[Closed] Again Tonight I Sang a Song

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Nighttime, 5 Achtus, 2719
Tom's Study, Vauquelin House

Peaceful, Anetol said. Nkemi could just barely feel the rumble of the words through her back. It was strange to be so distant once more; it was strange to be so aware of just how distant they were. The clairvoyant conversationalist took a deep breath and settled back into herself; she focused on the red of her sweater, the feeling of Anetol’s head just barely resting against herself, the tiny hints of red, blue, green scattered across the study, like treasures if one searched for them.

Bittersweet, Anetol said, too, and Nkemi felt the word somewhere in her chest. She touched her cheeks again; the tears had stopped, and, too, she felt she would have known if she had still cried. Both were true, Nkemi understood; there was no conflict between them. She thought she could feel Anetol smiling, although she knew, in truth, she could not.

“It takes practice,” Nkemi agreed, smiling a little more. “It was a long contact, I think. When we are first taught, we go in only long enough to make brush against the vestibule, and come back out.” She – all of them – had watched Professor Halasa urging the mona, precise but quick, to guide a student back to his body; Nkemi remembered the faint tinge of blue lips and fingernails, and the shuddering gasp as Koladhi had opened his eyes.

“I felt it,” Nkemi said, and there was a little smile in her voice. “It was very vivid,” she said. “Vivid is good – it helps to keep the borders clear.”

Nkemi knew how to hold on to the image. It was a part of prefect training for anyone intending to use clairvoyant casting in prefect work; passing examinations in clarity of memory was, too, a prerequisite for any magristrate to consider your evidence. Those long hot days had passed in an odd sort of daze; cast after cast, Nkemi remembered, mind after mind, and each time as she had emerged, she had done as she was trained, and recited what she had seen in her mind, first, and then aloud as soon as she dared speak – all the details she could remember, careful only to describe, and never to interpret, and more careful, still, not to speak where she was unsure.

She did not repeat to herself what she had seen in Anetol’s mind; she left it trickle like water between her fingers, so she was left with a damp palm: the smell of sage, a feeling of laughter, and the coolness of a breeze through rain-heavy air. Even that was already fading, replaced with the warm-bright light of the study, and the scratch of the branches at the window.

“I felt very well your nudge,” Nkemi said, smiling. They had discussed it, a little, abstractly, before the first cast. It was the wholeness of it which mattered, Nkemi had said, seriously. There were no set words or rules; there was no precise squeeze or thought which was intended. What was to be offered was a deliberate, controlled push – not a shutting of the opened door, which would force another caster out, but a squeeze all around.

It is something an untrained mind cannot do, Nkemi had offered, quietly. That is why it is a symbol to a caster of another caster’s mind, for errors do happen, for contact is, sometimes, made where it is not meant. She did not describe for Anetol the feeling of an untrained mind trying to refuse a connection, though she knew it well. It was a desperate, panicked flailing; like a man being held down, and squirming and bucking desperately; the difference between them could not be mistaken, once felt.

Then, quietly, “it was a beautiful place,” Nkemi said. Her hand went and took his once more, resting small on top of it. “I am sorry,” Nkemi said, carefully, “for your loss.”

[Tom Cooke]

Tom’s Study • Uptown

Nighttime on the 5th of Achtus, 2719

A
long contact. Now he thought of it, he couldn’t remember how long it’d been. With his eyes still shut, he could see the shadows of it; he could feel the colors. If he raised his head, he thought he might see a flat plain of grey sky, smell a waft of petrichor, like the backs of his lids were a window through which he could glimpse something he’d never see again. The panes were foggy.

Vivid, Nkemi said, is good. It helps to keep the borders clear. He smiled, at first.

Boemo, but he’d craved it. Ye did good. Daven letting him take a whole quart’penny from the wallet he’d lifted. Holding a vestibule was different; he felt drained. He felt different. Unfamiliar. The warmth bled from her voice into him – through him – I felt very well your nudge, she added, a smile still in the shape of the words – but the satisfaction was like one little candle against the dark.

More stinging behind his eyelids. He couldn’t account for it, same as he couldn’t account for that sniffle of hers he’d heard.

He kept his eyes shut. It was a well-trodden path, lining his breath up with the rise and fall of narrow shoulders at his back; he let it steady him. He was steady enough, oes, and rooted.

“If I want to keep it vivid,” he murmured, feeling the strange deep voice little more than a rumble in his chest, “I’ll have to – fill in the blanks as best I can.”

I can do that, he thought to add. He didn’t think he needed to. He wasn’t worried about lying, not now; he could believe, in this at least, that intent counted well enough, or that none of it really mattered. None of it but that there’d be a white flower where there might’ve been a pink one, or the color of the broken glass might shift from muddy green to dark wine-red.

Had it been Low Tide, or Hullwen? When had they hung it up? Whose idea had it been?

He pushed a smile to his face. “Thank you, Nkemi,” he added, resting his hand on the floorboards between them. It was where he’d erased the link. The wood was warm, the sort of warm that clings to the floor before the grate, warm with the glow of etheric fields.

It wasn’t a lie. He was thankful. He was glad to know he’d got it; he was glad she’d explained it to him well enough he’d known how to push, push from all sides, push intently like a mind that knew how. How to make his presence known – as another galdor. As a divinipotent.

He tried to imagine Nkemi back to back with another little galdor at Thul’amat, doing the same. She’d told him a little of how they used Ugoulo for third forms, the slightest taste of cognomancy. It was more, he thought, about the training of the mind than the caster’s relationship with the mona, or grasp of Monite. The setting of the mind on certain paths, paths that would be well-worn for a master clairvoyant: the creating and holding of a vestibule, becoming accustomed to the mingling of arcane consciousnesses and everything it entailed.

He found himself wondering how many times she’d invoked, how many she’d received. How many vestibules she’d found herself in, for one reason or another. Or how many witness’ eyes she’d looked through. He knew she was no magister, but he’d felt experience in the brush of her mind.

Not every prefect, he thought, chose clairvoyance. Even at Thul’amat, the heart of it. He half wanted to ask why; he knew he couldn’t’ve told her, had she turned the question on him. He thought he’d felt something of it, plenty of times.

She spoke again. Her voice was as soft as her caprise, but the sensation of her mind was already fading. He opened his eyes when he felt another warm hand slip round his.

He swallowed tightly. His fingers tangled with hers; he bowed his head against another prickle of tears.

He thought he must’ve lied to her. Whom have I lost, Nkemi?

He did not feel like a liar, not tonight.

He thought Nkemi pezre Nkese of Dkanat had some knowing of loss.

He did not know how to make sense of any of it.

His breath hitched, just once. All the lies he could’ve spilt snared his tongue still. She didn’t deserve any of them. But there was nothing but honesty in the hitch, or the single warm tear down his cheek. He took a deep breath, and then another, aligned with the soft breaths at his back.

He squeezed her hand.