by G. Deyke
~*~
After the cool dark of the temple the heat and light of the street is sudden and intense, and it hurts. The sun glares off the gray street and buildings, so that I cannot rest my eye anywhere without pain. I squint through my eyelashes and try to watch only Ty's shadow.
He leads the way in closed silence, and I think he is lost in thought. He shortens his long stride, so that our walk takes longer than it might. If he is thinking, perhaps he is glad of a longer walk before we reach Mel.
What he is thinking about, I do not know. The child, perhaps, though for myself I think it a mystery to which we cannot know the answer, and for which answer we have no use. Mel must kill the child. What does it matter which gods blessed it? It will die in the end, if Mel is successful, and Mel is always successful.
The sun is beginning to set when we come to the center of the city. There is a large clear circle of the same gray stone here, and though it is swept clean I can see traces of ash on the ground. Mel sits on a low wall across from us, facing away. Her shoulders are shaking.
She looks almost as if she might be crying; but Mel does not cry.
Still, it comes to me now that she has reason to. There is no one I love as Mel loved Kerheyin, but I try to think how I might feel if someone I cared about was gone: my stomach twists painfully at the thought of my mother or siblings dead, although I doubt I will ever see them again no matter how long they live.
I cannot even think of Mel dead. My mind dances away from the very thought, afraid of what I might find.
“Are we disturbing you, noble?” Ty's voice is mocking, as always.
Mel's shoulders stand still at the sound. Her own voice is calm, composed: “So you're back. Did you find what you wanted?”
Of course she was not crying. Mel does not cry. I feel foolish for even thinking it.
“Yes, I think so.”
“Arri?”
“He said...” I struggle to remember everything that might interest Mel. “The woman had white hair, but was young. And eyes like silver. He said she was Anarian, probably.”
“He knows nothing of Anarians,” says Ty with contempt. “Even for them, white hair and silver eyes would be a strange thing.”
I wonder why Ty would know anything more of Anaria than the Namer. Anaria is a strange land, far away, across the ocean. I know little about it save that Anarians have no talents and that they worship strange gods, who live among the stars instead of under the earth as ours do.
“Is that all?” Mel asks.
I say nothing at first, wondering if Mel would rather not know. But she asked, and I must answer. “He said the child was blessed.”
“We will be stronger than its blessing,” she says shortly. “Haryin smiles beneath us.”
Haryin Two-Faced is the favorite god of nobles. He is a god of intrigues and weighted deals. They say he cannot be trusted, and that if he helps you he will take double payment. But nobles pray to him more than any other god, perhaps because they are always making intrigues and weighted deals themselves.
Mel has always believed herself favored by Haryin.
“That was all, I think,” I tell her. My hand has crept back up to rub at my arm, although the hurt is almost gone now. I force myself to let it hang at my side.
Mel swings around on the wall to face us. Her eyes are bright and hard in the darkening light of the setting sun.
“By rights I ought to visit Kerheyin in his proper place of rest, that I might mourn him as befits my betrothed. To think that they have yet to bury him, these three years after his death! The state his body must be in! I am forced to wonder what Mother Lithuk had planned for the funeral, if it was ever to happen...”
“You would have learned of his death at the wedding, at the latest.” Ty's mouth twitches, as though he finds this thought amusing. Mel glares at him.
“You can mourn as we walk, anyway,” says Ty. “You wanted to go to Qualin, yes?”
“How can you be so callous? Have you no shred of compassion? Can you not even begin to imagine what it is like for those of us who know the death of a love? Do you even know what love is?” She has stood up by now, and balled her hands into angry fists. The light of the sun gleams in her glaring eyes. I shrink back a little, afraid as I always am of her anger, or anyone's; and yet a part of me is intensely, uncomfortably aware that Ty is cool and calm and unmoved. He is neither angry with Mel nor afraid of her anger; he knew what she would do, and goaded her all the same.
It comes to me that he must have wanted this, wanted Mel to become angry with him.
The constant mockery he makes of everything and everyone must be because he wishes to be disliked, by all who speak with him.
And he is successful enough, for I can easily see that Mel dislikes him; perhaps she even hates him. Mel hates easily. And I dislike him as well, as I would dislike anyone who finds it amusing to anger her. How can he be so disrespectful? Of Mel?
“I very much doubt you loved him,” he says. “For myself, I should find it difficult to love anyone whom I'd never met. Certainly he seemed to like another woman better than you, so even if you did love him it surely wasn't a feeling he shared.”
Mel has gone very still, but I can see her shaking with fury. Her voice, when she speaks, is low and dangerous. When she speaks to me in this way I do what she says without question. Now that she uses it with Ty, I can only be afraid. I shrink back still further.
“You shall be silent,” she commands through her teeth. “I am paying you to kill the child, not to mock my love – my love of which you know nothing. Nor can you claim to know whom Kerheyin did or didn't care for, as I very much doubt that you knew him any better than I did. He was my betrothed after all.”
Ty shrugs, but I can see a smirk hovering about his lips. “I don't seem to recall being paid to kill the child,” he says.
“You have been paid to summon your demon. It ought to make little difference to you whom you send it to kill.”
“So, having been thwarted in your plans to kill the woman – by her untimely death – you now seek to kill your beloved Kerheyin's child instead?”
“The woman's child,” she corrects, barely moving her lips.
“The last part of your 'betrothed' which still lives.”
“The last part of the woman who wronged me!” Her eyes flash. “I will not be wronged, conjurer. You would do well to remember that. And once wronged I will have my revenge.”
The sun is almost completely gone now.
When Ty speaks again, his voice is oddly careful. “If I were to summon a demon to kill the child, I'd need a focus.” He pauses. “Something of the child's. As both its parents are dead, something of theirs might do as well – and the longer I have the focus before the conjuration, the better my control of the demon. It would be best to find something before we continue our journey.”
“We can find something of the child's in Qualin,” says Mel.
“I would have at least three days between finding a focus and summoning the demon,” Ty warns. There is an odd note to his protest, but I cannot place it.
“Then we shall stay three days there,” says Mel. “I should be glad of time to prepare, and be certain that everything is perfect.”
Ty gives a small sigh and shrugs. “So be it. Which way shall we go – through the Desert again, or along the Mountain roads?”
“The Desert,” she says at once. “I cannot be seen. I might never reach Qualin through the Mountains.” I think she has laid aside her fury for now; it is replaced by a fear of being captured and taken back home.
“We shall have to walk up the Mountains in the end,” he reminds her.
“True – but as there is no other way –” she stops. “Is there another way? Arri!”
I jump.
“Calm yourself,” she says, but her voice is cool now, and she does not look at me. “You have mentioned Qualin before, have you not?”
I nod, looking down.
“You've been there
?”
“Not long,” I say. “Hardly a day.”
“And when you left...”
I can feel the heat on my face as I redden. “There was a well,” I say. “I've told you the story. I came out in the Desert.”
“That was Qualin, then?” she muses. “Do you remember the way back through the caves?”
I consider. I think I do. I was lost for so long in that twisting darkness that the paths I took were seared into my memory. I nod. “I think so,” I say.
But I am afraid to show those caves to Mel, for when I told her the story she laughed at me. She did not believe my tales of water that shone with its own light. She told me I must have dreamed it, sick with hunger as I was.
“If the water glowed all Qualin would know of it!” she said. “And as I have never heard of such a thing, it cannot be true.”
But at least she did not think I lied, only that I could not know what I saw. And perhaps Mel knows best. Perhaps the water did not shine, and all in that labyrinth of caves was darkness. But I am afraid to see the water again and know if Mel was right.
I know it is a foolish fear, but I cannot stop it.
And I am afraid of going to Qualin because nothing happened there that was good. I was there hardly a day. I had only just arrived, and then the well happened, and now that is all I can remember of the city.
And I am afraid because I am going back along paths I have already traveled once, and I am afraid that I may come out in Quiyen, and I must never again be in Quiyen where I was born. I was told to leave, and I left, and I cannot go back. I cannot.
“Then we shall journey to Qualin through the Desert and then through the caves,” Mel decides. “I think it is a shorter route, and certainly we shall better avoid suspicion the longer we can avoid the Mountains.”
Ty knows the way to the caves we speak of, he says; so we follow him, again. We strike out into the Desert straight away, and do not make camp until we have left Saluyah behind us.