“Nora,” he spoke softly into her ear. “This isn’t over yet. Look.”
She lifted her head. The roiling black mass of the Blade filled the sky above them like a cloud, coming down at them with the force of a galestorm. They stood on a small island of brown winter grass. Shreds of twisting black from the earth around them joined the eye of the storm revolving above. The wretched surface of the dark clouds was trembling, growing thin with its inflation. The tatters of souls like distorted faces gnashed their giant jaws, every eye staring down to where she and Owen stood. The first drops of darkness pattered like molten metal rain, burning like acid. Wherever the metallic raindrops hit Owen, they stuck, dissolving his skin, revealing a darker layer of another face beneath.
“No!” She flinched back, but his grasp around her wrist was firm. “You’re not the real Owen either?”
“No,” Owen said. “None of this is real. The darkest battles are those you fight in your mind.”
Nora’s breath came hard. Owen put his hands on her shoulders and shook her gently.
“Nora. Look at me. No, I mean really look at me. Who do you see?”
She saw … Owen. She saw a mirror reflection of herself. Dark hair, strong jawline, eyes that were opened to the world around them but took things at face value only. She thought she had finally found Owen, but instead she had found herself.
“All this time,” he said in a soft voice, “you’ve believed that you’re not worthy of being loved. You grew up in a world that told you so directly and indirectly every single day. You believed that it was only due to the mercy of a kind soul that you were even alive when you should have rightfully been dead. You were the Dark One. The evil twin. You were death. So how could anyone possibly love you? Go back, Nora, and see: whatever you did, however hard you tried to be good, to be a good girl, to fulfill all the impossible, inhuman things people demanded of you, it was never enough. It would never be enough to be loved. Instead they feared you, blamed you, shunned you.”
“Stop it,” Nora whispered.
“But you—you’re stubborn. You said to yourself: yes. I am all these things. I’m horrible, I’m uncouth, I’m rebellious, strong willed. I’m a killer. I’m a curse. And you shifted your gaze to all these terrible things, all the darkness, and accepted them as who you were. And all the good things about you, you shifted to Owen. As long as you had Owen, you told yourself, everything would be all right.”
“I don’t want to hear this.” She collapsed to her knees, one hand clasped over her face.
“A touch of iron—you in dark aspect,” he followed, joining her on the ground. “A touch of home—the Owen aspect of you. That’s what you’ve been telling yourself. That Owen is your home. It’s what you’ve been clinging to for so long that the Blade could use it against you, to manipulate you into submitting to its will.”
“But I fought back,” Nora blurted. “I fought the Blade. I fought Suranna. I fought everyone.”
“Yes, because anger was your weapon. It has served you well. But you can’t hold onto all that anger for ever. No one can. Anger is corrosive. It’s destructive. It’s harmful. It traps you and the ones who come after you into an ongoing cycle, wave after wave of destruction. You can use it as a tool, just like you can use a sword as a tool. But what you really need, Nora, the tool you always understood you’d need—because it, more than any dagger or iron in the world, represented your true, whole self—is transformation.”
“The shovel?” She clutched it tightly.
“Yes. This is your tool,” he said, one hand on the handle. “You chose it yourself. You know what to do with it?”
“Bang it against someone’s head and run away?” she snorted.
“Embrace who you truly are.”
“Who am I, Owen?”
“A charcoaler.” He gave her a lopsided smile. “The whole world is your charcoal clamp now, Nora. You’ve started with the temple in Arrun. Now you must go to the one that holds the most power.”
“Shinar?”
Owen nodded as a shadow fell upon them. The raging storm had crawled lower, dripping down hissing spits of rain. It hovered only a few feet over their heads and encapsulated them already on all sides. For a moment she watched it descend upon them, the scream of voices in the tempest, the ripping scrabble of claws against the earth, seeking, screeching, howling in fury. She squeezed her uninjured eye shut, trying to block it all out. The world, the Blade out there—it wouldn’t reach them.
“Every relic of power,” Owen continued, “every treasure of the gods is collected in Shinar. The balance of the world has shifted because of it, weighing down the scales in the Temple of the Fire God, distorting everything.”
“I know,” Nora said. “I’ve felt it.”
“Yes. The gaping black hole. Even the Blade fears it.” Owen gave her a crooked smile. “Look, Nora, this isn’t just about you. This is more than the Ridge, more than temples, more than kingdoms and empires. More than Owen. The whole world is at stake.”
“But why me? Why do I have to deal with it?”
He shrugged. “It’s just the way the wheel is turning. The real Owen trusted you to do this. He was so sure that you’d do this, he gave his life to make sure you’d be able to. So. Trust yourself. You have been in the dark for such a long time you forgot that there is light within you. And besides, sometimes the very world itself is your problem. To be able to truly heal yourself, you have to heal the world first.”
Nora’s breath hitched, a sharp lace of fresh pain welling up in her heart. “The real Owen’s dead, isn’t he?”
He reached over, and gently laid one hand over her left breast, where her heart beat thunderously. A glow emitted from her heart, white and blue, like a streak of lightning that crackled and sizzled beneath his touch.
“Don’t be afraid,” Owen said, leaning closer. Half of his face had been dissolved by the inky rain already. His flesh flaked from his skull, revealing another Nora below the surface. “I will always be with you.”
Nora licked her lips. They were frosted with chapped skin. From the heat, from the desert, from the thirst.
“Any moment now, the darkness of the Blade will finally claim you. You’ll have to find your light and make the right choice.” Owen fell apart around her, whispering in her ear as he embraced her a final time. “Shine, Nora.”
Nora held him close, crawled onto his lap. When she pressed her lips to his in a kiss, they prickled.
Blackness enveloped her. It washed through her with an icy touch. She felt numb, as though she had been thrust outside of her own body, and now the mirror shards possessed her. She couldn’t move. She felt disembodied. As if she were looking through windows instead of her own eyes. The whispering darkness clutched at her heart, and the light within it died.
The Seer
It starts with a high, sharp moan, equal parts pleasure and pain.
Imagine you’re on the wings of a bird flying high above the city of Arrun, swooping southeast over the Kandarin Empire until the unseen currents take you over the black-and-red mountains and broken lands of the spine of the world. Imagine now your bird’s-eye gaze picks out a rickety wooden cart traveling along a beaten track, through the depths of narrow gorges up into the heights, along even narrower ledges. Drop down closer and see that the cart is a crudely built cage with a tarp against the weather of the world, pulled back now so that you can see four children inside the cage. Soon there will be five.
The childtaker took children from their parents indiscriminately. He took young children (only when weaned), older children, quiet children, vicious children, scared and bruised and broken or beautiful without blemish, male and female, he took them. For coin. But never did the word slave pass his lips, nor the lips of the parents who for one reason or another sold their children to him. No, he simply took the children and journeyed onward with them. Probably, as some parents must have told themselves over and over again, to a better place than the harsh, unforgiving landscape they
lived in. Perhaps to the softer plains of the Kandarin Empire as farmhands. Perhaps to the guild houses in Babuk. Perhaps it was simply better not to know.
He took children from the small fishermen’s villages on the coastlines of the south to the farms and hovels of those carving a living from the desert’s rim, children with light skin, children with dark skin. And while he never got rich by his haggling and selling of these children, he did get fat. Sun and drink had burned his face red, and he had as quick and jovial a smile as he had a dangerous temper—which was why, he told the newly arrived children when they asked (and they all asked sooner or later) they had to travel in the cage. To be safe.
“One time,” he laughed as they clattered down a dusty road, “I had this kid with me, right here on my bench, and I couldn’t sell it on because its legs weren’t grown right, and no one wanted to buy it. So this child got to thinking that sitting next to me, it could mouth off. In my anger, I slapped it so hard it fell off the bench and under the wheels, and got broken even more than it had been to start with. But I was so angry, I left it there behind me, and when next I came down that road, not even the bones remained. That’s why, my dearies, you get to stay in the cage. It’s safer in there.”
Say this much for the childtaker, he was a moderately caring man. Meals twice a day, an unheard of luxury for most of the children in the cage, and he nursed their wounds and bruises until they vanished. Sometimes he even sang them lullabies—but only when he hadn’t found a place to stay for the night and drove on, his aged, wicked mule knowing the way by its dark, wicked heart.
The cage door opened, and the childtaker helped a large boy get in. His father’s lower lip was trembling a little, but his mother, stooped and gray, with two other children clutching at her skirts, did the haggling with the childtaker.
“He’s strong, you know. Big for his age. You’re sure to get a good price for Salah at a guild house in Babuk. Maybe sell him as a rower on one of the merchant’s galleys, eh?”
In the end, Salah got into the cage, his long black hair veiling his face as he ducked low, and the childtaker paid eight pennies for him. His father said nothing, though tears ran silently down his cheeks while the mother counted the pennies in her hand over and over again as though she could multiply them that way.
“You, Goldie!” the childtaker snapped at the eldest maiden who sat on her own in the corner farthest away from the other children. “You make sure the others don’t hurt him.”
Goldie swiveled her eyes over to the next eldest child, a lanky boy, daring him to try something. He slunk back with the other two girls and made room for the large newcomer who had been worth a lot more pennies than any of them.
The childtaker locked the cage and they rattled on and on. For a while the boy named Salah wept silently. He shuffled closer to Goldie in order to stretch his legs a little and in order not to sit directly above the wheels.
“Don’t sit by her,” the lanky boy whispered. “She’s cursed.”
The two girls nodded fiercely. They were sisters with dark skin and even darker hair.
“She was put in here by a crowd of angry people,” one of them whispered. “And since then two other children have died just like she said they would.”
The smallest child bared her teeth at Goldie who shrugged and brought her knees up to her chest. She couldn’t argue. And she knew the cost of defending herself, trying to explain. Though the childtaker’s caring hands had melted down the welts, she carried the blows that had led to them in her heart.
Salah pushed aside his hair after another sniff, and she saw that his eyes were as dark as the black sand on the shores of her village.
“Is it true?” he asked, his voice a soft rumble. “Are you cursed?”
The cart rolled on in silence for a few more minutes, and the girl sighed when the childtaker did not answer for her, did not object to the others calling her cursed. She knew he must have heard and was waiting for an answer as much as the large boy in front of her was.
“Everyone’s cursed,” she said gravely. “The whole world is. You, me, them. Only difference is you were cursed for pennies and I was paid for in gold.”
The childtaker cackled at that, a ridiculing sound like the bleat of a goat.
“I’m Salah,” the boy said after a while.
“I heard.” Goldie answered, her head against the wooden boards.
“What’s your name?”
“She doesn’t have a name,” the lanky boy hissed from his corner. “Her name is Curse and Bitterness.”
“Is that true?” Salah wanted to know.
“No.” Goldie closed her eyes to not have to see his frown as he tried to work out this new world he had entered.
“Then what do I call you?”
For a moment a name flew to the tip of her tongue, but she swallowed it down. That wasn’t her name. She had never had one. Her slave name, her slave life. No, but the sweet boy desired a name for her.
“The childtaker calls me Goldie. You can, too.”
“Goldie,” Salah said, as though tasting the name. “Goldie.”
He kept muttering her cage name until he fell asleep, jostling against her as the cart rattled along. And for the first time since she’d come into the cage, Goldie thought it might be good to have a friend like Salah.
On and on the cart traveled, to the next house, to the next village, always taking, never halting. Some of the children were sold off quickly, and new faces dropped in, but Salah and Goldie remained together.
“Where are you taking us?” she asked the childtaker on a night when the stars were shining brightly over the desert road and the other children were playing freely, hide and seek, with others their age on the caravan. No distinction between the cage children and those shepherded along by their parents.
The childtaker took a swig from a flask and smacked his lips as he regarded her.
“You know me, Goldie. I’m taking you kids to the highest payer so you can have a better life than those fathers and mothers of yours who weren’t able or willing to feed you anymore.”
“I meant Salah and me?”
“Ah. I’m taking you two to the Ancient of the Mountain,” he said finally. “Aloadin. Have you heard of him?”
Salah shook his large head. Goldie narrowed her eyes at the other carts and camels around the camp.
“I’ve heard tales,” she said.
“Not good ones, I gather?” The childtaker chuckled and took another swig.
“No.”
“Goldie,” the childtaker said, “this is a harsh world, and this is a harsh business, and it has been mine for a long time. In all my time I’ve taken children from the bare rock their parents desperately tilled, and I’ve brought them to other places, far from their loved ones, where they usually find friends if not family, and the work of their hands will be appreciated, even cherished. Sometimes when I return on my way, I meet those same children again, and they’ve flourished. Other times, they’ve run away, never to be seen again. And still other times, I go back and those children of the cage, they have their own children, and they stand by the roadside waiting for me to turn up and do my collecting. Because they know, see? They know and they remember that I take care of my children of the cage. I look out for you. All of you, but some of you especially, it is true.
“In all this time, I’ve sold four children to the Ancient One. Only four. But still they call me the Scout of the Assassins. That’s what you and Salah will be. You hear me, Goldie? You’ll be assassins.”
No, she thought, looking over at the shadow of her hulking friend. Salah could never be an assassin. He couldn’t hurt anyone. It wouldn’t be his fate.
But perhaps it could be hers.
* * *
Of course, the girl you know as Goldie would never be trained to become an assassin. This was not what happened to young girls during that time, or any time, really, especially not pretty young girls. However cursed they were, their fate in a man’s world would i
nvariably be a different one. The girl knew this much already, though she was but fifteen.
Echoes of the mule’s hooves clip-clopped over the rattle of the cart in the narrow gorges, so that the childtaker’s presence was heralded from far off, and those with ears were forewarned.
Three men waited for the cart when it turned the last corner into an open green valley. The break from the dull red-and-orange stone of the landscape around them to verdant green hurt their eyes. Goldie blinked rapidly to get rid of the blueish afterimage on the black of her closed eyelids. It blurred into the green, making it all awash in muted hues. And so it wasn’t until the last moment, just before the cart stopped, that she and Salah saw the men clearly.
Two of them wore swords at their sides, their arms crossed before them; they radiated menace. The third man in their midst stood smiling, welcoming the childtaker, and he was the most beautiful man Goldie had ever seen. His skin was smooth and dark like cinnamon bark. His oiled black hair and neatly trimmed beard were juxtaposed with startling sky gray eyes. Her heart beat faster when she saw him. After he had welcomed the childtaker with an embrace and a friendly pat on the shoulder, they both came forward to peer inside the cage.
“What have you brought for me this time, old friend?” the young man asked. His mouth was quick to smile, and with one routine glance over the children, he had already made his choice.
Those sky gray eyes halted on Goldie’s face. She raised her chin high, unlike the other children, unlike Salah, and met his gaze with equal curiosity, though her mouth felt parched. In his eyes, there was no death.
“Have you seen my golden one?” the childtaker asked, knowing full well that the man hadn’t stopped staring at the girl. “I paid a full gold shekel for her, but I tell you, the primitives in that village did not know the treasure they had in her. She will serve you well, Master Aloadin. She is a creature of fiery spirit, nimble in mind, and quick with her hands. But her true gift is special, unique.”
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