No.
She couldn’t. She couldn’t possibly. Her father had made her hair, wanting her to keep it always as a sign of her faith, her connection to both God and His creation.
There was no holy rebuke at that first, most selfish thought – only the pitiless reply of Día’s own reason. And then he wanted you to go out and give yourself in service to the world.
But her hair was her pride – a sin – her beauty – vanity, another sin – the one thing that truly belonged to her – greed, the most odious of sins.
But her job was to find Elim – she had to save him before the a’Krah put him to death. The Dog Lady was depending on her.
And who better than Halfwick to tell you where he’s gone?
But he was so far down – what if she still couldn’t reach him?
The answer was as cold and firm as the stone under her feet. Then you had better give it all.
“Hello?” Halfwick’s mutilated voice tried again in Marín. “Is anyone there?”
He hadn’t spotted her. She could still look for some other solution, run ahead to try and find help...
Except that judging by the tracks, Elim had already done just that – assuming he hadn’t gotten fed up and shoved Halfwick over the edge in the first place.
Día pulled her dreadlocks over her face, breathing deep from the rich, subtle scent of her own body’s creation. She held fast to their tips, the place where her father had first combed and shaped them all those years ago, and tried to remember the sound of his voice. He had been so big and strong, so full of stern, silent righteousness.
But all she could think of was Fours, her sad, craven papá, small and stooped, beaten down by years of fear and duplicity and self-serving compromise. She remembered their last conversation, the day Halfwick had sat up on the slab and obliterated the order of her life.
Papá, she had asked him, how do you know the right thing to do?
He had smiled down at his hands, pinching the little scarred spaces between his fingers. Well, I just think of what I might do, you know, this way or that one, and it’s... do you know, the right thing is almost always the one that I am most powerfully anxious to avoid.
That was how she had decided – right then, on the spot. She could have left Halfwick to his own devices, or given him a horse to use in hunting down his friend. But she had done the hardest thing – she had determined to go with him, just to see that he could have what he said he wanted, could join in Elim’s punishment without giving him the means to escape it.
And this was where it had gotten her.
“Please,” came the rotting moan from down below. “Please, if you can hear me...”
The world wavered as Día’s eyes filled with tears.
I was hoping that you had come to help make things right. That was what Weisei had said. I was hoping that the Starving God had sent you to help Afvik finish his life.
He isn’t a ‘Starving’ God, Día had wanted to tell him. He’s just God. He is love and abundance. He is creation itself.
But that didn’t mean he would never ask for a sacrifice.
Día clutched the tips of her hair one last time, a child’s tiny fist clinging to her father’s hand.
Then she stood and drew her knife.
“JUST EAT IT.”
Weisei sighed, as if Vuchak’s voice were a pain in his side, and rolled over. “I will, Vichi – after I wake up.”
No, not after. Now. Vuchak stood there with the cold meat in his hands, and prodded his marka’s backside with the toe of his moccasin-boot. “Well, split the difference with me. Have some now – just half.” Weisei’s stomach had to be kept busy, especially while the rest of him was at rest. Food was strength – strength to move, and strength to keep that half-ton of dead horse moving too.
Not that Weisei had any thought for that. He curled over, burying himself deeper in his black-feather cloak, striving to shut out Vuchak right along with the sun overhead. “Leave me alone – let me sleep.”
Vuchak glanced about their makeshift camp, willing some hidden source of patience to reveal itself. But there was only the dry copse of juniper and sage just up from the trail – the slow seep Vuchak had dug from the remains of the stream-bed – the horse, lying as far downwind as possible, with the makeshift travois bearing Dulei’s coffin still lashed to its back.
Vuchak let out a slow breath through his nose. The sooner he got through this, the sooner he could have his own rest. “I will,” he promised, “but I want to make sure that your body-soul doesn’t go hungry while your free-soul is out visiting. You’ve been working too hard, marka: you need to replenish yourself. Here, sit up with me, just for a minute – let’s share this one.”
Weisei sat up, propped himself up on one arm, and lifted the black fold of his yuye – but the look on his face promised nothing good. “Vichi,” he said, as if explaining something incredibly simple, “I don’t want it. That meat is cold and tough and makes me grow old chewing it. My guts are stuffed with it already – I haven’t been able to pay a debt since yesterday morning. Leave me alone and let me sleep, and if you really want to do something for me, see if you can find some koka berries anywhere around here. I’ll eat with you when I wake up.”
And he pulled down his yuye and rolled back over, folding his holy cloak over himself like a black-feather cocoon.
Vuchak stood there, cold venison in hand, marinating in silence.
He’d hunted down that deer – well, found it, anyway. Wrestled the carcass away from the coyotes. Washed it, butchered it, cooked it, dried the scraps, rendered the fat, pounded the relentless daylights out of the jerky until his head throbbed and his arms ached, and made no word of complaint about any of it. All Weisei had to do was chew and swallow – and that was asking too much? That was reason to order Vuchak out to find something more to his liking, as if he had nothing better to do – as if he weren’t absolutely dead on his feet?
Vuchak’s grip tightened, squeezing the steak until his fingers trembled, wrestling with the urge to turn and hurl it straight off the mountainside.
He wouldn’t, of course. He would master his anger. He would turn it to useful work. And if Weisei wanted to behave like a spoiled child, his ever-faithful atodak would be glad to accommodate him.
Vuchak strode right over and sat down on top of him, planting his knees in the dirt on either side of Weisei’s frail figure. Then he tore off a handsome bite of venison and set to chewing.
Weisei rolled over underneath him, his eyebrows lifting under his blindfold. “Vichi, what are you doing?!”
“I hear your wishes, marka,” Vuchak said from around his mouthful. “If the food is too hard and tiresome for your teeth, then mine will be glad to help you.” He kept his tone pleasant and sincere – nothing at all like the words underneath it. If you expect me to spit food into your mouth like a helpless baby, I’ll do it. If you want to act like an infant, I’ll treat you like one.
Weisei pushed and squirmed, raisin-faced with disbelief. “That’s disgusting – get off me!”
But it was the easiest thing in the world for Vuchak to swallow the meat, drop his weight on Weisei’s stomach, pin his arms, and lean in to make himself clear. “I will, when you can do what I ask of you. My job is to feed you. Your job is to move that horse. Our job is to take Dulei home. And if one of us can’t do his job because he decided to put his own wants ahead of his duty...”
The end of Vuchak’s thought fell away amidst the sound of onrushing footsteps: soft shoes pounding hard up the trail, and then stumbling to a halt. Vuchak glanced behind him – and realized too late that he had an audience.
“Ylem?” From under Vuchak’s armpit, Weisei’s voice was an astonished squeak.
Sure enough, the hulking half-man was standing there in the middle of the trail, sweating and sucking air and staring at them.
Staring at Vuchak, who was presently bent over Weisei like a lusty hunter plowing his reluctant wife: hips on hips, hands on wrists, faces bare inches apart.
Damn it.
But if the half had anything to say about that, there was no understanding it: he pointed obscenely down the trail, all but shouting his incomprehensible jabber. “Komquik – zilzfálenanuigoddagogíddim!”
What could anyone say to that?
Vuchak had no time to consider it: Ylem cast his gaze wildly about and then dove for Dulei’s coffin.
“Hey!” Vuchak called, bounding instantly up to his feet. “Stop that – you stop!”
The bastard half paid him no mind, molesting the box just long enough to pull off the horse harness they’d used to keep Dulei secure on the travois. By the time Vuchak caught up, the half was bolting back down the trail, pausing long enough for one more point, one more pleading burst of nonsense. Then he was gone.
From behind, Weisei’s voice was small. “I think we’d better help him.”
Vuchak did not want to help. He didn’t want to fight about food, or have to think about Ylem and his murderous holy mother. He just wanted to lie down.
... but whatever had panicked the half, Vuchak fully intended to go down and meet it before it came up and found them. He snatched up his spear, privately cursing the fishman who had smashed his bow, touched the knife in his boot just to make sure, and spared a glance back at Weisei. “Stay. Here.”
Vuchak did not like the edge in his own voice, much less the idea of leaving his marka alone and undefended. But any objection from Weisei stayed bottled up inside him, where it belonged, as Vuchak hurried off down the trail.
That was good enough. They would clear things up later. For now, Vuchak was off and running, chasing someone else’s problem before it could linger long enough to become his.
“WAIT – WAIT A minute, please.”
It was a choked, feminine voice, one that Sil probably should have recognized. She sounded like she might cry.
Well, that made two of them. He was hanging on to a shelf of barren rock, his boots dangling into empty space, and the thought of what might happen if he fell was only marginally more frightening than what was already happening while he clung on.
The rock was as sharp as a freshly-knapped flinthead, its edge sawing into his flesh. In his first frantic minutes, struggling to get a foothold before he fell, Sil hadn’t even registered the scraping, grinding sensation in his right hand. It wasn’t until he reached up for a better grip that he noticed the gash in his fingers where the rock had cut through them – saw the dull yellowish-white of exposed bone.
THEN it hurt, certainly – an angry, terrified throbbing. But it didn’t bleed, and it didn’t end. He didn’t lose his grip. He didn’t get tired. He didn’t even sweat. He just hung there, burying his head in the crook of his outstretched arm to keep the flies from his face, sick with days and nights of barely-suppressed horror, clinging less to the rock than to his failing conviction that he could still be fixed, that this could all still be paid for somehow.
Even if he didn’t see how.
Even if he was almost literally falling apart.
Even if the unpromised resolution at the top of the mountain was suddenly so much less tempting than the quick-and-guaranteed one waiting for him at the bottom.
Hurry up, he willed whoever-she-was up there. Before I lose my grip.
He could do it, though. He could just let go. Then it would be over – the pests, the stench, the sinister swelling in his belly, that unbearably foul taste in his mouth. All gone in an instant – in a quick, clean finish.
... unless it wasn’t.
Unless, god forbid, it wasn’t.
Just the idea was so awful that Sil could scarcely bear to consider it. The fall would kill him. Of course it would kill him.
But the hanging hadn’t. That long, blistering walk through the desert hadn’t. And if the drop didn’t... if he hit the bottom and just – just smashed like a glass on a flat rock...
The rope that dropped down beside him couldn’t have come a moment too soon.
And it wasn’t a proper rope – it was made from some peculiar native fiber, black and faintly oily and knotted every couple of feet – and Sil was no kind of climber, and he didn’t care a lick about any of it: he grabbed it and held on.
“I’ve got it,” he called as softly as he thought would carry, anxious not to provoke the horrible thing in his throat. “Pull me up!”
“It’s too short, and you’re too heavy,” she called back, her voice thick with exertion. “You have to pull yourself up.”
Ugh. Sil glanced up at the vague dark shape leaning down over the ledge – probably an a’Krah woman. If Elim were there, he’d have pulled him up.
... well, and if Sil meant to wait on Elim, he might as well throw himself over and have done with it.
Sil thought about warning her that he was going to be absolute rubbish at this – that he’d never climbed so much as a tree. Instead, he sank his efforts into seeking out one toehold and then another, getting one hand above the other, and doing his utmost not to notice the way the rope slid into the gash across his fingers, widening the bone-deep rip in his flesh every time he pulled himself up. But otherwise, the climb matched the rest of his life to date: slow, awkward, more failure than success, probably as dull to watch as it was unbearable to live –
– and over before he knew it. A warm hand closed over his wrist, hauling him the last of the way over the ledge. As Sil struggled to get his legs up and underneath him, his rescuer scrabbled for the rope, gathering it up as if it were a precious, priceless treasure.
Well, certainly it had done him a service. “Thank you,” he said, coughing in a feeble attempt to clear that irritating blockage, getting belatedly up to his feet to make a second, fuller start on gratitude...
... but as he got his first proper look at her, his mouth opened for something that started as Don’t I know you, caromed into Oh my god, and burst into a single, bottomless I’m so sorry before closing again, speechless and utterly impotent.
He did know her. That was the Afriti girl – Día, as she called herself. The one he and Elim had all but run over, that first day outside Sixes. The one he’d woken to find violating him with her mouth, that morning after the hanging. The one he’d ridden off from and left in the dust, after she decided to play the bossy big sister.
The one who was standing here now, clutching the mass of her own severed dreadlocks to her chest – bald as an egg.
“You...” Sil could scarcely grasp the implications. “... what have you done?”
She looked as if she would cry, or perhaps be sick on the spot. She backed up a step, eyes wide, and swallowed. “I came to help you,” she said in a thin, quivering voice. “You aren’t supposed to be here.”
Normally, Sil would have taken exception to being told his own business. But he absolutely could not fathom how she had gotten all the way out here, much less happened to pass right by here at this exact moment, much less why she would have... done that to herself.
“I know,” he said, striving to conjure some coherent answer, struggling not to stare at her denuded head. “But I’m – I told you, I wanted to go with Elim, to try and talk the a’Krah out of killing him. He’s here, you know – he was here just a bit ago. He’ll be right back.” He didn’t tell her about his hope of a cure from the crow people – it was a thought too fragile to even speak it.
Día shook her head, sparing a glance for that damned dead-weight fellow Elim had left propped in the corner. “No, I don’t mean here – I mean, you shouldn’t be here. In this world. You don’t...” She hesitated, as if groping for the right euphemism. “... you don’t belong here anymore.”
Sil was no fool. He heard what went unsaid – and even though the very idea was rank nonsense, it scared him terribly. “Ridiculous,” he said, with more force than strictly necessary. “I might be ill, but I’m not –”
“You ARE,” she said, her lip trembling even as her jaw held firm. “Someone put a noose around your neck and pushed you off a balcony and hanged you, and I’m
terribly sorry that it happened, but it did, and it can’t be undone. You need to realize that. You have to understand that you’re already –”
Sil wouldn’t hear it. He couldn’t. “Shut up, will you, just shut up!”
Día backed up a step, clutching her pile of hair even as she straightened to her fullest height. “You’re dead, Sil Halfwick. You died and you can’t –”
Sil bulled forward, possessed by a wild urge to grab the daft bint by the shoulders and shake her until she gave up that heinous lie –
– until she lashed out with a hard kick to the gut.
Something popped. A hideous, feculent belch ripped out of him, the taste bringing up putrid memories of that fruit and cheese he’d taken from Día’s private larder – the week-old pilfered afterthought that had been his last meal. Sil bent over to spit, desperate to get the taste out of his mouth...
... and looked down to see a dark stain spreading over his deflating stomach.
Sil stared down at himself, as relieved by the end of that unbearable pressure as he was helpless to understand the rank wetness creeping out over the front of his dirty blue shirt. If he didn’t know better, he’d think he had... well, it was as if he’d just... burst.
Someone was choking. Sil looked up.
Día had taken a sharp step to his left, perhaps to keep him from pinning her against the wall, and was now staring at him from a pace or two down the trail, her face as bloodless and gray as it had been the moment he sat up from the slab – and now crumpling with horrified disgust.
Him.
She was disgusted with him.
She was disgusted by him.
Sil stared at her – at the woman who had ruined everything. THIS IS YOUR FAULT! he screamed – only he didn’t get past “THIS” before the rotting paper in his throat finally tore, pulping his righteous outrage into a rancid, meaty gurgle.
Sil charged. He hurled himself right at her, desperate to hurt her – to knock her down, wrap his mangled fingers around her bald head and smash it into the ground until she was sorry.
But Día didn’t kick him again. She didn’t step aside or run or draw her knife or hit him. She might not have even seen him. She had just doubled over to throw up.
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