“What is that?” I ask, pointing at the picture.
Fan Ming translates my question for the librarian-witch, then tells us her answer: “That is Marike bringing the Gethin into the world.”
“The fire on the hilltop is meant to be Kahge?” asks Frederick, and Fan Ming nods.
I think about the Kahge I have seen—Spira City burning, and those revolting creatures alongside the steaming river, pointing at me.
“What does lidari mean?” I blurt out.
Frederick looks startled. “It is a name, is it not?” he says. “One of Marike’s generals, or her advisor?”
Fan Ming asks the witch. She answers briefly, and he says, “Yes, Marike’s prized general, one of the Gethin.”
“So the Gethin came from Kahge,” I say. “But could they go back and forth…between the world and Kahge?”
Again Fan Ming asks the librarian-witch. She shakes her head and answers at length, and then he says: “No, they were bound here by their bodies. A physical body cannot go over to Kahge, though it has been speculated that the essence of a Gethin might return to Kahge once its body was destroyed. There is no consensus on that, however.”
But I do have a body in Kahge. I think of what Mrs. Och said: If Julia can truly move between the world and Kahge, I do not know what the implications are, for her or for the world. Thinking too closely about it makes me nauseous with fear.
“And that is the great question, is it not?” says Frederick. “Not only how Marike brought them across, but how she gave them their monstrous physical form?”
“Yes,” Fan Ming translates. “It is a mystery none have been able to solve.”
“This is older than any writing I’ve seen,” says Frederick, returning to the bamboo strips. “Translating it will take more time than we have today. May I transcribe some of them?”
“Of course,” says Fan Ming. “I will help you select those that seem most relevant.” He pauses, as if struck by a thought. “The earliest recorded reference to Kahge is carved on a stele. Perhaps I could take Miss Heriday to make a rubbing while you start here.”
“Very kind of you!” exclaims Frederick.
I try to catch his eye—I am not keen at all on being separated farther in this warren of tunnels and caverns beneath the mountain. But Frederick barely looks up from the bamboo strips, and I have no choice but to follow Fan Ming out of the cave. If he tries anything, he’ll get more than he’s bargained for, that’s certain.
We climb a different stairway, winding upward until I am quite breathless, and come out into a vast cavern open to the light. The whole cavern is full of standing stones, tall and narrow like gravestones. I find myself blinking and squinting at the great oval view of the world through the opening at the far end of the cavern. We are facing south, and I can see over the forest we came through, the great walls of Tianshi off in the distance.
“The forest of stele,” says Fan Ming, gesturing grandly at the standing stones.
He takes me in among them, most of the stones as tall as I am or taller, and I can see that they are all carved with text, some fresh and new, some ancient and worn. Before a very old stele, he sets down his basket and takes out a brush. He cleans the surface of the stone, then lays a sheet of rice paper over it.
“Please hold it still,” he says, and I do. From his basket he takes what looks like a ball of dark wax and begins to carefully rub the surface of the rice paper with it, so that the inscription on the stone emerges pale amid the dark smudging on the sheet. When he is done and the text is clear on the paper, he rolls it up and hands it to me.
“There you are.”
A cloaked figure calls to him from the entrance to the cavern.
“Excuse me a moment,” he says to me. “There is something I must take care of, and then I will take you back to the others. Please—have a look around. There are many beautiful stones, and the air is fresher here than below.”
“Thank you,” I say, and watch him go. At first I am a little on edge, not sure of the meaning of his bringing me here and then leaving, but it’s true it is more pleasant than in the claustrophobic tunnels underneath the mountain. I go to the edge of the cavern to look out over the forest, fingering the scroll he gave me. Perhaps this sheet of rice paper holds all the secrets to this power of mine, if it is a power and not a curse. I just need to make sure Frederick explains it to me before he tells Mrs. Och anything.
I feel as if I’m being watched. I turn around and nearly tumble off the ledge in my fright. Standing there is a woman—I think it is a woman—but she has no eyes, just a mass of dark stitching where eyes ought to be. Her head is smooth and hairless, every inch of her tattooed with writing. She wears a sleeveless tunic that hangs to her knees, and her arms and legs too are covered in black ink, the writing winding about her limbs. The air crackles as she moves through it.
“Fan Ming said I could rest here,” I babble in Fraynish, forgetting every last word of Yongwen that I know.
“Show me your hand,” she says in Yongwen. I don’t dare refuse, and so I hold out my hand to her. I see the little blade in her hand too late. She nicks my finger and pulls the blade away with a smear of blood on it. I cry out, trying to step around her so I’m not on the edge of the cliff. She snaps the fingers of her other hand, conjuring a little flame, perhaps with the characters tattooed on her fingertips, and holds the knife in the flame. My blood sizzles, and she says to me: “Your mother was a witch. Drowned.”
That stills me. I clutch my bleeding finger and say, “Yes.”
“Your father?” she asks.
“Just a man,” I say in Fraynish. “Not much of one either.”
She shakes her head, not understanding me, and barks: “Speak Yongwen.”
I struggle for the words. All that study, and every last bit of it has flown.
“My father…man,” I manage in stuttering Yongwen. I cannot think of the word for ordinary, which would have been too much of a compliment anyway.
She sniffs the knife. The fingers of her free hand move in the air. It takes a minute to register what she’s doing, and by the time I realize she’s writing, it’s too late. I’ve only ever seen one other witch who could work magic by simply writing in the air with her fingers. I try to move away from her but I cannot move at all. My thoughts have gone thick and slow as molasses, struggling to crawl along through a heavy, dark space. She raises my arm to her wrinkled lips, and then out comes a black tongue and she licks my wrist. Everything in me recoils, and I almost remember something—a way out, another place—but my mind is slowed and dim, and the thought slips away almost as soon as it comes.
The witch pads closer and puts her arms around me. Muttering to herself, she feels the knobs in my spine, lifts my hair to her face and sniffs it. I stare at the tiny, spidery writing running along her cheekbones, down the bridge of her nose, across her forehead, covering every bit of her. Even the stitching over her eyes, I realize, is not random but a mass of tiny threaded script. Who are you? I want to say, but I can’t find a way to speak. She presses her thumb to my forehead and everything goes black.
I am kneeling on the pitching boat before Bianka while Theo traps a marble under a cup. My voice is thick with unshed tears: “I’d die before letting anything happen to him again. I swear to you, I’d die first.” And she reaches for my hand.
—
Pia takes Theo from my arms, shuts the door in my face, and I am standing in the hall with a bag of silver.
—
I take the book off the shelf in Professor Baranyi’s study—Legends of the Xianren I—and open the heavy tome in my lap.
—
I fire the gun and the Gethin falls. Mrs. Och is bleeding against the wall. I crawl over her wings to finish him off.
—
The fire is warm, the coffee is good, and Gregor says to me: “When the client wants to see you, I’ll let you know.”
—
A blur of images and memories rushes through me, spills out
of me, like my life flashing before my eyes, slowing down for certain scenes and then speeding up, racing by. A flood of color, a bright burst of laughter, a scream, my heart racing—I think I will burst with feeling it all at once—my bare feet on the cobblestones, the moon rising over Mount Heriot, music pouring out of the temple, honey on my tongue, a hand on my cheek, waking with the morning light, all the lost moments returned to me and snatched away again in the space of half a breath.
—
And then it stops.
—
I am sitting on the steps up to our flat above the laundry, eating an apple I’ve stolen. My mother was taken the night before, and I do not know what to do. I am horribly aware of my heart in my chest, its relentless thud-thud-thud. Dek and I had been to stare at the outer walls of the great prison, Hostorak, but we were just children—what could we do? My father stumbles down the stairs past me, a scarecrow in his raggedy clothes, his hair unkempt, his face ruined by opium. He looks back at me, but barely, half a glance over his shoulder, not meeting my eyes. “Forgive me,” he mumbles, and then he is gone, and that is the last time I see him.
—
Again the blur of sensation and emotion, my life speeding backward, and halting years earlier:
—
I am shouting for my brother, and he comes, he always does. Two older boys have caught a cat and shut it in a box. They are looking for tinder to burn it, and the cat is howling in the box like it knows what they have in mind. When I tried to free the cat, one of them hit me right in the nose with his fist, and now my nose is bleeding all over my mouth and chin and pinafore. When Dek sees me, he is ablaze with fury. I tell him in a great sobbing jumble what is happening. Oh, the splendor of him striding down that street, the way he knocks those boys’ heads together—never mind that they are both a year older than him—the way he sends them scurrying. He lets the cat out and tries to pat it, but it scratches him across the face. We come home bleeding but triumphant, and our mother looks at us and sighs. More laundry.
—
And back, and back:
—
They are quarreling, my ma and pa. He is searching the room, tearing it apart, and she is shouting at him, and Dek is shouting at both of them, but Pa is simply fixed on pulling open cupboards, looking in the kettle, pulling the mattress off the little bed, leaving our small home a ruin. He is looking for money. My mother grabs his arm and he shakes her off, and Dek lunges at him, roaring, and he gets knocked aside too. I am about two years old. I am crying, but nobody hears me, and then it is too awful for crying and I draw myself away from them. I hadn’t known I could do it, but suddenly they are all a bit blurred, muted. I feel safe. My father goes storming off, and my mother and Dek are righting things about the flat when Dek says, “Where’s Julia gone?” She looks around, her eyes moving right past me, and the same with him. They look and look but they do not see me sitting right there against the wall, still as a mouse, holding my breath. It seems obvious to me that they should not be able to see me. It seems like I have always known this hiding place in plain view was there for me and me alone. I watch them search for me, and my ma sends Dek running to look about the neighborhood, and then she looks so lost that I pity her, and I go and throw myself into her arms. I expect her to embrace me, to be relieved and happy, but she pulls me off her, holding me at arm’s length and searching my face, her eyes wide and amazed, looking at me hard, like the answer might be there, and I am crying again—I just want her to hug me, to tell me it’s all right, it’s going to be all right.
—
It is all wanting and terror and joy, the world huge and bright, and then a darkness unlike anything I’ve ever known, a rushing and roaring in my ears. I emerge again, but this is different:
—
I am kneeling on the red earth with my mother, Ammi. But it is not me—I am not her child. A rocky crag looms over us, a little black house at the top of it. Far behind us and below us, the world is like a moving painting of itself, half real. She holds in her hands a small clay pot, almost like a teapot but with two spouts, one on either side of it.
“I have it,” she says to me.
“We are almost ready,” she says to me.
“Can I trust you?” she says to me.
Her dark eyes, her pretty mouth. I see her so clearly, and she seems to pulse with life. I envy it, I am hungry for it, and I will do anything, anything at all.
Her hand on my face. The warmth of her.
“You won’t fail me.”
It is a statement, not a question. She is fearless and lovely. Leaving me with my longing, she wades into a river of mud and disappears into the world. A gurgling voice above me says, “You need to go back. They are waiting for you.”
And I wonder what I will tell them. I wonder if I will really betray them. But I know the answer to that. Her eyes, her skin, her beating heart, those little buildings far below, the whole story of human existence unfolding all at once, all the time—fear is nothing, loyalty nothing, next to my desire to be whole.
—
I open my eyes and am vaguely surprised that I have eyes to open. I am sprawled numbly at the center of everything that has ever happened to me, all of it spread out to be examined by this witch’s nimble fingers—except that last one, which is not my memory at all but someone else’s, of somewhere I’ve never been or dreamed of. The witch is squatting on my chest and I can hardly breathe. Her tattooed hands work through the threads around me and all over me—or are those ribbons, or what are they?
Then I remember the thought that eluded me before: I can disappear. But the effort it would require feels quite beyond me. I watch the witch, so preoccupied with her task, and I notice the little knife strapped to her wrist.
I can’t move my arm in the world, but I can pull it out of the world—just that part of me, just past the edge of things, far enough to be free of the spell paralyzing me. I vanish my arm, then swing it up and snatch her little knife. I stick the blade into her arm. She squawks. It’s a stupid thing to do. The knife is tiny, can make no more than a small puncture, and she has me immobile on the edge of a cliff.
She takes hold of a fistful of my hair and knocks my head against the rock. Suddenly I can hear a lot of talking, and it seems to me that maybe this noise has been going on for a long time. She gives my head another bang. Fan Ming is standing a few feet away, shouting. He is pressed against some invisible barrier in the air, trying to reach us, and there is Frederick behind him, also shouting. The witch ignores them and bends over my face. She bites my cheek, hard. The pain clears my head, and I pull my whole body back, blurring the world, freeing myself of whatever binds me. I shove her off me with all the strength I have. She sprawls on her back, grinning, my blood on her lips.
I make a desperate scramble toward Fan Ming and Frederick, feeling that surely this is all a dream, a nightmare. I find myself in Frederick’s arms, and his voice, which is both too loud and oddly far away, is asking me if I am all right. Fan Ming is gesticulating wildly now, shouting at the witch. She raises her arms up above her head, fingers working. I whisper, “Run,” but none of us move, and then small winged shapes are diving down from the ceiling of the cavern, filling the air. Bats. Frederick shoves my head into his jacket and we are on the ground, me gasping for breath inside his coat, my face close to the rock. I feel a few vicious pinprick bites on my back, my legs. I thrash and yell in the darkness of Frederick’s coat and then they are gone.
Frederick helps me to my feet. He is trembling and white-faced and the arm he shielded me with is bleeding. The witch is walking off among the standing stones. I try to make words, but my mouth feels thick and furry, my mind too heavy. I lean against Frederick and think about my mother, how clear she was in the memories the witch pulled out of me—a clearer picture than I’ve had in years—but that last one wasn’t my memory, so whose was it? I’d half forgotten her face, its lively expression, the warmth of her gaze, the humor of her mouth. Ma, the luminous center
of my world until she was gone—and it seems to me now that everything has been askew and all wrong ever since then, including me.
I wonder later if I fainted, but I’m too embarrassed to ask. Frederick carries me back to the painted cave below, where Professor Baranyi is standing at the shelf making notes and Gregor is pretending, not very convincingly, to be absorbed in a book.
Esme sees us first. Her face doesn’t change, but the pistol Dek got her seems to leap from the holster at her side into her hand—she is pointing it straight at Fan Ming’s forehead.
He blanches, raises his hands, and says in a rush: “A witch attacked Miss Heriday. Not one of the Tama-shan librarian-witches—I do not know who she is. I am sorry, but we must leave immediately. It is not safe, and I have no authority here.”
“He’s right,” says Frederick. Esme lowers the gun slowly but does not holster it. I notice then, with some relief, that Fan Ming is holding the rolled-up stele rubbing he made for me. I thought I might have dropped it off the cliff when the witch appeared.
“A little more time—” begins Professor Baranyi, but Esme shuts him down.
“We’re leaving now.”
Professor Baranyi begged to prolong our stay, then asked for a private word with me, but Fan Ming and our witch escort, Bao Wei, were firm in ejecting us quickly from the library, and they flanked me the whole way out. With Esme on their side, the professor gave up, and now he looks very glum and unhappy on his horse.
As soon as we are back on the road in the forest, me slumped on a horse in front of Frederick, I feel better. When I sit up straighter, he says, “All right?”
“Yes,” I say, relieved to find I can speak easily again. “I don’t know what that blasted witch did to me.”
His voice is low, close to my ear. “Fan Ming brought me up to the forest of stele, and you were…I don’t know how to explain it…you were tied up on the ground, but the knots and bindings were not of any earthly matter. It was as if you were tied up by darkness, and all around you pieces of light and shadow were moving across the ground, and that witch was stirring through it all with her fingers.”
Julia Defiant Page 8
