114 - A soul of obsidian, an icicle mind

There’s a lacuna in the line of memory. The next thing I recall is running down the path to the Dependent in my bare feet, with only the stars lighting my way. Surya chased me, yelling words I could not hear, but couldn’t keep up. It is all ragged. I know I threw open my mother’s door, heaved her out of bed and banged her up against the wall by the shoulders. But, nose to nose with her, I couldn’t speak. Some shred of sanity in me thought, ‘It’s because I didn’t have words then.’

Veraha is to be credited, not being a warrior. In the darkness he couldn’t know who the intruder was—though the fact that my mother, who was a warrior, didn’t palm-heel my nose might have told him something, if he’d been more awake. He did not yell or say anything, only shouldered the biggest fire poker and came up quietly behind me. Enough of my head cleared to let me whack both his hands open so he’d drop it, and smack him across the face so he’d know not to try anything else, with my back foot. Then my mother said, “Virani-e.”

Everything went silent, enough for me to hear Veraha, who’d gone for guards, run into Surya in the corridor. I looked into her eyes, black as onyxes in the darkness, so much my own, and knew she must be seeing and feeling the same, ‘so much my own.’ “Put it into words, my child,” she whispered. Surya had trained us all well. But my tongue stayed locked, and we both clearly heard Surya tell Veraha, “He’s remembered his stream-test.”

My mother took my face between my hands. I couldn’t see tears, but her brows had the line they took when she wept, and it was in her voice. “My child… My tiny, tiny baby.” She smoothed back my forelock, and set her teeth. “I make no excuses.”

A choked rasping was all that came out of me. In that ice-blade in me, I suddenly knew, was emotion as big as an avalanche; I felt if I set it loose it would never end, until I and all the world were engulfed. I couldn’t hold back the next surge of it, though, and it came out scraping like stone on stone. Surya pulled me to the bed gently by my hands, and got me sitting between himself and my mother, both wrapping their arms around me. Veraha lit a lamp, saying under his breath, “I hope that kyashin committee never catches wind of this.” I managed to get out, “Mama, Veraha, I’m sorry,” before the dam broke.

I don’t know how long it was. The cries came from the deepest place in me I’d ever felt cries come from, that I could remember, so deep that time ceased to have meaning. Newborn bawling sounds strange, in the voice of a man pushing thirty. Now and then, on Surya’s urging, I tried for words. At first all I could find were “cold” and “alone.” Then as the weeping started to ebb, the words came. “I was dying. The cold was crushing me, tearing me apart, and I was dying and even though I was dying no one would save me. You wouldn’t save me, you didn’t care, you just watched, I was dying and no one would save me.” I said this over and over, and my mother just listened wordlessly, tears raining, her arms tight around me. In time we lay down, and I fell asleep with my head on her shoulder, just as when I was a child.

†

Four ice-blades in the hissing darkness. Four ice-blades, the fingers of my sword-hand, grown outwards from a glacier heart, a soul of obsidian, an icicle mind. Four blades plunged into four tiny hearts, one of which withers and blackens and is gone.

I woke, beyond screaming. Tawaen, having been born to a slave-bred Yeoli, had never been tested; Kima and Vriah’s testing I hadn’t witnessed. I had been there for those of Roshten and his twin brother that the stream had killed. I knew what they’d all felt.

My mind was a tornado. Streaks like blades shot up and down my limbs; my breaths tore in and out of my lungs. I knew what I should do, the only solution. I crept out from my mother’s arm, opened the door. “Chevenga, you can’t go anywhere, healer’s orders.” The voice was that of Kaneka Iniya; he and three others of the Elite, all among the best at unarmed fighting, were posted at the door.

I clicked it shut, crept back through the room and climbed out the window. Did they think I couldn’t scale this wall, a perfect replica of the one I’d scaled as a child?

It was still pitch dark. I hardly felt the ground under my feet. My lungs seemed full of ice-flames; only one strand of the maelstrom in my head need be fixed on getting me there, and it was, firmly.

Even in the height of summer, the stream, springing as it does from a glacier, is always the same coldness; that’s why we use it. The burning on my skin was familiar, from fifteen, and from that much earlier time that I now remembered. It was deeply soothing, bringing blessed relief. A Yeoli knows in his bones how long it will take to kill someone two days old, with certainty. How long for someone nearly thirty years, who should never reach that age? There was a bead and a half or two, probably, before dawn; that should more than do it. Leach away the warmth in my body, drag away the heat of my life. Fourth Chevenga will flow away, dispersed, my only legacy an infinitesimal increase in the temperature of Terera Lake.

I turned face down, to drink it in, make the pain internal, too. I could breathe it in, even, if I wanted, do a fatal Kiss of the Stream; but no babies have the choice to make it that quick, so it wouldn’t be fair. I lay relaxed and peaceful, leaning my cheek into the pebbles on the stream bottom, except when I lifted my head now and then to take a breath. Then a hand grabbed my hair and a rock-hard arm wrapped around my neck.

Kaneka knew what he was doing, of course, pulling my head back fast to get his forearm under my chin before I could draw it down, instantly finding the arteries. He tightened on them just enough to make me feel a moment of light-headedness. I’d conceded too easily, at the door, letting them know I had another plan. How had they known I was here? They had to have been advised beforehand by someone who knew me well; I had an idea who. “Chevenga,” Kaneka said, “do you understand that you’ll be unconscious in an instant, if I choose?”

He had me pinned with his weight perfectly set so I could not throw him off with a twist; there was nothing I could do fast enough to stop it. If I were slow to answer, I knew, he’d give me another, more severe, taste of faintness. I said, “Yes.”

“You’re going to relax all over and let us do what we will without resisting, either by your agreement or my action. Your choice.”

I relaxed. His and two other pairs of hands pulled me out of the stream, and quickly trussed my elbows back and wrists forward, then hobbled my ankles, with soft cords. They laid me on my back on two of their cloaks, folding the hoods under my head, and put the third one over me. “Surya Chaelaecha contracted us,” Kaneka said. “He told us to tell you, you are to follow our orders as you are sworn to follow his. Here, open your mouth.” I did, and he laid in a thick bite-strap.

The emotion that the enwrapping of the stream had calmed came up full-bore. I was gone; my body moved of its own will. The part of me that stood far off, watching impassive, heard a wordless animal voice that sounded like mine. I don’t remember it well, as is always the case with attacks of full-blown madness. Surya’s standing orders to the four, in the event this happened, were to keep me from harming myself, but otherwise just let it burn itself out. Between the bonds, the strap and their holding me, I could not smash my head or my heels on the rocky ground, or bite through my tongue. It was hard enough work for them to put all four in a sweat (the fourth, who’d stayed at my mother’s door at first, had now joined us). At one point, Kaneka told me later, I arched my back right up off the ground while he was sitting on my hips, hoisting him full in the air, and held him there for a while. In total restraint is total freedom.

But of course it’s never that simple, with me. A bite-strap keeps you from biting, not from yelling, and we were well within earshot of the Dependent. I have a voice that can be heard across a battlefield when I raise it, and of course everyone in the Dependent knows it.

I was only distantly aware of them, but suddenly there were torches and drawn swords all around us, and Krero’s commander voice barking, “Don’t move a sinew or you die!” in every language he knew how to say it in. “Kras’, it’s us,” Kaneka said with, admirable smoothness, and explained. Krero smacked his brow, looking down at me. “Kahara, I should have known. One way or another, it’s always you making the action.”

They decided they had to either gag me, get me elsewhere, or both, else I’d wake all Vae Arahi if I hadn’t already, making the business of government drag slowly tomorrow. They chose both, and Krero stroked my brow and said “I’m sorry, Cheng, I can’t tell you how much I don’t like doing this,” before he wrapped my mouth thoroughly and tightly with bandages from his wound-kit.

As they trussed me to the litter, they agreed that they wanted to take me somewhere where they could un-gag me; but where? It was a clear and still night, the kind on which you can whistle and hear it echoed back a hundred times from different mountain-faces. There is no forest thick or deep enough, except at the Shrine, and of course people go there for peace. The Hearthstone Independent, they finally decided; had I not been unable to for more than one reason, I would have suggested Surya’s healing room, so well lined with sea-sponges that a death-cry from inside could barely be heard right outside the door, but one of them thought of it anyway.

So they carried me there, but of course the door was locked, and Kaneka remembered that Surya was sleeping back in the Dependent. Krero seriously considered kicking it in (“He’ll understand!”) until someone else remembered that Kaninjer, liking the idea, had had one of the rooms in his clinic sponge-lined as well. Someone was always awake there.

They ungagged me, but left the bite-strap there. I started coming out of it, from sheer exhaustion, as daylight began to creep in around the cracks of the shutters. I’d have a moment of calm, then I’d think, “I did that to my children,” and it would come shrieking back. It was almost as if I wanted to stay in the madness so as fend off the truth. My mother, I realized, was there, sitting silently with her arms around me, tears streaming, though she very rarely cries.

It was exhaustion that ended it. Sleep pulled at my body, but filled my mind with terror; I might dream. On Kaninjer’s promise that the stuff he was giving me would make dreams impossible, I took it, along with a lot of water, and fell into a sleep like death in what seemed like a bare moment.

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