by Segoy Sands
When sight and sound returned, he saw Phelan on his knees, vomiting bloody bile. The Eye was in the ring, saying something to Hamlet, then to the crowd.
“Four,” he held up four fingers, shaking his head. “It’s four and it’s no good.”
In the upper tier, Walder and Merton met eyes.
“We call it a night,” Merton said. “Everyone, drink.”
10 THE TRAITOR WITHIN
Deniela poured tea into the delicate green cups, discerning in the softly curling steam hints of passionflower, valerian, and, very faintly, poppy. Gáire’s precision with the blending of herbs was, she had to admit, unnerving. She herself had never gone beyond a basic skill with simples. This decoction would promote a sense of calm and wellbeing, and, she suspected, a long dreamless sleep, from which neither she nor the girl would wake, unless Gáire decided to administer the antidote. Deniela was the aksama, but she accepted that she was on trial. Should I fail here, let me die. She had told her of Naarwa Isle. She had told her of how the Rood War ended. She feared to say more, though the Spiral must be reassured, her critics silenced.
Tears leaked down the girl’s face. Deniela felt the wetness on her own cheeks. Nerves, of course. And nervines. How long had it been since she’d cried? It purified the heart, they said, but she was pure already, white heat, desert bone. There were twenty-four knots along the central channel, three around each of the lower and upper three nodal points, and six around the heart. Adepts were taught not to place their focus too much on the heart, because to loosen that six-fold knot was perilous. That was life’s work, life’s plan: ambush after ambush, until one recognized the traitor within, and laughed. What could one do but laugh, realizing that one had been trying to protect the innocent heart from the cruel incursions of the world, when one should have been protecting oneself from that most perverse of all organs, which wanted to let the world in, and would, little by little, until one felt the pain of every living thing. I learned that lesson slowly. But this, girl, what does she not know through the qassig? It filled the air, bubbling through the living stone of the walls and ceiling. It bubbled through them both, kneeling on the spiral-patterned carpet on the floor.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Prior to earning a doctor of philosophy with a dissertation on William Blake and ecophilosophy, Segoy Sands became versed in comparative literature and philosophy at Columbia University, where he won creative writing prizes amid an exceptional pool of writers who have gone on to create critically praised series for television. He draws inspiration for the Dark Spiral series from the British mythopoeic tradition: from Spenser's Faerie Queene to Milton's Paradise Lost to Blake's Jerusalem and Tolkien's Silmarillion. He is also inspired by fantasists, from Vance to Rothfuss and Le Guin to Clarke.
Growing up near New York City, attending Columbia (to drop out twice but graduate in close running for valedictorian, with the encouragement of the late brother of Ursula K. Le Guin), Sands gave up his worldly possessions, and embarked on peregrinations from islands in the Pacific Northwest to hills stations in Northern India.
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An Excerpt from The Gates of Paradise,
Book Two of the Dark Spiral
She had looked upon Nembulo Nucifera. She was a yeme now, and would no longer have to share a room with other novissi. Yet she was anxious. After years of following the same routines, she suspected that the turning back would not come easy to her. All the momentum of her mind was still toward the turning away. But perhaps that was part of it, not only for her but for every new yeme. Perhaps the art was to turn one flow into its opposite, rather than come to some final ending point, some point of readiness. What, after all, had led her to think that there was an end point in the turning away? Surely, it could go on forever. And the same must be true of the turning back. Between one moment and another, there was always the turning away and the turning back, in which worlds within worlds were altered, the perilous transition unmarked. At no point might one ever achieve perfection, only wider amplitude to share one’s abilities, to serve.
Showing her up to her new quarters higher in La Seritää Sierrellä was a young sister, at most three years her senior, in robes curiously lacking in glyphs. Her hair, brown as her limbs, was strangely angled across the brow. Her eyes were amused. In a year or two, would she have cut the rough gem of herself into such clear facets? Or would she have shipwrecked on herself and been humbled? And was the humbling part of the honing? Was the preciousness of the gem its indifference to its value?
Garbed in soft new clothes, taking the first steps of the turning back, she knew she must not shy from testing the tenor of her renunciation against the light of world. The smile on the older girl’s face told her how lucky she was and how difficult the change would be. Round and round, up the gentle turnings, she was ascending in a dream, higher and higher still, so high she almost expected to come to the outer egress, the Gates of Luba, for the first time since childhood. Ascending that upward curving stair, she remembered the first time she’d set eyes on La Seritää Sierrellä. It had pulled on her like some great umbilicus, spiraling down into the living rock of the Carreg Goch, the red stone valley in the vast center lands of La Tierra Rosa. Arriving with five other small girls, after a month’s journey from Paidrin, she had stood at the edge of that navel in the world, the deep crater, and felt its patience, as a sister explained that its red walls were sacred, a living presence of the mother.
Her guide now walked through another archway with tall, narrow roseate doors, but Ashe stopped. She had never seen anything so beautiful. The other girl raised an bemused eyebrow.
“Here is the vestibule. Let me show you.”
The doors opened onto a spiral stair, not of stone like the others but of orange-red sindoor, carpeted with a long vermilion rug alive with flame patterns. The southern wall, facing onto the open interior of the Sierrellä, was paned with glass, each stained a different hue, white, yellow, red, blue, green, violet. Late afternoon sun poured through the windows, casting onto the stairs soft-tinted beams that overlapped in unexpected ways, producing phantom hues like overtones in music, evanescing in and out of visibility. The beauty of it took her, so long a stranger to sunlight, by surprise, no mere display of colors but emotions made tangible.
Rushing to one of the long narrow panes, she gazed outside for the first time since that final brief pause before the descent into La Sierrellä. The canyon lip seemed shockingly close at hand. If memory served, there were windowed apartments above.
“Come,” the older girl said.
She counted thirty three stairs, and thirty three tinted panes, all in the same series of six colors, until the last three, which were clear. At the top waited a landing and a door much more modest than the one below. It looked to be of rough wood the carpenter had forgotten to finish, but above it, on a marble lintel was carved a perfectly formed gypsum rose. Her heart pounded beneath her ribs.
“Knock.” Her guide stepped down a stair or two, politely. “They’ll explain,” she nodded, and started back down the stair.
Alone, between one life and the next, she raised her knuckle to the wood and rapped softly. A tall red-haired woman, with sea green eyes, appeared.
“Sister Ashe,” she said warmly, “I am Saoirse.” She extended a long, delicate hand to lead her within. “You’ll want to meet the twins.”
The quarters were rectilinear. Along the longer south-facing wall, across from the windows, stood four wooden doors, set several feet apart. One of the doors opened, and out stepped two slim girls with honey-colored hair, close to her in age. She’d seen twins before, but never such mirror images. As Saoirse had, they gave her sisterly hugs.
“You’re Ashe, then?” one of them asked.
“It seems so,” she smiled, bashfully.
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