Chapter Thirty
The Culmination of Years of Study
Three days after Aloe left us, Simurgh came down from her balloon and told us that, this evening, he’d be back in Loasht. She also did not yet see any large boats heading down the Lanreas yet, meaning if Aloe did indeed travel by water, he would absolutely pass Dagmar, Echoes, and Silver, and do so in Loasht. Unless they had already failed.
“If they’ve been stopped,” said Kalyna, standing outside Simurgh’s home beneath the slowly deflating marabou balloon, “then at least we may get some kind of revenge on Aloe, yes?”
“I don’t know that this would be worth it for revenge,” I said.
“You may be surprised,” said Simurgh.
I hadn’t quite expected that from her.
“Besides,” said Kalyna, “killing him could help some of those still remaining in Loasht.”
“Or hurt them more,” said Simurgh, before I could. “By putting in his place someone who does not even consider themselves to be doing a kindness.”
“Well, obviously,” agreed Kalyna. “It can always be worse. Those of us able to bend the world around us in any way must simply accept that. We can only do what we can.”
“Forgive me,” I said, “if that doesn’t—”
“Comfort you? It wasn’t intended to.”
“Of course,” I sighed.
There was silence. Birds chirped, and a light breeze fluttered its way through the summer morning. I wondered whether the days were beginning to cool at all in Yekunde yet, such as they ever did.
Simurgh kicked at the dirt. “Well,” she said, “I’m off to the north if I’m going to do my daft part. And see if I can pick out Echoes and the rest.”
“Do you want to take anyone with you?” asked Kalyna. “To help?”
Simurgh shook her head. “No, no. I fly faster alone—due to both weight, and, well, reckless abandon.” She smiled. “On my own, I will do things that would scare a passenger.”
“And if you crash and die?” I asked.
“Radiant, I’ve always expected to go that way. I’d be disappointed if I didn’t. What sort of simurgh would I be, otherwise?”
“Well then,” said Kalyna, putting a hand on her shoulder, “please be as careful as you wish to be.” She favored the Loashti inventor with a smile that was much more reserved than I was used to seeing.
I nodded. “I’ll look for your signal. But, if it takes too long, I’ll have to assume you crashed and move forward anyway.”
“Naturally,” said Simurgh.
Within ten minutes, she was aloft.
I spent about an hour alone in the library with a mirror, practicing moving like Aloe. I did not have to perfectly imitate his expressions: this was broader than that, more concerned with using him as a totem—a symbol. Unfortunately, that meant I had to engage, intellectually, with Aloe’s ideas, which I did not particularly want to do. He had quite purposefully made himself into just such a symbol, so that people would feel correct in following him. Why else was he so attached to, and conscious of, the eye-catching cape that conveyed his power? But to do what was required, I would have to fully look at, and absorb, the awful thing he had become. And the awful person he had clearly always been. No one else, not even Kalyna, with her years of deception, was capable of doing this.
Once I felt I would make no more progress with practicing (though I certainly did not feel ready), I put on a simple robe of deep-blue-dyed linen and went down to the Games Hall, which was empty except for Kalyna.
She smiled weakly at me, and I did my best to respond in kind.
“How are you feeling?” she asked as she handed me a cup of coffee.
“Terrible. Hopeless.”
“Well, know that I have faith in you.” She rubbed my back and led me to a chair in front of a large mirror of hers.
My hair, by then, had grown into what I felt was a quite agreeable halo, but that wasn’t how Aloe wore his hair, and so Kalyna took up a pair of scissors.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I used to always cut my hair, and Papa’s, and even Grandmother’s when she was alive. They were all of differing textures.”
“Texture hardly matters,” I sighed. “Just as short as possible.” I sipped my coffee. It tasted wonderful.
“I know. I saw him. And the texture does still matter.”
Large black and gray clouds of hair fell to the floor of the library, and the face in the mirror became more . . . spare. It was as though the hair had given it definition, or character, and now I had no way to hide or distract—there was only my aging face with its fading beauty. Ifeanyas wore his hair similarly, but his face was almost cherubic and full of energy. Yalwas was bald, but he radiated a hearty power—or at least he had before they began leeching him with rubber tubes. I sat and stared at this unadorned version of myself.
Until, of course, Kalyna adorned me. In a way.
Aloe and I were of similar skin tone, and Kalyna had combined some of the makeup Echoes left behind to match my hue, which she used to cover the tattoos on my face. Then she took black kohl and used it to make my face into a sort of grotesque of our target. First with arched eyebrows that would read to the cheap seats as an angry man; and then shadows just under my face, to approximate the jawline I did not have anymore, but Aloe still did (for some unfair reason). Finally, she added his tattoos: three slim, squiggly lines beneath each eye, and then muddled them a bit with the dark brown that covered my own, so that they would look faded. This also served to hide my high cheekbones, a feature I was proud of that he did not share.
“That’s very good, for having seen him twice,” I murmured.
“I’m observant. Now drink that coffee carefully. I don’t want you to muss it.”
“Of course. But I’ll need much more coffee, and—”
“It’s got everything mixed in, yes.”
“Good.”
“Your heart may simply burst out of your chest during this,” she said, not unkindly. She ran a hand over my short hair to inspect her work; it was a nice feeling.
“That is one of many dangers I’m facing today, yes.” Another sip. “I told you I’d be risking my life.”
“I suppose I’m just now seeing how that may happen.” She clasped my shoulder, looking me over in the mirror, her head above mine. “And I suppose I’m worried about you.”
I shrugged and carefully finished my coffee. She took the mug and disappeared into the back.
I spent at least an hour simply staring at myself, as Kalyna brought me more and more coffee. A few times, she did have to redo parts of the makeup, as my hands had begun to shake quite intensely, but she didn’t chastise me for it. At this point, I needed silence. When the shaking began to slow, Kalyna silently put a hand on my back and left. She needed to make sure all of our collaborators—my assistants—were ready.
I sat alone in the Games Hall, staring in that mirror, allowing myself to feel my pulse rise, my mouth become numb, my hands turn leaden, my body heat up immensely.
In that coffee there had been many, many other substances, which were all now bouncing through my veins. I won’t list every one here, because, again, I don’t wish for what I did that day to be reproduced, but there was: some bhang, for an expansive mind; a few ground roots that added dirt-like smells beyond even that of coffee, to bring me back down from wherever I would be lifted; a sprinkling of purely ceremonial substances, as far as the Academy was concerned.
Of these last, I will say that many were from growths, or animals, associated with very specific gods—both from within and without Loasht’s Eighty-Three. There were also tree onion and elderberries, just in case my Fortresses might really protect me as they did our plants. I don’t know whether any of these ceremonial substances affected my body, or if only the knowledge that they were swirling within me did. (And “swirling” is the right word—I felt very sick to my stomach, to a degree easily beyond the mixture of fear, excitement, and coffee.)
Once my breathing and my extremities had slowed to, well, almost normal, and the speed of my heartbeat began to seem as though it, too, was normal, I felt a rarer sensation: I felt as though what coffee, tea, khat, and so forth do to one’s body, blood, and mind was happening only in my mind, but a thousand times over. Behind my eyes, you could say.
I had some truly excruciating moments, in which I became convinced that, in such a state, I would forget all the steps of what I had to do. But then, in an eternity or in another moment, I would realize that I didn’t know how to do anything else.
Eventually, some sad, backward little representation of the barbarous Tetrarchia came into the hall and spoke to me in her doggerel language. She was like all the worst things about our childish neighbors rolled into one. Then the pitiable thing repeated herself, in a laughable approximation of our own tongue.
“Radiant!” snapped Kalyna. “Are you ready?”
I looked up at her with the utmost disdain. Then I understood what my mind—with its many substances—was doing. I softened my expression.
“I’m sorry,” I said in Loashti Bureaucratic. Even knowing full well what was happening, and who I really was, I could not bring myself to speak Skydašiavos. The very thought gave me a new wave of nausea.
“Sorry for what?”
“For thinking unkindly of you.”
She snorted. “Silly thing to start apologizing for now. Your thoughts don’t hurt me.”
“Well, they hurt me.”
Understanding, at least to the extent that she was capable, came into her face.
“Ah, I see. He’s really in you now, isn’t he?”
“Very much so.”
“Good. That’s the idea.” She beckoned me with a broad motion. “Come on. Simurgh must have made it partway at least, because she’s done it. Even from here, through a telescope, it’s awful to behold.” Kalyna was not being glib. She looked quite genuinely disturbed by what she’d seen.
I nodded, stood, fell back into my chair, and stood again.
“Can you walk on your own?” she asked, offering her arm.
“I’ll have to. I certainly can’t show any weakness now.”
“If you say so. But I can ask them to go easy—”
“Don’t you dare,” I growled. Was this someone else’s tone, or my idea of someone else’s tone? Or was this who I really was?
I decided it didn’t matter. I had something to do and, on top of that, something quite oppositional to myself to do. I focused on the dirt flavor that still clung to the edges of my mouth, letting it cut through the fog and remind me where I was.
“Let’s go before I lose my nerve,” I said, even though I don’t think I had ever had more nerve in my life.
She nodded. “I know you can do this, Radiant,” she said, with what I took to be quiet awe.
She swept my cape onto my shoulders and then gave me one last pat on the back. (Why did she dare touch me?)
“Your thralls await you,” she said.
At first glance, the Lanreas River Guild looked normal enough, if empty. As I strode through it, uphill toward the Estate, that emptiness became more acute. Sometimes people looked at me from their windows, but when I turned to them, they disappeared. Quite a few of the buildings were empty, as I well knew.
I remembered when, early in our time here, Kalyna had wondered if these strangely cheery people got up to human sacrifice. This, now, felt like how the place would have been if such were the case. And, in a way, we were doing exactly that.
Kalyna and I passed the crumbling old Estate and continued north. She fell easily into step behind me, like my inferior, and this felt natural. My cape was pleasantly heavy on my shoulders, even in the summer heat. Comforting. Sometimes, I looked down at my sides and saw brocade catch the light of the setting sun with gold, green, red, and blue. I radiated power.
The clearing where Simurgh’s marabou balloon normally sat looked like an entirely different place—another country, perhaps. There were some fifty people waiting for me, standing in carefully regimented rows and wearing undyed linen cut to resemble Loashti army uniforms. They held sticks and farm implements like they were long guns. I’m sure, to an outsider, it would have looked like a pale imitation, but what mattered was how real it felt to us. Mostly, to me.
The crowd greeted me by saying my name in Loashti Bureaucratic: Aloe Pricks a Mare upon the Mountain Bluff. Some of them pronounced it clumsily, as though they hadn’t been speaking the language their whole lives, but I forgave them. (Or rather, Radiant Basket of Rainbow Shells did.)
The Tetrarchic amalgamate woman behind me said something, and my soldiers—my people, my siblings-in-arms—parted for me. In the center of the clearing was a fire pit. My soldiers must have dug it for our upcoming evening camping here, right over the border, back in our home at last. Here they would light an alchemical fire meant to keep away pests, and perhaps much worse things.
I moved to the pit and looked up into the northern sky. I gasped, and my soldiers all looked too, beginning to cry out in fear. The sky to the north was red and black: it was on fire.
Moments later, the same was true of the sky above us. It was mystifying and portentous. That this should happen now, when we had just returned home, was ominous. Our home was meant to welcome us back; the world was meant to bend around us. My loyal followers began to cry out in fear. In great, big (perhaps exaggerated) fear. Some cried out about the wrath of the gods, others simply moaned wordlessly.
A flame went up in the fire pit, but it would not dispel the clogged and bleeding sky, nor the terrible, unseen things that seemed to twist their way effortlessly through those red clouds. I called for calm, but my followers only grew more senseless in their fear.
Something was thrown into the fire, and it flared up higher for a moment. Soon enough it, too, was leaking red and black smoke, through which my panicking followers ebbed, reappeared, ran, and fell.
Then something else was in the smoke, a sharp smell, and for the moment, I was Radiant. Radiant Basket of Rainbow Shells.
In the north, I knew, Simurgh in her balloon had filled the sky with red smoke, for both its terrifying and its obscuring properties. We could only hope that Echoes, wherever she was, if she was alive, had seen this and answered in kind, but there was no way for us to know.
I also knew that once I had been greeted by my followers, Ifeanyas and Vidmantas had lit yet more of the dolphin blubber mixture up in the Estate’s library, fanning it through the broken opening at the top of the tower. This red sky now covered much of the Guild’s lands, especially here at the northern end. Now I saw the world quite similarly to how I hoped the other I was seeing it.
But for a short time, I was Radiant again, and Radiant had things to do.
“Keep screaming! Keep capering!” came Kalyna’s voice from somewhere in the darkness, first in Skydašiavos, then in Loashti Bureaucratic. “There will be time to rest later. Scream! Run! Fall!”
First, I circled the fire, spitting on the ground as a sort of ward to, perhaps, protect me from some of the danger I was going to bring on myself. This piece of the ritual I’d concocted was Masovskan, and Kalyna had spent a good hour making sure I pronounced the invocation perfectly, with all four syllables crammed into one in the split second between each spit. “Find a rhythm to it,” she’d said. “That’s how Masovskans do it.”
Next, I did a sort of capering dance, kicking up dirt and mixing the places where I’d spat into mud. This bit was Zobiski, but had never been part of a curse. It was a plea for good fortune and a show of thanks for the privilege of still being alive at this point in time. By using it toward such a harmful purpose, I was perverting it, but it nonetheless came easily.
I shut my eyes and pronounced a string of chants in twelve different languages: four Loashti, the four official Tetrarchic, two suppressed Tetrarchic, and even two from the Bandit States. More than a few of those languages were barely spoken anymore, yet Kalyna still walked me through some of the pronunciation. No, I will not tell you which languages they were, nor what exactly I was saying. Besides, by then, despite knowing who I was, my mind was traveling so far, buzzing and shaking and babbling with such force, that I did not even know what I was doing. I only knew that I was enacting what I had practiced.
The scale on which we were enacting our imitation was, itself, Skydašian. Long ago—as had been depicted in The Miraculous Adventure of Aigerim—there had been sorcerers who owned fiefdoms and fortresses, forcing their people into carrying out massive spells. It had begun in the South Shore, moved to the North Shore, and eventually came to be falsely attributed to Loasht.
There were other pieces of scattered magics from throughout the known world that I synthesized to create this amalgamation of a curse, but I will tell you only two more.
One was a very old Quru ritual meant to protect mountain towns and encampments from striped bears. It had only ever been used defensively, and required people wearing bear skins to act as the bears themselves, running away from the place that was being protected. More on that in a moment.
When everything was in place—the herbs burned, the pleas muttered, and Kalyna doing her part to keep the Guild members on task—I began the last piece.
This was Rotfelsenisch, but old Rotfelsenisch that I had found at the Academy more than a decade ago, preserved as proof of our neighbors’ barbarity. I didn’t have the Commonplace Book volume where I’d written it down, but it had remained in my head with no effort.
“I’ve never heard of that,” Kalyna had told me.
I had to, essentially, strangle myself as far as was possible.
“But,” she had continued, “it sounds like them.”
I took a deep breath. I stared at the fire. I heard the screams around me grow in frenzied intensity, arcing in and out of the blood red fog. I picked up a silk scarf, which was tied in a loop to a thick piece of wood. I put the loop around my neck. I waited.
Eighty-Three, I couldn’t do it. I thought of Silver, of their family, my people, my hatred for Aloe, but I couldn’t bring myself to begin twisting the stick, tightening the silk. It was cool and smooth against me. It reminded me of life, of why one should remain on the ground as long as possible, rather than rushing toward—
“Kalyna!” I wailed. “Kalyna, I can’t—!”
“I worried this would happen.” She was already behind me. She had been ready.
Knowing the importance of this part of the ritual, Kalyna immediately began tightening the silk garrote.
“How long?” she gasped. Even she sounded panicked now.
“Until I fall.”
Remembering pain is a tricky business, or at least it is for me. I don’t really recall what I felt or thought or did as Kalyna Aljosanovna strangled me, other than that I almost fell on purpose many times, just to make it stop.
But when I was truly unable to stand, she immediately untwisted the silk and let me drop. I don’t know if she helped me to the ground, said anything to me, spared me a look, or simply left. How could I? I wasn’t there.
I was up on a bluff in southern Loasht, in view of the border—or such would have been my view, if not for the smoke surrounding me and my soldiers. Now those red-blooded and strapping Loashti fighters were panicking and shooting at nothing. Certainly it was frightening, but I didn’t understand what had possessed them to entirely lose their composure this way. Or, for that matter, why I had so suddenly collapsed, unable to breathe. But now, on the ground, I was able to regain my breath.
(Was I hallucinating what I wanted to happen, or had I traveled in some way to embody Aloe? Whatever the case, I felt removed from all I saw and heard, while also absolutely in the center of it.)
I cried out to my people to contain themselves, but to no avail.
(“Now! Now! Go!” cried a voice that sounded like it was beneath an ocean of swamp: miles and miles of mud choking it out.)
Screams of terror turned into something else, but I did not understand why. Then Hail, one of my soldiers, ran past me, with a great gash in her head. There was something out there worse than smoke. Something solid was moving through those red clouds now.
The face of Elderflower, one of my first followers, whom I had known for years, emerged. He screamed for me to run.
I made it to my feet and moved toward him, but he motioned that I go the other way. Something appeared over him. Scales, glinting red in that morass. Teeth. Dark, dead eyes.
Then Elderflower’s face was gone. His body, still pointing in the direction he wanted me to run, flopped to the ground.
When the crocodile emerged more fully into view, I became sick with sorrow and shock. The great thing walked on two legs, in a mockery of humanity. Such upright monsters weren’t supposed to be so near the border; they all lived farther north, around Yekunde. This one must have traveled south for days, and by mistake, just to appear now as a phantom of my home. It made no sense.
What’s more, it didn’t stop to devour its kill—my poor Elderflower—but instead continued toward me.
I had never seen one so close before. Its stooped gait, its arms, used for balance but with claws—I was struck with the wrongness of it. Standing upright, sort of. Lumbering. A piece of Elderflower’s cheek dangling from its jaw. Not going back for its meal but coming for me.
It almost made me believe the old stories that my ancestors had told, about the Zobiski somehow being these things, or descended from them. As though the very embodiment of their atavistic nature was coming for me, to punish me for trying to cleanse them of it. But this wasn’t possible.
I pissed myself as I began to run from the thing. It was only a freak occurrence that it was here. Happenstance.
“Crocodile!” cried someone to my left, as the thing loped after me.
“Crocodile!” someone else screamed from my right, as I kept running.
Directly in front of me was the sound of rending flesh and screams. But the beast was behind me, and I couldn’t stop. I ran forward, until I hit something and fell back. Something hard. Not just another crocodile, but another upright one.
“Impossible,” I murmured to no one.
(I exulted when I found myself saying this.)
More came out of the red fog. More and more. More upright crocodiles than I had ever heard of being seen in one place, all killing at once. At least twenty, but it was so hard to count.
Some of my followers were still alive out there. I could hear them screaming as they ran away, moaning for help as they bled out. Why these predators had not finished them off and begun to dine, I could not understand.
Even stranger, these two-legged crocodiles—these unnatural, ancient, human-like, provincial mistakes—all just . . . stopped. They stood over me, around me, regarding me with their glassy eyes, housed in great big heads that would have made more sense upon their four-legged siblings. Were their teeth red from the reflection, or my people’s blood? Why didn’t they feed? What were they looking at? What in the world could they have been waiting for?
(“Go! Do it!” shouted a familiar voice. “It’s Aloe! Don’t hold back!”)
I didn’t see the first one; it was behind me. I felt only incredible pain: tearing or beating. Then there were great, scaly bodies slamming themselves upon me, and they began tearing off pieces. But not my head—nothing so quick. It was almost as though these dumb creatures, that only knew hunting and eating, wanted to hurt me as much as possible.
The pain was excruciating. The fear was absolute. But the most overpowering thing in that moment was my utter confusion.
(And then, as I felt all of Aloe’s pain—or felt the pain I imagined he was feeling, in my own hindered and expanded state—I, Radiant Basket of Rainbow Shells, realized something. For days, an element of this plan had bothered me. Not the morality of killing Aloe, which was justified. Not the very real pain and possible death that I would suffer, which I had resigned myself to. But something I wasn’t sure of.)
(As I watched, felt, and experienced Aloe’s possibly dreamed dismemberment, I wondered if my reservation had been the painful nature of the death I’d planned for him. The cruelty of it.)
(But no. No, it wasn’t that. It was something uglier, something that may have always been in me, or that may have come from Kalyna’s influence. What bothered me was Aloe’s confusion. The fact that he didn’t understand why this was happening.)
One of the beasts, instead of biting me, was using its claws to gouge out one of my eyes. I screamed. Why? Why was this happening? I had achieved greatness, but had so much more left to do! And now I was here, bleeding from where my limbs had been, beset by senseless creatures. Crocodiles more interested in causing pain than in eating. Why were the gods doing this to me?
As I began to mercifully fade from life, my mouth started moving of its own accord. Not to scream—I had been doing plenty of that already—but forming around words. Words that were not in my head.
“Not the gods,” I said hoarsely to myself. “Radiant is doing this to you.”
Impossible. Radiant was my—
“I was never your friend.”
I didn’t understand how it had happened, or why, but the last thing I thought, as the crocodiles finally moved to rend my body down the middle, was a deep sadness. Betrayal. Realization. Helplessness.
(“That’s enough! Enough! Stop!”)