It’s getting late. She gets up. “I’m going to get us some food and blankets,” she says. “You’ll stay here tonight. We’ll visit the third and final component of your tuning mission tomorrow.”
We have never slept anywhere but our cells. It’s exciting. Gaewha sends little pulses of delight through the ambient, while Remwha is a steady buzz of pleasure. Dushwha and Bimniwha spike now and again with anxiety; will we be all right, doing this thing that human beings have done throughout history—sleeping in a different place? The two of them curl together for security, though this actually increases their anxiety for a time. We are not often allowed to touch. They stroke one another, though, and this gradually calms them both.
Kelenli is amused by their fear. “You’ll be all right, though I suppose you’ll figure that out for yourselves in the morning,” she says. Then she heads for the door to go. I am standing at the door, looking through its window at the newly risen Moon. She touches me because I’m in her way. I don’t move at once, though. Because of the direction that the window in my cell faces, I don’t get to see the Moon often. I want to savor its beauty while I can.
“Why have you brought us here?” I ask Kelenli, while still staring at it. “Why tell us these things?”
She doesn’t answer at once. I think she’s looking at the Moon, too. Then she says, in a thoughtful reverberation of the earth, I’ve studied what I could of the Niess and their culture. There isn’t much left, and I have to sift the truth from all the lies. But there was a … a practice among them. A vocation. People whose job it was to see that the truth got told.
I frown in confusion. “So … what? You’ve decided to carry on the traditions of a dead people?” Words. I’m stubborn.
She shrugs. “Why not?”
I shake my head. I’m tired, and overwhelmed, and perhaps a little angry. This day has upended my sense of self. I’ve spent my whole life knowing I was a tool, yes; not a person, but at least a symbol of power and brilliance and pride. Now I know I’m really just a symbol of paranoia and greed and hate. It’s a lot to deal with.
“Let the Niess go,” I snap. “They’re dead. I don’t see the sense in trying to remember them.”
I want her to get angry, but she merely shrugs. “That’s your choice to make—once you know enough to make an informed choice.”
“Maybe I didn’t want to be informed.” I lean against the glass of the door, which is cool and does not sting my fingers.
“You wanted to be strong enough to hold the onyx.”
I blurt a soft laugh, too tired to remember I should pretend to feel nothing. Hopefully our observers won’t notice. I shift to earthtalk, and speak in an acid, pressurized boil of bitterness and contempt and humiliation and heartbreak. What does it matter? is what it means. Geoarcanity is a lie.
She shakes apart my self-pity with gentle, inexorable slipstrike laughter. “Ah, my thinker. I didn’t expect melodrama from you.”
“What is melo—” I shake my head and fall silent, tired of not knowing things. Yes, I’m sulking.
Kelenli sighs and touches my shoulder. I flinch, unused to the warmth of another person’s hand, but she keeps it in place and this quiets me.
“Think,” she repeats. “Does the Plutonic Engine work? Do your sessapinae? You aren’t what they made you to be; does that negate what you are?”
“I—That question doesn’t make sense.” But now I’m just being stubborn. I understand her point. I’m not what they made me; I’m something different. I am powerful in ways they did not expect. They made me but they do not control me, not fully. This is why I have emotions though they tried to take them away. This is why we have earthtalk … and perhaps other gifts that our conductors don’t know about.
She pats my shoulder, pleased that I seem to be working through what she’s told me. A spot on the floor of her house calls to me; I will sleep so well tonight. But I fight my exhaustion, and remain focused on her, because I need her more than sleep, for now.
“You see yourself as one of these … truth-tellers?” I ask.
“Lorist. The last Niess lorist, if I have the right to claim such a thing.” Her smile abruptly fades, and for the first time I realize what a wealth of weariness and hard lines and sorrow her smiles cover. “Lorists were warriors, storytellers, nobility. They told their truths in books and song and through their art engines. I just … talk. But I feel like I’ve earned the right to claim some part of their mantle.” Not all fighters use knives, after all.
In earthtalk there can be nothing but truth—and sometimes more truth than one wants to convey. I sense … something, in her sorrow. Grim endurance. A flutter of fear like the lick of salt acid. Determination to protect … something. It’s gone, a fading vibration, before I can identify more.
She takes a deep breath and smiles again. So few of them are real, her smiles.
“To master the onyx,” she continues, “you need to understand the Niess. What the conductors don’t realize is that it responds best to a certain emotional resonance. Everything I’m telling you should help.”
Then, finally, she pushes me gently aside so that she can go. The question must be asked now. “So what happened,” I say slowly, “to the Niess?”
She stops, and chuckles, and for once it is genuine. “You’ll find out tomorrow,” she says. “We’re going to see them.”
I’m confused. “To their graves?”
“Life is sacred in Syl Anagist,” she says over her shoulder. She’s passed through the door; now she keeps going without stopping or turning back. “Don’t you know that?” And then she is gone.
It is an answer that I feel I should understand—but in my own way, I am still innocent. Kelenli is kind. She lets me keep that innocence for the rest of the night.
To: Alma Innovator Dibars
From: Yaetr Innovator Dibars
Alma, the committee can’t pull my funding. Look, this is just the dates of the incidents I’ve gathered. Just look at the last ten!
2729
2714–2719: Choking
2699
2613
2583
2562
2530
2501
2490
2470
2400
2322–2329: Acid
Is Seventh even interested in the fact that our popular conception of the frequency of Season-level events is completely wrong? These things aren’t happening every two hundred or three hundred years. It’s more like every thirty or forty! If not for roggas, we’d be a thousand times dead. And with these dates and the others I’ve compiled, I’m trying to put together a predictive model for the more intensive Seasons. There’s a cycle here, a rhythm. Don’t we need to know in advance if the next Season is going to be longer or worse somehow? How can we prepare for the future if we won’t acknowledge the past?
9
the desert, briefly, and you