“My friend,” Ym whispered, “I believe I am going to need your help.”
“What?” the urchin said.
“Nothing,” Ym replied, reaching into the drawer of his table. The light spilling out was just from five diamond chips. Every urchin who had come to him had seen those. So far, Ym had been robbed of them only twice.
He dug more deeply, unfolding a hidden compartment in the drawer and taking a more powerful sphere—a broam—from there, covering its light quickly in his hand while reaching for some antiseptic with the other hand.
The medicine wasn’t going to be enough, not with the boy unable to stay off his feet. Lying in bed for weeks to heal, constantly applying expensive medication? Impossible for an urchin fighting for food each day.
Ym brought his hands back, sphere tucked inside of one. Poor child. It must hurt something fierce. The boy probably ought to have been laid out in bed, feverish, but every urchin knew to chew ridgebark to stay alert and awake longer than they should.
Nearby, the sparkling light spren peeked out from underneath a stack of leather squares. Ym applied the medication, then set it aside and lifted the boy’s foot, humming softly.
The glow in Ym’s other hand vanished.
The rotspren fled from the wound.
When Ym removed his hand, the cut had scabbed over, the color returning to normal, the signs of infection gone. So far, Ym had used this ability only a handful of times, and had always disguised it as medicine. It was unlike anything he had ever heard of. Perhaps that was why he had been given it—so the cosmere could experience it.
“Hey,” the boy said, “that feels a lot better.”
“I’m glad,” Ym said, returning the sphere and the medicine to his drawer. The spren had retreated. “Let us see if I have something that fits you.”
He began fitting shoes. Normally, after fitting, he’d send the patron away and craft a perfect set of shoes just for them. For this child, unfortunately, he’d have to use shoes he’d already made. He’d had too many urchins never return for their pair of shoes, leaving him to fret and wonder. Had something happened to them? Had they simply forgotten? Or had their natural suspicion gotten the better of them?
Fortunately, he had several good, sturdy pairs that might fit this boy. I need more treated hogshide, he thought, making a note. Children would not properly care for shoes. He needed leather that would age well even if unattended.
“You’re really gonna give me a pair of shoes,” the urchin said. “For nothin’?”
“Nothing but your story,” Ym said, slipping another testing shoe onto the boy’s foot. He’d given up on trying to train urchins to wear socks.
“Why?”
“Because,” Ym said, “you and I are One.”
“One what?”
“One being,” Ym said. He set aside that shoe and got out another. “Long ago, there was only One. One knew everything, but had experienced nothing. And so, One became many—us, people. The One, who is both male and female, did so to experience all things.”
“One. You mean God?”
“If you wish to say it that way,” Ym said. “But it is not completely true. I accept no god. You should accept no god. We are Iriali, and part of the Long Trail, of which this is the Fourth Land.”
“You sound like a priest.”
“Accept no priests either,” Ym said. “Those are from other lands, come to preach to us. Iriali need no preaching, only experience. As each experience is different, it brings completeness. Eventually, all will be gathered back in—when the Seventh Land is attained—and we will once again become One.”
“So you an’ me . . .” the urchin said. “Are the same?”
“Yes. Two minds of a single being experiencing different lives.”
“That’s stupid.”
“It is simply a matter of perspective,” Ym said, dusting the boy’s feet with powder and slipping back on a pair of the test shoes. “Please walk on those for a moment.”
The boy gave him a strange look, but obeyed, trying a few steps. He didn’t limp any longer.
“Perspective,” Ym said, holding up his hand and wiggling his fingers. “From very close up, the fingers on a hand might seem individual and alone. Indeed, the thumb might think it has very little in common with the pinky. But with proper perspective, it is realized that the fingers are part of something much larger. That, indeed, they are One.”
The urchin frowned. Some of that had probably been beyond him. I need to speak more simply, and—
“Why do you get to be the finger with the expensive ring,” the boy said, pacing back the other direction, “while I gotta be the pinky with the broken fingernail?”
Ym smiled. “I know it sounds unfair, but there can be no unfairness, as we are all the same in the end. Besides, I didn’t always have this shop.”
“You didn’t?”
“No. I think you’d be surprised at where I came from. Please sit back down.”
The boy settled down. “That medicine works real well. Real, real well.”
Ym slipped off the shoes, using the powder—which had rubbed off in places—to judge how the shoe fit. He fished out a pair of premade shoes, then worked at them for a moment, flexing them in his hands. He’d want a cushion on the bottom for the wounded foot, but something that would tear off after a few weeks, once the wound was healed. . . .
“The things you’re talking about,” the boy said. “They sound dumb to me. I mean, if we’re all the same person, shouldn’t everyone know this already?”
“As One, we knew truth,” Ym said, “but as many, we need ignorance. We exist in variety to experience all kinds of thought. That means some of us must know and others must not—just like some must be rich, and others must be poor.” He worked the shoe a moment longer. “More people did know this, once. It’s not talked about as much as it should be. Here, let’s see if these fit right.”
He handed the boy the shoes, who put them on and tied the laces.
“Your life might be unpleasant—” Ym began.
“Unpleasant?”
“All right. Downright awful. But it will get better, young one. I promise it.”
“I thought,” the boy said, stamping his good foot to test the shoes, “that you were gonna tell me that life is awful, but it all don’t matter in the end, ’cuz we’re going the same place.”
“That’s true,” Ym said, “but isn’t very comforting right now, is it?”
“Nope.”
Ym turned back to his worktable. “Try not to walk on that wounded foot too much, if you can help it.”
The urchin strode to the door with a sudden urgency, as if eager to get away before Ym changed his mind and took back the shoes. He did stop at the doorway, though.
“If we’re all just the same person trying out different lives,” the boy said, “you don’t need to give away shoes. ’Cuz it don’t matter.”
“You wouldn’t hit yourself in the face, would you? If I make your life better, I make my own better.”
“That’s crazy talk,” the boy said. “I think you’re just a nice person.” He ducked out, not speaking another word.
Ym smiled, shaking his head. Eventually, he went back to work on his last. The spren peeked out again.
“Thank you,” Ym said. “For your help.” He didn’t know why he could do what he did, but he knew the spren was involved.
“He’s still here,” the spren whispered.
Ym looked up toward the doorway out onto the night street. The urchin was there?
Something rustled behind Ym.
He jumped, spinning. The workroom was a place of dark corners and cubbies. Had he perhaps heard a rat?
Why was the door into the back room—where Ym slept—open? He usually left that closed.
A shadow moved in the blackness back there.
“If you’ve come for the spheres,” Ym said, trembling, “I have only the five chips here.”
More rustling. The shadow separated
itself from the darkness, resolving into a man with dark, Makabaki skin—all save for a pale crescent on his cheek. He wore black and silver, a uniform, but not one from any military that Ym recognized. Thick gloves, with stiff cuffs at the back.
“I had to look very hard,” the man said, “to discover your indiscretion.”
“I . . .” Ym stammered. “Just . . . five chips . . .”
“You have lived a clean life, since your youth as a carouser,” the man said, his voice even. “A young man of means who drank and partied away what his parents left him. That is not illegal. Murder, however, is.”
Ym sank down onto his stool. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know it would kill her.”
“Poison delivered,” the man said, stepping into the room, “in the form of a bottle of wine.”
“They told me the vintage itself was the sign!” Ym said. “That she’d know the message was from them, and that it meant she would need to pay! I was desperate for money. To eat, you see. Those on the streets are not kind . . .”
“You were an accomplice to murder,” the man said, pulling his gloves on more tightly, first one hand, then the other. He spoke with such a stark lack of emotion, he could have been conversing about the weather.
“I didn’t know . . .” Ym pled.
“You are guilty nonetheless.” The man reached his hand to the side, and a weapon formed from mist there, then fell into his hand.
A Shardblade? What kind of constable of the law was this? Ym stared at that wondrous, silvery Blade.
Then he ran.
It appeared that he still had useful instincts from his time on the streets. He managed to fling a stack of leather toward the man and duck the Blade as it swung for him. Ym scrambled out onto the dark street and charged away, shouting. Perhaps someone would hear. Perhaps someone would help.
Nobody heard.
Nobody helped.
Ym was an old man now. By the time he reached the first cross street, he was gasping for air. He stopped beside the old barber shop, dark inside, door locked. The little spren moved along beside him, a shimmering light that sprayed outward in a circle. Beautiful.
“I guess,” Ym said, panting, “it is . . . my time. May One . . . find this memory . . . pleasing.”
Footsteps slapped on the street behind, getting closer.
“No,” the spren whispered. “Light!”
Ym dug in his pocket and pulled out a sphere. Could he use it, somehow, to—
The constable’s shoulder slammed Ym against the wall of the barber shop. Ym groaned, dropping the sphere.
The man in silver spun him around. He looked like a shade in the night, a silhouette against the black sky.
“It was forty years ago,” Ym whispered.
“Justice does not expire.”
The man shoved the Shardblade through Ym’s chest.
Experience ended.
Rysn liked to pretend that her pot of Shin grass was not stupid, but merely contemplative. She sat near the prow of her catamaran, holding the pot in her lap. The otherwise still surface of the Reshi Sea rippled from the paddling of the guide behind her. The warm, damp air made beads of sweat form on Rysn’s brow and neck.
It was probably going to rain again. Precipitation here on the sea was the worst kind—not mighty or impressive like a highstorm, not even insistent like an ordinary shower. Here, it was just a misting haze, more than a fog but less than a drizzle. Enough to ruin hair, makeup, clothing—indeed, every element of a careful young woman’s efforts to present a suitable face for trading.
Rysn shifted the pot in her lap. She’d named the grass Tyvnk. Sullen. Her babsk had laughed at the name. He understood. In naming the grass, she acknowledged that he was right and she had been wrong; his trade with the Shin people last year had been exceptionally profitable.
Rysn chose not to be sullen at being proven so clearly wrong. She’d let her plant be sullen instead.
They’d traversed these waters for two days now, and then only after waiting at port for weeks until the right time between highstorms for a trip onto the nearly enclosed sea. Today, the waters were shockingly still. Almost as serene as those of the Purelake.
Vstim himself rode two boats over in their irregular flotilla. Paddled by new parshmen, the sixteen sleek catamarans were laden with goods that had been purchased with the profits of their last expedition. Vstim was still resting in the back of his boat. He looked like little more than another bundle of cloth, almost indistinguishable from the sacks of goods.
He would be fine. People got sick. It happened, but he would become well again.
And the blood you saw on his handkerchief?
She suppressed the thought and pointedly turned around in her seat, shifting Tyvnk to the crook of her left arm. She kept the pot very clean. That soil stuff the grass needed in order to live was even worse than crem, and it had a proclivity for ruining clothing.
Gu, the flotilla’s guide, rode in her own boat, just behind her. He looked a lot like a Purelaker with those long limbs, the leathery skin, and dark hair. Every Purelaker she’d met, however, had cared deeply about those gods of theirs. She doubted Gu had ever cared about anything.
That included getting them to their destination in a timely manner.
“You said we were near,” she said to him.
“Oh, we are,” he said, lifting his oar and then slipping it back down into the water. “Soon, now.” He spoke Thaylen rather well, which was why he’d been hired. It certainly wasn’t for his punctuality.
“Define ‘soon,’” Rysn said.
“Define . . .”
“What do you mean by ‘soon’?”
“Soon. Today, maybe.”
Maybe. Delightful.
Gu continued to paddle, only doing so on one side of the boat, yet somehow keeping them from going in circles. At the rear of Rysn’s boat, Kylrm—head of their guards—played with her parasol, opening it and closing it again. He seemed to consider it a wondrous invention, though they’d been popular in Thaylenah for ages now.
Shows how rarely Vstim’s workers get back to civilization. Another cheerful thought. Well, she’d apprenticed under Vstim wanting to travel to exotic places, and exotic this was. True, she’d expected cosmopolitan and exotic to go hand in hand. If she’d had half a wit—which she wasn’t sure she did, these days—she’d have realized that the really successful traders weren’t the ones who went where everyone else wanted to go.
“Hard,” Gu said, still paddling with his lethargic pace. “Patterns are off, these days. The gods do not walk where they always should. We shall find her. Yes, we shall.”
Rysn stifled a sigh and turned forward. With Vstim incapacitated again, she was in charge of leading the flotilla. She wished she knew where she was leading it—or even knew how to find their destination.
That was the trouble with islands that moved.
The boats glided past a shoal of branches breaking the sea’s surface. Encouraged by the wind, gentle waves lapped against the stiff branches, which reached out of the waters like the fingers of drowning men. The sea was deeper than the Purelake, with its bafflingly shallow waters. Those trees would be dozens of feet tall at the very least, with bark of stone. Gu called them i-nah, which apparently meant bad. They could slice up a boat’s hull.
Sometimes they’d pass branches hiding just beneath the glassy surface, almost invisible. She didn’t know how Gu knew to steer clear of them. In this, as in so much else, they just had to trust him. What would they do if he led them into an ambush out here on these silent waters? Suddenly, she felt very glad that Vstim had ordered their guards to monitor his fabrial that showed if people were drawing near. It—
Land.
Rysn stood up in the catamaran, making it rock precariously. There was something ahead, a distant dark line.
“Ah,” Gu said. “See? Soon.”
Rysn remained standing, waving for her parasol when a sprinkle of rain started to fall. The parasol barely helped, though
it was waxed to double as an umbrella. In her excitement, she hardly gave it—or her increasingly frizzy hair—a thought. Finally.
The island was much bigger than she’d expected. She’d imagined it to be like a very large boat, not this towering rock formation jutting from the waters like a boulder in a field. It was different from other islands she’d seen; there didn’t seem to be any beach, and it wasn’t flat and low, but mountainous. Shouldn’t the sides and top have eroded over time?
“It’s so green,” Rysn said as they drew closer.
“The Tai-na is a good place to grow,” Gu said. “Good place to live. Except when it’s at war.”
“When two islands get too close,” Rysn said. She’d read of this in preparation, though there were not many scholars who cared enough about the Reshi to write of them. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of these moving islands floated in the sea. The people on them lived simple lives, interpreting the movements of the islands as divine will.
“Not always,” Gu said, chuckling. “Sometimes close Tai-na is good. Sometimes bad.”
“What determines?” Rysn asked.
“Why, the Tai-na itself.”
“The island decides,” Rysn said flatly, humoring him. Primitives. What was her babsk expecting to gain by trading here? “How can an island—”
Then the island ahead of them moved.
Not in the drifting way she’d imagined. The island’s very shape changed, stones twisting and undulating, a huge section of rock rising in a motion that seemed lethargic until one appreciated the grand scale.
Rysn sat down with a plop, her eyes wide. The rock—the leg—lifted, streaming water like rainfall. It lurched forward, then crashed back down into the sea with incredible force.
The Tai-na, the gods of the Reshi Isles, were greatshells.
This was the largest beast she’d ever seen, or ever heard of. Big enough to make mythological monsters like the chasmfiends of distant Natanatan seem like pebbles in comparison!
“Why didn’t anyone tell me?” she demanded, looking back at the boat’s other two occupants. Surely Kylrm at least should have said something.
“Is better to see,” Gu said, paddling with his usual relaxed posture. She did not much care for his smirk.