by Rabia Gale
What else have I to do with life?
I reach into the light, reach for the angel wings. The burn starts up my arms immediately, surging through skin and nerve, muscle and metal. My spiders are on it, busily repairing the damage.
I grasp the wings. They feel—indescribable. Like solid light, heavy and light, substantial and immaterial at the same time. This close to their radiance, I can make out no detail. My fingers numb as I grasp them, sling them over my shoulders.
They come alive, then, grasping my chest, creeping over my back, melding with me.
Intense heat blooms through my muscles. Tendrils of the wings—of angel craft—root into me. They wind through my body, and everywhere they touch, they bring a purity so sharp it hurts.
I shudder.
I can bear it. With my spiders repairing and strengthening my body, I have enough time.
And then angel craft reaches my brain, and all of a sudden, everything changes.
This is beyond my transformation. My senses and my faculties expand in one breath-taking instant. I have no words for what I can now sense, no way to understand all that I now know.
A thought, a mere mental twitch, and the wings spread out behind and to either side of me with a swish.
Power runs into me like a current, radiates from my body.
Angel craft slides down my arms. It covers my left hand up to the tips of my fingers. My right resists—or else the angel craft will not force the issue with a hand made of metal.
I stretch my left arm, up to the ceiling, fingers stiff. Another thought, and there’s a hole in the ceiling, straight through layers of mud and stone and sand. A whole cylinder of material has vanished.
Harsh daylight shines down on me.
I bend my knees, flex my muscles, and leap.
The angel wings catch me, carry me, riding straight up on a wave of power that’s both a rush and a burn. Together, we fly into the molten sky.
The closer we get to the salt, the night walkers and I, the more it feels like we’re pushing against a gale. Rock crumbles away from our feet, the sky is obscured with weird lights, and I can no longer trust my sense of direction or time. The Painted Mountains dance, bands of color twisting around each other. Ghostly figures act out fixed tableaus—one man killing another, a mother scooping up her child—and I can no longer tell if what I’m seeing is the past, present, or the future.
Even worse is the nothingness gouged into the landscape. Pits of no light, no air, no strings.
Just emptiness.
Off to one side, a night walker staggers straight into one of these hollows, collapses into a pile of sand and a scatter of bleached white bone.
All around me, other night walkers follow suit.
They’re sacrificing their bodies to halt the wrongness, replacing the desert with themselves.
I press on. My new sleek body grows battered and pitted. The shine is gone. Previously well-oiled joints squeak and shrill, small parts break and fall off.
No matter. I’m at the top of the hills now.
I look down at the salt fields, and flinch.
The demon’s straining out of the salt, its back long, skinny, and ridged. The fingers of one hand are clenched in the ground. It lifts its skull-like head as I approach. Ghastly green fires burn in the sockets. Its mouth is a rictus of hate and pain and rage.
It’s a dying creature, entombed in salt for so many centuries. It will not survive long, but it’ll take as much of the world down with it as it can.
This I cannot allow.
I will not let all the sacrifices of the eilendi, of my mentor, of Kato, be in vain.
Curtains of sickly light flicker between me and the salt demon. I flex the knees of the golem body, sink into the sand.
Then I run.
Lines of light rip through my body, cris-crossing it with dents and scratches. One arm disappears in a boil of light, the fingers of one hand are chopped clean off.
Still I run.
I lose a foot and my gait is a fast shuffle, one leg dragging behind the other.
I push on.
I’m almost there. I—just—have to get—close—enough.
And as the golem crumbles—finally—into a pile of metal flakes, I gather myself into one tight ball of energy and make the leap.
Right into the salt demon.
I see her jump.
It’s a swift, subtle movement, a faint shimmer in the air, unnoticeable to human senses.
But I’m enhanced. I pick up that shift of particles, and my brain recognizes it immediately.
It’s Flutter, and she’s inside the salt demon.
Don’t be an idiot! I shout the words inside my own head, hearing them echo in my skull. I have barely any power to spare for even that thought; all my being is wrapped in trying to maintain some form of control over the angel wings.
They burn bright around me, a radiant shell. Inside it, though, I’m already worn and exhausted.
Such things were never meant to be worn by humans.
I only need hold on for a little while.
Already the wrongness is flowing away from me. The angel wings burn it away, searing the bleeding wounds of the world.
I snap them back and dive, turning my body into a spear of light. I punch the salt demon with my angel craft-covered left hand, follow it up with a series of kicks, wheeling and whirling around its head like some kind of gnat.
The creature bellows, a deep sound too low for human ears, that thrums in my bones. It’s dying, angel craft scoring its bones, Flutter shredding it from within, but not fast enough.
Not fast enough for me.
Angel craft burrows into my body, grips me tight, burns me alive. I could kill the thing—but what about Flutter?
Then I see her. In the mad green flicker of the monster’s eye, I see her. A shifting shadow, a ghostly reflection. Trapped.
My voice is a strangled shout. “Get out of there now!” I punch at the demon’s eye with my iron hand.
Pain explodes up my right arm, but it’s enough. Enough of a bridge. Flutter’s a shadowy mass inside my hand, quivering, hiding from the angel craft that’s rooting through the rest of my body.
The salt demon collapses in slow agony, mouth open, the fires in its eyes dying to a sullen glow.
I pull back from it, skim the ground, hover upon the hillside.
And then the salt demon looks at me. Sees me, as if for the first time. Rage and hate concentrate in its eyes, as it recognizes an old adversary.
I use all my remaining strength to rip myself away from the angel wings, leaving tears in my very soul. I fall to the ground, angel wings soaring up on their own, just as a beam of focused darkness from the demon’s mouth hits them.
Light and dark collide, but I’m already pressing my face to the ground, sand and salt on my lips and tongue.
There’s an explosion, but it comes from far away. All I’m aware of is the ache in my own body.
That, and Flutter’s almost-insubstantial hand, resting lightly on my iron one.
The eerie men found us, and brought us back to Malaki crater. There, a few remaining eilendi and captured Highwind medics tended our injuries and kept us alive.
I find all this out when I wake up a day later, covered in bandages and sore in every part of me.
“From Chosen to Angel-touched in one lifetime,” says Mehmet, kneeling next to me, wry amusement in his eyes. “Kato the Blessed, they call you now.”
I grunt. I don’t feel blessed, or even lucky.
“A moment longer in the angel wings,” Mehment goes on, speaking dispassionately, as if discussing some variation in the weather, “and your insides would’ve turned to ash. You would have been beyond help, then.”
Am I within the help of any human even now? I feel empty inside, and frayed on the outside. After being filled and wrapped in such awesome holiness, painful as it had been, the world—the normal world we had saved—looks flat and colorless.
“It doesn’t
stop my men from coming in every day and touching the soles of your feet and the hem of your tunic. For the blessing, you know.”
I glance down at my bare feet. They look decidedly profane.
“How’s Flutter?” I ask, sitting up on my elbow. The room—the inside of a prefabricated Highwind army hut—spins. I wince.
Mehmet looks at me, unreadable. Finally, “The eilendi have her. They say—they say—she is one of their own.” He doesn’t sound as if he believes them.
At least he didn’t call her a Highwind demon again.
I struggle to sit up, ignoring my protesting body. “Take me to the Director. I need to speak to him right now.”
He doesn’t want to help us, not at first. He says it’s impossible, it can’t be done.
But Daral had told me to get him to change Flutter back. I trust Daral in this. He had been a careful man in life, careful with thought and word.
What had he been to Flutter? I could ask her, but she’s lying on a mat right now, a grey, grainy tangle of pale face and torn cloak, bleeding out her life in thin streams of atoms. Minute by minute, she fades into the surroundings.
This can’t be the end Taurin has in mind for her.
I press the issue with the Director. His release back to Highwind depends on this.
The Director protests, says it’s too hard. Says he doesn’t have the instruments he needs.
“We’ll get you what you need,” I tell him. “The eilendi will help.”
The eilendi aren’t vocal, but they are clearly reluctant. They’ve taken Flutter into their bosom. She’s their dying sister and they want to make sure they do everything right in Taurin’s eyes for her.
Me, I want her to live.
I don’t question why it’s so important to me that at least one of us go on and live strong, live with joy, but it is.
It just is.
With Mehmet backing me up, I bully the Director, persuade the eilendi, and wring a number of mysterious supplies from desert people and Highwind soldiers alike.
At last they are ready to perform whatever arcane melding of eilendi prayer magic and Highwind science will give Flutter back her life.
I spend the entire afternoon pacing. As the shadows lengthen across the desert and the burnished sky takes on the softer hues of twilight, an eilendi, staggering with exhaustion, leans in the doorway.
I look at him.
“She should sleep,” he tells me. “But you can see her for a few moments.”
I brush past him into a room made by knocking two pre-fab huts together to accommodate the Prayer Circle. Eilendi in white gather in groups or singly, many still chanting in a whisper or clicking their prayer beads. The Director, face pinched with disapproval, is packing equipment into a crate.
I go straight to Flutter, lying on a pallet, a sheet drawn up to her chin.
As I kneel next to her, she opens her eyes. Brown human eyes, not the faceted full-black of the cloak’s.
She looks the same and yet different. Her hair is a softer black, her face a creamier shade of white.
“They say…,” she says, in a drained whisper, “it’ll take… time. I won’t… look the same… as I used to.” Her eyes are already closing. I have to lean forward to hear her.
“But you’re back to what you were. You can be eilendi again. Like you wanted, right?”
She says, fighting the sleep and drugs that are weighing down her eyelids, “Daral…?”
I hesitate, wondering how to word it. But there’s nothing I can do to soften the blow. I’m not blessed with the gift of words. “Dead.” My tone is gentle.
Her eyes close, but with grief and pain. Her mouth moves. I lean closer, and realize that she’s saying prayers for the dead. Tears leak from under her eyelids.
“He was… a brave man,” I say, feeling clumsy. “I think—I think I would’ve someday wanted to call him friend.”
“My… brother…” she breathes out.
I sit back on my heels, trying to see a resemblance between my memory of Daral’s face, and the one Flutter now wears.
I wait for her to speak again, but she’s already asleep, tear-trails shining on her cheeks.
There’s an eilendi at my shoulder. “We will take her away from this desecrated place, to heal in the Light Wells. Come, she needs rest.”
Outside, Mehmet meets me and we both look across at the ruin of Malaki Crater. Highwind soldiers and Deep Night creatures are either gathered in groups or amble aimlessly under the hawk-eyed stares of the baradari.
“What will you do now?” he asks me.
I jerk my chin towards the prisoners. “Take them home.”
“And after that?”
I shrug.
Mehmet hesitates. “There’s always a place for you at my campfire.”
“I—thank you. But,” I look up at the sunset-stained sky, “perhaps it’s time for me to find my own home.”
Two years later
I’m wiping slates and sorting chalk in the one-room school-house when Mera peeks in. “Excuse me, miss.”
I glance up and smile. Mera’s one of my brightest students. She reminds me of a bird with her quick, flashing movements, inquisitive eyes, and sleek, round-cheeked head.
“Sheep herders have come down from the plains.”
My heart skips a beat, like it always does when I hear this. “Thank you for letting me know, Mera.” My voice is steady and so are my hands, still working away.
She dimples at me and vanishes.
I make myself finish my task. I make myself rise with dignity, put away books and supplies, walk—not run—to the doorway, close up the school house.
I stand on the steps, looking over the town marching down the slope, houses with steep-pitched slate roofs and narrow cobbled streets snaking between them.
Markesh. Sooner or later, anyone who comes off the high plains to bring livestock to market goes through here.
My hands are clenched in the soft cream of my robes. Not the white of the eilendi or the brown of the novice, but something both in between and set apart. I no longer fit into the hierarchy of Taurin’s priests. I don’t know if I ever will again.
For now, I’m content to be Markesh’s only school teacher.
With a sigh, I relax my fingers and smooth the fabric. As always, the look of my own hands gives me a slight surprise. They’re not the long, pale hands of a cloak, nor yet the brown, square hands of before, but somewhere in between the two.
This, too, is something I will have to live with all my life.
I walk down the streets, in between houses leaning toward each other, and find my way to the outskirts of this small town. Even if I didn’t know the way, the stench of sheep and the general commotion would lead me down to the valley.
There’s a well here, and some stony, sparse pasturage for the sheep. The herders won’t stay long; they’re on their way to bigger markets in bigger valleys. Some will travel even as far as Banarkand.
I step over sheep dung, lifting my robes, and search the face of every man. There are grizzled grandfathers, wiry teenaged boys with laughing faces, and men with closed inscrutable expressions.
I look at them, but they don’t look at me, at least not directly. Their gazes slide over my face and land somewhere beyond my shoulder.
That is the way of their people. My status as a representative of the eilendi keeps them from discourtesy, but I have found out the hard way that not a single one will talk directly to me.
Later, I will fetch old Orlo from where he’s slouched over his wine to act as go-between. I’ve ceased grinding my teeth in frustration over it.
Besides, I’m looking for a man who will look me directly in the face, who will answer when I speak.
I’m past the well, the makeshift tents of the sheep-herders, and beyond the gazes fixed on my back. Now there are only sheep, and the steep rise of the plateau beyond them.
Not today, then, either.
I turn, and as I do, my glance catches on a m
an sitting under a stunted tree, working on some leather.
My breath catches, then comes out in a hiss.
The dog sitting near him examines me as I approach, decides I’m no threat, and turns his attention back to his master. It’s a working dog, wise and guarded, but I sense its affection for its master.
I’m glad of it.
He looks up as I stop, then gets to his feet in a courteous gesture. There’s no recognition in his eyes, just a mild curiosity. His face is still hard—it will never be soft again—but it’s no longer as stark and bleak as it used to be.
His right hand is concealed by a glove that goes under the cuff of his simple shirt.
I want to be dignified but I can’t help grinning like a fool. “Good day to you,” I say, lowering my voice, “Kato Vorsok.”
He tenses, gaze sharpening, eyebrows drawn together.
I wait, and let him take a good look at me.
“Ahhh,” he says. He doesn’t smile, but there’s a softening of his mouth.
“Indeed,” I say.
“What are you doing here?” he says, jerking a chin toward Markesh.
It’s on the tip of my tongue to say, Looking for you, but it’s not time for that. Not yet. “I’m the school teacher here.”
“School teacher.” He tries the term on me for size. A frown deepens between his brows. “Did the eilendi send you away after all? They said—”
I shake my head, cutting off his indignation. “No, it wasn’t them. It was me. I-I no longer belong there.”
“Have you lost your faith?” He’s as blunt as ever.
“No.” I can be blunt, too. “Did you find yours?”
He thinks about it, rubbing his stubbled chin with his left hand. “I don’t know,” he says, at last. “There are times where I feel nothing but a quiet peace, and times where black bitterness rises up to choke me, and I know Taurin is there through them all. I—no longer feel any resentment toward him, nor indifference, but… I’m not ready to reach out and grasp his hand yet. Not yet.”
