181 - Of all animals, we are the most naked

The eleventh bead clicked. Why had everyone else gone to bed without wondering where he was? It came to me: he’d told them we’d be doing a late session when he’d gone to kiss the children. Of course, he’d throw everyone off his trail but me.

Two beads, he’s been out there. How much would the cold have gotten into him by now? I tried to calculate. Wearing hardly anything, soaked through, ice falling, wind, no fat, so strong but weakened so many ways, had the usual dinner, no wine, in emotional crisis… he must be incapable of killing anyone who tries to stop him, at this point. If I run to Krero, he could have people swarming all over Haranin in a few tenths. Perhaps that would be everything going as it should.

Then it occurred to me that I was waiting in the utterly wrong place, if he did change his mind and come back, as I’d predicted, having taken a deep chill, which at this point was certain. If it was bad enough to affect his mind, he’d go straight into the hot-tub, forgetting that this was the worst thing to do, that it could stop his heart with shock, or make him faint and then drown. For all I know—he could have already. I took the stairs down three at a time.

All-Spirit spoke to me, beneath my conscious hearing. On the floor just inside the door to what they called the water-room, where in his right mind he would never leave Chirel, it lay; running, I saw it as I was about to step on it, and turned my step into a leap, over it. He was crawling on hands and knees, shivering so violently he could barely keep his balance even that way, his shorn hair white with snow. In his aura, which was weak overall, every other feeling was effaced by desperation for scalding hot water.

The room has a great stone Brahvnikian-style hive-stove; the fire was probably just coals, now, but the hearthstone was warm. When I carried him to it he tried to fight, cursing me with chattering teeth and slurring as if he were drunk, but he had no strength. His skin was death-pale and felt icy; his lips were blue. “You have to warm up more slowly,” I said. “Hot tub, yes, but only when you’re no longer half-frozen. Relax.” I opened the stove-doors, threw on two pieces of wood and closed them again, got his clothes off and him dry with towels, stripped myself and lay beside him on the hearthstone, pulling him close against me on his side, so fire warmed his front, the stone warmed his side and I warmed his back. The iron of the stove doors ticked steadily, growing hotter; I shifted his head as close to them as I thought would not burn him, and said, “Open your mouth and breathe in heat. That helps more than anything.”

“B-b-b-breathe in ac-c-c-cept-t-tance,” he rasped through chattering teeth.

“It’s the coldness in your innards that’s most deadly, so draw heat into them.”

“They d-d-die of brok-k-k-ken hearts, I know.” It might be a while before he made sense. But he obeyed me, his head quivering on my hand. “He s-s-said he would c-c-c-come back when we no longer d-d-d-did it. An-n-nother life. His sp-p-pirit-t was on a rock, as I was g-g-g-groping my way down. ‘I will b-b-b-be a twin again, Ab-b-ba. Ama is carrying t-t-t-twins. How many d-d-d-deaths do you rememb-b-b-ber, Surya?” So, he knew who was with him, at least.

“Breathe deeply. Draw it right down to the pit of your lungs.” With each good breath his aura grew visibly brighter, even from inside most of it.

“A-e k-k-kras. The Lak-k-kans have it all in their rec-c-c-cords of lives. T-t-t-ten thousand new names. I wonder if th-th-they will all c-c-come back in once place, or sc-c-catter all over the Earthsphere? Or mayb-b-be b-b-b-beyond the sk-k-ky, if people live on the stars. G-g-go… fly… g-g-go with the love of the one who s-s-s-sent you there.

“N-n-norii told me t-t-t-to write what I have lived… my life because it’s everything, ha ha. K-k-kyash, I’m sure I can’t hold a p-p-pen right now. ‘B-b-breathe in accept-t-tance of heat… Heat is life. Of all an-n-nimals we are the m-m-most nak-k-ked. We live d-d-d-defenseless, with no f-f-fortress of fur or f-f-feathers. We t-t-test ourselves in c-c-cold with our op-p-pen sk-k-kin. A lamb or a c-c-c-calf walks a moment out of the womb; a ch-ch-ch-child, a year. F-f-fifteen years later he p-p-p-puts on armour. D-d-did you put more wood on?”

So he knew where he was, too; that was good. “Yes, Virani-e. You needn’t worry about anything but breathing in heat, deep.”

“Thanks, Surya. T-t-tell me… what you f-f-felt about K-k-kuraila, d-d-do you think it’s th-th-that you knew her in a p-p-p-past life? D-d-do you remember liv-v-v-ving before?”

“Yes,” I said. “I will tell you as much as you want to know, later, when you aren’t so distracted. You keep forgetting: breathe in the heat, right down to there.”

“F-f-fair enough. I know what you’ve b-b-been trying to c-c-convince me, Surya. Th-th-that I am ent-t-tirely here. I have n-n-never felt I was. I have always f-f-felt part g-g-g-ghost to myself. On the f-f-field, where ev-v-verything is b-b-backwards anyway, th-the opposite of real l-l-l-life, it helps. If you are a g-g-g-ghost, st-t-teel cannot t-t-touch you. You n-n-need not fear d-d-d-death if you are already d-d-dead. I made the b-b-best of it.

“Sssssurya, you know what I did the other d-d-day? I wrote a poem… t-t-truly… ab-b-bout doing a back-flip in a d-d-double wing with Nik-k-ku. I’d b-be the last p-p-person you’d exp-p-pect to write a poem, except that-t-t I know a Mahid who’s a poet. Writes them all the time… he thinks in poetry. Bec-c-cause he was only allowed t-t-to think the fift-t-ty maxims… they are d-d-dark poetry in his mind, p-p-poetry of st-t-tone, p-poetry that d-does not die. B-b-but poetry… is immort-t-tal, yes? P-p-probably mine is c-c-crap… see what he thinks.”

I was suddenly ashamed I’d snooped in his papers. “Breathe in the heat, Virani-e. Concentrate on it.”

“I know my mind is g-g-going all over. M-maybe I can soul-t-t-travel.”

“No. Not right now. That’s an order. Stay here.”

“A-e k-k-kras. M-m-my will is yours ag-gain.” So he remembered reclaiming it, too. “M-m-mana was up th-th-there, t-t-too. He said, ‘Why d-d-do you think there is no warmth for you when th-th-there is s-s-s-so much, V-virani-e?’ Hey… I n-n-never t-t-told him that name. Maybe he’s b-b-been listening in on my c-c-conversations. C-c-can I get in the ky-ky-kyashin hot tub yet? Maybe if the wat-t-ter’s burning enough, the g-g-great person can wash off the f-f-fatal flaw.”

“When the shivering is gone,” I said. He tried to still it by will, managed only for a few moments. “It’ll be soonest if you breathe in heat, deep as you can.” He did that, putting his mind to it, saying nothing for a time, his chest rising and falling deliberately under my arm. The shivering faded more.

“I think... I might have been seeing things up there,” he said finally.

“It happens, with a bad internal chill. I wouldn’t worry.”

“I don’t even know how long I was outside… I didn’t know cold did that to the mind. What must it do to the minds of infants?”

Of course losing his sense of time would bother him more than the danger of wandering off a cliff. “Two beads,” I said. “It must be closer to twelfth by now. We get you past the shivering, you soak for a bit—not long—and then bed. And sleep in tomorrow.”

“I am asa kraiya enough that I can’t put a sword into flesh. Not even my own.” I said nothing. He wasn’t up to hearing what I would say, yet. “I should have known. Surya… I am sorry. For everything I said that hurt you, and especially for that which hurt you the worst, I am sorry. I… I was beyond thoughtless to you, I was cruel.”

“It was the death-in-you, Virani-e. Not you. I know that.”

“But the words came out of my mouth.” He tried to pull away from me, and I tightened my arms. “I’m forsworn, too, Second Fire come, before a judge.”

“I think most would say that if someone of your skill decides to do it with a sword and then doesn’t even manage to land a scratch on himself, it can’t really be called an attempt,” I said. He fingered his neck, under his jaw on the right where the artery runs and he has that impossible scar, a scar from a wound that should be mortal, from the Arkan Ten Tens. A drawing-outward cut, his sword-hand driving it deep… He’d held the edge there, trying to talk himself into it, for the entire time except when he’d been climbing up and then back down. The mark of it was in his aura. “I haven’t said anything to anyone,” I said.

“You are better to me than I deserve.”

“It’s not until tomorrow, that we’re going to talk about what you deserve. What you want and need is to soak in hot water, and it’s time. Do you think you can walk, or am I carrying you? If you’re going to try walking, take your time getting up.”

Of course he was going to try walking. I don’t know why I bother asking. He managed it, leaning on my arm and going very slowly. “So stiff,” he groaned.

“And you want to work the muscles, I know, as you normally would. Don’t. Your whole body is still colder than it should be.”

As he sat down in the tub, he gave a gasping moan of sheer this-is-what-I-was-waiting-for pleasure. He leaned his head back on the rim and closed his eyes. I got in with him. It felt better than I expected; I remembered, I’d had a tense night too. “Here,” I said. “Put your head right back, so all but your face is under. You know how much blood runs through the head; it will carry warmth to all the rest of you.” I pulled him next to me and held him with one hand under his head and the other under his lower back so he could relax entirely, half-floating. “All-Spirit, that feels good,” he whispered. “Thank you, Surya.” I kept him there until he was as warm as he should be, and dozing, then helped him towel off, and walked him to the couch in my office. Once he was asleep, I’d go upstairs and tell them I’d kept him because the session had been an intense one.

It occurred to me, it might not be entirely over. What if the death-in-him gained strength as he did? Just as I was starting to look for it in his aura, he said, with his eyes still closed, “My poor body. It’s been through the grinder… especially lately. I wonder sometimes whether one day it might just give out.”

That’s the most sensible thing you’ve said since I’ve known you, I thought. Will you take it to its conclusion? “That’s inevitable, in time, unless it’s prevented,” I said. “Any ideas how?”

“Quit putting it through the grinder,” he said, still without opening his eyes, as I covered him thickly with feather quilts. “Have mercy on myself.”

What I saw in his aura made me want to cry up to the sky.

--

Read More......

180 - Peace awaits you

I stayed away from the bedchambers, where he, Shaina, Etana and Niku had tucked their children into bed and kissed them good night a little earlier. I was the one who was assigned to him right now; their first question to me would be why wasn’t he with me, and their second, where was he? The thing that people usually think of last—that a person has come to grief by his own hand—would be the thing they’d think of first. How could I tell them, ‘He went to kill himself but I let him go because I trust him not to’? If one of them came toward me, I decided, I’d duck into an alcove.

His office was more suffused with the aura of his touch than anywhere else. Here the glow-globes cast a light that was the colour of flame, but softer. I knew the bookshelves, their doors made of beveled Arkan glass, held every war-craft book ever published; I wondered whether he’d planned to donate them all to the Circle School when he went asa kraiya. He said he didn’t have time to write a note… so why am I looking? Maybe he’d just meant to throw me off, and there was one, intended for someone else. Or perhaps I was looking for something else.

On the oaken desk, the battered ebon lap-desk with the brass corners dented here and there—he’d carried it with him all through the Arkan war and two terms as Imperator—sat closed. Papers lay all over, some handwritten, some machine-written, some Enchian, some Yeoli, some Arkan; everywhere was his fast firm athali scrawl, not only in black but here and there in red, blue and green; were the different colours random, or did they have some meaning? A book lay open right in front of his chair: something of significance? No, just an Arkan-Yeoli/Yeoli-Arkan dictionary. His map-globe, with the known world painted on it, and the unknown side shadowed in darkness, stood on a corner of the desk. Around one of the glow-globes stood a half-circle of beautifully-wrought porcelain statues, of his children—Lakan-style, they had real hair, donated by the children themselves.

Atop a stack of four books I saw an Enchian edition of The Yeoli Ritual Immersion: Origins, History, Incidence and Sequelae, by Meninder of Haiuroru University; the other three were also works by Haians about the stream-test. He was studying it. A medicine-box in the Haian style stood open; I saw the transparent glow of the medicines, each with its different hue, radiating from the tops of the vials. Had he somehow worsened his moment of truth by taking something?

To the inside of the lid was strapped a leather-bound booklet, entitled, in Yeoli, Manual of Home Medicine Use; the cover was inscribed, “For Chevenga, on the occasion of your birthday, Y. 1554; in health, Kaninjer.” Something made me untie the strap, and open the booklet. It was annotated all through in his hand. “K says unfailing on colds that start with sneezing.” —“K says stomach worse also with eating onions.” —“K says take one at the thirtieth hundred-potency before single-wing-flight, and no airsickness.” —“K says theme: ‘wants to but cannot’.”

How can you think you are not a healer?

A bead in the clock on the desk clicked. It was ten and a half beads, by the noon to noon way of reading an Arkan clock. He’d left around the ninth. The more time went by, the higher the odds were that I was wrong. The storm was gone, but sleet pattered on the glass of the office skylights; he’d been wearing only a shirt and a kilt, no cloak even. Even if he can’t find it in himself to turn the sword on himself or leap off a cliff, he could still freeze to death… or become dazed by the cold and step off a cliff without meaning to… Most likely he was kneeling warrior-style on a ledge somewhere, holding the sword-edge to his throat, trying to make the final argument to himself.

A paper caught my eye, by how the lines mostly fell short of one margin, leaving more of it white than usual.

To: Fourth

From: Fourth

a 63 1556

Ilesias, I am no writer, unless you count political correspondence, draft laws and that sort of thing, or putting my rambling tales to ink, which anyone can do. To get any good at it I’d have to practice more than I have time for. (In the day, I mean. Always I have to clarify such words, now.)

I’ll say, though, that I recently did find myself wanting to describe something I remember feeling—you know how it is—to pin a moment in time so that it is captured forever, like a flying insect in amber, so that you can always live it again by reading the words back. So—my first attempt at poetry. Please be merciful and forgive the flaws, but point them out so I can correct them.

We turn our faces into the wind

Your brown sword-hand and my pale shield-hand tender on the bar

Our other arms clasping each other.

Naked as birds we run off the edge giggling,

the trees beneath us turquoise with haze,

a hawk circling a hundred man-heights below.

When you taught me, you said feel;

You no longer have just arms and legs, you have wings.

The frame is your bones, the silk your skin;

feel through it what the wind and the pull of the Earthsphere

are whispering to you.

Move with all of you but nothing of you,

Embrace the void, slice the liquid and be borne by the solid

which are the substance of the sky, all at once.

Then together we learned to be in such harmony,

that we could make two hands of different hues on the bar

Into one pair of hands.

The sky is a blacker blue than you see even from mountain-peaks,

the clouds bright against their shadows on faint land;

we take a shock as icy as a mountain stream as we leave the tower of warm air that lifted us;

our breathlessness is not only from joy.

Can we do this?

Do we know each other so well?

We have both seen people die trying it, singly.

One tumbling tail over tip, jewel-bright wings as helpless as a cast stone;

another spun so fast we all knew she could no longer think when she hit ground,

though she could no doubt fear.

You say: omores, the only risk is half-action. Neither of us is known for that.

We close our eyes and kiss,

in case always and forever as long as we have

ends here.

We pull hard and dive like an eagle spying prey.

Wind thrums past the wires, hisses through the silk, beats our faces and clenched bodies.

Without a word, we uncurl, reach and arch backwards as one.

Now the sun shines up from beneath, caressing your womanhood and my manhood and all our war-scars.

Now above our heads and the wing are the shadowed stone low-reliefs that are Hetharin and Haranin, the sapphire of Terera Lake, the specks of Hearthstones and Assembly Palace.

For the most perfect and deadly moment, we are a cloud, a feather, a ghost, as empty of weight as the void in which we float—

then we find the substance of the sky liquid and then solid again, catching us hard by wing and harness.

We both would die happy, if it we died this way, but for now

we live.

Your friend always,

Virani-e, called Chevenga.

It’s to Ilesias Mahid; Fourth Ilesias, that’s his Mahid number, hence Fourth to Fourth. Dated yesterday; did he write the poem then, or earlier? There were no corrections; either he’d copied it from another draft, or it had come from his mind onto the paper perfect enough to satisfy him. Why isn’t it sent? It was as if he’d simply been interrupted in what he was doing, by the resurgence of the death-in-him.

Or else—this had been the start of the lethal chain of thoughts. Their marriage has become delicate enough that he signed consideration on their certificate, and I haven’t let him hold the bar while flying for the better part of a year.

No. I reminded myself: he was in his moment of truth, the last battle. Most people who fail it turn off the path and just stay trapped in whatever they’re trapped in, and the healer simply doesn’t hear from them again. Failure would put him on his pyre. That had always been the danger.

But I had my prognosis. I reminded myself: I am certain.

Yet my certainty made it no less his choice. I suddenly knew what I wanted to say to him, through the spaceless pathways of thought, if he could hear. It would be best if I had an image of him. On the open shelf near the desk was his copy of Lives of Notables. I pulled it out, opened it to his entry. The Arkan engraving was from when he’d been younger, a freshly-ascended semanakraseye, his face less roughened with scars or worn with cares. I put my hands on the page where his shoulders were pictured.

“First Virani-e Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e. I have said and done all I can, as have you. Yes, you and I both always knew, in the end, it would come down to your choice, to what you want in your heart of hearts. You have been entirely free in your choices, in truth, throughout.

“Whatever you choose, All-Spirit is with you. If I never see you alive again, I will know that is what was meant to be. If I do: same. I said it at the start, and it hasn’t changed, because it never does.

“Whatever you choose, know that you are loved, and know that you are one with the all. Above all, know that what you need and want by far the most in the world—peace—awaits you, either way. Be with All-Spirit, my client and my friend.”

--

Read More......

179 - Fear is the liar of thought

I took a very deep breath. And another. And another. I willed myself to stay in the circle of my breaths, keeping them very deep.

What stopped me—the death-in-him? The censure of All-Spirit? Knowledge in myself that it would be wrong to constrain him now? Just plain fear? Had it been for good reasons or bad?

He’s right, I told myself. Somehow, he’s right; everything is going as it should. But what was my part in it?

By the law of the land, I should run and tell someone, have the darya semanakraseyeni chase him and restrain him, as I had before. By the law of healing, I should not, because in his moment of truth his fate was where it must be and truly was, in his own hands.

For my own sake, I should, because I would indeed be truth-drugged if he succeeded, and I would reveal I had done nothing that could stop him though he’d told me clearly his intent and I couldn’t tell from his aura that he would not succeed; I’d probably be charged, maybe even for causing his death, based on what he’d said, and be sentenced to exile with safe conduct if I was lucky, without if I was not, in which case I’d end up like Sharaina, a red smear on the courthouse steps.

For his sake, I should not, in case he did not carry it through, so no one need know and he need not be embarrassed; because he was breaking an oath sworn Second Fire come in a court of law, I could see Linasika having him charged again.

For my sake, for his sake, for Yeola-e’s sake, I should, I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t, I should— I took in the breath the Haians call “expansive”—fast and deep almost enough to hurt—then let it out over a count of fifty, forcing calm on my mind.

Of course if you are in indecision for long enough, decision is taken out of your hands. He might be dead already.

I breathed, and I prayed. I am just standing here, instead of acting. Is All-Spirit directing me? Please, All-Spirit, be directing me. Please let this stillness, and my inability to touch his aura, be from an instruction of yours I hear only beneath my conscious mind.

I am not a master, I thought. The face of Renhaer, my master on Haiu Menshir, came suddenly into my mind, with the intricate network of smile-wrinkles on delicate brown skin beside either of his black eyes, and the perpetual gentle grin. “There is no one with a greater gift than yours that I have ever taught, Kinamun,” he told me, the day that I came, unwittingly, to the end of my training. “There is nothing more you can learn by instruction; only by the doing. Go. Choose your work carefully, as it best for the greatest strength to be applied at the point of greatest benefit. You have it in your power to touch history.”

That was only three years ago. I am not him. Learn only by doing, yes, but I haven’t been doing it for that long, I know nothing, really, I have touched history by failing…

It’s fear. It’s emotion, I told myself. I did another expansive breath. Fear is the liar of thought. The thoughts one has when seized in fear are always lies. I must not credit them, however strong the urge. Even the feeling that fear has, like a wall, is a lie; it can be gone fast as a puff of wind on the realization of truth. Something I’d say to reassure those patients who came to me with senseless fears: once upon a time, I was afraid of closed-in spaces. I thought I would be forever; I felt as if it was part of me as much as my hand or my face. But I am no longer. It was gone the moment I learned why it was there.

(The tunnel of the mine falling in around me… my pity, first, for those who died fast, crushed immediately or bleeding from mangled limbs, and then as the stink worsened, the thirst grew desperate and I started seeing and hearing unthinkable things in the perfect darkness and silence… the envy. Six centuries ago. Not now. Now I was in Renhaer’s healing room. That was the past, not part of me.)

When I exposed the roots, I tell them, I killed the vine.

Still, what I feared now was now. He could be lying shattered at the foot of a cliff… or bleeding out from a throat-cut… No, I told myself. Fear is the liar of thought. Even if these things are possible, or even likely, the imaginings come from fear and so are still lies, that I must not base my choices on.

Breathe in acceptance, I told myself. Everything is what it is, and there is no escaping that. Only with full acceptance of what has happened will you be able to bear it; only in that state will it come clear what to do. My emotion was nothing in the face of the greater truth. I parsed it out. It was just emotion, coming from my love for a client, my bond with a person, my knowing what he could be, to the world, if he lived, and my fear for my own fate—all natural things. I set myself free to feel them, but in the awareness that they were nothing but emotions. I stood in his training-room with tears of terror running down my cheeks, and my body trembling all over. When it eased a little, I heard the voice of All-Spirit.

Underneath your fear is your true prognosis. What is it?

“He won’t do it. He’ll choose life.”

All along, you have trusted your own judgment entirely, and rightfully. Why not now?

So I decided. He was on his own.

†

The Hearthstone Independent, a bustling place in summer when travel is good, quiets down in winter. He didn’t tend to have as many guests these days as he’d had before anyway, turning inward as he’d had to. The family’s bedchambers must be alive with children’s noise; the rest of the place was quiet as a tomb, or a museum when it is closed.

I walked down dim corridors, lit only by the Zak glow-globes that never go out, shedding their soft pools of strange cold light. Parts are like a museum; the Clock Room, for instance, is filled with his collection of time-pieces, given him by friends and associates from the time they learned he liked them. In that room, it is never quiet; there is a constant even chorus of clicks, ticks, drips, knocks, chimes, and all manner of other sounds, that gets almost deafening, in different ways, on the Haian aer and then the Arkan bead, most impressive when the two coincide. Time passes very loudly, in the Clock Room, so that you cannot help but be vividly aware of it, to enter a mental state that counts every moment.

I went through the dining hall, with its chandeliers only one-in-twenty-five lit now, dimming the brilliant murals so that they were almost colourless and macabre. From the vaulted ceiling hangs the single-wing in which he descended into Arko for the final battle, his one memento from the Arkan war. It is blue-green with the seven stars like a Yeoli banner, and has the odd hole burned through by sparks from Arko burning that landed on it when he left it on the Marble Palace roof to fight through the corridors; now in the half-light it hung black like a giant straight-winged bat among flickering shadows.

I went upstairs by one of the double marble stairways that frame the painting Honour, by Haiksilias Lizan, which is always kraumak-lit. It depicts the moment in the duel Chevenga fought against Kallijas for Vae Arahi, when he decided to get up and fight on, as his people were demanding, rather than concede, after he’d slipped on a stone and been struck. (Who but he would commission, and then hang where everyone who came into his house would see it, a painting showing him stretched out flat on the ground from a head-blow?)

Your people would demand it again now, I thought. But I’ve taught you to go your own way.

I wondered what time it was.

--

Read More......

[Author's note: TWF voting impact & Google Wave]

THANK YOU to everyone who voted at Top Web Fiction for The Philosopher in Arms (and Eclipse Court). Your votes have made a real difference already.

As of this writing, Shirley and I are occupying 1/5 of the top ten overall with PA at #5 and EC at #10, which means we both got to post nifty banner ads. In the fantasy category, PA is at #3 and EC at #6. In the science fiction category, PA is at #1 and EC is not on the board because Shirley must not have included "science fiction" as one of her tags. (Update: fixed.) What we're writing here is as much sf as it is fantasy.

But the more important impact is invisible to you. Due to your votes and hence our presence high in the race, our hits are way up. We both had record days yesterday, and we didn't do anything else especially promotional, so there can't be any other reason. THANK YOU, THANK YOU, and did I mention, THANK YOU? We'll see whether that increase continues. Considering the popularity of Web Fiction Guide (3,000 unique hits per month, slowly increasing) and that the Top Web Fiction service is the newest and shiniest thing over there, I think there's cause for optimism.

Thank you, again. Your vote remains valid for seven days, so naturally I will want you to renew it. What I will do is post a "Top Fiction Tuesday" reminder on PA every Tuesday, since this past Tuesday is when the voting really started, and since voting takes only seconds and requires no registration, I hope you'll help keep me (and Shirley) high in the standings so as to let surfing readers searching for good weblit that there's some right over here.

†

So I heard about Google Wave from one Gabriel Gadfly over at Weblit.us . This is a tool that the scarily-brilliant Google people have come up with for online collaboration, and I immediately saw its potential as a role-playing tool for Shirley and me, and so immediately began scrabbling, begging and whoring for an invite. It's in beta at the moment so you can't just sign on; you have to get invited by somebody who already has it.

Shirley and I both got signed on two days ago, but it was yesterday that we tested it in an actual working context. Our impression: AMAZING. We are never going to go back to RPing by IM again. Not only can you textually role-play the scene, but the author can add the narrative at the same time. It is WONDERFUL.

So we did two scenes, one of which was incorporated into yesterday's EC post, and the other of which was incorporated in yesterday's PA post. For a more detailed recounting of the experience, see my post on WebLit.us.

Were we the first weblit authors ever to include Wave-generated material into our posted works? We like to think so.

If you think Google Wave might be useful to you -- it's great for any kind of collaborative material whether it be novels or corporate reports -- and would like an invite, let me know, as I have six invites left at the moment (and Shirley probably has some too, or will soon). Email me at hearth at xplornet dot com with the email address to which you'd like me to send the invite.





--

Read More......

178 - Everything is going as it should

atakina 66 1556

Dear Chevenga:

I don’t understand why you keep running to suicide, which you’ve done now twice that I know of. It just makes no sense. It seems that when things don’t go the way you want, you figure you have to do yourself in, as though that’s going to undo what happened and make the world a better place. You’re sworn to obey the people and serve, aren’t you? Did we ask you to off yourself with each mistake? Well, I sure as shit didn’t. You’ve done so much for us already and could do so much more if you live, which you say you want to in spite of that death-in-you thing. So how do you come to death as a way of atoning for a screw-up? It won’t change history, it sure won’t do none of us good.

I figure all of us have made mistakes and some of us bigger mistakes than others, and I guess folks with big responsibility have a chance of making bigger mistakes than folks with little, but it’s not like you’re the only one who ever made a mistake. And isn’t just because of you that others have screwed up—most of us do that fine all by ourselves. And some folks are just mean and miserable and just waiting for mom or dad or their commander to look away for a moment so they can be as cruel and selfish as they want. It’s not like even you can control every one of them all the time or even a good chunk of it.

Anyway, we’re in this together. So unless you think all of us in Yeola-e should throw ourselves over the cliff each time we have a big screw-up, like a flock of sheep following the bellwether off of one, you need to quit doing that yourself or you’re going to have a pretty empty country.

So there. I don’t know whether I’ve expressed myself well; I’m just an ordinary fellow. But I say you need to get over thinking this you-got-to-kill-yourself thing and start remembering all the good you’ve done and would like to do yet. We could sure use you alive.

Melisaro Ora

Selina, Threshing Moon 1556

†

The way things had turned out, we’d do the asa kraiya ceremony just three days after the Committee released its findings. Not the timing I would have chosen, had I the choice. But I am just the aura-seer. The life of Chevenga runs, more even than I knew when we started, on a schedule willed by the people.

The last thing he needed was to be nervous about the Committee’s findings at the same time. My feeling, which I told him often, was that they’d write the truth: there had only ever really been one thing amiss with him, we were working hard on solving it, and there was every reason to be confident we would. But he could not know for sure, of course, until he saw it in ink. And I could hardly go to the Chevengani Mental State Assessment Committee and say, “Please ask for another extension, because Chevenga’s mental state is too delicate.” They’d present their report to Assembly on atakina 68 and the ceremony would be on 71.

I write an account, which no one will ever see, because what happened the night of atakina 64, 1556, will not be in his, which everyone will.

The last and strongest attempt of the death-in-him was upon him. I had seen the first slight waves of it rising three or four days before. The rage he’d felt on my telling him he need not go asa kraiya to live long, on 63, had soon passed, as he saw the sense of it. I told him on the morning of 64 that we would take a break today, which he seemed to take as a relief. I did not learn until later that, when he went down to Assembly Palace, it was to declare to Linasika Aramichiya that he intended to resign.

Within ten days of his asa kraiya ceremony, I had predicted in my own mind; it was seven.

“Step-dad!” Marel called me, from the door to our chambers, that evening. “The semanakraseye wants to speak to you.” Once I was in the corridor, Skorsas, who’d come here to accompany him, left us, almost scurrying.

I felt as if a hand were crushing my windpipe, and ice spreading all over my skin. The death-in-him filled his aura, smoky black and purple-grey and curling over and around him like the wings of an Arkan demon. It pervaded every vortex and energy-line, disordering and discolouring them all. The sword in him was so bright it burned my eyes, like the sun.

His physical face was impassive. “Surya, come with me,” he said, turned away and strode off down the corridor. I had never been afraid of what was in him before; I slowed my breathing and started an inward chant.

“Virani-e…” I wasn’t sure what to say.

“I cancel the relinquishment and claim back my will,” he said, without even a glance. I knew he’d do that, I reminded myself. This was a necessary part of his path, and it always involves the patient claiming independence from the healer. Like adulthood, the first stirrings come in rebelliousness. That didn’t stop terror from shooting through me. What was worst was how calmly he said it, and how precisely controlled and yet free every movement was, when I could see with my own eyes the life in him thrashing and screaming in the claws of the death. I followed him to the training-room, where he now kept Chirel. He lifted it off its rack, slung it on his shoulder, and turned to face me.

“I don’t have time or patience to write a note, so let this be it,” he said. “They’ll truth-drug you and you’ll repeat it back verbatim.

“I tried to save my own life, as anyone would, and in the process I destroyed it, and my good name. I would have died in happy ignorance with my honour and my dignity intact, and left a mark in history such that people in the future might have admired and emulated me. As it is, I’ve lost or am losing my friends, my family’s in chaos, I can’t spar, I can’t swim, I can’t fly, I can’t be alone, I can’t defend myself, I’m being hounded out of politics, I’m estranged from the military, the world thinks I’m a lunatic, and that’s how history will remember me. None of it can be undone… I can’t hide my foreknowledge again, I can’t undo the conviction, I can’t un-write whatever the Committee is going to present in three days, I can’t retroactively silence Linasika Aramichiya and erase everything he’s said that has rung true to my people.”

“Viran—”

“Chevenga,” he snapped, cutting me off. I’ll always be known as Chevenga. If I think I can change that name, I’m”—he spat out an acid laugh—“out of my mind! It’s carved into the stones, and it’s carved into the memories, and a thousand years from now I’ll be Chevenga no matter how much I want to be Virani-e. Chevenga the warrior; it’s madness to think I can go asa kraiya.”

A blurring flicker, and Chirel was in his hand, as if it had sprung out of the scabbard. He grabbed the hair that grew from above his brow and scythed it off short, then did the same with the sides and the back. The ancient blade cut through his black curls as if they were liquid. “I guess,” he said as he did it, “if everything is going as it should, what was meant to be, what was the way of All-Spirit, was that I should be destroyed… it’s for the best somehow… I can see that. I am too deadly, I am too powerful, there is too much darkness in me… I am insane, I can’t go on pretending I’m not… it was all for a reason, death is best for me, and best for the world. There… good enough… Skorsas will even it out when my body’s being prepared for the pyre.”

“You swore before a judge, Second Fire come, that you would never again attempt it,” I said, matching his unearthly calm as best I could. “You honoured that last time.”

He spat out another vitriolic laugh. “What are they going to do—arrest my corpse? Surya…” He took a deep breath, and his face softened. “I’m sorry. You’ve just tried to help, all you’ve done is healing work, and you’ve done it very well, as well or better than anyone else in the world could have done it. That it’s not enough is only because the patient is too far gone. It’s as you said in the first session; if it’s not enough, we will both know we did our best and I will go on to the next thing. It’s all my fault, Surya. Take that to heart, know that I know the fault is all mine and not yours at all.”

“Virani-e—Chevenga—nothing you are saying is true.” I couldn’t think of what else to say.

“Tell them this, Surya. My people, whom I love, the fault is all with me. I made a mistake, letting myself believe that it was death-obligation, not foreknowledge. I made a mistake going through this whole thing, and imposing the chaos and the madness that is in me on the world. I made a mistake not just accepting my fate with grace, but instead trying to do the impossible, fight my way out of it. I’m sorry for not staying with what I first planned, which would have been much more kind to everyone. I am sorry, I can’t say how sorry, for all the pain I have caused, to so many people, in all my life. I apologize in particular to those who have tried to help me, to those who somehow, for some reason, still love me, for trying where I could never have succeeded, so they suffer the pain of my failure. But understand, I count it as no one’s failure but my own. From the start, Surya, you’ve said it was all ultimately my choice; you didn’t lie there; I was taught that by my father also, ‘As always, you choose.’ I am sorry for the pain the choice I take now will cause, but I also know that it will save greater pain in the long run.

“I will not die in honour and loved as I would have; so people will suffer less for my loss than they did for my father’s, which is a blessing. All that’s left to me is to cut through this mess once and for all, so neither I nor anyone else will have to bear living with it any longer. I will go up onto the mountain and die as I am, as I was meant to be. If anyone tries to stop me I’ll kill them.”

He turned to go. I reached with my aura toward his to stop him, to weaken first the hand that held the sword, then the rest of his body. Something stopped me; it was as if my will and energy hit a wall. He strode to the great double-doors, saying over his shoulder, “Farewell, Surya. Thank you for everything. Go with All-Spirit. And don’t worry, since you have been right all along: everything is going as it should.” The doors closed behind him.

--

Read More......

[Author's note: what's this voting thing?]

In case you didn't read the post over at PA, Web Fiction Guide has started a popular vote service for online writing entitled "Top Web Fiction." You don't have to register or anything to vote -- just fill in a prove-you're-not-a-bot blank, and vote. The vote is renewed for seven days each time you vote, so I'll start doing an every-Tuesday reminder on both sites.

Though asa kraiya is listed at WFG, it doesn't show up on this listing because I am encouraging people to vote for PA instead, as that's the beginning of the story and the whole idea is to advertise my work to readers who've never heard of me. If people who've read the dead-tree books find PA, they'll find ak. Besides, I want them to read PA anyway.

So, please, exercise your democratic rights like good Yeolis////// netizens. Vote for PA... vote for Eclipse Court... vote for other weblit you like and think deserves greater exposure (you can vote for more than one site.) For me, it's all about finding those readers who will get something out of my writing.





--

Read More......

177 - You've worked long and hard for this

To: the Chevengani Mental State Assessment Committee

From: Linasika Aramichiya, Servant of Michalere

atakina 64, Y. 1556

Dear Sib Members of the Committee:

I do not know and yet it seems possible that the incident I am about to report to you is relevant to your mandate, and the law therefore obliges me to report it. This morning Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e visited me in my office. By the oath of the scrivener, on my crystal: his words are rendered, as best I am able, verbatim.

He asked if he could speak with me, and I welcomed him in, surprised though I was. By both the expression on and the pallor of his face, he seemed distraught. “There is something I must say to you,” he said. I asked him if he was all right, and he said, “No, but you know that, as you’ve been arguing it.”

I said, “You seem distraught.”

He said, “I’m going to resign.”

I could not help but express my surprise and disbelief, asking him if this was indeed true.

He said, “Yes. I thought the first person I should tell should be the person it will please the most, and that is you. You’ve worked long and hard for this; you deserve it.” Then he told me he would not announce it quite yet, and asked if I would please remain circumspect for now, and I agreed.

Then, on my crystal and All-Spirit be witness, he said: “Linasika, you are right about me; I owe it to you to tell you that, too. I did wrong, and I did wrong knowing I was doing wrong. When I was thirteen, when I first learned the laws, I was already in love with the position; I was already in love with my life as I’d been taught it would be. I wanted to do nothing but make those who I loved happy, and their lives the best, and it was so much. As semanakraseye, I’d be able to do so much for so many, the love I gave, I’d be able to spread so wide.” He began shedding tears as he said this. “But then I realized what the law required. I wanted to do the right thing; I wanted to do the best thing; I didn’t know which was.”

I interceded to say, “You should have told us.”

“But then I’d never have been approved!” he said.

“You could have fought Arko just as chakrachaseye,” I said. “Artira would have appointed you in a moment.”

“But then I’d never have been able to gain the allies, I’d never have been to get the Brahvnikian money, I’d never have been able to go to Kranaj and Astalaz and Segiddis and the Aniah speakers and fully represent Yeola-e, I’d never have been able to do all those things and they were all necessary for the war! If it were so simple, Linasika, if it was just ‘I should tell them,’ I’d have done it!”

I couldn’t get in a word. “All I wanted was semana kra, was to live semana kra, that was enough for me, it would be enough for anyone,” he said, his voice breaking. “Linasika, there’s nothing so beautiful in the world! I’m sorry, I know it bothers you, it seems like I’m crowing or gloating but it’s just the truth, there is nothing so good. I have been so lucky; I’ve been so blessed, just to be able to do it as long as I have. I never wanted to hurt anyone, I never wanted to take away anyone’s choices, I just wanted to live semana kra until I died, that’s all, and how it could all turn out so wrong is beyond me to understand. Call it madness… I guess if I understood, then I’d be worthy to keep the position.”

I asked him, “You never had ambitions for more power?

“Linasika, for the love of All-Spirit,” he answered, “I said that under truth-drug, if you don’t believe me when I’m under truth-drug, what’s the point of me saying it now, why would you believe me now? You think of me as a power-monger, you should try being with real power-mongers, you should have met Kurkas, or Astalaz, or Ranion, or been to an Arkan Aitzas party where every open word is about who has to suck whose dick, and every hidden word about stabbing someone in the back, and you’d see what power-mongering really looks like! You’re afraid of me, you said you’re afraid of me, you and however many other Yeolis you speak for, why the [Arkan obscenity] are you afraid of me, I can’t stand it that you’re afraid of me, that any Yeoli is, I can’t bear it!”

He threw himself to his knees then, and seized my hands. “I beg you, please don’t be afraid of me, please! I never wanted to hurt any of my own people that much, and it’s like a blade through me, slashing me apart!” He pressed his tear-soaked face into the back of my hands, and I felt he was trembling all over. “I know,” he said, “I know: I can’t ask someone else to change how he feels, I have to act myself. That’s why I’m resigning. The problem will be solved. Your minds will all be put at rest.”

I tried to address him but again he wouldn’t let me. “I’m sorry,” he said, still gripping my hands. “I just want to say I’m sorry, to everyone, to all Yeola-e, to the whole world; I’m sorry, I did my best, I’m sorry it wasn’t better, I’m sorry for the whole thing, for everything I’ve done, for everything I am, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

I interceded in his apologizing to say, “Chevenga, you’ve done some magnificent things.”

“For all the rest, then, I’m sorry,” he said. “For staining the good that I’ve done with the evil, I’m sorry, for corrupting the life with the death, I’m sorry.”

I said to him, “Chevenga, I don’t think you should resign.”

He looked up at me and cried, “What the [Arkan obscenity] are you talking about, you don’t think I should resign, are you crazy, you’ve been pushing so hard for it and now you’re telling me I shouldn’t!!?”

I said, “Semana kra, Chevenga. Leave it to the will of the people. Leave it to the Committee, to Assembly.” I told him I knew I’d always argued my position very definitely, but I also knew that not everyone agreed with me, and they might be in the minority. I told him, “I can’t know that isn’t so, and neither can you.”

He looked both astonished, and angry. “Curse it, Linasika,” he said, “I’ve just made up my mind to do the hardest thing in the world for me, the thing that tears out my heart, because once I go asa kraiya I am no longer warrior or general either so I will be nothing—nothing!—and now you, you of all people, are trying to talk me out of it!!?”

I just told him again, “Semana kra. Leave it to the people, to judge you. Whatever else I’ve said about you, you are most definitely not nothing.”

He sank almost to the floor then, crying without words, and one of his hands touched my foot. I leaned down to put one hand on his shoulder, which startled him.

“You don’t think I should,” he said, in a bare whisper.

“I think you should leave it to the will of the people,” I reiterated. “And I think—I hope—that whatever must happen to bring an end to your pain happens soon.”

What else could I say? I have never seen him so humble, or so obviously suffering. Incredible as it might seem, my heart went out to him.

He whispered, “Semana kra.”

I said, “Semana kra. I think, in the end, whatever else you and I disagree on, we hold that in common.”

He lay still for a while, his sobs gradually subsiding, one hand lying limp on my foot. Finally he slowly lifted himself up, and took my hands again. “Semana kra,” he said. “You’re right. I’ll leave it to the will of the people. Linasika… for the kind words, thank you. I wouldn’t have expected them, I’m sorry, thank you.”

I suggested that maybe he should go to his healer. “Maybe,” he said. “I’ll get out of your office, anyway.” And we told each other, go with All-Spirit, and he went.

Your eyes do not deceive you, sib members of the Committee. Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e came into my office to say he would resign, and I persuaded him not to. I have recounted this to your Committee with respect to his mental state, but I wonder whether a second Committee should be struck to assess mine.

--

Read More......

176 - The tears of pure fear

Warriorhood is a rhythm that thrums inside you, a quality in your limbs that bespeaks the fastest motion, a sense in your skin of the constant nearness of steel, the instant availability of the killing choice in your heart. How was it that I was feeling it more clearly than ever before now, when I was asa kraiya?

The next morning as dawn was faintly greying the sky, I had another flash of certainty that I would live long, and then felt the death-in-me seep over it, changing it back to the grind of limit I had always known.

Destruction lived all through me, in its various modes, as it always had; what I was torn between was the habitual numbness and the new horror. They shimmered dark and light by turns within me.

It’s all more clear than ever before, I thought, because I have attained that.

“I’m fine,” I whispered to Skorsas, who had seen something on my face, by the way he caressed my hair. I’m shattered. It’s going too fast. My asa kraiya ceremony was eleven days away. I’m not ready. I knew Surya would tell me, “Yes, you are.”

“You haven’t spoken to your mother?” he asked, when we were in the sponge-lined room.

“I think telling her that I have never accepted love whole-heartedly would hurt her. It’s something she can’t undo, so, why? Yet…” I felt my brows knit. Was I feeling even such things more clearly? Or were my brows just knit less often these days, so that when they were I noticed it more? “I must have accepted her love entirely once; she’s my mother.”

“Ask yourself when you stopped accepting her love except that you’d die young,” he said. “Turn face down.” He slid the towel under my hips, a very bad sign.

“I… you know, Surya, you can confirm or disprove it in my aura, but I think I never did. When I was growing up, she was the one person I could speak to about it.”

I felt the aura-seeing gaze without seeing it, as if my aura could feel. “It’s true enough,” he said. “Deep breath, make the white line. Breathe deep, breathe whole, breathe flowing, and make it very solid.” He touched the back of my neck, and gripped the hilt of the sword with his thumb and forefinger grip. I felt its whole length right away. I breathed, fighting to keep it from being gasps, until I was steadied down at least to some degree. Then his other hand slid under my hip and took my manhood.

“Aigh kahara mamaiyana no! Not this! Not this!” I’d screamed out the words before I knew it, and whipped away from his upper hand at least, and the sword was gone. “No, Surya, I can’t, I can’t, it’ll kill me, I can’t!”

“No, it won’t. You are ready. I can see it plain. I can see plain also how you feel you aren’t. You’ve lost the line of white light; make it again. Breathe, you know how.”

Fear was like a wall. “I can’t. I can’t… I can’t, Surya…”

“As part of your asa kraiya ceremony,” he said, “I’m going to do what I’ve been saying all along: take hold of the sword, and draw it out of you when you let go of it. That’s reality, Virani-e. It’s the reality of your choice, that you made so many months ago, back in Arko—to live. You have to accept it. If you want to live, which I know you do, you have to accept it. That’s what I’m going to ask you to accept in this tenar menhu—that this is going to happen.”

“I don’t know how…” I wept the tears of pure fear that a child, or a coward, weeps.

“That’s why I’m telling you how. One step at a time, just think of each as it goes, and you’ll do it. Haven’t you figured that out yet?” I had to laugh, albeit weakly. “Make the line of white light. Breathe deeply and flowing.” I did again, and he waited until I had it very solid and bright, and then, very delicately, made me feel the sword. By keeping my breathing steady with all my will, I learned how to endure both at once.

“If I had done this at the start, you couldn’t have borne it,” he said. “You’d have been so shocked your heart would have stopped in your chest and you’d have died right there on my table. Am I right?”

“Oh, yes.” I wasn’t certain it wasn’t going to happen now.

“Then know your progress. You have learned and grown and broken through the walls and vanquished the monsters… you have been astonishingly brave and strong, as we often are being when we feel most afraid and weak. You aren’t done yet, there’s one monster yet to vanquish, but you’re done with all but the one, and I have great confidence that you will win there too.”

“The hardest one,” I whispered. It wasn’t a question. I knew.

“The last is always hardest, the hardest always last.”

“What is it?”

“I can’t tell you… not because I’m holding out; I can’t explain it. I could put it into words, but they’d tell you nothing. They wouldn’t help your fear. Just trust that I know you’re ready. I can tell you when, roughly, because it will happen before your asa kraiya ceremony. Sometime in the next few days.”

“I can’t wait.” He laughed, sending the faintest of ripples into both hands, that I felt like a tender earthquake across my soul. “Relax, Virani-e. I’m going to keep you here a while. Just breathe in acceptance, of both.”

I felt every instant that this tenar menhu would kill me, but it didn’t.

†

It was eight days from the ceremony. “Short session today,” Surya said. “Just about one thing I want to tell you. You didn’t need to go asa kraiya to live past thirty.”

I remember, very clearly, the pattern of the two-man-loomed material on the arm of the cushioned chair, many-coloured flowers on green, as if against grass. It is etched in my mind as with acid on glass. I remember my throat closing up, suddenly strangled with dryness. All I could get out was, “Wha-a-a-at?”

“You don’t have to go asa kraiya to live past thirty. You don’t have to do any particular thing to cease believing you deserve to die at thirty, except cease believing you deserve to die at thirty.”

I remember both my hands going white on the chair-arms, while a distant part of me thought, “If I grip them too hard I’ll break them.” My tongue tried to work through phlegm that felt like glue. The words came out barely more than a whisper, between tearing breaths. “But… but you said… you said, first session you said… lay down the sword or die, go asa kraiya or die… those were my choices… you said…”

“I was lying,” he said. Now the room was spinning; I closed my eyes, and, when that made my gorge come up hard, opened them again. “It was a necessary lie—a life-saving lie. Tell me true, Virani-e: if I had said that you could be cured of it, that you could live, without making such a great change and huge sacrifice, would you have believed me?”

His words had come to me in waves, and now my answer sounded the same to my own ears. “No.”

“You’d never have come back for another session, and things would have gone as they would have gone.”

I could not speak, gasping for air as if I were drowning. “Put your head back, relax all over and make the white line,” he commanded. It took him three more times, and taking my head between his hands, to get me to even start.

“But… the sword in me… getting hacked up by little Riji because I could not touch him… everything I’ve gone through… the ceremony, for the love of All-Spirit, it’s set, the invitations are out, all the guests have made their arrangements, all the writers know…”

“You could still call it off,” he said. “Few of them will have begun traveling here yet; even if they have, it’s still something you can change your mind about, right up until the ceremony is done. Some people change their minds during the ceremony. If you called it off, all those military people who’ve been giving you such grief for doing it would be ecstatic.”

“Surya!” My world had gone mad. “Aaaiiiiigggghhh!”

“The question is, do you want to?” he asked me. I froze. “What did your father say? As always, you choose. That is how asa kraiya truly is and should be—not a requirement for some other benefit, but freely chosen. Here’s the thing you need to understand, which I think you’re ready to, now: you are set free now in two ways you didn’t know—to live past thirty without any condition, and to go asa kraiya because you want to.”

All I understood right then was that I wanted to strangle him. I settled for leaping off the chair and pacing back and forth, alternately pulling at my hair and striking the air, and letting out full-throated screams. “I know,” he said gently, in the pause I took to draw breath. “It’s more freedom than you’re used to. And yes, I did lie to you, so the truth is a shock. But it’s your reality, as it is everyone’s. Breathe in acceptance.”

--

Read More......