Chapter VI: White Demon's Return
Even though she couldn’t see her, Cédes felt the purple-eyed Furosan’s gaze boring into her. She fidgeted uncomfortably before speaking. “It would appear that I am known here.”
The other Furosan nodded slowly. “Yes. You are Cédes?” she asked.
“She is,” Stefi said. “And what gives you the right to call her a White Demon, anyway?” She glowered at the Furosan, soon finding how difficult it was to intimidate someone whose entire eyes, except the pupil, were a brilliant violet. Still, she noticed her twitch uncomfortably.
“Just Cédes, then,” the Furosan said stiffly. “They said you’d be making return home some day. And you make return with a friend. How lovely.” Her soft, commanding voice carried with it an odd accent that made her somewhat difficult to understand; her vowels sounded different, more full, and she placed different stress upon words.
Cédes tilted her head as she considered the Furosan’s voice that carried not a jot of emotion. “Sarcasm?” she said, although even Stefi probably couldn’t have detected any behind her way of speaking.
“No. Perhaps lovely is not the good word. My command of the Common Language is most broken. It is of small use here to make talking in it. I ought have said nice.”
Stefi, meanwhile, found difficulty in taking her eyes off the other Furosan. Of course Cédes couldn’t see it, but the two looked eerily similar. Maybe it was because they were both Alzandians. After all, Ifaut had once quipped that all humans looked alike. Still, the shape of their faces, the way they held themselves in a humble yet somehow still proud manner…
“What’s your name?” Stefi said suddenly and a little rudely.
“Kei-Pyama Feizanya seist,” she said, at last looking to Stefi with a sincere smile that put her at ease. “I mean, Kei-Pyama Feizanya, it is.”
“How do you know Cédes, anyway? Have you heard about Valraines and Sol-Acrima all the way out here?”
“No. You must talk to me of your stories one day so I may know. But my, you two have been around, have you? We all know of Cédes here, though. None could unremember her. And you, human, there is an air of familiarity about you. We have not never met, no?”
Stefi pondered how best to respond to the triple negative question. “We haven’t met,” she said, hoping that would work. She looked to the sky to see the twilight beginning to roll in, and with it more rain clouds to drive away the fleeting sunshine. “Can I ask something? Can we go inside?”
“Oh, yes. Where did I put my manners?” She smiled, her expression dreamy and almost vacant.
Cédes whispered to Stefi, “Do I answer that?”
“Of course not.”
Then, so only Stefi could hear, “Is it just me, or does she talk… oddly”
“Yes, she does.”
“Not as oddly as I do, though?”
“You speak just fine, Cédes. A little stiffly at times, but this girl-”
Kei-Pyama spoke up. “Shall we be making entrance inside?”
Stefi and Cédes agreed, for now with the approaching night their damp clothes were becoming uncomfortably cold and heavy.
“Are we taking the boat?” Stefi asked. She sincerely hoped the answer would be no.
“No,” Kei-Pyama replied, much to Stefi’s relief. “See that little building there?” She pointed to a small structure embedded in the cliff a short distance away, an entranceway with two thick columns flanking a wooden door set beneath an arch.
“No,” Cédes said. “I see nothing. I am sightless.” She’d even considered using sarcasm, but felt that the effect would be quite lost of this new girl.
“Oh. I give apology.” She glided over to the door as Stefi and Cedes followed. “But you still see future things?”
Cédes’s eyes widened. “How do you know of that?”
“I know much about you, dear sister Cédes.” She paused, her hand on the door’s ancient, rusted handle.
“I knew it!” Stefi shouted triumphantly. “You both practically look the same. Except Kei looks a little older.”
“My name is Kei-Pyama,” the Furosan said quietly with that same dream-like expression of serenity. “Kei means I am oldest child who happens to be daughter. It is old custom. If you must make my name smaller, say Pyama.”
“Oh, sorry, I didn’t know,” Stefi said.
“It makes no worries,” Kei-Pyama said. “I am more happier to finally meet sister.” Her tail jerked happily.
“We are related?” Cédes said quietly, getting back on subject.
“Why, yes,” the purple-eyed Furosan said. “That is why we been making a wait here for you for many years.”
“We?”
“Yes, me and brother. After they sent you away mamtré… mother said you’d be back one day. So we come here every day to make waiting.”
“What do you mean? Who sent her away?” Stefi said, a sudden anger welling up inside. She didn’t care if this other Furosan was Cédes’s sister. Her people, her family, had sent her best friend away from home.
“Stefi, please,” Cédes said levelly. “I am sure there is a reason. There is always a reason.”
Stefi turned to see Cédes’s face oddly blank.
“Yes, yes there does be a reason,” Kei-Pyama said, her eyes downcast. “For your safety. And ours.”
“Excuse me?” Stefi interrupted.
Kei-Pyama opened the door set in the cliff. “Come. We make walk and talk.”
The open door revealed a stone staircase descending deep into the ground, and at the bottom, where the sun’s dying rays could not reach, stretched an endless black corridor beneath the lake.
“Perhaps taking the boat would have been better,” Stefi said, her voice feeling muffled in the stale air and heavy, damp blackness.
“Perhaps making home tonight would be better,” Kei-Pyama said. “I would not want to get lost in the lake at night.”
Stefi felt Cédes’s hand pat her arm then slide down to take her hand.
“I will guide you,” Cédes said.
“Hey, you can’t see either.”
“True, but I see better in the dark than you.”
As they traveled through the dark, dripping tunnel beneath the lake, it seemed to Stefi that the darkness would never end as it pressed in on all sides and threatened to suffocate her. She didn’t know how long they walked. Somehow it seemed like it had always been that way. And always would be. She started to gain a new appreciation for her friend’s blindness. And the eternal nothingness beyond the Rainbow Bridge that Gemmie and Maya had cast themselves into.
After a few moments Kei-Pyama began to speak and told them, in somewhat broken Common Language no doubt due to her nervousness, what had happened. Her voice echoed hauntingly in their confines.
Fifteen years ago, she said, the humans came back to Alzandia, despite having already attacked many years before. No one quite knew why, but that didn’t matter. A short time after that, the Alzandian Council of Elders (“They are not a kingdom like Mafouras,” Cédes pointed out) declared that the only way Alzandia could be safe was to remove Cédes.
“I tried making for stopping,” Kei-Pyama said, her voice and language cracking. “But pamtré take sister away. I mean, father did. I saw a big flash on the hill then father and sister Cédes are gone forever.”
“My own father took me away?” Cédes asked with a restraint that surprised Stefi.
“Yes. How is he being now?”
“I do not remember him at all.”
“Oh. When you gone, humans gone too… then…” Her sentence collapsed into an unintelligible mangle of Alzandian and Common Language, and the rest of the journey carried on in silence.
After what felt like an eternity the three climbed another set of stone stairs and Kei-Pyama pushed open a wooden door. Before them was an open, peristyled courtyard of dark red stone and hanging plants. A small fountain sat in the center. It was illuminated by several lanterns and its waters reflected the warm, orange light. And it was ra
ining again.
“Welcome home, sister,” the purple-eyed Furosan said. “I hope it is likeable to you.”
“It does have a homely feel,” Cédes said. She couldn’t see, and yet, somehow, she knew where she stood, what was about her. Straining her ears, she could almost hear the past echoing through the courtyard, the laughing of children as they raced with reckless abandon about the fountain. She had been here before, she knew. Long ago.
“However,” she continued, “I would dearly like something to eat. How about you, Stefi? If that is not too much to ask, of course.”
“It’s not too much, it’s just right,” Kei-Pyama said. “And how about some clean cloths?”
“That would be nice.”
Kei-Pyama led them into a hallway along which countless doors branched off into cold, empty rooms or other corridors. Suddenly out of one those doors burst another Furosan who knocked Stefi to the ground. She let out a word more suited to Maya’s vocabulary than her own.
“What does that mean?” Kei-Pyama asked Cédes.
“Trust me, it is better that you do not know.”
The Furosan that had knocked Stefi off her feet offered a hand. She looked up to see a young man bearing a resemblance to Kei-Pyama, only his eyes were darker, his hair shorter and messier. And he had a nervous smile that made her heart skip a beat.
He lifted her gently to her feet and she felt her face redden. So this is how Ifaut felt when she was teased…
“Our little brother, Radus,” Kei-Pyama said.
“N-nice to meet you,” Stefi stammered. “My Stefi’s name… I mean my name’s Stefi!” She found herself still holding the cool hand that had helped her and hurriedly let go.
Radus nodded politely, still transfixing Stefi with his dark eyes. He said nothing.
“Cédes,” Stefi hissed rather loudly, “you never told me you had a brother!”
“I never even knew I had a sister until very recently.”
“Sister?” Radus repeated and beckoned at Cédes, a hopeful look in his eyes.
Kei-Pyama replied in the Alzandian language and must have confirmed that yes, she was his sister, because he seized Cédes in an exuberant hug, dooking and babbling all the while in Alzandian.
“It is pleasant to meet you, too,” Cédes said, her normally stoic expression quite perplexed. “Though I did not understand much of what you just said.”
“He knows very little of the Common Language,” Kei-Pyama explained as they resumed walking. “We share waiting for Cédes every day.”
“Every day,” her brother agreed.
“Every day for fifteen years.”
“How did you know I would return someday?” Cédes asked.
“Mother said you would.”
Cédes started. “Oh! Where is mother now?”
“Dead.”
“Dead?” But she didn’t cry, barely showed any emotion. It was if she had expected it all along. And, she thought miserably, it is difficult to mourn one long forgotten.
“Yes, about a year after you and father left. Her heart broke from sadness.”
In a moment Kei-Pyama had led them to a small room lit by a single lamp and with one glassless window overlooking the surrounding lake. The warm, sweet smell of rain falling upon sun-heated stone wafted in, a scent that evoked comfort and yet caution at a coming storm. It was the same smell that Stefi had often let wander unbidden into her room at home on lonely nights when lightning flickered soundlessly on the horizon.
“I am apologizing that this is all I can offer,” Kei-Pyama said as she pointed out the room’s sparse furnishings: two small beds with heavy blankets, and a table so low that one would have to sit on the floor to make any use of it. She turned to Radus, murmured a few Alzandian words, and her brother bustled out of the room with a smile directed at Stefi.
“Sister Cédes,” she began, “is all good to you?” Her voice carried a cold nervousness that cast a pall over her face.
“Everything but one thing,” Cédes said. “I have noticed a distinct absence of others here. In fact, you could say I have seen no one else.”
“Very good,” Stefi whispered with a smile, acknowledging her friend’s use of humor
“That is because there are few left here. Most dead or gone away.”
“Here’s the house!” Ifaut said as she and Sansonis came upon a rundown, wooden structure that was in the process of being absorbed back into the trees from which it was constructed.
“Nice place,” he said. He was suddenly regretful that this pitiful little shack had caused yesterday’s outburst at Ifaut. Yet she seemed happier, as if she’d forgotten all about that and her fears of him running off.
“It might have been. Once. C’mon and look here!” She dragged him, perhaps a little too forcefully, through the warped wooden door that would never close properly again. “Now… where was it?” she pondered to herself and began rummaging through the various effects that had long ago spilled across the floor: clothes, blankets, drifts of wind-blown leaves, even cutlery. So she didn’t have a hard time finding something to eat with, Sansonis thought.
“Aha!” she squeaked and held a small notebook aloft. “Look!” She thrust the book in his direction. “It’s messy human writing I can’t understand. Can you read it to me?”
He opened the battered leather cover to reveal pages faded with age and letters scrawled by an unskilled hand, blotted and smudged by water. “It’s not a storybook, you know,” he said as Ifaut pulled up a kitchen chair, turned it backwards, and sat so she leant on the back. Her eyes shone with expectancy.
“No?” She tilted her head sideways. “Then what is it?”
He flicked through the pages and noticed what looked like dates peppered amongst the mostly illegible letters. “It looks like a diary.”
“Kalkic!”
“How do you know?” he asked. There was nothing about the house, or even the small diary in his hands, that differentiated its previous occupants from other humans.
“This place… it smells vaguely like Kalkic humans.” She sniffed the air as if to prove it.
“And what do they smell like?” Sansonis continued scanning the diary’s pages.
“Soft and… a sort of a blue smell,” she said wistfully. “Like the sky might smell if you got close enough and didn’t sneeze because of all the fluff coming off the clouds. Or maybe they smell like soft moonlight. Like you do.”
“And what do other humans smell like?”
“Spicy. I don’t like spicy food.”
“No one said you have to eat them, you know,” he said, ignoring the book long enough to laugh at her vacant gaze as she stared off into space.
“And Furosans,” she continued, “we all smell-”
“Bad. Yes, I know that already.”
“Hey!” she protested, her blue eyes suddenly piercing through his. “Not all of us do.”
“I know. You smell odd… but comforting in a way. Warm and nostalgic, even.”
“Nostalgic? Is that even a smell?” She raised an arm and sniffed her armpit.
“Only if the sky has a smell.”
Ifaut sat in contemplative silence for a moment, listening to the rustle of pages being turned. Finally, she could contain herself no more. “Will you read it to me now?” she asked hopefully.
“I can only make out some words. It’s pretty messy and old. Hang on, here’s a readable page.” He pulled up another seat and sat alongside her, holding the diary on his lap so she could follow along if she so wished. She rested her head on his shoulder.
“Seventh day, month of sailing,” Sansonis began. “We have reached this island, the last in this northern sea. Few are left no… -Here it’s too smudged to read. But it picks up again- … terrible storms, we lost Makhesis last night to illness. Strange sights, too. I myself have seen the floating island mocking us, an utter impossibility drifting by twice a day. What seas are these we have reached? Floating an… -Another gap- …phantoms of Minhera, begrudging the l
iving they drift across the waters by night, pale and terrifying. The wailing or their dead eyes, I know not what is the worst.”
Ifaut let out a yelp. “Ghosts?” She shivered and glanced about nervously. “Look! It’s starting to get dark. What if they come and eat me?”
Sansonis smiled despite the cold shiver that ran down his own back and the ghostly eyes he felt were now staring at the back of his head. “I’ll look after you if they try,” he said. “Shall I continue? There’s more.”
“Y-y-yes.” She gripped the back of the chair and willed herself not to get too scared.
“There is nowhere else to go. We can go no further. We sent men to scout the other drowned remains of Minhera. That was a week ago. We ought to have followed our sisters and brothers to World’s End or even Acharn. But even they might not be safe.”
“Is that all? No more ghosts?” Ifaut whispered.
“It’s signed,” Sansonis said. “Helmsman of the Pakijané-” His breath lodged in his throat, and when it finally loosened it came in short, shallow gasps.
“Who? Who?” Ifaut pressed, sounding remarkably like an owl.
“I’m sure you can read the name,” Sansonis choked out.
“San… so… nis?” she said and suddenly stiffened. “Ah! That’s… you!”
“Not me. A relative, perhaps? Still…” he trailed off, feeling awfully chilled deep inside. Was it the same one that Shizai had told them about? No, it couldn’t have been; he died in Sol-Acrima. His father, perhaps?
“Maybe it’s just a common name,” Ifaut said, interrupting his thoughts. “Maybe he’s not even related. Maybe-”
“You should just be quiet for a moment. Chances are he’s related, all right. Sansonis, it’s a family name.”
Ifaut gasped and jerked so sharply in her seat that she very nearly fell over. She caught the wall just in time to steady herself. “How come you never told me before? All this time and I haven’t even been calling you your real first name!” She breathed rapidly, almost panicking. “How could I have been so insensitive? What if I’ve really offended you?”
“See here.” He pointed to the page. “There’s his given name. Milad.”
She snatched the notebook from his hands and frantically flipped through the pages, running her finger across words so smudged even the Kalkic couldn’t read them.
“Where’s your name?” she said, failing to grasp the preposterous nature of her actions. “Where’s yours, then? It has to be here. It just has to.”
He shrugged. “When Rhaka found me, that’s all he knew.”
With a frustrated cry, and all thoughts of wandering spirits forgotten, Ifaut hurled the book against the wall. It fluttered to the floor like a wounded bird and lay still.
“It’s not there.” She sighed in defeat. “You need a name. A first name, I mean. It’s like if I went around and had everyone call me Mafouras.”
Sansonis looked up, deeply touched by her efforts despite the outlandishness of her thinking his name would be in a moldy old diary. He’d never been worried by not having a proper first name; he had always just been Sansonis to everyone he knew, Ifaut included. But if she was so worked up about it…
“If it bothers you so much, how about you give me a name?” he said. At once her mood brightened.
“Really?” she said. “Oh, it’s such a big responsibility.”
“You’re a princess, though. Don’t you have the power to do that?”
“I-I guess,” she admitted.
“And with Stefi elsewhere, I come under your rule. Pick a good one, okay?”
She nodded vigorously. So vigorously, in fact, that her hair flew out in all directions and veiled her face. She parted her hair to reveal a broad smile. “Saun,” she said. “Your new first name is Saun.”