5.

 

The haunt Oyia circled the Temple of Ger slowly, her body lit by the violent light above.

Zaifyr could hear her voice, softly repeating that she was cold and hungry as he swam out to the half-submerged structure but lost track of it—and her—after he hooked his first metal spike into the wall. It was a much more difficult job than he had thought: the smooth rock had to be broken by a hammer too awkward and too big to easily slam in the spike. Still, he managed a first, then a second and third. But rather than hang from the wall to hammer in a fourth, he pulled himself gracelessly onto the top.

The once charm-laced man lay beneath the red light and raised his hand, holding it up against it. It sank into the skin, coloring him, changing him. A child who had been born in the City of Ger would have spent years without knowing the natural color of their own skin. It reminded him strongly of the early years of his life, where children were raised on the faltering beliefs of their parents. In the company of Jae’le, Zaifyr had passed ocean-side villages where children were born in the settling black blood of the Leviathan and a series of small cities where the left hand of a child was maimed in deference to Aeisha, the goddess of literature. As he rose from his position, the memory of them did not remove the queerness of light above him, nor leave him feeling less apprehensive about what he would find when he broke open the shell. Still, with his hand curling around the wooden shaft of the hammer, it did not stop him from striking the stone either.

After the third strike, he heard the haunt beneath him: “You think to break it open like a clumsy child with a coin jar?”

“Yes,” he admitted.

“This will anger Ger,” she said. “Are you not afraid?”

“No.”

But he was afraid, though his fear had nothing to do with Ger. It came from the ease with which he spoke to the haunt, by the familiarity of it and the whisper of his soul that said to do otherwise was to deny his very being.

He swung the hammer a fourth time.

That strike left a mark, a faint crack, but it was long and arduous work for more to appear, for a spider’s web of crafts to emerge around his bare feet. Strong as he was—stronger than most—Zaifyr was not his brother, Eidan. The huge man’s patient and methodical mind hid the strength that would have broken through the stone in half the time that it would take Zaifyr. It had been he who carried Zaifyr to the crooked tower, to his prison. He who had held him as the others built. He had not been aware of that—he could remember only constraint—but the haunts had told him so, had murmured in their brief moments of lucidity about his captivity without and within. They had said that Eidan stood still for five days, that he held Zaifyr in his grasp like a child, both unmoving, both silent.

Zaifyr had seen him only once since he released from his tower, traveling to where the huge man lived in the ruins of his birth, rebuilding it painstakingly like a model.

Easing the hammer down, he stepped close to the edge and gazed down. “Oyia.” The haunt returned his stare. “Why did you attack Orlan’s shop?”

“I did not know it was his shop,” she said. “I would not have wanted to anger him.”

“Few would, but you did because…?”

“I was told to do so. There was a girl inside.”

“Who told you?”

“She did.”

The nameless girl, the child in Oyia’s memory. There could be no one else for the haunt. But who was she? Zaifyr remembered her gaze, how it had not been new, but not yet ancient. Like me. Like me when I was young. “How did she know Ayae was there?”

“She knew.”

He went down on his knees, his hand reaching for the charm that was not beneath his wrist. “Did she know I was there?”

“I do not know.” A ripple in the water passed beneath the haunt’s body, distorting her for but a moment. “She did not say so, if she did. My first awareness of you was when I lay on the pyre, trying to remove myself strand by strand from that body. I felt you and the Keepers, then, as well as her.”

“You were fractured,” he explained. “Your awareness was drifting between two states of being—”

“I could sense Ger, as well.”

“You would have, yes.”

He had begun to tell her that it was the transcendence of flesh to spirit that had done it, that she had glimpsed the part of the world that had been made in the War of the Gods, but he stopped. She would struggle to understand him. It was difficult to convey that in absence there existed the definable sense of the world, the universe and them. But she would not retain what he said. He would tell her the same words again an hour later, and the hour after that.

Instead, he asked, “Why did you attack the girl in Orlan’s shop?”

“She said I could defeat the girl.” She was uncomfortable, shifting from foot to foot in the water, her tread without mark. “She said that she did not even know about her power.”

“That does not explain why.”

She did not reply.

“Oyia.”

“I do not know,” she whispered.

“Oyia,” Zaifyr replied softly. “A name does have power.”

Her mouth twisted, firmly shut.

“Oyia.” Persuasive, a hint of pressure on her being. “Oyia, tell me, what did you plan to do with the girl?”

“She wanted me to bring her back!” she snarled. “She said there were many like her, many who just didn’t know—and she wanted to know if I had the power to take her!”

Zaifyr’s hand touched the part of his wrist where a charm had rested only hours before. He went to press another question—to ask why she wanted her back (and where back was, exactly)—but the words did not emerge. As quickly as Oyia’s anger had risen, it had gone, drained from her frail form and lost in the dark water beneath her feet. She turned and began to circle the placid lake, her words faint whispers of hunger and cold, her mind taken by the need inside her, a need that would consume her, unless he wanted to use his own power—power he was already uncomfortable with having used.

Lifting the hammer, Zaifyr returned to work.