To pass the time on the ship that was carrying us along Ishti’s great Mohasi River, Professor Baranyi told us the story of Haizea, Ishtan goddess of vengeance, and Tisis, goddess of mercy, arguing over a bereft mother after a battle. We asked him, “So what did she choose?” and he said, “Isn’t that the whole of the human story? That choice?” This earned him a blank stare from Wyn, an eye roll from Bianka, and a chuckle from Frederick. I was struck less by the story than by the illustration he showed us in a book of the goddesses on their holy hill, watching the battle. Tisis was lovely, her hair like a river, stars on her skin, holding out a cup that overflowed with light. Haizea’s hair coiled around her head like snakes, and her eyes were black caverns dripping blood. In one hand she held a whirlwind like a sword. Her hands and feet were clawed.
It was the hands that made me shiver, reminding me of the glimpse I’d had in that other place, high above the burning city, of a hand that was not my own at the end of my arm, holding the gun I would use on Casimir’s witch, Shey. While Professor Baranyi pontificated on the parable of the goddesses, why they so often appear together in stories and in art, I stared at the picture of Haizea, looked into her bleeding eyes, and saw something I recognized. Today she will be my inspiration and my disguise.
There is a gap between the Hall of Abnegation and the monastery’s north wall, where I’ve smelled tobacco early in the evening. I go there now and tuck myself against the wall, vanishing. Monks are not meant to smoke, of course. The Shou-shu monks practice something called selflessness, which is not exactly what it sounds like, but maybe that’s just the poor translation. They strive to transcend the physical world, all of their bodily needs and worldly attachments. It is said that those who achieve selflessness live for hundreds of years, and that they do not eat or feel pain or desire—although somebody is eating those swallow’s eggs and the vegetables in Gangzi’s garden. In any case, the goal is immortality without the need for sustenance—the triumph of the spirit over the body. The greatest leader of Shou-shu was a man called Li Feizi, who is said to have lived a thousand years before one day walking out of the monastery to the holy mountain Tama-shan, where he perhaps remains to this day. Gangzi claims to be four hundred years old. I have my doubts, and anyway I can’t imagine what the point of living forever would be if you’re just going to stay shut up in a monastery not eating or feeling anything. I am not in the least surprised that out of three hundred monks, there are a few novices who are doing their time here for prestige, with no intention of taking the lifelong vows, and for whom a secret smoke break is a welcome reprieve from trying to transcend all desire and whatnot.
I hold the image of Haizea in my mind, half hoping that my smoking monk will not come tonight. But eventually he does, squeezing into the gap against the wall and trying to surreptitiously light his little pipe. He is young, and I suppose that can only make it easier. Then again, if he is too new, he may not know anything. I ease myself back into the world next to him, and his features come into focus. He gives a little squawk and drops his pipe.
“Oath breaker,” I say in what I hope is passable Yongwen. I practiced it with Frederick this afternoon, once he’d recovered a bit from Mrs. Och’s draining him. Even if I can deliver my lines, though, I can’t be sure that I’ll understand whatever this young monk might have to tell me.
He turns to flee, and I grab him by the shoulder. Here it is. I take a deep breath and yank him with me. One step—two—three—four—oh Nameless, help me—five: it feels like falling—back through the membrane of that edge-of-the-world space, back to the void in between, back to the place I swore I’d never revisit.
Kahge. That’s what Mrs. Och’s youngest brother, Gennady, called it—the hell of Rainist cosmology. But the idea of it is older than that. Whether he was right or not, it is farther than I remember. In Casimir’s fortress, it felt as if that place and the world were almost overlapping—I could see them both at once, could slip from one to the other and back again in an instant.
But this is different. I feel as if we are spinning in nothingness for a long time, the monastery and the city and the sky all around us at odd angles, and the monk screaming and then silenced, voiceless. For a horrible minute or two I think we are lost in the void, lost.
Then we are through. The boiling river is swollen, and Spira City, half formed and in flames, lies on either bank. Still Spira, no matter where I am—and I wonder why. We are standing on a boat that moves fast through the water, its ragged sails full even though there is no wind, only the still air steaming. The young monk falls to his knees, gibbering. My hand on his shoulder is a hooked, dark thing with black claws.
I am shaking with horror at the world transformed, myself transformed, but at the same time I feel a rush of something like triumph. Maybe just because I can do it. Not only by accident or in the madness of mortal terror but on purpose, with intent: I can pull another person right out of the world with me. Oh, what am I? And also, what power!
I spit the Yongwen words out, my voice hoarse and unfamiliar: “Where is Ko Dan?”
He stares at me, uncomprehending, and I think I’ve overdone it, terrified him beyond usefulness. I give him a shake, not too hard, but his bones in my grip feel absurdly fragile. I am afraid I might snap him in two by accident. Easy, Julia. Focus. I repeat the question: “Where is Ko Dan?”
He stammers an answer that I can barely hear over the roar of flames sucking up the air, over the roar of my heart.
“Again!”
He is telling me he doesn’t know. Hounds, what a waste this will be if he knows nothing at all. Now he is talking, but so fast that I don’t understand.
“Where? Where? Where?”
He repeats his answer over and over, wringing his hands, and this much I do understand: Ko Dan is gone. Disappeared. My heart sinks. The monk is weeping, pouring sweat. I think he has pissed himself, and frankly I’m not far from doing the same. I manage the bit I memorized this afternoon, though:
“I am Haizea, goddess of vengeance, and I will drown the world in blood and fire if you betray me. If you speak of this, the first blood will be yours. Do you hear me, human? Secret, secret, secret!”
He promises, sobbing loudly. Even if he does tell, he’ll be thought mad. When I look up, the boat is moving in slow circles. On the shore, a tall, cloaked figure with the face of a fox and enormous antlers reaches an arm toward me. Shadows gather behind him, monstrous shapes taking form through the smoke, tusks and snouts and curved teeth.
“Lidari,” crows the fox-faced figure, pointing right at me with his human hand. What the bleeding stars are these things? The other voices join in with awful screeches and roars: “Lidari! Lidari!”
I yank the whimpering monk back, away, spinning through emptiness and at last falling hard against the monastery’s north wall, behind the Hall of Abnegation. The monk’s knees give way instantly, and he sits, huddled and damp, staring up at me. I watch my hand pick up his pipe, stick it in his mouth, fetch his scattered matches, light it for him.
“Good man,” I hear myself say in my own voice, putting a finger to my lips. “Not a word.”
At first I think that I am all right. I can go to Kahge—or wherever it is—then come back to the world and be on my way. I’m just a little wobbly. But as I round the corner of the Hall of Abnegation, I start shaking so hard I can’t walk anymore. I lean against the smooth wood of the hall, clenching and unclenching my fists, struggling to breathe. All I can hear is the rush and buzz of my blood.
My dirty fingernails bring me back to myself. I stare at my shaking hands—but they are just my hands, a girl’s callused hands, broken fingernails. The image of those great hooked claws clutching the monk rises up in my mind, and my gorge rises too.
A basic rule of spying is to leave nothing behind—no sign that you have been there. But I leave the contents of my stomach on the path by the Hall of Abnegation before I can gather myself up and make my way home.
“Stoy,” says Theo, imperio
us in the way that surely only royalty and small children can be, pushing my breakfast off my lap and plunking himself down there instead.
“You’re going to get me filthy!” I object, but I pull him close anyway, drawing comfort from the feel of his skin and my own—ordinary, human. And yet we have this in common, Theo and I: something inside us that is neither ordinary nor human at all.
In Theo’s case, it is part of a book—The Book of Disruption. Mrs. Och says that long ago, when everything had a will and an essence of its own, the spirit of fire, called Feo in Fraynish lore, wrote magic into the world, disrupting the natural order by giving herself dominion. The original power grab, in other words. The other spirits joined together and subdued Feo. They couldn’t completely destroy the book she’d made, but they managed to break it in three. Then they birthed the immortal Xianren—Mrs. Och, Casimir, and Gennady, as I know them—and charged them with guarding the fragments of the Book, keeping them separate, and keeping order in a world now overflowing with magic. That’s the story anyway. Millennia passed; the spirits dwindled and became part of the earth. The fragments of the Book changed shape too—Casimir’s became a lake, Mrs. Och’s a great tree, and Gennady’s a shadow that clung to him. As their power faded, the Xianren had to reckon at last with the inevitability of death. Let’s just say Casimir hasn’t faced it gracefully. He decided to reassemble the Book, the source of magic in the world, turn it back into text, and harness its power. He already has two fragments: his own, and Mrs. Och’s, which he stole.
He almost got the third, as well. Gennady, with the help of the monk Ko Dan, tried to hide his part of the Book from Casimir by binding it to his son’s essence and then leaving Bianka and Theo behind so nobody would ever know. It was a ridiculous bit of overconfidence—secrets that big are hard to keep. When Casimir figured out what had happened, he hired me to kidnap Theo. I didn’t know that was the job at first, but when it came down to it and Pia threatened my life and the lives of those I loved if I didn’t obey Casimir, I proved myself a gutless pawn and did as I was told.
Every day, I wake up with that fact: I took Theo from his mother, and from safety, and I handed him over for silver. I nearly got him killed. Granted, I got him back too—but he’s not yet safe. Not until we find Ko Dan and get the Book fragment out of Theo. Then it will be up to Mrs. Och to keep her brother from assembling the fragments. I intend to see Theo safely out of the whole business.
Now I hold him against me and rock back and forth a little. His legs are muddy, and he is wearing nothing but a dirty shirt that hangs to his knees. He looks quite the little urchin, except for how well fed he is, round-cheeked and dimpled at the knees and elbows. He goes about shoeless and perpetually underdressed, never seeming to feel the cold, but today the air is balmy and springlike and so I am having my breakfast on the steps outside. Or I’m trying to, anyway.
“Lala umma wap Teo,” he says comfortably. “Stoy.”
“Please,” says Bianka, washing dishes by the pump.
“Pees,” repeats Theo mechanically.
“All right,” I say, laughing.
My mother used to tell us stories, Dek and I curled against her body in the bed for warmth. I hadn’t thought about them in years, but now whenever Theo asks for a story, they return to me whole, emerging from the depths of my memory like glittering beasts rising up from the bottom of the sea, freighted with all the fears and wonders of my girlhood.
When I tell my mother’s stories, I can’t see her face, but I remember her intonation, her dark hair falling over her shoulders and brushing against my cheek. I remember her hands illustrating the story: clever brown fingers that became birds flying, soldiers marching, a spider pouncing, the breeze wafting, or the moonlight filtering down.
“Once upon a time,” I say, and Theo sticks his thumb in his mouth, “there was a fisherman called Tomas. He married a beautiful girl and they had a beautiful son.”
“Sun!” cries Theo around his thumb, pointing at the sky with his other hand.
“Not that kind of sun,” I say. “A boy, like you.”
“Teo,” he agrees, and goes back to sucking his thumb.
“Yes. So one day Tomas is out fishing when he feels a tug on the line, and he reels in a great big silver-blue fish, twisting about on the end of the hook.” I mime reeling in a fishing rod, and Theo mimes along with one hand. “The fish lands on the rocks—whap—and says to the man, ‘What do you want?’ Well, the man is ever so surprised. Fish can’t talk!”
Theo cackles. He’s too young to understand the stories, but he seems to like them anyway.
“So he takes the fish home, fills a big pot with water from the well, and puts the fish in the pot. The fish swims in circles and asks him the same question again: ‘What do you want?’ It starts him thinking. At first Tomas thinks that maybe he already has everything he wants. He has his lovely wife, his lovely son, his lovely house on a lovely island. But the more he thinks about it, the more he thinks that none of that is what he wants most deeply. He doesn’t want to waste his wish, and surely a fish that can talk is a fish that can grant wishes. So he tells his wife: ‘Wife, this life is not the life for me. It does not fulfill my deepest wish. I must go and seek my heart’s desire. Please take care of this fish until I come back.’ ”
Bianka has stopped washing the dishes and is watching us with a complicated expression I can’t interpret. Her hair, normally an unruly black cloud around her face, is tied back in a kerchief, and it makes her face look smaller, somehow diminished. She does not discourage Theo’s affection for me, or mine for him, but I can only imagine how she feels seeing me with him. Still, she knows—I am sure she knows; I have told her and it was the truth and she believed it—that I would die before letting anyone harm him again. It’s a strange thing to love a child so helplessly. It’s different from every other love that I’ve known. When he laughs his beautiful, crescendoing laugh, I think my heart will crack right open. I could live on that laugh and nothing else.
“Go on,” says Bianka. “What happens then?”
“Well, Tomas goes off and he travels the world. He has a great many fine adventures, but he keeps traveling to find his deepest desire. Years pass and he grows old. He is too tired to travel anymore. He goes home and finds his wife packing all her things. He asks her where the fish is. She tells him that she killed and ate it the night he left. Without Tomas to provide for them, they were very poor, but when their son was grown, he went to the city to seek his fortune. He was very clever and became a rich man. Now, she tells Tomas, she is going to live with him in his big house in the city so she can spend her old age in comfort. Tomas remains alone in the falling-down house on the island, and every day he thinks of that beautiful fish twisting in the air long ago and of the moment the fish spoke to him, when everything still seemed possible.”
I stop, and Theo pulls his thumb out of his mouth.
“The end,” I say lamely.
“Dee enn,” he repeats, and slides off my lap, running to chase the chickens around the yard.
“Another of your mother’s stories?” asks Bianka, staring at me.
“I don’t know any others,” I say, half apologetically.
They are odd stories to tell a child—they are odd stories in general—but Dek and I loved them when we were little. When my mother finished telling us that story, we were outraged, berating Tomas for his foolishness, for not seeing that he had everything he wanted already. But Ma said, “I think we are all like that.” I can’t say that I agree. I can think of times in my own life when I was so happy I only wished that nothing would ever change. Before Ma died, before Dek had Scourge. And then later, with Wyn, for a while. But I think my mother could relate to Tomas—his restless heart, his aimless longing.
Tiring quickly of the chickens, Theo goes and bangs on the gate with a stick.
“Mama!” he shouts. “Owwwwwd.”
She shakes her head at him and sighs. “We’re going to go mad if we have to stay coo
ped up in this courtyard much longer.”
She looks so unhappy, squatting barefoot in the mud by the pump with the dirty dishes stacked next to her. She has been very low since I told her last night that Ko Dan was missing.
“I’ll help wash up,” I say. Theo gives up on the gate and comes over to splash under the water and get in the way. We laugh at him and wash up together and it almost feels natural, like we are friends—except, of course, it can never really feel that way.
Nearly clean now from the pump, shirt soaking, Theo runs squealing across the yard while we dry the dishes and carry them into the kitchen. Bianka heads back out ahead of me. From our makeshift scullery I hear her cry, “Theo!”
I run for the door, heart in my throat. She is bolting across the yard after him. Somehow he has gotten the latch of the gate open with his stick. He sees her coming and runs out into the road, shouting with glee. Before I can get across the yard, she has him, pulling him back in, slamming the gate. Her face is all twisted up and she is shouting at him: “Never run off! Never!” She whacks him on the backside. He squirms free of her and runs to me, grabbing my leg and howling with rage. Bianka stalks past us and then drops down on the steps, clutching her head in her hands and letting loose a ragged scream that dissolves into sobs.
Theo stops hollering and stares at her in shock. He can’t understand any of it, of course—why he has to stay shut up in here or why his mother reacts with such ferocity when he tries to stray out of her sight. He can’t feel that piece of The Book of Disruption fused to his flesh and blood and his innermost self. If anyone can take the text out of Theo without killing him, it will be the man who put it there. But if Ko Dan has disappeared from Shou-shu, we are without leads or any idea of where to look for him.
Julia Defiant Page 4
