134 - Extract of nothingness

The first time I spoke the name Norii Maziel, the sentence also had the word “fik” in it. Skorsas hadn’t yet told me that he was the one who’d swear to write and publish all I’d said.

Blindness had made my other senses keener, even in this short time, as blind people will tell you it does. By the way he sat in the stool beside my bed, I could tell he was neither a heavy nor a careless man. He smelled as if his clothes were kept in chests or closets with sprigs of lavender. His voice was middle-aged and gentle, and he had the delicate city Aitzas accent, that softens the t’s and tz’s and d’s, lightens the vowels and has a slightly musical rhythm. That was odd; all other writers were fessas. He can afford to write truth, I thought. I found myself wishing almost fervently I could see his face.

I took my answers off down my own path almost as soon as I opened my mouth, and could barely believe it when his pen didn’t stop scratching, even as I said the Mezem ravaged and despoiled all who entered it and was a boil betraying the corruption running through every vein and nerve of Arkan society.

He confessed to me he’d barely seen a Mezem fight in his life and didn’t know what to ask, so I gave him all the pat answers; I’d never let them ask me the questions myself, but I knew them well enough from overhearing other fighters answering. When that was done, just as I was thinking, “I’ve been had; he’ll leave now,” he turned the subject back to corruption. He didn’t protest or even calmly deny, only listened and wrote and now and then asked me to clarify. I began to think he either was a spy, or agreed with me.

We spoke for a good two beads, until I was starting to fall asleep and so beginning to mix gibberish in with my sense, and Iska obsequiously chased him out on Skorsas’s prompting, both of them worried that he’d quote the gibberish. What I most remember is him saying, as he left, “You don’t belong here,” and answering, “And who, other than those who choose to, does?”

He told me he would write the account of the fight for the Pages and the Watcher, as he’d promised, but he wanted to speak with me more. I found myself agreeing.

I still could not see, other than the vaguest light, which hurt like looking into the sun, but Iska said I should sleep without the bandages and just an eye-patch. He’d got a pair of spectacles for me, which he told me were darkened, so that once my sight came back I’d be able to see through them without them letting in enough light to hurt my eyes.

†

“Kaina marugh miniren, why doesn’t the world leave us the fik alone?”

Skorsas’s voice cut through my sleep like a knife. Someone was tapping on the door. He turned obsequious. It was Minis. “I promise I won’t wake him long! Or drag him out into the city!”

“Small victories,” Skorsas muttered under his breath, as he slipped out. Light from the wall-torches outside stabbed my eyes, until I groped on the night-table, found the spectacles and settled them on my nose, the wires cold and a little pinching behind my ears. I could see nothing clearly, but at least the lamp that Minis brought in didn’t cause me agony.

He set it on the night-table and flung himself into my arms, then pressed his ear against my chest. He wanted to hear that my heart was still beating. I pulled his head in closer with my hand. “I’m sorry for letting him get so close,” I whispered.

“It wasn’t your fault!” Spoken like a person without war-training.

“Of course it was,” I said. “My mistake, my fault.” He just clung, wanting neither to accept nor disbelieve. He was wearing far less jewelry than usual, oddly; mostly he was covered in the watery smoothness of silk.

“Are you getting Skorsas to read to you?” he asked. A boy after my heart, I thought, understanding how important books are.

“No. Arkan strategy and tactics doesn’t interest him, so I’m not subjecting him to them.”

“Wild Untamed Heart is a pretty good book,” he said helpfully. “Or Ripped Gloves.”

“Ripped Gloves?” I kept my laughter in. “These sound… too old for you, in Arko.”

“I get them from First Amitzas’s bookshelves,” he said. The Imperial Pharmacist read trashy fessas-quarter romances? I tried to imagine those stone-dead eyes running over melodramatic and heated words, and couldn’t do it. “I didn’t think it was plausible that the hero kept getting his gloves ripped off every time he turned around, though.”

“I imagine you’re trying to learn something about sex that isn’t from your father,” I said. “Wise inclination. The less you learn about it from him the better, in my opinion.” He didn’t say yes, but he tightened his arms around me in a way that let me know he knew the truth of this.

“He’s still going to ransom you, he says,” he whispered, half into the skin of my chest.

“Was he worried when it looked like he was losing that?”

“Not really.” Bless your honesty, child. “He said it was good either way.” I felt the wet warmth of a tear. “Raikas… this is getting harder and harder…”

“Lad! Think!” I said. “If I can take Riji, who can I not take? Hmm?”

He’d nearly fallen out of his box when Riji had taken me down, he told me; one of his Mahid had had to catch him by the back of his kilt. He clung again like someone lost at sea. You are everything to me, his arms said. He’d almost lost all the love he had in the world; from who else was he permitted it?

“I didn’t see how you could win when you were…” He trailed off, not knowing how to say it, or perhaps overly concerned that he’d insult me.

“When you’re fighting you don’t really notice pain,” I said.

He asked me also how I’d known where Riji was. Since the Ring mavens could hardly have failed to notice, I’d told Norii just that I had a gift; now I told Minis the same. That reminded me; I didn’t weapon-sense any Mahid tubes staying unearthly still outside the door. “Where are your Mahid?”

“I… em…” His tone became that of any child caught in mischief, rather than a child who whose power was second only to one other’s in the empire. “I sneaked out without them,” he said in a half-whisper.

As if he were any child caught in mischief, I reprimanded him, albeit gently. It turned out two boys had chased him. “They might have slit your throat, just to steal all this silk your wearing, and make sure you couldn’t tell and describe them to the Sereniteers.” Having had Mahid shadowing him all his life, he had no idea that anyone would even think such a thing. “Who’s going to take you back to the Marble Palace?” He had a plan to borrow a guard or two from the Mezem. I made him swear never to do it again also, though he did so in tears. It meant that he couldn’t visit me.

We talked of the fans then, and what they saw in me. “Someone to emulate,” he said. “A champion of what they see as good.” You are speaking for yourself as much as them, I thought. If I have done that for you, I have accomplished something for all the world.

Though he knew he should go—they might be ripping out their hair at the Marble Palace, since who knew what fate would befall whoever was caught letting him get out of their sight—he kept coming up with other topics, as pretexts to talk longer. Fans had broken the mirror at the Puckered Fig, he told me, and he and his betrothed had had to hide under a table. She had been watching the fight, which made me think that my privates were perhaps the first male’s she’d ever seen.

“She’s two years older than me, and she already looks like a grown woman,” he said. “I’m not going to get my growth for years.” So seamlessly, he shifted in and out of being an average boy.

“That’s how it is, girls grow up first,” I said. “Not fair, but that’s life. You have a way to go before you get truly randy.”

“If randy is what Ilian did, I don’t want anything to do with it,” he said.

“That’s not randy; that’s toadying. Randy is wanting to do it with someone who wants to do it with you too. It starts in the eyes...” He was listening rapt, by his stillness. “See what I mean? With Ilian it wasn’t there at all. You look at them, they look at you… there’s a certain look. To look is to imagine… to look is to touch with the eyes.”

“I like looking at her,” he said, with a touch of dreaminess. There is the beginning of it, I thought. He was eleven. “I feel like a little boy next to her. I was dreaming of her when… when Ilian did what he did… and ruined it.”

“When will you marry her… third threshold? That’s lots of time to grow. I’m about that old, twenty-one.”

“I’d rather skate than think about sex.” Though I had not skated as he had, these words somehow brought back a vivid sense of the time I’d been the age, drawn both to childhood games, and adult desires. How sweet life was then, I thought, when the Mezem had been nothing more to me than a legend. “I keep saying I should go, and then starting to talk again.” I could sleep in until noon if I wanted, I told him, so no matter. He acceded to his own discipline, then, knowing that if we both fell asleep with him on me, the Marble Palace would be in an uproar. I kissed him on the forehead. I kept thinking I wouldn’t see him again, and yet somehow he always seemed to come back.

†

I should add the one bit of the tale of my fight with Riji that remains, though I didn’t find it out for myself until days later. I asked Iska idly what sleeping-drug he’d given me the night before, that had an effect so natural. He grinned.

“Extract of nothingness, we called it,” he said. “The Haian term, I think, is placebo.”

-

This scene from Minis's point of view

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