WE DON’T know how the world that contains all other worlds began. That is a mystery it holds to itself. But we know there are many worlds. Some are far away from the one we call home. Some are as near as the outside of your skin is to the blood in your veins. Our people traveled through many worlds before they reached this one, where we made our true home. During that journey we changed, many times.
YASH WITHDREW the knife from the base of Dzhesq the Needle’s skull and sat on the stairs for a moment to catch her breath. She touched the sorcerer’s neck to feel whether his blood was moving. It wasn’t.
The dead sorcerer lay on a landing five or six strides wide, beyond which the stairs continued down, curving along the outside wall of the tower. All was made of polished dark-blue granite with streaks and patches of white, like clouds swirled in an evening sky.
Her gaze came to where a pool of Master Needle’s blood was still spreading.
She had killed many things in her life. Animals. Monsters. But this was the first human being she had slain. Or did a sorcerer count as a human being? Yes. This was a new thing for her.
She hadn’t known what she would feel at this moment. She still didn’t, and it didn’t matter. The tower master was her first. More enemies might already be on their way.
She closed her eyes and listened. To her relief, the stairwell was quiet. But for how long? There was no telling. She couldn’t take the body back to her room; there was no place to hide it. If she shoved it out the window, someone might see it falling or hear it land. But there were other rooms.
She rose, took hold of the corpse by the hair and began dragging it across the blue stone.
She had noticed the door on the way up. Most of the doorways she had seen inside of the tower were simply open, but this one was closed by a slab of dark wood. It hung on metal pins fitted into the stone wall. A loop of copper halfway up suggested it pulled open.
She took hold of the handle and yanked.
It was heavy, so she had to release Needle’s hair and brace one foot against the wall to start it opening. But when it had cracked about the span of her arm, someone began pushing it from the other side. She jerked her feet up and clung to the copper as the door swung wider.
She couldn’t see who it was, but they made a grunting sound. Whoever it was could surely see Needle’s corpse lying on the landing. She pulled the knife out and dropped quietly to the floor.
Then someone stepped out and toward the dead sorcerer.
He was big, taller than any human, but he looked more like a man than the thing that had come out of Needle’s chest. But he wasn’t. His skin was roughly pebbled and grey. His long hair was coarse, each strand of it as thick as her little finger. He wasn’t wearing any clothes.
She leapt toward his unprotected back, but the being spun around far faster than she had imagined he could and caught her right arm with his huge hand. She thrust the blade at him with her left, but his other hand clamped on her wrist. She swung up, twisted, and kicked him in the chest with both feet. That surprised him and broke the hold on her right arm. He growled and hurled her through the door. She skidded across polished stone and then rolled back to her feet. He bent and picked up a heavy wooden club bristling with flint spikes from where it lay on the floor. He took a step toward her. But he paused, his eyes cutting back to the landing.
“Wait,” the giant said. “You killed him.”
“Yes,” she replied.
“Good. But why?”
“Does it matter?”
“No,” the giant replied. “But I’m pleased. I did not like him.”
“I didn’t like him, either,” Yash said. “Maybe you and I don’t have to fight.”
“Maybe,” the giant said. “Who are you?”
“I am Yash,” she said. “I—”
But then he jumped toward her. She saw it coming; he had been inching forward as they spoke. He was big and fast and very strong. She had been lucky to get away from him when he caught her before. She couldn’t let that happen again; he probably wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.
He whipped the club toward her head. She dodged, barely, then she ducked under his arm and stabbed him in the armpit. To her surprise, she felt resistance; whatever he was, he had bone there, where a normal person did not. The blade went in anyway and came right back out. She skittered past his ribs, hoping to get to his back, but he managed to turn with her, swinging a backhand at her head. She quickly ducked beneath the blow again and sliced open his inner thigh. Blue-white blood sprayed out; she smelled wildflowers.
He stumbled and then lurched at her.
She weaved through the large, cluttered room. He crashed after her. She ran under a table, toward an open window beyond. Something whooshed by her head and shattered against the wall near the opening. She turned around in time to see him flip the table toward her. She jumped into the window frame and teetered there on the sill, which was only barely wider than her footspan, fighting to keep her footing as the table slammed into the wall, briefly blocking the window before falling back into the room. She dove back inside, barely evading the next wicked swing of his club, and sprinted back toward the door with him panting at her back. Getting slower. The pale blood was everywhere now.
“You’re waiting for me to bleed to death,” he growled.
“You didn’t give me much choice,” she said.
“I don’t have any choice,” he said. “Even dead, his command on me remains. I must kill you.”
“I’m sorry for that.”
He charged but was a lot slower this time. She feigned backing up but then stepped quickly to the side and lunged to meet him, making him badly misjudge his swing. She shoved the knife through the ribs where his heart should be. The blade lodged there, and rather than sticking with it—easily within the grasp of his monstrous arms—she let go and spun around, ready for his next attack.
His back was still to her. Wheezing, he sank slowly to his knees and toppled forward.
She watched for a few heartbeats to make certain he wasn’t trying to fool her. Then, giving the giant’s body a wide berth, she went back to the door, dragged Dzhesq’s body inside, and closed it behind her.
The giant still hadn’t moved, and the huge pool of blood he now lay in was convincing evidence that he wouldn’t. Still wary, she examined the room a little more closely. It was almost round, which meant it probably took up this entire floor of the tower. There were two large tables and dozens of smaller ones, racks of shelves filled with scrolls, pots, urns, and cauldrons, three of which had been toppled and broken during their fight, spilling ochre, green, and dark purple powders on the floor. The giant had thrown one of the big tables at her, and it lay upended near the window. On the table that was still upright, bits of bone, metal, shell, and stones of various colors and sizes had been sorted into piles, but she couldn’t discern what categories they had been grouped into. Near the window a pedestal supported a large incense bowl, this one blue-green and carved from precious dedłiji stone.
A large wooden case contained an assortment of tools—knives with blades of bronze, bone, and obsidian; hammers with heads of progressively larger sizes, the largest a little bigger than her closed fist; and an axe with a coppery-looking blade. A large cabinet contained clothing, none of which would fit her.
When she ventured to the side of the room farthest from the entrance, she discovered a corpse; the clutter had prevented her from seeing it earlier.
There, beneath another window, the floor had been traced with strange symbols. Some looked like writing, others appeared to be stylized animals. They formed a double-armed spiral. It looked to her like four of the symbols indicated the cardinal directions.
A woman lay in the middle of the markings. She was probably around thirty, dressed in a dark yellow shift. Her hands and feet had been bound with rawhide strips, and her mouth and nose were covered with what Yash at first took for some kind of paste. Her dead gaze was fixed somewhere between the floor and the ceiling. Her skin had a blueish tinge.
She had been smothered to death slowly. Whatever Needle had put in her mouth and nose had hardened into a rubbery substance while she was still trying to breathe.
It was one of her own people, a woman of Zełtah. Yash didn’t know her name, but by the arrangement of piercings in her ears she guessed her to be a white-spruce woman, probably from Tsecheen.
She wished there was something she could do for her, but there wasn’t. Whatever the sorcerer had done to her, the woman’s soul was either consumed or long gone. Her body was just that: a corpse. Her people didn’t bother much about those.
“He is dead,” she whispered, in case something remained that could hear her. “If that can be of comfort.”
It was all she could do, and she had to move on. But a pitch-knot of anger had formed inside of her, a splinter, but one that could become a white-hot fire, given the chance.
I don’t need you, she told the pitch-knot. I will do this without you. She took a long, slow breath, and the splinter flowed out of her. She took one more to be sure.
Now certain the giant was dead, she rolled him over. It wasn’t easy, but it was the only way to get the knife back. Then she pried the giant’s own weapon from his fingers and crushed Needle’s chest with it, placing a dagger from the case in the sorcerer’s hand and returning the giant’s club to him, folding his thick dead fingers around the handle. Now it looked like the two had killed each other. How long that would fool anyone—if it fooled anyone at all—she did not know. But from now until she was finished, every pulse of the heart counted. If the deception gave her a dozen or thousands, it was still worth the effort.
But as valuable as time was, there was something more to do before she left.
She knelt by the dead giant and touched two fingers to his blood. Then she closed her eyes and tried to clear her mind.
Shame, bondage, and misery met her touch, surging from the corpse up through her fingers and quickly spreading throughout her body. She felt ill. She struggled not to vomit. She clenched her teeth as tears started in her eyes.
“I am sorry, my foe,” she whispered.
I am sorry.
But we were fated to fight
And one to die
I am sorry, my foe
I am sorry I do not know your name
Or the place that gave you life
Who are your kin?
Where is your place?
I want to know.
Slowly, the darkness beneath her eyelids brightened, as if a dense fog was dispersing. She began to make something out. The smell of flowers grew stronger until she saw them in a mountain prairie: a field of yellow, white, crimson, and violet surrounded by the pale trunks and green spring leaves of aspens.
“I see you now, my former foe,” she sang softly.
T’chehswatah
In the fields of flowers
Among the Aspens
In winter wears a white mantle
Waiting for the spring
It is spring for you now
Go there, my brother
Go there, my sister
Be among them once more.
Her vision grew clearer. All of the trees and flowers bent in the same direction as a wind came up. Then all was still.
Thank you, the wind whispered.
“You are welcome,” she replied. Then she stood and went to the window. She looked off toward the mountains.
“Shechu,” she murmured.
One has gone now, my grandmother
One has returned home
One of the naheeyiye
To T’chehswatah
Perhaps they left
A way in
A way in here
Into Dj’eendetah, Among the Monsters
Into Qen Dj’eende, The Abode of Monsters
I could use some help
Shechu
My grandmother.
She waited, but no answer came. And she could wait no longer, not in this room.
She hurried back up the stairs to her new quarters and stripped off the robe, now soaked in blue-white blood. A quick search of the suite turned up a low table with a pile of clothes on it that seemed meant for her. She found another robe, this one dark blue. She shoved the bloody one under her bed and looked over the rest of the room. The chuaxhi was now gone without a trace, evaporated back into steam, returned to its alien realm. To her eye, nothing looked out of place.
The adjacent room had a washbasin and some cloth; she wiped her face and arms until they looked pretty clean, squeezed the blue tinted water from the rag out the window, threw the rag back by the basin, then donned the robe.
Then she went back to the window and leaned out.
She could see half of the fortress, and beyond that, part of Honaq city: thousands of houses built on the hills around the river. She had seen it upon arriving and thought it both amazing and repellant. Far too many people crowded into one place for her taste, too much smoke from too many fires. Even so, Honaq had a certain beauty. Toward the center, where the fortress she now occupied stood, it was orderly, a place designed by clever people who liked straight lines and perfectly round circles. But as it spread, it became more like a living place, more accountable to the contours of the river and landscape than to human imagination. The yellow and brown swaths of stone and mud-brick buildings were striated with vivid green gardens and flood-marsh, expanding at the city edges to join the verdant fields filling the rest of the valley. Boats like colorful water-beetles cut ripples in the surface of the river and tree-lined canals. She was sure that, given time, she could find more beauty in Honaq.
Right now, however, the city was not her concern. The fortress was.
The fortress was surrounded by two circular walls, the innermost of which had eight towers along its circumference, with a ninth, larger tower in the very center of the structure. From this window of the Blue Needle Tower she could see four others.
The closest was the color of pine pollen: possibly the Yellow Bone Tower. It had a window facing her about two lengths of her body lower and another farther down. Just at the edge of the distance she could jump.
She heard something behind her and turned.
A big man—tall, wide-shouldered, with a rounded, soft face and substantial nose—stood in the doorway.
Chej, her husband.