by Rabia Gale
“Hmm.” Rafe wasn’t so sure. Mirados was only a rohkayan—who knew what Karzov’s young kayan were capable of? “How do we find the Scepter after this?”
“We open the Vault of Secrets. If we’re lucky, Karzov hasn’t figured out a way into it as yet—or even located it. It has a tendency to move if it doesn’t know you.”
“So we go in, avoid all other mages and thugs and especially Karzov, find the Vault, get in, grab the Scepter, and get out. All right.” Rafe looked around its companions. “Let’s do this.”
The way out of the Chamber was a short corridor that looked like it was made of out of glass. It narrowed behind them as they left, wavering like the ripples of a wake, pushing them onwards towards a darkened archway. Mirados paused right before the archway, square, blunt-fingered hand raised as if groping for something. Rafe wrenched himself away from the ka waves of the corridor, and probed as well. Distant ka-structures awaited him, but there was nothing that felt new or poised or imminently perilous.
Isabella said quietly, “Nothing that I can tell.” She’d searched with senses different from his, but of them all, it was Isabella’s judgment that Rafe trusted the most.
Mirados turned and put his finger to his lips in an exaggerated keep-quiet motion. They all nodded their acknowledgment, and he turned and slipped out through the narrowing exit.
Isabella was next, then Furin, each moving quickly.
Rafe hesitated. He didn’t want to leave the Chamber of Names. There were mysteries there he wanted to… no, not solve. Just explore. Wrap himself in. Gain wisdom from.
Instead he plunged out, ka pulling away from him, into…
…a place of no sight.
No weak light. No shades of grey. No lines of ka, poisonous, pale, or otherwise.
Rafe stumbled—or thought he did. It was hard to tell with the way the world tilted crazily. He didn’t know where he was—at the head of a stairway, in the middle of a causeway, teetering on the edge of a ravine.
He didn’t know.
He couldn’t move.
His hand clenched around his walking stick, the wood hard against his palm and fingers. He felt the fine crack in one place, the rough sandpapery spot in another. He heard the surf-pounding of his own heart and the wind-movement of his own breath. His neck tingled with the proximity of the others.
But there was no sign nor sight of ka, and his kyra was tight coiled inside him, refusing to be budged.
He was ordinary.
An ordinary blind man, sweating from fear of the unknown.
“Rafe?” Isabella, her lips almost brushing his ear. Prickles broke out all over his skin; he nearly jumped.
“I see… nothing.” Rafe managed through stiff lips. He knew he was shaking, and he couldn’t stop it.
After two years, the ka… was just gone.
“What’s wrong with him?” hissed Mirados.
“He can’t feel the ka,” Isabella whispered back.
Mirados gave an impatient sigh. “Well, isn’t that—”
“Leave me,” said Rafe. “Just go—and leave me.”
“Fine,” said Mirados curtly.
Isabella put her hand on Rafe’s shoulder, turned him around and guided his slow, faltering steps. She stretched out his hand until his fingertips slid across something cold and hard, then dipped a nothingness that buzzed slightly against his palm.
Isabella brought his hand back to a rectangular panel. Another identifying device, like the one on the other side of the Chamber.
“The Chamber of Names is right through there,” said Isabella. “Go there and wait for us. We’ll scout around and report back—maybe we can see what’s causing this.”
Rafe nodded—and feeling her gaze on his back, stepped forward. He couldn’t stop the wince, the wholly irrational feeling that he was walking into a wall, but what was in front of him was air, and it gave, though not without pricking him all over.
He heard the others leave, their footfalls scuffing behind him. A few more steps and he’d be in the cool splendor of the Chamber of Names, with that stately ka flowing in ageless designs. There he’d be…
No.
Rafe stepped back out of the portal, pulling back until the buzz of it vanished. He turned on his heel, slow and deliberate, several times, walked two steps to his left, three backwards and one to his right, until he was thoroughly disoriented.
No. He was a kayan. He was supposed to solve problems, not whimper and hide in the corner when faced with an obstacle.
He knew the ka was out there. He knew that beyond the sphere of his brain and blind eyes and keen ears there existed a world of depth and color.
He just couldn’t access it. It was cloaked from him—but not from Isabella and Mirados. Neither of them had complained about not using the kyra or sensing the ka.
There were drugs—potions—that dampened a kayan’s abilities. He’d been fed some as a child. His sister had slipped some to him while she betrayed him. He couldn’t think when he would’ve eaten doctored food—his last meal had been a while ago in the submersible and he’d have felt the effects of the drug in the Chamber of Names.
No, whatever was affecting him was here, in this building, and set for him.
Karzov knew of his return. Karzov would’ve expected Rafe to come here. They’d hoped to have moved quickly enough to have caught the Shadow off-guard, but Karzov had to have been taking anti-Rafe precautions for a while.
The man was a meticulous planner, that was certain. It was one of his main strengths, in fact. That marriage of intricate and patient scheming with a total lack of empathy made the man terrifying, even apart from his status as krin slayer.
So. There was something here, perhaps nearby, attuned to one Rafael Grenfeld, ex-diplomat, now kayan, that was blocking him.
It would’ve been easy for Karzov to learn enough about Rafe to set up a defense specifically against him. After all, he had Bryony.
And most likely the disabling of that defense would sound an alarm.
Right. Let’s see, Rafe old boy, if we can figure this out.
Rafe sank to the floor and gingerly let his senses—both ka-sight and kyra—reach out into the darkness around his head.
Again that feeling of disorientation—with no ka to see, no shadows and pale light to give depth—he could’ve fallen or turned upside down and never known it.
The feeling made him sick to his stomach, set his teeth on edge. He pushed further with his consciousness, stretching out into the black unknown. Sweat broke out on his forehead, and his body shook all over.
So close.
Still no good.
He hitched his ka-sight to his kyra, threw it out like a rope, right into the well of the darkness, the place where it was thickest, weightiest, most suffocating. Like a light, this darkness had a source. Where it gathered most, there he’d find whatever was blocking his ka-sight.
He felt like a rubber band, close to snapping. He stretched….
… and rebounded back into his body.
Rafe growled, low and frustrated, in his throat. Isabella could throw her kyra across whole rooms, into spaces far distant from her body. It was not something he had been able to do, this total disconnect from his body.
Just thinking about it sent chills up his spine. Could he just throw his senses outward and leave nothing behind to guard his prone body?
And what is this body doing to help right now, eh? Rafe chided himself. You’re no use to anyone in this state. Go, get your ka-sight back so you can help Isabella and the rest—do what they brought your useless self out here to do!
Still he hesitated at the precipice, not ready to walk away from his body.
Just go.
And he pushed himself out.
Was that a snap as he broke out of his normal range of sight, smell, touch, and hearing? He couldn’t be sure, but he couldn’t feel his body right now.
He’d disconnected.
Panic set in.
Great Selene, can I
return?
Frantically he reached out and grazed something. The slenderest of threads, rough and slight against his fingertips.
The way home.
For a moment, Rafe paused, tempted to return, to ascertain that his physical vessel was still safe, that at this moment some Blackstone thug was not prodding it nor some young kayan drone wrapping it in magical netting.
No. If I go back, I won’t return to this abyss.
He turned his face towards that point of highest density and set off towards it.
It was like a going down a slope, and Rafe had to lean back—hard—to keep from tumbling head over heels into whatever was sucking up his ka-sight.
He was fortunate that his kyra was much more resilient. Silently, he thanked Isabella and the Selene Sisters who’d taught her for his own training.
Was it possible for complete darkness to get even darker? He’d always been of a rational, scientific bent—darkness was only the absence of light.
Not this stuff. It was not just an absence of light, but an antithesis of it. It was the Anti-Light instead of the Not-Light. And like light itself, it was intense in its darkness, brutal upon his outflung senses. Rafe was afraid its crushing presence would unravel his very being.
Like krin in light, he thought, and felt a twinge of sympathy for those creatures destroyed by radiance.
But something lay behind this veil of blackness and the only way through was through the abyss.
Rafe clung tight, slowed himself for one unbalanced, staggering moment.
He let go.
Rafe fell.
He knew that his body was left behind, he knew that he was disembodied senses, but it didn’t stop him from feeling as if all breath was being squeezed out of his lungs. The abyss clenched around him, narrowing to a funnel. Darkness whipped by, in frenzied cloud-shapes and wind lashes of fury. It flayed his skin and cut at his eyes, bled him of his own essence. He was helpless in its grip, couldn’t think, couldn’t escape, couldn’t…
And then it was gone. Sight, sound, touch, and smell reappeared with such abruptness that it slammed him backwards, wheeled him around, and sent him spinning in all directions.
Since when can I fly? thought Rafe dizzily, as his fingers touched rough-grained rock, then he turned over, and scraped the same rock against his foot. I’m as light as a dandelion.
Maybe that’s because you’re not really here in the flesh, Rafe, the dry, disinterested part of himself observed from a safe, yet not too far away to mock, distance.
Right. Rafe gritted his teeth. He was on the end of his kyra string, one that stretched back through the vortex and back to his body.
He’d come out on the other side.
Which was a cell.
A narrow cell with no light, damp stains on the floors, and the odor of unwashed human and piss rising into the air. A prone figure stretched out against one wall, a blanket over its face.
The source of the reek, no doubt.
Why’d I think smell was such a good idea to bring along? thought Rafe, but his attention was already on something at the other end of the cell, something incongruous, ka-driven, and without a doubt, the origin of the darkness that had smothered his ka-sight outside the Chamber of Names.
Thanks to his manipulation of kyra, he’d pushed himself over to the other side of the barrier. Both kyra and ka-sight worked now—he saw the intricate systems of ka all throughout the strange spherical contraption. It was not happy ka, this, but sullen and prickly, worked into twisted nooses, spiky knots, and razor-edged wire. It was coiled in upon itself, presenting thousands of small, sharp thorns.
The device that housed it hung from the ceiling. Three chains held it up, several handles jutted out of it. Rafe could understand why. Even he didn’t want to get near it.
Still, he nudged his kyra closer, trying to control his drift. It was one thing to replace his own vision with his kyra, when he could use his physical body as reference for how far and how wide his field of vision should be. But without his body, his kyra scattered—already he felt the bump of a wall, though his sight insisted he stood in the center of the cell.
And, he realized, judging from his vision, he had either grown taller or now floated a couple of feet above the ground.
And his hearing had wandered off to crouch over an annoyingly irregular drip-drip of water in the corner.
Pull yourself together, Rafe. Literally!
The last thing he needed was for the feeling in his left foot to go off and get stuck in a wall, or something silly like that. He wasn’t so good at kyra that such a stunt was guaranteed to be temporary.
He pulled at his senses, grimly reeling them in. They were resistant. His hearing refused to budge, while his touch just danced out of reach, then splintered into smaller senses so it could grab at more things. Like a child, touching everything it saw.
If touch had a voice, right now it’d be saying, Wheeeeee!
Senses dispersal. The technical term, spoken in Isabella’s dry voice, came back to Rafe. Unhooked from his body, his senses had a tendency to wander. Since he’d never thrown them so far before—and never expected to, considering what a dullard he’d been as kyra pupil—Rafe had paid little attention to that part of her lecture.
He forced himself back to that day, standing upon the highest ramparts of that part-school, part-nunnery on the Point, surrounded by sharp black mountains upthrust from the earth like a bristling collection of knives. The razor-edged air nipped his ears and slipped in blades to his lungs. He had never been so cold before. Selene was an ill-defined white smudge in his kyra-sight, and no lack of trying would sharpen her image. As Rafe got more and more frustrated with his lack of progress, Isabella had become more and more pedantic and prone to lecturing, as if the competing theories of several long-winded and intellectual nuns could shake his kyra loose from him.
“When your senses begin to disperse—and they will, being like unruly children,” she’d said, paraphrasing some long-dead Sister who’d obviously disliked her charges, “you have to take them in with a firm hand. They are still part of you—imagine that you have them on tethers, and they, like balloons, strain free to fly away…”
And here, he’d interrupted—rather rudely, as he now recalled—to say that since he couldn’t throw his senses as far he could spit, calling them back was a moot point.
I should’ve listened to the end of the lecture. It was more useful than the one on the history of kyra usage.
Ah, well. That was the past. Now where was he?
Balloons. Tethers. Right.
He imagined his senses as a bunch of wayward rubber balloons in bright primary colors, like he’d seen once at an Oakhaven ball.
He pictured strings—no, make that twine—no, those strong, slender metal cables—leading from the balloons to himself. His phantom fingers twitched, curling around thin metal strands. He tugged, but his mental ropes had little give.
Who knew metaphors were so important? The world of kyra was like the world of poetry, where the images you used were important.
I wish I’d listened to the end of that lecture, though Rafe ruefully. Isabella had resigned herself from being his kyra tutor at the end of that session, and left the Point the very next day. She’d returned to Ironheart; he’d moved on to the Talar with Sable.
He changed the metal cables to strong strings instead and tugged. His senses bobbed—like balloons—and he felt immediately seasick. His stomach churned—even though it had been left far behind.
Could I still throw up? he wondered and wished he hadn’t, as the drip-drip of water receded, walls spun around him, and his knees felt sore from kneeling on hard rock. He resisted the urge to stand. His ghostly fingers brushed over the rough woolen blanket covering the cell’s occupant; Rafe immediately pulled that balloon to himself.
The still figure did not move. Had not felt that phantom touch.
Luckily for Rafe.
All right, now he had all his senses bunched around h
im. They didn’t feel very secure, though, and he didn’t want the bother of mentally holding imaginary strings.
Rafe tried to imagine his senses all melded together into a sphere around his consciousness, but the balloons swayed and stubbornly refused.
Okay, so they didn’t want to mix together.
He thought a little, then pictured them in rings around him.
Too abstract. A balloon drifted to the end of its tether, Rafe jerked it back.
Flower, he thought and pictured the Monarique Rose that Sable had grown. The balloons melted, became more translucent, and settled around him in petals.
All right. Now that he looked perfectly ridiculous…
Rafe turned back to the ka-device with its nasty little magic within.
He let his touch brush out against it and forced his normal sight to see more detail.
There was no quartz anywhere in its construction.
Rafe almost dropped his petals in his shock, then grabbed his senses before they turned into bubbles and floated away.
Ka flowed through quartz, brought up from the bottom of the universe, or so the shahkayan Rafe had trained with believed. If you wanted to store ka, or hold a ka-system in place, you used quartz to anchor it. Without quartz, ka dissipated into the air, abraded into wisps too tiny to be tweezed out by kayan.
There were no other substances that could hold ka, or so he had learned.
Well, I’m learning differently now, thought Rafe grimly. The device was made of some metal alloy that hedged in the ka.
And the ka did not like it.
Neither does this kayan.
The metal was smooth, hard to grasp. He couldn’t get in to the ka, which vibrated, unhappily, in its fetal position. Rafe nudged, but it wouldn’t respond to him at all. It had none of the vitality he associated with ka, none of the movement. Its stillness unnerved him.
It didn’t buzz, but when probed further, it keened and curled tighter about itself.
Like a wounded animal. As if it had been tortured.
Rafe drew back, disturbed. He was anthropomorphizing, he knew. Ka didn’t think or speak, but it was like animal life. He’d had pets back in the Oakhaven agri-caves; his mother had owned birds and his father two sleek silent hounds. It had been natural for him to think of ka as a pet.
