I don’t remember my mother, or where I was born. I can remember, barely, arriving in Nestevyo. I was riding behind my father, gripping him hard around the middle. A second horse, following placidly behind us, carried all we had in the way of possessions. Clothes, tools, a few precious books.
We moved into a shack near the water, a few hundred yards from the village proper. I don’t know if my father paid anyone for the right to live there or not. It hadn’t been used in years, perhaps in decades, and there was nothing much left but four ugly walls and a fire pit. I remember the first night, sleeping under the stars, nothing overhead but the skeletal shapes of the rafters.
The next day, my father traded the horses to some of the villagers in exchange for help rebuilding the roof. A pack of them came over, riding in a wagon heaped high with dried grass. They were dour, suspicious men, often with their dour, suspicious sons along, and they stared at my father and me as though we were circus attractions. But they had brought ladders, and they spent all day putting up thin wooden shingles covered with mats of dried grass, fixed in place with an awful-smelling muck that looked like liquid shit. My father, though unused to manual labor, did his best to help, and in the evening he broke open a bottle of spirit he’d brought in our bags and poured each villager a generous measure.
It was as auspicious a beginning to our life in Nestevyo as we could have hoped for. Nevertheless, it was clear from the outset that we could never truly be a part of the village. In our old home in the south, where the Mithradacii tide rose high and lasted long, most of the old peoples of the world were erased. It’s easy to forget that north of the Worldshearts there are clans who never knelt to any tyrant, people whose children bear no trace of the blood of the Children of the Sun. The people of Nestevyo were descended from such stock, short and broad shouldered, with hair as black as a crow’s wing. They call us mikadvi, which means “muddy” and is appropriate enough. My father and I both had hair the color of freshly turned earth; we would be unremarkable in the lowland cities, but here in the Murnskai mountains we were as foreign as Khandarai.
My father put food on our table however he could manage. He sold his services as a scribe, or traded them for things we needed. Aside from the village priest, no one in Nestevyo was literate, but there were still occasional things that needed writing down: wills, papers for the provincial government, letters to distant family. This did not bring in enough to either feed us or keep my father busy, so in the meantime he fished, like every other man in the village. The dark waters of the Sallonaik are bountiful, rich enough that even a clumsy pen pusher like my father could coax a fish or two onto his line. The other villagers laughed at his scrabbling efforts, and in spite of the hurt to his pride he laughed with them, and joked at his own expense, and got them to teach him how to do it properly.
At the time, I did not understand what my father gave up to live in Nestevyo. Like any child, I was concerned only with my own affairs.
***
I was nine years old when I first understood that I carried a demon.
I realize now I had felt its touch before that, the cold sensation of scaled skin scraping against the warmth of my heart. At the time, though, I thought nothing of it. It didn’t hurt, exactly, and it always went away soon enough. If I told my father, he no doubt put it down to a chill.
In my ninth year, a villager named Belvetz, for whom my father had done some work copying out letters, gave us a dog. The animal was a runt, the tag end of a litter who would never be useful for work, and normally he would have been tossed into the lake as not worth feeding. Belvetz, who had four sons of his own, suggested that a small dog might make a good pet for a child my age, and so my father brought him home and I acquired a companion. My father named him Sagamet, which is an old Mithradacii word meaning “dirty snow.”
Sagamet was a Murnskai mountain dog, a breed as hardy as the villagers who raise them, thick legged with short, curly hair that sheds water like a duck’s feathers. He was a dark, muddy gray, to match his name, with a few patches of pure black on his haunches. He took to me at once, and I of course loved him with all my heart—no boy of nine can resist the attentions of a friendly dog. Before long he walked at my heel whenever I went out, like an eager shadow, and curled up by my side when I sat down to read.
I did not play with the other children of the village. It was not so much that they hated me, though I suppose they might have and I would never have known it. The differences between us were so vast we knew instinctively they could not be bridged, and neither I nor they ever tried. I was already taller than every other boy my age, with my strange, mud-colored hair. Instead of learning to fish, hunt, and climb like the boys, or even to mend nets and make cloth like the girls, I was devoted to my father’s strange trade of reading and writing. I practiced nearly every day, going through the few books we had over and over whenever the sun was high and the sky was clear. We could not afford to waste candles to give me light to study by, so it was in the evenings that Sagamet and I would venture into the thin woods surrounding the village, or wander up and down the shore of the Sallonaik and investigate its many rocky inlets and pools.
The great lake is so large it has winds and tides, like an ocean, and the shore is covered in rocky columns and tumbled boulders, overgrown with scraggly trees and vines. In some places, these form pools that are connected to the lake when the water is high, but not when it recedes, and sometimes in these pools the lake would leave us treasures. Big fish, trapped by the tide’s retreat, flopping and gasping in the shallow water; one such find could feed us for days. Or bits of detritus, floated in from ships wrecked out in the deep and hung up on the rock. I had once found a man’s shirt, torn and sodden, and a carved bit of wood my father said might have been part of a ship’s rail.
On the day I discovered my demon, I knew the water had been particularly high the night before, and now that the tide had gone out I had hopes of finding either something to play with or something to eat. Sagamet was game for a walk, as always, and we set out up the shore towards a pool I knew, where a short scramble over rocks would let me in to a shallow, sand-floored basin. The sun was sinking toward the horizon, but I had at least a couple of hours before it became too dark to see.
As I walked, I picked up a stick and pretended it was a sword, swinging it around at imaginary foes. I had been reading the Wisdoms, specifically the chapters dealing with the wars against the Demon King, and I imagined myself one of the holy soldiers of the Sworn Church battling the evil sorcerers of the south. Demons rose up before me and were cut down, one after another, while my faithful companion Sagamet ran circles around me and barked excitedly every time my stick clacked against a tree branch.
When I reached the pool, I looked down from the top of the rocks and saw that something was indeed waiting for me. It was a big gray hummock, longer than I was tall, lying motionless in the middle of the pool. From where I stood, I couldn’t see any more than that—it clearly wasn’t a fish, but it looked too smooth to be a rock. It might be, I thought excitedly, a cannon, half buried in the sand. How a cannon could have floated up and into the pool I had no idea, but I was caught up in the idea at once. I clambered down the rocks, Sagamet following sure-footedly behind me until he was low enough to jump into the pool with a great splash.
Wading in the water, which came up to my thighs, I approached the humped thing. The part of its surface that was out of the water was smooth, like it had been polished. I realized with a start that it was moving, very slightly, in and out. Sagamet barked excitedly, splashing back and forth in the water.
I should have turned around and run, then and there. Instead I moved even closer and prodded the thing with my stick.
The books say that the salverre of the Sallonaik is not a true shark, because it breathes air and lacks gills. But it possesses all the other important attributes of a shark, most notably a mouth full of triangular, serrated teeth and a voracious appetite. This one had been stuck in the pool since last night’s high tide, getting angrier and angrier as the water drained away and its hide dried in the unaccustomed sun. The touch of my stick roused it to a fury. Its head, which had been buried in the sand, came up with a spray of water, and it lunged forward by thrashing its long, gray body against the sand. Its teeth snapped closed inches from my foot, and I scrambled back in fright against the rock wall of the pool.
At that moment, Sagamet doubtless saved my life. He charged, barking furiously, hackles raised, and put himself between the salverre and me. The creature lurched toward him, and Sagamet jumped away, then dashed in again, trying to nip at the gray hide. This time the great fish was too quick for him; his barks changed to howls of pain as the jaws closed around his midsection. It thrashed back and forth, dragging the dog through the water, which turned a frothy red.
I forgot my fear at once. I let go of my stick and groped under the water for a rock. When I found one, a jagged chunk of limestone I could barely lift with one hand, I charged the salverre. Sagamet was still howling weakly. The creature opened its mouth as I approached, and he slid free, floating limp in the water in a spreading slick of blood. It came at me, jaws wide, and I brought the rock down on its head with all the strength I could muster.
I must have stunned it. I barely remember what happened next, in the wild tones of a dream. I gathered Sagamet into my arms and ran to the lakeward side of the pool, where there was a small lip of stone I could mount without using my hands. How I got back up onto the high ground without toppling over and cracking my skull, I have no idea. I laid Sagamet down and fell to my knees beside him.
I was sobbing already, from fear and because I could see at a glance that my dog could not be saved. The salverre’s teeth had torn great rents in his flanks, and while his breath still whistled feebly, the pulses of blood from the wound were already slowing. I put my hands on him, and they came away as red as if I’d dipped them in paint. I wanted to scream, but I didn’t have the breath.
Then I felt the cold sensation again, right behind my eyes. Without quite knowing why, I touched Sagamet again, and this time the cold flowed out through my fingers and into his torn body. I could feel him, heart and lungs and guts and brain, as though his body were a beautiful, perfect machine someone had smashed great chunks out of with a hammer. In that moment I could see how it all fit together, and I reached out with the cold and began setting things to rights.
I don’t know how long it took. All I remember is opening my eyes, at the end, to find my dog sitting up and licking the tears from my face.
***
I went home that night, after Sagamet and I washed out the blood in a stream, and told my father what had happened. I did not have wit enough to lie. He listened, indulgently at first and then with cold eyes and furrowed brow.
“You have saved Sagamet, but you may have damned yourself doing it,” he muttered when I was finished. “Listen to me, Abraham. You must never tell anyone else of this. Never, you understand? Until the day you die. This kind of miracle does not come from God. It is sorcery. There is a demon inside you, working through you. I had hoped …”
My eyes had gone very wide. My father pulled me to him and wrapped me in his arms.
“It will be all right. We will tell no one, and you will not use this power again. Just … don’t say anything. Not even to me, in case someone is listening. Promise me.”
I nodded, my head pressed tight against his shoulder.
The next day, my father told the other villagers I had discovered a salverre in one of the tidal pools. A party of them went out, with spears and ropes, and brought the creature back in triumph. That night we roasted it by the shore and had a feast. The flesh was tougher than I liked, but I ate a second helping, and I brought home a string of guts for Sagamet.