Like an opalescent grindstone, there winked into view a place. It wheeled impossibly huge before Ki. It eased toward her ponderously. In some long-forgotten reach of her brain, an instinct stirred. Ki’s left arm and hand freed themselves of Dresh’s head. She watched idly as her hand crabbed out toward the distant glittering wheel.
She did not swim, nor crawl, nor perform any act of locomotion. The wheel was two body lengths away from the tips of her fingers. It was a lifetime away. It was on the far side of the glittering points of light. It was not a place at all, only a bright mural on the far wall of the sky. A placid sleepiness wrapped her. Always she had been here. She recalled an ancient dream of reaching; she did not remember what she reached for, nor why. There remained in her only a remote spark of purpose that bade her left hand continue its scrabbling, finger-waggling crawl. It was fitting that she do so. That movement was a part of this light-sprinkled darkness, was one with her eternal arching flight. Ki dreamed a dozen lives away.
Contact! Her fingers brushed the shining opal wall. The tips of her fingers wiggled into a warm, yielding surface. Her hand sank into it. A sudden tingling seized it, an awakening from numbness. Like a drowning swimmer whose face breaks the surface of the water, Ki fought. The glittering wall yielded to her fingers, but provided no handhold for her to pull her body along. Rather she was drawn in, sucked up. Her face touched the warm surface and broke through. Life scintillated in her veins. Her skin sang with it. The sudden wash of sensation engulfed her and drained her. She sank in a heap.
‘Up!’
Ki was given no time for thought or recovery as Dresh drove her body to its feet. She hurried along a shimmering corridor lined with identical closed doors. The head’s eyes flickered back and forth, scanning each door as they passed; grey wall, grey door, grey wall, grey door. Her vision was tied to Dresh’s once more. His darting glimpses were making her sick. She was giddy with the flashing images, too young to her reborn life. She staggered along, confused and disoriented.
He jerked her to a halt before a door, no different from any of the others. ‘In here!’ he barked, activating her body before she could comply voluntarily. The door swung open to her touch and closed silently behind her.
Ki found herself in a small austere room. As her breathing steadied, so did her vision. The room was almost a cell, devoid of furniture but for a low bedstead with blankets folded across the foot of it. She sank wearily onto it, placing the head gently at her side. She rubbed her aching shoulders, trying to comprehend such things as time and physical spaces. Blindly, she fingered a smarting semi-circle of identations in the flesh of her arm. Teethmarks. Dresh picked up her thought.
‘I was forced to hold on any way I could. You very nearly dropped me, you know. But,’ grudging admiration came into his voice, ‘for one who claimed no skill at leaping, it was a prodigious feat. It is typical of Rebeke to gamble her life on her superior skill. And yet we matched her.’
‘I cannot do it again. You must not ask it of me.’
‘So say all women after they have birthed their first child. Yet when the need comes upon them again, they find the strength. So shall you, Ki, for you must. But do not think about that right now. Worrying will only weaken you.’
She snorted derisively. ‘Do you think I’m not worrying now? We seem to have leaped right to the center of their hive.’
‘Quarters for the novices, if I am not mistaken. With safe corridors for those not yet adept enough to trust their daily lives to leaping. It is not quite where I had hoped to find us, yet it is closer to where we must be. My body is not far from us now. The closer we get to it, the more I may draw upon the powers of it.’
‘Let’s get this over with.’ Ki picked up the head and settled it firmly into the crook of her left arm. A strand of dark hair fell across her eyes. She brushed at her forehead but it didn’t move. She sighed, and brushed Dresh’s black hair back from their shared eyes. The wizard let go a short chuckle.
‘So swiftly do we adapt to one another, Ki. Perhaps we were wiser to forget about regaining my body. Let them keep it. I shall tap your body for my needs, and you shall remain my faithful steed and companion.’
‘Not likely. Sooner would I be a house slave to a Brurjan. Dresh, no more bandying of words. Many doors must mean many novices. Might not one enter at any moment?’
‘Do you have so little respect for my powers, Ki? This room has been empty long. It has almost lost the imprint of the one that last used it. That does not mean it is absolutely safe, but it is the safest haven we shall find in a Windsingers’ nest.’
‘Hush!’ Ki’s quick ears had picked up a muted murmur of voices passing by the door. Fear swept over her. She listened long to the footsteps retreating down the hall. When silence fell again at last, she expelled her held breath in a ragged sigh. ‘Can we go and get your body now?’ she pleaded.
‘Certainly. Just step out in the hall and ask directions of the first novice you meet. Trot on in, and ask Rebeke sweetly for any boxes of wizard meat she happens to have around.’
‘So how do we do it?’ Ki asked grudgingly after her surly silence had been ignored.
‘I don’t know. Dammit, do you think I am in the habit of losing bits of myself to the Windsingers? It all depends on what they do. I haven’t the power to meet Rebeke and the other full Windsinger I sense hovering over my body. We must wait until they leave off their watching, or until we have found a weapon.’
‘And if they open the boxes?’
‘If I sense that happening, then we must risk all and try to reclaim my parts.’
‘You would know if they had broached your boxes?’
Dresh expelled a long breath in a hiss. ‘I believe I would. I hope I would.’
‘But you are not sure?’ Ki pressed him in dismay.
‘Ki, do you know what my powers are? No. You know only enough of the stuff of wizardry to fear me, and to make you angry. You take a foolish pride in being “only Human” as if my wizardry were some freak of my birth, and not a prize hard won, at much sacrifice; as if my skills were a monstrous unfairness to those who do not have them. So you credit to me powers beyond the skills of any to attain. I, who possess wizardry, know the limits of my arts. But of the Windsingers? Who can say, except one that is a Windsinger? I am a wizard, and the ways of magic are not unknown to me. But the fear and loathing you feel for a Windsinger, who has forsaken the shape of her birth species and taken on the attributes of a race that no longer exists … those feelings I share. I can guess at their limits. But as I am not a Windsinger, I cannot plumb the depths of their arts. What skills do they truly possess, and what ones do they pretend to, that they may better control the masses?’
‘You aren’t sure,’ Ki confirmed it for herself. ‘For all you know, they could have both boxes open by now.’ Slowly she set the head back on the bed beside her.
‘I would sense that!’ Dresh asserted. ‘If they drained my body and hands, do you think I could survive in this state? If I had taken another body when they drained me, I’d survive. But that is all it would be; survival. Wizardry is an art of the body as much as the mind. I’d have all my long training to begin again …’ Dresh’s voice trailed off desolately.
But Ki’s mind had followed a different path. ‘And what of me?’ she demanded angrily.
‘Eh?’ Dresh asked, distracted.
‘What about me? If the Windsingers drain you while we’re here, I’m left holding a dead wizard’s head. Then what?’
‘The Windsingers would stop you,’ Dresh explained calmly. ‘Surely you’ve realized that.’
‘Kill me?’ Ki pressed.
‘No!’ Dresh snorted. ‘We aren’t all savages. No, not kill you. Stop you. Put you in a void room.’ Ki’s face was pained as she tried to grasp his meaning. ‘Sort of like putting a turnip in a root cellar,’ Dresh elaborated.
‘Like when we jumped?’ A tingling dread ran over Ki’s body; a mindless forever of frozen dreams.
‘Exactly,’ Dresh agreed, pleased she had grasped it.
Ki put her own head into her hands. Her eyes were closed against her palms, but her mind shared Dresh’s view of the wall.
‘Why me?’ Ki asked rhetorically.
‘Because you said you would do all in your power, and signed your name to it. It’s all in the contract, Ki.’
‘It always is,’ she mumbled.