by Rabia Gale
To Rafe, it was a place of pain, all barbed wire and acid. The contaminated ka, still wild and unmanageable, taunted him from afar, daring him to test it again.
He could still feel it searing his soul, the agony still fresh as if it had happened yesterday.
So when Coop, as proud and eager as a new father to show off the Ironheart settlement, tentatively asked if Rafe was up for a tour, he said yes.
And that morning he did something he hadn’t in two years: he brewed magebane tea.
Selene had just peeked over the rim of the world. Theo still slept on the one bed in their shared quarters. Rafe had a pallet on a wooden floor still raw and new-looking. Since the first thing he’d done in his quarters was to memorize its layout, he didn’t waste any time fumbling about when he got up. He rolled up the pallet, stacked it neatly in the corner, and got dressed. His clothes were no longer the fitted ones of an Oakhaven gentleman, with lots of buttons and ties and ornamentation. His shirts, coats, and trousers were all of subdued colors that matched each other. They were the clothes of a blind man who was used to leaving places in a hurry.
Screens partitioned off the one large room into separate sections. The Friendship authorities had showed it to him with their apologies—with the number of people pouring into New Hope and the surrounding outposts, space was at a premium. Even the dedicated around-the-clock building in Friendship could not keep up with the demand. As Rafe lay unsleeping on his pallet at night, distant hammers banged, diggers grated and roared, and trains and trolleys whined on their tracks.
Rafe heated water in a kettle over a Shimmer-made hot plate. From the hodge-podge of magical devices in the chamber, it looked like whoever had prepared the place for their kayan guest had gone on a determined scavenging expedition. Besides the hot plate, there was an ornate timepiece with an alarm transferred through ka, a ka-powered shaver, and a rubbish bin that leached waste of ka and disseminated it through the air. Rafe captured these loose threads and wound them into the smoky quartz inside his walking stick.
The crockery provided was of a thick and sturdy kind, so solid that it would survive a fall from clumsy fingers.
No doubt that too was planned.
He took a small pouch cinched shut with a drawstring from his pocket. It was light in his hand, loose leaves rustling. He laid it on the low table and sat a while, not thinking of anything until the kettle gave a low hoot. He switched off the hot plate and opened the pouch.
The dried leaves crumbled as he took a liberal pinch and dropped them into a mug.
Oh, well. If I’m going to fail at being a kayan, might as well fail in the most miserable, whimpering way.
He added another scoop into the mug, spilling magebane leaves across the table. Their sweetish odor rose to his nose, reminding him of afternoon teas with Bryony, which he had enjoyed, and the rare occasions he’d been summoned by his grandmother to be medicated, which he hadn’t.
He held the mug steady with one hand while he poured. Its exterior surface grew warm. Steam rose into his face; involuntarily he held his breath. Then he let go with a shake of his head—in a few minutes he would down the stuff, after all.
The timepiece was across the room, but it didn’t matter. Rafe set the timer with a twitch and a tweak of blue ka. He hardly thought about the act, doing it as easily as he’d wound clocks in Oakhaven two years ago. His ka-senses were like extra limbs, manipulating the world in ways different from his hands.
And he was voluntarily numbing them.
And why not? It’s not like I’m of much use here right now.
Rafe set the mug against his lips, and in a gesture half-despair and half-defiance downed its contents. The tea scalded his mouth and throat. It tasted medicinal, with an odd combination of sweet and bitter. His grandmother had never made any attempt to disguise its taste, just as she had never made any attempt to explain just why she dosed him weekly. Rafe was not given to demonizing old women, but he could never help but think of her as a witchy old crone.
Bryony, on the other hand, greeted him with smiles and a lavish spread of delectable flavors and delicate scents: citrus peel, flower petals, almond paste, lemon filling. She pressed goodies into his hands and urged him to take them on his trips.
Far from easing his quartz sickness, she’d planned to make sure he never knew of his powers. So she could keep him under her thumb as long as possible.
Rafe set down the mug with unnecessary vigor and waited for it to do its work.
He had never taken magebane with an awareness of what it was and what it did. Two years ago at the Point, the place where both Isabella and Bryony had been raised, the Sisters of Selene had made up this pouch for him. Sable had kept it for him—and from him. It was too easy for the quartz sickness sufferers to misuse the potent drug. In an effort to free themselves from the sear and burn of toxic ka, they became addicted, not even realizing how much damage they did to themselves.
Rafe had run across two of these unfortunates in the Talar, a young mother and a middle-aged dromedary driver. Both had been potential kayan, driven to the brink of madness by the poisoned ka surrounding them.
Their ends had not been pretty. The shahkayan had meant to show him their fates as a warning, but even they didn’t know how wretched and horrifying it was. They could not see and experience the ka the way Rafe and those like him did, they did not know what it was like as those alien-to-them senses were numbed, attacked, sliced up, and amputated by the vicious drug.
Nor the way it spread all through the kayan, replacing pathways that should be attuned to ka with its own dreamy poisons.
He was fortunate that his grandmother, for all her flaws, had kept the dosage low when she medicated him. Bryony may have been far less careful, but he’d been away so much, it hadn’t mattered.
But now, armed with knowledge, he could see the beginning stages of it firsthand in himself.
He could not sense the magebane circulate in his system, only the effects of it, like following a man by trailing his shadow. Strand by strand, ka winked out for him, like room after room going dark as the master of the house went through turning off lights. The darkness settled around him, like a too-confining quilt, muffling him.
The spark and roar of the Tors Lumena faded to a glimmer and a muttering. Then, those too were gone, and Rafe was left in the dark, with senses that couldn’t reach beyond the room.
His hearing had sharpened. His own breathing was loud in his ears, as was the blood pounding in his head and the heart pounding in his chest. His slick hands were clenched in the fabric of his loose pants. The weave of it was thick and scratchy. Yet another train squealed by, shaking the walls. The silence it left behind was just as deafening as its screech.
Rafe reached for his walking stick. His hand knocked into it, sent it clattering to the floor. He fumbled for it, sent it rolling. When he finally got his hand on it, it felt awkward, all wrong in his grip. There were scratches on it he’d never noticed, the knob of it was battered.
Rafe gripped the table and levered himself to his feet. Navigating by kyra, seeing just a few feet ahead of him, with no peripheral vision, he made his way to the door.
From the far corner of the room, he heard Theo turn and sigh. Rafe paused, until his brother settled down.
He eased open the door, stepped out, and shut it behind him. He prodded ahead of him with his walking stick. There were stairs several feet away, at the end of the corridor, with a clear path between them and him.
So far, so good.
Rafe took three steps and tripped over some unseen child’s toy. He windmilled as it shot across the floor and careened into a wall. He steadied himself by grabbing someone else’s door knob. It rattled, and a sleepy, annoyed voice demanded who was creeping about so early in the scorched morning?
Rafe let go of the knob.
It was going to be a long day.
Fortunately, Coop had sent an escort. Six men waited for him at the bottom of the stairs which Rafe made his way
gingerly down with no further mishaps. They crowded around him, herding him trainwards without quite touching him. Once he was safely on board, his escort decreased from six to two. Those two installed him near a window, then sat in an opposite row.
The journey passed in silence.
Coop met them at the platform in New Hope. The train station was an echoing cavern of a place, full of rushing and hissing, stamping and screeching. It smelled of burning and the air was clammy. People milled about with frenetic purpose.
Rafe would’ve ducked right back onto the train if it hadn’t been for Coop and his desire for an update.
“Isabella?” he asked.
Coop shook his head. “Not yet. But you can’t sit indoors moping all day, Rafe.”
His friend was right. But his own helplessness enraged him. Once, he had been a government agent, with a list of contacts and access to an entire state’s network of spies and informers. He should be out there with Coop’s men, tracking, asking questions, following leads, getting into places he wasn’t supposed to go and getting information from people who didn’t want to talk to him.
He had been good at that, and he’d enjoyed the work. It had been enough for him.
And now? Supposedly, he was stronger than ever, but that hadn’t prevented Karzov from stealing Isabella right from under his nose. Tension coiled inside Rafe.
He longed to be out there, doing something.
Coop didn’t let Rafe stew in his own frustrated thoughts long. He seized Rafe by the arm and hurried him outside, talking a mile a minute. The clearer, cooler air was a welcome relief. Recognizing Coop only wanted to take his mind off his worries, Rafe obediently directed his myopic, monochromatic kyra vision to all the structures and features his friend wanted him to see. Various commemorative statues, including—to his horror—one of himself, were featureless blobs. The sites of New Hope University, New Hope Hospital, and other ambitious New Hope projects were blank fields with skeletal structures on them. Coop pointed out the innermost ring of defenses in the distance; to Rafe, they were sinister hulks, bristling with unknown spiky objects.
Rafe made polite noises of congratulations. This place was everything Ironheart itself had promised to be and more, but he couldn’t summon any enthusiasm for it. The rattle of trolleys, the rumble of diggers, the pounding of feet, and the calls of vendors and construction workers was all a din.
Coop stopped, so abruptly that Rafe was a few steps ahead before he realized his companion had stalled. He turned around and brought his kyra-sight to Coop’s face which wore an expression of exaggerated thoughtfulness.
“Those heroic mental endeavors can’t be good for you, Coop,” he called. “Come on before you sprain something.”
Laughter flickered like lightning over his friend’s countenance. “No, but this is a damned dull expedition for you. Let’s leave the Tors Lumena till after lunch, and go to Little Point instead.”
He turned on his heel and forged a path through the middle of a group of youths coming up behind them. “Sorry,” he yelled out to them, not sounding it. “Make way for my friend, will you.” Over his shoulder, he called out, “Come on, Rafe.”
His long-legged stride was brisk and unconcerned for his friend’s disability. Rafe didn’t know whether to laugh at this or be exasperated. He put some more speed into his own pace, loose rocks turning underfoot, and caught up with Coop at the end of the street.
“Little Point?” he questioned, but Coop only said mysteriously, “You’ll see.”
He did. Little Point was a man-made hill, formed from the debris of excavation, raw and crumbly and bare of vegetation, at the edge of New Hope. A building clung to the top of it, an unremarkable structure made of brick with a corrugated tin roof.
A path, with steps cut in places, climbed straight up to the door. Coop took it with ground-eating strides, fairly leaping up the steps. That boundless nervous energy was a new thing. Perhaps it was due to being immured in stuffy rooms enduring paperwork or sitting on committees.
Or perhaps it was an effect of his krin-possession two years ago.
Rafe frowned as he took the path at a slower pace. He didn’t want to arrive at the top only to collapse from exhaustion.
Still, this had better be good.
Coop had his hand on the door handle when Rafe caught up to him, breathing hard. I need a session in the gymnasium. Several of them. He noted with a touch of sourness that Coop didn’t look like he had been put to any unusual exertion.
“Of course,” said Coop, conversationally, “I don’t know if Newvale will actually be here. Fellow spends as much time on some forsaken mountaintop in the Barrens as he does in New Hope.”
“Wait. Did you say Newvale?”
But Coop had depressed the handle. Finding the door unlocked, he pushed his way in, calling out a loud “Hallo.”
Rafe crowded in close behind.
The room smelled like a lab, of open flames and scorched lab coats, of formaldehyde and lubricant. It was too warm despite its location and thin walls. Coop shucked off his coat and threw it over a chair.
Rafe’s kyra-sight showed him clutter. On the left, tables were piled high with books and papers, mathematical aids and steel instruments. A huge wheeled chair, stuffing protruding from the ripped upholstery, was shoved to one side. Several smaller wooden chairs, prim and straight-backed and uncomfortable, stood in a cluster.
The right side was different. A granite slab stretched its length and its surface was scrupulously clean. The rectangular blobs along it were probably shelves of reagents. Cabinets lurked in the shadow below.
Through the doorway opposite Rafe was some huge, multi-part instrument whose purpose he could not make out at all. It was all a confusing jumble of shapes and even pushing his kyra-sight toward it didn’t help.
A smallish man hurried out of this chamber.
“Oh, it’s you, Cooper,” he said, and turned to leave,
“Just a moment, Newvale,” said Coop, laughing. “I’ve brought a friend to see you. Rafe, this is Newvale. Newvale, Rafe.”
“Rafe who?” Newvale turned around and stared at Rafe. With an inward chuckle, Rafe realized they were both squinting shortsightedly at each other, one with kyra-sight, the other through thick-lensed glasses.
“How do you do?” he said cordially, putting out his hand.
“Oh, that Rafe.” Newvale sounded enlightened. Rafe wondered just what Newvale had heard about him. “Pleased to meet you.” He pumped Rafe’s hand vigorously.
“I have your book on natural principles,” Rafe told him. “I’m sorry that I never made it all the way through under my own steam.” He’d left the book on his nightstand in his rented rooms in Oakhaven the day he became a wanted man. He wondered, for the first time, what had happened to his possessions.
Newvale waved his hand dismissively. “Oh, that old thing!” he said airily, as if he hadn’t labored over it for ten years. “Hopelessly outdated, I’m afraid. You should see what I’m working on. I’ll send you a copy when I’m done.”
“I’d be grateful,” said Rafe, gravely, wondering just whose arm he could twist to read it to him. There was no chance his kyra-sight could handle the fine print and dense proofs.
Coop snickered, and Rafe shot him a quelling glance.
“You heard of Newvale’s conclusive discovery of Selene’s mechanical arm, didn’t you?”
“Yes, Isabella wrote me.” It was one of only four notes she’d sent over the two years.
Isabella. His heart gave a painful squeeze.
To cover it, he said, gesturing to the gigantic machine at Newvale’s back, “Is this the instrument…?”
“No, no, no!” Newvale shook his head with enough vigor to set his hair flying. “It is even better than the first! It is my third—and best—model. Come, I will show you.”
He seized Rafe by the hand and pulled him into the back chamber. Chattering enthusiastically, he took Rafe on a disorganized and bewildering tour of the instrument an
d its various parts. Phrases washed over him: electromagnetic spectrum… agitation of lumenium particles… diffraction… reflective index.
Coop stood in the doorway, hands in his pockets. No great effort was needed to make out the grin on his face.
Not that you were any better, Rafe mouthed at him. Coop shrugged as if to say, We all have our obsessions.
To his surprise, the more Newvale talked, the better the pieces of information slid into place for him. It had been proposed that their world was like a well-run, macro-machine, but never proven by Oakhavenite scientists. Selene sailed across the sky by no means visible to the naked eye. Only Newvale’s experiments and instruments had made out her rotating arm, one made of so perfect a material, nigh on transparent to those on the disc. Only a flicker of the stars behind it had alerted Newvale to its movements. From there he’d probed it with as many instruments modern science had to offer.
When those failed to spot it, he made his own.
He’d learned that the giant arm reflected a special ray on the light spectrum. The rays, bouncing back onto specially coated plates, produced a readable graph.
“The things we’re learning now,” Rafe looked wistfully at the instrument. “Across the Divide, in the Talar, they’ve known these things for centuries.”
“Ah?” Newvale looked interested.
“One of their smallest majid—a domed city—is built over a series of cascades. Over time the water has exposed a bed of bluish quartz—the whole city glows with the color.” Rafe paused, hearing once again the constant backdrop of running water. Monarian waterways and Oakhaven public squares were nothing compared to it. “In one of the caves is a star map made of ka, a relic from before the Scorching. It includes celestial bodies we have only recently rediscovered by telescope and many yet to be found.
“The prime duty of the shahkayan of that place is to preserve the knowledge the ancient kayan left behind. It is a constant battle to keep the cavern safe from erosion and damp, flooding and breakage. The ka-systems are fragile and unstable and the wild ka from the quartz around it is a disruptive influence.”