Or so I imagine.
The child was mad, of course. Later events proved this. But it makes sense to me that this madness, not mere religious devotion, would appeal most to the Bright Lord. Her love was unconditional, her purpose undiluted by such paltry considerations as conscience or doubt. It seems like Him, I think, to value that kind of purity of purpose—even though, like warmth and light, too much love is never a good thing.
* * *
I woke an hour before dawn and immediately went to the door to listen for my captors. I could hear people moving about in the corridors beyond my door, and sometimes I caught snatches of the Lights’ wordless, soothing song. More morning rituals. If they followed the pattern of previous mornings, I had an hour, maybe more, before they came.
Quickly I set to work, pushing aside the room’s table as quietly as I could. Then I rolled aside the small rug to bare the wooden floor, which I inspected carefully. It was smoothly sanded, lightly finished. Dusty. It felt nothing like a canvas.
Neither had the bricks at the south promenade, though, the day I’d killed the Order-Keepers.
My heart pounded as I went through the room, collecting the items I’d marked or hidden as potentially useful. A piece of cheese and a nami-pepper from a previous meal. Chunks of melted fakefern wax from the candles. A bar of soap. I had nothing that felt or smelled like the color black, though, which was frustrating. I had a feeling I would need black.
I knelt on the floor and picked up the cheese, and took a deep breath.
Kitr and Paitya had called my drawing a doorway. If I drew a place I knew and opened that doorway again, would I be able to travel there? Or would I end up like the Order-Keepers, dead in two places at once?
I shook my head, angry at my own doubts.
Carefully, clumsily, I sketched Art Row. The cheese was more useful as texture than color, because it felt rough, like the cobbles I’d walked across for the past ten years. I yearned for black to outline the cobbles but forced myself to do without. The candlewax ran out first—too soft—but between it and the soap I managed to suggest a table, and beyond that another. The pepper ran out next, its juice stinging my fingers as I ground it to a nub trying to depict the Tree’s greenscent in the air. Finally, though I used my own saliva and blood to stretch it and properly color the cobbles, the cheese crumbled to bits in my fingers. (To get my blood, I’d had to scratch off the scab from the previous night’s bloodletting. Inconveniently, I was not menstruating.)
When it was done, I sat back to gaze at my work, grimacing at the ache in my back and shoulders and knees. It was a crude, small drawing, only two handspans across since there hadn’t been enough “paint” to do more. More impressionistic than I liked, though I had created such drawings before and seen the magic in them nevertheless. What mattered was what the depiction evoked in the mind and heart, not how it looked. And this one, however crude, had captured Art Row so well that I felt homesick just looking at it.
But how to make it real? And then, how to step through?
I put my fingers on the edge of the drawing, awkwardly. “Open?” No, that wasn’t right. At the south promenade I had been too terrified for words. I closed my eyes and said it with my thoughts. Open!
Nothing. I hadn’t really thought that would work.
Once, I had asked Madding how it felt for him, using magic. I’d had a bit of his blood in me at the time, making me restless and dreamy; that time, the only magic that had manifested in me was the sound of distant, atonal music. (I hadn’t forgotten the melody, but I’d never once hummed it aloud. All my instincts warned against doing that.) I’d been disappointed, wishing for something more grandiose, and that had gotten me wondering what it felt like to be magic, not just taste it in dribs and drops.
He’d shrugged, sounding bemused. “Like walking down the street feels for you. What do you think?”
“Walking down the street,” I had informed him archly, “is nothing like flying into stars, or crossing a thousand miles in one step, or turning into a big blue rock whenever you get mad.”
“Of course it’s the same,” he’d said. “When you decide to walk down a street, you flex the muscles in your legs. Right? You feel out the way with your stick. You listen, make sure there’s no one in the way. And then you will yourself to move, and your body moves. You believe it will happen, so it happens. That’s how magic is for us.”
Will the door open, and it will open. Believe, and it will be. Nibbling my bottom lip, I touched the drawing again.
This time, I tried imagining Art Row as I would one of my landscapes, cobbling together the memories of a thousand mornings. It would be busy now, the area thick with local merchants and laborers and farmers and smiths beginning their daily business. In some of the buildings just beyond my drawing, courtesans and restaurants would be opening their books for evening appointments. The pilgrims who’d prayed with the dawn would be giving way to minstrels singing for coins. I hummed a Yuuf tune that had been a favorite of mine. Sweating stonemasons, distracted accountants; I heard their hurrying feet and tense breath and felt their purposeful energy.
I was not aware of the change at first.
The Tree’s scent had been thick around me since I’d been brought to the House of the Risen Sun. Slowly, subtly, it changed—becoming the fainter, more distant scent I was used to. Then that scent mingled with the smells of the Promenade, horseshit and sewage and herbs and perfumes. I heard murmuring voices and dismissed them… but they were not coming from within the House.
I did not notice the change at all, really, until the drawing opened up beneath my hands and I nearly fell into it.
Startled, I yelped and stumbled back. Then I stared. Blinked. Leaned close and stared more.
The cloth on the nearest Row table: it moved. I could not see people—perhaps because I hadn’t drawn any figures—but I could hear the gabble of a crowd in the distance, moving feet, rattling wheels. A breeze blew, tossing a few fallen Tree leaves across the cobbles of the Promenade, and my hair lifted off my neck, just a little.
“Intriguing,” said the Nypri, behind me.
Yelping in shock, I tried to simultaneously jump to my feet and scoot away from the voice. Instead I tripped over the rolled-up rug and went sprawling. While I struggled upright, grabbing for the bed to get my bearings, I realized too late that I had heard him enter, and had dismissed it. He had been standing in the room, watching me, for quite some time.
He came over, taking my hand and helping me to my feet. I snatched my hand away as soon as I could. Beyond him, I realized in dismay, the drawing had not only stopped being real, but also it had faded from view entirely, its magic gone.
“It takes great concentration to wield magic in a controlled fashion,” he said. “Impressive given that you’ve had no training. And you did it with nothing but food and candlewax. Truly amazing. Of course, it means we’ll have to watch you eat from now on, and search your quarters regularly for anything bearing pigment.”
Damn! I clenched my fists before I thought to stop myself. “Why are you here?” I asked. It came out far more belligerent than it should have, but I couldn’t help it. I was too angry over my lost chance.
“I came, ironically enough, to ask you to demonstrate your magical abilities for me. I’m still a scrivener, even if I’ve left the Order. Unique manifestations of inherited magic were my particular field of study.” He sat down in one of the room’s chairs, oblivious to my seething fury. “I should note, however, that if you meant to escape through that portal, your efforts would’ve ultimately been futile. The House of the Risen Sun is surrounded by a barrier that prevents magic from entering or leaving. A variation on my Empty, actually.” He tapped the wooden floor with his foot. “If you had tried passing through it via that portal… Well, I’m not certain what would’ve happened. But you, or your remains, would not have gotten far.”
Broken bowel, voices screaming… I felt ill, and defeated. “It wasn’t big enough to pass through, anyw
ay,” I muttered, slumping onto the bed.
“True. With practice, however—and more paint—no doubt you could pass through these portals.”
That got my attention. “What?”
“Your magic isn’t that different from my own,” he said, and abruptly I recalled the holes he’d used to capture me and Madding and the others. “Both are variants on the scrivening technique that permits instantaneous transport through matter and distance via a gate. Which is itself merely an approximation of the gods’ ability to traverse space and time at will. It seems that your gift expresses itself extraversively, however, while mine is introversive.”
I groaned. “Pretend I haven’t spent my life studying musty old scrolls full of made-up words.”
“Ah. My apologies. Let me try an analogy. Imagine that you hold a lump of gold in your hands. Gold is quite soft in its pure form; you can mold it with your fingers if you exert enough pressure. Then it can become many things: coins, a bracelet, a cup to hold water. Yet gold isn’t useful for every purpose. A sword made of gold would bend easily and be too heavy to wield. For that, a different metal—say, iron—is better.”
A rustle of cloth was my warning before Dateh took my hand. His fingers were dry, thick-skinned, callused at the tips. He turned over my hand, exposing my own calluses from carving wood and clipping linvin saplings, and also the stains from my makeshift paints. I did not pull away, though I wanted to. I did not like the feel of his hand.
“The magic in you is like gold,” he said. “You’ve learned to shape it in one way, but there are others. I imagine you’ll discover them with time and experimentation. The magic in me is more like iron: it can be shaped and used in similar ways, but its fundamental properties and uses are very different. And I, unlike you, have learned many ways to shape it. Now do you understand?”
I did. Dateh’s holes, or portals, or whatever he called them, were like my doorways. He created them at will, perhaps using his own method to invoke them as I used painting. But while his magic opened a dark, cold space devoid of—everything—my magic opened the way to existing spaces… or created new spaces out of nothingness.
While I mulled this, I found myself rubbing my eyes with my free hand. They ached, though not as badly as on the previous occasions I’d used my magic. I supposed I hadn’t overdone it this time.
“And your eyes,” Dateh said. I stopped rubbing them, annoyed. He missed nothing. “That’s even more unique. You saw Serymn’s blood sigil. Can you see other magic?”
I considered lying, but in spite of myself, I was intrigued. “Yes,” I said. “Any magic.”
He seemed to consider this. “Can you see me?”
“No. You don’t have any godwords, or you’re masking them.”
“What?”
I gestured vaguely with my hands, which gave me an excuse to pull away from him. “With most scriveners, I see godwords written on their skin, glowing. I can’t see the skin, but I can see the words, wrapped around their arms and so on.”
“Fascinating. Most scriveners do that, you know, when they’ve mastered a new sigil or word-script. It’s tradition. They write the sigils on their skin to symbolize their comprehension. The ink washes off, but I suppose there’s a magical residue.”
“You don’t see it?”
“No, Lady Oree. Your eyes are quite unique; I have nothing that compares. Although—”
All at once, Dateh became visible to me. I was too distracted by his looks at first to realize the significance of what I saw. I couldn’t help it, because he was not Amn. Or at least not completely, not with hair so straight and limp that it cupped his skull as if painted on. He wore it short, probably because the priests’ fashion of long hair worn in a queue would look ridiculous on him. His skin was paler than Madding’s, but there were other things about him that hinted at a less than pure Amn heritage. He was shorter than me, and his eyes were as dark as polished Darrwood. Those eyes would’ve been more at home among my own people or one of the High North races.
How in all the gods’ names had an Arameri—proudest members of the Amn race and notorious for their scorn of anyone not pure Amn—contrived to marry a non-Amn rebel scrivener?
But as my shock at this realization faded, a more important one finally struck me: I could see him.
Him, that was, and not the markings of his scrivener power. In fact, I saw no godwords on him at all. He was simply visible, all over, like a godling.
But the Lights hated godlings…
“What the hells are you?” I whispered.
“So you can see me,” he said. “I’d wondered. I suppose it works only when I use magic, though.”
“When you…?”
He pointed above us, off toward a corner of the room. I followed his finger, confused, but saw nothing.
Wait. I blinked, squinted, as if that would help. There was something else etched against the dark of my vision. Something small, no bigger than a ten-meri coin, or Serymn’s blood sigil. It hovered, glimmering with an impossible black radiance that shimmered faintly; that was the only way I’d been able to sift it from the darkness that I usually saw. It looked just like—
I swallowed. It was. A tiny, almost-unnoticeable version of the same holes that had attacked us at Madding’s house.
“I can enlarge it at will,” he said when I finally spotted it. “I often use portals at this size for surveillance.”
I understood then why he’d compared me to gold and himself to iron: my magic was prettier, but his made a better weapon.
“You haven’t answered my question,” I said.
“What am I?” He looked amused. “I’m the same as you.”
“No,” I said. “You’re a scrivener. I might have a knack for magic, but lots of people have that—”
“You have far more than a ‘knack’ for magic, Lady Oree. This?” He gestured toward the floor, where my drawing was. “Is something that only a trained, first-rank scrivener of many years’ experience could attempt. And that scrivener would need hours of drawing time and half a dozen fail-safe scripts on hand in case the activation went wrong—neither of which you seem to need.” He smiled thinly. “Neither do I, I should note. I am considered something of a prodigy among scriveners because of it. I imagine you would be, too, if you had been found and trained early.”
My hands clenched into fists on my knees. “What are you?”
“I am a demon,” he said. “And so are you.”
I fell silent, more in confusion than in shock. That would come later.
“Demons aren’t real,” I said at last. “The gods killed them all aeons ago. There’s nothing left but stories to frighten children.”
Dateh patted my hand where it sat on my knee. At first I thought it was a clumsy attempt on his part to comfort me; the gesture felt awkward and forced. Then I realized he didn’t like touching me, either.
“The Order of Itempas punishes unauthorized magic use,” Dateh said. “Have you never wondered why?”
Actually, I had not. I’d thought it was just another way for the Order to control who had power and who didn’t. But I said what the priests had taught me: “It’s a matter of public safety. Most people can use magic, but only scriveners should, because they have the training to keep it safe. Write even one line of a sigil wrong and the ground could open up, lightning could strike, anything might happen.”
“Yes, though that isn’t the only reason. The edict against wild magic actually predates the scrivening art that tamed it.” He was watching me. He was like Shiny, like Serymn; I could feel his gaze. So many strong-willed people around me, all of them dangerous. “The Gods’ War was not the first war among the gods, after all. Long before the Three fought among themselves, they fought their own children—the half-breed ones they’d borne with mortal men and women.”
All of a sudden, inexplicably, I thought of my father. I heard his voice in my ears, saw the gentle wavelets of his song as they rode the air.
Serymn’s voice: ther
e had been rumors about him.
“The demons lost that war,” Dateh said. He spoke softly, for which I was grateful, because all at once I felt unsteady. Chilled, as if the room had grown colder. “It was foolish for them to fight, really, given the gods’ power. Some of the demons no doubt realized this, and hid instead.”
I closed my eyes and inwardly mourned my father all over again.
“Those demons survived,” I said. My voice shook. “That’s what you’re saying. Not many of them. But enough.” My father. His father, too, he’d told me once. And his grandmother, and an uncle, and more. Generations of us in the Maroland, the world’s heart. Hidden among the Bright Lord’s most devout people.
“Yes,” said Dateh. “They survived. And some of them, perhaps to camouflage themselves, hid among mortals with more distant, thinner gods’ blood in their veins—mortals who had to struggle to use magic, borrowing the gods’ language to facilitate even simple tasks. The gods’ legacy is what turned the key in humankind, unlocking the door to magic, but in most mortals that door is barely ajar.
“Yet there are some few among us who are born with more. In those mortals, the door is wide open. We need no sigils, no years of study. Magic is ingrained in our very flesh.” He touched my face just under one eye, and I flinched. “Call us throwbacks, if you will. Like our murdered ancestors, we are the best of mortalkind—and everything our gods fear.”
He dropped his hand onto mine again, and it was not awkward this time. It was possessive.
“You’re never going to let me go, are you?” I said it softly.
He paused for a moment.
“No, Lady Oree,” he said, and I heard him smile. “We aren’t.”
12
“Destruction” (charcoal and blood, sketch)
I HAVE A REQUEST,” I said to the Nypri when he rose to leave. “My friends, Madding and the others. I need to know what you plan to do with them.”
“That isn’t something you need to know, Lady Oree.” Dateh’s tone was gently chiding.