“Come,” she said, touching my scarred jaw. “Tell me your name.”
Though I wanted to pull away, I did not. I’d heard that the star clan mages used senses other than sight to work their magic—hence the veil twisted in her other hand. As I answered, my jaw moved against the delicate pads of her fingers. “Rafel Sal AnLenia.”
I chose names for An Riel based on vaguely Spanish names, because there’s a history of imperialism there as well as of old wars with desert nations, and when I rolled the names around in my mouth alongside the initial character ideas, the sounds fit. They’re not meant to be Spanish, only to evoke a commonality because we English speakers will probably recognize the rhythm and sounds shared by the An Riel names. For the star clans I developed less, and merely chose a handful of syllables and made rules about how many syllables names would have for which gender and place in clan hierarchy. If this novella was a novel or series, there would have been a lot more rules and specifics. But the amount of work and world building should fit the project.
“Rafel,” she repeated.
“Dinah.”
• • •
For centuries the citadel of Shivers has stood upon the desert bluff overlooking the southernmost bend of the Irisu River. Built and molded from stones and mud bricks, it blends into the orange and red layers of the desert from any angle. It climbs the slope on seven terraces, like the shelf farms of An Riel’s seaside cliffs.
Comparison is another good world-building technique. Twice the information, and more chances to reference something the reader will recognize.
The city was more blood-soaked by fighting than most. Control had traded between An Riel, Eruse, and star clan rebels over and over and over again. The rebels’ first priority was leaving it uninhabitable for the imperial armies, and so they churned the mines out, planting them everywhere they could as they fled. Maximum damage to the enemy, even at great risk to themselves.
I’d spent nearly a month here, hunting rebels, when it was temporarily in An Riel’s possession. The Gardener, gardening.
Now I was here to dig up flowers, not create them in violence.
• • •
Our first day together, Dinah Aniv said nothing to me before moving out, though her eyes lingered on the alterations I’d made to my red uniform. We were all instructed to remove metal insignia and the extra weight of ribbons and medals, to leave behind sidearms because the worked metal interfered with the magery. We were allowed our sabers so long as they were twins, one for each hand, for the star clans said they balanced each other out that way. “Marries the humors, or some such thing,” Commander Saria AnYar said dismissively, never hearing or feeling the hum herself.
For my uniform, I’d gone a step further and snipped off buttons and pried away the grommets from my boots. My jacket tied shut now, and my laces threaded directly through leather. Dinah glanced down my chest and even to my feet before meeting my eyes in brief approval and striding away with a grand gesture that we all should follow.
• • •
We were designated Sky Breaker team, after one of the star clan gods incarnate.
• • •
As we picked our way through the deserted city, I kept both hands on the pommels of my sabers. I felt the singing energy connect, like a circuit closing through my body. Wind blew sadly through empty homes, ruffling threadbare window dressings and rattling old door chains. Our collective boot-steps were a rhythmic beat, kept in time by a sergeant in the rear shield row tapping the hilt of his saber to his shield.
Not even rodents or wild dogs had taken up residence on this terrace, though there were signs of both near the bottom fortress gates. I suspected the desert cats kept them away more readily than flower mines. The triggers were nearly always too sophisticated to be blown by anything smaller than a child.
I heard the cry of an eagle but couldn’t see it in the painfully blue sky.
Sweat prickled my scalp. The hum held gently in my teeth.
I studied everything: patterns of brick and shadows, rubble, alleys, sniper perches, unhinged shutters, scraps of old canvas. I caught myself hunting signs of rebels instead of mines. Men were my specialty, and so I touched my tongue to the hum in my teeth, paced Dinah, and waited for a bomb to be found.
It only took a block and a half.
• • •
That first mine hunkered in a long, thin crater in the street, crowded with rubble for disguise. It was at an intersection of our wide boulevard and another road cutting immediately up to the next terrace on narrow stairs. I remembered that narrow stairway from my Gardener days; it was a dark cut-through once the sun was low in the afternoon, nearly impossible to see into even from the fourth-terrace neighborhood above it. Excellent hiding for rebels.
Dinah Aniv moved forward. I kept to her elbow, “pacing” her, as she walked slowly and evenly with her bare hands before her, fingers splayed. Her veil covered her face and hair, falling just past her chin. Sheer and undyed, it’s meant to mar her vision only enough that she always remembers not to rely upon sight. Sight is imperfect, the star clan mages believe, more so than smell, hearing, taste, or especially touch. Eyes can be fooled, even the eyes of magic.
We stepped carefully in case any trigger waited hidden under the stones of the street. That was rare, but not so rare we shouldn’t consider it. Once we stood near enough to crouch and touch the mine—a mash of ceramic and clay, as large as a hound’s head—Dinah stopped. She glanced at me, and I could just see her open eyes through the veil.
I did my job: paced out the perimeter, marking with chalk any irregularities I noticed, inspecting windows and rubble within the limits of the perimeter. Took half an hour of silence but for the scrape of my boots and the low breathing of hot men behind me.
When I finished, I had three places marked for Dinah to investigate, though none required her immediate attention. The stair alley leading to the next terrace was suspicious, but there were no signs of recent movement or habitation. It was only my gut wondering if rebels still used it, if there were still insurgents hiding here, waiting to ambush. I signaled to the shield sergeant, and the rest of the team spread out to protect the perimeter lines.
It was Dinah’s turn.
I softly asked where she would have me, and she gave me my lead.
Jogging to the nearest wall, I hooked an arm into the low window, then used it and the ones above to climb up the wall to the roof. I sat, straddling the brick ledge, one boot dangling into the courtyard, the other flat and solid on the orange roof patio.
From there I could see everything. I heard the team’s quiet shuffle on the bricks, felt the breeze, saw over the houses to the rest of the city: there was colorful movement six blocks over and one terrace down. Cloud Swallower team.
I breathed deeply the dry desert air, and watched. Not only what I could focus on, but all of it. My peripheral vision, the patterns my mind recognized and didn’t. The hum. I settled into that space, learned it, understood it, so that any slight shift would not be missed and I could warn her in time.
Dinah knelt at the bomb.
She reached with both hands in a single, elegant motion and skimmed her fingers along the surface.
I shivered as if she had touched my spine.
As the sensation passed, I realized I was humming along with the desert, too soft to hear even myself, only the subtlest vibration in my sinuses.
Nothing happened.
The wind slipped lazily over rooftops; the eagle called out again. Tore through the tension like an alarm. Several men below me shifted, wiped away sweat, glanced up.
All around, the orange and red city hummed.
Dinah slipped her fingers along the ceramic bomb, touching every inch of it, caressing it, reading it.
Sweat dripped down my back, caught at my belt, along my belly, soaked the cloth above my eyes.
She bent lower, twisted to put one bare foot on either side of the pothole, and slipped her veil off her face. From my pe
rch, I saw her eyes were closed. Her lips moved, and she put her mouth against the bomb.
My stomach tightened, and I wanted to touch the hilts of my sabers for that circuit of electrical balance.
Dinah stroked the underside of the bomb with her fingers and lifted it out. She stroked it again, with her lips. She murmured, and maybe her tongue slipped out to touch the bomb, too.
All the servicemen from An Riel stared. The star clan men averted their eyes.
I wanted this to be uncomfortable, but also sexy and dangerous. Like the flower mines are both beautiful and deadly. It’s the way of desert magic to be two opposing things at once, and Rafel and the Rielans (and the reader) can and should have visceral reactions to the difference, the otherness.
Setting the bomb upon the road as gently as she would a baby, Dinah put her veil back on and then pulled small items from invisible pockets in her robe: petrified wood, an opal the size of her eye, river-bored limestone, the long black feather of a crow. She removed a chalk pencil and string. She laid the black string around the bomb precisely, in a series of squares. She drew letters directly onto the bricks. I couldn’t see well enough from my perch to decipher them.
Everything fell still. Not even a breeze shifted the hem of the mage’s veil.
I absorbed the hum, the quiet beat of my pulse in that strange tranquility.
Suddenly, Dinah said, “Ah!” very loudly and with a full yawning breath. Not a few of the men startled.
She directed her voice along the spine of the bomb.
A pale pink cloud of air puffed out from the bomb, shaped in swirls like a full blooming rose. It would have gone for blood if it had exploded.
Instead it fell to pieces.
The Sky Breaker team visibly relaxed, smiling some, shaking hands. The star clan members kissed their fingers.
I leaned off the wall, climbed down to the second-story window, and from there leaped to the ground.
It was a good landing, firm and exactly how I intended.
Dinah glanced at me as I rose and seemed to catch herself staring. Through the sheer veil her expression was washed out, but her black eyes and her mouth were apparent as she cast an amused smile at me, as if knowing I was trying to impress her.
I realized I was, at least a little bit.
• • •
That first day went better than the second, though the routine of disarmament never quite got boring. We found too many sun-bleached bones for that.
I fell into a good rhythm, and so did my team, as we systematically cleared the third terrace. Though there was always some tension between Rielans and the star clan refugees while in camp, once we set off as Sky Breaker team the mission goal put a stop to it.
Twice the first week I went off alone, signaling to the team I would return shortly, and on the second foray I found what I was hunting: a rebel crouched among broken pottery and dusty rolled rugs, waiting for us to pass so he could trigger a secondary device.
I slaughtered him too easily. The trigger was maged into his palm, so I sliced off the hand before marking the house with a flag made from his striped yellow and blue tunic. It was only then it occurred to me Dinah Aniv and likely the entire rest of the team might be horrified at what I was bringing. So I dragged one of the rugs under his ruined arm to soak up any blood that leaked out of him—the star clans collected all the blood of their dead—and wrapped the severed hand in a cloth.
I’d been gone no more than half an hour from Sky Breaker team’s perimeter. I didn’t know how to do it gently, only that I should. I brought the sergeant in charge over to Dinah and carefully unfolded the stained blue cloth from around the hand. “Here is the trigger I found on a rebel,” I said, “and the body is marked for mortuary; also I arranged for his blood to be as easy as possible to collect.”
During revisions I added a few words to give more insight into Rafel’s emotional connection to the events so he didn’t come off as terribly affected by PTSD or a sociopath. I hope it did the trick.
“Rebels still in the city, sir,” the sergeant said, not a question so much as gravelly acceptance.
“Not many. We’ll need to keep an extra eye out. I want to make a few sweeps before we continue the mine hunt.” I glanced at Dinah’s face. Her veil was rolled around her neck as always when she was not disarming. The mage’s lashes fluttered as she stared at the seeping wrist, the smoothly cut skin, broken bone.
“You have to tell us if it is disarmed,” I reminded her softly.
Her mouth trembled as she opened it to speak; then she thrust forward her own large hand, finger out. She touched the pale line of magic painted to the palm. Dinah jerked away, gasping. “Warm,” she whispered. “Warm and soft.”
The sergeant glared at me, as if I’d upset her on purpose. “We should retire to camp, sir, to take care of this locked and safe.”
I reached for Aniv’s wrist. “Dinah?” I asked.
She did not allow me to touch her, but took the hand and its cloth wrap from me. I could see the tendons tight in her neck, the quiver of her brow, as she folded the cloth around the hand again. “It is dead, unable to trigger anything,” she said in a tight voice, and she left to give the hand to one of her star clan soldiers.
• • •
After that I was recognized as the Gardener. It changed how everyone looked at me: the Rielans with admiration or at least shared pride of country, the refugees with fear or suspicion or anger.
Jarair Man AnGraya lifted his chin, clapped my shoulder, and declared at breakfast mess, “Excellent to have a gardener to help us get rid of all the weeds!” The men laughed, and I smiled a bit, but uncomfortably. I was good at my job. I liked to be. But I finally realized I probably shouldn’t be so glad to be so good at that particular work.
• • •
Dinah came to me the next morning as I emerged from my tent, still tying my red jacket closed. I nearly ran into her. Her eyes were narrowed and dark, her hands folded into the skirt pockets of her red-pink-violet-yellow-striped robes. She said, “You are like the cree bark tree, whose berries are poison but whose roots hold water.”
Tension at the heart of their relationship, and the relationship between An Riel and the Sweet.
I was more afraid in that moment than I’d been since returning to the Sweet.
“You are a very good pacer,” she whispered.
“You are a very good mage, Dinah.”
“You have murdered so many of mine. You are famous for it.”
What could I do but nod? I thought of arguing over the word murder.
She shifted her feet; it seemed her hands clenched inside her pockets, and yet she did not remove her flashing eyes from my face. “Rafel the Gardener,” she murmured. “Did you know we plant flowers for the dead, too? Did you know we water gardens with the blood of our fallen?”
“Yes,” I said.
Her surprise made clear she did not expect me to know.
I wanted to touch her—the way she touches everything, to understand it. I left my arms dangling at my sides. I said, “They are your enemy too.”
“Who is?”
“The men and boys who plant the bombs. The ones who hide in the cities, in the riverbeds, waiting to blow us all up. The man I killed yesterday was not one of yours.”
“He was star clan,” she whispered.
“You would have died. And the seven men of your clans in Sky Breaker team. Not only us Rielans.”
She tilted her face up, her long nose like an arrow pointed at me.
I said, “We are your allies—I am your ally.”
“Can a man from An Riel ever be allied to the desert?” she asked, but she immediately turned and left me. She did not want an answer.
If she had, maybe I’d have told her about the hum.
• • •
The refugees in the camp were the first star clan people I had a chance to observe who were not prisoners or enemies. It surprised me, coming from An Riel, how little they seemed to reve
re their women, despite the magical gift from their gods coming only to women—so I thought then.
During the war, most of the rebels had been men—unless their cell had a mage with them—and we assumed it was for the same reason most An Riel soldiers were men: because we are far more expendable. Second and third sons, nephews, men not needed for keeping a family strong or keeping a country strong. We are the tools, the servants, the branches of the tree. Our mothers, sisters, aunts are the roots and heart.
The most important word in this paragraph is “assumed.”
I wondered for the first time if this distinction was why the star clans fled to the Eruse Confederacy instead of to us, because the Eruse do not even allow their women to inherit property.
It was not that the star clan women were treated poorly, that I saw. They and their men dressed rather alike, and both seemed to hold positions of respect within the refugee hierarchy. It was that in watching them interact, I noticed a deference on the women’s behalf toward the men, except where the mages were concerned. It baffled me, for it was the opposite of Rielan ways. I wanted to ask Aunt Lusha, who’d spent time in the Sweet. I wanted to ask Dinah.
But Dinah, of all the star clan in camp, was the one treated most differently. I could not tell if it was awe or fear that kept them from gathering too closely around her, men or women. To a certain extent it was true of all five star clan mages in camp, but Dinah Aniv was most definitely set apart.
I decided it could only be for reasons similar to my own outsider role: she was famous for how skilled she was at her work. There was no doubt in any of the pacers’ minds she was the fastest cleaner. Perhaps that made her the most powerful mage and worthy of their awe.
Special services had hardly any women with us in camp, except for the mission commander—a third cousin to the Queen—and her second daughter. It made the star clan women something of a focus for the flirtatious attention of some of our soldiers—the newer ones who didn’t know better and weren’t already husbands. In the service we were expected to keep our urges in check, and if we absolutely must we should confine our releases to each other, so there was no danger of getting ourselves all over a woman who didn’t wish it. The commanders and aunts tended to look the other way so long as we kept it within our own rank.
The Anatomy of Curiosity Page 11