And suddenly hells filled the street.
No, not hells. Holes.
With a sound like tearing paper, they opened all around us, perfect circles of darkness. Some lay along the ground, some on the walls; some must’ve hung unsupported in midair. One of them opened right beneath the scrivener’s feet, practically the instant the last word left her lips. She didn’t have time to cry out before she fell into it and vanished. Another caught Kitr, who had turned to run to Madding’s side. It opened before her between one step and another, and she was gone. The racing dog cursed in Mekatish and darted around the first hole that opened at his feet, but then another opened above him. I saw his short fur stand on end, pulled upward, and then with a yelp he was sucked in as well.
Before I could react, Madding suddenly shoved me away from him, into the doorway of the house. Stumbling over the doorway’s raised step, I turned back, opening my mouth to speak—then saw the hole opening at his back. I felt the pull, its force powerful enough to jerk me forward a step even after I stopped.
No! I caught the door’s elaborate handle in one hand to brace myself and used that leverage to raise my walking stick, hoping Madding would be able to grab it. Madding, his eyes wide and teeth bared, strained toward me. The sound of jangling chimes was barely audible, sucked away by the hole.
He mouthed something I couldn’t hear. He ground his teeth, and I heard him in my head this time, in the manner of gods. GET INSIDE!
Then he flew backward, as if a great invisible hand had grabbed him around the waist and yanked. The hole vanished. He was gone.
I fumbled with the door handle, my breath wild and loud in my ears, my palms so sweaty that the stick slipped loose to clatter on the ground. I could hear no one else on the street; I was alone. Except for the remaining holes, which hovered all around me, darker than the black of my sight.
Then I got the door open and ran into the house, away from the holes, toward the clean, empty darkness where I was blind but where at least I knew what dangers I faced.
I got three steps into the house before the air tore behind me, and I flew backward off my feet, and a sound like trembling metal filled the world as I tumbled away.
7
“Girl in Darkness” (watercolor)
MY DREAMS HAVE BEEN more vivid lately. They told me that might happen, but still… I remembered something.
In the dream, I paint a picture. But as I lose myself in the colors of the sky and the mountains and the mushrooms that dwarf the mountains—this is a living world, full of strange flora and fungi; I can almost smell the fumes of its alien air—the door to my room opens and my mother comes in.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
And though I am still half lost in mountains and mushrooms, I have no choice but to pull myself back into this world, where I am just a sheltered blind girl whose mother wants what’s best for me, even if she and I do not agree on what that is.
“Painting,” I say, though this is obvious. My belly has clenched in defensive tension; I fear a lecture is coming.
She only sighs and comes closer, putting her hand on mine to let me know where she is. She is silent for a long while. Is she looking at the painting? I nibble my bottom lip, not quite daring to hope that she is, perhaps, trying to understand why I do what I do. She has never told me to stop, but I can taste her disapproval, as sour and heavy on my tongue as old, molding grapes. She has hinted at it verbally as well, in the past. Paint something useful, something pretty. Something that does not entrance viewers for hours on end. Something that would not attract the sharp, gleaming interest of the priests if they saw it. Something safe.
She says nothing this time, only stroking my braided hair, and at last I realize she is not thinking about me or my paintings at all. “What is it, Mama?” I ask.
“Nothing,” she says, very softly, and I realize that for the first time in my life, she has just lied to me.
My heart fills with dread. I don’t know why. Perhaps it is the whiff of fear that wafts from her, or the sorrow that underlies it, or simply the fact that my garrulous, cheerful mother is suddenly so quiet, so still.
So I lean against her and put my arms around her waist. She is trembling, unable to give me the comfort that I crave. I take what I can, and perhaps give a little of my own in return.
My father died a few weeks later.
* * *
I floated in numbing emptiness, screaming, unable to hear myself. When I clasped my hands together, I felt nothing, even when I dug in my nails. Opening my mouth, I sucked in another breath to scream again but felt no sensation of air moving over my tongue or filling my lungs. I knew that I did it. I willed my muscles to move and believed that they responded. But I could feel nothing.
Nothing but the terrible cold. It was bitter enough to be painful, or would have been if I could feel pain. If I had been able to stand, I might have fallen to the ground, too cold to do anything but shiver. If only there had been ground.
The mortal mind is not built for such things. I did not miss sight, but touch? Sound? Smell? I was used to those. I needed those. Was this how other people felt about blindness? No wonder they feared it so.
I contemplated going mad.
* * *
“Ree-child,” says my father, taking my hands. “Don’t rely on your magic. I know the temptation will be there. It’s good to see, isn’t it?”
I nod. He smiles.
“But the power comes from inside you,” he goes on. He opens one of my small hands and traces the whorling print of one fingertip. It tickles and I laugh. “If you use a lot of it, you’ll get tired. If you use it all… Ree-child, you could die.”
I frown in puzzlement. “It’s just magic.” Magic is light, color. Magic is a beautiful song—wonderful, but not a necessity of life. Not like food or water, or sleep, or blood.
“Yes. But it’s also part of you. An important part.” He smiles, and for the first time, I see how deeply the sadness has permeated him today. He seems lonely. “You have to understand. We’re not like other people.”
* * *
I cried out with my voice and my thoughts. Gods can hear the latter if a mortal concentrates hard enough—it’s how they hear prayers. There was no reply from Madding, or anyone else. Though I groped around, my hands encountered nothing. Even if he’d been there, right beside me, would I have known? I had no idea. I was so afraid.
* * *
“Feel,” says my father, guiding my hand. I hold a fat horsehair brush tipped with paint that stinks like vinegar. “Taste the scent on the air. Listen to the scrape of the brush. Then believe.”
“Believe… what?”
“What you expect to happen. What you want to exist. If you don’t control it, it will control you, Ree-child. Never forget that.”
* * *
I should have stayed in the house I should have left the city I should have seen the previt coming I should have left Shiny in the muck where I found him I should have stayed in Nimaro and never left.
* * *
“The paint is a door,” my father says.
* * *
I put out my hands and imagined that they shook.
* * *
“A door?” I ask.
“Yes. The power is in you, hidden, but the paint opens the way to that power, allowing you to bring some of it out onto the canvas. Or anywhere else you want to put it. As you grow older, you’ll find new ways to open the door. Painting is just the first method you’ve found.”
“Oh.” I consider this. “Does that mean I could sing my magic, like you?”
“Maybe. Do you like singing?”
“Not like I like painting. And my voice doesn’t sound good like yours.”
He chuckles. “I like your voice.”
“You like everything I do, Papa.” But my thoughts are turning, fascinated with the idea. “Does that mean I can do something besides make paintings? Like…” My child’s imagination cannot fathom the possibilities of magic
. There are no godlings in the world yet to show us what it can do. “Like turn a bunny into a bee? Or make flowers bloom?”
He is silent for a moment, and I sense his reluctance. He has never lied to me, not even when I ask questions he would rather not answer.
“I don’t know,” he says at last. “Sometimes when I sing, if I believe something will happen, it happens. And sometimes”—he hesitates, abruptly looks uneasy—“sometimes when I don’t sing, it happens, too. The song is the door, but belief is the key that unlocks it.”
I touch his face, trying to understand his discomfort. “What is it, Papa?”
He catches my hand and kisses it and smiles, but I have already felt it. He is, just a little, afraid. “Well, just think. What if you took a man and believed he was a rock? Something alive that you believed was something dead?”
I try to think about this, but I am too young. It sounds fun to me. He sighs and smiles and pats my hands.
* * *
I put out my hands, closed my eyes, and believed a world into being.
My hands ached to feel, and so I imagined thick, loamy soil. My feet ached to stand, so I put that soil under them, solid, hollow sounding when I stomped because of the air and life teeming within it. My lungs ached to breathe, and I inhaled air that was slightly cool, moist with dew. I breathed out and the warmth of my breath made vapor in the air. I could not see that, but I believed it was there. Just as I knew there would be light around me, as my mother had once described—misty morning light, from a pale, early-spring sun.
The darkness lingered, resistant.
Sun. Sun. SUN.
Warmth danced along my skin, driving away the aching cold. I sat back on my knees, drawing deep breaths and smelling fresh-turned dirt and feeling the glaze of light against my closed eyelids. I needed to hear something, so I decided there would be wind. A light morning breeze, gradually dispelling the fog. When the breeze came, stirring my hair to tickle my neck, I did not let myself feel amazement. That would lead to doubt. I could feel the fragility of the place around me, its inclination to be something else. Cold, endless dark—
“No,” I said quickly, and was pleased to hear my own voice. There was air now to carry it. “Warm spring air. A garden ready to be planted. Stay here.”
The world stayed. So I opened my eyes.
I could see.
And strangely, the scene around me was familiar. I sat in the terrace garden of my home village, where I had almost always been completely blind. Not much magic in Nimaro. The only time I had ever seen the village had been—
—the day my father died. The day of the Gray Lady’s birth. I had seen everything then.
I had re-created that day now, falling back on the memory of that single, magic-infused glimpse. Silvery midmorning mists shivered in the air. I remembered that the big, boxy shape on the other side of the garden was a house, though I could not tell if it was mine or the neighbors’ without smelling it or counting my steps. Prickly things near my feet danced in the breeze: grass. I had rebuilt everything.
Except people. I got to my feet, listening. In all my years in the village, I had never heard it so silent at this time of day. There were always small noises—birds, backyard goats, somebody’s newborn fussing. Here there was nothing.
Like ripples in water, I felt the space around me tremble.
“It’s home,” I whispered. “It’s home. Just early; nobody else is up yet. It’s real.”
The ripples ceased.
Real, yet terribly fragile. I was still in the dark place. All I’d done was create a sphere of sanity around myself, like a bubble. I would have to continue affirming its reality, believing in it, to keep it intact.
Trembling, I dropped to my knees again, pushing my fingers into the moist soil. Yes, that was better. Concentrate on the small things, the mundanities. I lifted a handful of earth to my nose, inhaled. My eyes could not be trusted, but the rest—yes. That I could do.
But I was tired suddenly, more tired than I should have been. As I squeezed the clod of dirt, I found my head nodding, my eyelids heavy. I hadn’t slept much, but that did not account for this. I was in a strange place, scared out of my mind. Fear alone should have had me too tense to sleep.
Before I could fathom this new mystery, there was another of those curious rippling shivers—and then agony sizzled behind my eyes. I cried out, arching backward and clapping dirty hands to my face, my concentration broken. Even as I screamed, I felt the false Nimaro bubble shatter around me, spinning away into nothingness as the sickening, empty dark rushed in.
And then—
I landed on my side on a solid surface, hard enough that the breath was jarred from my body.
“Well, here you are,” said a cool, male voice. Familiar, but I could not think. Hands touched me, turning me over and pushing my hair from my face. I tried to jerk away, but that jarred the racheting agony in my eyes, my head. I was too tired to scream.
“Is she all right?” That was a woman’s voice, somewhere beyond the man.
“I’m not certain.”
The words felt like godwords, slapping my ears. I clapped my hands over my ears and moaned, wishing they would all just be silent.
“This isn’t the usual disorientation.”
“Mmm, no. I think it’s some effect of her own magic. She used it to protect herself from my power. Fascinating.” He turned away from me, and I felt his smugness like a scrim of filth along my skin. “Your proof.”
“Indeed.” She sounded pleased as well.
At that point I passed out.
8
“Light Reveals” (encaustic on canvas)
I AWOKE SLOWLY, and in some pain.
I was lying down. Heavy blankets covered me, soft linen and scratchy wool. I listened for a while, breathing, assessing. I was in a smallish room; my breath sounded close, though not claustrophobically so. It smelled of spent candlewax, dust, me, and the World Tree.
The lattermost scent was very strong, stronger than I’d ever known the Tree to smell. The air was laden with its distinctive wood resins and the bright sharp greenscent of its foliage. The Tree did not lose its leaves in autumn—a fact for which we in the city below were deeply grateful—but it did shed damaged leaves whenever they occurred, and it replaced those just before the spring flowering. It tended to smell more strongly during that time, but for the scent to be this strong, I had to be closer than usual.
That was not the only unusual thing. I sat up slowly, wincing as I discovered that my whole left arm was sore. I examined it and found fresh bruises there, and also on my hip and ankle. My throat was so scratchy that it hurt when I tried to clear it. And my head ached dully in a single area, from the middle of my scalp right down into my head and forward to press against my eyes—
Then I remembered. The empty place. My false Nimaro. Shattering, falling, voices. Madding.
Where the hells was I?
The room was cool, though I could feel watery sunlight coming from my left. I shivered a little as I got out of the warm blankets, though I was wearing clothing—a simple sleeveless shift, loose drawstring pants. Comfortable, if not the best fit. There were slippers beside the cot, which I avoided for the moment. Easier to feel the floor if I left my feet bare.
I explored the room and discovered that I had been imprisoned.
As prisons went, it was nice. The cot had been soft and comfortable, the small table and chairs were well made, and there were thick rugs covering much of the wooden floor. A tiny room off the main one contained a toilet and a sink. Yet the door I found was solidly locked, and there was no keyhole on my side. The windows were unbarred but sealed shut. The glass was thick and heavy; I would not be able to break through it easily, and certainly not without making a great deal of noise.
And the air felt strange. Not as humid as I was used to. Thinner, somehow. Sounds did not carry as well. I clapped experimentally, but the echoes came back all wrong.
I jumped when the door’s lock t
urned, right on the heels of my thought. I was by the windows, so their solidity was suddenly comforting to me as I backed against them.
“Ah, you’re awake at last,” said a male voice I had never heard before. “Conveniently when I come to check on you myself, rather than sending an initiate. Hello.”
Senmite, but no city accent I was familiar with. In fact, he sounded like someone rich, his every enunciation precise, his language formal. I couldn’t tell more than that, since I didn’t talk to many rich people.
“Hello,” I said, or tried to say. My abused throat—from screaming in the empty place, I remembered now—let out a rusty squeak, and it hurt badly enough that I grimaced.
“Perhaps you shouldn’t talk.” The door closed behind him. Someone outside locked it. I jumped again at the sound of the latch. “Please, Eru Shoth, I mean you no harm. I imagine I can guess most of your questions, so if you’ll sit down, I’ll explain things.”
Eru Shoth? It had been so long since I’d heard the honorific that for a moment I didn’t recognize it. A Maro term of respect for a young woman. I was a bit old for it—generally it was used for girls under twenty—but that was all right; maybe he meant to flatter me. He didn’t sound Maro, however.
He waited where he was, patiently, until I finally moved to sit down on one of the chairs.
“That’s better,” he said, moving past me. Measured steps, solid but graceful. A large man, though not as large as Shiny. Old enough to know his body. He smelled of paper and fine cloth, and a bit of leather.
“Now. My name is Hado. I’m responsible for all new arrivals here, which for the moment consists solely of you and your friends. ‘Here,’ if you’re wondering, is the House of the Risen Sun. Have you heard of it?”
I frowned. The newly risen sun was one of the symbols of the Bright Father but was little used these days, since it was easily confused with the dawning sun of the Gray Lady. I had not heard anyone refer to the risen sun since my childhood, back in Nimaro.