One of the tacit rules of Lurien dictated that, for reasons of decorum, Makers never returned to the humble dwelling they shared as Mates; and it was quite sensible, really: would a grown butterfly ever deign to enter the tiny chrysalis cocoon of her past?
So that, when Gallan and Raddia, while settling on their porch to have a last red-sky glass of whiteberry wine, saw Lorn approach their cabin, they both rose to greet him with barely suppressed apprehension. But their Maker smiled their fear away, saying he was merely visiting to wish them luck in their oncoming Surfacing rite – which, thanks to the crowdedness of the morning’s spectacle, appeared to be common knowledge.
However, the moment he stood at the foot of the stairs, and his wrinkled face was lit by the flickering flame of the lantern, both Gallan and Raddia stepped back and bowed their heads – though not before glimpsing the last, chilling change that had come over Lorn’s weary eyes: two large holes of uncolour in the center of the grey disks.
Don’t be afraid, he said. You can look all you wish; my draining old Substance can do you no harm, and to be honest I would welcome some of yours, if only to feel young for a moment.
Yet just as they had noticed his end spots they now sensed the worry in his voice; something hastily hidden, threatening to burst out of its mental cage.
And then Lorn did something that made them shiver despite the mildness of the red fall; letting out a rasping sigh, he said, “It is better that we step inside.”
Though they had spent their childhood concealing this particular thought, it was true that Lorn had been Gallan and Raddia’s favourite Maker. For even when he administered a punishment – fastening the muzzle’s straps, or making them kneel for a beating – he didn’t do it with Navva’s impassivity, but with perceptible displeasure and even a hint of regret, as if he recalled all too well his own pain as a child and wished he could spare both them and himself the pointless misery. And a few times, when Navva happened to be out on some chore, he had even soothed their tears by whispering words of kindness and comfort – a transgression unthinkable for a Maker.
That was why it took a while for the fact of Navva’s absence to dawn on them, and even then they asked no questions, glad that the sour old woman was away and unable to hear their hushed, conspiratorial talk.
It was Raddia who spoke first, tickled by the untought-of audacity of not just looking her Maker in the eye, but also of addressing him in audible speech.
“What are Ghosts, o Wise and Noble One?” she said.
“Well, apparently I’m not so wise, for I don’t really know; it is a word the Sages of the Circle sometimes use, but like so much that comes out of their minds, it seems to be a riddle. Some claim that these Ghosts were the first inhabitants of Lurien, and that they were extremely powerful; they could speak the Original Language, and so were able to alter the world according to their whim. Until something terrible happened, and they left. But I, for one, never truly believed this particular legend; it doesn’t make sense: if they could rule us all, why would they ever leave?”
“Is it true that the Sacred River no longer accepts our Substance?” Gallan asked next, and only when Lorn grinned at him did he blushingly add, “O Wise and Noble One?”
“There are rumours, but then there are always rumours – life is too tedious without them. I think you shouldn’t take today’s unfortunate incident too gravely; after all, the woman was the Mate of a Denier, and the Fault was unbearable to behold even by a Fault’s standards. At any rate, you shall find out soon enough.”
These last words made Gallan and Raddia tense – thinking of the Sacred River’s surface staying horribly still while their Substances strove to merge in vain, and then of strong hands holding them down until they drowned and were carried off naked and intact like logs – but Lorn once more relieved their dread.
“I wasn’t speaking of that, you dumb little beasts! Haven’t you noticed my end spots? They’re half the size of my ugly head.”
Yet their Makers’ submergence (which they might not even attend, if their own rite failed first) was hardly a lighter topic, and so Gallan’s thoughts strayed briefly to the peculiar thing they had found in the goat cheese – but an instant was all Lorn’s mind, honed by age to a hawk’s precision, needed.
“May I have a look at it?” he said, and Raddia hastily obliged him, taking the circular object out of her pocket and giving it to Lorn, who proceeded to examine it by taking off his right glove and toying with it, gauging its weight in the hollow of his palm and turning it over to study the engraving. “Fascinating,” he mumbled after a while. “I’ve never seen anything like it; its substance feels potent, more than a beast’s I’d say, and yet it doesn’t show the slightest desire to leak into mine, any more than it would allow my Substance to pass – it’s almost as if... it scorns me.”
“You mean it is alive?” Raddia whispered, equally enthralled by Lorn’s words as by the sight of his bare hands, the long pale fingers like flower stems bending to some inner breeze.
“Honestly, I can’t say. It certainly feels more alive than any piece of stone I’ve ever touched; the only comparable thing I can think of is the Everbridge.”
“Maybe we should toss it in the fire, to see if it’s indestructible as well,” Gallan said in a tone of childish excitement.
But Lorn seemed unwilling to part with it, opening and closing his fist around it and gazing thoughtfully into the thing’s mysterious shininess. “It reminds me of another myth about these Ghosts of yours,” he said. “The Three Circles, it’s called. Ages ago, goes the story, while the Ghosts still lived in Lurien, each of them had a third eye, with which it could see into the past, present and future and know everything that had happened or would ever happen. But one night, while they slept, someone stole these precious eyes – and the Ghosts have been looking for them ever since. And when they find them, they shall destroy the thief and the entire world that contains him. Now some believe that the eyes of the Ghosts are hidden in Lurien, and that someday they are going to appear in the form of three circles, heralding Lurien’s doom.”
Gallan and Raddia considered the tale in silence, and then Raddia said, “And you believe that this – thing – is one of those circles?”
Lorn gave a small puff of laughter. “Not really, no; I do think that it’s mightily strange, but it’s ludicrous to believe that all-knowing creatures wouldn’t know their eyes would be stolen, and by whom. No, I simply think your goat wandered off into the Mists, where things from other worlds are said to occasionally appear, rolling down from their threshold at the summit of Mirror Mountain.”
“So, should we report the circle to the Circle?” Gallan said in jest, but suddenly all the quiet mirth was gone from Lorn’s face. Dropping the thing on the table, he hurried to put his glove back on, fumbling because his hands shook badly.
And in that instant, while their Maker’s mind was too much in turmoil to keep such a momentous thing hidden, Gallan and Raddia knew right away the reason for his unprecedented visit: Navva was dead.
Lurienites were powerless in the face of tears; intense unhappiness was thought to leave the Substance defenceless, and so, besides a soothing word, all that was allowed – or rather tolerated, and solely among Mates – was the holding of hands, with gloves on.
And that was all that Gallan and Raddia, appalled by the sight and the sound of Lorn’s uncontainable sorrow, could do: grab a hand each and squeeze it, all the while filling the old man’s mind with the cooing of empty solace, till finally the sobs abated and Lorn, hanging his head in shame, delivered the ultimate blow.
“She – she cut her throat,” he croaked. “She cut her throat with a knife.”
They’ll put her in the ground like a Fault, was Raddia’s first, horrified thought, while Gallan, like a boy who hears of death and tries to picture a face, a voice, a colour, was thinking of Navva’s robes: did they turn white for a moment, when the blood gushed out of her, severing its bond with the milclo
th, and then turn red once more as the fabric soaked up the blood?
“Don’t think about it!” Lorn begged in a choked whisper. “Speak your minds aloud before someone hears!”
Yet panic, after a lifetime of forcible silence, had sealed their lips, and no matter how hard they tried to unthink Navva’s suicide, it kept rattling madly in their heads.
And then, while they hovered in this wild state, dreading the first cut of a Sage’s knifelike voice, they started to pick up other thoughts, growing in number and volume until they became a deafening din out of which they could only make out nonsensical words – a hole... a celestial end spot... an invasion of alien darkness...
The sky, in all its glorious purity, young Mates were instructed, is what you should strive for, and all that you can hope to attain in life. Because unlike the skies of inferior worlds, Lurien’s firmament was unblemished by stars, moons and clouds, spreading in seamless white or red magnificence.
That was why, when Gallan and Raddia stepped out of the cabin, and following the collective gaze of the people crowding the scarlet gardens and flower copses looked up to the sky, they were seized by an unutterable fear. The plan they had quickly agreed on was this: they’d steal away to Lorn and Navva’s home and help carry their Maker’s body to the Sacred River, there to be joined her old Mate – for Lorn had nothing to hope for, and dreaded being put to an undignified death or, worse, forced to mate with a Fault.
But there were things greater than life or death, and one such thing had suddenly, inexplicably, occurred.
A great circle of uncolour had opened up in the centre of the heavenly dome, slowly but visibly sucking its surrounding redness like milk seeping away through a hole in a bucket. And as the width of this unnerving void expanded, the light in which everything around them was bathed in up until moments ago grew dimmer and darker – from ruby to crimson, maroon, brown – till finally whole pieces of the landscape (birch groves, whiteberry shrubs, even the edges of the Sacred River) were swallowed up by creeping shadows, seemingly lost forever in the thickness of uncolour.
And standing in a knot that shrunk as fear pressed against them like a second, palpable darkness, Makers and Mates were mind-murmuring or outright open-mouth speaking of the Sages’ silence in their hour of direst need, for it seemed that no word had come out of the Domicile despite the frantic pleas for guidance, help, support.
In a way, this senseless disruption in the order of the world offered the three conspirators the ideal diversion – when the heavens themselves were bleeding into a vortex of nothingness, no one would care for a stupid old bat who had ended herself out of fear; they could carry her corpse to the Sacred River naked as a skinned goat’s and no one would spare a single glance; and the stony silence of the Circle wouldn’t hurt.
But as they laboriously turned their eyes away from the hole in the sky – surely so much exposure to uncolour was harmful to the Substance – and crept away from the crowd, Raddia heard a thought that had briefly entered her own mind and then been expelled as a needless burden of gloom uttered from the lips of an elderly Maker.
“The eye of a Ghost is upon us. Fate have mercy on us all.”
Like those of most Makers, Lorn and Navva’s cottage was situated further away from the Sacred River – for it was Mates who needed its beneficial presence most – and by then it had been almost entirely claimed by the slithering shadows, which Raddia’s glowstone was far too weak to dispel. All they could make out were vague shapes that seemed, against all reason, to be stealthily advancing towards them.
And as silence made one of their minds, Gallan and Raddia could feel not only Lorn’s desolation, but Navva’s despair as well, her horror of being drowned into the Sacred River like a cat in a sack, of her last moments being suffused not with peace but with the shameful insanity of panic. And then trepidation for the crime they were about to commit finally and brutally set in, and despite their wish to aid their devastated Maker, Gallan and Raddia couldn’t help thinking – and thus passing the thought on to Lorn – that if the Circle came out of its slumber and caught them in the act, even the fragile hope of redeeming themselves with tomorrow’s Surfacing rite would be gone.
It was because of this collective brooding, worsened by the growing murkiness, that they were so unprepared for the attack, quick and violent as an evil thought.
One moment they were dragging their steps through leaves and grass, and the next two beastly sounds erupted at once, a hostile growl and a retching – and suddenly Lorn was on the ground, cluthing his slit throat in a vain attempt to stop the river of blood that leaked through his fingers, while a few steps away, head lowered and knees bent in an attitude suggesting both fierce defence and ferocious enmity, stood a female Fault, naked save a sheepskin out of which her grimy udders spilled and swung, stinking of dung, and brandishing a blade darkened by Lorn’s blood.
The three of them stood in suspended motion, considering the enemy. You think it’s the Circle? Raddia asked Gallan. You think they knew, and sent this animal to dispatch him in the same way as Navva? Can’t say, Gallan replied. Maybe the Faults somehow got wind of what happened to one of their own, and decided to rebel against their masters.
However, it was clear that, even if she weren’t going to attack them as well, they must avenge their Maker’s murder; and one didn’t have to be a Sage to do that – Faults’ minds were as easy to bend and command as a lamb’s that strays from the fold.
Thus, looking straight into the eyes of the beast, Gallan and Raddia’s Substance leapt and filled her, ordering her will into submission and her blade-wielding hand to sink into the filthy flesh of her abdomen and cut, slice, eviscerate.
And the murderous Fault, unable to resist their mental sway, obeyed, falling to her knees and roaring with pain as coils of bloody gut sprung from the jagged wound across her belly like snakes; then she collapsed on her face, groaned, writhed, and died.
Then Gallan grabbed Raddia’s hand and pulled her away from the corpses.
“We have to leave at once and act as if none of this happened.”
“But Lorn and Navva? We can’t – ”
“We can and we must; their Substance is gone; we now have to protect our own.”
And so they hurried back to the sky-gazing throng, and thence, keeping their minds as blank as possible, to their cabin. They had gone completely unnoticed; no one had seen. Except the eye of the Ghost, Raddia thought. The second circle.