It is with them I shall stay.”

  Jathen looked up from his book. “Hatori, what’s an Ishim?”
>
  “Incarnated soul.” He shook his head. “A person, Jathen: human, Tazu, Clan, Tyr’sat, any of us with a claim of higher intelligence. We are Ishim.”

  Jathen nodded and returned to his page.

  The Tghyyr’sāqyn cried, “Yes!” and were filled with hope.

  Bree and Bron called the other travelers and asked who amid them would stay and become their people with the Tghyyr’sāqyn. The Tghyyr’sāqyn were afraid, for the others were many and looked warily upon them.

  But Bree called to them, “Come with us, and we will show you evolution from creativity. We shall create nothing from something and something from nothing, find what has never been found, hidden within what was never hidden.”

  When two days had passed, twice as many humans as Tghyyr’sāqyn joined them in peace and hope, and they were ever after known as the Msāfryan.

  Despite the misadventures with the ryml and the barrier of language, the time with Ahalteke’s family was a diverting way to travel. Jathen found himself smiling for the first time since parting ways with Charmed Wind.

  Then they reached the border into Zo’den proper. The Tazu were not like other cultures who kept soft borders, easily crossable and discernable only by lines on a map. The Nation marked its territory with dazzlingly tall megaliths. Ancient and intimidating, the stones could be seen from bounds away on the flatlands.

  Jathen’s heart swelled with joy and architectural pride. “They are as old as the dismantled dome in Kidwellith,” he gleefully told Ahalteke. Standing tall in his stirrups, he leaned over his grumpy ryml’s neck, drinking in the distant line spaced out across the whole border. “And the glyphs carved on all four sides are part of their magic, meant to keep Talents from teleporting or Veil-sliding across. Basically, the whole thing’s a gigantic ward-charm. Right, Master Hatori?”