by Bryan Fields
The more I looked at the pattern of light on the shark’s side, the more I wanted to run. Not just run, but flee for my life in blind panic. As it swam closer, the stronger the urge to run became.
Maraz grabbed my ankles and hauled me into the grotto inside the ship. I tried to swim out past her. She punched me in the stomach and held me until the fear faded. Eventually, I looked at her and gave her a nod.
Maraz patted me on the shoulder and pointed up. I nodded again and followed her back to the catamaran. The fisherman hadn’t actually caught any fish, but he was most of the way through the pony keg. Some standards of fishing success are universal.
I said, “I’m sorry I panicked down there. That’s never happened to me before.”
Maraz shook her head. “The bands on the shark’s side created it. They charge the water to drive prey from hiding. I should have warned you about the effect, but lantern sharks are very rare in these waters.”
“I see. Well, thank you. For punching me.”
Maraz leaned back on the netting. “My pleasure, David.”
The return trip took somewhat longer than the trip out—the sails needed a few more hours to capture enough wind to propel the ship again. Maraz and I kicked back to enjoy the ride instead of hanging on for dear life. I got a few more photos, including some nice shots of another group of lizardmen spearfishing off a large raft.
Maraz poked me with her toes and asked, “Why don’t you want to take pictures of me, David? You take pictures of everything else.”
I looked down and blushed. “I wasn’t sure if it would offend you, or if you would want people back home seeing you…like this.”
“Naked?” She laughed. “I’m an Ideal. Let them look. If I inspire them, or make them envious, or fill them with wonder, or give them a few minutes of fevered imagination, I’ve succeeded.” She struck a pose and asked, “Do you think they’ll remember me once they’ve seen this?” I settled for nodding and taking the picture.
Maraz kept posing for a bit, mostly muscle and bodybuilding shots. She also did a few close-up portraits and detail shots of her beard braiding. Not that I was likely to try anything like it myself, but it was fascinating to look at.
The sun was low on the horizon by the time we returned to the dock. There was no way to get back up to the dining hall in time to get dinner, so we bought a skin of fermented fruit juices and a basket of roast pork ribs to eat in the scurrier on the way up. We gave the driver an extra coin, and the rats got to chew on the rib bones back in the stable.
The monastery gatehouse and watchtowers were flying bright yellow flags with diagonal black stripes. “Storm warning,” Maraz said. “We’ll need to get extra provisions in case we’re housebound tomorrow.”
“How bad will it get?”
“It’s not typhoon season, so it won’t be the worst of what we get,” Maraz replied. “Still, if you lose your footing, the winds can blow you off the edge. It’s happened before. We’ll settle in and wait it out unless there’s an emergency.”
“Why not have everyone sleep in the dining hall tonight?”
“If the storm is bad enough, we will. If it’s not too bad, we’ll work out as normal in the morning. Otherwise, we hunker down and hope it doesn’t get unbearable.”
We stopped by the mess hall and checked in for the night. The staff gave us extra skins of water, a basket full of rice and noodles, and a pair of blankets. They were woven from giant rat underfur and were far softer than they sounded.
The storm would be too much for our linen door, so we fitted a wooden storm shutter across the opening and fixed it into place with bamboo crossbars. The roof might be thatch, but it was still Dwarven engineering. I’d expect the walls to spring a leak before the roof did.
Maraz took the hammocks down and put together a pallet on the floor. “We’ll sleep like this tonight. Makes falling out of bed a lot more difficult.” I couldn’t argue with that logic—stone floors hurt. I got settled and connected the phone to the solar station to recharge.
Maraz propped herself up on one elbow and asked, “Did you bring images of your home world along? Other than the ones of your family, I mean.”
“Good question. Let me see what I have.” I had some anime and classic TV shows I’d loaded for our flight to Mumbai, but those wouldn’t help. At that point, I smacked my head and pulled up the pictures I’d taken in India.
“Here we go. This isn’t the country I live in, but Mumbai is one of the biggest cities we have back home. There are also a lot of baby pictures.”
“Oh, ho,” she said. “You are a father. Show me your child.”
She browsed through the pictures while I told her about Sharon and how she died. Like Rose, she accepted the whole arrangement without blinking. “You gave your friend a great gift,” was all she said.
Once she was finished, I set the phone to charge and asked, “So, what did you think of Mumbai?”
“Your people wear a lot of clothes,” she said. “And there are so many of you. How does the wind ever get into those cities? The smell must be horrible.”
“Sometimes. Pollution, garbage disposal, clean water, crime—all of those are real problems.” I shrugged. “Denver, the city I live in, only has around two million people in and around it. Mumbai has more than twenty million people living in it. Way too many for my taste.”
“Twenty…million. In one city.” She shook her head. “How can your world support so many? Aren’t they starving?”
“Maraz, the population of my world is seven billion. And yes, some of them are starving. Many are poor. Some have no education, some go to school for twenty years. It’s far from perfect.”
“I didn’t expect perfect,” she replied. “I did wonder how a Dragon could pass unnoticed, but…all those people. It’s madness.”
I blew out the oil lamp and settled into bed. “It is. So many of us want more from life, or want a better world. We look beyond what’s there and try to see what could be. That need is what draws the Dragons to us. People who are satisfied with what is can’t nourish them.”
Outside, the wind started to pick up, and the first gentle drops of rain hit the roof. They didn’t stay gentle for long. The wind gave a few hard gusts and fell off to nothing before driving the rain against the shutters like a fusillade of bullets. Thunder followed hard on its heels, becoming the steady booming of distant cannon in the night.
Even muted by the stone walls, the storm drove away all thoughts of sleep. Maraz finally rolled up on one elbow and asked, “What do you do to make your world a better place, David?”
“I… I don’t know.” I listened to the rain for a moment, trying to think of something. “I helped save the world once, but it didn’t make much of a difference since nobody knows about it.” I paused for a bit more, unsure how to proceed. I described my job as being record keeper to an apothecary. That she understood well enough, but explaining about Thain’s plot and going to the Feds took a while.
When I finished, Maraz nodded. “I’m not sure about some of what you said, but I understand you did the right thing despite the cost. That answers my question.”
“Do I meet your standard for being a good citizen?”
Maraz shrugged. “Do you meet yours?”
I thought about it for a few seconds. “I’m trying to.”
“Then you meet mine.”
We lay there in silence for a while. Long after Maraz dropped off to sleep, I stared at the ceiling, acutely aware of how much I was missing Rose. I wanted to measure up to what Maraz expected of me—in the same way any army recruit wants to succeed in the eyes of their drill instructor—but even that feeling wound up being hijacked by the acceptance, and turned into longing to be reunited with Rose.
I didn’t mind it. I minded not minding. I didn’t want to cheat on Rose with Maraz—not that Maraz would let it happen—but I wanted to be able to want to. Even that thought left me missing Rose all the more.
The acceptance was intended to be tem
porary. Did anyone, even the Dragons who engineered it, have any idea what the long-term effects would be?
Chapter Eleven
Brief, Brief the Pain
Morning arrived far too early. The storm was still going on, but it was down to heavy rains and only light winds. We spent the morning cleaning up our hut, and were back to sparring after lunch.
Maybe it was the lack of sleep, but I’d woken with a burning desire to prove I wasn’t anyone’s puppet. As soon as we got out on the sands, I asked if Altia was ready for our promised bout.
Maraz asked, “Are you sure you want to do it now? You might have a line of folks waiting for you by the end of the day.”
“Bring them on,” I said. “If they want a piece of me, I’ll oblige them.” I didn’t feel as cocky as that sounded, and wasn’t sure I’d win. Regardless, when Altia looked at me and nodded, I felt a rush of joy. I couldn’t help but grin at her.
Altia’s weapon of choice was a razor chain—a kind of steel whip. I’d seen her slice limbs off of pig carcasses with it. The ghost steel version wouldn’t actually cut me, but it would feel like walking into a blender. We stepped out onto the sand and bowed to each other. When Maraz dropped her hand, I charged.
Altia was weakest when she was just starting. It would take a few seconds for her chains to get up to speed. In that time, I got close enough to drive my shoulder into her solar plexus. She fell backward, dropping her whips. She rolled sideways, reaching for one of the whips, and I took her head off with a two-handed down stroke.
Maraz pointed to me and shouted, “Victor!”
I gave my ghost steel sword a flourish and started laughing. “Who’s next?” I shouted. “Who else has a grievance with me? Anyone? Anyone?” I turned in place, holding my arms out to my side. “Who’s next? Who wants to face me? I welcome you!”
Maraz walked up to me and clapped her hand on my shoulder. “How do you feel, David?”
“I feel…wonderful,” I said. “Unstoppable. ‘If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst forth at once in the sky, bathing the world in brilliance, it would be like unto the splendor of the Mighty One. I am eternal, all-consuming fate. I am born Shiva the destroyer. Death. The Shatterer of Worlds’.” I lowered my arms and took several deep breaths. “This is it, isn’t it? The battle-joy you talked about?”
“Yes.” She took the sword out of my hands and handed it to one of the other Ideals. “That was beautiful ritual poetry. Did it just come to you?” She guided me over to a stone bench and helped me sit down.
“No, it’s from a holy book back home, the Bhagavad Gita. I just happened to remember it.” I leaned my head onto her shoulder and practiced breathing. After a few seconds I looked up. “Is Altia all right? Did I hurt her?”
“She’s fine. Quite thankful to you, in fact. You demonstrated a flaw in her technique.”
I nodded. “Good. I didn’t want to hurt her.”
Maraz raised an eyebrow at me. “You know you can’t hurt her. Not seriously, and not permanently. In fact, from the way you charged in, I’d say you intended to hurt her. That is what we’re teaching you.”
“Hurting people before they can hurt me or someone else, yes.” I shook my head. “Not to hurt people who aren’t a threat.”
Maraz smiled. “You know how to do that already. Now that you have attained battle-joy, we will begin learning to achieve it at will.”
And that became the pattern for the next month.
The battle-joy wasn’t a light bulb I could turn on and off, but there were triggers capable of bringing it out. While we sparred, Maraz kept poking at the triggers we knew about, looking for ways to inspire me. It wasn’t rage or bloodlust she was after, but supreme, radiant confidence.
Up until now, sparring had been tempered to some degree by a reluctance to seriously hurt one another. Now, Maraz was fighting me full out, and bringing in other Ideals to change things up and keep me on my toes.
The monastery blacksmith took the time to craft a duplicate of Kindness in ghost steel for me, a gift I hadn’t asked for. Even though the replica would have to remain at the monastery, the gesture touched me far more than I expected. I bought him a barrel of imported ale as a way of saying thank you. We didn’t see him again for the next three days.
I fought Altia a few dozen more times, both armed and barehanded, and three times got my ass handed to me when she found her battle-joy. Elves are far faster than I’d ever imagined, and once she got her razor chains going, getting near her was about like sticking your face into an airplane propeller spinning at full throttle. I managed a lethal blow once, and all it cost was both eyes, both legs, and any chance at children. Fair trade.
I was better against her barehanded, even though her nails could cut core samples out of a glacier. She had a spell that transformed her nails into something stronger and sharper than the Dwarven steel Kindness was forged of. She stripped my left forearm down to the bone once and tore my throat open twice with them.
The downside was the spell took time to turn on and off. If I could dodge her initial attacks, I had a good chance of being able to grapple and carve her up with her own nails. It wasn’t pretty or gentlemanly, but it worked. Find a weakness and exploit it—the Stonewall mantra.
The last few days of my stay raced by in a blur of blood and thunder, until I woke on the last day and found Maraz sitting on the floor staring at me.
“Morning,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Your time with us,” she said. “After breakfast, once you’ve gathered your things, I was hoping you would come down to the village with me. I want to get a tattoo.”
“You still have room for another one?” I waved my hand at her. “I’m sorry, stupid question. What are you going to have done?”
“An unclosed circle. It’s a symbol of…absent friends.”
I smiled. “Sure. I’d be delighted.”
I got a chance to say my farewells during breakfast. Dwarves aren’t a terribly sentimental bunch, so in many cases good-bye amounted to little more than a grunt and a nod. Altia gave me a small rock covered with purple lichen. It was partially hollow, and a tiny, gold-leafed tree had managed to take root inside the stone.
I hardly dared breathe on it. “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll take very good care of it.”
“This tree is isuul. Humans call it graniteheart. It may grow the width of your smallest fingernail in a year.” She stroked the leaves with the tip of her finger. “These are the trees we make into our dwellings. No home is complete without one.”
I looked down at the tree again. “This is the kind of tree the city of Tianisa was built on?”
She nodded. “The same.”
“Amazing.” I poured a little water onto a linen hand towel and wrapped it around the stone. “Does it take full sun or shade?”
“Full sun with good water. Plant it in earth when the roots begin to split the stone.” She gathered up her gear and gave me a smile. “Don’t worry. It takes a lot to kill one once they’re established.”
“I’ll take that as a vote of confidence.” I secured the bundle in my bag and followed Maraz out of the building. A farmer had just finished delivering a scurrier full of produce to the kitchen, and he was delighted to get a few coins to carry us down on his return trip. I got several pictures of the giant rats for posting on the Internet and creeping people out.
The tattooist in Caifa was a living monument to his craft, showing more ink than skin to the world. His forehead and the sides of his face had lines and whorls picked out in bumps and ridges, produced by packing cuts with small pearls and letting the wound heal around them.
His tools were essentially the same as what you’d find used in a prison, except they were clean and made of exquisite steel. The needles were narrow and sharper than any nail, almost at the level of Earth tattoo guns. He used a leather strap to hold Maraz’ arm down on his work table. He took a bit finding exactly the right spot to start, marking it, and tracing a few light guide m
arks. Then the hammering started. Dingdingdingding. Dingdingdingding. Dingdingdingding.
The tattooist kept the needle moving around Maraz’ arm, leaving ant trails of ink. Each pass he made around her arm defined the image a little more. The serpentine ant trail became an interlinked pattern of knots. I waited and watched, holding Maraz’ hand, entranced by the interplay of ink and blood. When the tattooist stopped to refill his ink, I stood up and stretched. Rose was sitting on a wooden stool, smiling at me.
I pulled her into my arms, lifting her off the ground to make kissing her easier. I buried my face in her hair, inhaling the sweet scent of her. I felt our bodies slip back into synch, coming together like oiled gears. For the first time in three months, I felt complete.
When I stepped back, Rose looked past me and said, “Was David a good student, Ideal?”
“Of course. I would not have allowed it to be otherwise. He had a few bad habits he needed to unlearn, but he was very attentive. His growth was quite a surprise to a few of the other Ideals. Thank you for choosing me to work with him.”
“You seemed to be most likely to bring out the best in him.” Rose looked at the new tattoo on Maraz’ arm and cocked her head to the side. “I guess he made an impression.”
Maraz smiled and half-shrugged. “He did. I enjoyed being his instructor.”
Rose nudged me and inclined her head toward the tattooist. “Are you getting one as well?”
I hadn’t thought about it, but I liked the idea. “I think I’d like to. You don’t mind, do you?”
“You’d know if I did.” Rose waved at one of the nearby kids and paid him to bring us a skin of chilled fruit wine. I had a few swallows and let Rose strap my arm down.
The tattooist made a few marks on my arm and then nudged me. “Hold hands,” he said. “Focus on your memories. The ink will bind them to your flesh.” While he talked, he changed to a new needle and poured out a new supply of ink.
