“There’s nothing at all like this in Atlua, is there?” she asked.
“Nope,” said Puk, his stalks still focused on the leather ceiling. “Not even close. Pretty much all of eastern Atlua is a forest, except for where some cities are built, of course. It’s a little sparser in the west and southwest, where the land starts to curve and become Gillus, but still there’s a ton of green. Not like here, where there’s just nothing for miles and miles and then suddenly a fucking skull that’s bigger than any building I’ve ever seen back home.”
“Do you think any aeons ever lived up there?”
“I mean, probably, right?” he said. “You’d have to assume. Seroo couldn’t have been the only one. Or maybe it was the one true god, who knows? My guess is that there’s one still alive in the ocean over in the west. Or it’s dead and idiots are still sacrificing to it every spring for no reason. That’s probably more likely.”
Kali imagined a great beast breaking the surface of the water, waves cascading off its glimmering wet flesh as it devoured poor sacrifices pushed over cliff edges.
Whether there was a living creature there or not (perhaps a relative of the dead aeon Gregori claimed had been found at the bottom of the sea?), she was glad Herrilock wasn’t forced to contend with any threats of that size. It was a good thing Seroo had been dead for centuries, otherwise it could stomp out all life merely by traipsing around without even realizing it was doing any harm.
“You gonna miss anything from home?” Puk then asked.
The question caught her off guard. She pondered it for a moment, not wanting to sound either too sentimental or uncaring.
She answered, “The warmth.”
“You ain’t gonna be hard-pressed for warmth out here,” Puk told her, wiping moisture from his face.
“I mean the comfort of being home,” she clarified. “I’m sure you know how it is being home. Everything feels safer, your troubles seem less urgent and terrible. Sometimes it feels like all your responsibilities wash away and you can just relax. Just be happy.”
Puk grunted. “Not sure I can relate,” he said. “My parents were fine, but, uh…I would call ‘home’ a stressful environment for sure.”
His confession saddened her. She couldn’t comprehend going back to the inn and not being enveloped in its comforts. Even though she constantly kept herself busy with her work, being home put her more at ease.
“And besides, if home is the only place you’re happy, then I’ll give you some advice: it might not be a faif thing to do, but you should really give alcohol a shot.”
Kali wondered if that bit of advice might have originated with his father Doro.
“Is there anything you miss about your home?” she asked him.
He didn’t need to take a moment to consider his answer. “Nope,” he said. “I miss Atlua, sure, but not home. I’m glad to be outta there.”
They pressed on in silence. Kali trailed a few steps behind Puk despite his shorter stride.
She reached her hand into the knapsack slung over her shoulder, sliding it into the inner pocket where she kept her money and the key to her bedroom back at the inn. She grasped the key, the coolness of the metal coursing through her fingertips, and she thought of the warmth of her home.
- -
Puk’s devotion to the Waranex Church had forever wavered.
It was never something he had been interested in himself, purely something forced upon him by his parents. His mother Mip and his fathers Grut and Brek, in particular. It was no wonder that Doro had no ties to the church, and Nork was largely indifferent to both the church and Puk.
Mip, Grut, and Brek surely wished that Doro was similarly indifferent toward Puk, but alas, the man’s influence had seeped in. He had been considered no more than a necessity in mating for Mip and the others, but Doro had always been eager to have a child.
Puk dutifully attended sermons with his three devout parents, as well as the myriad community functions the church organized each month. Those were always his favorite part of being ingratiated into the church, as he loved filling up on the free food prepared by the Anures and other churchgoers.
Their faith believed in the Ustrels’ creation of the world’s living species, just as the jeornish believed, though in a more abstract sense. They did not believe in the ancient Ustrel war against the Asrani (a subject Puk knew little about), and actually did not believe the Ustrels were physical beings at all.
Waranex Anures preached that Ustrels were metaphysical beings that existed in the aether, flitting between the fabric of the world, breathing life into all that existed in Ustlia: its peoples, its animals, its plants. They therefore believed that when jeornish mages casted magic, they were not drawing on ancient powers bestowed on them by their ancestors; they were harnessing the Ustrels themselves, which were manifesting in reality as different forms of magic. That was why magic was capable of such varied and tremendous powers. It was the Ustrels being channeled into their world.
It was important for followers of the faith to take time each week to thank the Ustrels for all they shared with the world, and to grant some of their power back to them in return.
That was what Puk always found silly about the whole thing. His young mind kept poking holes in the practice every time his parents made him enter the local church’s Spiral.
If the Ustrels granted him life, why would they want or need it back?
If they were sapping life from him, was he slowly dying each time he entered a Spiral?
If the Ustrels were giving him life, and he was giving it back, and then they were giving it back again, what was the point of the whole thing?
There were never any satisfactory answers from any Anures he inquired about this. Only vague replies and recited scriptures that by now he had long forgotten. Empty justifications that left his head no sooner than they had entered.
But he had entered the Spiral anyway, to appease his mother, and always came out feeling refreshed, if not mildly annoyed.
Puk and Kali had been walking down the Ribroad, with nothing but blazing sands stretching out endlessly on either side of them, for close to an hour. In the distance, Puk spied a large stone jutting out from the earth outside the bone structure encasing them. It was one of the Spirals that Anure Rahk had mentioned lining the Ribroad.
The structure was built exactly like the one in Trillowan and the others scattered all over his homeland. It was one huge piece of stone, only wide enough to fit one person inside, but reaching into the sky four or five times the height of a typical qarm. It was a largely unremarkable piece of stone, with no fancy adornments of any sort aside from the Ustrel symbol for “Rest” carved above the archway that allowed entry into the stone tomb.
Custom dictated that traveling qarms stop in every Spiral they found. Releasing one’s self to the Ustrels was meant to show gratitude and humility and invite good luck and safety on their journey.
It had been a long while since Puk last entered a Spiral. He definitely hadn’t seen one since arriving in Herrilock, and there had been a few he ignored in Atlua, which had caused a pang of guilt with each instance.
Well…
He was heading toward a reunion with a fiery man who he’d capsized, and he was also running low on his precious fire-spit, so Puk thought that maybe making a quick offer to the Ustrels wouldn’t hurt.
“Do you mind if we stop there?” he asked, pointing ahead at the Spiral growing steadily closer.
Kali seemed surprised by the request, but she said they were making great time and it shouldn’t be a problem.
It took another ten hot minutes to reach the structure, and when they did, Kali positioned herself on the ground with her back against one of the road’s colossal bones.
The azure curtain covering the Spiral’s entryway was drawn, indicating that it was unoccupied. Puk slipped into the stone and yanked the curtain closed, cutting himself off from the outside world.
He instantly began to feel the stone’s cool
ing effect that Anure Rahk boasted about back in the city. It emanated off the rock, and when Puk pressed his palms to the blank stone in front of him, he moaned in relief.
The desert heat was bad enough under the Ribroad’s shade, so he didn’t know how he would fare in the open desert the following day. He wanted a black mage present to conjure a mass of water to drop on his head every ten minutes.
With his palms still pressed to the stone, Puk retracted his stalks and closed his eyes, bringing them closer to his head. He exhaled loudly, the air blasting through his nostrils and resounding through the small chamber.
Even as a child, when he had been more well-versed in the church’s teachings, he never knew what to say or think in the Spirals. It was an awkward experience, going in for ten minutes while his parents waited outside. Now he had Kali waiting on him in their stead.
Help me get through this, he thought, feeling foolish. There was no one around to witness what he was doing, no way for anyone to read his thoughts, and yet he was embarrassed by them.
He continued.
Let my small, shitty body not shut down while I try to cross this fucking desert. I want to get back across the sea.
Puk caught himself making one appeal after another, which he was fully aware was not the purpose of a Spiral. He couldn’t stop himself from internally vocalizing these wishes. It had been a long time since he had felt good or safe or whole, and he wanted to be encased in the Spiral’s cool embrace and never let go.
Thank you for cooling me down, he thought stupidly. Thank you for providing me with an opportunity to go back home. Thank you for the fire-spit in my bag.
The last one had slipped in by accident, but it was truly something he was thankful for.
He tried to recall the proper recitation for ending one’s time in a Spiral. No doubt he fumbled a lot of the correct terms and phrases, but he thought it was a noble attempt:
“Thank you for all, for you are all; all you are has let us prosper. I offer what I can back to you, to share with others.”
And then he added, Oh, and let Voya be alive.
Puk extended his eyestalks as his eyes fluttered open. He took one last deep breath and released it, then left the comforting cool of the Spiral.
Kali was going to town on an itch on her knee when he emerged. She looked up at him and said, “Oh, I thought that would take longer.”
“Nah,” he said, lifting his backpack up off the ground. “You ready to go?” She nodded and gathered her things.
As they continued down the road, perspiration already building on Puk’s watery-blue skin, he couldn’t help but chuckle at what he’d said back in the Spiral.
‘Thank you for all, for you are all.’ Who comes up with this shit?
He stopped walking for a second to reach into his bag and extract a pouch of nuts, which he merrily munched while he jogged to catch up to his new friend.
CHAPTER VII
A TRADE
Kali wanted to swear, and so she swore.
Half an hour earlier, they had arrived at the first travelers’ outpost along the Ribroad. She was sitting at a table in the dining area while Puk was still settling into their room upstairs. The place was lively, as it always was. The two Ribroad outposts were consistently the most occupied, since it was one of the most well-traveled roads in the country.
Kali wanted to swear because as she sat at the uneven table, nursing her cloudy cup of water, she realized that she had royally screwed up in the planning stage of their journey.
It was going to take them, at minimum, half a day’s travel to reach the area where her sister’s bestiary claimed the cordols would be. Once they reached that location, they would then have to spend time searching for the animals, however long that took, plus however much time it took acquiring the eggs.
There was no way they could realistically get back to the outpost before nightfall, and trudging through the dunes in the severe cold would not be a great situation for either of them.
Why the hell did I not think of this sooner? she berated herself, taking another sip of the water, which tasted slightly off. But it was good enough after a long, hot day.
She wracked her brain for a solution.
Leaving earlier in the morning would yield the same result of walking in the bitter cold for several hours, which would likely wear them out by the time they reached their destination, so that was out.
The closest town she could think of was Toralas, on a small peninsula jutting out from the coast. It was a notoriously run-down city, one that tourists and travelers tended to specifically avoid if at all possible, but that meant one advantage would be cheap rates at the local inn.
She tried to conjure her most accurate mental map of Herrilock, attempting to determine whether Toralas was a shorter distance than simply returning to the outpost. She wasn’t sure. If it was closer, it was by a negligible amount, which would not be felt in the cold.
Perhaps it was a sign.
She’d had doubts about the entire operation right from the start, not only ethically speaking but from a purely logistical standpoint. Now here was another bump in the road in need of a speedy solution.
Maybe the answer was to call it quits and return home, explain to her parents that the opportunity just wasn’t right after all. She’d have to eat the cost of the supplies she had bought Puk, since he obviously could not pay her back, so that was unfortunate. But not the end of the world.
With a sigh, Kali looked up from her near-empty glass and saw a clean-cut jeornish man sitting at the bar, watching her. For a split second, she thought it was Jeth, but it was definitely a different man, though his features were strikingly similar. He smiled at her, nodding a hello.
She returned a weak smile, not wanting to anger or offend. Her gaze was then drawn back to her glass.
Kali wondered if her sister ever wrestled with doubts about the lengths she went through to achieve her goals. Becoming a scholar at the Repository was no easy feat. It was the largest library not only in Herrilock, but on the entire continent. Possibly even in all of Ustlia, though Kali had no way of being sure.
It was originally built by a colony of centripts, and therefore a majority of the current librarians were still centripts; only the best of the best were folded in, and it was even harder for others to integrate themselves into the tower’s stacks.
The Repository was a bastion of knowledge at the center of the desert, which Kali always saw as a less-than-ideal location due to how remote it was, necessitating many long, hot days of travel. But centripts never were concerned with the heat and in fact welcomed it; the lack of moisture was great for preservation of the books and other documents. It was a tower twenty stories high, with three underground levels consisting of living quarters for its scholars, outfitted with small apartments, a dining hall, and other commodities.
Scholars in its employ were expected to be on-hand at all hours of the day, on rotating shifts, in order to assist visitors with any questions they had about any topic imaginable, or help them locate a book within the endless rows of shelves the tower held.
When they weren’t at visitors’ beck and call, many of the tower’s scholars were pursuing their own research, either individually or within groups. Once again, the research topics were wide-ranging and varied, though Kali did know that her sister was on a team dedicated to finding a permanent cure for the mold and perhaps a way for afflicted centripts to re-grow carapace segments that had fallen off.
In order to join the Repository’s esteemed ranks, one had to demonstrate an encyclopedic knowledge of a range of subjects so widespread Kali couldn’t even perform the simple task of remembering what all the subjects were.
She remembered Lissia studying multiple bestiaries (mostly Herrilock-specific, but some that covered both Gillus and Atlua as well), histories of the region, spellbooks (given that she was jeornish, Kali often wondered why her sister did not pursue attendance at a mage academy; that was what she would’ve done, if she coul
d master magic), and a ton more. Potential scholars also had to be at least mostly fluent in Carsuak, which was possibly the most difficult aspect of the training.
Earning the title of a Repository Scholar was a high honor and extraordinary achievement. Those who lived in the tower were highly regarded by everyone in the country.
Lissia had sacrificed hours of time up in her room studying countless textbooks rather than hanging out with Kali and their friends. She missed out on jovial dinners, parties with varying degrees of wildness, and building relationships with people in Seroo’s Eye. Kali knew of a few specific friends that stopped bothering to invite Lissia out because they figured she’d decline, as well as one or two guys who were interested in her but were pushed away in lieu of furthering her studies.
It all seemed incredibly isolating to Kali, and she wondered many times if her sister felt lonely locked away in her room with nothing but worn leather covers and musty pages, or if she was truly happy in there, expanding her knowledge and growing closer and closer to her dream every day.
Either way, she had a lot more to show for all her efforts than Kali did. She felt like she had worked equally hard in her own pursuits with so much less gained.
Spit and Song (Ustlian Tales Book 2) Page 16
