She did. She wandered the halls, feeling ever colder away from the warmth of his presence. She thought about her mother and father, searching; she thought of her friends, who must have been terrified by now. Maybe they all thought she was dead. Maybe they were dead—for all she knew, years could have passed. Decades. She had no sense of time. I should be terrified, she realized.
But somehow, she wasn't.
On the tenth floor, written in the farthest corner, she found a letter written in Kaam's tiniest script, in English. It was a letter from him to her, Samarjit, and it poured out his hope, his fear, his longing to possess her in breathtaking ways.
He'd filled the tenth floor long, long ago. Before she was born, perhaps.
She reached out and touched her fingers to the chalk, closed her eyes, and said, "I feel it too."
He was there when she opened her eyes, writing frantically in the tiny spaces left between lines. Samarjit. Samarjit. Samarjit. Over and over and over, in letters she recognized and then alphabets she only vaguely knew. He wrote it in Punjabi, the language of the Sikh scriptures. In Chinese characters. In Cyrillic. In marks that no longer had meaning to modern eyes.
She put her arms around him from behind, and he stopped writing. The silence in her mind, which had been a constant hiss of chalk on stone, was deafening.
The one who wins the war. That was what her name meant.
And as he turned, she saw eternity in his eyes. It was not dark. It was bright and vast and full of terrors. I am the one who writes, Kaam said, and she heard it through her skin, through her soul. And while I write on the skin of the world, that which would consume it, pauses.
Kaam had stopped writing, because of her. Her father had told her: The captive does not destroy. He makes you destroy yourself.
You had to want to lose yourself in him.
She saw her skin begin to change, felt her mortal desires bleed away. Felt eternity reflected in her eyes.
Kaam kissed her, a soft and gentle kiss of longing, love, desire, sadness, and then he was free, a mist in the air, a whisper in her mind. She saw it clearly then, all the things her father hadn't told her: of the wise men gathered together in a long-fallen kingdom, knowing the end of days was upon them. Of binding a spirit, a jinn, a si'lat, to their service to hold it at bay, because they were weak and afraid to sacrifice themselves in the struggle.
They had kept him here in prison all this time, while their descendants kept watch. While they served. Knowing the end of the world, the end of everything and everyone, was on the shoulders of one poor, half-mad creature bound to their service.
Samarjit Cole was one of their blood, and one of their blood had finally freed him.
There was only one thing to do. One thing to keep the darkness at bay.
She knelt down, picked up the chalk, and began to write stories on the skin of the world.
I am the one who wins the war.
However long the war would last.
She felt him before she saw him, the metallic warmth of his presence, the whisper of his breath, and felt his arms around her. Her breath lurched in her throat as he pressed a warm kiss to the back of her neck.
Kaam would not abandon her. He was free to do as he chose.
And he chose to stay.
He knelt beside her, picked up a piece of chalk, and began to write with her.
Stories Are Gods
Peter Orullian
I eased to my knees beside her chair, breathless.
“Anna,” I managed, huffing from my shambling jog to her convalescent room. I looked up at my love, anxious to hear her speak a word. Any word.
She looked down at me. “Lour?” I could see lucidity in her face—she’d used my name, knew who I was. But the real question remained in her eyes.
I glanced at the hand-mirror in her lap, its handle squeezed beneath her whitened knuckles. “Eight years,” I said. “You don’t remember?”
She raised the mirror, her expression like that of a disoriented child. The face reflected there was her own. Just older. Eight years of catatonia staring back.
“I was inside the Bourne,” she said, quieter, her voice fragile. “I was taken by a trader. A highwayman. Sold.” She looked at me, her brow rising, as though she hoped I could help her decipher the rest.
I put a hand over her fingers and gently pressed the mirror back to her lap. How much did I tell her? I didn’t know it all, myself. But damn me if I didn’t know what I had done. Things I’d thought about every day the past eight years as I’d sat in this very room hoping her distant, empty eyes would focus on me again—like they did now—and we could start over.
It wasn’t the time to share any of that. Not right now. Maybe not ever. “How do you feel?” I asked. A safe question.
A feint smile rose at one corner of her mouth, looking more bitter than mirthful. “Muddled,” she said.
“You’re back in Aubade Grove, Anna.” I glanced around the clean but rather bare room. “And this is a hospice, of sorts. They’ve been taking care of you.”
“There’s so much . . . missing.” She struggled to find words, memories, her brow pinching. After a long moment, her eyes relaxed, no longer seeming to reflect inward, and her smile sweetened as she looked at me. “I remember you, though. My Lour Nail. And what did it cost you to have me looked after like this?”
I returned her warm smile. “I’m a philosopher by trade. A catatonic mind presents a unique challenge.”
“I’ll wager you’ve squandered countless hours telling me bad jokes, trying to pry me from my catalepsy.” She swallowed, resting her voice a moment. Then shook her head in mild reproof. “That can’t have helped the Grove’s only albino win any arguments on the theater floors.”
“Ah, but this is Aubade Grove, my dear. I convinced the college Savants that there was science to be had in observing and treating your condition.”
She gave a small laugh. “Nonsense. The Grove colleges study the sky. The mind and body they leave to others. ”
I shrugged and left her question unanswered. Wasn’t important, anyway. The only thing that mattered was that Anna had returned from a long journey inside her mind. Deafened gods had I missed her. I would never have thought one could hold the hand of the woman he loves and feel so far from her. Know she was far from you. In mind. I’d had eight years of that.
“All hells, what are we rambling on about, you’re back, my girl.” I paused, happier than I’d been in . . . well, in eight years. “You’re back.”
“I’m back,” she repeated, and inclined her head, so that our foreheads could touch. The way we used to.
Anna had been the only woman who’d ever touched me. Albinism has that effect. Or maybe it was my slight frame. A woman has a right to feel safe with her man. My bones seemed to break easy, besides. Physick men and blackcoats called it brittle-bone disease. I called it the nuisance that was my body.
“Why in every last hell did you ever marry me?”
It was a question I’d asked myself a lot over these years she’d held that thousand-league look in her eyes.
She pulled back, like you do when you want someone to hear and see your reply. “Why, because you’re objectionable, of course.” There was a wicked grin on her face now—a subtle thing, but there to be seen if you knew how to look. It wasn’t a tease. In fact, that grin did more to punctuate what she said than refute it.
“Objectionable?” I said, a bit playful. I think I needed her to explain.
“You make me laugh,” she clarified.
In truth, most of the time, I did so more by accident than design.
“It’s all the popular positions I take in the discourse theaters, isn’t it?” I laughed out loud, and very much liked the sound of it in her little convalescent room.
She shook her head, clarifying again. “It’s the look on the faces of the opposing panelists that I like best.”
Good hell did I love this woman.
I was a slight albino philosopher with
unpopular opinions about most things. If there was ever proof of the abandoning gods, it was that any woman could love me. Let alone Anna, who many thought would be the next Savant of the College of Cosmology.
I smiled, more content than I had a right to be, and inclined to kiss her . . .
. . . when her eyes grew distant. Her cheeks slackened. And her thousand-league stare returned.
Just that fast, she was gone again.
Eight years.
After eight years I’d gotten eight minutes. If that. And now what?
Damn me.
I tried to rouse her. For hours I tried. Bad jokes. Unpopular philosophical arguments. Physical contact. Nothing worked. Eventually, the hospice workers gently ushered me out of her small room and onto the cobbled street.
It was dark hour. Maybe later. I didn’t care. I stood there in the dark and chill, hating. Hating my bad luck. Hating the abandoning gods. Hating the Bourne and every last creature sent there by those gods during the Placing. The gods-damned creatures had bought Anna from a highwayman and made use of her somehow. Until I’d found a way to get her back—
“Pleasant evening, don’t you think?”
I turned, un-startled, toward the owner of the deep, clear voice. A man stood against the wall of the hospice, his well-worn coat buttoned to the top. He looked like every field hand I’d ever seen. He didn’t speak again for a long while, pulling a time or two on a tobacco stem, the end flaring in the dark.
Then he stood up and came close so that I could see his expression. Or rather the lack of expression. Empty, by those silent gods. His face was just plain empty. In philosophical terms, I’d say diffident. Lacking animus.
But that was my nerves trying to gain control of my fear, which had begun to gallop along irrationally. The Grove didn’t have real enemies. Debates, sure. Spirited disagreements. But never hate. Never . . . apathy.
“Did you enjoy those few moments of clarity with your wife?” he asked.
A chill shivered through me.
I stared, unmoving.
“You’re welcome,” the man added.
My dying gods. Velle. Had to be. The Velle knew how to render the Will, cause things to move, change . . . stir. And they lived inside the Bourne, where Anna had been taken . . .
“You plan to take her back,” I surmised, trying to sound defiant.
“Do you honestly think a single woman is that important to us?” The man took a long pull on his tobacco stem, savoring the smoke as it rolled from his lips and nose in slow streams.
“She must be,” I replied. “Why else make a trip to Aubade Grove to give her a moment’s clarity.”
The man turned and began to stroll, clearly expecting me to join him. I didn’t follow. Several strides down the small street he stopped. Never looked back. Waiting.
After several long moments of indecision, my skin began to prickle. A chill. But not of cold. Not temperature cold. This chill moved inside me. I shuddered as it touched my bones, as it caressed memories I’d successfully forgotten—about being an albino child, about how I’d rescued Anna. I felt like a cello string being played on a bitter midwinter morning, moments from snapping and ending that deep, dry note.
I dropped to my knees, staring up at the back of the Velle, who hadn’t moved, save his head, which cocked back as if to some expectant pleasure.
That’s when I felt the chill deepen. And in my mind images flared. Dark hovels rank with the sweat of childbirth labor. Long brackish ponds walked in by stooped figures harvesting mud-roots. Fields of short graves.
I agonized with the brutal suggestion of the images. My body and soul resonated in the night with the Velle, as if we’d become connected somehow. And just as my own dark secrets began to surface, the note ended. I crumpled to the stones, exhausted, defiled in a way one feels who’s been caged and put on display as a low one. Something to be gawked at. Ridiculed. I knew those feelings. Oh, I knew them.
When enough of my strength returned, I stood and limped to the Velle’s side. If I hadn’t broken or cracked a bone in my left leg it sure felt like I had. But I shuffled alongside him as he started to stroll.
The man turned his indifferent eyes on me. “What do your stories say about the races in the Bourne?”
His question needed no answer. We both knew what the stories said. Whatever lived in the Bourne had been herded there, placed by gods who’d abandoned us all. And those races were kept in the Bourne by a barrier of some kind. A veil, the stories said. Raised by the gods to keep these Quiet races at bay. Keep them from coming into the Eastlands to test men. Test them with war. With death. With suffering.
He was merely reminding me of all this before coming to his purpose.
“There’s an argument about to begin in your College of Philosophy,” he said. “Not a Succession of Arguments,” he clarified. “This won’t involve your colleges of astronomy or mathematics or physics. Or even cosmology.”
I looked up at the five great towers of the Grove, their observation domes looming hundreds of strides above. They formed an immense pentacle at the center of the city. Each college had its own tower. Libraries and research halls and discourse theaters connected the towers in a broad pentagon that held walking gardens at its center.
“The annual position forum, you mean.” I hadn’t planned to attend. Usually a waste of damn time.
“Aubade Grove’s College of Philosophy has recently taken a charter from the League of Civility.” The Velle turned down a narrow alley. “A few members is all. More of an experiment than anything else, at this point.”
“I don’t give a spit for the League,” I said, grateful for an angry thought to combat the chill still rolling through me. “But the few who’ve signed on with them are influential with the college, that’s a truth.”
“They’re responsible for this year’s philosophical position. They plan to submit that the stories about the Bourne are misunderstood. They’ll call to question the existence of the Veil that imprisons the Quiet. They’ll argue to rationalize all of this as an unfortunate mythology. Put it away. Ignore it in the same way rational men ignore all irrational things.”
Favoring my broken leg as I was, my boot caught on an ill-fitted stone and I fell. “Good gods-damn!” I was pretty sure I’d just broken my wrist trying to stop my fall.
The Velle paused, staring in the direction of the Grove towers. They ascended the night, carving dark pillars from the star-filled sky.
As I watched him, I began to have an idea about why he’d come to me. Of all the philosophers in the Grove—hell, maybe of all people in the Grove—I was one who held Bourne stories to be true. Anna had been taken there. And I’d once tried to go there myself.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“Simple.” The Velle turned and stared down at me. “You will argue against them. You will be sure the existing philosophical position about the Bourne remains in place.”
I forgot myself for a moment, and asked, “Why do you give a tinker’s damn what a bunch of high-minded philosophers thinks about the Bourne and all its beasts.”
A sharp pain erupted behind my eyes and nose. My eyes began to water. My nose bled. Then abruptly the stabbing sensation was gone. The Velle’s brief touch.
When I’d caught my breath, I reframed my question. “I would have thought you’d prefer we pay you no mind. Attentive men prepare better. You know, in times of rumor and threat and war.”
The Velle shook his head, and tossed his tobacco stem away. “We’re not concerned with your little armies. Or your Sheason, who render the Will as we do.” He paused a long moment, as if deciding whether killing me might prove a better course. After all, he was asking the Grove’s frail albino to make his argument for him. I was awfully damn good on the theater floor—no false modesty there—but that didn’t always matter in the ways it should.
“What we care about is the Veil,” he continued. “We want to understand it, scientifically.”
“That’s not be
en a focus—”
“I know,” he replied. “But you’ll get to it eventually. And the concerted effort of the Grove colleges in understanding how it works is something we care very much about.”
“Because in understanding it, you might be able to bring it down, that it?” The logic wasn’t hard to follow. “Why in every last hell would I want to help you, then?”
He looked past me, back the way we’d come. “Because we’ll find a way to bring it down, eventually. Because you might want to be considered a friend when we do. And because I can return Anna to you. Permanently.”
End the catatonia he meant. My silent prayer for so long.
“There are risks, of course,” he added. “Her mind has found a sanctuary. You’d be taking that away from her if I make her fully awake.” His resonant voice came low, deep, almost from the stones beneath me.
I stared at him. To get Anna back . . . And I had no love for the League. Still, could anything he wanted of me be the right thing?
“And consider . . . it’s the argument you’d have wanted to make anyway. You, of all people.” He cocked his head—the first human thing I’d seen him do, other than smoke a stem—and asked an odd question. “Why ‘Lour Nail’?”
It was a nickname. One I’d had since my youth. So long . . . that I didn’t answer to anything else. I took out my compass, placed it in the palm of my hand, and held it toward him. The Velle bent down, reading the needle.
“It’s out of true by a few degrees south,” he said matter-of-factly. Then he nodded. “‘Lour,’ the alternate for ‘lower.’ And ‘nail,’ the astronomer’s name for a compass needle. Clever. You have this effect on all compasses.” It wasn’t a question. He nodded again. “I felt it in you. Something in your blood. In your flesh. Heavier. Perhaps related to your white disease.”
“Albinism, thank you.” It wasn’t humor or anger. Just rote.
That’s when I saw the most human thing I’d seen from the Velle. An almost smile. In my experience, it takes practice to almost smile. It was a bitter thing. More mocking than amusement.
“Oh, that is poetry,” he said.
I shook my head.
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