Everything changed in the space of a breath.
Someone clipped Roh’s ear; he felt the kiss of a glowing blade. Then he was on the floor, gasping. Abas lay against the wall, the skin over his skull split, oozing blood. His eyelids flickered.
Roh looked over at Abas’s broken chair. One of the women lay heaped next to Abas. A dark pool was forming beneath her. Roh’s head spun. A slow spread of blood moved over the stones toward him. He was shivering. Someone was next to him, making rasping sounds, the way Lilia did when she had trouble breathing, only these sounds were wetter, choking, as if he did not drown on air but blood.
Roh tried to see who was making that sound. The Patron’s chair was overturned, empty. Crumpled beneath the table was the inert form of his son, the sanisi. Chaigaan lay four feet from Roh, cheek pressed to the stones, staring at Roh with wide, glassy eyes. It was dark beneath the table, but Roh saw a wet, glistening mound heaped against the sanisi’s belly – the spill of his insides, leaking onto the floor. Roh’s hands were sticky with blood; the blood of the Patron’s son, flowing along the runnels in the stone, mingling with the blood of Abas, and the dead woman, bleeding past Roh.
He heard muted cries, the scuffle of boots, leather, and above that, the hissing of infused weapons. He looked under the table, toward the main room, and saw wispy tails of Para’s breath streaking through the air. He tried to find Kihin and Dasai, Nioni, Chali, and Aramey, but he saw only a mass of fighting figures, a stir of fleeing slaves.
Roh crawled toward Abas and cradled Abas’s head in his lap.
Abas murmured something but did not move. Cold sweat stung Roh’s eyes. He heard the rasping breath of the Patron’s dying son.
Roh choked. He clutched at his stomach and pulled away from Abas. He wouldn’t vomit. Not here. He looked back under the table and saw a way through. It was three feet from the top of the dais to the floor. He was too small to drag Abas. He had to wake him up or leave him. He lay on his belly beneath the table. The dying sanisi was whispering now, something that sounded like a prayer.
Someone cried out. Blades burst and hissed.
A man grabbed hold of Roh’s ankle. Dragged him out from under the table.
Roh gurgled a cry. He clawed at the stone with his bloody hands, kicked out.
The grip relaxed. Roh tried to hop away, too late. One of the strange men gripped Roh’s shoulder and brought one hand back. A blue blade flashed – it sprouted from the man’s wrist like a living thing. Roh crossed his arms. The air around him grew heavy, condensed. He recited the Litany of the Gale.
He tensed. Not himself but the blue particles of Para’s breath. The air around him pulsed, contracted. He expelled the breath from his lungs and pushed the wall of condensed air outward.
His attacker shivered. His blue bonsa weapon lodged in the coagulated air.
Roh parted the air and caught the man’s hand in a deceptively simple grip. He twisted. The weapon wrenched free.
The misty blue breath around him dissipated. The man reached through the broken defense and jabbed toward him, impossibly fast, a kill strike. Roh saw the strike just as the man formed it. Roh pivoted. He still gripped the man’s hand in a crippling hold.
Roh stumbled over one of Abas’s arms. He fell to his knees and pulled his attacker down with him.
He saw something moving at the corner of his eye. A blue weapon flashed. The length of a sanisi’s infused blade arced across Roh’s field of vision, neatly splitting the man in two. For one still moment, the man grinned at Roh. A thin line of blood appeared across his face. Half of his head slid away.
Roh still held the man’s warm hand, his grip welded to the flesh like a vise, terrified to let go, his body still telling him that to let go meant death.
Blood gushed. The body tottered, balanced upright only by Roh’s grip.
A figure bent over the leaning body. Clad in black, spattered in glistening blood. A lean face, an ugly scar. For a long moment, Roh did not recognize him.
“You can let him go,” Kadaan said.
Roh’s fingers were numb. The dead man’s hand felt cool. Roh let his grip relax. The corpse fell to the floor.
Kadaan’s infused blade hovered over the still body, black with blood. As Roh watched, the blood seeped into the branch. A single drop escaped from the tip, dripped to the floor.
Kadaan held out his free hand to Roh. “Up,” he said.
Roh couldn’t move.
Kadaan gripped his hand, pulled him up. Roh found his footing. He was too shocked even to protest Kadaan’s grip.
“That was the last,” Kadaan said as Roh looked back to either end of the table. Fewer sanisi moved among the dead, perhaps only a half dozen standing. How many had been seated at the table?
“My friends,” Roh said, “where are my friends?”
“The dancers are out.”
“No,” Roh said, “the Dhai.”
Maralah stepped up behind Kadaan. She wiped the blood from her weapon onto her trousers. “That could have gone worse.”
Kadaan spit on the floor. The spit was bloody. “Anyone tell you you can see through hazing wards,” Kadaan asked Roh, “or were your Dhais not interested in telling us that?”
“What do you mean?”
Kadaan sheathed his weapon. “More than wards,” Kadaan said, looking back at Maralah. “He saw them clearly. I had to look twice. I felt them before I saw them.”
“No simple ward could get them this far into the hold,” Maralah said. “The boy can see through complex wards, too. That’s a pretty skill.”
“Where are the physicians?” Roh knelt next to Abas.
Kadaan crouched beside him. He gripped Roh’s elbow, not unkindly. “What does a Dhai boy know about fighting? Those were some interesting tricks for a coward.”
“Dhai aren’t cowards,” Roh said. “I’m going to be a sanisi.”
“Are you?”
Kadaan’s face was a hand’s breadth from Roh’s. Roh knew the sanisi wasn’t even ten years older than him, but so close, Roh saw something dark and vast in his gaze – a knowledge of things Roh had yet to grasp, let alone understand. He felt suddenly very small.
Kadaan barked at one of the sanisi to get a physician.
“The Patron’s son,” Roh said, glancing under the table.
Maralah nudged Chaigaan’s hand with her boot. “Gone,” she said.
The sanisi still lingered about the table, inspecting the bodies of the dead men, when Chali came up. He asked, and then hugged Roh tightly. He helped Roh wrap Abas’s head. Chali assured him Abas would be fine. Then he went back down to help the others, the sanisi and petty soldiers alike, until the Saiduan surgeons arrived.
Roh sat on the steps leading up to the dais, waiting for Dasai to send someone to fetch him. The sanisi would not permit him to leave the hall alone, and Chali was helping the physicians.
Kadaan passed near Roh. Roh watched him.
“You do not look much like a boy,” Kadaan said.
Roh wrinkled his brow.
Kadaan stepped over to him. He picked up a chalice from the table. He wet his finger in his wine, reached out. The sanisi’s wet finger touched Roh’s lower lip.
“This doesn’t seem to suit,” Kadaan said. He leaned over and took Roh’s chin in his hand.
Roh sat absolutely still.
Kadaan pressed his mouth to Roh’s, so both his lips covered Roh’s bottom lip. The gesture was so startling that Roh was afraid to move for fear the sanisi would cut him in two. Kadaan’s tongue licked away the smear of red on Roh’s lower lip.
Kadaan still leaned over him. When he spoke, his voice was low. “You have a gift, boy. Without that gift, we would all of us be dead tonight. I don’t mean to forget that.”
Kadaan left him.
Roh stared after the sanisi. He did not move again until Kihin shook him.
“Roh?”
Kihin’s face was stricken. “Tira! Is this your blood?” Kihin was staring at Roh’s hands.
> “No, no,” Roh said. “None of it’s mine.”
“We need to get back,” Kihin said. Roh saw Aramey standing behind him.
“Ora Dasai?” Roh asked.
“He’s fine. He sent us back for you. Me, Aramey, and Ora Chali. Ora Nioni is just outside the door. We were afraid–”
“I’m fine,” Roh said. He stood. He bit his lower lip. “Kihin?”
“What?”
“Why did those men look like Dhai?”
34
Taigan couldn’t say when she decided to go back for the girl. For two days she walked west, back to Dhai, feeling nothing but the churning of her insides and the throbbing intensity of a blinding white migraine that forced her to bed down in the dirt, in the dark, for six hours until it passed. When she emerged from the duff and bracken, she squatted to urinate, and pissing was painful and bloody.
Sometime in the last few days, Taigan had decided it was time to change the way Taigan thought of himself… hirself… herself… yes, herself, again. The gods had a grim sense of humor, because though she could knit her flesh and bones and organs back together at will, she had never learned to cure something as simple as a cold or a urinary infection. “They are not of your body,” the old woman who trained her once said, “they are in your body. Interlopers. You must wait for them to pass.” But a skilled tirajista could cure pox and blight and every sexually passed disease from Dhai to Saiduan, so why couldn’t she?
She knew there were holes in the old woman’s knowledge. A people couldn’t pass two thousand year-old training skills down without losing a great deal. As Oma rose, perhaps Taigan would come into the knowledge on her own, the way she had learned her body denied death, the way she learned it also denied a fixed physical sex more than most. Some days, she wished the change would halt halfway through and give her some aspect of both sexes in both mind and body so she could feel more confident in calling herself ataisa. Most days, though, she was just Taigan – all sexes and none. It amused her to play with the language of self.
Her beard had thinned many months before, and what remained was soft and downy but did not recede any further. Her breasts were almost noticeable now, so she bound them. It was a relief they never got bigger. She could still pass for male. People made assumptions in Saiduan when they saw a lone figure on the road dressed as she was. Assumptions made her life easier.
Some days, she envied the omajistas who could open gates. At least they knew what they were. Or would know, once she found them and told them. But the gifts Oma bestowed upon her often felt like curses. What use was there for a person whose body and mind shifted with the seasons?
Taigan spent her second night within the welcoming arms of a bonsa hybrid, a gnarly, twisted thing that grew like a bear’s claw from the side of a rocky mount. She woke sometime during the night to voices and watched a small family camp in the ravine below. They lit a fire. She saw their faces in the warm glow. Two mothers, perhaps an aunt, a father or two or maybe an uncle, and four young children. Taigan often found it difficult to sort out Dhai family relations. Things became complicated very quickly.
They were exiles, or perhaps Woodland Dhai come to carve out an existence in the less toxic mountains. Despite having less virulent plant life, living this close to Dorinah had its own dangers for Dhai. Taigan imagined this family would fetch a fine price in the slave markets there. In Saiduan, the two women alone would net a very fine purse. Taigan began putting prices on them and imagined the sort of things she would buy. But after a time, that no longer amused her, and she found herself caught up in their light banter and storytelling. One of the mothers brought out a stringed instrument from a battered case. She sang in a low, clear voice. The others joined her.
Taigan wondered if their lives would be any different here during the coming darkness. Perhaps they could escape it, this plucky little family with the bright eyes and soft mouths. Taigan had often thought about running away to some icy, mountainous island and waiting out the next twenty years of madness. But going too far down that line of thinking caused the ward on her back to burn. It incited the headaches. She was a bound thing, tied by Maralah’s string, the same way these people would be if she sold them off into someone’s household.
After the singing, the family banked the fire and bedded down. Taigan listened to two or more of the adults making love in the tall grass near the camp. She heard soft laughter and the low sounds of desire and need and release. How strange to be Dhai, she thought. How strange to have a family that eats and sings and laughs and makes love as if it were nothing.
Their desire provoked hers, and she moved her hand between her thighs. But the fullness of her bladder and the promise of the pain she would experience on emptying it dampened her spirits. Instead, she folded her hands across her belly and closed her eyes.
Taigan found herself running through the details of the last great campaign the Saiduan fought against the Dhai. It was a battle every Saiduan military member learned, from line soldier to war minister. It was the last great battle of the long war. Two forces met outside the great city of Aaraduan, then known as Roasandara.
The Saiduan bear cavalry had been outside Roasandara since dawn, just northwest of the city, waiting for the Dhai. They numbered ten thousand. Forty thousand Dhai – a mix of infantry and tirajista companies – came down and met them on open tundra. They fought for less than an hour before the Saiduan cavalry gave ground, withdrawing to positions closer to the city. Two more divisions of Saiduan infantry – including a command of tirajistas – were coming up from the south and were within hearing distance of the fighting. Two Dhai generals, their names blotted from history, rode toward the battle at the head of their units. Seeing the small Saiduan infantry, they attacked their right flank.
Taigan had not shared this battle with the scullery girl. It was one she wanted to put before her, to see how she’d solve it. Before Maralah sent the letter. Before she learned the scullery girl could not fly. Perhaps it didn’t matter anymore. They were fighting Dhai again. A fitter, smarter Dhai. They would not act like their ancestors, so in truth, it shouldn’t matter now how some old conflict was resolved.
Taigan’s bladder was heavy again. She slid down the tree and squatted off to the side. She gritted her teeth and bore down. It felt like pissing blood. She knew from past experience it would be two or three days more before the pain eased and the infection cleared. Until then, blood and fire.
As she pulled up her trousers, she heard a noise nearby. She froze. Though she wore all black, the moons were out. She would be visible. She stepped closer to the tree to blend in with the dappled shadows. She opened herself to Oma, like reaching through a thick, sticky gauze, and recited the song that helped her tether its power just beneath her skin, ready to shape the misty red haze as she saw fit.
A small figure climbed into the clearing. It was one of the children from the camp below. Taigan let out her breath. She released Oma; it was like expelling some syrupy weight.
The girl stopped short. Looked right at Taigan.
Taigan thought to call on Oma again and strike her dead. But her heavy bladder and sour mood made it all feel like too much effort. She raised a finger to her lips, thinking it a universal sign for quiet, but the girl spoke anyhow. Taigan wondered how any of these Dhai survived in the world.
“I saw you in that tree,” the girl whispered.
“You saw shadows,” Taigan said.
“No,” she said.
“Would you like to hear a story about a battle?” Taigan said.
“From very long ago?”
“Yes. Two forces. The Dhai and–”
“Are you a ghost?”
“A… ghost?”
“One of the souls that got free of Sina. Come to haunt us.”
“No. Are you?”
She laughed. “No, of course not.”
“You should go back to your family. There are terrors in these woods.”
“You’re not terrible,” the girl sa
id, “you’re a person.”
The girl’s fearlessness made Taigan breathless. She tried to remember a time when she did not fear people and they did not fear her. Her birth had been strange, and during her formative years, before she began going through the changes, her sexual organs – let alone her sense of herself – never fit into the three neat boxes her people had for them. Unsure of what to call her, they labeled her ataisa, but that never felt right, either. She wondered, looking at this little girl with the orgiastic parents, how different her life would have been if she were raised in Dhai instead of Saiduan. Not Dhai as it used to be, not the Dhai that taught the Saiduan to hunt and kill and enslave, but the Dhai as they became. The Dhai that made this girl and the one Taigan had pushed off a cliff.
“Go home,” Taigan said, and walked away.
When dawn touched the sky, and Para’s fiery blue essence flooded the world, Taigan was still walking. It wasn’t until then that she realized she wasn’t going west, back to Dhai, but east, back to where she had left the scullery girl.
By the time she reached her, Lilia would have been without water for four days. It was quite possible Lilia hadn’t even survived the fall. Taigan had spent a lifetime doing as others told her. The oath she broke to her Patron, the betrayal that lost her the title of sanisi, had shaken her more than she realized. Before the betrayal, before she was Maralah’s instead of the Patron’s, she acted on blind faith, following the call of Oma, the Lord of the Dawn, the Lord of Awakening, the Lord of Change. It was not Maralah who moved her now nor her Patron, but her rising star, her bloody, glorious god.
She stopped to urinate again, braced against a tree, and hissed out a prayer to Oma to relieve her from pain and want and confusion, and to deliver calm and clarity.
Her star was rising.
It was the scullery girl’s star, too.
Oma help them both.
35
Snow bathed the world in pearly silence. Zezili found something very comforting about that as she walked Dakar across the clean stretch of silent white. Few travelers were on the roads to Lake Morta this time of year. As dusk fell, she finally saw the approaching stretch of the vast lake. Blessed by Rhea, all said, it was a lake full of stories – and tourists during the summer. But the peak of summer travelers had passed, and the first snows were on the ground.
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