[Closed] [Mature] Shun the Light

[Tom Cooke]

The Way to Serkaih • Dkanat

Nighttime on the 33rd of Bethas, 2720

T
he window is open, whisking in the smells of the desert night. It’s quiet, but it’s not the sort of quiet that lays thick like a blanket; where the laughter from downstairs has gone, it’s been filled by the wind whipping over the scrubland and canyon, between the buildings of Dkanat, tangling through the wooden chimes. They have a warm, sad way of singing at night.

There’s also the sound of his voice rasping quietly. It comes in fits and starts, like the wind. Sometimes his lips move and there’s only breath; sometimes he murmurs a piece of a phrase, half a sentence in Estuan, feels his way around an unfamiliar Mugrobi word. His pen scratches the paper. The books are spread out before him, but beside his page is his own notebook filled with his own hand and somebody else’s words.

Fragment 3

Tsiha pezre Iwayiq, “Detection and Exposure,” foreword

Dzeros pez Uqurezem (? look into) postulates that most super-natural investigations have sought to coax spirits out of some pseudo-spiritual “hiding” place, as has been the accepted method (where there has been any accepted method).

…

If what the layman calls a “ghost” exists as a monic resonance, then see this spell as a dye: like any detection ward, it seeks to translate subtle monic activity into physical stimulus. The discerning and sensitive investigator does not wish to harass monic remnants into showing themselves to the naked eye; this cannot accord with the noble uses. Such investigations are dangerous and frankly rude …

His back aches. He’s been holding his head up for what feels like hours, and he wonders that his fingertips haven’t bruised his cheek. The bridge of his nose feels pinched and harassed by his glasses; his eyes struggle to focus on his cramped writing through the lenses.

He thinks he is beginning to understand why ib’vuqem has the reputation it has.

There isn’t much monite in what remains. Fragments of spells, mostly, just like the fragments of articles. You can’t do much with a fragment. One – the most complete – he has written out over and over again, checking and double-checking his writing from the Cultural Center earlier to make sure he’s copied all the runes correctly. One word already he can’t make out in the invocation; he had squinted at the faded ink for hours in special collections, trying to guess whether the tiniest squiggle on the side of a line meant that the rune was different, once.

And anyway, it’s only a fragment itself – a fragment which stands by itself, useless but easy to cast, but a fragment. There is a leybridge which crumbles and falls into the dark: he’s more intrigued by the implication of what follows, but that, he supposes, he will never know.

The streets are empty at this hour; the last of the bochi has long gone to bed, and only the faintest smell of dinner clings about the air. Louder to him is the smell of sweet, cool wine from the cup a little ways from his notebook, brimming and untouched.

Jinasa had brought it up to him earlier; she’d had keen curious eyes for his books and all the papers spread out in front of him, though she’d not lingered long enough on his scratchy, half-legible handwriting to ask about They Are Heard.

She was more interested in the other books. Crossed and Colorful Streams: The History of Serkaih lay open on the desk beside him. “Ah, I see,” she had said, setting the cup down and offering him a rare smile. “I was never one for history, but with him it is never dull.”

He wanders, now. A People’s Account of Dkanat is spread out over top of his notebooks, as if there’s any chance of him returning to them tonight. He runs his hands over the well-kept leather bindings, turning the pages carefully. He’s almost smiling, reading a passage; something about it is familiar.

His back aches. He breathes in the dry, chilly desert breeze, the smell of the oil lamp, and the sweet tang of wine. His eyes wander toward the window again, blurring; he takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes.

A small, familiar figure moves through the street.

He watches, wondering. It’s only when she’s out of sight that he catches a blur, dark-on-dark, in the shadows; it follows.

His throat is dry when he steps out into the night; he’s barely sure what he’s doing, only that a headache has started up at the back of his neck and in the tension of his shoulders, and if he doesn’t move quick, he’ll lose both of them. He doesn’t know what he’s thinking, only the wind that scrapes dry against him is cold, but the pit in his stomach is colder.

His head is full of remembered lanternlight, of fingers curled round his arm just before the edge of the canyon; it’s full of the shape of a man leading him back through the streets, slow and careful, leaving him at Emeka’s door. But all the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end, and raw, frayed laughter is ringing through his mind – and the smell of blood, and…

Vita’s dark; the sky is full of light, except for the gap where Benea used to be.

He doesn’t stumble, though his legs ache. His canteen is in his satchel; he takes a sip of water now and then against the dryness in his throat. He’s been along this path before now, alone, back and forth from the Cultural Center. He’s lost both of them now, but he still follows, because he doesn’t know what else to do.

He finds her under the first lanterns, as the path begins to dip into the valley. They spark off her headwrap, and the wind tugs at her hems. He looks around sharply, but his poor eyes can’t see much of the shadows.

“Nkemi,” he calls softly, tugging his amel’iwe closer about him.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Night, 33 Bethas, 2720
The Canyon's Edge, Serkaih

Nkemi smiles, sitting on the low stool; lantern light gleams in the window, and ada’na Mafedha’s field mixes softly with hers at the edges. She is propped upright on a heap of pillows; she is paper-thin in the evening glow. Her hand trembles where it rests on the bedspread. Nkemi covers it, and despite the blankets it is cold.

“A familiar face is a blessing,” Mafedha murmurs in soft Mugrobi. The light dims from her eyes, where it had caught and gleamed; they close, and her breath whistles out softly from her nose, the thin breeze through the window flickering at the candleflame.

Nkemi sits a moment longer, her face solemn; she rises, then, and turns to Fakeha. “Thank you for the gift of this memory,” she says.

Fakeha smiles at her. “A moment of clarity is like an oasis in the desert,” she says, quietly.

Nkemi bows. “I am glad to have drunk my fill.”

Fakeha bows, too; Nkemi takes the other woman’s hands in hers, and they embrace. She feels Fakeha breathe deep, her arms trembling against Nkemi, the clairvoyant mona of their fields mingling in a soft caprise. It is gentle and easy, and so too is their parting, and the light flickers off behind Nkemi as she goes.

Nkemi thinks at first to make her way home, but she knows their time is running short. Benea hides her face tonight, though Ossa is bright. The lights up the hill are dim; there is only, Nkemi knows, the lantern on the porch, left to guide her home. She breathes in deeply, standing in the midst of the street, and she goes.

If she has not gone, it is not because she has not thought of it. The days have been full, and the nights too; she has shown Anetol all she knows of the edges of Serkaih, and she does not know, yet, if what she has glimpsed of its heart is hers to reveal. She has showed him much of Dkanat, too; Iki’dzof has butted his thigh, and one of the littlest goats nibbled the hem of his trousers, earning herself the name Dzepi’pat.

There has been her heart to fill, moments to hold close through the journey back, through the months to come in Thul Ka and the months to come beyond in Vienda. Windward Market does not seem so far as it once did, when she thinks of gray smog, of snow, of strange pale faces and harsh words. She has laughed, spoken and listened both; she has brought distant tales which she never yet knew how to set down to paper, and in the sharing knows herself more seen, and less alone.

The edges of Dkanat go quickly; for all the town occupies of her, it is not so large, set against the desert. She leaves the lights at the edge of the streets behind; she does not turn up the hill, but walks out into the desert instead. She knows the path in the dark, starlit in the absence of the moon. The wind shivers over the sand; a tail rattles on the cracked ground, and other, stranger noises drift from further still, but if there are uliams, tonight, Nkemi hears no sandstorms to wake their voices.

The stars are spread out overhead; there is not a cloud in the sky. She stands on a small slim stretch of flat ground, and the world all around her gleams, and she is very small, against the tapestry of it, and very grateful.

The wind is cold, all the same; all children of the desert know that it does not hold its warmth, when the sun goes. Nkemi pulls the scarf wrapped around her shoulders tighter around herself; the hems of her pants whisk at her ankles, and her sandals leave tracks through the dirt. She thinks of other, colder things; she thinks of inky black darkness which blotched up through a page, which spread around her in the night. She thinks of a cold hand wrapped around a tattooed one; she thinks of a long time ago, and another hand which once held hers, which was warm in some way she still does not understand.

Nkemi reaches the edge of the canyon, and there she waits. The first of the lantern gleams before her, smooth glass, the lines which are twisted through it casting shadows on the ground. She stands, and she looks over the edge of it, at the gleaming lines of lanterns stretching on ahead, and the more distant valley floor, with its secrets.

“Nkemi.”

The prefect jolts; she turns, and takes a step forward, and feels the brush of his field against hers.

“Anetol?” Nkemi asks, her eyes wide. She sinks into the caprise, warm and welcoming without stopping to think. He comes to the edge of the light, and there is no mistaking the red hair threaded through with gray and white, nor the wide dark gray eyes, smudged around the edges. She smiles, though she frowns, too, looking at him.

“I did not think to see you here,” Nkemi says, instead. She does not look away from him, the canyon and all the lights of Serkaih at her back.

[Tom Cooke]

The Way to Serkaih • Dkanat

Nighttime on the 33rd of Bethas, 2720

T
he prefect’s thin, squared shoulders are draped in a scarf. The light shivers strange through the glass of the lantern; he can tell she’s swathed in color – bright and vivid – but he can’t tell in this light if it’s green, yellow, red. It seems one thing at the edges of the shadows and another in the light. The colors shift as she turns, and there might be a hundred colors in her skin, too, and reflected like stars in her wide dark eyes, and he can’t say he knows what any of them are.

Her caprise swirls warm and welcoming into his, like the meeting of dyes in water, and his can’t help but to do the same. It makes him smile, at first; she’s smiling, too.

But there’s a watchful frown somewhere in the folds of it; or maybe it looks different in this light. “No,” he says. He has to catch his breath. “No,” he tries again, “I would imagine not.”

The back of his neck still prickles. He thinks to look around – somehow, he can’t look anywhere but Nkemi. He knows there’d be no point in it; the breeze sways the lanterns, and all around him the light’s shifting, and the shadows around it, and they could hide a hundred men. There’s no caprise with him, either; he could be anywhere, and you’d have no sense of him.

But he remembers, too, the pained wheeze of his breath. He remembers the grunts, how the long walk to the canyon the other night was slow going. Maybe he’s outpaced him.

Maybe he was going someplace else.

As he comes up, he can just see over the crest behind Nkemi. The lights of Serkaih spread out, twisting their path down and around and inside. It’s a sight that would’ve taken his breath, but Nkemi is looking at him and only him, and he can only look at her.

His mouth is dry. I was restless, he thinks to say. I needed to take a walk. Nkemi is watching him, and he can’t quite tell whether the look on her face is a smile or a frown. The wind picks up, whistling through the canyon. He hears the dry rasp of it through scrubs, through the twisting bare branches of the tree down the path. It tugs at the hems of their trousers and flutters at the edges of her scarf.

“I was up late studying.” He thinks she knows how much time he’s spent in the Cultural Center. He remembers walking the winding road back from the house under the hill, smelling strongly of musky goat fur and spittle and hay, telling her of ada’na Safeera’s decision. He’s told her of his readings in her grandfather’s histories, too, of his budding interest in the dzes’tsuqufo form of storytelling.

I was restless, he thinks again to say; I needed to stretch my legs. I’m just heading back now. “This is going to sound strange,” he says, taking a step closer, “but – you passed under my window, coming down here, and I thought I saw someone following you.”

The smile has dropped off his face; he meets her eye, his mouth set grim, his brows drawn. For whatever else she’s seen of him, he doesn’t think she can have forgotten how they met the second time.

It’s not unreasonable, either, he doesn’t say, this worry – not with how everybody’s been acting. All those cheerful Mugrobi warnings. Nobody’ll explain a damn thing to me, either.

“Maybe I was wrong; I haven’t seen anyone since I lost him,” he goes on, grimacing. He still doesn’t look behind Nkemi, but he does take a deep breath, taking out his canteen. The wind ruffles his hair and her headscarf. “I’m sorry if I startled you.” He raises his brows.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Night, 33 Bethas, 2720
The Canyon's Edge, Serkaih

It is not quite a question. Nkemi does not think it a coincidence; she knows he has spent long hours at the Cultural Center; she thinks of his smile when he told her ada’na Safeera had granted him access to They Are Heard, something softer than joy and brighter than relief, the way his shoulders had softened, just a little, in the telling, and yet tightened too.

There are many things one could do in the desert at night; there are those who go down to the tsan’ehew below in the dark, to pay their respects from the light of the path. This is not Nkemi’s first trip to Serkaih at night, even since; once, many years ago, she followed Natete down the winding path along the cliffside, and he took her through the lanterns. They carried with them a lantern of their own, and her small hand rested in his, and she said nothing of what she knew. She had not been called a liar, when she spoke of it; no one had asked her to keep silent. She had not told, then, and not for many years since.

Nkemi is not so sure she believes in coincidences.

Nkemi’s eyes widen when he speaks of it. Her gaze goes behind him; it searches the desert in the dark. She turns, slightly; she steps out of the pool of light, and closes her eyes a moment, and she opens them again, and looks out over the horizon. She knows better than to think she can see well, but she searches, all the same, for a hint of movement.

She looks back at Anetol when he speaks again. Since I lost him, he says, and her eyebrows lift, slightly. She smiles when he speaks of startling. “I was followed without knowing it, at least by you,” Nkemi says, cheerfully; she thinks of an alleyway in Vienda, and the quiet trap he laid for her, the second time they met, of foul-smelling cigarettes and his eyes darting past her. “It is well that I am startled.”

She comes forward and tucks her arm through his. “There have been sightings of the Dzevizawa,” she tells him, “a wick tribe to whom this place is long forbidden, not so distantly.” She thinks of what she knows of the history of it; she looks up at Anetol, who is frowning down at her, his amel’iwe brushing against her wrap. She does not know whether she should tell him the why of it, which goes back to nearly thirty five years ago, before her parents returned to Dkanat, long before she was born. She has heard herself only whispered stories, and for all she knows them for true, she knows, too, how truth may be shaped.

“There are those who are frightened of them,” Nkemi says, evenly, her arm tucked through his. “I do not think they would do me harm, if we met here on this path; perhaps it was one of those which you saw, for I think it must be only under darkness which they can come here.”

They are the both of them standing at the edge of the cliffside. Nkemi thinks; she has been thinking for many days, and still there is much she does not know. She thought on the airship here, on the cablecar, in the halls of Ivuq’way, on the steamship, on a camel’s back; she has thought since, watching him intent in his studies in the archives beneath the Cultural Center, or leaving behind his glasses and books to join her to visit the goats.

She makes her choice, then.

“Would you like to join me?” Nkemi asks, politely, looking at him. “I thought to visit the tsan’ehew at night; there is much of Serkaih still to see.” She knows how many hours they have spent wandering; it is with clear eyes and an open face that she offers him this truth, which perhaps until now she has hidden. She does not know any more than she did a moment ago, if this decision is the right one; she has made it now, all the same.

[Tom Cooke]

Serkaih • Dkanat

Nighttime on the 33rd of Bethas, 2720

H
e watches her step into the dark, all her bright not-colors blurring darker.

His throat tightens; he knows what the prefect’s doing, all the same. And – all the same – he doesn’t move from the light. He knows how to catch a man in a crowd, or down a tangle of alleyways; he knows how to look for even an unassuming man in a crowded bar. They both do, he thinks. But he doesn’t know anything of this kind of dark, and even if he stepped out of the lantern’s bastly caprise, his old perceptivist’s eyes would strain against the blackness.

He listens, still. She steps quietly, and he can hear skittering on the cracked earth and again the distant creak of branches. Nothing, though – and she smiles over at him, and he manages to crack a smile back.

He doesn’t say anything, but he inclines his head, and there’s a wry tilt to his smile.

Her arm slides as easily through his as the mona in her field, belike and unlike. In the desert cold, her shoulder’s warm against his; he looks down at her, and he’s not smiling anymore. “Oh,” is all he can say at first. At the name Dzevizawa, the rigid line of his back loosens. “I see.”

His face softens, and he’s quiet.

They’re looking out over Serkaih when she offers. Her voice is light and offhand, but he feels her eyes on him, and he turns over her words in his mind; he doesn’t understand, at first. When he does, he doesn’t yield to the prickling all along his spine, even though it’s cold enough he might’ve shivered with the wind. He shouldn’t be surprised, but he is, all the same. He feels as if he’s been looking at a picture without seeing what’s in the very middle of it, and he still can't quite make out the shape.

He doesn’t look over at first, either; his eyes linger on the lights, following them into the dark with his eyes. “I would be honored,” he replies. “Thank you.” He looks at her and smiles, and they take the first careful steps down the path.

Their sandals are quiet in the dirt. It’s strange, to descend among the lights finally – all he can think is how they’re turning into lanterns, after all. How there’s no real following them, in the end.

The morning after he’d come to the canyon’s edge with Kafo, he’d gone down to the Cultural Center to go looking for the books ada’na Nkese’d told him of. He hadn’t thought of it then, strangely enough; maybe it was the tsorerem and tsochyusem wandering down their paths, putting out the lights one by one as the sun brought all the colors to life. He’d run across Ifran then, carefully cleaning the glass on a lantern, and they’d bowed and quietly gone about their way.

He can’t bring himself to tell Nkemi who he thinks he saw; the thought of it – of the lights – makes him feel oddly ashamed to have suspected the man in the first place. He doesn’t think they’ll come across Kafo down here, where the lights are nothing but lanterns.

Dzevizawa. That answers another question, at least. He looks over at her as they pass into the light of a metal-cased lantern; bits and shards of light shaft over her face, and it’s hard to read her expression.

He can’t muster up anger here, not amid his gratefulness; he doesn’t know what he’d do with it, if he did. Thinking of Tsaha’ota, he can’t say he knows enough about it to be angry one way or another. It’s more like sadness he feels, thinking of quick, quiet feet through the dark, snatching at their chances under the new moon.

“I wonder what they’ve come for,” he says softly, “even though they've been forbidden.” It’s too soft to be a frown on his face, but it’s not a smile, either. His field mingles warm with hers as they curve around toward the bottom. The stars are only a little dimmer now between the walls of the canyon.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Night, 33 Bethas, 2720
Into the Canyon, Serkaih

There are a thousand holes cut carefully into the metal skin of the lantern, and the fire gleams out of each, catching pale red on the inside of the metal, and washing out onto the paths and their faces both in equal measure. Nkemi catches a hint of red, a gleam of dark gray, just a few spotted freckles.

Here, on the wide path down the cliff side, here, at night, one can see the spacing; walking in the center of the path, there is no moment when one is completely outside the circles of the light. Just as the last speck of light sweeps the ground, the circle of the next lantern begins; they spill into one another, always, no matter how the pattern is cut or the glass is shaped, no matter whether strongly or weakly.

There is space in the light for both of them; Nkemi walks on the outer edge, as she did before, with Anetol between her and the wall. Her mind is clear; her choice is made.

On the walk through the desert above, she had given herself over too well to the rhythm of it, the steadiness of her breathing and her feet, as she reviewed the words in her mind, over and over again. She does not have her notebook with her; she does not need it, by now, even though she has not cast this spell before. There are some, Nkemi knows, which cannot truly be practiced; the further one descends into the conversations, the closer one comes to such. Spoken, yes, so long as one is careful to hold neutral in intent, very careful never to want, not even with a single syllable.

Here she is focused; her feet go carefully along the path, and her arm holds, ready, for despite the light it is harder to see than during the day, and no matter how often the way is swept, small pebbles tumble down from the cliffsides, a reminder from Bash and Imaan joined together that nothing man does can stand in the way of the world.

They slope down, together. Over the soft sound of footsteps, Nkemi listens, still; here, too, she is present. It is hard to know; she hears nothing. She thinks, once, to turn back up and look at the lip of the canyon, but she knows there is no point; she knows better than to think a dark figure will loom, obvious, between the lanterns and the sky.

They come around the bend, and the floor of the valley is spread out before them, gleaming, the circle of lights around the Cultural Center stretching itself out. The tsan’ehew gleam, some of them; the ones polished to a shine by wind and age gleam most of all, trading their features for reflection with the steady passage of time. Nkemi breathes in, deeply, for this sight too is imprinted upon her. She squeezes Anetol’s arm to her, gently; they keep on.

“I don’t know,” Nkemi says, quiet and thoughtful. “It is no one’s wish to keep them from a sacred place.” He knows, by now, if he had not before, that it is not only arati buried at Serkaih; there are duri, and wiki as well, though perhaps fewer. This is not a place which is forbidden to the humans of Serkaih, for all that its attendants are arati.

“But as I understand it, our laws are not their laws. Without such understanding shared between us, there can be no peace,” Nkemi says. “Justice is not always kind.”

They come down to the valley floor. The path here, too, is wide and well-lit; there are no gaps between the lights, except at the edges of the spilling circles, where triangles of darkness creep in. Some of the tsan’ehew are lit, gleaming and ghostly.

“The place I will take you,” Nkemi says, “is one which Natete showed me, a long time ago. It is old; it is older than even Ib’vuqem, though they knew it too. Perhaps it is as old as Serkaih itself.” They walk through the memory homes, through the dark; Nkemi does not search the stillness around them for what it may hide, but stays to the path.

[Tom Cooke]

Serkaih • Dkanat

Nighttime on the 33rd of Bethas, 2720

N
kemi’s wiry arm was steady and solid through his, and he didn’t once think he’d fall. But there’s a relief that sweeps through him when they reach the bottom, all the same; he knows it’s a trick, in some ways – knows the ground down here is no flatter than the path down, and they’ll snake up and down among the tsan’ehew – but it sweeps through him anyway like the night breeze.

He breathes in deep. The smell of it’s different at night, without the warm scent of sun-baked rock and all else that rises up from the earth at the touch of the sun. The canyon walls cut some of the chill, but there’s a depth to it down here, a sharp intent, that the wind rolling out under the broad desert sky doesn’t have.

He feels it tingling through him. The tip of his nose is faintly numb; his cheeks prickle, even with Nkemi’s warmth at his side.

The colors have gone to sleep. It’s not them but the shapes he notices, now, and the shapes he notices much more. He should’ve remembered these tsan’ehew, given he’d walked this path nearly every day, to and from, but their faces are unfamiliar to him. The lantern-light gleams off the smooth rock, the sweep of curves and corners he’d never’ve noticed in the daylight. The fresher ones cast shadows: even some of the most worn, the largest, cast deep shadows indeed. Where the lanterns are close, the shadows’ edges are crisper than the rocks’. So it is.

The Cultural Center is a bulky dark mass above the range of the lanterns. He squints up at it, though he can find its shape only as dark-on-dark, or where the uppermost bits of it block out the stars.

“I suppose so,” he says slowly, nodding. Nkemi squeezes his arm, and he squeezes hers back. There’s enough light to see by, but he doesn’t have to look over to know the expression on her face; it’s in the shape of the words, that solemn, thoughtful look. “Maybe someday,” he adds, “when whatever happened is – more distant.”

There’s no anger in his own, for all his uncertainty. He supposes kindness isn’t always just, either. The thought makes him uncomfortable; he doesn’t follow it too far.

Seems like there should be some way for them to pay their respects, he thinks, but he doesn’t say it. However he feels about galdori, there are plenty of duri in Dkanat, too, and he’s never heard of any other wika tribe being banned; he thinks Nkemi’s speaking the truth, when she says nobody’d want to keep them from their tsan’ehew. He wonders what in the hell happened, and he doesn’t think he ought to ask that, either, even if she knows.

On the walk here, his eyes adjusted to the dark as much as they could; now they adjust to the lanternlight, and they feel raw with the past hours’ reading.

He glances over at her, curious. It’s no darker here on one of the paths, though the walls are narrower, and the shadows where they lay at the edges of the light seem thicker. The border between light and shadow is sharp here, too.

“As old as Serkaih,” he murmurs.

The gleam of the smooth stone picks out the shapes of worn tsan’ehew he’d not’ve even seen by daylight. Older things, he thinks, showing their faces in the night.

They walk on. He thinks to ask where they’re going, but he doesn’t; he won’t disrespect her with his impatience. His mind, after the past hours, is a swirl of ib’vuqem and history, and he can’t think of any place he’s read about that fits this description. He thinks of Natete and their watchful looks in Ivuq’way, and the knowing sinks deeper through him.

Nor does he look over at her, just yet. He doesn’t know what’s in his eyes; he’s afraid it’s hunger just as much as curiosity. He’s silent, and he trusts her to guide him on.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Night, 33 Bethas, 2720
The Canyon Floor, Serkaih

The canyon walls stretch up around them; the floor sprawls, and they wind through between the walls, the stripes which are so colorful during the day only shades of gray at night. Here and there, the light spills against them, and in the pale firelight there is a sudden glimpse of color, of pink or orange or red or yellow, creeping out of the dark.

The floor of the canyon bends, as a river must have, once, on the surface of the rock; the edges are as smooth as those of the tsan’ehew. This is a place she did not take him, when they wandered in the light; the houses around them grow older and older, though occasionally, still, here and there, newer ones gleam.

Nkemi stops, once, at the edge of the path. She turns; she reaches up, and takes one of the hanging lanterns from its posts, and lifts it down. In their wake, darkness creeps in at either edge, but there is a pool of light cast around them.

Nkemi takes Anetol through the tsan’ehew, her footsteps careful on the uneven ground. They wind, back, through sloped and ancient houses slumped over, until they reach a newer house at the edge of the wall. If it is not precise, then it is, at least, recognizable: the house on the hill above Serkaih.

“This is my grandfather’s tsan’ehew,” Nkemi says, quietly, looking down at it. She sets the lantern down before it, and she kneels; she speaks of the cycle in Mugrobi, quietly, and she sends a prayer to Roa. She rises, then; she stands back, and lets Anetol come closer, if he will.

They do not linger long.

Nkemi hangs the lantern once more on the path, the circle of light stretching out to touch the others; she adjusts the edges until it overlaps on both ends, smooth and even. They continue on.

There is a place where the path turns with the canyons, as it has many times before, where the path comes to brush the wall and then sweeps along it. This time, at the wall, Nkemi steps away; she leads Anetol along the edge of it. It is solid wall, and solid wall still, and then suddenly it is not – suddenly, there is a space between. Nkemi’s hand holds his, and she turns sideways, and slides through.

Something gleams overhead in the darkness – reflected light from the lanterns or the stars, gleaming off the whisper of runes carved overhead, tucked between and beneath stones. Even in the day time, there would be no reading them by natural light, but some of them are just visible, faded and worn but still present: spirits, they whisper, and memory, too.

Inside there is more space; Nkemi stands in the heart of it, and she looks back at Anetol, her hand still in his. Golden phosphor is set into the walls, and sheds light throughout. The floor is a massive spell circle; it must have been carved into the sandstone long ago, from the way the edges have worn down and grown glossy, though it is still distinct and visible.

“Natete told me that the scholars of ib’vuqem used to cast here,” Nkemi says, softly, “or so he surmised, from their notes.” She squeezes Anetol’s hand, and she steps away, and comes to the edge of the circle. She looks down at it, her gaze sweeping over familiar lines and runes; she thinks of what she saw when he meditated, in the small cabin in the steamship, and the runes he had written out which he did not wish her to see.

“This is what I came to do as well,” Nkemi says, looking back at him across the small chamber. Her headwrap is gold tonight, too; it gleams in the light, shining threads through it sparking and glittering.

[Tom Cooke]

Serkaih • Dkanat

Nighttime on the 33rd of Bethas, 2720

W
hen Nkemi takes the lantern down, the light shifts over her face; it was lit from above, and now it’s lit from underneath, and all the colors shift, too.

For a while, the only light is the pool around them. Nkemi’s hand is warm in his, but the dark at his back and his sides and even spread out before them prickles all up and down his neck. The hairs on his arms stand on end. They move quietly, quiet enough he can hear scratchings and the brush of wind and older rock sounds in the canyons, and he doesn’t look in the deep shadows because he knows he can’t see a thing.

He thinks it looks familiar at first, when the light shifts over it. His eyes widen slightly with Nkemi’s quiet voice; the rough shape of it takes on meaning, tucked into the canyon wall as if tucked into the side of the hill. A shift of something deep – a color he doesn’t know – moves through his field. He says nothing; he thinks she knows, and if he doesn’t know if he can be honored, he knows how deeply he’s touched.

He stays standing when she kneels, soft long-voweled Mugrobi lilting off her tongue. He recognizes words, here and there. Tseriy’dzosat, dzú. Roa.

In the closeness of the lantern, he can see the two steps leading up to the door, the soft chiseled shapes of windows worn down by time. It’ll have been Nkese, or else Nkemi’s aunt, who carved this one; maybe both of them together. He thinks of the warm callused hands on the leather cover of A People’s History, and the stories he’s still finding inside.

When Nkemi rises, he comes closer. They don’t linger long, and he knows enough now to know he oughtn’t kneel or leave anything; there’s nothing to leave, anyway. But he bows his head and says his own prayer to Roa, Estuan and well-worn.

“Domea,” he murmurs to the tsan’ehew and the old man’s memory. The lantern shifts away, and the old house falls back into darkness.

She doesn’t start back, when they find the path again; he wonders at it, but he says nothing. He follows her deeper into the canyon, the both of them quiet. Her hand’s still warm in his when they turn away from the path; he resists the urge to reach out and touch the canyon wall, to reach out and hold onto her. When they slide into the gap, he brushes smooth rock with his hand. He breathes in deeply, and his eyes begin to adjust to soft gold phosphor light.

For a heartbeat, he can’t make sense of it. When he does, he nearly – nearly – jolts, though his hand is still wrapped firmly in Nkemi’s.

The tip of one of his sandals is brushing the wide arc of a line. He follows it around where it meets another line and another, overlapping circles. He freezes, expecting – he doesn’t know what he expects – but it never comes. A chill passes over him; he takes another deep breath, and his eyes come into focus on lines of writing sweeping around a curve.

His eyes move up, and up, to where the gold fades into shadow: what he’d thought was the natural texture of a cave wall is more runes, runes on runes, runes he can’t make out with his poor eyes, runes he doesn’t even think she could make out at their uppermost.

Nkemi speaks. The fear falls away, except for that prickling sense of wonder that comes from being in a place like this.

He nods, glancing over at Nkemi before he glances back down to the runes. She squeezes his hand and steps away. He steps back himself to read the monite underfoot; he tilts his head, following it, squinting his eyes. He steps over the line to try and read it upside-down, and doesn’t have much more luck.

He’s found no mention of this in They Are Heard, whatever else it’s spoken of; if ib’vuqem came here to cast, he doesn’t think they used this, whatever it is. “I’ve never seen writing like this,” he says, running a hand along his jaw. “If it’s monite, it’s…”

Old, he supposes. Damned old seems more accurate.

He looks over at her in surprise, her headwrap sparking concord-gold in the new light. There’s gold reflected in her eyes, too, and her skin. “To – meditate?” he asks, uncertain.

Their voices are smooth and resonant here. A good place to cast, he thinks, no matter what you’re casting. A good place to listen, too.

Another wave of leiraflesh ripples over him. He looks down at the floor, back up at her; he takes another few steps back, ‘til he can see the heart of it, full of more strange runes.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Night, 33 Bethas, 2720
The Canyon Floor, Serkaih

All of Serkaih is ancient, and full of the weight of history. Nkemi sees it in the curve of the cliffs and the tsan’ehew, in the sweep of colors during the day and the nights at light. She remembers it woven back through her own history, from a time when she was barely taller than the tsan’ehew herself, from the way it has shrunk, since, and yet never gotten smaller.

What she remembers when she thinks of this place is awe; she remembers her hand in Natete’s, slipping sideways through the hidden place in the wall. She remembers the joy on his face, the bright widening of his eyes, the energy in him as he took her from corner to corner, showing her this bit of monite or that.

“Old,” Nkemi supplies, when Anetol’s voice trails off into silence. “Yes.” She goes forward to the wall; her fingers hover over a rune pricked out by the light. “Natete has told me historians believe the pronunciation of monite has not changed, in all the years which we know to remember. The writing has,” she traces her fingers along the curve of the letter, not touching it.

They are only slightly different; perhaps the vowels have changed, or the letters become less ornate. The rubbing down of time makes it hard to tell. Natete told her once, longingly, that he could have written a paper just on the markings in this cave – that they are a better example than what most of palaeography has to work from.

“Perhaps,” Nkemi says, when Anetol asks his question.

She stands by the wall, still, turning back to look at him; she feels the gleam of light against her cheek and the wrap around her hair. She smiles at him. “This is a place which is a secret,” Nkemi says. “Only a few of the tsorerem and tsochyusem know to come here, to honor the lights. There is no agreement signed, and no permission needed, but it is understood that to come here means not to speak of it. This is what Natete told me when I first came; this, I have honored.”

Nkemi looks around, once more, at the gleaming light. She does not think to cast in the plot; she does not know its purpose, or what spells would call to it, and she would not waken its strength if she could. “The ward on the doorway is meant to be of safekeeping,” Nkemi says, quietly. “To protect those who call to that which we cannot reach.” She looks back at it, for a long moment; she turns back to Anetol.

Nkemi smiles at him; she comes close. “Sit with me?” She takes his hands in his. They lower together onto the floor away from the edges of the plot, and Nkemi holds his hands in hers, and she does not ask, this time, that he should go first; she knows it is upon her.

“This is a story,” Nkemi begins, “but all which I say is the truth of my memories, and the truth of my heart. When I was first allowed in Serkaih as a child, I was glad to play here amidst the tsan’ehew, to walk in the memories of my ancestors and imagine their stories. One warm day many years ago, I lingered later than usual, and I saw in the distance a small lizard, belly flashing yellow in the sunset light. I chased it, deeper into the canons, and time passed, though I did not know it.”

“It was dark as I began to search for the path,” Nkemi says, her hands soft on Anetol’s, her gaze, too, soft on his. “I saw a woman in the distance; she glowed, as if lit by the moon. The light shone through her, and when she turned I could see the bones underneath. She smiled at me. She told me she had come looking for her daughter, and she told me not to fear.”

Nkemi breathes in and out, evenly, the smooth, rhythmic breathing like a meditation. “I felt something cold behind me. She told me not to look back; she reached out to me, and I took her hand, and she led me back to the path. She did not let me look, even when I tried; she cupped my head in her other hand, and she asked me to tell her more about the goats.”

“That is all I remember,” Nkemi says, evenly. “I know jara found me lying in the lantern light of the path and brought me home. I was sick, tired and feverish, for almost a week. I know it frightened my juela, very badly; I know a priest did not fear me, when it had passed.”

Nkemi is quiet, her small face set and serious. “There is much I do not understand of what happened to me that night,” she says, evenly. “I do not believe it was only the hallucination such as fever can bring. I have seen things, since, which make me sure of it. I do not know whether the wandering woman meant me harm or ill; all I know is that I did not fear her, and that, I think, I should like to see her again.”