Vivian was no stranger to feeling inadequate. And yet, the thought of living among an alien civilization both scared and excited her. Not once had she felt like a foreigner in her town; mere pretender amid the genuine people of Milton Keynes. It was hard enough to blend among humans, she thought, let alone Alarians. She simply couldn’t see how a civilization as old and wise as the Alariankind would fail to notice she was essentially from a different universe.
Nevertheless, before condemning Vivian to most certain death, the Artisan performed an act that would have put all universities out of business back on Earth: she turned Vivian into a walking dictionary.
Vivian hurriedly slipped into her black leather jacket – which was so long it tickled her heels when she walked – and pulled on her leather shoes with inbuilt metal toecaps. She fastened Agi around her belt and pulled her long, black hair in a bun, as it was customary about Kranija. She was at the door when Lady Saah called Vivian aside and showed her to a large, exquisitely-decorated coffer. Inside there was an age-battered parchment which contained a single, black symbol.
‘This is Taal’kai , a very special Thread,’ said Lady Saah, retrieving the parchment from the coffer with such care one would have believed it was made of glass.
Vivian rounded her neck for a better look. The symbol on it reminded her of two arrowheads joined together at the tip. For all she made of it, the arrowheads looked like stylized V’s.
‘Show me the back of your neck and don’t move. The procedure is somewhat risky,’ said Lady Saah. ‘We don’t want to damage you nor the Thread.’
Vivian’s eyes widened in horror but Lady Saah returned Vivian a reassuring smile.
‘Don’t worry, dear. If anything goes wrong, you’re in the house of an Artisan.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I will weave it right into you.’
Lady Saah unfolded the parchment and pressed it hard against Vivian’s nape.
‘D-do I need to do anything?’
‘Just stand still now. As still as you may.’
A strange, surreal chant emerged from Lady Saah and the flesh on Vivian’s skin tightened.
A rush of energy surged through her body, like a million ants burrowing into her every nerve and sinew. Vivian’s breath quickened, and with it began the familiar symptoms foregoing a panic attack. But in place of a punishing fear, she felt pain. In fact, to say she was in pain would have been an understatement. It was torture.
A long metallic wire detached from the parchment and burrowed through the fabric of her clothing and into her skin. Vivian shut her eyes and bit into her fist, knowing her agony was about to peak. She was right to believe it would.
It was agony as Vivian had never felt – worse than having all her teeth pulled by an inexpert dentist; worse than being sawed in half with a serrated blade. Her brain and spinal cord were on fire.
She wanted it all to end, to cease to be. Surely a pain so great would follow her beyond death and the promise of oblivion, of nothingness.
But just as quickly as it came, it all ended. Her pain broke off as the fire ants in her spine ceased to tingle, sting and burn. Soon enough the only remnants of the living agony she had experienced were her sweaty palms and a fist with teeth-marks in it. She was alive.
A film of images covered the back of her head, fast, chaotic and jarred, like a speeding train gone out of control. Under a racing heart, she stood, transfixed, as uncountable pictures flashed in and out of her mind. She opened her eyes.
Lady Saah was standing next to her, smiling her great smile, a blur of white pearl against the magnificent black. On her ebony cheek she saw the dregs of what looked like a dried-up tear. Vivian didn’t realize it, but the Artisan had held her hand like a mother throughout the entire proceedings.
Vivian’s eyes now travelled to the wooden plaque displaying the Haijk’s yellow-bird badge followed by the unreadable runic name.
“ Goltgoss Haijk – Nasitra’nëja e Handla’kami ”, it read, for it was unreadable no longer.
Not only could Vivian look at the runes with her naked eye, but also read them. Before her eyes, crooked runes reformed into their English counterpart. It now showed: “ The Golden Goose Healing Practice – Artisanship and Healing Merchandise ”.
The highly-calligraphic runes, which had previously refused to settle upon a definite form, were now as clear as day. The Alarian language, Æurlek, still looked alive, but in a tame and friendly sort of way. Though the writing would still move in the corner of her eye, it would settle upon a definite form as soon as she would look straight at it.
‘ Ju talma Æurlek? Ju unbrikkar dol ligsve? ’ said the Artisan tentatively and for a moment, nothing but utter gibberish entered Vivian’s ear.
But as her mind took over, it all changed, and suddenly she understood that what the Artisan had said. The words came to her as readily as divine inspiration.
‘ You speak Alarian? You understand the language? ’
‘I… I think so,’ Vivian replied, and was surprised that what came out of her mouth was Æurlek, though her senses could equally perceive it as English. It sounded harsh and guttural inasmuch as it was soft and melodious.
‘It… it sounds like I think in one language and speak in another. But how?’ she asked.
Once again, Alarian sentences tumbled out of her mouth, despite her having no recollection of them getting there. Every word sounded both foreign and familiar.
‘You have been woven with Taal’kai,’ said the Artisan. ‘The Thread of All Tongues.’
‘I… I can speak Alarian?’
The Artisan smiled. ‘You speak a lot more than Alarian, dear. You voice them all. Every tongue, language and dialect that ever existed or is yet to be born.’
‘Is that language Thread in… in me now?’
The Artisan nodded. ‘Taal’kai connects the living Thread inside you with the Pattern of Threads. Part of its knowledge flows through you.’
‘So my mind is simply accessing the Pattern?’
‘A small portion of it,’ said the Artisan. ‘Didn’t want the connection easily severed, so I wove it a little deeper than one normally would.’
Visited by a sudden understanding of things, Vivian found the wall-mirror. She could barely perceive a needle-sized hole where the Thread had punctured through the fabric of her clothing and shot into her spine.
She took off her jacket and lifted her shirt. A black symbol had appeared on the back of her neck: two stylish V’s joined at the tip. If she hadn’t felt the Taal’kai Thread enter her spine, she would have thought it was no more than a tribal tattoo.
Lady Saah waited for Vivian to be fully clothed before addressing her again.
‘This Thread was no easy find. Only the Lightsome are branded with The Thread of All Tongues—’
Vivian instinctually knew the Lightsome was a name given to great Alarian diplomats and other high representatives, but she had no idea how she came by such knowledge.
‘–don’t let anyone see it,’ the Artisan whispered. ‘It would avoid embarrassing questions about where you got it. And keep that knife close, you hear?’
‘Yes, Lady Saah.’
‘Better stay put for a few more beats,’ said Lady Saah, and Vivian instinctively knew beats was the Alarian equivalent of minutes . ‘Give your mind more time to adjust to the Taal’kai.’
As the Artisan predicted, Vivian later remarked she withheld more than English in her vocabulary. Her awareness now sheltered the Alarian language Æurlek – a runic speech which sounded like all the worldly languages were being spoken through a single, well-articulated mouth.
Vivian spoke English and now Alarian; she could somehow switch between the two with exceptional ease. Not just the two, but five more. Was that a French word she had just thought about?
Five
languages became fifteen.
Who would have thought Latin, a language she always imagined to belong to hot-tempered centurions, essentially sounded like an Italian limerick?
Fifteen was now five thousand, and she was getting a bit of a headache.
Zogzam ata’tai tarama dui – something told her Æurlek was not the only language or dialect spoken in Ærria.
Dancing rune. Crossed arrows. Distorted S. Undecipherable curlicue. Circle with a dot in it.
At least a couple hundreds of those languages were neither from Earth nor Ærria. The Artisan had hinted Existence was the home to more than just humans, and something told Vivian she had been given a glimpse into it.
Moments later, Vivian commanded over seventy-thousand languages, dialects and their spin-offs. As more and more foreign words entered her mind, her headache dissolved into nothingness.
It was a long while before Lady Saah spoke in clean Æurlek, devoid of all accents.
‘The King of Hoarfrosta himself gifted me this rare Thread, as payment for healing his son. It contains every language of the cosmos, except Æurlek’ääj , our ancient Æurlek, whose grasp of it has more to do with imagination than skill. I’m thankful to lose it. Shinn’shaan knows how tiring was to speak it.’
Vivian smiled and felt her jawline return the tiniest of squeaks. Both throat and tongue seemed to have repositioned themselves to accommodate a sudden command of myriad languages.
The Artisan’s hand found Vivian’s shoulder. ‘As the Weaver, so is the Thread, and yours is as good as Threads go. Wouldn’t fancy seeing it wasted on this old tart,’ Lady Saah grinned, her quicksilver eyes all a twinkle. ‘You, on the other hand—’
Vivian noticed the Artisan was now holding a blank roll of parchment. Its gray parchment was wound around a polished rod of obsidian and contained a single list of herbs. Vivian quickly recognized the ingredients from her previous lessons.
‘—something tells me commanding words will make more sense to you,’ Lady Saah continued, unfolding the scroll. ‘They’re easy enough, these herbs. Nothing you haven’t seen. You’ll find them at the marketplace.’
The Artisan placed the rotulus scroll in Vivian’s hand, along with a fistful of iron coins. Vivian knew they were ossi , a subdivision of the Alarian crest.
‘First time in Solidago, you buy yourself something nice,’ she said caringly. ‘And good luck with the errand, dear.’
In the company of Kaap – who had turned himself into a furry little backpack to keep a low profile – Vivian stepped out of the door and into the alley.
Vivian’s first impression of Solidago was that she had travelled back in time, but not to a time where architecture had been invented. All houses were twisted out of shape, to say the least. Windows either too large to open or too small to make a difference peppered the city in places one would never dream of having one.
The walls were mostly cast in brickwork by the kind of stonemason whose day job was financial advising. Skewed walls with more bricks than mortar, knotted chimneys keeping the smoke inside and cupping rooftops whose main purpose was to gather rainwater – Solidago had it all and more.
As the oldest civilization of the cosmos, Alarians might have been excellent at healing, philosophizing and weaving into the fabric of reality, but they were very poor city builders.
Clay, volcanic glass and bricks baked out of compressed ashes seemed to be the preferred building materials – either they preferred it or they lacked the imagination for inventing better. Rooftops were coated in riverstraw, which was about as waterproof as a swabbing mop. Volcanic glass paved the pathways, which made it impossible to walk on at the smallest sign of a drizzle.
And yet, in all its bubbling chaos, the city had charm…
With each cobble of a lustred black, the pavement resembled the scales of a large lizard, sleeping under the starry sky. Along the obsidian-coated roads, a soft breeze carried distant smells of brimstone and sulphur, mementos of Kranija’s volcanic temper. Purple fire – an invention of the north – was apparently in fashion, because the Alarians had used it for everything. But for the purple-flamed luminaires and the idyllic light they cast, Solidago was a mantle of black velvet against the indigo sky.
Vivian stepped into the heart of the city with confidence.
The central market was built upon a plaza of obsidian flagstones. Countless stands had been crammed between the crooked terracotta facades, exhibiting assorted goods.
The Alarian marketplace appeared to provide a variety of merchandise: mysterious ointments, unidentifiable vegetables, crocheted vests, leather footwear, fur-enmeshed pouches, obsidian tableware, decorative trinkets, jewellery and a wide variety of handcrafted tools.
About a dozen beggars soaked in the crispy sea breeze, their clothes sprinkled with holes held together by thread. Vivian was suddenly reminded of the Neds back home, whose origin was in a poverty gone epidemic, in a state that couldn’t be bothered. She wondered what to expect from Ærria.
One of the beggars – an old man with a foot-long beard – seemed to have had it worse than the others. While everyone else wore shoes of many degrees of wear, his feet were enclosed in transparent bags. She approached and dropped twenty-three ruvi in his pouch. The old man blinked back his gratitude through a pair of mismatched eyes.
This could have been me , Vivian thought to herself as she walked away from the wall of beggars, thankful Lady Saah had offered her a home.
‘Beautiful urb, Solidago’ a small voice rang through her head. ‘Alarians call it Sole-Day-City . Once every leap, Ikko shines for full resting.’
She gathered her eyebrows. ‘The sun only rises once a year?’
‘If Vivian call that rising. Kaap would say– Hey! Where Vivian going?’ Kaap’s frightened voice entered her mind from somewhere across her shoulders. ‘Herb merchant over there!’
Vivian gave her backpack a conciliatory stroke. ‘Gonna see around first, alright? The Artisan gave me some money.’
She quickly found the most colourful stand in the market. Its name was advertised in magnificent colour-changing runes. Vivian drew herself nearer and watched the runes rearrange into comprehensible English words:
“ Mama Vadda’s Thread-Altering Trinkets ”
A thin woman with silver-white hair had spread her jewellery across a large wooden wedge. Metal-woven bracelets, insect-shaped earrings, runic necklaces and gemstone-encrusted boxes were just a few of the main attraction.
‘Ælorria preserve me, a customer!’ cried the vendor when she saw Vivian approaching. ‘You likes Mama Vadda’s jewellery, yes?’
‘Umm, I merely just—’
Before she got a change to find a verb for the sentence, Vivian was taken by the arm and arranged in front of a mirror.
‘Try this on, prettie,’ said the woman, and attached a firefly clip-on earring on Vivian’s ear.
‘Ouch!’ cried Vivian.
She felt the tiniest prick in her earlobe. Meaning to remove the earring, Vivian automatically turned to the large display mirror, only to find someone else staring back at her. She yelped.
‘Great for carnivals, hmm? Furries is all the rage these days.’
Vivian beheld herself and the large rabbit ears that had sprouted out of the top of her head. Every bit of her skin was now covered in thick black fur.
‘Hmm, perhaps not,’ said the vendor, detaching the clip-on, and Vivian watched herself rebecame the Vivian she remembered.
‘What about one of our wristlets, hmm?’ asked Mama Vadda, but instead of waiting for a reply, she fastened a beautifully-woven bracelet around Vivian’s unsuspecting wrist. ‘It has up to five in-built alterations!’
Vivian watched the woman pull one of the interwoven threads embedded in the bracelet and felt another small prick in her wrist. Her velvet-black hair had braided itself into a compli
cated-looking bun.
The vendor pulled a second Thread, and Vivian’s lips turned burgundy, as though she was wearing make-up. The third Thread had made her blonde, but the fourth had merely just cut a foot from her general height, which made Vivian too short to see in the mirror what the fifth Thread had done. All she knew was that the fabric around her chest had tightened.
Before she could figure out what had struck her, Mama Vadda had already removed her woven wristlet, and was returning it to the stand.
‘Sixty ruvi,’ said the woman.
Vivian checked herself in the display mirror. Her every feature seemed to have returned to normal.
‘How does it work?’ she asked.
‘Honestly, prettie. How does it work? ’ the silver-haired woman echoed the question, while giving Vivian a suspicious look. ‘What’cha mucking ‘bout, hmm?’
Vivian pointed at the woven wristlet. ‘How does it change my appearance like that? How is it even possible?’
‘Æbekanta evade me, prettie. Was you never in school?’
‘ Vivian drawing attention to herself , ’ Kaap’s mind found her own from the inside of her leader backpack. ‘ Merchant thinks Vivian slow in mind— ’
‘—I’m slow in my mind, sorry’ said Vivian quickly. ‘Had a bit of an accident with an exploding—‘
Vivian’s eyes darted to the beverage merchant across the street.
’–barrel when I was small.’
Vivian’s first vein of lies easily triggered the next. Before she knew it, she had spun a whole loom of deceit.
‘Father worked in a distillery. Too poor to have me schooled. That being said… how does it work?’
The vendor continued to stare at Vivian as though she had never seen anything like her around. When Mama Vadda spoke next, her tone had been dumbed-downed to fit a toddler; one who had to be explained why one plus one doesn’t equal eleven and why it should care.
‘Tis those Threads, see. They was imbibed with Kaalà,’ said the vendor. ‘You has heard of Kaalà, havenya?’ she eyed Vivian distrustfully.
‘Of course I have!’ Vivian rolled her eyes. ‘Anyway, it says right there—‘ she pointed at a small wooden plaque ,‘—that one can become anyone, as long as they wear the jewellery. Is that true?’
Vivian Amberville - The Weaver of Odds Page 16