[Closed] [Mature] Shun the Light

[Tom Cooke]

Serkaih • Dkanat

Nighttime on the 33rd of Bethas, 2720

P
erhaps, she says.

It prickles all up and down his spine. She is smiling, all lit up in gold. He doesn’t look down at the circles; he can barely hold the words, as she goes on. You know, he thinks. You know what I am, and this is why you’ve brought me here.

It’s only a splitsecond; his expression doesn’t change. The fear falls away like a curtain, and he nods slowly, his brow knit, as she guides his thoughts back onto the path. “I will keep it,” he says. She knows he knows the value of a secret, if not why – or just how much – but he knows the value in saying it aloud, too; he knows a little more of Mugrobi truth now, and he knows that when an honorable man says it aloud, he can be held to it.

He doesn’t say how much he was just wishing he’d brought his notebooks, to sketch out some of these symbols. He should’ve known there was no point; ib’vuqem were exhaustive in their note-taking, even to the point of irrelevant asides, and he knew they’d’ve at least made note of something like this.

He’d been groggy when he’d left Emeka’s house behind. Now, everything’s vivid and sharp with wakefulness. She goes on, and the knowing drops through him, sinks inside him, cold and heavy with realization. He doesn’t even know yet what he knows – just that he’s on the threshold, and he’s begun to see what’s beyond the door.

“Thank you for trusting me with it,” he adds when she takes his hand. She leads him to the edge of the plot, the mona still warmly intermingled around them.

Outside the lines, he doesn’t hesitate before he sits; nor does he ask her why, nor does he let the lingering fear that crawls at the back of his neck compel him. He owes her this much. They sit across from each other on the smooth cold stone, and he’s happy for a moment just to have the weight off his hip.

The truth of my memories, she says, and the truth of my heart.

He listens very closely, though there’s no need. Even her soft voice fills up the chamber. It weaves and lopes through the story, and if at first he doesn’t understand, he doesn’t have to; it’s each word, one after the next, like the stories in her grandfather’s book. Building, building. Her vowels are longer, he thinks, in the days since they’ve come to Dkanat.

His eyes are wide, but they don’t widen – he doesn’t jolt – when she speaks of the woman. The expression on his face isn’t a smile or a frown, but it turns wistful; his hands are just as soft on hers as hers on his. His breathing follows the rhythm of hers.

A priest did not fear me – His throat tightens; he looks out of these eyes at her, and keeps the wistful look on his face. I did not fear her, and…

She’s finished, and he’s quiet, their hands still together between them. He doesn’t look away from her face. I believe you, he might’ve said to an Anaxi. “I don’t believe it was only a hallucination, either,” he said softly, “for what that’s worth. I think you know that already.” His lip twitched; it was almost a smile, for just a second.

When he finally looks away, he looks at the ward. He might feel it, he thinks, if he shuts his eyes and tunes out everything else; he wonders if the tsorerem keep it, or if the power of it is such that it has lasted. Everspell, he doesn’t dare think.

Whatever it is, it hasn’t pulled him from himself; he feels safe, or as safe as he ever does.

I have seen things, since –

“I have also seen things,” he says, looking back at her. “I’ve never reached out to one like her, but I –” He swallows, and his hands twitch. “I’ve seen possession,” he says, “and… worse. Since the bend in my river.

“I’m not so much of a storyteller,” he says. “But this is one truth of mine. In Bethas of last year, I was in Brunnhold’s phasmonia; I, and a student that had also come to the phasmonia, came across – a ghost. An angry, hungry ghost, who had to be warded.

“I’m familiar with spells of reaching-out and warding, even if I’ve never cast them before – except for the ward that I meditate with.” He breathes in deep. “I’ve spent a great deal of time feeling – my wits were in question, if I looked too closely at what’s happened to me. Trying to learn more, because I’ve no choice.”

I need you to know, he wants to say, what I am. There are priests that would fear me, if they knew.

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 … “It doesn’t sound to me like the woman meant you any harm,” he says, smiling a little. “I understand why you’d want to find her again.”

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Night, 33 Bethas, 2720
The Canyon Floor, Serkaih

Nkemi knows he will not call her a liar or a fool; she knows what she saw in the circle in which he meditated, the wards which he chalked with a careful hand as the steamship rocked through the Turga’s waves. She knows all of this before she begins, and she does not doubt it as she goes on, both of them settled on the cool stone floor.

His breathing follows the pattern of hers; his hands are soft on hers, as hers are in his, and their fields are deeply intertwined, and warm with the mingling. Her wrap drapes on the ground, just brushing the cool cave floor - for all that it is nothing but dirt and sand outside, the floor here is nearly clean - and his is too, both of them bright colors washed gold in the light.

Nkemi’s head inclines softly, when he speaks of what he himself has seen. She does not ask, and she does not need to; what he wishes to tell her he does.

A hungry ghost, he says; Nkemi nods again, and thinks of darkness wrapping around her in the crypts beneath the Church of the Moon. She knows hunger, now; she thinks of the longing that reached through her, for warmth and for the sun, unquenchable. She knows; she remembers the sight of darkness wrapped around a tattooed hand, of blood dripping from a cut palm, of candles which burned themselves down and the wax which spread over the soft skin of her palms.

It is when he says he understands that she smiled again, wide and soft. Their hands are clasped between them still.

“I do not believe she did,” Nkemi says, quiet and solemn. “It is my belief - though I do not know - that she protected me from something else which wished me harm, or which, in the blindness of its need, could not but have harmed me.”

“I have seen one such also,” Nkemi says, quietly, “in the crypts beneath the Church of the Moon. It had been lost so long that they remembered little more than pain and longing; they knew only the dark, and feared and ached for the light.” Nkemi’s voice was soft and heavy with the weight of the memories; her eyes softened at the edges, her smile frown solemn. She remembers the weight of the spell which held them safe, swirling in the waters of Iz inside her mind, cool and bright and heavy all at once.

“I do not know what I may find here, if she still remains to be found,” Nkemi goes on, looking at him; she thinks of the ghostly hand lit by moonlight, bones and thin clinging transparent flesh, and she thinks of the darkness which she never saw, then. “I believe that I am prepared, such as I may be, but I can make no guarantees.”

Nkemi is silent, a moment; she squeezes his hands. “There will be other nights,” she says, and smiles at him. “If you wish to go - if you wish to sit in silence and meditate - I am grateful to have shared this place and these memories with you.”

The other offer, the one which pools between them, she leaves unspoken. She puts no pressure on it; she is not sure, herself, knowing what she does of his casting, and thinking of what it has almost cost them. She waits, then, in the uncertainty between them, to let him choose.

[Tom Cooke]

Serkaih • Dkanat

Nighttime on the 33rd of Bethas, 2720

I
n the blindness of its need. Here his expression doesn’t change, either. In the quiet between her words, it’s hard not to think. He hears these thoughts too loudly to set them aside. Would I have harmed you, he wonders, in the blindness of my need? I’d’ve felt you in the dark, warm and breathing, just like him. Just like anybody.

Nkemi’s hands are still warm and soft on his. His eyes widen when she goes on, for all he’s not surprised, for all he’s seen at Brunnhold.

She didn’t ask; neither does he. He tries not to wonder, but it’s almost impossible. He remembers her saying she’d given a lecture at Brunnhold – on the map spell – and he can’t imagine when else she’d’ve been. That wasn’t long ago; that, he thinks, was last year. He pushes down another chill before it can trickle through him.

They knew only the dark, she says, and feared and ached for the light. He keeps his breath even, but his pulse is like thunder in his ears. The rushing fills up the silence, like the ghost of whatever river carved out this place.

He remembers –

In the dark, Kafo calls it; he’s always thought of it as the cold. He wonders if Nkemi’s wandering woman feels it so, if she hungers and twists and aches.

He’s never heard of a ghost protecting someone – but he never knew much of ghosts at all before a year and a half ago, when he’d become one. Perhaps it comes down to the ghost: perhaps it was never what he was, but who he was. Or perhaps it’s that his kind are the hungriest and most monstrous of them all.

He is not a ghost, he reminds himself. Ghosts are not souls; they’re pieces. Perhaps there are milder ghosts, tatters of milder portraits caught and held by the mona. There are slivers of hate and rage, slivers of fear, hunger. Maybe there are also slivers of love – love for a daughter, maybe. Or longing, or loss, or some tangled up stitch of all of those things. He thinks he can imagine what it would feel like, to wander through the cold looking for a missing daughter.

He takes a deep breath when she squeezes his hands, turning it over in his mind. If you wish to go, she says, then if you wish to sit in silence and meditate. He looks at her, smiling, and then down at their hands, dark on pale. The gold light washes over them.

“I can’t say that my presence won’t interfere with your casting,” he says after a moment, answering what she hasn’t asked. He looks back up with his brow furrowed. “I don’t know if I can cast with you, either. Even if I know the spell you’re going to use, I haven’t practiced it.”

He raises his brows. “But – if you’d have me, Nkemi, I’d be honored to stay. If something happens, I know a ward or two, and... at worst, I can go get help.”

His heart is still thrumming in his chest, but the rhythm of his breath is even.

“All the same, I’m grateful for what you’ve shared with me,” he says, “grateful beyond words.” He takes one of his hands out from under hers and presses.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Night, 33 Bethas, 2720
A Cave Within the Walls, Serkaih

Nkemi smiles as he makes his offer, too. She shakes her head when he asks about casting with her; she has cast with him before, and thinks she would be glad to do so again, but this she knows must be her and her alone. She has never practiced this spell either, not in full; it is one such that she does not think can be practiced, not truly.

“Your presence here is a blessing,” Nkemi says, smiling at him. “Unexpected, but not unwelcome.”

Nkemi does not rush to it. She does not kneel in the plot whose meaning she does not know; she does not have chalk, either, and nor would she use it, if she did.

She meditates, first, searching for ised’usa so that she might find tsiwow’af in her casting; she sits cross-legged with Anetol opposite her, their fields mingling, and they both meditate. At times they talk in the midst of it; mostly they are silent. Nkemi did not know how long she would need, but she knows, she thinks, when she is ready, when the swirling waters of her mind are calm and smooth.

Anetol rises, and moves away, over towards the wall where the phosphor lights gleam. She feels when his field leaves her range; there is a last brush of his caprise, and then, though she knows he is there, she can feel him no more.

Nkemi takes her waterbag from her waist; she cups her hand, tightly, as a Mugrobi knows how to do, and pours as much water as it can hold into the soft lines of her palm. She dips the two fingers of her other hand into it, and she traces the lines of a rough plot around her on the ground – a large circle, first, large enough to meditate, and swirling lines drawing in and out within. She starts towards the center, and she works out; when her fingers are dry, she dips them again, and when her palm is dry, she refills it once more.

The air is cool inside the cave, and a little damp; the water lingers on the floor, and gleams in the shine of the phosphor lights.

The swirls creep outwards; they stretch along and go through the outer borders of the spell circle, and spiral out into the world beyond. Then, one careful word at a time, fingertip by fingertip, Nkemi paints a handful of words into the spaces between them, careful and deliberate, filling much of the empty space.

She cups her damp hands together in her lap when she kneels; she does not hesitate. She never meant to, but there is reason not to, now; such plots do not last long.

Nkemi begins.

This is a calling spell; it reaches out like cognomancy, though to something else. It is not a spell of ib’vuqem, but it is not so far off, either. It calls; it reaches through the distance, as if the mind can touch that which dwells outside it. She describes to the mona the one she seeks to find; she tells the story as she told it to Anetol earlier, though in different words. This is the place where the spells differ and fall short: in the restriction of one’s reach to one other, amidst all which may dwell beyond.

Nkemi winds this all into the invocation, explaining herself to the mona, and asking them to join her in this search. She moves into the espial, then; and there it begins in earnest; kneeling in the midst of the cavern, the stone plot before her, the water around her gleaming against the rock, gold phosphor light pooled and lapping over her, Nkemi casts, and reaches out, her lips moving steadily as her eyes flutter shut.

[Tom Cooke]

Serkaih • Dkanat

Nighttime on the 33rd of Bethas, 2720

T
hat the chamber’s sheltered from the wind – and all that gold phosphor – doesn’t make it any less chill. He feels it like the bottom’s fallen out of the cold, the moment he steps out of the last caprise, like a last brush of fingertips. It goes all through him, then, grips his bones with ice. He yields to the shiver, this time; he thinks he can’t be judged for it.

He never turns his back on her, though he lets his eyes wander over the wall as he moves closer to them. If he stares too long, if he lets the worn old lines blur in the soft glow, he feels as if they’re just on the edge of making sense. The shape of a word he knows, here; the spacing of a familiar clause, there. In the corner of his eye, Nkemi’s taking her waterskin from off her belt, and he half-turns back again to watch her.

Here in the light, the shadows are deeper. The gold spark of her headwrap and the vivid colors of her wrap, the whites of her eyes, are what he sees first. His brow knits; his eyes follow her hands. She pours water into one cupped palm, and nothing patters to the stones. He wonders if this is the medium, then watches her dip her fingers in it and thinks again. They spoke a little during the meditation, but he hasn’t asked.

Slowly and gracefully, Nkemi paints a glistening plot on the floor.

He watches. Shadows pool in the folds of her scarf, and the hems of her trousers swish around her thin dark ankles. Gold light limns her shoulders from behind; her palms flash pale in the shadows, her sandals whispering on the smooth rock as she steps gracefully around what she’s already drawn.

She doesn’t draw the ward from the outside and close herself up inside it. She trusts herself to work from the inside out, tracing swirls like tendrils as they dance around and eclipse the circles. As he watches, she begins to paint monite in the gaps, just as carefully.

He’s standing very straightly, and though his legs ache, he knows better than to lean on the wall and doesn’t make to sit. His breath is still in his chest, aching, until he reminds himself to breathe again.

When she kneels, he thinks he understands what she’s about to do. Slow on his stiff knees, he crouches with her, though he doesn’t sit on the floor like he did earlier. He spreads his fingertips out on the rock, trembling slightly; he ignores the twinging in his knees and in his back, watching closely. There’s still no medium when she begins to cast, and he knows, now, that there won’t be any.

From the glistening edges he can see, the plot looks unfamiliar. He doesn’t dare get closer. He knows her field must be etheric, even though he can’t feel it; the air has thinned – some of the chill has gone out, the numbness in his cheeks prickling away – and taken on a filmy, slippery texture, one he can feel against his skin and somewhere inside his body. He understands enough of the invocation to know what she’s describing; what words he doesn’t understand, he knows.

This is not like the spell he’s pieced together from They Are Heard. It’s more like some of what he’s seen in Kzecka, though the set of the words is unfamiliar.

Nkemi casts, he thinks, as she tells stories. She’s a way of telling it clearly, of setting it all out and weaving it all together and then asking, with humility and intent both. Her monite, too, has something of the desert about its vowels, and they lope and leap and ripple through the dark air.

When she falls quiet, her eyes fluttering shut in the shadows of her brow, he waits. He resists the urge to lower himself back to the floor, to ease into the quiet and into every sensation as he did when they meditated. But he’s learned nothing if not that there’s ised’usa in this, too. With his fingers braced against the rock, he watches her breath rise and fall. His finds the rhythm, too. He feels the way the air breathes, strange and living. He feels the cold, and the iron taste of fear.

He’s not sure what he expects to happen. He watches nothing but her face.

In the soft light, he thinks the shadows underneath her eyes have deepened. Her expression doesn’t change, but he can see the flicker of movement underneath her eyelids, the flutter of the shadows of her eyelashes.

A jolt goes through her. Something – he can’t say what – flickers across her features. He stays still himself, crouched, his hands clammy against the faintly damp floor. The plot still glistens, but he wonders how long it will be before it dries.

Nkemi is prefect-straight. He shifts on his haunches, careful not to make a noise. The chamber is utterly silent; it’s a silent he doesn’t think he can grow used to, even for the long time – time he can’t measure – they spent meditating here. And he doesn’t know how long he crouches opposite her this time, either, except that he’s willing to stay there for a great deal longer, if that’s what it takes.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Night, 33 Bethas, 2720
A Cave Within the Walls, Serkaih

Nkemi sits in the midst of the plot. She is a deep well, and energy washes through her like water. It pools in the quietness of her, in the places where she is still, and flows between them, swirling bright. As she casts, her words flow too, and they draw the energy from her and reach it out into the world beyond.

In her mind’s eyes, as she chants words made familiar by long study, she can see the water of her essence swirling along the lines of the plot, following them, spiraling out from her and into the world beyond.

She is only a droplet then, and she searches - she reaches out, searching - for something which is only a droplet too. Guide me, she asks the mona, show me, shape me; she leaves behind the coolness and the stillness, the familiar places which swirl in her wake, and stretches herself into the unknown, gleaming still.

She finishes the espial and holds in the midst of the spell; she is silent, without even the ritual of chanting a holding word again and again, for it is all of her which reaches and strains.

Something reaches back.

Nkemi jolts; she feels it flicker through the body where she is rooted, to which long hours of practice, of study, of movement, tie her. She feels it too in some other nameless place, deeper and more sacred. She reaches - there no other word for it but that - she strains -

She cannot hold.

Nkemi’s eyes open. She does not know how long it has been, but that all the muscles of her legs and back are taut and stiff, and her mouth dry. She licks her lips; she chants through a hoarse voice, into the amandation, and curls the spell. Her eyelids flicker; she sits back, hard, in the midst of the circle, and closes her eyes once more.

“I felt a presence,” Nkemi says, quiet, when she thinks she can speak once more. She has no sense of the time which has passed; she feels new aches through her, and she opens her eyes again and finds the last of the plot drying.

She does not qualify it; she does not say that she cannot be sure what she reached, though she knows it is true. She does say that she reached something; of this she is sure. If her words led her astray - if it was nothing at all like what she believed it to be - then so be it; she cannot be sure.

The Mugrobi rises to her hands and knees, and then to her feet; she breathes in deep, finding her balance between them, remembering to settle back into them. She turns to look at him.

“I do not know what,” Nkemi goes on, evenly. “Something reached to brush me - cold and hot at once, and both of them enough to burn.” She shakes her head, lightly; she breathes in deeply. She thinks of her mother conjuring snow from air in the midst of Thul’Amat, and it is easy to smile once more.

She does not know more than that. What brushed her felt nothing like the hand she remembers from long ago; yet, she thinks - did her reaching out feel like her hand? She was too small then for even an eddle; she was only her smile and her bright voice. She does not - cannot - know what she went into the dark; she held nothing back.

Was the cold something cruel? Or a warning? She does not - cannot - know. All the same she knows it is enough for the night; she knows better than to try again, feeling the tingling all through her and the faint headache at the back of her skull. She welcomes it, for it reminds her of herself, and she knows better than to feel the connection without gratitude.

Nkemi folds herself over; she twists. She reminds herself of her arms, her legs, all the places of her body. “Will you join me?” Nkemi asks, looking to Anetol. She smiles at him. “This will be ised’usa, but it is done after one finds tsiwow’af, or the closeness to it which casting brings. It is a welcoming back of the body.”

Rolls

Clairvoyant ghost reaching spell: 2

[Tom Cooke]

Serkaih • Dkanat

Nighttime on the 33rd of Bethas, 2720

N
kemi’s eyes open.

He doesn’t know how long it’s been. His back aches, but he doesn’t lower or stand from his crouch. His mind flies through the motions – the words – he tries to steady his breathing as he watches, tries and fails. He hasn’t thought to be ready, in case; somewhere in his mind, perhaps, he has thought that he will never see It again. He remembers the ward, but he doesn’t think the remembrance is enough.

But she opens her mouth, and the voice that comes out, though startlingly hoarse, is hers. He can tell by the way she phrases the amandation; he can tell by the long, lilting accent, and the calm control of the words, and the fact that there’s an amandation and a curl at all.

I felt a presence, she says. Fear licks through him like fire, but the darkness and the lights are all still, and he can hear nothing but the quiet resonance of her voice against the smooth stone. He lowers his erse to the floor and grunts.

There’s still something strange about it, when she stands. He resists the urge to go to her rightaway; he remembers coming to with her warm hands chafing the life back into his. He thinks she looks, for a moment, like the legs she’s standing on might not be hers, like her eyes and lips don’t quite know where to go.

He watches, and Nkemi settles back into herself: her thin chest swells with her breath, and the ghost of her brings her face back to life, for all it is a tired one. She’s had a prefect’s balance the whole time, and a prefect’s straight back, and Nkemi pezre Nkese’s solemn look. She’s been in there a damned long time, relatively speaking. He suspects it’ll take a lot more than cognomancy – or a spirit – to shake her out of it.

He sags gratefully against the floor, for once untroubled by the cold. He nods at the description, shutting his eyes a moment.

When he opens them, she’s smiling again. She bends, the folds of her scarf rippling, to stretch long thin arms toward her sandaled toes.

He hesitates at first; it seems to him Bash is dragging him down to the stones, and the only thing colder than sitting here would be standing up and shivering. Welcoming back, he thinks wryly, the body, with all its little pains. But he smiles finally and nods and pushes himself slowly to his feet. “Of course,” he says, and goes to her, and his caprise sinks warm into hers. It aches with worry; he can’t, and doesn’t try to, hide it.

She explains a little more, but mostly he follows her motions.

The body’s all there; it was there this morning, and it’s fucking here tonight. He doesn’t have to touch his lily-pale toes or put his mind in the numbness of his skinny fingers to know so. He can’t help the resentment, even as gratefully as he watches her – putting herself, all of herself, back into the muscles that twist and stretch, the ribs that swell with breath, the face that finds its colorful, familiar smile.

Eventually, the gratefulness wins over. He can’t bear to imagine her tser’úxiraw.

“Cold and hot at once,” he repeats, some time into the silence of their meditation, “enough to burn.”

He’s reaching up over his head, spreading his arms wide to feel their wingspan; he’s feeling the pressure of the ground underneath his feet, and the lines and aches of someplace another man has lived and worn well. “Was it – hungry?” he asks softly. “Or cruel?”

Does he know the difference?

“What would you have done if it’d been her, and she’d been – a threat?” he asks after another quiet, not sure where in his body the ache he feels is.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Night, 33 Bethas, 2720
A Cave Within the Walls, Serkaih

Nkemi feels the ache of thirst in her mouth; she honors it, and breathes in through the scratch of it against her throat and through her nose. She takes her waterskin, and tilts her head back to drink from it. She closes her eyes, and she acknowledges every moment of the drink, the coolness and the ache both, and feels it all through her.

He comes closer and smiles at her, and Nkemi greets his field with hers, and they mingle warm together.

Nkemi begins with her fingers; she opens and closes them, bends each one at each joint, and focuses on the feeling at the tips of them. She notices where they are cold, where they are stiff, the little aches in the joints. She notices the damp spots left behind from the waterskin, and the feeling when the wind brushes across it, the pleasantness and the unpleasantness too.

“Now the wrists,” Nkemi says, smiling, looking at Anetol. “We come towards the heart, slowly; we bring ourselves back to the center.” What she speaks aloud is no more than what she thinks; when she guides, if she guides, it is never any different than how she guides herself in the quiet privacy of her mind, only put into words. She can feel it – can see it – as if her skin too is clear, and energy flows all within her, stretches from her fingertips back towards her heart and the soul at her center. Nkemi knows it flows both ways, not only out from her core to her fingertips, but back, as well, from the outside in.

She feels the kneeling in her back and legs most of all, and when she comes there, she acknowledges the pain and she is grateful for it. She speaks it aloud. “The aches are a reminder that we feel,” Nkemi says, quiet and even, looking at the small man across from him, and thinking of how slowly and carefully he rises. “We can let it anger us, or we can be grateful to it; we can work to welcome it, however else we may feel.”

All the same she aches; when she bends, when she twists, when she rotates her ankles or her wrists or her waist, she aches. She breathes it in, and out once more, and she sinks into it, and into herself as well.

She does not always talk. Sometimes they move together in silence; in time, he speaks himself. Nkemi looks at him.

“I am not sure,” Nkemi says, quietly. “Heat is hungry, I think, always; the fire crackles to be fed. Cold, too; it takes the warmth, never-ceasing, for whatever we can give is not enough to heat the world around us.”

“As for cruel,” Nkemi shakes her head. “I do not think such a thing can be cruel,” she says, quietly. “Even if it means harm, I do not think it is harm born of cruelty, but desperation.”

Anetol asks; he presses further.

Nkemi looks at him. They are coming to the end of the meditation, the end of the movement. She settles her shoulders back, and draws herself up straight, and frowns. “I do not know,” Nkemi says, very honestly, looking at him across the small gold-lit cavern. The last of her plot is gone, dried away; she is herself once more, every inch of her, from small cold toes to the wrap which covers her hair, and the scarf between. She stretches herself up; she arches back, and bends forward, and comes at last together, shaking herself loose and tucking the wrap of her shawl tighter.

“I do not always know what mercy means,” Nkemi says, solemn and quiet; she thinks of an inky black hand; she thinks of a rooftop, and a river below. “Or justice.”

[Tom Cooke]

Serkaih • Dkanat

Nighttime on the 33rd of Bethas, 2720

H
e rolls his wrists at the ends of his arms. He feels rather than hears – this time – the soft pop. When he spreads his fingers, they ache; he can feel the unscarred skin stretching over his knuckles.

Some of the aches of movement are quick and sharp, relenting into nothing, and some blur into an ache that stretches past the joint and into all the muscles. Sometimes he regrets these; they seem to him like warnings, only he’s in a strange country, and he doesn’t always have the map right-side up. He remembers swinging this fist for the first time and feeling the muscles of his back – muscles he knew to trust with anything – crack sharply and abandon him, all at once.

I was grateful for it when it was mine, he wants to say.

It’s the old argument; there’s no place for it here. Nkemi kneels, her scarf swishing, its hem just brushing the rock underfoot. He kneels across from her. When he stands, the unfamiliar twinge in his hip startles him as much as it usually does. He remembers when it was smooth, when there was a great deal more weight to carry and he carried it better than this.

He tries to welcome the stumble of one foot as he rises. It surprises him to feel the strain in the muscles of his chest; he hasn’t realized those were tense, when he was breathing unsteadily. He feels the filling-up of his lungs with sharp cold air, and then finds the beat of his heart amid all the other sensations.

The muscles are all there, he thinks as he stretches his arms above his head one more time. Even if they’re weaker. And the bones, and the blood, and the pumping heart. He thinks of a lover’s thumb pressed to his pulse, and a soft voice.

His eyes are closed at first when he listens to her. When he opens them, she’s looking at him, intent and serious. The gold lights glint in her dark eyes.

I do, he wants to say. I was cruel. He knows what she means; he doesn’t know if ghosts can be cruel – scraps and tatters of things – or if they’re like the heat and the cold, just things that can’t help themselves. But he knows what he is, and he knows he was cruel.

The end is as hard as the beginning. As much as it aches, he thinks it’d be easier to slip from one movement to the next until he forgot why he did them, until sensation fell asleep underneath the doing. But that, he supposes as he finally pulls himself straight and still, is the opposite of the point.

He glances down and away. He worries he pushed too hard. He thinks of her in the wick restaurant, in the Soots, and what she told him – he thinks of her in the flat, and of the book dealer.

“I’ve heard poems describe cold as cruel,” he says slowly, rolling his shoulders and adjusting his scarf. “Heat, too. I don’t know.” He rubs his eyes; they ache.

He’s not sure how long they’ve been down here, but he looks around at the cave a last time, breathing in deep. He lets his eyes trace all the symbols on the walls, and the sweep of the ward on the smooth rock floor, where Nkemi’s small plot has long since faded. If he tries to remember the shape of any of them, he knows he’ll just forget.

He blows out his cheeks. “If I were –” He hesitates, looking toward the dark of the entrance, past the ward. “If I were like her,” he says, “and the cold had made me so – so desperate, I… don’t think I’d want to be that. Not as I am now. I think mercy...”

He breaks off, but he looks at her with a smile, offering her his arm this time.

“I don’t know either,” he says. “I know a man who says that honor can be brittle; perhaps it’s best not to know.”

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Night, 33 Bethas, 2720
The Canyon Floor, Serkaih

Nkemi smiles back at Anetol; she tucks her arm through his. She is not very warm, and neither is he; together, though, they are warmer than apart, and she is grateful for it. They both move slowly, neither rushing, towards the entrance to the cave.

“I do not think there is honor in hiding,” Nkemi says, solemn and thoughtful. “A wise professor once described honor to me and my classmates as like the gardens of Ire’dzosat. It can be still and deep, like the waters of Iz, which flows around obstacles undeterred. It can be flaring hot, like the fires of Ifús, consuming all which comes to it. It can be sharp enough to cut, full of memory, strong – and perhaps brittle too – like the stones of Tseli. It can be twisting and hard to grasp, like the winds of Úvew.”

“Most of all,” Nkemi goes on; she turns sideways, first, sliding through the gap, her hand holding lightly to his arm, even though the sound of her voice is enough to follow, “honor is as Ur’dzúxas; it can be in all things, if one does the work.”

They come out through the gap; it is lighter than it was, though dark enough that the lanterns still glow in the path. The sky is not bright with stars, anymore; it is gleaming, distant gray-blue, and slowly beginning to lighten, though there is no sign yet of sun creeping over canyon walls.

“I never understood,” Nkemi says, smiling, “if he meant that there may be all four aspects within each of us, or if different people experience honor differently, choosing their garden. To me honor like Iz sounds best, but I have always liked water. Perhaps,” her voice lightens to a giggle, “it comes of being born in the desert.”

Nkemi finds her way back to the path, Anetol’s arm looped gently through hers. They come back into the light, which washes over both of them, firelight gleaming through metal and glass at the edge of the wall. Nkemi turns back towards the Cultural Center, back towards the way they came. She smiles once more at Anetol, and opens her mouth to speak.

There is a yell – a scream, perhaps – loud enough to echo off the canyon walls. Nkemi jerks; she turns back, looking from side to side, looking wide-eyed to Anetol.

“This way, I think,” Nkemi’s face pulls into a frown; she looks down the path, deeper into the canyon.

“Stay in the light,” Nkemi tells Anetol. She slides her arm from his; she turns and she runs, small sandals pounding against the dirt, throwing herself and all her strength into it. They round the bend.

A white clad figure is running towards them. Badhe’s face is pale and taut, his eyes wide. He cries out; he comes to a stop, and Nkemi does too, and he catches her with his hands.

“Ada’na Nkemi?” Badhe asks; he is shaking.

Nkemi takes her hands in his. “Ada’xa?” She asks. His skin is cold and clammy; her heart is pounding in her chest, from the run and the fear.

Badhe is shaking; his eyes flicker closed, and they open again. “I told them we needed more guards,” he says. His lips press together, and his gaze darts back and sideways, over his shoulder; it fixes again again on Nkemi. “Nkemi,” he says, blinking. “And – ada’xa Ahatol,” he takes a deep breath. “What are you doing here?”

“We were meditating,” Nkemi says, frowning intently. “Ada’xa, please, what has happened?”

Badhe shakes his head; his hands tighten on hers.

Nkemi squeezes his hands, lightly; she lowers them, and steps around him.

“Don’t,” Badhe rasps.

Nkemi goes past, slowly.

“Don’t,” Badhe says again; he has closed his eyes now, shaking still.

The canyon turns again at the end of the path. Nkemi knows this place; it opens here, wide, into something like a clearing.

He is lying in the middle of it.

Nkemi gasps aloud; one small hand presses to her mouth. She does not scream. She sees it all at once – the red smear of blood drawn in circles around him with words written in the midst of strange shapes, the places where he should not open but does, the lengths of string lying on the ground, the bones scattered here and there bleached white, a sharp knife driven down into the middle of him with no blood around its hilt, the bowl with a strange gleaming green liquid still pooled in the bottom, set off to the side.

Nkemi goes forward, slowly; she is praying, quietly, and it is a moment before she knows that the words are spoken aloud. “Please, Hulali,” she is saying, quietly, again and again. “Please.” She does not cross the lines of the circle, but stands at the edge. She steels herself, and looks down, slowly, at his face; there are few faces she does not know in Dkanat and Serkaih.

This one gives her pause.

Nkemi’s face creases in a frown. She feels Anetol behind her; she feels his field, tangled with hers, and more rushing through it than she can say. She knows her own is wild with emotion; there is nothing indectal about that which they see. “It is ada’xa Kafo,” Nkemi says, frowning. “From the caravan.” She swallows, hard. “Naulas guide him now,” she says, quietly.