“All from your master?” she asked.
“There was a man whose children were taken by the hollow people. He commissioned my fourth mark.”
“Did you take away his grief?”
“I slaked his anger, allowing him to grieve.”
“And how many patients have you treated who did not commission a mark for you?” she asked.
My ears burned a bit with that question. I’d started my apprenticeship at an age when most finished theirs. She assumed I was unmarked because I was incompetent, not because I was inexperienced. “He’s the only patient I’ve treated, so far.”
“Your master does not give you patients?”
“You are my tenth consultation. Most people I visit don’t require my services.”
“That stops you from providing them?” she asked, surprise plain on her features. “Interesting.”
My impertinence balanced by hers, I repeated my question. “Why wake Dhalig Mora?”
“Do you think I can make you understand by explaining?” she asked.
“Perhaps,” I said.
“Then tell me: what are the ingredients for despair?”
The bedside patter about the three basic emotions is true, but it’s a truth we Sentimancers use to lie. You can, ultimately, break anything down to a combination of those three, but there’s an alchemy to it, a series of subcombinations, of stopping points. Fear and hunger mixed in the right portions give you anger. Suffuse it with a hint of pleasure and it becomes rage. Layer it with another combination of hunger and fear and the rage becomes wrath. That’s why a Sentimancer’s case is full of so many vials. It could take days to generate some of the complex emotions we want if we start from the base elements.
I’d never been asked to explain that before, and continued my display of top-notch professional competence by fumbling as I tried to find a simple way to answer her question.
“I thought so,” she said.
“It’s very complex. Explaining it to a lay person …”
“When you understand despair, understand it truly, I will answer your question. I promise you that.”
I could have told her about Kjolla, shown her that I might not know how to induce despair, but I knew the flavor of it all too well. Kjolla. Dead in a raspberry patch. Smiling. My fault.
I deflected instead. “I still have two years in my apprenticeship. What happens if you are executed before my master discloses the ingredients to me?”
“I make no promises I cannot keep.” There was a smile in her voice, though none touched her features. It made the corridor seem marginally less horrifying. “You have somewhere else you want to be. Better go before you miss your chance.”
The straps on my case were cutting into my shoulders. I nodded to her, pulled my sleeves back down to cover my wrists again, then trotted up the corridor, eager to put as much distance between the prison and me as possible.
I caught the tram, meaning to go to the barrows, but her question kept echoing in my head. What are the ingredients for despair? I knew the balances for countermanding it, but not the formulas for inducing it. As the tram clacked along the streets I mentally reviewed the inventory of my case, trying to pull out the subcomponents I would need, but none suggested themselves.
A good Sentimancer can work in both directions, starting from the basic elements of feeling to build up to the more complex ones, or breaking down a complex feeling into its component parts. I couldn’t fathom the foundation of despair, so I changed directions and tried breaking it down. Inevitably, my mind wandered to Kjolla, to the flash of teeth behind his smile as he ran off, the misshapen, bloodied lump of flesh we found days later. Raspberries.
I missed the stop for the barrows. Instead, I got off at Market Street and went home to Master Nubeshai’s.
I suspect everyone else living in Bubble spent the afternoon watching the preliminaries of the trial. They saw Prosecutor Mhed’s opening statement as it was uttered for the very first time. “No motive, no excuse, no explanation could possibly justify the rash, selfish act of approaching Dhalig Mora with the intention of waking him. It is not just a matter of self-preservation that we keep the Moras asleep and apart; it is our sacred duty to our fellow beings, the world that nurtures us, and all that we hold precious.” Before that trial, most people hadn’t thought about Dhalig Mora in his filled pit or Vasik Mora in her stony keep since they were children listening to bedtime stories. After it, everyone was fired with a romantic passion to ensure that the sundered lovers were kept apart eternally, that we preserved the Sleeping Bubble that gave us all life.
Not me. I buried myself in my workshop, remixing each of my concoctions, relabeling them with a meticulous care Master Nubeshai would have to praise. It was well after midnight before he came to check on me.
“Everybody else slipped out to watch your patient on the broadcast,” Master Nubeshai said. “They’re just now trickling back.”
“She’s not my patient. She refused service,” I said as I sealed a vial of ennui.
“She requested a second consultation, before the sentencing.”
That didn’t make any sense to me. She’d been so calm, and a little derisive about sentimancy. Why would she ask for me back? I tried to deduce an answer on my own—Master Nubeshai would not answer stupid questions—but came up with nothing.
“Was she so disturbing?” he asked after I’d been silent too long.
“I’ve no recipe for despair,” I said as I wrote out the label for ennui. “I can’t even pick apart its components.”
“You know the process for balancing it, for countering it out of a patient’s system.”
“Yes, but I can’t figure out how to induce it.”
“Despair should never be induced. That is far outside the appropriate range of a Sentimancer’s work.”
“Grief was the first recipe you taught me.”
Master Nubeshai pulled a stool over to me, its feet groaning across the slate floor of the workshop much too loudly. Then he perched on it, a tiny little man with thick clumps of white hair bunching in and around his ears. “Sometimes, people need to feel grief. They experience tragedy, but do not react to it as they think they should. The disparity can wound them far more thoroughly than the tragedy that sparked it. We give them protection from that.”
It was a basic tenet of sentimancy, the first lesson taught to apprentices: there’s no such thing as a bad emotion. People feel, and need to feel. It’s our job to free them from the limitations or short circuits in their bodies that can miss one step or get stuck on another. And if Master Nubeshai was repeating that lesson to me, an apprentice of three years, it was because he was telling me something else entirely. I took a moment to turn it over in my head.
It’s true that there are only three basic emotions, but we tell people that to lie to them, masking the complex with the illusion of simplicity. “Despair is a bad emotion.”
“It is a dangerous one,” Master Nubeshai said, “with no redeeming virtues. It damages, but does not teach. It’s a counterpoint to calm, a balance demanding nothing, requiring nothing to maintain it, and crippling its victim until time wears out the chemistry fueling it.”
“Or a Sentimancer intervenes,” I said, thinking again of Kjolla. Of what was left of him. Of the police dragging me away from the morgue, and of a spry little old man with white tufts of hair jutting from his ears as he spoke quietly and stuck me with needles.
“You know despair, Georg. You remember its taste. That is enough for you to do a Sentimancer’s duty. You do not need a recipe.”
He squeezed my shoulder, then rose from the stool. But that wasn’t enough; it couldn’t be. If she wanted me back, then either something had changed in the hours since she’d refused my services, or she expected that something would have changed by the time of our next consultation.
I pictured her n
arrow, jagged features, the true-calm suffusing them, the rich beauty of her voice. The change hadn’t come from her, wouldn’t come from her. She expected something more from me.
“Did you watch the trial opening?” I asked.
“I could tell she’d refused treatment. She was calm,” Master Nubeshai said.
“I can induce calm.”
“Yes, but it was the wrong choice. They could forgive her for madness. They’ll execute her for calm.”
“What would you have given her?” I asked his retreating form.
“Fear,” Mater Nubeshai said. “She needed pure fear.”
That’s what I’d thought, too.
That night I dreamed of Kjolla. His laughter echoed through the corridors of my sleep while phantoms of his small hands clutched my own, or held my shoulders, wrapped me about the waist in an embrace. All through the dreams I could feel the hollow people lurking in the shadows, waiting for my lapse, yearning to take him from me. I woke with the scent of raspberries and blood, both smells permanently mingled with my memories of Kjolla, though not both at once.
Predictable, Georg. You’re so predictable.
Without turning on a light—there was no reason to tell the entire hall I was having nightmares—I went to my case, pressed the button on the side, and waited for it to unfold. I pulled a sampling capsule from a drawer on the side, pressed the needle to the pad of my finger, then fell back onto my bed while I waited for the results. Then I played beat-the-machine.
What are you feeling, Georg? Grief, obviously. Revulsion. Horror. Loneliness. There was a hint of rage under it. Weariness, too. Three years later, I was tired of mourning Kjolla, tired of running into reminders that set me brooding and sent me nightmares. Tired of wondering whether I’d really begun to heal, or Master Nubeshai had only sentimanced me into a too-old apprentice prone to brooding fits. What do these components make? What will the machine say?
Regret, of course. Raw and disjointed, but in the final reckoning, regret. I held the capsule up to catch streetlight through the window and read the display. It agreed.
Is regret the end state of despair? Sundered Moras, I hope so.
I couldn’t go back to my patient with nothing more than I’d had before. She might or might not expect something new of me, but I would expect more of me. She was guilty and she was going to be executed, but I would not stand outside her prison cell unable to protect her from the inevitability of her fate. She might smile. Or smell of raspberries.
Master Nubeshai wouldn’t give me the recipe for despair. He might not even have it, though I doubted that. But one thing any Sentimancer must learn before being sent to patients is that people do not always ask a question to get its answer. Sometimes, the question hides something else, a clue to their internal state, to the thoughts triggering it. The woman who’d tried to end the world asked me for the one recipe I would never have. I needed to know why she would do that.
Most of the reporting done during the night of the trial was biographical sketches of Prosecutor Mhed, and there were hundreds of those. I dug deeper, back weeks to when the first arrest was made. None of the articles gave any details—they didn’t even give her name—but there was one clue. “Woman from Bernin caught breaking into Vedhalig Moreeum.” “From Bernin” could mean she was born there, that she lived there, or only that Bernin was where she’d rented the car she took to Vedhalig Moreeum, Dahlig Mora’s filled pit. Hopefully the article had been published before they found her gong, before they realized she’d been there not as a stupid prank or deranged stunt, but because she meant to end the world. Before she had become an official nonentity. Hopefully it didn’t have her name because it was too soon to know it, not because we’d already decided she no longer had one.
I was in the pantry, gathering provisions for my trip, when Master Nubeshai found me. “Beginning your journeyman trek?” he asked.
I laughed. An apprentice could leave for their journeyman trek whenever they liked, but they’d receive no more training from their master. I was not about to walk out with two years of my apprenticeship left. “No. Just research for my patient.”
“Going to Bernin?”
I turned to face the shriveled old man. His sleeping tunic was sleeveless. Even wasted with age, the intricate tattooing running from wrists to shoulders was impressive—black dots filled with bright colors in ever smaller, more detailed patterns. Would my arms ever bear a mosaic like that, a tapestry recording patients pleased enough with my work to commission a mark? “How did you know?” I asked.
“You are diligent, Georg. It’s what I would do.”
The compliment stunned me. And then, I wondered whether he’d actually meant it as a compliment.
“Leave your case,” Master Nubeshai said.
“I could be gone for several days,” I protested.
“An apprentice leaves the hall with his case for his journeyman trek, not before.”
The smell of Kjolla’s raspberries, of his blood, was still so strong with me that I could taste it. I couldn’t be separated from my case for days.
“You won’t need it. Trust me, Georg. Trust yourself.”
I nodded my agreement, slung the satchel of food I’d gathered over my shoulder, then stooped to heave my case off the floor. “I’ll take this back to my room, then go.” I could tuck a few vials into my satchel. After all, I didn’t need the whole case.
Then Master Nubeshai’s hand was on my elbow, his muscles flexing under his tattooed skin as he took the case from me. “Borrow one of the hall’s vehicles. I’ll take your case.”
Shame raced ahead of my fear. Predictable, and transparent. And about to follow a nightmare with nothing but my own chemistry to defend me. I stared at the patterns worked into the black ink of Master Nubeshai’s arms. He knew what he was doing. “Thank you,” I said. I let him take the case, and then I went out to the garage where the hall’s vehicles were stored.
The sky swirled purple and rose above me as I drove, the skin of the Sleeping Bubble starting to glow with daylight. I went as quickly as I dared to Bernin, but still hadn’t reached it when the glowing subsided and night fell. After sleeping so little the night before, I was exhausted, so I pulled off the road, threw down a sleeping bag, and called that camp. Five minutes later, I was fast asleep.
The black night sky shimmered faintly overhead when I woke to the scent of ozone and freshly turned earth. I froze instantly, too frightened to analyze my panic. My fingers clenched at my sides. My lungs burned, and it took me a moment to realize it was because I’d stopped breathing.
I was surrounded by the hollow people.
I didn’t wet myself, and only a few tears slid from my eyes as I forced myself to sit up. There were eight of them, their charcoal gray skin reflecting the shimmer from the sky, their green eyes glowing. They were crouched low to the ground, hunched over their long limbs as they stared at me.
“It’ll be fine, Georg.”
At the sound of Kjolla’s voice, I turned. The one who’d spoken was a female. She was sitting up straighter than her companions, her glowing eyes with their slits of pupils making my skin crawl with every breath she drew.
“Don’t … don’t do that,” I said.
“You worry too much, Georg,” she said, still using Kjolla’s voice.
“Just kill me and get it over with,” I said, even as I pictured what they’d leave of my body for Master Nubeshai to claim. “Don’t torture me first.”
She cocked her head, the strands of wispy black hair she hadn’t cropped into short spikes catching in a light breeze. Then she tasted the air, her black tongue darting out in short, quick stabs. I could just barely hear the low rumble that rolled from her throat. I blinked and they were gone.
“Sundered Moras,” I cursed as I twisted around, looking for a monster from the night sneaking up with long fingers and a rock for my skull.
Nothing. I bolted for the vehicle, locked the doors, then doubled over and wept. Some of it was relief. More of it was fear. And emptiness. No case, no vials to help me balance it, just aching, agonizing emptiness.
Kjolla.
He wasn’t my son or my brother. As far as I know, we didn’t share blood at all. But his mother took me in when my parents died during the Vasik rupture. I was twelve then, and sixteen when she died of the gasping sickness. Kjolla was just eight, and neither of us had anybody else. But I could find enough work to keep him in school and a roof over our heads, and that’s what I did. The neighbors helped where they could. Everybody loved Kjolla. It was his smile.
The smile was still there, at the end.
When the sky glowed with dawn I was more exhausted than when I’d stopped. I darted outside long enough to retrieve my sleeping bag and to check the depressions where the hollow people had knelt and confirm it hadn’t been a dream. There were no signs of a nest; they’d stumbled on me.
Bernin was only a few hours away. I was there by breakfast time and went straight to the shop where my patient had rented her vehicle. It was closed, so I sat down outside the door and fell asleep. I woke when the shopkeeper, a middle-aged man with a limp, swatted me with his cane.
“My doorway ain’t a hostel,” he said.
“I didn’t spend the night,” I replied. “I was just waiting for you to open.”
“Well, I’m open now,” he said, unlocking the door. I followed him in. It wasn’t clear to me how he conducted any business inside the shop. Every horizontal surface save a creaking swivel chair behind the desk was covered in boxes and stacks of papers. The sheer height and instability of it all nearly left me claustrophobic. “Breakdown, robbery, or bad planning?” the man asked.
It took me a moment to figure out what he was talking about. “I’m not here to rent,” I said when I processed it.