174 - A blood-curdling scream in the night

When you go through such a healing, your full awareness comes back to you gradually. Your notice of what is around you, and what ought to be, slowly clears. I was healed enough to be speaking perhaps three-quarters fluently again when I thought, my guards are all armed. On Haiu Menshir.

I had never been there, that I remembered, but I knew what everyone knows: Sailortown, the part of the port of Haiuroru where foreigners stay, is walled off, and there is a gate. It is part of the World’s Compact—a very sacred part—that no weapons ever pass through that gate.

It was a little before dawn. I waited until we’d eaten, then called Krero in, trying to fit it in before Alchaen arrived.

“You know nothing about it,” Krero said cheerily, when I was done struggling to get out the words. “You’re a patient of the House of Integrity, you’re not responsible, don’t worry your head.”

I’d missed him, and his endearing habit of choosing for me. “I’m a patient of the House of Integrity… who has weapon-sense,” I said. “Alchaen knows it; we’ve spoken about it. I can make… an appointment with Speaking Elder Dinerer… tomorrow. Shall it be I… or you… who tells her what’s going on?”

He sat down on my bed in his sulking way, with a sigh. “We all thought it best you be kept out of this… given your condition. I tried. Chevenga, we’ve already gone to Speaking Elder Dinerer, asking for a dispensation.”

Silence hung, as he did not tell me her answer. “And?”

“We did it all properly, trust me, through the ambassador and everything. We were thinking that Mahid, or whatever Kurkas might send after you, would be unlikely to extend the same courtesy before bringing their weapons.”

“She said no.”

He leapt to his feet and paced. “You know what burns me, Cheng? They live here in their perfect, sunny, flowery little world, peaceful and happy and innocent and protected from everything by the rest of us—so they don’t know what it’s like in the rest of the world, what we have to endure, what we have to do to protect ourselves—and them! They can get away with never lifting a sword, never putting on armour, never raising a sweat. Perhaps they will someday all die for their pacifism. Fine. But you shouldn’t have to.”

“She said no, so you sneaked weapons in.”

“Look, Cheng, Chirel’s at the embassy. In Sailortown. On the other side of the gate. All proper and legal. Someone sent it anonymously from Arko—isn’t that incredible?”

“It’s what I asked… him to do.” I had bequeathed the sword to Skorsas in my Arkan will, but told him I wanted him to send it to the Yeoli embassy on Haiu Menshir, on the chance I’d end up here. Still, to part of me, it seemed a miracle. I wanted to touch it. I needed to touch it, sling it on, draw it, practice with it; more than anything, I saw, that would bring me back to myself, or the self I must be for the next part of my life.

Still, I’d asked him a question. “You haven’t answered.”

“Well… I guess I should take it as a good sign, that I can’t throw you off the chase by a distraction,” he said, with pursed lips, and signed a flicker of chalk. “If the Arkans don’t try anything, no one will ever know. If they do, we’ll have been proven correct.”

I took a deep breath. “Excellent. The semanakraseye of Yeola-e is welcomed as guest and patient…” I took another deep breath. “…onto Haiu Menshir, and the first thing he… does to show his gratitude is… commit what by their reckoning is… an act of war. Good move, Krero.”

“Well, that’s why we thought it best you didn’t know!” he said. “They’re not going to call all the Haians out of Yeola-e for what a mere guard captain arranged. You’re wearing the green ribbon, you can’t even talk straight—kyash, you didn’t even know this yesterday, why do you have to know it today? Can you go back to not knowing it?”

“Krero.” After two years of disuse, my command-voice was there, no doubt because I started using it before I thought about whether I would be able to. “Disarm everyone. Sneak those swords back out.”

“Chevenga…” He stood before me and faced me front on. “No.” Was that the trace of a smile on his lips?

“What do you mean, ‘no’?”

“I mean no. I won’t. You can’t give me orders.”

“I could have sworn I was the born and duly-approved semanakraseye of Yeola-e, and chakrachaseye by my own appointment.” All-Spirit, I thought. I said that entirely smoothly. But what is he thinking? It is automatic impeachment for a semanakraseye to break one of the major laws of Yeola-e, and I had done that, killing eight Yeolis in the Ring—but I hadn’t told Krero, or any of the Yeolis here, that I’d done that. Had Alchaen breached confidentiality? Or did they know some other way? It suddenly came to me, with horror so utter it made me go cold all over and all the way in: I told Artira my Ring-name in a letter. If they’ve been reading the Pages… they know.

That wasn’t Krero’s reasoning, though. “You are,” he said. “But you are wearing that.” He tapped the back of my wrist through the green ribbon. “While on Haiu Menshir, like in any land, you live by the laws of that land, yes? By the laws of Haiu Menshir, you are incompetent. Meaning, not responsible. Or doing any national business.” Now, he couldn’t help the triumphant smile. He tapped the hilt of his shortsword through his shirt. “These aren’t going anywhere.” Then whipped his hand away casually, as Alchaen civilly tapped the door and came in.

Often after he worked with me I’d end up lying limp, mute and in a sweat, ready only for a swim in the sea and sleep. Best I not wait. Once we were alone, I touched the green ribbon. “What does this mean, Alchaen? Legally?”

For a moment a look of wishing I hadn’t asked flashed across his face. Did he know my sane self that well, or had Krero, or others, spoken to him? “It means you are a patient of the House of Integrity,” he said, as if I needed to hear the part I knew as a preamble. “Meaning, by Haian law, you are resident here, and you are not competent to have… the full responsibilities you otherwise would.”

“Meaning what?”

“It means… such things as, your signature on an agreement would not have standing, nor any agreement you made verbally—”

“What if it’s between me and other Yeolis?”

“Well… what is between you and them is between you and them, so long as no law of Haiu Menshir is breached. But—”

“What if I wanted to speak with Dinerer?”

“Em… on your own behalf? Or… Yeola-e’s?”

“Let’s see what the answer… is… with both,” I said. “Just on my own.”

“Well… what would it be about?”

If he knew, no doubt, he’d be required by Haian law to report it. I didn’t want to lay that on him without being certain I could speak to the Speaking Elder. “Confidential matter.”

“Between you and Dinerer?” His brows arched a little.

“Never mind, then… on behalf of Yeola-e.”

“Well…” He looked a little as if he’d taken a sip of vinegar. I bet he didn’t have this problem with his last client, I thought. “She wouldn’t accept… em… your representation as… truly official… and because of that, em… she wouldn’t hear it.”

I have been too insane, I thought, to notice the constraints of insanity on me. In that sense, it’s a good sign that I’m noticing now... I made the best of it in my mind, but in my heart I wanted to leap up, scream, run, throw rocks. It’s like being back in Arko—no. Don’t think that. That’s the worst thing to think.

When we were done the healing work, and I lay limp on the bed after my swim, Krero came in with a second shortsword under his shirt, lifted my pillow slightly with my head on it, and slipped the sword under. “If something happens, we yelled to you it was there, got it?” he said, with a wink and a grin.

I had been here a little more than four moons, now, with twenty guards. How likely was it that Kurkas’s spies had not found out, when the torturers had scraped me and so must know my first intention was to come here? That, or that they’d respect the World’s Compact, which seemed even more unlikely, was the only thing I had to hope for, so I did. It was, of course, in vain.

A few days later, at the death-hour, weapon-sense tore me up out of an abyss of sleep that had been blessedly deep. Both guards on the roof had fallen off, without a sound, as people do when hit by Mahid darts.

I leapt out of bed, grabbing the sword from under my pillow and crying the alarm with a yell so blood-curdling I was struck by it myself, since it carried all the old terror and fury at Mahid I hadn’t known I had left in me.

But I had forgotten. I was a patient of the House of Integrity. Merchoser, who was watching over me that night—I was still never left alone, or even without a lamp burning while I slept—tried to pull me back into bed, then gasped and froze, seeing the sword. Outside, my guard, two on each wall, didn’t even move, let alone draw, while four Mahid with dart-tubes and shortswords came quietly within dart range. Realization crept over me, crawling like fingers up my spine and sending horror-tingles all down my limbs: a blood-curdling scream in the night from me is a shrugging matter for them. The pair on the back wall, one of whom was Krero, both went down, cutting off his words, “Easy, Cheng, go back to sl—” and the Mahid began slashing their way through the woven reed-leaves.

“Merchoser take cover!” I hissed, and smacked out the lamp; under woods and roof on a dark night it was pitch-black, best for me. Guessing they’d shoot low, at my bed, I sprang up onto one of the logs that ran along the wall, hanging on by one of the posts, and heard two sharp huffs of air; one dart thumped into my bed, the other snicked into the opposite wall. “Light!” one of the Mahid coolly hissed. Where Merchoser was, I could not know, but I did not hear him move; I hoped he was under the bed.

I leapt for the closest Mahid, who had his tube to his lips but aimed elsewhere, and took his head off. Then it was as if I were back in Arko, except that all was well because I had a sword in my hand and was using it. It seemed wrong that Skorsas wasn’t near, in a wardrobe, perhaps, quietly swearing, and the place didn’t smell of ceaseless katzeriks. The only difference was knowing Krero, who had wept with me for Mana, had fallen and was possibly dead himself. There was no reason they must use stun-darts here.

I heard myself laugh, long and ragged and shrill with blood-rage, a maniac’s in the dark. They froze; I moved, Arkan words coming easily to my tongue as I let my hand fly. “I will destroy you, black dogs, I will send you to eternal smothering in Hayel, my nightmares, I drink your blood and dance on your naked dying hearts, your death is my ecstasy, your agony-cry my song, I have always defeated you, I always will, send a hundred Mahid, send a thousand!”

In time my blade stopped finding men and found only air, tedious after the delicious catching of flesh and bone, and the joy of blood spattering warm. Outside Yeolis were coming running, including two with bows (where had they hidden those?). “He’s up in a tree!” I heard, over moaning near my feet, which I silenced with the sword. “Inside! Krero! Se’kras’! Cheng!”

“Where were you for the height of the party?” I said archly to Sach, who had a bow. “Never mind, lend me that.” One Mahid was sliding down the trunk of a tree, another staying still up in another one, in the hope that we wouldn’t notice he was there. It had been two years since I’ll drawn a bow, but my hands hadn’t forgotten. They were both easy shots, and I finished them where they fell; such a pleasure to grab straight hair that I knew was blond, and thrust a blade past onyxine collars.

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173 - The empathy of memory

“Schevenga… what is it? It’s all right, Shchevenga, Alschaen! Alschaen!” The Haian came in, and got me sitting on the bed. Of course I could not tell them why I’d frozen and turned white. “I mentioned a friend of mine, a Niah woman, who he was lovers with in the Mezem,” Piatsri told Alchaen. “She has a child by him. I just said she had written to me about him.”

Alchaen took my hands, in his expert way. “Deep breath, Chivinga. You cannot know the truth of this, without calm.” When, between his help and the shreds of my will that I could find, the emotion had eased, he said, “Tell me what went wrong.”

I got out just one word, which was enough. “Dead…”

“You are thinking she is dead?” Alchaen said, in that overly-even tone that psyche-healers use. I signed chalk.

“No, she isn’t!” Piatsri said, with a touch of protest. “I got a letter from her just a few days ago! We’re talking about Niku aht Tanra, right? Called Wahunai? Has to be—no other woman was in the Mezem.”

“Chivinga, would you know her handwriting?” I signed chalk. Now and then, in the Mezem, we’d slipped notes under each other’s doors. “Piatsri, may he see the letter?”

The Brahvnikian was hesitant for a moment—Niku had told me they’d been pen-friends from her mid-teens, sharing every thought—but then agreed, and went to fetch it.

“Part of what they did to torture you was tell you falsehoods that would cause you pain,” Alchaen said to me. “You remember that Yeola-e has not been entirely defeated, don’t you?” I signed chalk again. What was in my mind and what he told me had warred against each other until he’d got Denaina to confirm the truth; even so I wasn’t entirely certain, and would not be until my family and the guard arrived. I chalked in part to humour him.

“Cast your mind back to the day of your fiftieth fight,” Alchaen said. “Did you think she was dead then?” I signed charcoal, feeling reasonably certain. She flew out. She was never brought back—I’d remember that—nor did I hear of her death from anyone, or read it in the Pages… “So you know you acquired the idea during the time you were being tortured. You absolutely cannot trust it.” I closed my eyes and lay back on the bed.

Piatsri was back soon. My eyes did not lie to me; it was her writing. He pointed out the start of a passage to me.

Piat, the baby is beautiful and a joy... she is so bright of spirit and smiles and smiles... she gurgles and coos at me and seldom cries. She loves the feather hangers and bubbles at them... Her eyes are darkening and they will be like her father’s. I will look in them and see him in her, every day of her life, whatever has become of him... I still have part of him here in the baby’s eyes. I laugh with her and try not to cry at the same time when she nurses. I don’t want to lay my worries on her tiny head…

I could not read more, for my eyes blurring with tears, and had to put my head back again, even as my heart leapt and danced. “Tell him more,” Alchaen said to Piatsri, laying his hand on my shoulder. “Where is Niku? What’s happened with her in the last few months? How is she doing?”

“She’s home, on Niah-lur-ana. She had the baby… oh, it must be a little more than three moons ago now. I know she’s been in some sort of argument with other people there, about some political thing, but she won’t say what it is. Some private Niah matter. I thought at first she was in trouble for not killing herself rather than be captured—you know how they have that—but the way she writes about it, I think it’s bigger than that.”

Allying with Yeola-e and revealing the wing! Her words, in the darkness on the grass-faib field as I held the moyawa on my shoulders, came back to me. “I will fight for you; but I am a good fighter. And I will have the Wasteega Foa”—the Niah oracle—“on my side… ‘It is time to come out,’ Lord Friend told me.”

He pointed to another passage. I feel in my heart that Chevenga is still alive. I have no other news but just my hope. My prayers must be hammering on the Gods’ ears, and if I could find Lord Friend to wrestle with for his life, I would, but my dreams are empty of the Gods and the wind is empty of their words.

I shook tears out of my eyes and smacked the letter down on my night-table. He’d brought it in a flat polished wooden case that, when he opened it on his lap, proved to be a desk-in-a-box, with pen, paper, a well of ink built-in, and various compartments. Without asking, I snatched up the pen and one sheet of paper and began scrawling. You’ll understand, Piatsri. You are forbidden to tell anyone I’m here; I’m not. I had it written in a tenth. Alchaen raised no objection. Denaina… I wouldn’t give the choice. “You…” I said, “know how… to send… to her… how… long…?”

“Yes. It’s an odd thing… she told me long ago to take my letters to her to a Niah man who lives in the Sailortown part of Haiuroru port, in the evening. I’ll get a reply back, sometimes, the next morning. Even as close as Niah-lur-ana is to here, I have no idea how they do it.”

Ha! I know how they do it.

He folded my letter carefully into a compartment, gently extricated his pen from my hand and neatly closed it all up.

I did indeed receive an answer the next morning. She had give our daughter the perfect name for the child of two slaves: the Niah word for “freedom,” which is vriah. She wanted desperately to be with me, but could not. “Now that I know for certain you are alive, omores,” she wrote, “I have to tell them that it is certain again that a foreigner knows our secret, and that will stir it all up again.”

I wrote back to her offering to come to the island and speak to her people, once I was healed. If I can ever speak well again… Alchaen reassured me I would, kept reminding me of how far I’d gotten already, from entirely mute to halting.

It was like a miracle, writing daily across sea. We made our plans. Her people agreed to invite me and hear me out, so the discussion was deferred until then, but in the meantime she would quietly consolidate her friendships—crucial, when her life might depend on it—and secretly find those A-niah who were willing to go to Yeola-e as an elite unit of flyer-teachers. In the meantime, I would heal.

†

I had thought I’d be nothing but overjoyed when my parents and the other Yeolis arrived.

Alchaen spoke to them at length before he let us meet, telling them what had passed, how different I was from what they knew, and all the ways to be careful with me. Their faces were still all shocked at the sight of mine. As well as having the new scars, they told me later, I looked ten years older.

The axe of madness fell when I saw my mother’s face. The world froze, then turned black and icy; I was done with healing and there was nothing left to do but die. By my memories, so long ago now—the knife in her hand, the darkening scarlet on her tricolor shirt—she had killed my father.

I fell to my knees, half-fainting, then got up and ran, planning to find a way to kill myself. Alchaen raised the House alarm and the strong-arms came; I would not strike them, since they were Haians, so they seized me and pinned me to the bed. Niku had spoken of A-niah captives biting through their own tongues so as to bleed to death while in bonds, so I tried it. The pain was welcome, the iron tang of my blood no different than anyone else’s I’d tasted; I breathed some in and choked. Voices rose, a hand laid a sharp-smelling cloth over my face, and the world spun away like a leaf falling.

When I woke up, my mouth was full of linen; I was not restrained, but knew by the heaviness of my limbs that I was drugged. I could do nothing but weep. Alchaen questioned me, having me answer by hand, not much different from how we spoke usually anyway. I feel for him, trying to calm and reassure my parents while he himself had no idea why I’d done this.

“There were other lies they instilled into you,” he said, once he’d got the reason out of me in his skillful way. “Chivinga, how could you do this to yourself without finding out whether this was one or not?”

He had to take me into trance and find out the reason from the fly on the wall. It was that I didn’t merely believe it, but, as far as I could tell, remembered it. “They tortured you into fashioning, by your imagination, a falsehood in the guise of a memory,” he told me. “Yes, it’s possible. I have seen other cases.” But no amount of telling me that seemed to touch it, so he prescribed encahun nenanhanun, which means “empathy of memory” in Haian. It means the conveying of one person’s memories into another person’s mind. A Yeoli might call it the ultimate and perfect chiravesa.

The procedure requires three gifted Haians: two telepaths to make the bond and an empath to sense whether matters are getting too far out of hand, as they often do. More specialists, I thought helplessly, wondering how much of a bill the treasury of Yeola-e, which must be flat broke, was running up for putting all the bits of me back together.

The idea frightened both my mother and me—since I could not bear to be with her, Alchaen spoke to us separately—but we both agreed nonetheless. “Your relationship with her is very important to you,” he told me. “So it’s best that you know the truth absolutely beyond a doubt. It is best for her, too.”

It was done at night, in a room lit by one small lamp only; darkness was most peaceful and blank, and therefore best, they told me. The reading and sending telepaths sat together, almost embracing; to their shield-side they positioned my mother, and to their sword-side, me, while the empath, whose name was Megidan, sat facing them, where she could reach us both with her hands. They all handled me as if I were a glass statue cracked almost through. Megidan explained everything to both of us very carefully, and more than once. The way of breaking the bond, she explained three times; I need only let go her hand.

In the silence of trance, I felt fingers on my temple, the sending telepath’s, a touch as gentle as feathers. Then Megidan guided my mother to relive that day, and my mind was suddenly stabbed full of brightness, as strong as my own thoughts but coming through my shield-side temple from those fingers. It was sunlight, greenness, the smell of cedars; above their highest branches, the peak of Haranin against a blue sky. I am home, walking, a warm arm around my waist, a strong hard man’s body in my own arm: my husband, my love, my Tennunga.

He smiles, his cheeks flushed a sweet pink between sun-gold curls; we were just play-sparring. We kiss; in that, I can forget the sound of the wings of Shininao, and that I am carrying a knife in Vae Arahi, that something terrible I cannot name awaits us, like enemies in ambush. I fight it off, as I’ve had to constantly these past few days, to be happy with him.

We walk silently past the rock. A thrashing jolt all through him—his face frozen in the ultimate shock—something on his chest, the steel tip of a knife, reddened from inside him, through his heart, the other behind him, Enchian—the eyes I love look at me in immeasurable anguish, and turn to glass—

I tore my hand out of Megidan’s, and heard the echo of my own scream. My mother had lived this, probably a thousand times, before time in its mercy had made it cease haunting her; for me it had been the first, and it was etched on my memory forever, now. In time, I came to understand that Alchaen had made a careful calculation: the cost to me of having the memory was worth the benefit of regaining love for my mother. But no one should ever have to make such a choice. All the blame lay with Kurkas Aan.

It had been strange even to see my father from a grown-up’s height. Now I would have to heal from seeing death-shock on his face, and his eyes setting before he even fell.

But the lie was slain. My mother and I flung ourselves into each other’s arms, and the abyss between us was gone as if it had never been.

The next morning when she came to see me, I was so startled I jumped a little. She’d cut her hair to a warrior cut; it made her look uncannily like me, in female form. “I am going to cease being asa kraiya, for now, to fight the Arkans,” she said. “Long in the tooth or not—stop looking so worried, my child, I do plan to train first. But I can’t bear not to fight them, when they have done what they have done to you.”

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172 - The inside of my own skull

Once when Alchaen and I were speaking, or should I say, he was speaking and I was half-speaking, of the surgery, I found myself distracted, my eye drawn to one thing. On a shelf near the bed stood a glass jar of liquid with a pinkish-beige and knobbly mass, about the size of an eye, suspended in it. I was never squeamish, but this somehow turned my stomach. I asked him what it was. “Your mind seeks out the strands,” he said, smiling. “We brought it here, because you took comfort from seeing it was no longer in you. The grium sefalian.”

All I had time to do was think, so big, then it was out the door, while he dashed after me, worried. Behind a bush I heaved up everything I had eaten that day, and perhaps a few before.

That made me feel better, though; reminding myself that it was indeed out of me, I went back in, rinsed out my mouth and took a good look, turning the jar in my fingers. How had it not affected me more? But in my hands it was defeated, dead; on my shelf it was not a haunt but a trophy. I still have it, and bring it out every now and then when I think someone needs to see it for some reason.

The surgery itself was something I thought I would never remember, assuming that I’d been unconscious at the time, but once Alchaen said, “Something you said while Kaninden was operating on you,” and I didn’t hear the rest of the sentence. “Oh yes,” he said, when I’d conveyed to him the question, ‘I was awake?’ “You had to be, so that she could ask you what thoughts came into your mind when she touched… em, I think I should explain the whole thing.”

To my amazement, most of it eventually came back to me, no doubt because it was one of the less unpleasant experiences I had while healing.

The room, to my great surprise, has walls and roof entirely of Arkan glass. Above all, a Haian surgeon wants to see very well what she’s doing. Sunlight is not enough; there is also a device of several mirrors that direct the rays so that they shine from several angles onto the part of the patient being operated on—though not brightly enough to burn.

Kaninden, who made a specialty of surgery inside the skull, usually liked the patient to be in restraints, his head clamped absolutely still, but the feeling of Alchaen and the other healers was that for me that would be too much like being on the Mahid table again. So instead, Alchaen put me into trance, and gave me a command to stay entirely still throughout, which worked well enough.

Kaninden cut back a flap of my skin (they’d already shaved my head entire), and several healers held my head while she cut a circle into the bone, aching slow, with an obsidian knife. There is no other way to get an object so large out from inside a person’s skull. I remember how I felt the scraping, right into my teeth.

Alchaen had also given me the command to regain speech, so when they had the piece free, I said, “May I see the inside of it?”

“Ehh…” Kaninden seemed a little discomfited. “Why?”

“So I can tell everyone I’ve seen the inside of my own skull,” I said. “How many people can say that?” There was a healer holding the pulse-point on my wrist; only when he acceded would Kaninden show the piece to me, pinkish and bloody.

Then I ceased feeling anything, even as I knew Kaninden was poking about my brain with some sort of instrument. They’d needled me to keep me from feeling any pain while they cut, but I had still felt the cutting; now I felt nothing. “There are none of those kinds of nerve inside the brain,” she explained, when I asked. It stood to reason: we have nerves to give warning, and if something gets inside the skull, other than a Haian surgeon’s instruments, there’s generally no point in warning.

“Now we are going to use the”—here she used a Haian word—“to find the grium. You will have sensations, perhaps memories, or thoughts that don’t follow from what you were already thinking; I want you to tell me what they are, and I also want you to tell me if you get sensations like what you know of the grium.”

The Haian word, I learned later, is iliraen. I did not know that the same force that makes a sting and a spark if you shuffle over a rug and then kiss someone is what runs along the nerves and in the brain, until Kaninden told me. Nor did I know that you can get enough of it out of a lemon with copper and zinc rods stuck into it, joined by wire to some sort of device to control the amount, and then to a rod, to make a person remember something from childhood if you touch it to his brain. These were things I would never have believed, except that they were happening on Haiu Menshir.

I was lying on a table in a room of glass with four or five masked healers touching me—but then I was running up the side of Hetharin with Mana, no older than seven or eight; then I was smelling a whiff of cedar branches; then I saw a flash of the breastplate of the youth in front of me as we marched to Laka. “Chivinga, it’s startling, I know,” Kaninden said, bringing me dizzyingly back to Haiu Menshir. “But you must tell me.”

There was a trick to being in two places at once, so as to keep speaking, but in time I got it. It was about three aer, as Haians measure time, which I know as half of a good night’s sleep for me, before she was satisfied she’d got all of the grium. She could tell, by feel and by what I said, where it was. I did indeed feel the sense of the grium again, some of the time, to my horror. It was hard enough work for me that they kept toweling sweat off my face, and the memories cease almost from the moment she said, “Relax, Chivinga. Your part is done.”

When I woke up, my mind was so scrambled I didn’t know the hand lying in front of my face was mine at first, even after the fingers moved, which I must have done. I had forgotten the simplest things, such as how to count backwards from ten. “This always happens,” Kaninden told me, seeing fear on my face. “It will all come back to you as the wound heals.” That proved true, and in time I got back the clarity I’d had before the grium.

†

I was just beginning to speak when Alchaen sat me down in a clearing near the beach, with the look on his face he got when he was about to tell me something severe. “You are ready to know,” he said. “Have you noticed the scar on your testicles?” I hadn’t; now I found it, a tiny knot of hardness in the skin near the roots of them. “Let me say first, we have someone who can cure it, though you likely think that is not possible,” he said, very gently. “They gelded you.”

“It’s all right, it’s all right…” I felt his hands on my shoulders, and his voice crashed into my mind through darkness. I’d gone faint for a bit. Probably every man has thought about it, I imagine, and told himself that if somehow it did happen, or if he proved unable to father children, that he could make peace with it; it was another thing again to be told right out it was done. Almost without willing it, I counted my children in my head: Fifth, Kima, Niku’s child—three, if they all still lived. More than my share, some might say; being semanakraseye, I live a different life than most Yeolis, who by law may not have more than two apiece unless there is plague or war. But most Yeolis, if they lose one, can have another. “It’s curable, the way they did it, as I told you,” he said, insistently. “It’s all right.”

Since the rule was not to leave a mark on me, Kurkas hadn’t had them taken right off, but instead he’d had the Mahid poke something like a pin-dagger through the skin, and make a mess of the tubes inside. He didn’t tell me then, but they’d tested, acquiring some of it when I’d healed enough from the head surgery to have wet dreams. How they could tell that a drop had fathering-power in it, I have no idea, but they could, and I was indeed gelded.

The healer who would cure me was actually not a Haian, but a half-Zak from Brahvniki, with a name that sounded vaguely familiar: Piatsri. Perhaps there’d been a Piatsri among Ivahn’s staff when I’d visited, I thought.

This Piatsri had the gift of seeing inside another person’s body, and moving minute things by will. It would not hurt, Alchaen reassured me. I signed a double-chalk like two knives, wanting to say, “I don’t care if it hurts as badly as having them slashed up again ten times over—just do it.”

The worst you could say was that there was warmth almost to the point of discomfort, and then itching, and even so, they had another Haian there holding my shoulder while Piatsri laid hands on me to do his work. He seemed to suffer worse than me, as those with manrauq do from using it; a Haian apprentice mopped his brow and fed him some greenish-coloured tonic immediately after each time. I remembered how Svetkabras had aged twenty years in one in the Mezem. I hoped we were paying Piatsri well.

Once, when he’d recovered enough afterwards to speak again, he said to me, almost in passing, “I have an old friend who knew you in the Mezem; she’s been writing about you in her letters lately.” She? “Alas, I’m forbidden to write her that you are here; we can’t tell anyone. Well… she more than knew you.” He smiled. “Let’s just say, she has the living proof that you had your fertility then…”

That’s where I knew the name from. Niku had mentioned that when she’d been free, she had often written a Brahvnikian on Haiu Menshir, who she’d met as a girl while caring for her mother there: Piatsri.

“Shchevenga,” he said, “are you all right?”

I wasn’t. Claws of emotion were leaving streaks of fire across my soul. That was one of the first times a misconception Kurkas had burned into my mind came roaring back. I remembered what I had forgotten: that I knew they were both dead.

--

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171 - Sense in the whirlwind

He remembered doing this already, of course. Who could know, how many times? For me it was the first, so I clung hard to him, pouring tears silently onto his neck, while he held me patiently. Was I imagining it, or was he bonier, as if he hadn’t been getting enough to eat? Or just more rawhide, from fighting? I drew back to look at his face. His eyes were more careworn, even smiling, that was certain. Every Yeoli’s must be.

It was good just to see him well. That would not be the case with everyone I knew. Among the warriors, a majority of them must be gone. “Krero…”

He was patient, in a well-practiced way. “Easy, Cheng,” he said. “You do best when you’re relaxed. Lean on me.”

“Sa… chara…” I managed to whisper.

“You want to know how he is? Well, I don’t know… let’s find out. Hey, Sach! How are you!?”

My other heart’s brother was guarding another leaf-built house; he came trotting up, though with a distinct limp he hadn’t had before. I flung myself into his arms tearfully too. “All-Spirit,” he said. “Each time you do this, Cheng, it makes me want to cry like the first time, too.”

Where’s my mother? Where’s my shadow-father? We were in a cluster of five of these leaf-houses, a tiny Yeoli village in the midst of the green beauty of Haiu Menshir. Someone came out of one of them: my little sister Sishana. Not so little; she’d grown a hand-span. “Sish!” I called. “Whe—” Kyash. The inward swearing on being unable to get out a whole word seemed wearingly familiar, too. I knew that house was where my parents were, so I went to it. “Ma... ma?”

I couldn’t help a gasp when I saw her. Her hair was cut into a warrior-cut, as I had never seen it, that I could remember. It made her look uncannily like me, in female form.

“Hello, love.” She held out her arms, and I flung myself into them. You are changed; all Yeolis are changed; Mama, I am changed so much... It was strange even to have the memory of being who I had been in the Mezem, in her presence. I killed eight Yeolis. Just as well I couldn’t say that. Even if this last, worst torture hadn’t happened, I’d never be the same.

But her touch, the warmth of her body, those things that were all-encompassing safety and life to the infant in me, were the same, as if the world hadn’t changed. I felt brought back to myself, as if part of me that had been cut off, the whole time I’d been in Arko was now rejoined. “Take a deep breath, Chevenga,” she said gently. “The words will come. I’ll wait for them.”

I have tears. Lots of those, right now. I took a deep breath; obedience to your mother can come from such a primal and easy place. She patted my back as if I were a baby on her shoulder again. I will say the most important thing, if it kills me. “I... love... you.”

Her arms tightened, with more strength than I remembered. Has she been training? “I love you too, my lion-cub. You’re getting better. It’s all right, love.”

“Kari, is it Chevenga? I’ll help you...” Esora-e’s voice; he came out the branch-framed door. He looked precisely the same, tough as old boot-leather, but, at the same time, like a stranger, for the length of time since I’d last seen him. “Do you need to be held, lad? I can carry you if you need.” I just stretched my hands towards him from my mother’s back. He put his arms around me more gently than I remembered him ever touching me, as if I were glass. They took me between them, and I laid my head on her shoulder and closed my eyes and let out my heart in tears. Sish piled in, too.

Here is safety; here is sanity. I just took it in, like a person dying of thirst draws in water. So familiar, and yet so strange, for those two years away, and for all the changes.

What happened? How is Yeola-e, how is Vae Arahi, tell me everything, leave nothing out; but of course they already had. As if he could read my mind, Alchaen said, “Don’t worry, Chivinga. What is missing will come back.”

“Whe... when?” They all laughed, fondly, as if at a familiar quirk. Even insane, I thought, I am in a hurry.

“When you are able to assimilate it,” he said. “The mind has a capacity to protect itself. That’s why you have forgotten so much; the mind will divide itself into parts, to protect some of itself.” I remembered splitting apart from myself while Klajen first and then any number of Mahid had tortured me, and how it had helped.

“You’ll be fine, love,” my mother said. “You listen. You breathe. It will all help.”

They loosened their arms on me, as if in respect for my independence. I seized them back, not so independent quite yet; that I could do. They closed in again, as if to say, as long as you want, whatever you need. “You may ask whenever you wish,” Alchaen said. “We are always here, Chivinga. Always. You let go now, you may hold on any time again.” I signed chalk. That I could do, too.

When I could bring myself to let go, I went around and hugged everyone, going to the guards if they wouldn’t leave their posts. To a person, they acted as if this had happened several times before. Then Alchaen took me into the house that he told me was mine. It felt so.

Inside there were two small beds and a writing-desk, with pen and ink and a few papers on it. I saw my own writing. On a night-table by the bed I knew was mine was a jug and a cup and a comb; there was a small clothes-chest, but I knew that I needed little in the way of clothes in this place. No wonder Haians want to wear long robes elsewhere in the world, I thought. They’d freeze otherwise. A breeze that had somehow made its way through the trees from the sea sent a set of wind-chimes, made of shell, to tinkling. The sound was so familiar I hardly heard it. It all had the feel of having been home for three months, as it had been.

†

I will never known all that Kurkas had done, or did himself, to me in that moon, though others do. There is a full account in a file, but I will never read it. I learned some from mentions, from what my people around me seem to know, some from answers Alchaen gave in the rare times I asked.

Drugs, of course since it was Arko: Accedence many times, Mahid’s Obedience, more truth-drug, All-Spirit knows what else. Smothering, rape, humiliation of a hundred kinds; these are only words, yet though I can write them, if you asked me, I would not be able to say them smoothly, even now. The first rule had been that I must be left with no visible marks; but then Kurkas had been unable to resist doing something that left slight ones.

They scraped me at least once more, so Kurkas knew of my foreknowledge, and the moyawa, if he believed it. What they got out of me they used against me by convincing me of lies: that Niku and the child were dead, that Yeola-e was defeated and all the circle-stones smashed and the Sword of Saint Mother melted down, my children all killed, my family all rendered barren, and plenty more that I don’t remember.

“He hated you and feared you,” Alchaen told me. “He could not know the true meaning of what he did, since he has never felt it. Yet you know all these things, and still cry, Why? For you there can be no answer that is enough, no reason that justifies to your heart what you have suffered, for all it might explain to your mind. You will have to accept that.”

Now my healing was my work, half a day, every day. It was as bitter and painstakingly slow as war-training, and in many ways harder. I was torn asunder a thousand ways; madness has as many branches as a tree. But, I learned, so does sanity; in a thousand ways I was healing. As the body will at least attempt to heal itself without even a healer’s help, so will the mind; as Haians say, that is the work of the vital force. But I was lucky as well to be aided by one so good. Like a war-teacher, seeming to read my mind often in the same way, saying “Follow the threads, Chivinga,” Alchaen led me along the black twisting path.

Like a fight, or a long-lasting pain, I don’t remember it well. Some of what I will describe came after this last awakening; some came from before, since it did return to me. I’m not even sure which is which, so I cannot put it in proper order. Alchaen made notes, but them too I will never read.

At the outset, he’d learned he could enable me to speak by putting me in trance, to question the deeper layers on my memory, not unlike truth-drug. There he found an even and patient voice claiming to have been a fly on the wall while it all happened, who thus knew all that had happened to this other person, Chevenga, and could describe it dispassionately. The fly even knew what I could and could not bear to remember when I woke. “No, no, don’t tell him that, he’ll jump in the fire-coral,” the fly said once to Alchaen; I happened to spot it in his notes, in Enchian, once when I peeked. Madness is devious, no less devious than the mind in which it lives; but so is healing.

Alchaen was sense in the whirlwind, routine in the confused aimlessness, steadying arms in the terror. He made me, and had trained everyone else to make me, take care of my looks in the morning, train, eat when I was hungry, swim when I was hot, nap when I was tired, however strong my own urge was to ignore my inclination. He filled the missing pieces; to my every question he had, or was, the answer, even if that was only his calm. He taught me to speak again, like a child, from nothing.

He set me laws to adhere to. Don’t fight what I felt, but let it take and pass through me, he told me; hearing this, I thought immediately of what Iska had told me to do the night before my fight against Riji Kli-fas. Tell him what I felt so I need never face it alone; distinguish myself from my madness; be patient, be patient, always be patient. (Not that that was different from what I’d been told all my life.)

He forbade me ever to curse or hurt myself, even as little as a smack on my own forehead or calling myself an idiot even if I was being one. “You are hurt enough already,” he would say. “You feel as if you are weak, childish, stupid, cowardly, but you are none of these things. The feeling comes both from the torturers setting out to convince you of them, and the residue of the suffering itself.”

Always, look at my heart with the eyes of a scholar, question all I felt, ask why with everything. I had never done that before, always knowing, or thinking I knew, what I felt, and putting it aside by will if I had to. Now that ability was gone; terror or sickness or pain or rage or all at once would seize and toss me at their leisure like sea-waves a leaf, and most of the time I had no idea why.

I had to build up entire my understanding of myself again. I went slowly, painfully, having to learn many things several times over, same as I’d had to awaken to myself several times. It is for that reason, I now understand, that the mad are so engrossed in themselves; it is a matter of necessity.

Yet in the end, I think, I came out with a better mind: certainly wiser and broader than before, which, I felt, would be an aid in the war. I also was stronger, in knowing what I could survive. To understand madness is to understand sanity.

--

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170 - Many awakenings

Integrity. The Haian word, I am told, carries less of the ethical meaning of the Enchian or even the Yeoli, and more of the more ancient meaning: ‘wholeness.’ Wholeness, as is needed by those torn asunder. Hence, House of Integrity, the place where Haians take in the worst of the mad. So easily the signs, both in his words and in what I felt myself, had slipped through my mind, like oil through grasping fingers.

I’d long trained in the art of mastering fear. I took the first long breath, willed my mind to still, told myself, I am a warrior, and felt how out-of-training I was this way too. The thoughts, barely identifiable, that brought on terror kept poking their black paws through the bars I had raised; somehow I couldn’t put them aside, as I had always been able to before. My mind was clear of the grium; but something else was there. Suddenly nothing in it felt as it should.

But that’s just it. That’s the idea. The words were laughing and smug, and did not belong to me, though they were in me. From then on, one wrong thought after another came, like sparks, each setting off a fire in my mind as across a tinder-dry city. I could do nothing to stop them; whatever self-mastery I had ever learned was ashes. So the agony they brought, I was defenseless against, helpless as a slave in chains, being dragged towards a pit I knew would destroy me.

The worst of it was that it all felt familiar. I had fallen this way a thousand times before.

All-Spirit help me… the voice was Kurkas’s. I succeeded, Shefen-kas. Don’t fool yourself. You thought I would never break you, but I did. I heard his laughter echoing, as if from high above me, mixed with the screams I screamed silently in flames, licking me all around with searing truth, drawing me to the pit’s brink.

“Chivinga.” Hands gripped mine hard enough to hurt, just a little: earthly pain, something to hold to. Alchaen was nose-to-nose with me, his eyes fixed on mine, entirely calm. “Chivinga, look at me. You are on Haiu Menshir.” The white beach, the sea, the sky, the sun’s heat, it was still all around me, and yet was not; I had forgotten it. I would swear I smelled smoke. Now I understood the line in the play, ‘My mind is in darkness.’ “Take strength from my hands,” he said. He had a steadiness about him, like a sage, knowing how to be one’s rock in the storm. “Can you hear me?” he said.

Yes. The word formed in my mind, as ever—it was the truth and all my intent was to say it—but somehow my tongue was cut off from my will, as with truth-drug, but opposite, now refusing to speak instead of speaking of itself. My throat was closed as a gate; my lungs were stone, like a wall. What I had in the Mezem was child’s play, I thought. This is madness.

He seemed to see the yes in my eyes. “You fear for your sanity for good reason,” he said, firmly, but without urgency. “But you are thinking of it as permanent, as people do, and it is not. In time you will be as you were before. You are a very strong person, and you’ve already come far, faster than I thought you would, in truth. This is the first day, for instance, I have ever seen you as you were described to me: fast-moving, brave, quick-tongued… stubborn… This is the first day you have been sane enough to fear for your sanity.”

Alchaen… I had never said his name aloud, that I could remember, but crying it desperately in my mind was also unthinkably familiar. Alchaen… “It’s all right,” he said, as if he could hear. “I will tell you everything; but you should be at least sitting down.” I obeyed. I had to fight the flaming maelstrom in my mind to tell my limbs what to do. The softness and warmth of the sand was a faint comfort, but still a comfort.

“First of all: you needn’t worry about letting Denaina know; she does. The people of the shipfast who brought you in knew who you were, and so informed her. Here… lie back.” I obeyed again. I hoped he wouldn’t tell me to close my eyes; if I did, I’d have nothing but what was inside my skull to see. He took my head between his hands, one under the back of it, one on my forehead. That in and of itself was calming. “Deep breaths,” he said. The horrors faded, slightly.

“They kept you in the Mahid section of the Marble Palace for a month,” he said, both gently, and distinctly, as if I were a touch slow. “You were tortured, many different ways, until you appeared to Kurkas to be broken; but you were not. In negotiating for your ransom, the Yeolis required that they see you before they made full payment. So Kurkas ordered you taken to Yeola-e.

“They took you in a carriage, that was very well-guarded, but you still managed to escape, the first reason I say you were not broken. You couldn’t have done that, if you were. They must have chased you, but you somehow eluded that too; I suspect it was by running the opposite way they expected you to, to Tenaspur rather than Fispur. Don’t worry for a moment that you’ve lost your deviousness, Chivinga.

“You gained passage on a Yeoli ship, and they brought you here, though a little circuitously; that chest-wound, you got in a fight on an island.

“You cannot know, because you have forgotten, but you have improved greatly since you arrived here. I mentioned the surgery; once you were sufficiently healed from that, you were transferred to the House of Integrity, and I became your psyche-healer. Here’s what you need to understand: you are vastly better than you were.”

Alchaen shifted his hands on me, as if to remind me they were there, and make me feel their tenderness again. “When you first came to me, you could not speak, nor truly move of your own will, except, from what I understand, when your life was threatened. You would not eat or drink enough, unless we urged you, and you never truly slept, for nightmares. That was three months ago.

“You have had many awakenings, in that time. This is but the latest; but I think, just from my experience—I’ve healed many people who were tortured before, as it is my interest—this one will stick. You are afraid you can’t speak; not to worry, you can; we’ll try, in a bit. You have a way to go before you are able to command an army. But it will come.

“As I mentioned, Denaina learned you were here the day you arrived, and sent a pigeon to your sister right away. We also wrote to your family after we had fully examined you, recommending that some of them who were closest to you come to be with you. They came as soon as they could, your mother and your shadow-father, along with a troop of guards…”

They’re here? They’re here… they’re here… I felt my mouth working, but no words came out. No matter. Which way, Alchaen? I rolled out of his grip and leapt up. Never mind, no matter. My body knew it knew the way.

Inland from the beach the trees thickened and there were bushes also, none of a kind I’d ever seen, all with strange big polished leaves, and some with huge orange or pink flowers. I ran along a path of the same white sand, my feet seeming barely to touch it, my mind in a dream. Alchaen chased me, but I soon lost him.

Ahead I felt weapons—short blades, carried as if hidden—but no fear with them, only a sense of protection. The guards. Four of them were stationed around one place; it came into sight, a small house whose walls were made, as far as I could tell, of the reed-like leaves of these trees woven together, the roof thatched out of the same. The guards were light-armoured and helmetted, with shortswords under their kilts. The one at the door of the place was—Krero.

He looked at me as if he hadn’t seen me for a tenth-bead, rather than two years, and as if something about me was concerning him. Krero my heart’s brother! I got out “Krer—!”, my voice breaking high. I flung myself into his arms.

--

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169 - The table in the oubliette

I am standing in the silence of night, beside a great circular pool whose bank rotates with time, like the Earthsphere. Distant on the opposite bank is the black silhouette of a cloaked woman, standing still as a stele, but moving as the bank moves; I see her black head creep across the face of a blade-silver moon. I know her name is Vora, “scythe.” Like the marker of any clock, she frightens me, but she is far away.

I busy myself with administrative tasks: going over Assembly and Committee-of-Assembly orders, assigning bureaucrats, writing reports. Somehow the monotony of this becomes engrossing, changing the unbroken thread of time into a shuffle of moments.

Then suddenly I feel a presence at my shoulder, like a breath of wind so slight it is barely felt. Vora is beside me, close enough to touch me, if she willed, her face like living white stone in the darkness. Panic seizes me, by the throat and stomach; I realize how much time has crept by, wasted on trifling things I could have delegated, that much of my life gone without my living it. I want to leap up and move, strike myself, speak my repentance, beg my life back; but time has no more soul to answer than a river, flowing one way only. It has only more of itself to rush by mindlessly while I waste it begging, gone forever. Vora waits.

†

I swim in an impossibly warm sea. Emerald, sapphire and ruby fish swim over stony fingers of fire-orange, pink, gold that reach up from the bottom as I float over. The fish then turn to words; I dive to chase them with my hands, and they flit out of reach with a thrash of the tiny letters that are their bodies.

My senses take in. Swishing and clacking, as if of long, dry reedy tongues, but far above me. Distant rushing thunder, but too steady for thunder; sun, white hot, hotter than sun is, on my skin. Sky, blue, brilliant; against it, an impossible tree, its trunk smooth and brown as a mamoka’s trunk, a single burst of branches flaring out from the top, each shaped like a single great leaf longer than a man, but formed of green spear-heads spaced as perfectly as banisters on a bridge. The sun flickers blinding between them as they move in the wind. A hand, which I know by its touch is a Haian’s, lies on my brow.

Such a beautiful place my dreaming mind has brought me to, so creative and free in its wanderings. Such gentleness, I have inwardly escaped to. The Haian is no longer touching me, but doing some paperwork; I hear the scratch of his pen. He is middle-aged, his long black hair streaked with grey, the wrinkles around his mouth and eyes bearing a kindly shape, as those of Haians tend to. He is not wearing the typical Haian robe, black with the two white stripes, but a sleeveless shirt of some gossamer beige fabric. I raise my head. I am on a beach wider than any beach can be, made of impossible white sand, fine as flour. At its edge laps a brilliant turquoise sea; the steady thunder, I realize, is far-off surf. The air is both sweet and salty, beautiful to breathe after the pit-stink of Arko.

I feel the freedom of almost-nakedness, wearing only a loin-cloth, a black arm-ring, my crystal and father’s wisdom-tooth, and a leaf-green ribbon tied around my sword-hand wrist. My hair feels oddly short; running my hand through it I find it has been cropped severely but evenly. Has this barbarian without caste somehow been de-elevated, in a dream?

The Haian looks at me. By the look in his eyes, I am very familiar to him, but showing a new facet of myself, in some way, that intrigues him. “Chivinga,” he says, in that delicate accent, making me realize that for all I like Anhunem, I miss Persahis desperately. Luck-spirits of dreamworld, may I see him before I wake? Better still, may I never wake, into that scratched and ribboned and memento’ed little room with the bars on the windows and the two Mahid kits floating still as death outside the bolted door? Please, can there be another world and another place for me, in dreaming at least?

I have never seen this Haian before, but somehow I have a name for him: Alchaen. My imagination has some craft, coming up with a name so realistically Haian-sounding; maybe I should take up writing stories. I sit up, and find one thing unpleasant, one flaw in the perfect scenario of this fantasy: my body is weak, and feels delicate. I feel out of training as if I’ve been wounded; sure enough, I find a scar I don’t remember getting, that by its deep pinkness and tenderness, I got three or four months ago, on the left side of my chest, about a half-handspan below heart-height. Too real; can we make that go away? I wish to no avail. Still, it’s a small complaint.

“How are you?” the Haian asks.

“Wonderful,” I say. “I want to stay here forever. Can that be arranged?”

His eyes flicker with just a touch of startlement, as if I’ve done something odd, before they go impassive-kind again, healer-style, and he smiles. “Stay here forever? You have a home to return to.”

“Oh, I know,” I say. “But that’s after I wake up. Isn’t time elastic in dreams, so it can stretch to an infinity within a moment? Or can it be, at least, if I am firm enough in choosing that?”

“Certainly,” he says, “if you were dreaming. You are not.”

I laugh. “Don’t tell me that! It will fling me out of it. You think I want to open my eyes to that ceiling again?”

“I assure you, Chivinga, you won’t. Do you know where we are?”

“What it is called, I have no idea. I know its essence—beauty and peace beyond plausibility—and that’s all that matters.”

“We are on Haiu Menshir. Do you remember first meeting me?”

“Look, Haian,” I say. “You claim I am not dreaming; but you are within my dream, but a figment of my own imagination, and so could say anything, especially if it pleases me. You’re not talking me into anything that is so unbelievable it breaks the spell and sends me back to Arko. I like it here.”

He laughed, a gentle rippling. “I understand your concern,” he said. “The truth, you know in your heart; so let it come to you in its own time. Let me suggest that you act on the assumption that this is reality, rather than dream, until it is proven otherwise. What harm can any act of yours do, if you are merely in a dream?”

Eminently fair and sensible, I had to admit. Why not play it, like chiravesa? “Haiu Menshir?” I said. “How did I get here? And no, I don’t remember first meeting you, if it’s not now… I hope you’ll forgive me.”

“My name is Alchaen of Berit,” he said. “Nothing to forgive, Chivinga. We are on the grounds of the House of Integrity of the University of Haiuroru. How you got here, as best I understand, was that you somehow made your way from Arko to Tenaspur, from where you came by ship to here.”

“Tenaspur? You’re straining my credulity, dream-Haian. It’s much shorter via Fispur.”

“I am only citing the captain of the ship that brought you,” he said. “She said that when they took you on, you were half-starved and exhausted and had manacle-sores on your wrists and ankles, as well as the cuts and scratches someone gets running through wilderness.”

I suddenly itched to get up, so I did. It was far too hard and took far too long. I have to work myself back into shape, I thought. Yet if I’m dreaming… no, I should anyway, in case I find myself facing dream-enemies. He carefully ordered his papers and slid them into a portfolio, so as to get up with me. If this were real, I asked myself, what would I most want to know? “How long… what’s the date?”

“By your own calendar—I’ve kept it, knowing you would ask”—he thumbed through his papers, found one. “Verekina 17, 1550.”

My heart was suddenly pounding. “Verekina 17? All-Spirit, it’s spring? Oh kyash, kyash, kyash…” The snow was melting fast out of the passes of Yeola-e, opening them; in the plains it was very close to fighting-season, if it wasn’t already. I’m acting very much as if this is real and not a dream, I thought. If it is… I’m out of Arko.

I’m out of Arko I’m out of Arko I’m out of Arko I’m out of Arko… My hand went to my head, the place under which the thing they’d put into me that would kill me was growing. “The grium sefalian…?”

“It’s been removed. As soon as you were sufficiently healed from the lung-wound, you underwent the surgery. You were able to express to us, your choice.”

Now my breaths began coming hard, with shock, bringing a faint twinge of pain from between my ribs, under the scar. For months I’d been measuring, asking myself ‘How is my mind?’ and feeling the answer; I’d pretended to myself not to the feel the deterioration, but I had felt it. A confusion, a dullness, an inability to keep track of things, forgetting my thought mid-sentence, seeing things out of the corners of my eyes… it had all grown gradually worse, in Arko. I could easily know it had been there now, because it was gone. My mind was as it had been before: clear.

I sank to my knees, tears weakening me. He took my hand and guided it to my head; under my scalp my fingers felt a circular ridge on my skull. “That’s where she cut through the bone,” he said, steadying me by my shoulders. His touch was as familiar as if I’d felt it innumerable times. “All-Spirit, All-Spirit, All-Spirit,” I whispered through my tears. “How do I thank her—whoever she is? How do I thank Haiu Menshir? Where do I start?”

“We are but doing our work,” he said. “But I will make sure you meet Kaninden—that is the surgeon’s name.”

I leapt to my feet, my mind, so beautifully clear and fast again, filling with calculations. I was free to seek alliances. Brahvniki, Tardengk, Curlionaiz… Niah-lur-ana. I counted off days in my head. Half a year of fighting season left even in the heights; plenty of time to win back ground, and then winter would be on our side. First thing was to let home know I was here. “The Yeoli ambassador in Haiuroru,” I said, “is it still Denaina Shae-Sara? Which way is it to the city?” She’d have pigeons that homed to Vae Arahi.

“Chivinga…” He laid his hands on my arms, tenderly. A sudden anger came up, making me want to fling him off; only his being a Haian stopped me. “You aren’t well enough, yet.”

“What are you talking about? My chest’s healed, my head’s healed, I’m walking and talking, am I not?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then tell me which way to the city. I don’t have to be dressed.”

He looked flummoxed, as if I’d never spoken this way in all the time he’d known me. What was I doing for all that time? “Chivinga… it’s not that, it’s this.” He touched the green ribbon around my wrist with two brown fingers. “I mentioned that you are in the House of Integrity… maybe you don’t know what that means…?”

“I don’t care what it means. I have my duty to do and nothing is more important.”

He seized my shoulders, fixed my eyes with his, and said, “Remember the table, Chivinga.”

He is a Haian. I must not strike him, fling him to the ground, even raise my voice more than I have. I was suddenly tingling and bristling all over, and a kind of darkness impinged on my mind, like smoke. “What table?”

“The table in the oubliette.”

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