Authors: Kelly McCullough
I raised an eyebrow at him.
“Yes, you’re far better trained to deal with pain than nine and ninety other types of mage, but that still doesn’t mean that you can handle this. You’re talking about a spell that rearranges your very bones!”
“Several of them have been rearranged before. With less warning and to no good effect. I lived through it when Devin broke my wrist, and when that guard in Öse shattered my
shoulder blade, and both times I got the job done despite the pain.”
“I don’t think this is a good idea.…”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea either. Frankly, it’s a terrible idea and I hate it, but I don’t have a better one that solves the problem the posters have made for us. Think about it, even if we can get from here to where Fei and Vala and Stel are being held without those posters getting us killed, I’ll still be exposed.”
“Help Fei?” said Scheroc.
I pushed myself back and up to squat on my heels, ignoring the qamasiin and focusing all my attention on Triss. “Even if we successfully bust them loose and somehow find the Kothmerk, return it to its rightful owner and then leave Tien, I’m going to have to deal with the problem of my face at some point. That likeness is going to spread to every one of the eleven kingdoms. I’ll never be able to show this face anywhere again safely.”
“I know but…”
“But what, Triss? As long as I look like this”—I touched a hand to my cheek—“I’m fucked. The bonewright gives me a way out. And not just once either. The goddess no longer protects my identity. Say we manage to change my face some other way—and we’re going to have to, or I’ll never be able to go out again—well, the next face I put on is just as vulnerable as this one. If it’s exposed somehow, I’ll be right back in the same trap. I know it’s dangerous, but if I can make the bonewright work for me, I’ll always have an out. I think that’s worth the risk.”
Triss’s wings slumped. “It might be at that, but do we have to do it right now?”
“Not this minute, no. We’re both too wrung out to try it short of a couple of hours’ sleep and a good meal, but I don’t think we can wait much longer than that. If we’re going to try it, then sooner is much better than later, because it increases our chances of succeeding at what’s going to be a damned hard job under the best of circumstances.”
Triss hissed grumpily. “All right. We’ll do it after
breakfast, but I reserve the right to say ‘I told you so’ if you end up with your face twisted into a pretzel.”
“So noted.”
“Save Fei?” Scheroc sounded awfully pathetic.
I nodded. “Soon, little one. Soon.” At least, I hoped so.
I
was actually a lot more pessimistic about our chances of making any of this work out than I’d let on to either familiar. Especially the bonewright, since I’ve never been much for high magic. A fact I was reminded of in ways both obvious and subtle as I worked to duplicate Vala’s spinning of the spell threads. Sitting in the middle of one of the hexagons that she had drawn and decorated with symbols, I moved through a slow recreation of her spell, while Triss offered up encouragement and corrections from his place in the other figure.
If Triss and I hadn’t watched the whole thing with an eye to reporting how to recreate it at a later date, it would have been utterly hopeless—thank you, Master Urayal. As it was, I had to check and recheck each colored thread of light as I set it in place with my will and the naming of the corresponding glyph, hoping that I had managed both the proper intent and intonation. What the Dyad sorceress had done with ease and verve in a matter of minutes took me over an hour to painstakingly set in place. But I did eventually get there, or at least I hoped that I had.
From within, the spell looked even more challenging than it had from the sidelines. The web of magic was all around me, a continually shifting net of color and light that I could only ever see a part of, since it lay as much behind as in front of me. But even more than the appearance, the
feel
of the spell daunted me. I could sense each of the connected glyphs as a presence anchored in my flesh—the ends of the lines were far more than just dots of light dappling my skin.
Each thread created an almost unreadably tiny replica of its master glyph, a replica that went ever so much farther than skin deep. I could feel the glyphs scribing themselves
inside me. Most wrote themselves on the muscles and tissue lying just beneath my skin, others anchored themselves in sinew or bone, while some few drove deep, etching their meaning in heart and mind. It felt as though I were being illustrated from within, a living manuscript in three dimensions.
As I worked through the spell, I kept telling myself that the sensation would probably stop when I finished naming the glyphs, or at least that I would get used to it. Wrong on both counts. The threads of magic never quit moving and I never stopped feeling it as they wrote and rewrote their meanings within the medium of my flesh. It didn’t hurt, but it was the creepiest sensation that I’d ever experienced. Perhaps this was how the dead might feel could they be made aware of the worms burrowing through their nerveless flesh. Sensation returned somehow beyond pain, but not beyond the ghost of imagination.
“Are you all right?” Triss asked, and I realized that some long but unmeasured slice of time had passed since I set the last of the lines in place.
“I don’t know,” I replied a few heartbeats after I should have. “It’s a question with no simple answer. Say that I am unhurt, and you will strike as close to the mark as matters at the moment. This is a most disturbing sort of spell, my friend.”
“It’s not too late to call the whole thing off,” he said, his voice low and worried.
“No, but I’m not sure I’d be able to make myself assay the thing again if I aborted it now, and all the arguments I made before are still true. Much as I would prefer to take another path, I don’t see any way to get from here to where we need to go without passing through the gates of the bonewright.”
And so, before Triss could argue further, I began. Raising my hands to my face, I touched fingertips to cheekbones, sliding them back and down …into agony!
When I was thirteen, Siri clipped me beside the eye with a spinning backfist. She was wearing a pair of cestuses at
the time, and the iron weight over her middle knuckle cracked the orbit of my eye socket. My whole head filled up with the most excruciating sort of pain, and I’d thought that I could almost feel the line of the fracture, like a ribbon of hot wire dragging along the bones of my skull. This was like that, only more so, a red hot chisel carving away at the planes of my face.
I shrieked and jerked my hands away from my cheeks. I couldn’t help myself. Triss responded with a hiss like a whole kettle of tea spilling into a roaring fire as he leaped forward to the very edge of the hexagon that held him. The necessities of the spell kept him there on the other side of the line, but I could see how badly he wanted to come to me.
Shifting to the Varyan that was his first human language, Triss barked my name, “Aral! Aral! Get it under control! You can’t make that kind of noise here, not with the caras-snuffling maniacs who live below.”
He was right, of course, and I forced myself to inhabit the pain, to own it and make it mine. Make pain a part of you instead of an outside enemy and it becomes your own, a possession that you can put aside for a time instead of an invader you have to fight. My face still burned, but I was in control again …for the moment. I knew that I had a lot more work to do and I didn’t think I’d be able to suppress the screams when I got to it. Which meant I needed to take precautions.
So, while holding the main structure of the bonewright firmly in my mind, I spun a second spell. Simpler, weaker, freestanding, something that I had learned long ago at the feet of Master Kelos—a zone of silence that would contain my anguish. As I finished, Triss nodded his approval, though I could tell from the set of his wings and the twitching of his tail that he was still deeply upset and worried.
So was I.
Not to mention frightened and hurting. It took an enormous effort of will to bring my hands back up to my face. This time I set my fingertips against the still raw-feeling lines of my cheekbones, and then stroked down from there
with my thumbs to the hinges of my jaw. It felt like someone was hammering spikes into my jawbone as I swept my thumbs forward—shifting flesh and bone as I went. This time I didn’t scream. I didn’t dare, not while working on my jawbone. But oh how I whimpered.
It was the corners of my eyes that did me in. I’d wanted to reshape them to make me look less foreign. I’d never make myself look truly Zhani, not without much better sculpting skills than I possessed, but I’d hoped to at least split the difference between my Varyan roots and my Zhani home. But the nerves in my eyelids were simply too sensitive for what I was trying to do and I started to black out.
I could feel my control of the spell slipping away as I went under and I tried to hang on, but I just couldn’t keep it together. The glyphs under my skin started to pulse and jump as the spell backlashed and my muscles convulsed in response, driving my fingers deep into the flesh of my face. I felt my bones bend and twist in response to the magic and knew that I was seconds away from tearing my own face in half.
That’s when the voice came into my mind.
You are a Blade of Namara. The
last
Blade. You will control yourself as befits a servant of the goddess, and you will overcome this.
The voice was firm and cold and genderless, but strongly familiar, and my only thought was that somehow, beyond hope or prayer or death Justice herself was speaking to me. The thought was reinforced by the feeling of a second ghostly pair of hands closing over my own, weakly tugging at them, trying to move them back and away from my face. In that moment I believed that my goddess had returned to give me one last command.
And I obeyed.
How could I not? I reached through the agony and the backlash and the convulsions and I took control of my actions and my pain once again. I followed the guidance of the ghostly hands and stopped my own from tearing at my face. I’d never known pain like I felt then as I slowly and
carefully smoothed out the damage I had inflicted on myself. It made me want to curl up and die, but every time I thought I had nothing more to give, the voice would speak again into the darkness of my mind.
You are Aral Kingslayer. You will not fail. You cannot fail. I love you and I will not let you fail. You will do this. You will survive and you will triumph.
And somewhere in there I realized that it was not the voice of Namara I was hearing. It was Triss. The hands that guided mine were cold and silken, wisps spun from the shadow that connected us even across the uncrossable lines of the diagram. It should have been crushing—a sort of second losing of my goddess—but it wasn’t. It was deeply comforting.
Never in all the long centuries of my order had Blade and Shade communicated that way, words spoken clearly mind-to-mind. To have it happen now in this moment of dire need, was, quite simply, a miracle. My goddess might be dead, but there was no other power but Justice that would grant a Blade that beneficence. Not after we had been damned by the Court of Heaven itself. Somewhere, somehow, the ghost of Justice lived on and had given me what I needed when I most needed it.
With that to hold onto and Triss to guide me, I completed the difficult task of redrawing the lines of my face. Again, how could I not? When I finished, I released the threads of the bonewright, then bowed my head briefly and whispered into the void.
Thank you, Namara, wherever you may have gone.
Triss flowed up and around me then, enclosing me in his wings and his love.
She is in our hearts, as she has always been. You knew that once, though for a time you may have forgotten how to listen for her voice.
I looked inward, focusing my mind on the problems I now faced, and listening for the voice of my goddess to tell me what to do about them. But I could hear nothing but silence. I would have expected that to hurt me, like a new hope snatched away before it could fully form, but it didn’t.
Namara might not have answered me in the way I would once have expected her to, but somehow that was exactly as it should be.
Because Triss was right, but he was also wrong. Namara did live within us, but not in our hearts. She lived on in the ideal of justice and our duty to see it done. But justice was not the simple thing I had once believed it to be. In my youth I had seen Justice as a sort of divine idol in the shape of Namara. I had worshipped that idol and served her as best I could, and that was right for the boy that I was. But many things had changed in the years since then and not all for the worse.
In my youth I had believed not just in my goddess but in the
idea
of the gods, that they were our rightful overlords and that they always held our best interests in their hearts. I had seen Namara as a part of something greater than the base strivings of those who walked the surface of our world. Because of that, the death of my goddess at the hands of her fellows had very nearly killed my soul.
It had also rewritten my identity far more thoroughly than the bonewright ever could and in ways that I was only beginning to understand. For one, the gods were us. Whether our evils and petty cruelties were a reflection of those who created us, or whether in some way we had created the gods we deserved through the power of our belief didn’t matter. What mattered was that the Court of Heaven held no more claim to true justice than did the courts of men.
While I might still agree with Namara’s ideal of justice, I was starting to understand that in simply handing my conscience over to the goddess of justice, I might not have made the justest of choices. It wasn’t merely that I no longer saw the world in the stark black and white that I had as Namara’s Blade. It was more that by falling into the place where the grays dominated the scale, I had finally started to understand the importance of all that lay between the extremes.
The world was no simple place, and in becoming more complex myself I had begun to see the complexity of that world. It was not a comfortable feeling, nor one that lent
itself to the simple act of listening for the echo of the goddess in my heart. I had to
think
my way to the right answers now, an entirely more daunting proposition. Where
was
the justice in my present plight? And with it, my duty?