If you performed sothaín correctly, your movements were liquid, limpid, graceful. You held each attitude for countless minutes, minding your breath, paying attention to everything, thinking purposefully about nothing.
Then, once you had achieved perfect stillness and were at one with the attitude you struck, you were supposed to flow from that attitude into the next, with ‘the slowness of a pearl that sinks through oil.’ (Or so Lanie’s battered old manual on the ancient Quadoni practice instructed. As the text was written entirely in Quadic, she wasn’t sure if she had translated the metaphor correctly, but there were plenty of pictures, so she kept trying to puzzle her way through.)
If you transitioned attitudes every five minutes, you could get through a set of twelve in an hour. There were twelve sets of twelve, which meant that it would take you half the day to move through all the attitudes, if you did them properly. Some of the great Quadoni practitioners spent their waking hours doing nothing but holding sothaín. They then presumably spent the next twelve hours sleeping it off.
Since discovering the slender manual in Stones Library three years back, stuffed on a shelf between two moldering tomes5, Lanie had been practicing the first set of sothaín attitudes with Goody. Goody, of course, was a natural—or rather, a supernatural—at stillness, being both undead and formerly Quadoni. Other than her company, the only contribution to Lanie’s sothaín studies Goody would give Lanie was this:
Where is breath?
In the stillness.
What is stillness?
Sothaín.
Goody, of course, didn’t have any breath to speak of at the bottom of her stillness. And Lanie could never get her own breath quite right. Something always twitched or ached or fell asleep whenever she was holding an attitude. At least nowadays her limbs no longer shook like tree branches in a cyclone after only thirty seconds of posturing.
But despite its challenges, Lanie loved sothaín. She found she could set its silence against Grandpa Rad’s dry lecturing, his never-ending criticism that drove the relentless pace of her studies but was never satisfied. The internal silence of sothaín, like the busily humming quiet of the garden, was also different from any of Goody’s one thousand expressive silences, and brought Lanie rare contentment in a house where she could never satisfy anyone, least of all herself.
So why, she wondered, have I never thought to practice sothaín in my garden?
Mak, it seemed, had gone right to it. He was holding an attitude Lanie had not mastered yet, from the fifth set.
Each set of twelve attitudes was dedicated to one of the gods, and the fifth set went to Kywit, the captured god. It was a series of angular and twisted attitudes, suggestive of torture. You could not, just by studying the illustrations in the manual, intuit the narrative they were supposed to represent. But watching Mak move with agonizing slowness from one attitude to the next, Lanie finally understood how sothaín might be used, not merely as a practice to clear the mind or access hidden reserves of strength, but to express the profoundest depths of lament. The twelve attitudes of the fifth set went:
Mak was just transforming from a dirty sack of sad, forgotten bones into a sturdy sapling whose branching arms were lifted beseechingly to the sky, when Lanie cleared her throat.
“Gyrgardi,” she said in her faltering Quadic. “Greetings. Um.”
Almost too slowly to see, Mak pulled himself out of sothaín. His expression, which was that of a young god born out of misery and into enduring agony, did not change. He looked at Lanie, his green eyes as clear as sap.
Lanie tried to marshal the correct vocabulary. She was still unsure of all her tenses, knew herself to be mediocre at the rhyme and meter that were as important to a Quadic sentence as its content. But she had to try. She’d promised Goody.
“My…” What was the word for sister again? Oh, well. “My father’s daughter…” Lanie peered intently at Mak through her spectacles, eyebrows raised. Did he nod? Either that, or his jaw clenched involuntarily. “My father’s daughter hath—”
Divided? Denuded?
“—devised a scheme. Tonight, on Feasting Fight… no, on Fire Feast…” Lanie cleared her throat, tried again. “Tonight, by surge and will, she’ll make thee to forget. By fascination’s force, thou shalt forget.”
Lanie scrabbled through the flowers and thorns of his language for a word that meant ‘everything.’ She knew ‘all.’ But ‘all’ in Quadic meant the whole world and all the worlds beyond it. It didn’t mean what she meant, which was ‘all the things that make you you.’ What she wanted was the Quadic word for ‘substance.’ For the soul.
Spreading her hands, she tried again. “Forget… thyself.”
Mak’s sharp face was like shards of glass. His green gaze pierced her. He asked slowly, “Lahnessthanessar?”
Old Quadic again. Ritual talk. The name of some spell, perhaps? Lanie thought she had encountered ‘Lahnessthanessar’ before—which book? which passage? where?—but seemed to remember it having something to do with music, not magic. Music. Was that right?
Lanie couldn’t be sure. She wasn’t sure of anything. Trying to communicate, in Quadic, to a hostile Quadoni, was shredding her confidence to cheesecloth. She was leaking vocabulary faster than she could talk—forget internal rhymes, least of all end ones! Shaking her head, squaring her shoulders, taking a deep breath, she tried again.
“She’ll see that thou’lt obliterate Quadiíb. Forget thy home, thy name, thy friends…” She gulped and said a word out of rhythm: “Gelethai.”
The murdered gyrlady’s name gave her tongue the taste of profanity. Wretchedness etched itself anew onto Mak’s forehead. He brought the flat of his palm a few inches before his face, the same sothaín attitude for grief he’d used with Goody Graves in Stones Gallery. The one from the twelfth set, dedicated to the god Doédenna, Saint Death.
At a loss for what else to do, Lanie followed Goody’s example and mirrored his movement for as long as he held it. When Mak let his hand fall, so did she. They stood there, examining each other.
He looks more human now, Lanie thought. Less like a bird or a god or a wraith. Tired, sore… almost approachable.
In impetuous Lirian, she blurted, “Look, Mak Cobb or whoever, if you want to go back to the poison cabinet right now… I won’t tell. I won’t stop you this time, I promise. I just… I can’t… can’t watch. Okay? But if you’d prefer that to…” She trailed off.
Mak was shaking his head, his lips curling. Not in a smile. “Thy sister,” he said in slow Quadic, putting a slight flex on the word she’d forgotten, “hath forbidden suicide. Her fascination’s force I must abide. And as for what thou wilt and wilt not watch—child.”
He held her gaze. Lanie remembered the bird. The gray shadowy winged thing that Saint Death had released back to Mak at her insistence. It had passed straight through Lanie’s breastbone, into Mak’s lips. His substance. His soul.
Watching her face closely, Mak nodded. “Thief of death,” he said in a soft, steady voice, “corruptor of my will—thou stole thy choice when thou didst murder mine. My suffering is thine; thus, I rejoice.”
And he turned his face from hers, withdrawing his contempt, his despair, his attention.
Lanie grimaced. Was it her fault that Nita had captured him? He—yes, and his dead gyrlady too, and his whole high-flown nation!—should’ve known better than to underestimate a Stones! Had Mak known Nita four years, let her fly him in the field, yet never understood her? And to blame Lanie for saving him! Blame her, when his death might have meant that she died too? Goody Graves had been right yesterday; Mak Cobb ought to want to outlive his foes and dance upon their graves! Where was his gumption?
Her internal surge reared up its sunflower head, nodding with ardent encouragement. It reached out citrusy, surge-y fingertips to tickle her everywhere, all the way up and down. It promised faithfully to give her all the right rhymes in any language she wanted—from Quadic quatrains to Skaki villanelles to Damahrashian rhyme-and-replace gutter slang—if only she’d just please get back to embroidering more mouse bones as soon as possible! So many tiny, perfect, awesomely irresistible little mouse bones to sew!
Lanie grinned at Mak, newly radiant and confident, taking him aback. She further startled him by pushing her spectacles firmly up her nose, hooking her thumbs together, and making him a traditional Quadoni bow—wings to breast and all. In a burbling-river rush of flawless Quadic, Lanie danced backward in her garden. As she went, she shot her parting crossbow bolt, using the couplet structure from Quadoni quest-poem cycles:
“Rejoice in thy capacity for thought. At midnight thou’lt forget—and be forgot.”
5 The first book was Espionage, Volume I: The Pulchritudinous Art of Betrayal, Seduction, and Subterfuge, a far fatter volume than the second book, its slim sequel, Espionage II: Notes on a False Tooth.