First of all, I’m sorry I’ve gone so long without either updating or communicating what’s going on with this story. I want to apologise for that, and thank everyone who’s stuck with me and shown an interest in my writing over the years.
Sadly, I’m breaking that silence to say this story is officially on hiatus. It’s difficult to admit, even to myself, but I think it’s only fair to be clear with anyone who still reads it.
I’ve been busy and demotivated. I’ve been having trouble with writing in general, and with getting my head right for Simra and TES stuff in particular. Both still have an important place in my heart, but I’m having difficulty accessing it lately and it doesn’t seem to be getting easier.
I’m not abandoning Simra or this story. I want to get back to it. I just don’t know when I will. It could be next week, it could be much later down the line. Until then, the least I can do is be transparent about it.
Thanks again to everyone who’s read and enjoyed any of my work on this project. It’s been a blast, and a rewarding and educational experience. I really hope I can recapture that same feeling in the future and continue this story in the same spirit I had when I first started it.
“It’s bound to something. That’s the way with them, curses. Always are. Have to be! Like…” Llolamae screwed her face tight, almost scowling with concentration. “Imagine a knot. The complicated fisherman’s kind. There’s loops and there’s twists and there’s, like, knots tied to knots. But if you know how it got tied, you know how to undo it. See?”
“I think so,” said Simra.
The sun was setting in Vedith’s garden, already halfway hidden behind the high mountainsides that walled the valley in. Pink sky. Heat and green and growth or not, it was still Winter, and the days were short, the nights dark and sudden.
“How’s that help us?” said Simra. He was fidgety with second thoughts he was trying not to have. His knee trembled as he sat by the water, boots and footwraps off, and cleaned his feet in the cold of it.
Funny, how quick an ‘us’ had cropped up. Him and the mer he came here to kill, and the girl who guided him to the place where he could do it. Funny, how sometimes when you call something funny you call it that so as not to call it something else.
“Well…” Llolamae sat in the elbow of a thick and gnarled tree, legs crossed under her. She cocked her head, frowning. “Knots, right? A pull on the right part, and it comes undone. That’s curses. Causalities and conditions, all hung on a central contingency.” Tutored words, told off pat. She closed her eyes and nodded then, smiled a little, like she was proud to have remembered a part of some long-ago lesson.
“I understand that alright. But say you come across a knot you didn’t tie, and don’t know how to tie. Not much more you can do than just fumble at it, is there? Pick and scrabble. Hope your fingernails are just the right length and your luck’s just right to come across the right bits. See what comes loose…”
“Aye…” Llolamae admitted. “I’d best get started then.”
Simra’s back straightened and he turned full around through his waist. Raised a wet leg onto the streamside and leaned chin on hands, hands on knee. He looked at Llolamae, brows low and creased. “On…fumbling?”
“Did you not hear me?” Llolamae dropped out of the tree in a flop of feet and falling cloth. “Just sort of got to start feeling round the edges of it, seeing if I can find the thing. Contingency. The thing it’s bound to.”
On his feet now, Simra drew up close to Llolamae, lowering his voice. “Why? I mean, like it or not, I’m on this path now. I could’ve killed him. Sort of still don’t know why I didn’t. But what about you? What’s your reason? Sympathy? Loyalty? Whatever Vedith knows about the torquestone?”
Llolamae shrugged and gave a faint simple smile. “Have you not seen Master Vidanu’s Tel? I don’t want to sleep in a hole under canvas anymore, waiting for a proper spire to grow. Vedith can help.”
Simra bent low, drying his feet and picking up his boots to hide the smile that cracked across his face. “Wise is what that is!” His best imitation of Vedith; a decent one, at least. “Wise is what I call that!”
Poor taste, might’ve been, to joke about someone just as soon as you get done breaking their fingers with their own teakettle. It got Llolamae laughing though, which meant the blame was shared, halved. You take what chances to laugh as life gives you.
The old gardener had retreated inside, into the creeper-grown cottage, alone. Jokes or not, Simra couldn’t blame him. Reckoned it was best he leave him that way. Wouldn’t be the first time he’d tried to get back on talking terms with someone he’d pulled a blade on, but that was one of many things that didn’t get easier with practice. Leave it till tomorrow. He let Llolamae head inside, alone, and alone he stayed out here.
Fast shadows along the ground. They lengthened and grew with the sinking sun, then spread like damp over everything. Planting beds and plants; the root-branches and branch-roots of the tall things that weren’t quite trees. Walls of the cottage as the dusk came down and a golden light glowed up inside. Llolamae’s magelight. No windows, but it fissured out through the cracks and gaps; made it look like it was breaking apart.
Simra walked in the warm dark, between the beds, the tree-things, the trellis. Careful planted feet, going nowhere. Going nowhere, he told himself, going nowhere; reassuring himself of it, confirming it in his mind. A fragile thought, wavering like a candleflame.
Harder to keep smiling once you’re alone. He made himself breathe from his belly, hand jumping from the hilt of his sword to the sheathes on his knives to the woodbound grip of his sword, uneasy again. If he’d been one for praying, he thought, now would’ve been a good time. Sparing a life — not the kind of thing you want cause to regret. He’d’ve liked cause to do it more often.
…
It wasn’t falling asleep that came hard. Out in the warm dark open, in sweat-stiff clothes, with his mantle balled round his scarf for a pillow, sleep fell on Simra quick and heavy as a Summer’s sudden rain. He’d been so tired. Days of tumbling first this way then that, never knowing where he was headed, or how he was meant to get there. Confusion can exhaust you, same as anything else.
But he woke before dawn, mist on his cheeks and soaked into his outer shirt, world still grey and faded. Couldn’t get back to sleep after that. He picked himself up, stretched, arms above his head and back arching. Regretted it. Grunted a curse and hobbled a few steps, trying to work out the new knots he’d tied in his muscles.
He’d heard of people – swordsmen, ascetics, people with time on their hands – who’d start each day stretching. They’d move from one pose to another, each with their own special names. Scorpion Rears to Strike; Swallow Takes Flight; Spinning Silk. After that it’d be like they’d shaken off all the weight of their body and it’d go through the day light as thought, doing what it was told. Simra didn’t know any stretches like that. Part of him wished that he did. The rest scoffed at the whole idea, or at least the idea that it would work for him. Some things just hurt. Some things, once broke, stay broken.
It was still hot, cloying. The warmth down here didn’t come from the sun, didn’t leave with it either. Just pooled like water, regardless of night or shade. Made you sluggish. It was a warmth that wore you like wet clothes.
A teacup lay on its side, half-forgotten in the flattened grass where he and Vedith had fought. Knees clicking, Simra bent and picked it up, took it over to the watercourse that ran through the garden. Filled it. The cup’s dark glaze turned the water to ink. He splashed a careful measure onto the hobstone and hovered his calloused left palm above it. He felt it grow warm then hot as he fed its enchantment another splash of water.
The teapot was dented, muddy, discarded same as the teacup. He fetched his own – dark fire-blackened bronze, small and sturdy, just more than enough for one person and barely that – and made tea.
With nothing to eat, he drank the whole pot.
There was light enough to read by now. No food, little sleep, but at least he had that.
Crouching by his bookbag, he unlaced its mouth and pawed through. Paper, parchment, a book written on slats of wood, laced together like window shutters. Best not to read anything that mattered, that needed to last — not in this wet heat.
He fanned out the handbills and bounties he always had, stuffed and dogeared in the bag’s bottom. Woodcut prints of faces the law, or some lord, or the Temple had put a price on, all of them land and sea and leagues away, useless to him. Old news from elsewhere. Boat refugees from Bravil moved on by measured and merciful force from Narsis; told there’s land for settling in Vvardenfell; meanwhile, the violence in Cyrodiil rages on. Always violence, unrest, discontent — a decade of the same and getting worse each year, and they still didn’t call it a war. First the Concordat that lost Hammerfell, now this ‘violence’, and the Empire still wouldn’t admit it was anything less than whole. For certain it wouldn’t admit it was at war with itself; ablaze with a fire that threatened to spread. That was last year, last Summer, and nothing Simra didn’t already know. Caselif had told him enough for that. He stuffed the bill back in his bag, keeping it for scrap paper.
The writ stood out. It was long, not a scrap but a scroll, and made from fine silkpaper. Not block-printed in bulk, but written in his own formal hand — decent, even with the strike and scratchiness that came with employing a dip-pen to write a script meant for the brushes he’d never quite learnt to use. Ulessen’s scribe had hunched over his shoulder, watching as he wrote it. Now, with the sun rising slow, a change in the dark before it shed any light, he sat in the shade of the trellis and began to read.
It was his usual. He’d done his own writwork for years now, he’d said. Set his own terms. And he never left much room for worming out by one clause or another, not for him, and not for the client. That was the idea. Keep things stark, simple, in plain words, but lengthy enough, detailed enough, to make things seem professional, polished, planned for. In this writ, only the clause about up-front pay was changed. There was no pay at all, just a debt held over him, clear and quiet and smug, sure there was no way out from under it but the way Ulessen had offered him. A backroads lender, you could run from, hide from. A Telvanni magister, one with all the force and power of an old Tel behind them, would always find you.
A shrill from inside the cottage and Simra was already on his feet. It wasn’t the same sound as hurried him up that snowbank two yesterdays ago, and into a triangle of Kogaru with spears and sour red-painted faces. But it was still Llolamae, and it was close enough. He trampled beds, weeds, grasses. Found the door and shouldered it in, hand gone to his knives and twitching one out of its sheathe.
Vedith was asleep, on his back, on a palette of green wood and silky mushroom skin. Open mouth and pot-belly rising, falling. His broken hand was clawed shut, clutched to his chest like a pigeon’s bad wing.
Llolamae turned to look at Simra with ricebowl-wide eyes, sparkling with her grin even before he saw it in her red-gummed mouth, her mismatched child and unchild’s teeth. She shrieked again, words this time:
“I done it!”
Simra slackened and stopped. The hand on his knife-grip, the half-drawn blade, was heavy and weak now. His shoulders sagged. “You figured it out?” He said it flat. Couldn’t muster any feeling into the words, not while his heart was still pounding, choking the back of his throat and fooling his tongue dry and clumsy.
“I reckon so, aye!”
“Then why scream about it?” He saw Vedith was still sleeping, even through all the noise. Seemed Simra had strength left to feel bitter on that, at least.
Llolamae half-turned away, a slight hang to the angle of her head. “Thought you’d be pleased…”
Simra held back a grunt, a huff, and slumped against one of the cottage walls. “I am.” Seemed he had sense left to feel bad over snapping at her, at least. To feel bad all round. Aching shuddering muscles, battle-blood draining sick and away before he even knew it was up and upon him. “That’s good. Really good, maybe.”
“Sort of wondered if you’d come running again, too…” A part-moon sliver of Llolamae’s grin had stayed on her face. She turned it to him now.
Simra shrugged. He was here, wasn’t he? “What’d you find out? Can you break it? The curse.”
The kettle was caked in rust, battered with years of use. A round of thin worn grey iron, short spout tacked to one side with a knotty scar of joinery. Not a good kettle, Simra thought. Like something you’d buy from the single extortionate shop in a clapboard and mudbrick glass-rushers’ town, knowing full and well it won’t last. Not the town, not the tools you bought, and sure as sin not the promises of wealth that planted the place in the minds of those that built it. Temporary, all of it. Hoping your hopes will come good before the hope runs out and the seams run dry, and the ashwastes around you are just wastes again, and the rush-town turns ghost-town, all barren windows and doors chattering in the wind. Anycase, this kettle had been used and loved far longer than it was ever meant to be had. And it sat now on a warm flat hobstone, gurgling and shuddering geriatric as it boiled.
“Outside,” said Vedith, savouring the word. “Always best to be outside, if you can. Eat, sleep. Sit, stand. Light and air, the sound of things growing. Always feels cleaner, closer.”
“Closer to what?” said Llolamae. She’d listened intent to Vedith since he started talking. Wide eyes and questions. Talking back every chance she got. Between them they killed silence dead every time it crept in.
“Well, to everything! Out in it, eh? In what?” They said that together, then together they chuckled. One laugh like water, the other like rattling reeds. “In everything!” Vedith answered with a sigh, a nod, like he thought it was the sagest thing anyone ever said.
Time alone did this to a person, Simra knew. He’d seen that, been that. People are meant to talk. Map out their world in words and share what’s in their heads. And if there’s only their thoughts to listen as their thinking mutters out of their mouths, they’ll still talk just to talk, and listen just to hear a voice. Might be they’ll clam up in company, but just as often it goes like this. Get two people in one place, and both of them better used to being alone than not, they’ll talk about anything. Constant as cicadas, both of them used to holding up both sides of a conversation…
Simra held back. Hummed sometimes, nodded. Watched Vedith splash a last measure of water from a broad and dark-glazed teacup onto the hobstone. Watched it steam as the enchantment in it hissed to life and heat at the touch of water. A hobstone was an expensive way to do what fire could do far cheaper. Trust a Telvanni to have one, and only the world’s sorriest kettle to sit on it.
“Does it not ever get cold?” Llolamae asked. “Being out, I mean. Too cold for that, down here?”
“Oh no. Oh no no, oh no, I’ve seen to that. Things wouldn’t grow right, would they? Better for them to just keep things just so. Just the same. Much better.”
Vedith crumbled leaves between his grubby fingertips, out of a clay jar and into the simmering kettle. Green and indigo, curls and twists, shaped like insects in pain. Simra watched, wary, thinking of Bandrys and Galgas, poisoned, limblocked and staked out on the plains. Pull a trick once and all your life you’ll be wary it’s come back to bite you. But Simra only noticed the crescents of black under Vedith’s curt blunt nails. Felt his lip curl and his nose wrinkle, and tried to cover his revolt and his watching with talk. “And what’s good for the garden is good for the gardener…”
Vedith’s head jerked up. Rheumy sightless eyes, staring at nothing. He grinned straight through Simra, a grin all gaps and gums. “That’s right! Wise is what that is! Do you know, when you hear something said you’ve always thought but never thought it in words? Wise is what I call that!”
“I don’t know about that,” said Simra. It was a Temple platitude. An old holdout, so far as Simra knew, from the Imperial mission in newly opened Morrowind. An attempt to syncretise Niner doctrine into something easier for Dunmer to swallow. It didn’t work; not the way the mission wanted. Adopted by the Temple and preached out often as anything else, with no mention of Mother Mara, Steadfast Stendarr. It was nothing obscure, yet Vedith had never heard it. “Just a small thing I’ve often thought myself,” Simra lied.
“It’s good is what it is…” Vedith poured the tea into three mismatched cups, the colour different in each one against the red, the black, the pale grey lacquers. He inhaled a head full of steam and drank first, putting Simra a slight bit better at ease. “What was it you said you were, friend?”
“Oh any number of things,” said Simra. “Here, today, I’m just a messenger.”
“He’s got a letter!” said Llolamae. “It’s about the torquestone!”
“Seems everything is, around here…” Simra muttered.
“What’s that?” Vedith said.
“A letter,” said Simra.
“Well, well… Well. I don’t know who it is you’ve come from with your letter but they can’t know me. Even when my eyes were younger, I never was much of a one for reading.”
Simra felt the scratchy start of a flush at his hairline. The shaky waver of something beneath him, bending to break, to fall away. He laughed; tried to make it sound easy. “Simple mistake to make.”
But Vedith was tense now. “Really now…” Spoke like someone’s hand moving slow to their swordbelt. “Who was it?” A slow-moving hand wishing it could stay still. Less a threat and more a plea.
“Tel Branora!” Llolamae chipped in, bright and helpful as ever.
And then everything was in motion.
A flash of pain washed over Simra and he broke snarling through it. Limbs in a tangle, tugging, pushing. One reedy shriek, choked off into scarce and stolen breath, sour against Simra’s face. Then he was over Vedith, above him. Had slapped aside the teacup the old mer had thrown, its contents scalding against Simra’s arm and chest. Had tumbled across the hobstone and borne Vedith down with his weight, his speed, his youth, as he scrambled to get away. Now Simra hunched above him, stinging forearm bruising into his windpipe.
Vedith’s arm thrashed. His grubby fingertips turned the earth, the mulch, clawing for the kettle just out of his reach. But Simra saw. And things were slow now, almost still and surreal. The blood-thunder in his ears turned the world quiet. The tunnel-tight focus of his eyes made everything seem simple. Arm still trapping Vedith, Simra picked up the kettle. Emptied it into Vedith’s face in a spluttering of wet leaves, then swung it crushing down onto the old mer’s desperate fingers.
An airless squawk and Vedith’s hand curled up like a dying bug, and Simra grabbed the wrist and passed it to his other hand. Holding it fast, choking Vedith, both with the same arm, Simra felt himself reach now for his belt. Plumwood and cold iron, the tight-wrapping of leather, Simra’s fingers found the leaf-bladed knife his old spearhead had long ago become and drew it.
Vedith’s blind eyes bulged. Starved for air, or had he somehow heard the steel? Simra couldn’t hear a thing until the noise struck him.
A shrieking in Simra’s right ear and something knocked him sideways. Tumbled his shoulder into the ground, the dirt, toppling him halfway off Vedith. His vision bloomed blue and shocking white. Too narrow before, now it had split wide, like a breaking egg behind his eyes, and he scrabbled blind, crabbed sideways and backwards and up, thrashing ruinous through a plantbed till he could almost see again.
Just silhouettes at first. Shapes and colour, clotting together. Llolamae stood, face pale and drawn in shock, the kettle braced in her hands. She’d hit him. Cracked it into the side of his head.
“Fuck’d you do that for?” Simra yelped, and it came out hoarse and stupid.
“You were going to kill him!”
Was he? He’d felt himself hesitate. “I didn’t want you to come.”
“You lied! You lied!” Llolamae stamped her feet, shrieking.
“This is why! This is why I didn’t want you along but you didn’t give me any choice!”
“You lied! You didn’t want to give him anything! You didn’t want to find out anything! You just wanted him dead!”
“I don’t want anything! I don’t even want to be here! If I had any fucking choice—!”
Llolamae screamed and threw the kettle.
Simra ducked it, jerking out the way, hissing through his teeth. “It’s just a job! I can’t not! I can’t—”
Still screaming, Llolamae’s face was red in blotches, her eyes wild and hands clamped over her ears.
“—and now I’m screaming, pleading my fucking case at an unarmed child, while I’m the one with four knives and a sword and fucking magic! Fuck!” Simra stopped and stormed a few paces off, kicking through the planting bed. He lifted a hand to where his head hurt. Hot against his fingertips, but no blood when he looked. Just a child, after all, swinging a thin and ill-made kettle at him. “Fuck…” he repeated, a rasping sigh this time. Then his eyes fixed on Vedith. “You!”
The old Telvanni was curled onto his side. Body confused, he tried to face Simra even as his legs and good arm pushed him backwards and away. His mangled hand brushed vague at his throat.
“If I’m not killing you and fucking off home…” Home? When had Tammunei and Noor become that? “…You’re gonna tell me why someone wants me to. Right now!” Simra crashed a path through the flowering shoots and saplings to come closer. Made to kick at Vedith then stamped his boot into the dirt by his face, sending him flinching, whimpering, trying to speak. “Why’s Mistress Ulessen want you dead?”
“Msstrss…Lessen?” Vedith choked out, eyes balled shut then bulging open.
Simra’s head throbbed. Llolamae was still screaming, starting to form words again after long moments of wordless fury and terror. “Will you please shut up or I swear by bones and blood I will gut him right here and leave you to clean up what’s left!”
Silence after that. Splitting-loud with the ringing in his ears – leftover like the afterburn of looking too long at the sun – but Llolamae had gone quiet. Her lip shook, face all pinched and red and sour, and he didn’t blame her. Stopped looking at her so as not to blame himself.
“…I don’t know…Mistress…” Vedith managed when Simra went back to staring at him. “Only Felisa…”
“You don’t know—” Simra started, and then something fell into place. “When did you leave Tel Branora?”
“Red Mountain. It was before.” Every word still sounded like a gasp. “Mistress Therana! I served Mistress Therana! Same as here. Never knew…to do any different.” Vedith pulled himself onto hands and knees, grimacing, then sat himself on the ground, a heap of skinny grubby limbs around his potbellied body.
Simra walked round him, wary, circling the point of his dagger in the air. “Go on.”
“Minded the Tel. Kept the spires strong, steady. Tried to at least, after she sent away Kurani, but she’d always made the plans and I kept it all growing right, kept everyone fed. I only ever wanted to serve the House. Serve the Mistress. And I never did mind her turns. I was faithful! Useful!”
“So what happened?”
“One of her turns…” Vedith chuckled without humour. “This one turned on me. Mistress Therana called me up to her. She never was much of a one for the proper ways any more. Not by then. Never speaking through Felisa like she ought to have. So she called me up and face to face, she said to me, ‘Dalvur, you’ll be here about the yams of course.’ And I said yes, I was, not knowing what she was talking about, but you don’t say as much to a magister, do you? I’ve seen what happens when you do. ‘As you’ll know, they’ve always irked me. Always! Can’t stand them! Never could.’ Said it was the smell, something like that. And I said I’d see what I could do about that. And she said, ‘Would you?’ All smiling. And cursed me.”
“What was the curse?”
“Nothing she uttered out loud. I don’t know the particulars…”
Simra crouched down next to Dalvur Vedith and met his eyes. “So tell me what you do know.” Quiet and coaxing.
“Nothing grew. Wasn’t like everything died all at once, mind, but nothing new came in. Nothing planted would shoot. The seeds stayed put in the ground like stones. The spires wouldn’t answer the spells. No growth, no repairs. There was no life in anything anymore. No fruit, no rice, no fungus. No yams — the mistress made sure of that!”
“And they cast you out.”
“Aye. I don’t blame them.”
“It didn’t help. Branoris is still barren.” And now it all made sense. “As long as you live, is that it? Is that why the new mistress sent me? To fix the old one’s mess?”
A hoarse moan and Vedith jerked away, shuffling across the ground, fraction by fraction further from Simra. “Please, ser…” His head shook, hanging, like a heavy gourd on a stem too thin to bear it. A tendon bobbed and trembled in his neck.
“They’re starving. I’ve seen it. Everyone. Both islands.” For what? The caprice of one mad wizard. Simra was sick with it. His voice ran cold and flat, almost bored with it. “It’s slow. They buy food in when they can. Mainland grain. They fish too. Course they do. But it’s never enough.”
“Ser, please…” Vedith lifted his broken hand and laid it on Simra’s arm.
Simra flinched. Twisted to throw off the hand and grip its wrist in his fingers, not tight, but holding firm. “D’you know what hunger does to someone when it never goes fully away? What it does to children born into it, growing up in it?”
Vedith’s mouth was still moving. Shaping the words, but only breath came out.
“They don’t grow right. You ought to know something about that. Two hundred years,” said Simra. “How many more left in you, I wonder?”
Fat silent tears rolled down Vedith’s lined cheeks.
One push of the knife and then he could run, Simra thought. One gentle push in the right place and he could be gone. Use the last scroll in his bookbag and be back in Tel Branora, all of this done and dealt with. He’d done worse. Some of them had even begged worse too. So why was he wavering? Something felt uncertain, unsettled. “Tell me. Think carefully,” said Simra. He spoke and kept speaking, not knowing where the words might lead. Just playing for time. Looking for a reason. “Did your old mistress say anything? Anything, when she laid the curse on you?”
“She said…” Vedith’s forehead wrinkled further. Deep creases and bunched eyes. “It was my duty. I’d still be doing my duty by the House. By her. Just a new way of doing it, she said. She…patted me. On my head?”
Sitting back on his haunches, Simra let Vedith’s wrist go. He faced out at the warm stillness of the air, the green stillness of the leaves and blossoms all round him, and saw none of it. Open eyes but they were good as closed. Every breath tasted of turned earth, dark and impersonal, and somewhere the wings of insects droned a spiraling song from flower to flower. Dim and distant, he came aware that he was furious with it. This place, this work, his place in it. And it exhausted him.
Maybe it was the mess of it all. The careless tangle the Telvanni had made of all this, blunder built on blunder. Like the song of the old mother who swallowed a spider because she’d swallowed a fly, and never stopped swallowing after. Rats, cats, dogs, bears, her hunter husband; the whole world going down her throat to fix one petty problem that got bigger with every fix. Maybe it was seeing them all rolled under it, that problem, and only a whim at the root of it all. Vedith, all of Branoris, Llolamae, him, all of them struggling to breathe in its long cold shadow.
But most of all he was tired. Disgusted with himself already. With the cling and brittleness of sweat on his skin, dried and gone damp again, drying under his clothes. With the scald on his arm and chest that was starting by now to sting, and the warm sharp smell that cut over the scent of soil and made him wonder if Vedith had wet himself in the struggle. He was too tired for it. Needed something to cling to; something solid and something solved.
“Llolamae?” he called out. “What d’you know about laying curses?”
The Kogaru were slow to be off, no matter how Simra stared at them. A pointed look, poised like a hawk on the hand and impatient in its silence. They picked themselves up and gathered to go all with the same reluctance. Simra couldn’t imagine why. Sooner they got going, sooner he’d be gone. Ought to be what they wanted.
“D’you know he’s this way?” Simra asked once they were underway.
Kaliklu was leading again, but only by a few strides. “Until the water we were only guessing.”
Simra found that less than comforting but said nothing of it. “It’s his work, then?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve seen it before? Been here before?”
“Yes.”
“Often?”
“No.”
“He a friend?” No response. “Should I be wary is what I’m asking? Scared? Ready for a fight?”
“Of course you should be wary.”
“Wary of what? Ready for what?”
“Anything,” Kaliklu said, curt and impatient with the questions now.
Simra kissed his teeth, loud and harsh, and walked fast to put distance between him and the elder. He’d get nothing more from him, that was clear. Old man was on enough of an edge now without Simra grinding it sharper for him. No help at all, Simra thought to himself. Ready for anything. Ready for anything always seemed a good way to be ready for nothing much. The world’s a place of specifics. A mess of specifics, infinite beyond thought, infinite beyond thought of thinking. Be ready for the world? You can’t. Best you can do’s prepare for what you know is in your closest corner of it. What you reckon’s around the bend.
And there was the thing. He didn’t know what to expect. Besides the holdout of a mage with enough power and strength to change the land for half a league around. To dig a hole in the surface of Winter and fill it with high green Spring. Besides a Telvanni turncoat, stubborn and strong enough to break from the mistress of Tel Branora and flee to the world’s wild north edge. Besides a problem big enough that Tel Branora wound launch some tieless nobody northward and into the Sea of Ghosts, to go scour a bleak little rock in that waste of ice and slate-grey ocean, and bring back news Dalvur Vedith was dead. And not knowing what to expect, he had no way to prepare. Not the slightest sketch of a plan.
The stream ended abrupt in a clearing. It was overgrown, small, but stood out stark in the thatch-thick woods. Cutting it in half, the water rested in a cool silver sickle of pond, pale lilies on the surface and purple velvet flowers with lolling hand-long petals. A dancing cloud of yellow blossom-moths, same as before, twisted like smoke through the air. Hundreds, thousands.
A kind of structure stood in the pond’s curved belly, half-surrounded. A low shape with a slumped curved roof. Growth covered it, so dense it looked made of nothing but pink and white flowering vines, woody-skinned creepers. Curlicues of bramble split off its bulk like flyaway hairs from an unkempt head. But underneath the overgrowth, Simra thought he could make out stone. Rafters and ribs, reaching up from the ground and forward, like a short hunchbacked tunnel. A skeleton of scaffolds and supports in black screw-surfaced torquestone.
A slack line of growing things made something like a trellis, meandering till they met the hut and knit over and into its side. Simra wanted to think of them as trees but it didn’t quite fit. Only thing right about them was the trunks – birch thin, fine and pale, planted in close order – and only because they were in the right places. The rest was inverted. Up top, their roots fanned out like the bare bones of a parasol, naked and tasting the air. Their branches crawled thick and tangling across the ground, clawing into the dirt, all wearing a ragged plumage of leaves. Their pattern was almost regular. Quadrangles and half-circles, traced out across the clearing floor in ledges and ridges, the edges of raised planting-beds full of damp black earth.
The roots cast a stripey shade below them. Bent over one of the beds, arms buried partway to the elbows in rich dirt, Dalvur Vedith knelt by his trellis, his hut, head bowed.
Whatever Simra might’ve expected, he hadn’t expected this. The brown tatters of a simple robe hung off his sloping back. It looked like a horseblanket. Wrapped haphazard around him and held on with complicated knots and cinching lines of faded purple braid, but a horseblanket all the same. Wisps of colourless hair floated around his small dark grey head, and tickled at his jutting ears. And when he looked up and stared, his eyes were pouchy, small and bright in a deep-lined face.
“There you are.” His voice was cracked, creaking like a disused door. “I wondered, you know. Would you ever come back? I wondered. And as I felt you in my garden, I thought: well then well then, be it what it may, but an old mer can hope…”
“We do not disturb you without need, Gurrigalattu,” said Kaliklu. “You know this. Just as you do not disturb the island beyond this valley.”
“My valley…” Vedith smiled. Holes and gums, teeth and darkness.
“Your valley,” Kaliklu was quick to agree.
“So! It’s true then? You’ve come to see me. Come to see old Dalvur?”
“I have brought someone, yes. Someone who wished to meet you.”
“A visitor!” Vedith’s head cocked and twitched on its thin neck, casting round. His eyes were hollow, half-lidded and lookless. “I count five. You’ve not brought visitors before, Kaliklu.” He sniffed, long and deep through one nostril, covering the other with a dirty finger. “To what do I owe the pleasure, old friend?”
Simra thought a moment, dry-mouthed and asking himself, how much could he say and keep all his stories straight? “I’ve searched you out to pass on a message.”
Vedith’s jaw went slack. Mouth open, his dust-coloured tongue moved fitful, like he was counting what teeth he had left. “This one’s not one of yours, Kaliklu. He speaks for himself! And doesn’t, hah, doesn’t smell so much like blood. And the other?”
Simra glanced round, searching for Llolamae, and found her beside him, toes on the edge of the water that separated them from Vedith. She was puffed up, standing straight and strident. Not a little girl but a Mouth again, like when he’d first met her.
“I’m Mouth to Master Vidanu of Tel Kogaris.”
Vedith scrambled upright and onto his feet. His robe was gathered up and girded at his waist, showing the grubby knob-kneed length of his skinny legs. His face was a blur, spasming from feeling to feeling. Through terror to joy to despairing of a hope he’d never had the time to hold. He bowed and twitched, stepping back and stepping back, till he retreated into the trellis and flinched from it with a dry gasp.
“House…” he started, struggling to find breath for the words. “House business then, is it?”
Llolamae shot Simra a look of confusion. Shrugged and angled her eyes, questioning. Simra nodded quick and insistent.
“Aye,” she said. “It is that.”
Dirt-flecked hands wringing each against the other, Vedith paced a moment, back and forth amongst the beds and roots. His mouth moved silent, teething and chawing over talk that wouldn’t quite come. Whatever Simra might’ve expected, he hadn’t expected this. An old mer falling to pieces, knowing maybe what’d come for him.
Vedith stopped. “Vidanu, d’you say? Kogaris, is it? Not — I mean, that’s to say not—”
“That’s right,” Simra cut in. “Vidanu of Tel Kogaris.”
“It’s about the torquestone!” said Llolamae.
“The torque—?” Vedith’s face slackened, all the workings under his skin laxing all at once. “The what? The stone! You mean the twisty, the twisting, the one with, the one you can… Hah!” His empty eyes rolled back deeper into his skull, eyelids fluttering. Relief. “Of course, of course. Of course! Torquestone. Good name, very good name. Hadn’t thought… Well then, come in! Come over. You must. Oh, will you take tea? I have something, somewhere, very good…”
The Kogaru had bundled together into a group, talking in fevered whispers amongst themselves. The hunter spoke most, with Kaliklu listening, nodding. They were tense, anxious here. Nerves in all their faces, the set of their shoulders and turn of their bodies. Jangling nerves in all their voices. Kaliklu peeled himself from the group and spoke to Simra:
“You have no more need of us.”
It didn’t sound like a question. Simra stepped closer while Llolamae scuttled round the pond and onto its far side, capering between the beds. “That right?” he said.
“We have already stayed too long.”
“Too long for what? Have we stayed too long too and you’re not telling us?” Simra hissed. “What about getting out of here?”
“You have only to follow the water.”
“For how long? To where? Blight, you agreed to guide me! I bled for that, bargained for that!”
Across the water, Llolamae was chattering to Vedith, bright as birdsong.
“We did,” said Kaliklu, reaching out an empty hand. “We have.” The hunter plucked the wand from his bundle and passed it into Kaliklu’s grasp. He wasn’t pointing it at Simra, but the message was clear.
Force his hand and Simra would’ve bet the wand was empty, or close to it. Or that Kaliklu’s fingers wouldn’t find its touch-runes fast enough, unpracticed and unfamiliar with it. But why gamble when there was nothing to win. Kaliklu was right. Right, and scared, and like as not to do something stupid.
“Off with yourselves, then,” said Simra. They’d played their part, done as they said they would. Even so, for the second time that day, Simra couldn’t help but feel cheated.
They upped fast, silent and impatient, making to hurry away. Sooner they got going, sooner they’d be gone, and gone was where they wanted to be, they’d made that plenty clear.
“Busy busy!” Simra muttered at their backs. “Hurry hurry. Sure you’ve got fucking caves to paint. Other strangers to ambush and extort…”
Kaliklu still held the wand as they hustled towards the clearing’s edge and back the way they came, following the water. None of them looked back. Just fled, fast as they could.
All morning they walked by water and never saw it. The tangle of trees hid it from sight, but surrounded them in its sound. The chattering run of clear bright water.
Simra’s mouth was dry and sour from the heat. He caught himself patting the waterskin looped to his belt, checking it, then caught himself checking again, hopeless and habitual, like a superstition. Why would it have changed? Blighted thing was empty that morning. Of course it was still empty now. Still empty, and still sweat stinging at his back and in his eyebrows. Feet still hurting, but when did they not?
There was no track through all this growth. Every step was a blow struck against the forest. A process of gnawing into its bulk, its mass, chased on by the sense it was healing behind you, would mend quicker than you could travel. Trap you.
Following the Kogaru, Simra stepped where they stepped, weeds and grasses, and Llolamae traipsed behind him. They weren’t comfortable here, he realised. No more than he was. Didn’t know how to move through forest like this, all crashing feet and the cutting switch of a spear against the knit of green ahead. Their people had lived on this island since before time had a name for itself. Generations and generations, living in the icewastes of the coastlines like as not. Life and living balanced between the sea and the hotcaves. Might be this place had still been the greenest piece of the island in Kaliklu’s younger years, but Dalvur Vedith brought the forest. It was recent; newer than anything like this ought to be. Not a forest, Simra corrected himself. A garden.
The light changed. One moment, filtered yellow sun and shadows of midnight green. Now things were luminous, sallow. Fungus reached in fronds, thin-stemmed up to left and right, like fences of growing willow. They ended capless in paintbrush tips, like blossoms almost, or the tendril-mouths of something that lived too deep under the sea to be understood by anything that didn’t. No glow to them that Simra could see, but then again there was no sunlight either. A smell on the air, like wax and turned earth and the sweetness of boiled milk.
Underfoot, nettles and weeds grew high as Simra’s waist. Pale-leafed and sticky on Simra’s clothes, they spooled and hedged together like messes of twine, and he tramped through them in long high clownish strides. Not a path, too thick-grown for that, but then why did the fungus either side feel like it’d been waiting for them? Ushered them into itself. Grown round them, maybe. A tunnel, a passage, a funnel.
To one side a tree was trying to grow, crashing up through the wall of fungus. Colourless craggy bark, dried up, and all its leaves starved to bones. The weeds crowded its trunk and had clambered choking into its branches. They sagged under the weight, overburdened, but up amongst them the weeds were flowering. Each was a pair of petals, lurid yellow and palm-sized, with a long smug purple needle hanging down.
Simra felt his mouth twist and tighten. He strayed as far as the fungus fence would let him, not keen to be under the weed-choked tree. Something pinched at his vision as he passed it by. Motion. He snapped his head up, back. His hand went for his belt, then slacked.
Butterflies. Moths maybe. A swarm of them, all big as his palm, swarmed between the branches in billowing stormclouds, wheeling scattering loops. Simra felt himself frown. Their wings were bright yellow and they searched the air with flickering tongues, thistle-flower purple.
“What in the—…”
Llolamae whooped and clapped her hands. Stopped and turned in place to watch them, mouth open and jaw hanging.
“There a reason Telvanni do things like that?” Simra said, stuck between the wonderment and wrongness of it. “Or is it just for the spice of it. See if they can.”
“Might have a reason.”
“Seeing if you can’s not a reason.”
“Might be an important one, even!” said Llolamae, neck still craned, keeping track of the moths.
“A weed that – let me straight this out – kills trees to make flowers that turn into moths, and then…fuck knows where that journey ends.”
“Seeing if you can’s important sometimes. That’s what Master Vidanu says. Testing principles, intit? You start small, and it might look like nothing, might even seem like a waste. But then who’s laughing when you reapply it somewhere else and of a sudden you’ve up and cured autumnsbone or gripe!”
“With moths…”
“Maybe.” Llolamae looked down, looked full at him, squaring her hips and shoulders.
“Fuck…” Simra muttered. “Well if I was waiting on a sign we were getting close… Come on. Let’s get this done.”
The fungus ended but Simra couldn’t quite place when. Gone in the time it took not to look at it. No fungus, no breeze, and back to daylight through the still leaves overhead, littering the ground like scraps and shatters of noontime gold. The weeds had given way to a dark velvet of moss, tending slippery and slow downhill.
Simra looked up from watching his feet, not wanting to stumble. A bright gap showed ahead in the closure of ferns and trees. The Kogaru disappeared through as Simra watched. He forgot the footing, his care of it, and hurried after them, muttering again, “Come on.”
With one hand he parted the greenery, opening the gap to fit through. Stiff hairy stems, one broken and bleeding what looked like bile. Delicate fronds, complex and intricate. Tiny leaves fitting together like tiles in a mosaic, like teeth in a clenched mouth. His other hand itched anxious at his belt, hovering between the hilt of his sword and handle of his knives.
“Come on…” Didn’t know if the words were meant to speed Llolamae behind him or steel himself for what was ahead. It was this place. Turning him round, putting a fear up him at seeing – what? – a stand of ferns. Then, sky, stark and open. A cut through the woodland, ten strides broad.
A deep narrow ribbon of water cut across the way and the Kogaru haunched down beside it, drinking from their cupped hands. Only the hunter stood back, leaning on his spear and glaring as Simra came through the ferns. Without looking down, the hunter lowered a hand to the bundle slung across his shoulders and brought out a flattened leather bottle, throwing it beside the youngest Kogaru who set to filling it.
Simra eyed the water. Crouched down beside it and sniffed, careful of it. Moss, moths, fungus that found you in the wilderness and fanfared your way with steepled stems — hadn’t yet found a thing in this basin he trusted. Just because he liked the look of this water didn’t mean he’d start trusting it too. How long had they walked beside it while it hid from them?
He wet his cracked lips. Unhitched his own waterskin, crushed the air out, and submerged it, giving it the side of his gaze as it filled. The water was so clear, seemed almost so still and steady in its running, that he scarce knew his hand was under it except by the chill of it. Deep and sharp, flooding up his wrist and into the bones of his arm. He was already longing for it. Thinking how it would ache in his teeth and unparch his throat. Freezing, high-mountain cold.
Wincing, Simra stood up and and passed the skin into his other hand, fluttering the wet one like that might fidget some feeling back into its fingers. Llolamae lurked by him and he passed her the uncapped skin. “Hold this a moment.”
Straight away she made to drink.
“Tscht! Hold on!”
She hesitated, mouth still open and skin raised almost up to it.
“I said hold it.” Simra cocked his eyebrows and jerked his head at the Kogaru, watching a moment. They were drinking free and open now, and weren’t dead yet, but all the same, all the same... He shuffled his old leather satchel round to his front. Picked through, staring into it, and came up with a length of plaited twine round his fingers, the coin-slight weight of a bronze medallion dangling from its length. It was wide across as a fingerjoint and tarnished green-blue by water — centuries of patina, he might’ve thought, if he hadn’t watched the streetmage etch her enchantment into it himself less than three years ago.
“What’s that do?” Llolamae asked.
“Makes water safe to drink,” he said, taking back the skin. Safe, unless someone put poison in it by design.
“By magic?”
He nodded. “Small thing, but it’s saved my life more times than any other blade or bit of magic I’ve ever owned.” Anycase, he liked to think it had. He’d never really know, not while it did its job, but since half the camp at Gelan-Telai went down with a blood-tinged flux, Simra reckoned one never could be too careful.
The medallion went into the neck of the skin and came out wet. No more tarnished though. Simra liked to think that meant something. He drank a measured draught. One clean, cold sip, then a long glug, cheeks filling, throat filling, then stomach cold and glad with it. “Ghosts…” he gasped. “Good.” He swilled out the sour corners inside his mouth, washing away the taste of thirst, and turned his back to Llolamae. Spat.
She took a quick gulp when he passed it to her then drained it dry.
Taking it back, Simra crouched to fill it again. Thoughtless, he found himself thinking, and something he thought stuck like a fishbone in the throat of his mind. Might be nothing. Maybe so, but it still itched. Looking down at the cut of the stream through the forest, it had no banks. No silt, no pebbles or gravel. Just the clean cleave of it, a deep brief trench through the moss and the pale solid stone beneath it. Like a gutter, sliced neat. Like something brand new.
Chewing the inside of his cheek, he dipped the medallion again and made himself look away from the water. Its stone bed, its strange slow run. There’d be no standing up for falling down if he let himself get tripped up on every scrap of strangeness in this place. Best just to carry on. Get this done. He’d been away long enough already.
Simra crouched and Llolamae sat on her heels. Between them was the ragcloth bundle Llolamae had carried all this way, spread out like a mat with their provisions.
Eating after so long spent hungry. The first filling of an empty belly. Simra knew how that went and he tried to start slow. Took timid bites from a panbread, telling himself once this one was gone he’d let it settle a moment, then set on the rest, eat his fill. There were crisp dried slices of chalk-coloured turnip. There were seedpaste balls, savoury and dark, and dark in their sweetness, and rolled in crushed dried herbs that tasted faint of medicine. But Simra already knew nothing would be better than this first panbread. Soft still with the oil that coated it, it tasted golden and good as he chewed each bite, counting the workings of his jaw.
Llolamae tore through her share, unrestrained. She set on the paste balls first, eyes closed and nodding her head to the rhythm of her chewing. Her teeth showed red from them, flashing whenever her mouth opened.
Simra held back from telling her to slow down. Who was he, her mother? She could get cramps if she wanted. Instead he enjoyed the round panbread, nibbling it through all the phases of a moon. From fullness to shrinkage to halfness, through crescented waning to nothing. Then he licked his fingertips clean of the oil and waited.
“They steam their bread in the South, you know.” Simra spoke for something to do before he started eating again.
A lump of seedpaste worked down Llolamae’s neck, half-chewed. “What, always?”
“Not always. Sometimes they do it in a pan like this. Sometimes in a clay oven. Sometimes dry, sometimes with oil or fat.”
“Why say as it’s what they do then, when they do other things too?”
“They do other things,” Simra allowed. “But when you think of bread up here, it’s panbreads. When they think of bread? Steam.”
“Huh…” Llolamae pursed her mouth and her tongue worked around inside it, cleaning red from between her teeth. “What’s it like?”
“Depends what it’s made from. But on the ordinary? Generally talking? It’s…soft.”
Saying it, Simra realised he missed it. Steamed buns. A filling of poached or pickled meat, diced vegetables, sticky preserves. But then, go south, and he’d miss panbreads all over again. He knew how missing things went. You long for what’s not there, and when you have it you’re hungry for something else. Not like luck to ever let anyone just be satisfied.
“Soft sounds alright,” said Llolamae, eyeing one of the panbreads on their mat. She bobbed up and down a moment, legs jigging under her, then she snatched it. In one bite, half of it was gone.
Simra took some crisped turnips and ate them one by one from the palm of his other hand. Enjoyed the risen sun on him and the strange welcome fact of how warm it was here. The scents on the breezeless air. Scrub and brambles, strong and woody; distant pines from the basin floor.
The grim-faced Kogaru, aged middlest of the three, picked his way up the slope. He came over the ledge’s lip as they ate. A small flash of disgust on his face as he looked at Simra and Llolamae – was it the food, or something inherent in them? – and then it was gone. He shrugged something down from over his shoulder to fall dusty at his feet.
It was some animal Simra had no name for. Fleshy worm-pale body divided in rings, patched all over in an irregularity of dull-black chitin, like scales sown onto a shirt for armour. No face but a round pucker of mouth — or else what Simra hoped was a mouth. All its eight stubby caterpillar legs were bunched at that end and the rest of it was thick tail. All told it was maybe the size of a small pig.
The Kogaru had brought out a knife, incurved along its edge. Not bone or stone or glass, but forged iron, tang sheathed in wood and leather. Traded or taken? With who? From who? Simra wondered, watching out the side of his eye as the hunter prised the scales from its tail.
Might be this was meant to impress him. Intimidate them. Metal knife and mighty prey. Of all the fool ways to flex your fierceness on a stranger, Simra thought… The beast didn’t even look like it could run, let alone fight back. He turned his attention full back to Llolamae, making a point of paying no heed.
“Course they’ll have rice more than bread.” It didn’t need saying. He was talking to fill silence; to show how deep his inattention went. “Seven, eight times in ten?”
Llolamae chewed and grunted in response. He’d lost her. She was watching the hunter, the beast as he butchered it.
“At least that’s the way with everywhere but the mountains, hills. Fucking Sadras, they’ve got the coin for it now, the land. Still won’t eat or grow anything but millet, sorghum. Never had the chance to ask one why, but I reckon it reminds them where they’re from. What they are. Keeps their hearts in the hills. Tscht. Well, they do say it, don’t they? Fastest way to the heart…”
Simra tailed off at last. Let a sigh rattle free of his throat and turned his neck to half-watch. The Kogaru was paring a long thick fillet off the thing’s tail, like Tammunei easing the flesh from a fishspine. Like a fish, this thing had a bone down its middle. First Simra had ever seen of such a thing. Bones both outside and in, it had the same wrongness as a cliffracer’s toothed beak, or the child-cry of a fox in the night. What was it? He wanted to ask, but didn’t. He’d get no answer anycase. Not from this one.
Finished with the fillet, the hunter called out. “Kaliklu!”
It had the feeling of a name to it. The elder’s, maybe. It was him that answered, coming from the cavemouth.
Crouched beside his breakfast and outnumbered by painted strangers, Simra felt it again. The slipped illusion of safety. Like being near an animal stronger and faster than you, and knowing the safest course is calm, but not knowing if it’ll save you for certainty. It was a rush of nerves, a sudden awareness of how far his hands were from his swordbelt, and how that hunting knife could be in him quicker than his own sword could come out.
Simra’s tongue flickered snake-careful out his mouth and wet his wind-chapped lips. He put them into a smile for the elder. “Is that your name?” he said. “Kaliklu?”
“It is.” The elder said it like Simra had cheated him out of some secret.
“Simra,” said Simra, touching his chest. “Of the Zainab. And Llolamae.”
Her head angled up, mouth full of crisped turnips, eyes wide. She pointed at herself with both thumbs and gestured with her palms open, like a smile of the hands while her mouth did other work.
“We met badly,” Simra said. “But you’ve been kind to us. Led us safe to warmth in the night. Will you share our food?” He was too tired to get by on threats; too wary of a fight he might not win.
Spindly legs and bending show-boned back, Kaliklu crouched next to the ragcloth spread and took up the last round of bread. Eyes on Simra’s eyes, he took a thoughtful bite and chewed.
Llolamae swallowed and stared. “This had to last us…”
That was something, coming from her. She’d scarfed half their provisions in one meal. Simra kept those thoughts to himself. “Sharing alike’ll last us longer.” He pointed at the fillets of pale flesh with his eyes.
“Thank you,” said Kaliklu. “I do not think you wish to harm us.”
It was a start. “I want to believe you don’t want to harm us either. I threatened you before. I’m sorry for that, but I’ll do so again if threatened. I don’t want to, but I will, and worse.”
“There was another thing you wanted. From us.”
“Yes. But I’d rather trade for it. Exchange. Share.” Simra tried for words, making sure he was understood. “I give, and you give.”
Kaliklu shifted his shoulders on their joints. A shrug. “You are Zainab.”
“Yes.”
“And you want to find someone.”
“Yes. And in return – in trade – I can give you things you want. I have salt, spices, works of magic. I have metal. Good iron knives.”
The elder ate, thinking. He didn’t agree, but didn’t decline. “There is something to do first.”
He stood and Simra stood with him, straightening up from his crouch-stiff haunches. “If I can help, I will.” It was half to earn good will, but only half. The rest was curiosity.
Llolamae shifted, uncertain, where she sat.
“As you helped carry our kinsman?” said Kaliklu, brows raised.
“Yesterday I hurt one of yours. Today let me help you. To trade, it helps to start equal. Even. In balance. D’you see?”
Kaliklu made a scoop of his fingers, pawing out meat from the thing’s black shell. White ribbons of flesh, like the insides of a stringsquash. “Iron, you said.” He sat cross-legged with the other Kogaru, pale sun on their red backs, sucking cooking-juices from their fingertips and frowning.
Far side of the small fire, Simra crouched on his haunches, and picked at the section of shell he’d already eaten clean. “And salt. Spices. Tea. Whatever barter you might want, there’s a good chance I have it.”
The Kogaru spoke amongst themselves, muttering in their own tongue. Then the hunter looked back to the youngest. Went back to feeding him, morsel by morsel of the meat, all gentle motions and gruff stern sounding words. He was the only one with food left. Smallest, weakest among them, and they’d served him the most.
Kaliklu spoke for the three of them. “Knives, you said.”
“I did.” Simra felt the set of his mouth change. He’d sooner keep any blades he had. This was bad country to be without them, he reckoned. “Good edges, strong blades. I’ll even sharp them for you. I’ve got the gear for it. But I’ll need to know I’m getting what I want in exchange.”
Kaliklu snorted.
“Am I? How do I know you know anything I want to know?”
Another noise, tight-mouthed but it was the closest Kaliklu had come to laughing, so far as Simra had seen. “An outsider, you said. That is who you are looking for?”
“I did.”
“Do you think there are many of you here? Outsiders? I know of one other.”
“Well? Name him.”
Crack and gravel at the side of Simra’s hearing. Llolamae was capering, crawling along the side of the stone ledge where they sat. She’d started by searching out pebbles, skipping them through thin air and into the trees below. Now she’d turned to rocks, the biggest she could find, throwing them down the slopeside and watching them break as they fell.
Little enough harm in it, Simra thought. The biggest rocks she could lift weren’t big enough to cause trouble. Just wished she’d do it quieter. He thought of telling her to stop – change back to the pebbles at least – but couldn’t bring himself to it. What was he, her mother? Besides, it briared at the hunter. He’d stopped his feeding to stare needles at Llolamae, trying to keep his face straight and failing. It was worth the noise just to twitch the sour bastard’s temper.
“We have a name for him,” said Kaliklu.
“Dalvur Vedith?”
“Perhaps. I do not think ours is the name you use. We have another for him.”
“Then what is it?” Simra caught himself chewing at the inside of his cheek, impatient.
“No. First you will tell us, why do you want him?”
“Fine. Fine fine fine…” said Simra, thinking. Kaliklu was guarded, chary of showing his hand. But it’s a player with something to lose who takes so much care in hiding it. Some way or another, he cared what happened to Vedith. “I’ll show you.”
Simra creaked upright and onto his feet, buying time. He ducked into the cave, down into its height and shadow, and grabbed up his bags to drop them heaped by the fire. Humming inside his closed mouth, he loosed the drawstring on his bookbag and brought out a leather scrollcase. The Sermons of Vivec, twelve to twenty-one, with commentaries and reflections from whatever pious inkstains the Temple in Suran asked and paid for their thoughts. What were the chances the Kogaru could read?
“Here,” he said, mouth dry, gesturing with the scrollcase. “It’s from where he’s from. Research he started, and another finished. I don’t know more than that. Only that someone paid good money to have it brought to him.” Simra shrugged, gave a half-smile, as the lie came together just tight enough. Don’t claim to know the whole story and you won’t be asked for it. “Telvanni…”
A sharpness showed in Kaliklu’s eyes and Simra’s heart staggered. “Good money, you said… Then you can afford a high cost for our help.”
Simra’s relief soured no sooner than it had come. He ungrit his back teeth by force. “I reckon so.”
“You are Zainab,” Kaliklu said, a small shadow of a smile on his face, like he’d won. “I knew that you would understand.”
Simra wondered how many Zainab the old Kogaru had ever met to have such a strongfounded opinion of them all. “Fair is fair. What’s your price? How many knives are we talking?”
“Just one.” Kaliklu’s smile widened, worse somehow for it. “The one that cuts air. You used it to maim one of us from afar. You will give it to us as payment, and to make wrongs right. Blood for blood, and the weapon that wounded. That is the price of forgiveness.”
The wand. Simra paced, then stopped pacing. Arms crossed, drumming his ribs with his fingers and cursing the corner he’d backed himself into, he thought it through. Thrusting a hand through his hair, forcing it to go slow, he resigned himself to it. “Fine.” The blighted wand was losing its power anycase, its attitude getting worse year by year. Better not to rely on it. Better to sell while it would still fetch a price. Still, the thought of being without it was a naked fearful thing. “Fine fine fine. You drive a high price, but if that’s what it’ll take…” He was giving them faulty goods. So why did it feel like he was the one being cheated?
“We’ll need food too!” Llolamae called over. “Nother one of those bugs made of meat. Nother one of those and we’ll call it a deal.”
Simra tilted Llolamae a questioning look. Hadn’t known she was paying the deal any mind. The surprise lasted only a moment. “You heard her.” He bent slow to unhide the twisted tin length of the wand from his boot. “I right the wrong we did each other, gift you this, help as I can. That makes me a friend. A stranger in your care while you take me to Vedith. We’ll need treating like guests. Fed as you feed, safe while you’re safe. Right?”
Kaliklu huffed but did not object.
“I knew you’d understand.” Simra crouched back down by the fire and returned to picking at the shell he’d left. “I share with you, you share back.” Dull black shell, scorched to chalk by the roasting of the flesh inside it. He chucked it onto the smouldering fire, like a potshard into a midden. Watched the cough of sparks, and the shuddering resin-smelling smoke of the branches the fire was built on. Watched Kaliklu’s face through it, axehead-hard and still.
“We call him Gurrigalattu…” the old Kogaru said, slow, like unfolding some close-kept mystery.
“And that means what in your tongue exactly?”
Kaliklu pursed his mouth and worked his tongue thoughtful inside it. The youngest Kogaru winced as he leaned in, and murmured something to his elder, who hummed, gave a solemn blink, and translated. “The one who…greens? Or seeds. Makes thrive what would not without him. The one who makes things grow.”
“So…the Gardener?” Llolamae said.
Simra looked past the fire, the three Kogaru, the ledge and out into the basin below. The cone-trees and birches, the ferns and spindle-stemmed wide-spreading mushrooms, at the bottom of a slope thickgrown with flowers and brambles. No wilderness. No accident. A garden.
They gathered themselves up after that, shells left to bleach and crack in the wintertime sun. They left the fire too, still burning to burn itself out.
Simra stripped down to his jacket, his two shirts, the days of sweat from the cold and the heat under his clothes and stiff on them. He tied his mantle over his gathersack and tied his scarf round its strap, scratching at his neck. Good to let his skin breathe. A good choice, as they picked along the slope and headed down it, under the treeline and into the shade of it, hot and growing hotter the lower they went.
Llolamae’s face flushed, shining with damp. Like her body didn’t know what to do with this much warmth. Like she didn’t know what to do with it either — for all the heat, she kept her flapped hat on.
“Work both ways, you know. Hats.” Simra walked beside her, keeping the red backs of the Kogaru in sight up ahead. “Stop you losing heat out your head when it’s cold, but when it’s hot..? Like I said. Both ways.”
She gave him a dazed look, then went back to watching her feet, careful of the roots and thick growth that choked round their knees in the forest at the bottom of the basin. They’d gone another twenty, thirty trudging strides before she raised her hand like a sleepwalker and dragged the hat from her head.
“Better?” Simra tried.
“Never thought you could be too warm…” she slurred, rumpling the hat between her hands.
“It’s just as bad, trust me on that. Worse! Cold, you can always put more on, light a fire. Too hot though, once you’re down to skin and shame and sweat and you’re still sweating, suffering? What d’you do then?”
“What do you do then?”
“Tell you when I figure that out.”
They went high-kneed through deep and dew-damp weeds that left Simra’s trousers smeared wet to the hip. Low, bare sun-starved branches, thin as wind-troubled hair that tickled at his neck and cheeks and made him flinch, blink, angry of a sudden and then forgetting why.
“The research,” said Llolamae.
“What?”
“That scroll for Vedith. It’s about the torquestone, intit? Like what Master Vidanu’s learning about. Like you said.”
Simra’s heart stumbled again. He’d said so, hadn’t he? “Think so, but it’s not like I know much about the finer points.”
“Master Vidanu’d be ever so grateful to know though, wouldn’t he? What it says, I mean.”
“I’m sure. Mistress Ulessen though? Not so grateful. Not if I showed him.” Simra gave a dramatic shudder, making Llolamae smile a little. “Doesn’t bear thinking about, what she’d do to me.”
“Dunno what else a Telvanni’d find to be interested in round here. Master Vidanu says it brought him all across a week of sea just to come see it and see about it! So it must be really special? Don’t know about anything else special round here…”
“Are you not seeing what I’m seeing? A bowl poured full of high Summer when all the rest’s deep Winter outside?”
“Oh, aye… Well there is that.” Llolamae sniffed. “Any Telvanni can make things grow though. Have you not seen Master Vidanu’s tel?”
Simra didn’t reply. Couldn’t sound impressed about that mess and keep a straight face. That was one lie too big and too many for this morning.
“Course he did all that without any help at all. Except from me. Just a bit.” Llolamae pinched her fingers together and grinned, puffed up and proud. “If Vedith can do all this with the torquestone, and him not even a real wizard? Think what Master Vidanu could do!”
“You think the torquestone’s what makes this place like it is?”
“Course! Got to be! I mean, you did say.”
“I did, yeah…”
But Simra remembered the coarse porous stone of the ruins, the screw-spiralling rock growing up out of the hilltop, and it seemed nothing like the strange glassy walls of the cave here, or the chalky ledge or light-brown shale of the slopes. Then again, what did he know about rocks? Then again, in the ruin at the top of the torquestone hill, hadn’t he also been warm? Black stone, not hot to the touch, but with something to it. Not a flake of snow would settle…
Simra ran a thinking hand through his hair, pushing it back from his face. It was stiff-cloyed and oily with nights spent outdoors. Days spent sweating in the scanty warmth of his clothes surrounded in cold. Days where he’d been too weak to charm himself clean again, needing his strength saved for fire and light and bare-boned survival. But here in the cave’s glassy-walled gut, it was warm enough that he’d tucked back his mantle over his shoulders and held his scarf in one loose hanging hand like a wrung out and well-coloured rag.
In front of him the corner, red as rust and clayed and smeared. Palmprints showed at its edges in the daylight that crept down the tunnel behind him. The sectioned ghosts of fingers, caking the colour onto it, and themselves made of colour. It was hard to stare at. Like it had a gaze of its own looking back at you. Simra turned his eyes and they settled on the tips of his fingers, nails undered with black. Disgusting.
“It needs blood?” Somehow he’d known, in some back-dark cloister of his brain. Of course it did. He tried to say it like it was nothing, but feeling came in at the hems of his voice. Interest, apprehension, stirred and muddled. “Why?”
Kaliklu thought a moment. “Blood is a tie.” He brought his hands together, fingers knit. “Like family. You, a mother, a sister…” His hands pulled apart. “Like that, but still you are tied, do you understand? That is blood.”
Sisters and separation. That struck a nerve. Like he knew, thought he knew, presumed to know. A flash of anger rose up in Simra but banked down quick – just a coincidence, the wrong words said to the wrong person – but the sour taste of it stayed in his mouth. “It connects, then? Joins distant things?”
“Yes.”
“And things share across that joining? The heat of the earth here? This paint and your paint, tied together. Do you feel like you’re here when you’re painted like that? Warm like here wherever you are?”
“If the magic is strong.”
Might be he was flattering himself, but Simra reckoned he caught a hint of something in Kaliklu’s face at that. Not respect, nor even quite appreciation, but an admission, a gratitude. Simra had grasped it, straight to the root. It made a satisfying kind of sense now he saw it, clear as smoke in a cloudless sky.
“And my help…” Simra began. “How much d’you need?”
“Enough. Not a lot. Only enough that there is blood in the mixing.”
Simra’s back teeth set and started to grind. “Can it not be other blood? An animal?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t have any though, do we?” The thing outside, all white flesh and shell — Simra had watched the other Kogaru butcher it, but hadn’t once seen it bleed.
“You said that you would help.”
“I will,” Simra said, harder than he’d meant to. “Just trying to understand.”
Kaliklu crouched to the floor of the cave, dry packed dirt amongst all this glassy stone. There was a shallow pit holed out before the painted corner, a bowl two hands across. Kaliklu placed a hand at the edge of it, showing Simra.
“Fine,” he muttered. “Fine fine fine.”
Reaching into the hidden padded pocket of his jacket, Simra brought out the razor he kept there with careful fingers. A wedge-shaped blade of bronze, almost like an axe-head shrunk down to size. Its thin tang curled to a spiral and Simra gripped it by that, delicate as he could.
Kishewyr had sworn by bloodletting, Simra remembered. Some High Rock assumption about balance in the body. It’d always seemed a fool thing to Simra, imagining a body could have too much blood. Rather that than too little. But Simra had watched a time or two, half-drunk and curious as with the careless slow focus that came from his pipesmoke, Kishewyr found his letting kit, found a vein…
Now Simra took off the braided string from his neck, old arrowhead hanging from its end. Rolled up a sleeve and twisted the cord tight partway up his arm till it bit and the skin swelled either side. Left hand, he’d decided. His right had suffered enough, all old scars and new scabs. He flexed, watching the tendons move, fighting a rising sickness and trying not to think. The veins showed raised, pink-blue through the grey back of his hand. Do it. Now, before you can think too much. Easy as stubbing your toes in the dark, done before you know it’s done, and impossible to do if you’re trying. First came the bloom of red from the vein he’d found on the back of his hand, and then the blossoming pain. The welling and drip of blood from his knuckles and into the packed dirt bowl.
Simra didn’t look. No need anymore. Just a small cut, he'd seen to that much. None of that showy palm-gashing and prick-swinging that came with the swearing of blood-oaths in the old Nord sagas and songs. Too much risk that you'd cut something that wouldn't fix right. Just a small cut, that's all the situation asked. Still, his head felt full of air. He couldn’t stop thinking of what to wipe the blade on. Scarce anything on the blade to wipe, but the thought kept coming back. He’d done worse to himself by accident; others had done worse and he’d done still worse to them. Almost funny that this was so difficult, then. Made him feel sick as it did. It wasn’t the blood or the cut. Just some other something, better left nameless.
“That is enough,” said Kaliklu. He had brought out a skin-wrapped knot of grease, white-yellow. He warmed it to melting in his hands. Mixed it in the bowl with the blood, spitting too now and then till a thick red paste had formed.
Amazed and repulsed the old mer had so much so much spit in him, Simra untwisted the cord and looped it off his arm. Standing, arm held awkward above his head to slow the blood, he hurried over to his bags and fished one-handed through them till he found a strip of cloth, same as had bound his right hand. Muttering, fidgeting and unsure what to do next, he licked the wound and spat too. Copper on his tongue. He wrapped the back of his hand tight.
“What now?” Simra said. “Need tears now too, do you?”
“No.” Kaliklu didn’t look up. “Wake him. The one you hurt. He needs it most.”
The youngest Kogaru woke with a bleary-eyed grimace. He straightened, leaning on a patchy-painted arm with his twisted leg stuck out along the ground in front of him. He wasn’t shivering now. Only making faces when he set his weight wrong, or forgot, and moved the wrong muscle. Seemed a night in the warm cave had done him good. He and the elder spoke in their own tongue, and Simra gave up listening.
The sound of striking stones, the starting of a fire, echoed down into the chamber. The elder crossed to the bowl of dirt and paint again, and chanted as he smeared the wall. Another red handprint, shining new, and then he came back to the boy. Smoke-scent from above.
Simra thought, as the elder mended the patches in the boy’s paint with careful hands and low murmuring words. As the hunter above made fire with stones on stones and set his kindling burning. He wondered about this binding with blood, this sharing across spaces. If they did it with warmth, could they do it with fire? They wouldn't use magic to call one from nothing, but maybe they could borrow across distance. If warmth, then why not the rest of a flame — its light and its hungry violence. He thought about what Noor had said about sigils, about writing that wasn't writing, songs that store themselves even when the singer is silent. But they still needed a singer, she said. A sigil doesn't cast itself. There was something in that, half-hidden from him, but huge just beyond his knowing. Like seeing a sliver of an island out to sea, and knowing it’s a mountain beneath the water. Or maybe not. He’d have to think on this, sound out that connection. Watch the Kogaru and see where that took him.
The painting was done now. Kaliklu turned his attention to the boy’s leg. The skin was wrinkled and wrong in one snarled spot. Beneath it, the muscles bulged and knotted. Clucking in his throat, Kaliklu rubbed his hands together, still cloyed with paint and blood, and pressed down with both palms. A long sigh, and he worked into the flesh with the undersides of his knuckles. Simra saw the tendons in the old mer’s neck stand taut as he pushed hard. His shoulders sunk and slumped, all the weight of his effort and patience down over the boy’s leg. And when his hands came clear, the skin was still wrong, but the muscles had laxed. They tensed, twitched, but the worst was gone.
If it was magic or not, Simra couldn’t say. Might be someone like Noor would claim wisdom was there even in things that took no magic to do. Wisdom, the real wide range of it, was in knowing what others don’t. How to slaughter a guar without sight of the knife souring its meat. How to turn the milk of its ralk into curds and then cheese. How to bring a baby out into the world when the baby won’t let itself come. And now this too. Simra felt bitter over it, covetous and lack-hungry with all he didn’t know. Cheated somehow too, in some cold part of himself. He'd seen the spell in his wand do worse by far to a body. Here it had been weak, easy to fix.
The smell of sizzling flesh, cooking meat was coming down into the cave. The sweet-ripe firm smell of shellfish, but with no tang of the ocean. The other Kogaru was cooking his kill.
Simra could hear Llolamae talking, asking questions, and getting nothing back. He curled and uncurled the fingers of his hand, twisted his wrist this way and that, wary for anything amiss. Nothing, except that the blood wouldn't stop. The rag was red with it now, soaked through.
“Sure you don’t need any more?” Simra muttered.
“It is enough.”
“Still coming. Let me know if your mind changes.” Simra’s lips pulled back, showing a bitter flicker of teeth. If Kaliklu heard the tone of his words, he did nothing to note it. “Well that’s my part of the trade done, anycase. What about yours?”
“Wait. If we are to help you—”
“If?” Simra echoed. The slow seeping away of his blood was doing nothing for his patience. “Wish I’d known there was any ‘if’ about this before I cut myself for you… Help. Will you or won’t you?”
Kaliklu was silent a moment before he spoke. “Yes. But we will give the help in our time, not yours. Or would you try to force us again?”
Simra tried to ignore the temptation in that. Two against one. He still had the razor in his right hand. His mouth felt dry and stiffened. He could do it, but it would only give them reason to lie, trick him. He needed this done, dealt with, worse than he needed it done soon. “In your time,” he said, though his tongue was sour with it.
“Come then. We will eat. Then we will talk more of trade.”
