The Best of Deep Magic- Anthology One

by Jeff Wheeler

  Ahad-dian poured salt into the bath and shut off the water. “Do you understand me?”

  Chellis’s stomach settled somewhat, and she dropped her hand from her mouth. Of course she understood. The Merdans all learned Landwalker languages, Hagori and Nakanese and Trinnish, in addition to their own dialect and signed speech. Did the slave trainers know so little about her dwindling people?

  She merely nodded.

  Ahad-dian stepped away from the tub, but gestured to it with his hand. “If you want it. You look . . . uncomfortable. You scared the others. Fear leads them to neglect; you’ll have to forgive them.”

  Chellis eyed him, mulling over his words. No Hagori spoke so politely. Even Temas hadn’t. Was it a new dian tactic? What more could they possibly do to her?

  “What’s this?” Ahad-dian asked, moving toward her. She backed up into the cot, but he stopped halfway across the room, crouching down on the carpet.

  Her eyes followed his, and her ribs involuntarily contracted around her heart.

  The bloodstains. Temas.

  Ahad-dian lifted a five-inch switchblade from his belt, identical to the knife Lila-dian carried. The knife that had left long, thin scars down Chellis’s back and breasts. Chellis held her breath.

  “Not Merdan blood,” Ahad-dian commented, almost more to himself than to her. Merdan blood flowed blue and left gray stains—stains that blended well with the dingy carpet. “And too old for Lila.”

  He glanced at her, his eyes curious. She saw a dark sort of light in their depths. Sympathy? But no Hagori knew that emotion, especially dians.

  He stabbed the tip of the blade into the carpet and dragged it around the stains, cutting a square piece that revealed stone underneath. He stood, returned the knife to his belt, and stuck the carpet under his arm.

  “What on earth did she do to you?” he asked, though he looked ahead at nothing in particular. When his dark gaze shifted to Chellis, he said, “You’re welcome to the tub, Naki. I can’t leave the room, but it’s there.”

  Chellis’s skin itched. She stood, wincing again at the stiffness of her joints, and padded toward the tub. She discarded her rough dress and slid into the water, sighing as its coolness climbed up her skin, soothing away chafes and flakes.

  “No one will expect harvesting from you today,” Ahad-dian said. “And hopefully not tomorrow. Your health might be forfeit, but even the overlords won’t risk your life. And they won’t question my judgment. They haven’t in the past, at least.”

  Chellis smoothed back her thin hair and studied the dian with wide eyes. Ahad-dian seemed sincere. Had the great Moray finally heard her pleas and granted her a fraction of relief?

  “I recommend you rest after you bathe, Naki,” Ahad-dian said. “You’ll need it.”

  “My name is Chellis,” she dared to say.

  Ahad-dian straightened, his eyebrows raised. “So you do speak.”

  Chellis sank deeper into the water.

  Ahad-dian offered a small smile. “A strange name,” he said, “but if you prefer it, I will use it.”

  She had that option? “I do.”

  “Chellis, then,” he replied. “I recommend you rest after you bathe, Chellis.”

  How strange to hear someone else say her name. Her true name.

  Even Temas hadn’t done that.

  * * *

  For two and a half days, Chellis had peace.

  She did not leave her room, she did not see Lila-dian, and she did not cry, save for a short time the night after Ahad-dian’s arrival, when she wept once more for Temas. She hid her tears in the seams of her dress and over her own scrapes and bruises. Though Lila-dian didn’t know it, she had taught Chellis how to weep in complete silence.

  Before two and a half days could become three, Ahad-dian came to the small chamber with a kelp-green card in his hand—a Merdan summons. Or, rather, an irrefutable command for more tears.

  Chellis eyed the card, her throat tightening. But Ahad-dian said nothing of it, merely set it on the tub rim. He sat beside it. Chellis, on the cot, picked knots from her hair with her fingertips.

  “What is the ocean like?” Ahad-dian asked, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees. “Your ocean, not ours.”

  Chellis blinked. She searched the question for tricks, but she found none. Then again, Ahad-dian had proved himself—so far—a dian who didn’t employ tricks, unlike Lila-dian.

  She answered, “It is all the same ocean.”

  “Is it?” Ahad-dian countered, his voice sounding like feathers on a morning breeze. “On a map, maybe. But my ocean is the surface, the layer of water that parts before the bow and reflects the sky. The water that breaks when I cast a line, that ripples around the string. Your ocean is all the layers beneath, where the ripples don’t touch. It’s the sand and the coral and all the dark miles I don’t see. Please, tell me. What is that ocean like?”

  Chellis’s hands dropped from her hair, and she studied the Hagori man. Perhaps for too long, but he didn’t chide her for it. He met her gaze, his expression unwrinkled.

  “You are not a dian,” she said.

  He laughed. “Then what am I?”

  “Not a dian.”

  His back straightened. He rubbed one hand over his shaved chin. “Not always a dian, but dians are made, not born. I’ve been a dian these past three years.”

  Chellis inched forward on her cot. Only Temas had ever spoken so many words to her. She nearly forgot the summoning card on the tub rim. “Why?”

  Ahad-dian smiled, but it was a sad smile that didn’t move his cheeks. “Because I cannot fight. I have Widow’s Blood—I bleed until there’s nothing left.”

  Chellis narrowed her eyes. “But our tears would heal the wound.”

  “A waste of tears. Too many for one man,” he replied, and shrugged. “And so I became a dian.”

  “I would heal you,” Chellis said, glancing to the card. “But I don’t choose who receives my tears. Not anymore.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ahad-dian offered. “But why do you say I am not a dian?”

  “Because you say ‘please.’ And because you apologize. Because, so far, your words are too soft for a dian.”

  He chuckled.

  Chellis lowered herself to the floor and folded her legs under her, careful not to pinch the fins leafing from them. “The ocean is vast, with no walls. No up and down, silent save for song. It is light and free and peaceful, like swimming in sleep itself. It is cool and comforting, filled with life. There are no cages, no locks. No wars. It is a holy space.”

  Now Ahad-dian studied her. She wondered what he saw. He said, “You must miss it terribly.”

  “It sings to me through the desert, through the citadel,” she said, glancing to the walls around her. “It ails me more than Hagori hands.”

  “They do wrong to hurt you.”

  The words shocked her, yet dared Chellis to embolden her speech. “They do wrong to keep me at all.”

  Ahad-dian did not respond. He picked up the green card and held it in his hands. “I’ve tried guntha weed—the liquid in its leaves burns the eyes and makes them tear. I’ve tried salt and lemon and onion, but the tears that fall are just that. Tears. They can’t heal. They’re not the right kind of tears, the ones that form from deep within. Only those have the power to heal men.”

  Neither of them spoke for a long moment. Chellis’s eyes remained on the card. When she lifted them, she saw that Ahad-dian watched it too.

  “Let me try,” she pleaded, curling her webbed fingers into fists. “Let me try it on my own, no whips or words, no incentives. Let me cry my own tears.”

  Ahad-dian gazed at her. “Can you?”

  She nodded, already feeling the sting in her eyes. “I have enough in my heart to give you what you need.”

  She looked to the missing square of carpet where Temas’s blood had spilled.

  “All right,” Ahad-dian conceded, pulling blinders from his belt. “I will let you try.”

 
He hooked the fine chain leash to the back of the iron ring that had encircled Chellis’s neck since the Hagori slavers pulled her from the sea. He did not jerk the chain or keep it taut, merely held its end as he guided Chellis into the marble hallway, past the two bulky men who still guarded her door.

  As taught, Chellis remained a step behind Ahad-dian, which wasn’t hard, considering his long stride. However, even within sight of the guards, Ahad-dian slowed until she walked beside him. Turning the corner, she fell back, and again he slowed. Chellis watched his face as they neared the collection room, but it remained smooth, unreadable.

  The collection room lay empty—Chellis had not seen another Merdan since her capture. The dian tried to time it that way.

  Her breath quickened as she reached the left platform, the muscles in her thighs tensing in remembrance of her last long visit chained over the vat. But she had told Ahad-dian she could do it without prompting. She couldn’t let him change his mind.

  She knelt. Ahad-dian removed the leash and replaced it with the heavy chain suspended from the wall. His warm fingers embraced her wrists—carefully smoothing down the fins there—and cuffed them in manacles, which also affixed by chain to the wall.

  Then he knelt beside her, biting the inside of his cheek. Their eyes met, and he slid the spongy blinders over her eyes, blocking out the light.

  Ahad-dian moved away, and for the first time since becoming a slave, Chellis felt cold.

  She leaned over the vat, her chains clinking only once.

  And she remembered.

  She thought of Temas crouching on her floor, trying to teach her a children’s game with rules that kept changing. She heard his cry as soldiers seized him, the flickering light in his moon-wide eyes, the gargle from his lips as the blade raked across his neck.

  She heard Lila-dian’s voice: fish-whorer, scubweed, fish fodder. She felt each choking jerk of her collar, each open-handed slap across her face, each lashing that bit into her skin like the coils of a jellyfish.

  She breathed saltwater, felt the cool embrace of the sea as she followed the shadows of her dwindling kin. The fiery agony of the harpoon piercing her calf and dragging her to the surface. The rough hands of the Hagori pulling her, tying her, crating her.

  She lived every lonely night, every curse, laceration, burn, and break. She felt the walls of her chamber press against her every side, laughing at her, suffocating her.

  And she thought of Ahad-dian, imagined him being beaten for walking alongside a Merdan, for feeding her too often, for letting her heal. She imagined him chained and shackled and dragged away, replaced by a darker, crueler dian.

  The thoughts flooded her mind, and Chellis wept.

  * * *

  Chellis wept for hours, but she could not mourn everything at once; the next summons would demand more, and the next, and the next.

  Choking back her sorrow, Chellis let it dry in the back of her throat. Ahad-dian removed the soaked blinders, and men with rough hands collected every stray tear for the Hagori arsenal.

  The green card demanding Chellis’s contribution to the war came again two days later, and once more, Ahad-dian allowed Chellis to cry for herself. She did, but not as heavily as before. She feared—and she saw that Ahad-dian feared—that she would be unable to continue filling the expected medicinal supply based on memory alone.

  The summons card appeared in Ahad-dian’s hand less than a day later. He crumpled it in his fist.

  “Too soon,” he said with a scowl. “They’ll kill your kind off with demands like these.”

  Chellis eyed the card, yet oddly she didn’t fear it, not with it clutched in Ahad-dian’s hard-knuckled fingers. “Why?” she asked, drawing her knees to her chest, adjusting herself on the cot.

  “The war is getting bloodier,” Ahad-dian groaned. “More soldiers killing one another, and the Vitian lines haven’t budged in a month. The slavers aren’t pulling in new Merdan, so the king wants the ones we have squeezed dry.”

  Chellis frowned. At least more aren’t being caught, she thought. Or were all her people already enslaved?

  “I can’t ignore this one,” he mumbled.

  Chellis stiffened. Had she translated his words correctly? “Ignore . . . this one?”

  He didn’t look at her. “You’ve received four summonses this week. I didn’t report for the second.”

  Chellis’s heart beat harder in her chest. Before she could ask why, Ahad-dian answered, “It’s too much for one person.”

  She stiffened. No Hagori had ever referred to her as a “person.”

  “I don’t want to hurt you, Chellis,” he said, but his eyes focused on the card, not her.

  Chellis shivered. She stood, stretching out the fins that lined the sides of her legs. “You’re not a dian,” she said. “No dian would speak as you do.”

  He actually smiled. “I’m certified. But I haven’t been . . .”

  His words caught. He licked his lips and retrieved the chain for Chellis’s collar.

  “Come with me,” he said, reaching over her shoulders to attach the leash.

  “Where?” she asked.

  But he didn’t answer, and Chellis dared not speak as they passed the guards outside her door. However, Ahad-dian didn’t lead her toward the collection room, but away from it. Past other guarded doors and down a hallway that reeked of spoiled fish. Up a narrow set of stairs that Chellis faintly remembered having passed before, shortly after her arrival to the prison.

  They stopped at a thick door. Ahad-dian thumbed through the keys on a small brass ring pulled from his belt and opened it.

  She cried out, then clamped her hands over her mouth the stifle the sound. Sunlight. She trembled as her eyes traced the golden rays pouring through the barred windows of the citadel.

  Ahad-dian guided her forward, then out another door. Soft, hot air grazed her skin. The brick floor was hot and dusty under her feet, like the skeletons of sunbaked anemones.

  Outside. Chellis stood outside.

  Her lips parted and she dropped her hands as she took in the courtyard, its angled paths formed with more brick, its thorny gardens filled with wood chips colored rose and indigo. It smelled clean and fresh, but the still, arid air burned her nostrils and gills. It felt like fine sand filtering through her lungs, and once more Chellis craved the sea.

  But the sun.

  Tears sprang to her eyes, and seconds later a blinder’s spongy pockets pressed into them.

  “Please don’t cry,” Ahad-dian whispered into her ear, his breath tickling her skin. “Not yet.”

  She nodded and breathed deeply. Ahad-dian removed the blinders. Chellis spied a guard to her left and lowered her gaze.

  Again Ahad-dian led her forward, keeping the chain taut, perhaps to ease the guard. The brick began to burn her scaled feet. Ahad-dian moved so she could walk on wood chips or, when the landscaping permitted, patches of trimmed limp grass.

  He stopped as two guards approached. They spoke in a dialect Chellis didn’t understand. Ahad-dian answered in a similar fashion, making sharp gestures toward Chellis. After a minute, the sun growing hot on her skin, the guards nodded and let them pass.

  They walked until the sunlight became uncomfortable and threatened to dry out her skin. Ahad-dian had to talk to another set of guards, again in that unfamiliar dialect, before leading Chellis onto an elevated walkway over a narrow ravine. Chellis dared to lift her head and look around, taking in the desert landscape around her, the short, tall cliffs that provided backdrop for the citadel and its neighboring buildings, the wild cacti beyond the cultivated gardens, women in veils and long dresses working to pull weeds or sweep walkways. Chellis did not see their reaction to her; all kept their heads down.

  They started down a set of stone stairs. The rock blistered her feet, but Chellis did not complain. Even if Ahad-dian had merely meant to take her for a walk, she didn’t want it to end. She didn’t want to return to that cramped room full of sour memories.

  She peered
around, looking for guards. She only saw them afar, so she asked, “Where are you taking me?”

  Ahad-dian released a long breath through his nose. “I won’t tell you yet, unless you want the blinders.”

  “It will make me cry?”

  He seemed uneasy. “I think so. I suppose I should hope so, for the sake of the summons.”

  Chellis nodded, her leash clanking against her collar. Ahad-dian led her through a covered corridor carved from the rock face itself. He used another key to open another door, and Chellis found herself in a sandstone-tiled room lit with skylights carved into the ceiling. Two guards, one at the left wall and one on the right, watched them, and an older dian sat at a simple table in the room’s center.

  The dian behind the table perked up. “She looks very young to be wasted.”

  “This is for collection purposes,” Ahad-dian replied. He showed his green card.

  The dian looked uneasy. “Has it been approved?”

  “Of course,” Ahad-dian replied, and Chellis wondered at the lie.

  Ahad-dian said something else in the unknown dialect, and after a moment, the dian nodded and gestured to the door on the left.

  As they neared, Ahad-dian whispered, “You were right about my not being a dian, in a sense. I’ve never been assigned a Merdan before. I manned that table up until the time Lila-dian transferred.”

  Chellis pressed the heel of her hand against an uneasy tightness blooming in her stomach. It was the same weightless sensation she got when a bull shark lingered nearby. “What did he mean, ‘wasted’?”

  Ahad-dian opened the door and led Chellis inside. A long, white-tiled hallway met them. “I shouldn’t tell you.”

  “But you will.”

  “It’s when the Merdan can’t cry anymore,” he whispered, so hushed Chellis had to lean in to hear him. “Something happens to them. We go overboard, or they’re away from the sea too long. Something in them breaks. I’ve studied it, but I haven’t found a cure.”

  Chellis stopped in the hallway and grabbed the center of her leash before it could pull on her collar. “Stop crying? Break? What do you mean?”

  Ahad-dian looked much older in the brighter lighting.

  She said, “They can’t meet their summonses?”