Beneath Ceaseless Skies #230 Read online

  The sleigh stopped. We must have reached the palace. Some misguided retainer began to draw open the door.

  I squeezed his hand and leaned over to speak to that person. “You will keep distance until I am finished here. Then I will call you.” Not waiting for a reply I locked the door behind me again, then drew on my deepnames and warded us for good measure, so that those outside would not be able to overhear. “I should have done this earlier. Forgive me.”

  He nodded. “There is not much more.” He did not look shaken, just deeply in pain, but he spoke quietly. “She said I was a monster. She drew on her deepnames to strike me.”

  “And you overreacted.”

  “She’d always been so much stronger. Older. But on that day, after what happened, she was not. I should have realized that.” He took his hand out again and wrapped his arms around his torso. “My blow—my defense, if you will—it destroyed her deepnames. That’s it. That is my crime.”

  It was my turn to lean back and close my eyes. Deepnames were usually taken in adolescence, often at a time of great emotional turmoil. He must have just acquired his. “I am so sorry.”

  “And everything just... ended. Her heirship. My parents divorced. The Coastal Alliance broke down. My sister—she left him, later. I do not know what happened. Nobody talked to me.”

  “How is she doing now?” I asked.

  “She is a professor at the Mainland Katra University.”

  This did not answer my question. “The university that expelled you?”

  “They knew I injured Ulín. And then, my preferences in pleasure—I was too dangerous.”

  I shook my head in denial. You made yourself safe for me.

  “I want to reconcile. It is not possible. She does not want to talk, and if I insisted—if I insisted, I would end up like Ladder sending his failed assassins to your court.”

  Now it was my turn to look away. “What happened—the politics, your parents—what happened is not your fault. It is his fault.”

  “I could have controlled my reaction better. Maybe.” He looked dubious, and I was not sure at thirteen any person, a child, in sudden possession of such great might and such great hurt, would have been able to do so. But I saw that he judged himself, and that others had judged him as harshly.

  He said, “Every day I wish to undo it and every day I cannot.” And then, “I heard this, that Ladder’s students are often would-be suicides, or those whom Bird disdained for crimes both inadvertent and terrible—and I am one of those.”

  “Tajer. Please.”

  “When I fought the first assassin, I heard a melody,” he said. “It haunts me. Calls me to his court.”

  Oh yes. The pain of that was sudden and deep. He made music, a song he had denied to Bird, for those to follow in his steps. “You can resist it,” I said. “Your choices are your own.”

  He looked away. “I think your people are waiting.”

  “Thank you,” I whispered. Hoarse.

  He pushed at the door, then stopped, for I had not unlocked the magic that held it. Turned to me, as if weighing something. “It is hard to imagine you would want more now, but if you do—I will wait. Tonight.”

  I swallowed, then pulled down my wards and let myself be shepherded out of the carriage. Marvushi grinned at me, but then her face fell, seeing mine. I gave orders for both my comfort and his, then retired to take ablutions, to rest, and to think.

  * * *

  A treasury of trust

  When evening fell, I donned plain linen robes, the kind I wore that morning when I stood on the tiles, and I called for Marvushi to attend me. “I bid you go to him and bring him to my rooms,” I said. “Discreetly. Do whatever you need to do to persuade him.” Then I sent my other retainers away. Nihitu stood guard outside.

  I opened the chests I had prepared earlier in the day and laid what I needed on a low table. Then I dimmed all candlebulbs except a few and reclined on the bed to compose myself and to wait.

  Marvushi did not let me down, for soon I felt the Raker’s footsteps in the corridor, and the carved doors of my chambers were opened to admit him. He wore pants of bone-colored linen and an open vest of the same material, and the diamond net shone at his chest. His lip curled when he looked at me, desire mixed with a darker feeling. “I told you to come to me.”

  “My rooms are better equipped.” I gestured at the table. “I think I am ready for the knife.”

  His eyes devoured the feast I laid out for him, blades with bejeweled handles in the likeness of lions, dirks of dry ironthorn, plain but exquisite blades forged of finest steel by Stromha artisans, bone daggers with deepname-honed edges.

  He said, “I still did not say anything about knives.” But in his voice, I heard that hunger, the hunger that had made me fear, all those long centuries ago.

  He turned to contemplate me now, the air gone scorching and still. He frowned, one corner of his lip still tilted up, in a strange rictus of need and doubt. “But you said...”

  I did say. Not with knives. And he attended.

  I wondered whether to speak. Of broken things, and trust, of all my histories of blood that was scattered like rubies across the desert. Instead I said, simply, “Yes.”

  His right hand curled around the hilt of a short blade with the hand of bird’s eye maple, Stromha-made, impeccable in its balance and as simple as breath. He weighed it in his hand. Need and memory shook me as I forced myself to be calm.

  “You would give this to me,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “You would trust me.”

  “Please.” I said. Hurry. I would not be able to wait still for much longer.

  He sat on the bed and pushed me down on the cushions in one smooth motion. Then he straddled me. His left hand on my chest. My eyes followed the knife, the glint and shine of it, and suddenly I did not know if I would be able to do it, after all.

  “This is not about fear,” he said. “I do not need or want your fear.”

  I swallowed. “I do not know.”

  His hair, unbraided, cascaded over me, cocooned both of us in darkness. “We can stop now. Do something else. Do nothing. As you want.”

  I leaned back to contemplate him, the dark need boiling in him now, the effort of restraint, his vulnerability and mine. And then I breathed. For a long time. Until I was ready.

  I said, “I want you to open my skin.”

  His deepnames flared to life, a steely crown no longer cold but pinpricked in warmth, and he cut me down the chest, precisely and shallowly. It was no great wound, but blood welled from it, and he touched his thumb to that wound and brought it to his lips, and I savored it with him, this moment in which trust was the greatest need, this moment in which we were melded.

  He smiled then, a slow and secret smile, and brought his hand down. Power flared along his fingers, shaping itself into a structure I had shown him, all those days ago, in the honeycomb library. He healed the bleeding gash on my chest. Then he let me lie there, and breathe with it, as the enormity of what had just happened passed through me. My lips moved, but I could not quite speak.

  “Yes?” He said, the blade glinting in his hand as the candlebulbs I had not extinguished swam closer, giving us both the light.

  “Yes,” I croaked. “More.”

  The need in his eyes turned dark as he cut me and healed me again. Again. My body was the land and his cuts the naming grid, and the joy of it was the only geometry that existed. I do not know what I thought. You are nothing like Ladder. Yes. Like this. I devoured him with my gaze as he kept working, and the last vestiges of fear melted into a kind of heat that spread my power around him, like wings. An enormous, peaceful feeling that held us both suspended beyond the world.

  In the end he brought the bloody blade to his lips and kissed it, then said, “This is beautiful. You are beautiful. Though I confess that am not much for knives. I prefer to use power.”

  He put the knife down, cocking an eyebrow at me. But I was content. “Next time, m
y friend.” I pulled him to down to lie by me, and he did not protest, the light we had made banishing for that moment our shadows.

  * * *

  Move the eighth: and make a beacon of my pain

  A few days after that, Marvushi, who went by neutral language again, came to inform me about a delegation that had arrived from Niyaz to see me.

  “From Niyaz?” I frowned. What would anyone from Niyaz possibly want of me now, after the failed plot and the pain of my very own so-called student’s betrayal? But after a while I ordered myself dressed in the azure robes, I donned numerous long strings of diamond and carved opal and proceeded to the audience chambers. There I sat on the tumbleweed throne, Nihitu on my right side and Marvushi on the left, to await what the Ruler of Niyaz could possibly say to me. Surely it would be misguided to expect an apology, or even an offer of truce. More likely I would hear from him bluster well-decorated in flowery sentences. Just a week ago I had felt too tired for any of this, all too ready for the respite of my star before I passed into my next body; but now I waited without fatigue, my mind and senses alert. Upon my order, servants opened the pale limewood doors to admit the emissary.

  Emissaries. Nine people walked in, some in their thirties and forties, one startlingly young; all dressed in women’s garments. The leader was middle-aged and stout of body. Their dress of dark blue with a design of enormous roses was of a fine yet practical cut. Their hair, long and wavy, was pinned up in a golden lizard-shaped hairstick. Others wore their hair braided and over the left shoulder, which had long been the mark of women rebels, of Laaguti Birdwing, and of Urwaru, when she first came to me. I squinted my eyes, expecting every single one of them to shine with exceptional power. In that I was mistaken. Some did not even have deepnames. Others had long names, a single three-syllable, even a single five-syllable. Only the very young person, short and dressed in plain gray and hiding behind the leader, had three deepnames.

  I motioned them to kneel on a new reception carpet traded from beyond the Mountain Veils to the east and thus immune, I hoped, from even a hint of politics.

  They bowed to me again and sat in a triangular formation of one, three, and five in a row, the person with three deepnames hidden firmly behind the leader’s broad back.

  The leader said, “Greetings and gratitude, Sovereign of the Sands, for agreeing to see us without violence. I am Laaguti, and these are my companions, these named strong women of Niyaz.”

  “Laaguti,” I said. “An ancient name.” A name with a long history here in Che Mazri, a history of being refused admittance, for offering this admittance once had caused a war. And how much more so now, after that failed assassination? “What do you seek here, knowing the history of that name and of my realm?”

  The leader grimaced. “All of us had been imprisoned under the previous ruler, and all of us sought to escape. Many of us suffered nameloss or partial nameloss, and violence beyond nameloss. A new ruler arises in Niyaz, and no sovereign in the land would offer us shelter. But it is more than shelter we seek. We beg now to be admitted to the University on the Tiles, to learn what has long been denied to women in the springflower city of Niyaz.”

  Again they bowed to me.

  I said, though I already knew the answer, “I would have your name. Not the one you have taken, but the one you gave to the ruler of Niyaz as he had imprisoned you.” When he so handily interrogated you for your customs, your desires, your words, to pass on to his agent.

  She looked at me, this stout woman with no adornment save a hairstick and a trace of kohl at her eyes, this woman who, I believed, had traversed the desert in an arduous and perilous journey to come to me after she managed—in how many unsuccessful attempts?—to escape her imprisonment.

  I held her gaze. And into that gaze she said, “I am Nadda Urwaru Rihzal.”

  “Of course you are.” Of course she would be. She would probably be genuine, and some of her companions would be genuine, and some of them would be spies. Perhaps even an assassin. If I sent her away, she would be killed by that assassin, and I would have done the work of eliminating a thorn in my enemy’s side. The killing would surely be blamed on me, to scare other powerful women who wished to come to my school. If I accepted her, it would yield more betrayal, and, in due time, when the new Niyazi ruler was ready, perhaps a pretext for war.

  I looked around and held the gaze of every woman there. “Every ruler of Niyaz feels himself cunning. Feels like he is inventing something.” I turned to the leader again. “Nadda Urwaru Rihzal, in this you are only a pawn.”

  She nodded. “To the ruler of Niyaz, I have always and ever been a pawn. You will decide what I could become for you, Sovereign of the Sands.”

  I leaned back against the cushions and steepled my hands. Certainly in the land, mistrust had grown like weeds between the shining lines of the grid—and I did not need this trouble, especially now, or ever.

  Marvushi leaned over to whisper in my ear. “My teacher, a third solution presents itself.”

  I raised an eyebrow, urging them on.

  “You could send them to another school. All of them are far enough from here. Those desperate for knowledge will persevere, while the spies will despair.”

  I grunted. Certainly a solution, with more privation for those who had suffered, and still discouraging to any of my would-be Niyazi students. And who was to say that in another land these refugees would be accepted? Certainly Mainland Katra University imposed strict rules, and so did the Lainish Royal Academy, and the Great Mountain University of Keshet... all of them too grand to live without rules, unlike my University on the Tiles, where the only requirement for learning was desire.

  “Thank you for your counsel,” I said to Marvushi. I had already chosen to risk a conflict with Niyaz when I began admitting these students. After Urwaru’s betrayal, I doubted the new ruler of Niyaz expected me to continue doing so. And if I did, this new Urwaru would, perhaps, betray me again. Or she could be earnest, a woman of great power and determination and of great hurt, who sought to study with me, like so many named strong before her.

  I let the corner of my mouth curve up in a copy of the Raker’s smile. “Nadda Urwaru Rihzal, a spy of that name has been recently apprehended in the palace. If you are genuine, then I would let you choose some among your people to deliver the spy back to Niyaz, along with my letter.”

  She closed her eyes, absorbing the meaning of my words, how she had been used, an offer to rid her of spies. The other women sat still. Some too still. “And the rest of us?”

  “The rest of you will have gained admission. Provisional admission. If you are a pawn, then it is now your choice whether to remain so, Nadda Urwaru Rihzal.” After my time with the Raker, I felt more reluctant than ever to banish students, however much I might distrust them. And I admit I was curious to learn more about nameloss, if these women would be willing to share their past.

  Urwaru bowed to me, and her companions as well. After they filed out under the watchful eyes of Nihitu, Marvushi leaned over again. “It’s too bad about the other schools. I was going to offer to accompany them. I admit I am curious about the academies in other lands, what one can study there...”

  I felt a pang in my stomach. To lose Marvushi so soon after Urwaru’s betrayal would hurt me. Yet, it was also a nature of students to leave—sometimes forever, sometimes only to assuage their need for knowledge and yet more growth, and I, having no desire to stifle or overpower my students, had learned to trust that need.

  I smiled at them. “If you wish to travel, then I might have a mission for you.”

  “My teacher?” Curiosity mingled in Marvushi’s voice with a kind of glee.

  “Not so speedily. Do you know about the First Ones, and the naming grid of the land, and how it may be maintained?”

  Marvushi nodded. “I do.”

  I got to my feet and motioned them to follow, away from the audience chambers and towards the underground spaces of my library. “Then let me teach you of star-death, a
nd in particular, that of the Katran Mouse-star, of which detailed records are kept only at the Mainland Katra University...”

  They followed in my footsteps, grinning all the way.

  * * *

  All the missing miscounted stars

  Days extended into weeks. In waking hours I sat in counsel with my people while the Raker attended classes or pored over the books in my library. At night we made fire and light.

  As the time progressed he read more and more about Ladder and his court. He had heard that melody and it haunted him, just as I had, those long centuries ago.

  I asked him about it at last, and he said, “It calls me to traverse the desert until I come to the court of sandstone terraces, to gaze upon his students wearing white and test the might of the Orphan.”

  “You can resist that call,” I said again, uneasy and in pain. “Like you resisted Ranra.” Of her, no shadow had been seen. I suspected that Tajer knew something of her fate, but he would not say.

  “You knew that she accompanied me,” he said. “Yet you kept silent. Why is that?”

  I swallowed. “I knew. And yet I urged her to reveal it to you herself. I hoped she would change her path and make a better decision.”

  “I, too, will make my own decision.”

  I inclined my head to him. “Of course. It is your choice. Yet, I would rather not see you forced into a shape not your choosing. That is why I revealed her presence to you in the end.”

  He nodded. “I can resist. And yet I wish to know more. To walk that path. To look upon the Orphan.” I saw a hunger in his face, deeper than the words he had spoken to me. “I hear the song. When I look to the east I also see a light.”

  “The Headmaster holds a candle to light the way.”

  “Its color is that of your star.” He turned back to the books, not waiting for my reply.

  I did not try to dissuade him when he made his mind to go.