Kelfor- the Orthomancers

by Gillian Andrews

  Now she is struggling with the cough, too. She was infected a few weeks ago by one of the more virulent strains of bacteria which are so rampant here. Normally she throws off these infections in a few days; this time it is lingering. I can hear how hard it is for her to drag air into her lungs.

  She attempts a smile across the space separating us. I smile back, so proud of my thin, tired mother. I wish I could take her pain away.

  She is hit by another fit of coughing. It happens just as she is moving her weight across from one spar to the next. She only has one of her hands fastened on the metal.

  It is not enough.

  She looks unsure, just for an instant, as the fingers of that one hand are put under too much pressure for their stiff joints. I distinctly hear her say my name, “Remeny!” before she looks back to me, an wistful expression on her face.

  She stares into my eyes, gives one shake of her head as if to apologize to me, and then her fingers slip from the girder.

  I give a cry and fling myself sideways, lurching to grab at the nearest of those thin arms, but the gravity on Hethor is more than strong enough to pull her body down much faster than my hand can snap out to reach her.

  In the time it takes for my heart to thump once into my throat, she is gone.

  I watch the ragged body drop. It looks like a pillow stuffed with sand. My mother makes no further sound. Only the occasional dull thump comes back up to me, the dull slap of bone and flesh against metal as one part or other of her falling body crashes against the structure. What had been the person I loved most in the world careens down onto the concrete gulley below, arriving as nothing more than the immobile agglomeration of lifeless cells. I am paralyzed. I feel time stutter and then stop as she drops away from me.

  I am overcome by a sensation of utter loneliness, so intense that it leaves a swollen bubble of blackness in my heart, in my stomach. Even so, my eyes are dry. If I cry now the Scoriat will punish me. I am sickened with myself. It shouldn’t matter to me, but it does. I’m ashamed of my will to live.

  The laws, though, are clear. I am expected to tidy up my mother’s remains, wrap her in the sackcloth provided for such events as this – which are not unusual – and pull her body to the disposal chute ten sectors over. If I deviate from this routine, I will myself be beaten. Being beaten is very, very painful. Believe me, I know.

  I compress my lips and begin to move downward. The emptiness begins to turn to a dull anger. Why did she fall? Why has she left me alone?

  My hands tremble as I gather the slight body into the sackcloth, gently wiping away some of the small lines of blood first. The air is suddenly bereft. There is no oxygen reaching my lungs.

  As I finish the task, I grasp two corners of the shroud and look up, narrowing my eyes, seeking out the rest of the teams. But the curvature of the dome has put them far beyond the horizon.

  “Move!” snaps the first-level Scoriat guard, already bored by the proceedings. “You are taking too long. Get the body to the nearest disposal point.”

  I tussle with the dead weight of my mother’s body. I am too thin for such a weight. As I struggle to drag my burden across the gulley floor, my heart swells almost to bursting. I gasp for breath. There is no one to see except the Scoriat, and he cares nothing for one ... indeed for a hundred ... Inmuri. He has been bred to be indifferent.

  He looks as if he were wishing the Inmuri would stop this sort of thing. Now a team will have to repeat the whole of this section to clean up the mess my mother’s fall has made. It will put them behind schedule for the rest of the day.

  He is probably wondering why we Inmuri workers are not chained to the structure. Hardly a week goes by without one or other of us falling or throwing ourselves off the girders. It must be a real nuisance. He will probably be wondering why the Stave doesn’t do something about it. After all, there is an endless supply of these workers.

  His nose wrinkles with distaste. Now he will have to go all the way up to the compound to pick out a substitute team. That is over three miles away and means walking outside of the dome in the punishing heat. Luckily for him, he is a Scoriat; one of the Raths can be reduced to cinders in less than an hour if it isn’t well-protected against the heat.

  The Scoriats are not Raths; their DNA is Inmuri like mine, but they have gotten used to the cool air pumped to them. It is allowed in their barracks, too. The heat of our planet gives them no pleasure. The guard’s face is long. It will take a long week to train the new members of the team up ... and the Scoriats are of the opinion that the Inmuri learn very slowly.

  That makes me realize something. I stop, earning myself a sharp rebuke.

  My team is broken.

  I can no longer work in Istak Dome.

  I am a girl.

  That can mean only one thing: I will be taken to the Xenokarth, to be placed into the Triune Genetic Program.

  The Xenokarth is where the Scoriats are engendered, where our Inmuri genes are slightly altered to produce children with skin in the form of the patterns of each Rath estate. My part of the city produces Scoriats with the light stars of Istak. I will be expected to produce Scoriats with those stars stamped into their skin, with the heightened sense of loyalty to the Istak Raths that is also bred into them. My body will become a factory of future Scoriats for the estate.

  There are terrible stories. Rumor has it that they push a huge needle inside your stomach, and then your skin expands until you give them a Scoriat baby. Then they push another needle in you, and so on, until your skin is loose and your body broken. Then you die.

  I have been left without parents.

  My entry will be automatic.

  They take all female Inmuri children between twelve and fifteen who have no live parents. Until recently no girl had been safe after the age of ten. Happily, policy has changed. There are too few Inmuri left. The Raths had to cut back. Poor things. Now only the orphaned are being taken.

  The realization makes me want to join my mother. Perhaps I would prefer to be dead after all?

  I think quickly. Can I get up high enough before the guard stops me? I will need to be at least nine levels up for it to be lethal.

  But the Scoriat is already beside me. Of course he is. He wouldn’t risk the loss of a valuable female bearer. He is grinning in that awful way the Scoriats do as he reaches down to grasp me by the arm, just above the elbow. His large hands hurt; they will leave marks in my skin. A representative of the Stave has appeared. He positions himself on my other side.

  “Triune Genetic Program,” he says – quite clearly. Then they drag me away from the chute, away from what remains of my poor dead mother.

  As I am escorted from the dome, the ground shifts as though it is physically opening, pulling me down with each step. I don’t need to be told that nothing will ever be the same again.

  I begin to cry. I want my mother to come back. I want to gaze at more stars in a dark sky with her. I’m not ready to be alone.

  The Scoriats shake me a little, angry with my weakness. The Inmuri we pass avert their eyes. Amongst the Inmuri it is the custom to unsee other people’s shame. We do not like to witness the downfall of a tribe member. We believe that to watch is to take pleasure in it. So we do not watch.

  I am not watched by many of my tribe on the walk to the compound. I want to cry out to them. I want them to help me, but I am not a baby. I am thirteen. I know that they can’t.

  The two Scoriats take me directly to the humble cobb my mother and I share. Shared. Here they let me go momentarily.

  “You may gift her belongings,” the member of the Stave tells me. He is a Steward, one of the higher echelons. “And yours.You will need nothing where you are going.”

  My nose is running. I cannot stop the tears. I look around at our cobb. The only home I remember. Now it is suddenly part of my past. It looks small, but warm. There are two mattresses, two plates and two spoons. There is a large cauldron in the remains of last night’s fire. There are two small chalices
which we use for water. There is one small figurine and there is one change of clothes for each of us. I want to bury my face in my mother’s shawl, still hanging over the one chair. My legs buckle for a second.

  They shake me. They are losing time.

  I know what I am expected to do. I have seen this happen to others.

  I place all the items onto the mattresses and drag them through the heavy curtain which is the entrance. I take great care not to glance toward the hiding place of the orthomancer amulet. That cannot be passed on. That belongs only to me, or to one with my family’s blood. My mother has pressed that knowledge into my mind time after time: Protect the amulet. Do not let it fall into the hands of others.

  It has been passed down through our family for the generations we have been subservient to the Raths, hidden from any but our own eyes. I don’t know what it stands for; that information is long gone. But I do know that it is the symbol that my family is supposed to guard. I know that its value is above my own life’s worth. I leave it in the secret hiding place. It is underground. The amulet will be safe even if the cobb is knocked down, which it may be. Each year there are fewer and fewer of the Inmuri – of us – left.

  It is tradition that the belongings of the dead be shared between friends, and now it is my place to conduct the Ceremony of Passing.

  My fingers shake as I bend down to my mother’s sleeping roll. It is simply a brown sack filled with straw, but it still has her scent. I allow myself to hold it up close to my face for just a moment. Only for a moment. I must begin the ceremony.

  First, I take her eating spoon. It was one of her most precious belongings. It was beaten from soft buttery metal mined on the other side of the planet by an ancestor of my mother’s, long before the Raths came. It has been passed down through the generations since. Now it is for me to decide who is worthy of this most valued possession.

  I look sadly over those waiting. None are looking at me. The Inmuri in the compound at that time have formed a circle around the entrance to our cobb, but of course none will meet my eyes. They are all staring down at the beaten earth. I spot Kalyka, little Kalyka, who will be eight years old tomorrow, and who has no such item to help her eat. I have seen her struggling to scoop up the watery soup that is our staple diet with three twigs bound together and whittled to give a slightly concave center. Even sealed by the resin of dried lesine, it isn’t very efficient.

  Kalyka’s eyes open so wide that the young girl looks like one of the planet’s nocturnal marsupials. She turns to her grandfather, unable to believe her good fortune. Her parents died in the mine years ago. Her grandfather nods in a solemn manner, reminding his granddaughter that the occasion is one of sadness, one of respect.

  The girl takes a small step forward. Her eyes meet mine for a split second. She hastily looks away.

  “May Kianara and Niyafora, our suns, take her soul into perpetual rest,” she says in a small voice as she takes the shining utensil, “to safeguard her spirit. I shall be honored to guard the memory of her in this token. May she play between the stars.”

  There is a murmur of approbation. The girl has spoken well.

  I move on to the next item. It is a tiny carved lion. It was perfected by my mother’s father’s father over many months, before his hands were crippled by dome work, before he took the great fall.

  It is a small figure, carefully cut from a piece of the special black soapstone which used to be found in the south of Hethor and is prized above all things by the remaining members of the Inmuri tribe.

  I run my hand over the soft contours. I want very much to keep it. The stone is cool, not cold. It is the last of our family’s carvings. Once this leaves my hands, there will be nothing left to barter.

  There used to be two, but the other went on a sachet of medicine for me, when I was so ill that it was thought that I would not survive without it.

  A few days ago, I told Mum to sell this one to buy herself medicine. Anger flares inside me again. She refused. I should have insisted. Why hadn’t I? She might be here now if she had done as I asked. And for what? It is to be given away now, in any case. No use to either of us. Blackness floods my mind again, swamping it with fury.

  Black soapstone is a huge rarity now in the camp. It is a sad fact that nobody can travel to the south to collect it any longer. The Raths wouldn’t set their long necks outside their fine domes, and the Inmuri are not permitted to travel. We Inmuri are not allowed to move off the small area allotted to us in the city. On a planet which was once entirely our own!

  The Scoriat steward grunts. He is losing patience with me. This is taking too long. I hold the lion out to Fenn, occupant of the next cobb. He and Hella are brother and sister. Hella is my best friend. She is the same age as me. She will be working in the mine now.

  Fennen, or Fenn, is only a year older than me and currently working night shifts in the Istak Dome. It will belong to him, but its influence will reach Hella, too. Hella is different. She is a free spirit: laughing, alive, vibrant despite the harsh work she does in the mine.

  I always thought that, one day, Fennen and I would become closer. Now that will not happen. Still, if anyone is to receive this animal spirit, it should be him. Sometimes Fenn himself reminds me of a lion, though I’ve never seen one for myself.

  My mother’s great-grandfather did, though, before they were made extinct by the Scoriats. The Raths decided to use them as target practice for their newly fledged Scoriat army. If the figurine is correct, then Fenn definitely has a semblance to the lion, with that mane of dusty hair which falls to his shoulders.

  Fenn steps forward proudly, his eyes glistening as he stares up at the blue planet Leyvala, just visible now in the sky. “May the two suns take her soul into perpetual rest to safeguard her spirit. We shall be honored to guard the memory of her in this token,” he mutters, letting me know that he knows it is for Hella too. “May she play amongst the stars.”

  There is a slight murmur of disappointment from the rest of those present. The words were too hurried. But I know that Fenn has been moved by the gift. He has spoken fast so that nobody else will notice that his throat is choked with emotion. I know him better than the others. My mouth twitches. If I could I would smile to myself. But I can’t smile just now, not even for him. All I can do is look at him. He is staring elsewhere, of course. Not just because of the custom, either. He doesn’t want me to see what he is feeling. He is almost a man. Inmuri men don’t show feelings. I wish that he would erupt into movement, kill my accompanying guards and save me from whatever is about to happen to me. He doesn’t. He looks away. My heart gives a twinge of disappointment. It hurts.

  I give the rest of our kitchen utensils, the rest of our meager possessions, to Veta, Hella’s mother. Her large family will always be in need of such things. The worn-out woman nods her head to thank me and intones the response in a flattened voice. She will miss Mum. My mother was one of Veta’s only friends. I also pass her the shawl, Mum’s most treasured possession. Veta sags a little more as she takes it.

  The last thing I have is our bedding. It is old and lumpy, hardly the most comfortable gift to pass on. Since nobody is looking at me, I walk forward to touch Kalyka’s grandfather, Fimbrian, on the arm. The stocky man looks up. He raises one eyebrow, awaiting my decision.

  My spirit is suddenly lightened. I remember the slim little boy I spied upon the previous evening. How many like him are there in our city? I hold the soiled bedding up. “Please leave this by the sandshafts, for the shunned to use.” I turn to pull down the thick curtain which blocks the door, adding it to the pile. “That is what my mother would have wished.”

  Fimbrian nods. “Your mother is now at peace. Her possessions have been shared amongst those who need them. She no longer has physical property to tie her to this place. Her spirit is free to move on, to the next journey. We bow our heads in her honor, in her memory.”

  A huge lump sticks somewhere in the middle of my throat. If her spirit has moved on, th
en I must be glad, but it is leaving me far behind, here in this terrible, terrible place. I shiver. Now I know what it feels like to be completely alone.

  The rest of the group disperses. The two Scoriats take me in the restraining hold again, pushing my thumbs backward. If I want to avoid pain, I must walk in step with them. We begin to make our way out of Astakarth and toward the dreaded Xenokarth.

  It is a day’s walk. It is situated fifteen miles to the south-west of Astakarth, in independent territory. The Xenokarth serves all seven Rath karths, not just one family. That is why it was necessary to place it outside the catchment area of each dome.

  As we pass through the gates of the City of the Seven Karths, a decuma of Scoriat soldiers falls in behind us, the ten men marching in step. They are leaving nothing to chance. I am to be allowed no opportunity to escape.

  When we walk past the sandshafts, I think I catch sight of a small figure. It appears to be staring in my direction. It looks, at that distance, like Zivan’s son, but I can’t be sure. Whoever it is, he seems to be moving along with us slightly as we make our way out of the city. Or am I just imagining it? I lower my own head, almost blinded by fear of the future. Pure panic is rattling around the numbness of my mind.

  We walk on and on. Their hold on me never varies, never changes. They seem immune to the road, the path, the loose stones that cut into your feet. The two Scoriats never speak, never show interest in their surroundings. It is like being held in a vice made of some inanimate material.

  I’m not tired. This is easier than working a shift in the dome. The heat is strong but, unlike that of the dome, it is dry.