TOLTA was away when Dabni had returned home, a small grace. One of Tolta’s younger sisters had been due to deliver her first child a tenday ago and the delay had worn the mother-to-be to a frazzle. Dabni found a note pinned to a cupboard, a quick explanation that the sister had gone into labor at last and all signs pointed to a prolonged delivery. She wanted all of her siblings gathered around her when she gave birth—even the disowned one. Tolta might be gone for days.
Rina had gone off with her father on an overnight field trip to meet his Sloth assistant, which meant Dabni had the house to herself. When she awoke the next morning, it occurred to her that instead of rising and beginning yet another day, she could just sleep in. Allowing the book shop to remain closed for a day or maybe two struck her as a compelling idea. Jorl was beyond the range of her watch, and her index of the people of Keslo was up to date. She could just roll over and go back to sleep.
A sudden tug on her consciousness wrenched the fantasy from her and left her fully alert, as if she’d been plunged into an icy rain. Her simple bedroom vanished, replaced by the imposition of Klarce’s office flooding her senses.
“Your target will be on his way back to you soon,” said the councilor. “You’d indicated that the senator had gone off on an outing, transported by his assistant. Is it possible you didn’t know he was coming to the final island?”
She fanned her ears frantically at the news. The frown on Klarce’s face reflected Dabni’s ignorance back at her. She was still processing the councilor’s words. Last island? How did Jorl even know the location of the last island? Centering herself and blushing as she struggled to regain control she asked, “Surely he did not allow the Sloth to land with him.”
“No, though one might argue that as this island exists on no map of Barsk it cannot be considered a part of the Compact. In any case, neither of us pressed the point and the Brady remained aboard his yacht for the duration of the visit. I spoke with him at length and in a short while he’ll be interviewed by the Full Council. I’m sure he’ll brief you fully upon it when he returns to Keslo.”
“Brief me? Why … why would he do such a thing?”
“He has been informed that you are an operative of the Caudex and our agent on Keslo.”
Dabni lost all composure again, gasping before she could stifle the reaction. “But … doesn’t that compromise my assignment? How am I to keep watch on him if he knows I’m doing so?”
“You compromised it long since. Or did you imagine it an unimportant detail that he had given you a child?”
Rina. Rina had been onboard the yacht. The “field trip” had been to the final island. Had Klarce met her daughter?
“Councilor … I can explain. You see, I—”
“Spare me. Consider yourself on probation until the Full Council can take the time to properly assess whether your action reflects a simple lie of omission or deliberate treason. Rest assured, a new agent will be assigned to your husband.”
“That’s hardly necessary, I’m right here. My loyalty has never swayed. Please. You have all my reports. In all the time I’ve been here, Jorl’s done nothing to warrant suspicion. Whatever reason the Matriarch had for marking him, he’s never threatened the Caudex’s purpose.”
Klarce’s response lowered the temperature in the imagined office. “That’s not for a field agent to say. You have only a tiny piece of the entire picture. Jorl ben Tral may not be a threat, but he is far from harmless. That said, the council will likely reach an agreement with him and be content, for now. But we would be foolish not to keep him under surveillance. And, as you’ve demonstrated a lack of objectivity, that task is beyond you and will be assigned to another.”
She swallowed, holding her body still. “I understand.”
“You are not completely out of favor, Dabni, but the council is very disappointed with you. Consider it a sign of our regard for your previous work that I have reached out to warn you that your husband is aware of your double life. Goodbye.”
Like the closing of a book, the conversation ended and Dabni was back in the warmth of her bed. She let out a great breath and shuddered, as her body reacted to the information. Had they also told Rina? And if so, how much had they told her about the Caudex? The child was bright but she couldn’t possibly fathom what it all meant. And somehow Jorl had learned of the final island, which meant if he hadn’t already known to find the Caudex there, he knew it now. But again, what else had they told him? About Ulmazh? About their long-range plans for saving the Fant? Even now his keen mind would be reviewing the time since they met, putting together any pieces that had seemed slightly out of place over the years. And again, how much had Klarce told him? That she had been assigned to watch him was certain, but what about the order to end his life?
A sound at the foot of her bed pulled her attention from her thoughts. Pizlo stood there, red-rimmed eyes intent on her.
“Who were you talking to?” he asked.
“What? I—no one, of course, there’s no one else here.”
The boy frowned and she felt a tug on her awareness much as when Klarce had summoned her. A duplicate bedroom formed in her mind, one in which Pizlo now sat at the end of the bed.
“I saw you, in a park a while back. I saw you plucking people’s threads and doing something that Jorl never said Speakers could do. That got me wondering what other things you might be able to do. So now when I know I’m going to see you I take some koph first. In case you’re doing something special, I don’t want to miss it. And just now, you were talking to someone. Jorl taught me the trick of it, because he worries about me and wants to be able to check in. I don’t know if he does it with anyone else much though, because it’s against the edict. But that’s what you were doing, right? What I’m doing now. So it’s not just Jorl breaking that rule, and that’s another way you’re not like other Speakers. And I bet that’s probably so about whoever you were talking to.”
Even after so many years, talking with Pizlo made her feel like someone had shoved her trunk in a vice. For Tolta’s sake she’d tried to see him as just another child. But it was one thing to steel herself for an encounter with him and quite another to be taken by surprise. Still, here he was asking questions that she’d never anticipated from him. She took a calming breath and her training reminded her that she needed to reframe the situation and establish her control.
“It’s rude to spy on people and listen in on their conversations.”
“I wasn’t listening in,” he said. “I might have, if I’d gotten here sooner. But by the time it occurred to me to try and grab some of your threads like I’d seen you do, you were done.”
“Fine, then it’s rude to grab people’s nefshons.”
“Is it more or less rude, if the nefshons being grabbed are those of someone you know—like my grabbing yours—or strangers like the people in that park?”
“There are some things that simply aren’t any of your business, Pizlo. Just because you share everything you know does not mean everyone else does or must. Adults often have secrets.”
“Like that you’re a Speaker? Does Jorl know?”
“He … no, no he does not. There’s no reason he should know. I don’t use the ability to Speak to the dead.”
“But you do use it, just in other ways. Like at the park. Will you tell me what you did?”
Dabni glared at him and thought—not for the first time—that maybe the Caudex would be well served having an agent keeping an eye on the island’s wild child abomination. Perhaps she could convince Klarce to allow her to remain by offering to take on a task no one else would bear. “Have you grown up to be an extortionist, Pizlo? Are you demanding I show you this thing or you’ll tattle to my husband?”
Pizlo’s ears fanned out in surprise. She’d guessed wrong.
“I’m just trying to understand what I saw. It looked like you were taking nefshons from people and building something. Will you show me how you did that?”
She shook her head. “Honestly, I cannot.”
“But you had it in your hands. I saw it grow.”
“You misunderstood. I don’t know how to build such things. I was given the thing you saw me holding. I only know how to add to it, I can’t create such a thing from scratch.”
“Oh.” Pizlo regarded her silently and moved closer up her bed. “If you show it to me maybe I can help you figure it out.”
Dabni almost dismissed the absurdity of Pizlo’s offer out of hand. She was Caudex trained. What could a wildling teach her? And yet … until he’d asked the question, she’d never considered the implications behind the index, had never thought or realized that though she could modify the structure, she wouldn’t know where to begin if she wanted to craft such a thing herself. Perhaps his unique perspective could show her something new, which in turn she might use to stay in favor with Klarce and the council. She doubted the Caudex would have any compunction of moving her to another island and not letting Rina to come with. Or, even if they allowed her to come, Dabni hardly liked the notion of taking the girl away from ready access to her father. For her child’s sake, if she could learn something valuable from Pizlo she had to try.
“We call it the index,” she said, bringing her hands together and summoning the complex structure into being whole from memory. Its shining shape hovered above her open palms.”
“We who?” asked Pizlo.
“Myself and another Speaker who gave it to me.”
“Oh. That’s not the same Speaker as the one you haven’t told?”
“Told? Told who? Told what? What are you talking about?”
He shrugged, all of his attention still on the index. “There’s a Speaker who gave you this, and there’s at least one other who gave you something else. You were supposed to give that other thing to Jorl, but you never did.”
“I … how do you know anything about that? Who told you about Klarce?”
Pizlo sighed, sounding much like her daughter did when she’d exasperated Rina by treating her like a child at a moment where she felt herself the epitome of adulthood. “Nobody tells me, not like you mean. Sometimes I just know things. But I don’t have all the details. Like, I didn’t know her name until you just said it or what the other thing was—”
“Fine. That’s as it should be. It’s private and none of your business.”
“Well, can I at least see it? You’re letting me see this one.”
“What? No, absolutely not! Tolta would never forgive me!”
“What does Tolta have to do with it? She’s not a Speaker, not like you and me and Jorl.”
“Because it’s a bad thing, Pizlo. It’s a meme designed to hurt people.”
He frowned. “Oh. Is that why you didn’t give it to Jorl?”
“I … well, yes.”
“But this Klarce, she wanted you to? To hurt him?”
She wanted to cry. The innocence of the boy’s perspective unnerved her, cut through the rationalizations she’d told herself, the lies. With a sob, she confessed, amazing herself as she did. “They didn’t just want him hurt, Pizlo. They wanted me to kill him. They didn’t give me a choice. They rescinded the order or he’d be dead by now. Do you understand? They asked me to murder my husband, the father of my child.”
“But … you didn’t.”
“No.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“But I might have.”
“No. Not for a long time. You just haven’t realized that. Not yet.” And just that quickly, he let it go. No judgment, no guilt. He’d gone back to studying the index in her hands. “How do you make it work?”
Dabni shook her head, sorting her thoughts, shunting aside the strange sense of absolution and focusing on the need to pluck something of success out her failure. “Look more closely and tell me what you see.”
He settled next to her on the bed and pressed his face as near to the index as he could without actually touching it. “It’s big and small at the same time. It’s like … it’s like a map!” His ears lifted up and he grinned. “Like a map of the archipelagos, but instead of islands and their locations it’s made up of people.”
“You’re right. Mmm. I never looked at it that way. I’ve always thought of it more like a complicated jumble of connections.”
He shook his head and moved around the bed, trying to look at the index from the side. “That can’t be right,” he said. “If it were then it couldn’t have a shape. There’d be no starting point to hook the first things together.” He reached for it.
“Don’t touch it!”
But her warning came too late and though the construct of the boy’s hand didn’t actually touch the index, he made contact with it. He gasped as he drew his hand back, holding a copy he’d somehow made. That was further than she’d been prepared to allow, but no matter. She would snatch it back as the onrush of information dropped him and then disrupt his memory of it before he could recover.
“Wow! That’s incredible.” Pizlo tossed his copy of the index back and forth from hand to trunk to other hand like a ball.
Dabni gaped. “How are you doing that?”
“I kinda have to. It tickles. No, itches. Well, no that’s not exactly right either. It’s prickly. All those people trying to talk to me at once. They’re settling down now, a little.” He continued to juggle it.
“You’re not feeling overwhelmed?”
He shrugged. “Not really. I mean, a little, maybe. It’s a lot like when I see one of the moons through the clouds and it pours a lot of knowledge and facts into me. It’s like drinking the rain; you don’t have to swallow all the time, you can just let it flow into your open mouth and down your throat. You don’t need to taste it all.”
“That’s … okay. I have to think about that. No one has ever described it that way.” She let the index fade from her grasp. And Pizlo did the same with his. A moment later he manifested it again in his other hand.
“How did you take a copy from me? You shouldn’t take things that aren’t yours.”
“I didn’t mean to, and like you said, it’s a copy, so you still have yours. As soon as I touched one thread in it the whole thing came rushing into me. First the structure and then all the people.”
“You saw the underlying structure?”
He grinned, still not overwhelmed as she had been that first time, but looking a little drunk. “Oh yeah.”
“Can you tell me anything else about it? How it was made?”
He nodded. “Oh sure. Kind of like rain, too. Well, like a drop.”
“I don’t understand.”
“A raindrop. You know, it’s not just water, right? The water forms around a particle of dust. This is like that. Only instead of dust, they used an idea.”
“A particle of an idea?”
“Uh huh. Because nefshons are particles, too, just smaller. That’s what’s at the heart of your index. Somebody’s nefshon of an idea.”
“Can you tell what that idea is?”
“You don’t know? The whole thing resonates with it. It’s what’s holding all the pieces together.”
“Humor me. What’s the idea?”
“Everyone. Every bit you add tells every other bit that together they’re everyone.”
“That’s it?”
“Well sure. The best ideas are big but simple. Because everyone is in it, it always wants to include everyone. I think that’s why it jumped into me. Your copy doesn’t know me. Why is that?”
Dabni sighed and, not for the first time, wondered what the child of Tolta and Arlo might have accomplished if he had been conceived after they’d properly bonded. “You already know the answer to that, Pizlo.”
His face dropped and he let the index fade from him again. “Oh. Yeah.”