#How Simras Plan Works

[supermahipalsingh-blog]

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[dunmerofskyrim]

80

“It’s bound to something. That’s the way with them, curses. Always are. Have to be! Like…” Llolamae screwed her face tight, almost scowling with concentration. “Imagine a knot. The complicated fisherman’s kind. There’s loops and there’s twists and there’s, like, knots tied to knots. But if you know how it got tied, you know how to undo it. See?”

“I think so,” said Simra.

The sun was setting in Vedith’s garden, already halfway hidden behind the high mountainsides that walled the valley in. Pink sky. Heat and green and growth or not, it was still Winter, and the days were short, the nights dark and sudden.

“How’s that help us?” said Simra. He was fidgety with second thoughts he was trying not to have. His knee trembled as he sat by the water, boots and footwraps off, and cleaned his feet in the cold of it.

Funny, how quick an ‘us’ had cropped up. Him and the mer he came here to kill, and the girl who guided him to the place where he could do it. Funny, how sometimes when you call something funny you call it that so as not to call it something else.

“Well…” Llolamae sat in the elbow of a thick and gnarled tree, legs crossed under her.  She cocked her head, frowning. “Knots, right? A pull on the right part, and it comes undone. That’s curses. Causalities and conditions, all hung on a central contingency.” Tutored words, told off pat. She closed her eyes and nodded then, smiled a little, like she was proud to have remembered a part of some long-ago lesson.

“I understand that alright. But say you come across a knot you didn’t tie, and don’t know how to tie. Not much more you can do than just fumble at it, is there? Pick and scrabble. Hope your fingernails are just the right length and your luck’s just right to come across the right bits. See what comes loose…”

“Aye…” Llolamae admitted. “I’d best get started then.”

Simra’s back straightened and he turned full around through his waist. Raised a wet leg onto the streamside and leaned chin on hands, hands on knee. He looked at Llolamae, brows low and creased. “On…fumbling?”

“Did you not hear me?” Llolamae dropped out of the tree in a flop of feet and falling cloth. “Just sort of got to start feeling round the edges of it, seeing if I can find the thing. Contingency. The thing it’s bound to.”

On his feet now, Simra drew up close to Llolamae, lowering his voice. “Why? I mean, like it or not, I’m on this path now. I could’ve killed him. Sort of still don’t know why I didn’t. But what about you? What’s your reason? Sympathy? Loyalty? Whatever Vedith knows about the torquestone?”

Llolamae shrugged and gave a faint simple smile. “Have you not seen Master Vidanu’s Tel? I don’t want to sleep in a hole under canvas anymore, waiting for a proper spire to grow. Vedith can help.”

Simra bent low, drying his feet and picking up his boots to hide the smile that cracked across his face. “Wise is what that is!” His best imitation of Vedith; a decent one, at least. “Wise is what I call that!”

Poor taste, might’ve been, to joke about someone just as soon as you get done breaking their fingers with their own teakettle. It got Llolamae laughing though, which meant the blame was shared, halved. You take what chances to laugh as life gives you.

The old gardener had retreated inside, into the creeper-grown cottage, alone. Jokes or not, Simra couldn’t blame him. Reckoned it was best he leave him that way. Wouldn’t be the first time he’d tried to get back on talking terms with someone he’d pulled a blade on, but that was one of many things that didn’t get easier with practice. Leave it till tomorrow. He let Llolamae head inside, alone, and alone he stayed out here.

Fast shadows along the ground. They lengthened and grew with the sinking sun, then spread like damp over everything. Planting beds and plants; the root-branches and branch-roots of the tall things that weren’t quite trees. Walls of the cottage as the dusk came down and a golden light glowed up inside. Llolamae’s magelight. No windows, but it fissured out through the cracks and gaps; made it look like it was breaking apart.

Simra walked in the warm dark, between the beds, the tree-things, the trellis. Careful planted feet, going nowhere. Going nowhere, he told himself, going nowhere; reassuring himself of it, confirming it in his mind. A fragile thought, wavering like a candleflame.

Harder to keep smiling once you’re alone. He made himself breathe from his belly, hand jumping from the hilt of his sword to the sheathes on his knives to the woodbound grip of his sword, uneasy again. If he’d been one for praying, he thought, now would’ve been a good time. Sparing a life — not the kind of thing you want cause to regret. He’d’ve liked cause to do it more often.

…

It wasn’t falling asleep that came hard. Out in the warm dark open, in sweat-stiff clothes, with his mantle balled round his scarf for a pillow, sleep fell on Simra quick and heavy as a Summer’s sudden rain. He’d been so tired. Days of tumbling first this way then that, never knowing where he was headed, or how he was meant to get there. Confusion can exhaust you, same as anything else.

But he woke before dawn, mist on his cheeks and soaked into his outer shirt, world still grey and faded. Couldn’t get back to sleep after that. He picked himself up, stretched, arms above his head and back arching. Regretted it. Grunted a curse and hobbled a few steps, trying to work out the new knots he’d tied in his muscles.

He’d heard of people – swordsmen, ascetics, people with time on their hands – who’d start each day stretching. They’d move from one pose to another, each with their own special names. Scorpion Rears to Strike; Swallow Takes Flight; Spinning Silk. After that it’d be like they’d shaken off all the weight of their body and it’d go through the day light as thought, doing what it was told. Simra didn’t know any stretches like that. Part of him wished that he did. The rest scoffed at the whole idea, or at least the idea that it would work for him. Some things just hurt. Some things, once broke, stay broken.

It was still hot, cloying. The warmth down here didn’t come from the sun, didn’t leave with it either. Just pooled like water, regardless of night or shade. Made you sluggish. It was a warmth that wore you like wet clothes.

A teacup lay on its side, half-forgotten in the flattened grass where he and Vedith had fought. Knees clicking, Simra bent and picked it up, took it over to the watercourse that ran through the garden. Filled it. The cup’s dark glaze turned the water to ink. He splashed a careful measure onto the hobstone and hovered his calloused left palm above it. He felt it grow warm then hot as he fed its enchantment another splash of water.

The teapot was dented, muddy, discarded same as the teacup. He fetched his own – dark fire-blackened bronze, small and sturdy, just more than enough for one person and barely that – and made tea.

With nothing to eat, he drank the whole pot.

There was light enough to read by now. No food, little sleep, but at least he had that. Crouching by his bookbag, he unlaced its mouth and pawed through. Paper, parchment, a book written on slats of wood, laced together like window shutters. Best not to read anything that mattered, that needed to last — not in this wet heat.

He fanned out the handbills and bounties he always had, stuffed and dogeared in the bag’s bottom. Woodcut prints of faces the law, or some lord, or the Temple had put a price on, all of them land and sea and leagues away, useless to him. Old news from elsewhere. Boat refugees from Bravil moved on by measured and merciful force from Narsis; told there’s land for settling in Vvardenfell; meanwhile, the violence in Cyrodiil rages on. Always violence, unrest, discontent — a decade of the same and getting worse each year, and they still didn’t call it a war. First the Concordat that lost Hammerfell, now this ‘violence’, and the Empire still wouldn’t admit it was anything less than whole. For certain it wouldn’t admit it was at war with itself; ablaze with a fire that threatened to spread. That was last year, last Summer, and nothing Simra didn’t already know. Caselif had told him enough for that. He stuffed the bill back in his bag, keeping it for scrap paper.

The writ stood out. It was long, not a scrap but a scroll, and made from fine silkpaper. Not block-printed in bulk, but written in his own formal hand — decent, even with the strike and scratchiness that came with employing a dip-pen to write a script meant for the brushes he’d never quite learnt to use. Ulessen’s scribe had hunched over his shoulder, watching as he wrote it. Now, with the sun rising slow, a change in the dark before it shed any light, he sat in the shade of the trellis and began to read.

It was his usual. He’d done his own writwork for years now, he’d said. Set his own terms. And he never left much room for worming out by one clause or another, not for him, and not for the client. That was the idea. Keep things stark, simple, in plain words, but lengthy enough, detailed enough, to make things seem professional, polished, planned for. In this writ, only the clause about up-front pay was changed. There was no pay at all, just a debt held over him, clear and quiet and smug, sure there was no way out from under it but the way Ulessen had offered him. A backroads lender, you could run from, hide from. A Telvanni magister, one with all the force and power of an old Tel behind them, would always find you.

A shrill from inside the cottage and Simra was already on his feet. It wasn’t the same sound as hurried him up that snowbank two yesterdays ago, and into a triangle of Kogaru with spears and sour red-painted faces. But it was still Llolamae, and it was close enough. He trampled beds, weeds, grasses. Found the door and shouldered it in, hand gone to his knives and twitching one out of its sheathe.

Vedith was asleep, on his back, on a palette of green wood and silky mushroom skin. Open mouth and pot-belly rising, falling. His broken hand was clawed shut, clutched to his chest like a pigeon’s bad wing.

Llolamae turned to look at Simra with ricebowl-wide eyes, sparkling with her grin even before he saw it in her red-gummed mouth, her mismatched child and unchild’s teeth. She shrieked again, words this time:

“I done it!”

Simra slackened and stopped. The hand on his knife-grip, the half-drawn blade, was heavy and weak now. His shoulders sagged. “You figured it out?” He said it flat. Couldn’t muster any feeling into the words, not while his heart was still pounding, choking the back of his throat and fooling his tongue dry and clumsy.

“I reckon so, aye!”

“Then why scream about it?” He saw Vedith was still sleeping, even through all the noise. Seemed Simra had strength left to feel bitter on that, at least.

Llolamae half-turned away, a slight hang to the angle of her head. “Thought you’d be pleased…”

Simra held back a grunt, a huff, and slumped against one of the cottage walls. “I am.” Seemed he had sense left to feel bad over snapping at her, at least. To feel bad all round. Aching shuddering muscles, battle-blood draining sick and away before he even knew it was up and upon him. “That’s good. Really good, maybe.”

“Sort of wondered if you’d come running again, too…” A part-moon sliver of Llolamae’s grin had stayed on her face. She turned it to him now.

Simra shrugged. He was here, wasn’t he? “What’d you find out? Can you break it? The curse.”

“Not with magic, no. Reckon I know how, though.”

[dunmerofskyrim]

78

The Kogaru were slow to be off, no matter how Simra stared at them. A pointed look, poised like a hawk on the hand and impatient in its silence. They picked themselves up and gathered to go all with the same reluctance. Simra couldn’t imagine why. Sooner they got going, sooner he’d be gone. Ought to be what they wanted.

“D’you know he’s this way?” Simra asked once they were underway.

Kaliklu was leading again, but only by a few strides. “Until the water we were only guessing.”

Simra found that less than comforting but said nothing of it. “It’s his work, then?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve seen it before? Been here before?”

“Yes.”

“Often?”

“No.”

“He a friend?” No response. “Should I be wary is what I’m asking? Scared? Ready for a fight?”

“Of course you should be wary.”

“Wary of what? Ready for what?”

“Anything,” Kaliklu said, curt and impatient with the questions now.

Simra kissed his teeth, loud and harsh, and walked fast to put distance between him and the elder. He’d get nothing more from him, that was clear. Old man was on enough of an edge now without Simra grinding it sharper for him. No help at all, Simra thought to himself. Ready for anything. Ready for anything always seemed a good way to be ready for nothing much. The world’s a place of specifics. A mess of specifics, infinite beyond thought, infinite beyond thought of thinking. Be ready for the world? You can’t. Best you can do’s prepare for what you know is in your closest corner of it. What you reckon’s around the bend.

And there was the thing. He didn’t know what to expect. Besides the holdout of a mage with enough power and strength to change the land for half a league around. To dig a hole in the surface of Winter and fill it with high green Spring. Besides a Telvanni turncoat, stubborn and strong enough to break from the mistress of Tel Branora and flee to the world’s wild north edge. Besides a problem big enough that Tel Branora wound launch some tieless nobody northward and into the Sea of Ghosts, to go scour a bleak little rock in that waste of ice and slate-grey ocean, and bring back news Dalvur Vedith was dead. And not knowing what to expect, he had no way to prepare. Not the slightest sketch of a plan.

The stream ended abrupt in a clearing. It was overgrown, small, but stood out stark in the thatch-thick woods. Cutting it in half, the water rested in a cool silver sickle of pond, pale lilies on the surface and purple velvet flowers with lolling hand-long petals. A dancing cloud of yellow blossom-moths, same as before, twisted like smoke through the air. Hundreds, thousands.

A kind of structure stood in the pond’s curved belly, half-surrounded. A low shape with a slumped curved roof. Growth covered it, so dense it looked made of nothing but pink and white flowering vines, woody-skinned creepers. Curlicues of bramble split off its bulk like flyaway hairs from an unkempt head. But underneath the overgrowth, Simra thought he could make out stone. Rafters and ribs, reaching up from the ground and forward, like a short hunchbacked tunnel. A skeleton of scaffolds and supports in black screw-surfaced torquestone.

A slack line of growing things made something like a trellis, meandering till they met the hut and knit over and into its side. Simra wanted to think of them as trees but it didn’t quite fit. Only thing right about them was the trunks – birch thin, fine and pale, planted in close order – and only because they were in the right places. The rest was inverted. Up top, their roots fanned out like the bare bones of a parasol, naked and tasting the air. Their branches crawled thick and tangling across the ground, clawing into the dirt, all wearing a ragged plumage of leaves. Their pattern was almost regular. Quadrangles and half-circles, traced out across the clearing floor in ledges and ridges, the edges of raised planting-beds full of damp black earth.

The roots cast a stripey shade below them. Bent over one of the beds, arms buried partway to the elbows in rich dirt, Dalvur Vedith knelt by his trellis, his hut, head bowed.

Whatever Simra might’ve expected, he hadn’t expected this. The brown tatters of a simple robe hung off his sloping back. It looked like a horseblanket. Wrapped haphazard around him and held on with complicated knots and cinching lines of faded purple braid, but a horseblanket all the same. Wisps of colourless hair floated around his small dark grey head, and tickled at his jutting ears. And when he looked up and stared, his eyes were pouchy, small and bright in a deep-lined face.

“There you are.” His voice was cracked, creaking like a disused door. “I wondered, you know. Would you ever come back? I wondered. And as I felt you in my garden, I thought: well then well then, be it what it may, but an old mer can hope…”

“We do not disturb you without need, Gurrigalattu,” said Kaliklu. “You know this. Just as you do not disturb the island beyond this valley.”

“My valley…” Vedith smiled. Holes and gums, teeth and darkness.

“Your valley,” Kaliklu was quick to agree.

“So! It’s true then? You’ve come to see me. Come to see old Dalvur?”

“I have brought someone, yes. Someone who wished to meet you.”

“A visitor!” Vedith’s head cocked and twitched on its thin neck, casting round. His eyes were hollow, half-lidded and lookless. “I count five. You’ve not brought visitors before, Kaliklu.” He sniffed, long and deep through one nostril, covering the other with a dirty finger. “To what do I owe the pleasure, old friend?”

Simra thought a moment, dry-mouthed and asking himself, how much could he say and keep all his stories straight? “I’ve searched you out to pass on a message.”

Vedith’s jaw went slack. Mouth open, his dust-coloured tongue moved fitful, like he was counting what teeth he had left. “This one’s not one of yours, Kaliklu. He speaks for himself! And doesn’t, hah, doesn’t smell so much like blood. And the other?”

Simra glanced round, searching for Llolamae, and found her beside him, toes on the edge of the water that separated them from Vedith. She was puffed up, standing straight and strident. Not a little girl but a Mouth again, like when he’d first met her.

“I’m Mouth to Master Vidanu of Tel Kogaris.”

Vedith scrambled upright and onto his feet. His robe was gathered up and girded at his waist, showing the grubby knob-kneed length of his skinny legs. His face was a blur, spasming from feeling to feeling. Through terror to joy to despairing of a hope he’d never had the time to hold. He bowed and twitched, stepping back and stepping back, till he retreated into the trellis and flinched from it with a dry gasp.

“House…” he started, struggling to find breath for the words. “House business then, is it?”

Llolamae shot Simra a look of confusion. Shrugged and angled her eyes, questioning. Simra nodded quick and insistent.

“Aye,” she said. “It is that.”

Dirt-flecked hands wringing each against the other, Vedith paced a moment, back and forth amongst the beds and roots. His mouth moved silent, teething and chawing over talk that wouldn’t quite come. Whatever Simra might’ve expected, he hadn’t expected this. An old mer falling to pieces, knowing maybe what’d come for him.

Vedith stopped. “Vidanu, d’you say? Kogaris, is it? Not — I mean, that’s to say not—”

“That’s right,” Simra cut in. “Vidanu of Tel Kogaris.”

“It’s about the torquestone!” said Llolamae.

“The torque—?” Vedith’s face slackened, all the workings under his skin laxing all at once. “The what? The stone! You mean the twisty, the twisting, the one with, the one you can… Hah!” His empty eyes rolled back deeper into his skull, eyelids fluttering. Relief. “Of course, of course. Of course! Torquestone. Good name, very good name. Hadn’t thought… Well then, come in! Come over. You must. Oh, will you take tea? I have something, somewhere, very good…”

The Kogaru had bundled together into a group, talking in fevered whispers amongst themselves. The hunter spoke most, with Kaliklu listening, nodding. They were tense, anxious here. Nerves in all their faces, the set of their shoulders and turn of their bodies. Jangling nerves in all their voices. Kaliklu peeled himself from the group and spoke to Simra:

“You have no more need of us.”

It didn’t sound like a question. Simra stepped closer while Llolamae scuttled round the pond and onto its far side, capering between the beds. “That right?” he said.

“We have already stayed too long.”

“Too long for what? Have we stayed too long too and you’re not telling us?” Simra hissed. “What about getting out of here?”

“You have only to follow the water.”

“For how long? To where? Blight, you agreed to guide me! I bled for that, bargained for that!”

Across the water, Llolamae was chattering to Vedith, bright as birdsong.

“We did,” said Kaliklu, reaching out an empty hand. “We have.” The hunter plucked the wand from his bundle and passed it into Kaliklu’s grasp. He wasn’t pointing it at Simra, but the message was clear.

Force his hand and Simra would’ve bet the wand was empty, or close to it. Or that Kaliklu’s fingers wouldn’t find its touch-runes fast enough, unpracticed and unfamiliar with it. But why gamble when there was nothing to win. Kaliklu was right. Right, and scared, and like as not to do something stupid.

“Off with yourselves, then,” said Simra. They’d played their part, done as they said they would. Even so, for the second time that day, Simra couldn’t help but feel cheated.

They upped fast, silent and impatient, making to hurry away. Sooner they got going, sooner they’d be gone, and gone was where they wanted to be, they’d made that plenty clear.

“Busy busy!” Simra muttered at their backs. “Hurry hurry. Sure you’ve got fucking caves to paint. Other strangers to ambush and extort…”

Kaliklu still held the wand as they hustled towards the clearing’s edge and back the way they came, following the water. None of them looked back. Just fled, fast as they could.

[dunmerofskyrim]

43

When they came to the rivermouth the water lay low on its banks. Wide and widening towards the strait where it let out into the sea, the river was spread too thin over too much bed. Long ago smoothed by the river in high-flowing months and years of springmelt, rocks stumped up from the ground, dry now. Fallen weeds and stranded reeds, silver with frost. And what of the river still ran was skinned with a sheen of ice. A veinwork of currents, ankle-deep, travelled sunbright towards the sea.

“Ought to mean we’re halfway,” said Simra.

He leaned on his spear, both hands gripped high on its shaft just below the hook that spurred back from its head, and hunched with elbows crooked towards the river. If you could call it that anymore. He wouldn’t if it weren’t on his map.

“To Davon’s Watch?” said Noor.

She still rode her guar, albeit at a walk. Vereansu pride; why walk when you can ride. They’d spent two days in the woods and coves in ground too rough to ride through. She was making up for lost time now and it bothered Simra. The deepening cold was cruel on the guar, and Tammunei and Simra reined theirs along on foot to rest it. It carried only their packs. The slackening sack of millet; the skillet hitched to its empty and arse-worn saddle.

“Mhm.” She was about to complain, Simra reckoned — didn’t take a seer to say so. He pre-empted her. “Before you say a fucking thing, yes it’s slower going than I said before.” His teeth barely parted to speak and they grit again straight after.

“Three days already,” she said.

“This is the third,” he corrected. “You wanna thunder on ahead alone? Lame your guar into the bargain? Just as well throw twenty drams down the first ditch you find — only buyer’ll buy him in Davon’s Watch after that’s the butcher. Or the knacker.”

Her face stiffened. Steam from her nostrils as she let out a huff. Chastened though, Simra reckoned. If half of Vereansu pride’s in their riding beasts, worst thing you can do is threaten to waste one.

“Nothing?” Simra cocked his head at Noor. “No further contentions to shove at me? Good. Glad we’re of a mind.”

The wind struck up whistling and stung at Simra’s ears. Grease them, his mother would’ve said, else they’ll snap straight off. She’d have shelled out on pork or mutton for that very purpose. Whatever seemed better marbled at the Gulleybottom market; more likely pig after Redrunsday, and cuts of heart and black pudding, going cheap before they soured. Cooking them, she’d render out what fat she could to rub her children’s eartips. You smell like a bad candle, Soraya would say after.

Around them the land was heady, rolling, trapped with ditches and gullies half-hidden in yellow and red heather. Streaks of snow bright amongst the scrub. Stones and spars of rock, starting to look like seacliffs, but no gulls any more to shriek — not so far east. Mountains rose to right of where they stood, days away in the distance and bleak already with snow. The rivermouth began to yawn if you looked off to northward, a growing confusion of stillwater and sea.

“Cross?” Simra jutted his chin at the shallow river. “Nice not to have to ford or ferry over for fucking once.”

His mood was sour by then. He forced sunshine into his voice, hoping to drive it off, repair the bitterness built up between he and Noor. Wouldn’t do to sour her towards him worse than he needed to. Wouldn’t do to have nothing tying her here but debt — and Tammunei, he supposed, but what if she took them with her? What then? Simra thought of the rattling pouch in his gathersack, useless without someone who could use it, and sure as snow he couldn’t.

“I didn’t know we were going to sell them,” said Tammunei. No sorrow in the words. Not quite. Only a strange weighted surprise.

“Well we can’t ride them over the Inner Sea…” Simra answered, careful. He might have said more – unless you’ve got some better idea as to how we can afford to take ship then I’d love to hear it, but no, of course you don’t because who else thinks this shit through but me? – but he held his tongue.

“We’ll leave them with the right person then. Someone who’ll ride them,” Tammunei said. “Feed them.”

Simra pointed a glance at Noor, over a hunched shoulder and the tall line of his knotwooded spearshaft. “If I can.” Not a hard thing to almost-promise. Selling them as riding guar would bring back a better price than selling them as meat or leather and bones. But a riding guar has to be ridable.

Tammunei joined their look to his, but blunter, harder. A slow persistence of pressure, like the dropstone lid on a jar of preshta-lo, crushing by patience the wet from the leaves. Vereansu pride, it seemed to say; had she any left, or was she as clanless in heart as in line and in name?

Noor’s face went hard like she was holding her breath. A leathern creak of stirrups. She dismounted. Flat shoes on the frosty ground and then she reached down to take those off too, and stood barefoot like some much-suffered saint.

Simra looked down. Fixed his gaze on his wrist. Prayer beads he’d never prayed with, in a string of clay and lacquer, red and blue and black. The copper coiled snake bracelet. Two thin rounds of etched silver, locked each into the other. The six-faced pewter ring, warm on his left middle finger. Eyes dropped like it had humbled him, or stirred up some scrap of penitence. But inside he was bitter-pleased. With himself; with Tammunei for siding with him on this small and sticking thing. So long as he had Tammunei, he had them both in hand.

I had hiding places all through Dyer’s End by then. The stoved-in top of the store-tower, well out of the way, and safe and steep in peril as only high places feel, but airy and cold. The colour shop low in the depths, with its weights and scales, and its rust-screeching iron grate that covers the door. A factoring pit in a dusty and dim dyer’s workshop, where I buried myself on the wintriest nights of that closing year. The overhang between two roofs, where ill-planned buildings crowded together, its entrance hedged with weeds grown up from the silt and the ash of a gutter, and looking out and down towards the citadel’s eastern harbor and the slate-grey sea.

In each of them I cached goods and supplies. Jars of rain- and well-water; scraps of good cloth or metal; grain and gram and the compact of saltfish I found breaking into another basement. And in each of them – whichever was nearest – I hid at the first sign of life beyond the life I was living. Runners across the rooftops or scavengers down on the streets. Quiet and careful folk who moved like hunters — with them I feared the worst, remembering the glassgarden, and the savour of meat in the pot.

I remembered they’d asked me about the coat I wore. Known by name the one who’d worn it. The eggfarmers — gone, are they? All but one, I knew. Drosi and Guls were dead by my hand, the life burnt out from both their bodies. But of Tepa I knew nothing; not even a face to remember, let alone a fate to put to it. Tepa with their pack of nix and their hiss-clumsy voice. And each time I heard the pitchy rilk or chatter of nix in the night, I still thought: They’ve scented me out. They’re coming for me.

That was part of the reason why I struggled to not stay put. One night in the warehouse tower, the next in the dye-pit with its purple walls and purple-dust floor and the stains that stuck to my elbows and knees til the next rain washed them off. I didn’t know then how a nix tracks prey, tasting the air and tasting the dirt. I only knew that if my passing was to leave traces, I’d best leave a mess of traces, a confusion of them. My tracks would lead nowhere but back on themselves. Or so I thought.

Still I wondered: How long before they find me? How long before the sound or shadow I jump at turns out to deserve my fear? Not long, it turned out. I proved far better at outrunning my hunger than I did the last of the eggfarmers.

Past trampledown earth and underbrush scarred with the cookfires and foraging of an army on the move. Past saltwater ricepaddies clinging to the coast, to the small stilt-hut or stone-perched houses of farmers, seen from up on the way they walked. Past the rough hard-crossing country that lay inland, all pink-grey stone and the distant shapes of herders and their nix on the low sharp hills. Winding along the seacliffs, between banks of dirty-blond heather and rills of silt where the ocean rushed in at high tide, the narrow road led to Davon’s Watch.

The millet ran low after crossing the first river, but they camped the next two nights close to some beach or small rocky bay, and each time Tammunei caught dinner from the water. Pale flat sandeaters with mottled wings and squashed alien faces that hovered into Tammunei’s hands as they waded knee-wet in the shallows and came back legs glittering with salt. Sea-shalk from traps of woven twigs and flotsam, cobbled together more to keep fishcatching magic in than to catch fish themselves. Tammunei sang soft as they worked and only Simra went taskless as night set in, using the time to write. They made soups of salt and kelp and bony fish. They cooked the shalk in their shells, sucked out the bitter-rich meat, and Simra saved the chitin to sell. They fried the flatfish in red oil from Simra’s jar of preshta-jan and scraped the flesh from off the hundred fingers that skeletoned their wings.

Only the guar went hungry, got skinny. This was bad land for grazing, and what grass there’d been was burnt or champed to the roots by the army that had passed this way. Tammunei tried to feed them white soft fish, kelps from rockpools. Said they remembered Ahemmusa guar would graze from the sea just as well as from grasslands, scraping barnacles from stones with their blunt flat teeth and searching out snails and weeds at low tide. But these guar were Vereansu. They wouldn’t eat. Simra wouldn’t have thought somewhere sparse as the Deshaan Plains could leave a beast or a person spoilt but here they were all the same. Stupid animals. Probably wouldn’t fare well on a boat, even if they could pay their stabling over the Inner Sea.

Fifth day out from Senie, another deeper river struck across their path. A gorge deep enough that falling down it would likely break your legs if not kill you outright from the impact. At the bottom, rocks and coursing water, impatient to get at the ocean and kicking up a rise of freezing spray. But on the far side, a spur of land leaned down toward the sea.

Simra made out the far-off prickle of jetties and piers, shapes reaching out into the water. The far-off shows of boatsails, and flashes of paint-bright hulls. A cram of tiled roofs, parched yellow in the vacant sun, and streaked here and there with wild herbs blown as seeds from off the hills and growing up now in their gutters. Every roof sloped seaward, like a shieldwall braced for a hail of arrows — angled to cast off ashfall from Vvardenfell. And beyond the town roofs and the harbour, paddies stretched past seeing, out along the tiderace of the seal-black beach.

“Pretty,” said Simra at the hem of the gorge. The water roared below as it scrummed against the rocks. “Hadn’t expected it to be pretty.”

“So what did you expect?” Tammunei asked.

They leaned over the gorge to look down and Simra had to silence the urge to snatch them back from it. They’re older than you by who knows how much. Older and wiser in every way but the worldliest. Stop making them a child in your mind just for the sake of feeling needed.

“Nothing,” said Simra. “A name on a map, on the other side of a river. Didn’t know the river would be like this either.”

“It’s impressive,” said Noor. “Anyone with a mind to raid in from this way would have hard work ahead of them.”

Simra shrugged. “The best fortifications are those the world gives you. Why dig a moat when you can build near something like this?”

Tammunei leaned further. Closed their eyes and stretched out a hand over the drop. Again the need to steal them back from the fall. But they sat down, feet hanging into open air.

Simra almost spoke.

“Wait,” said Noor. “Something’s being given.”

“A vision?”

“A memory, I think. When the ghosts speak, you listen.”

“They’re hollow,” Tammunei said at last. A voice not quite their own. “The walls of the gorge. Passaged. At low tide the ways in are dry. Caverns combing the cliffs underneath the town. Pored and chambered like a seasponge. From the sea to the stream to the shrines below. From the sea to the stream through the stone…”

Tammunei came back to themself as the sun moved westward and past them. They stood and dusted themself down.

Simra stirred from one foot to the other and tried not to show his discomfort. But it had seemed to hurt Tammunei. This was what he’d hoped travelling with Noor – learning from her – might help prevent, and all to no end. The ghosts still knew where to find Tammunei, and Tammunei still let them in — or perhaps couldn’t keep them out.

“Tunnels under the town,” he said. “Your ghosts say anything about where we can find a bridge?”

“This way,” Tammunei said, leading off. No dream in their voice so much as the tiredness of one who has slept overlong. “Something else too. Someone, but they’re waiting. They’ll make themself heard when they’re ready.”

Hasten the day, Simra thought, bitter as salt-pickled plums.

[dunmerofskyrim]

32

It was only this year, I think. This year and yet a world ago. I was a boy then. A mercenary contracted to the company of the Red Vahn, in the pay of Jarl Ulfric Stormcloak.

There had been a battle. I had no hand in it. Held neither shield nor spear but went among the bodies with the throat-slitters, the scavengers, beside my quartermaster to take what we could from the wreckage. Pulling gold teeth from out the jaws of death; cutting arrowheads from the fallen.

It was the first I’d seen. Death I’d seen before. I’d killed — not clean, not often, yet all the same and even so. But a battle’s something else entire. Like a thing that shouldn’t be: a great ripeness of carnage, corpses. Springtime in the Rift and the reek and the flies and the hunger of wasps made the whole spectacle more than could fit in my head. Waste, as far as the eye could see. Ground boggy underfoot despite weeks without rain. And then there were the wounded. And they were almost worse.

No hand in the killing, and perhaps that thickened my guilt. Fight in the throng and you protect those around you. Your violence is also an aegis for the fighters ahead and behind, to left and to right. I’d saved no-one that way. I begged our company’s healer, at least let me help with the wounded. He was an Altmer, tall, lines round his eyes like the cracks in pottery too small and tight to let even water seep through. Clovis, an Altmer with a West Nordic name. Healer to our company, barber and surgeon, plier and puller of real teeth when they rotted.

He’d let me help him before. My mother had taught me plants good for poultices: ravelbyne, willowbark, the white from the eggs of the Skyrim rock-warbler. I’d been useful to him then. Keen eye and listening ear, I’d learnt from him. I helped him cut cloth for dressings and he cut my hair. (And I still wear the outgrown aftermath of that cut now, mussed from the sack thrown over my head, slicked to my brow with sweat.) But when the wounded came in from that battle on the plain, I begged him.

“Let me help you again.”

“You don’t know how.”

“So teach me.”

In the back of a wagon he taught me words. A mantra in Altmeris so old no-one speaks it, save when they don’t want to be understood. Words to distance myself from pain and quicken the mending of my own body.

“What use will that be when more wounded come in?”

“If you’re among them? Plenty.”

“And if I don’t plan to be?”

“A healer heals what he knows. As far as bodies go, I assume you know your own best. If not, you’ve – ah – had a youth more interesting than mine. But the fact remains: to learn healing, start with yourself.”

“But where does the magic come in? It’s just words.”

“There’s nothing for magic to work on, is there? Are you hurt, Simra?”

And now I collapse, and I think: Yes, I’m hurt, yes. I collapse on the floor of the towerhouse and the buckle of my knees, the pain in my hands as I catch myself, tell me I ought never have got up. My vision is dark. A feeling like strong drink starts in my skull. And I roll onto my back, then onto my side. The flank where I’m wounded is upright. My shirts stick to the skin and beneath it my torso feels caved in, bruised, beginning to throb.

The mantra Clovis taught me. The Rift. It was only this year, and I was only a boy, and I’ve not yet stopped being that. I’m not yet nineteen. That’s a truth I’ve tried of late to put from my mind, but bleeding and starting to whimper I feel every part a child again. Lost and afraid and not knowing how to save myself. It’s that childish feeling that starts me crying. A wrenching hopelessness, as I realise my only hope is myself. No-one is coming to help.

The mantra can be begun at any point along its length. It’s a circle. Only touch to a point in its circumference and trace around. I grope and grovel towards the place it has in my mind now. I touch, and begin to trace, begin to talk it through. Unfamiliar sounds in a language I don’t know. But they chant the rhythms of the body, the cycles of waste and renewal. And their rhythms force my breath to slow where it had grown tight with panic. That’s the mantra’s first mercy.

Still there’s dark seeping into my eyes. A threat on the edges of my mind, made of memories that beckon, beg me to drown as I dream them. Anything but live in the now, where the pain pounds like a drumbeat, overshouting the stamp of my heart.

Awake. I need to stay. I need to stay awake. The sleep that wants me will swallow me whole.

Simra’s pen hovered. His hand paused til the nib went dry.

Chronicle, account, book-to-be — whatever it was, it was growing messy. Like a once-groomed garden left unchecked. It had started out as neat squares of prose on the folds of parchment he’d bought in Bodram. Now it was a roll of papers, extraneities, scraps scribbled here and there and tied all together with a strip of someone’s torn shirtcloth. Good parchment at its heart and oddments furling round and outwards. Only Simra could order them now, and that bothered him…

The leaf he was working on rested on the back of his satchel. Stiff leather, stiff paper or parchment laid over it. It had served him fine as a writing desk for years when nothing finer could be found.

The little Telvanni-made notebook sat next to him, beside his inkstone in its carved bone box. It was open to his calculations, scribbled down from memory after that morning in Othrenis. Just to check he’d not cheated himself, or let himself be cheated. Just to keep track rather than count out all his coin again. Just so that if someone in Senie asked – a merchant, a traveller – at what price rice for retail down the southwestern road, he’d be able to tell them. Information’s a saleable luxury too, and lighter by far than coin.

He’d bartered away what he couldn’t use. The helmet with its bonemould peak and mail coif; the shell earring and painted luckstone. He’d walked into town with five pairs of boots slung across the saddle of the guar that he led for a pack-beast.

Some of it went in trade. A toothless pantryman in the fuggy warmth and shade of his shop, amongst the shelves of jars and baskets of potsherds. He’d smiled too often as Simra traded him the earring, the luckstone, for their worth in wares. A refilled flask of the local sujamma; worse by far than Tamsora Minu had served him, but not too bad to drink if you weren’t too proud to drink it. A leaf-wrapped parcel of black-flecked white scuttle. A small jar of preshta-jan to season days of nothing but rice, and a paper-bagged handful of black dried hunter’s mushrooms.

The helmet went to a smith. But she was the tools-and-nails backcountry kind, and Othrenis is a small town, and Simra knew better than to ask for all its worth in coin.

“You have rice? Millet?”

“My winter stores.”

“Any you can sell?”

She put up two pounds from her pantry, brown hulled grains, black now and then with wild rice, errant from off the plains. A skillet too, of dark-hammered iron, and two-dozen fowling arrows: a gift to keep Noor in temper about a morning wasted on trade.

“D’you sharp blades too?”

“Two shil a knife. Three for a longer blade.”

“A yera and four then.” Simra unsheathed his four knives, his heavy-bladed sword, laying them down. At once he felt half-helpless without them. Even with a looted hatchet through his belt and magic at his fingertips. “Be back for them and the remaining – what? – call it two yera and four?”

“Two.”

“Just two?”

“Just two. Buying it’s no sure thing. Who’d I sell helmets to herebouts?”

“Only people like me.”

“Only people like you,” she nodded.

Simra didn’t argue. Only carried on through Othrenis to its narrow corner of a marketplace.

No rain today but the ground was still churned to mud from the traffic of traipsing feet. A streetfood seller roasted groundnuts and grilled skewers over rocks he kept hot with flames from his fingers. Cone-hatted farmers wrapped up against the cold in all the clothes they owned grouped together round cauldrons of trama-root and brown rice tea to sell their surplus.

Scant harvest this year, Simra reckoned over their baskets, their urns, their bundles. They had little to sell and prices were dear. Winter rewards the miser, he thought. But he bought three more pounds of saltrice, five starchy white winter dirtyams like hairy crooked fingers, and a bunch of long onions with skins like paper. Paid in coin. Would have felt almost charitable if not for his own slimming funds. Winter rewards the miser but the hearts of the hungry belong to the generous; the maxim finished itself, bitter in his thoughts. Where had he read that? Heard that? It wasn’t Temple creed, that was certain. Eight or Nine? It would come to him, but wouldn’t come now…

Returning to the smithy, Simra bought a skewer of three plump grilled dumplings. Wasn’t that what he’d wanted, after all? They were hot, comforting, filled with fermented rice-bran paste and shards of crushed numb-pepper. He forced himself to eat them slow, staving off guilt with each chaste small half-mouthful.

When Simra left had left Othrenis that morning, he left with a feedbag of rice and yams and onions slung over the guar’s neck. A string of dead men’s boots still hung there with it. Not even the farmers would buy them.

Four shils worse off. That’s where the page said he stood now, in blot and bleeding ink. No matter the pay he’d had from House Minu; he’d lose that soon enough as well. He had the arrows, the sharpened steel. The skillet where a simmer of scuttle and yams and preshta-jan was steaming down now, starting to smell good as it fried. But the page of calculations still briared at him.

He closed it. Stowed it in his bookbag where it wouldn’t look at him and he needn’t look back.

“Who taught you?”

Tammunei asked it from across their camp before Simra could go back to writing. They half-rose to hunker a stride or two closer, around the small fire, the seething skillet and its contents. Red oil, sliced black scuttle, chunks of yam gone the colour of rust as they softened and sizzled.

“Taught me what?” Simra asked, leaning over the satchel and parchment in his lap to put the words into his torso’s shadow.

Tammunei’s eye went to the skillet, the steam.

“My ammu, mostly.”

“No,” Tammunei frowned. “You weren’t very good before. You haven’t seen her since.”

Something tightened in Simra’s throat and he told himself it was only the insult. “You mean when I met you? I thought I was alright…”

“You’re better now,” Tammunei offered. “So I wondered who taught you, between here and then?”

“Morrowind,” Simra lied, short-tongued, a little sharp. “Didn’t know the ingredients when I came here. That’s all. Scuttle, scrib — where’d I learn to cook that in Skyrim, hm?”

Now they’ve got you remembering, Simra thought. Tammu and Ebonheart and all that came after. Every word he wrote now drew him closer to writing that out.

“I’m sorry,” said Tammunei. “I’m interrupting.”

“No. No, I’m done writing.” Simra began to fold his parchments, his papers, clean his pen while his inkstone went dry. “Food’ll be ready soon. Best get to it.”

“Noor’ll be back soon. I should look useful. Or thoughtful at least.”

“And so the witch sweeps in from off the plains to scowl at my cooking…”

“Shul! It smells good! She’s grateful. Only she shows it badly.”

“I got her arrows. Hunting ones. Another reason for her to pretend she doesn’t know the words for ‘thank you’.”

“She’ll like those.”

“And I’d like if she caught us some racer with them. Deer, goat, nix. Thinks any of that’s likely?”

“Not deer. Not for five days now.”

“Not even gonna ask how you know that.”

“Less goat too with every eastward step.”

“Hm. I’m sure we’ll manage.”

[dunmerofskyrim]

24

“Bastard!” Bandrys’ voice was a gurgle, gone almost shrill with rage. “That bastard! Those bastards! Fuck them with their forebears’ bones! Fuck!”

A shriek of rage echoed across the plain, pale and thin as dawnlight. The wind blew cold over stiff grass, frozen dew, the frost-mazed sheet of a poor-pitched tent.

“Think there were ever any bounties to start with?”

“I don’t care! I’ll say d’you think I fucking care? Fuck! The n’wah’s fucked us. Off with our purses and into the fucking sunrise? I swear by ash and blood, Galgas…”

Someone spat heavy. Groaned as they made to move.

“Tracks.”

“What?”

“Guar tracks. One set of hooves. The road ahead.” An expectant pause. “Looks like rain today. Be gone later.”

Footsteps tramped across the grass, creaking hoary in the cold.

“How are you so calm? How are you so calm, you bastard!”

No answer. Just the sound of spitting, and one pair of hands fumbling with cloth, rope, hide.

“Fuck the tent! Time’s losing and I’ll say I am not letting that bastard shake us! He can’t have got far and when I find him, I swear…” Another short howl of frustration, like glass heated to glowing, about to shatter and break. It cracked into another gurgle and a hawking spit, profuse and darkly wet. “Go! Let’s go already! Think he can cheat me? Think anyone can cheat me! Fuck!”

Running feet and falling boots. Their gait was clumsy, staggered. The sound rose, then faded away.

At last Simra let himself breathe. His ears rang for the strain of listening, for the briefness of his breath, the hard cold of the ground he lay on. Bellydown in the grass while someone called him a cheat — he ought to have felt every bit the snake, but instead it felt like triumph, relief. They’d taken the bait.

Sunlight broke through the weft of the cloak that covered the three of them. Noor and Tammunei slept next to Simra. Elbows and knees and sleep and fear. Every slow-taken breath scared Simra deeper into silence, afraid they’d make some sound without knowing it and throw the whole plan from its cradle. Still, they’d earnt the rest. They’d walked among the grasses and along the plains, singing together this spell. A large cloak of woven grass, thatched through with charms of concealment to last from night til after dawn. And that was no small thing.

He began to count down. All round was a vast clear flatness. Once he was out from under the cloak there was nothing but the grass to hide him — just a gamble, chancing that the brothers would not look back.

A count of two-hundred shrunk away. The hot taste of copper filled Simra’s mouth again and became thick. It was his gums again. The poison again, same as had plunged the brothers into a deep and dream-plagued sleep, and seen them wake all but bleeding themselves pale through their mouth. It had been kinder to Simra. The agent in the sugar had seen to that, fighting the worst of it off. Still his wrists and ankles ached, stiff beyond the cold. Still, he leaned his head forward and blood poured dark and slack from his lips to drain into the ground. He spat to clear it. Still the taste remained: hot copper, faint black pitch.

Another two-hundred ticked past. It was still a gamble, but the odds were changing. Wait any longer, he’d risk losing them. Noor had unharnessed the guar and horse, and clapped them off up the road ahead, to go where they would. It had set a false trail for the brothers to follow, but also left Simra, Noor, and Tammunei dismounted. The chase would be on foot. But Simra didn’t have to catch them; only keep them in sight.

At last he crawled out from under the cloak and came to a crouch. Behind him, the way he’d crawled, there was nothing to see. Just grass among grass — not invisible, but unremarkable to the barest brink of it.

The wise-ones had done their work well, he thought. What was he next to that? A kit of tinder and kindling. A hedge hung with baubles and bits of magic, and most more shiny than worthy. He’d have found a way alone, he told himself. He always would and always had before. He knew his own recourses against poison and sickness, though none were pretty or came without cost. He pictured himself, daubing runes onto his body as the poison set in; eating ash and chanting til the sickness set in to purge his body. Tammunei’s way had been easier. Folly not to take it when offered… Folly, too, not to seize time by the scruff while it was still on his side.

“Hey,” he hissed. “Hey.” Louder now. “Wake up. It’s time.”

The grass fluttered, like some sudden small wind had shook its stems. Then the sight of it twisted, creased, and split open. Noor gathered herself up from under the cloak and clambered out to crouch beside Simra.

“Stay low,” he said. “Level with the grass.” He jutted a thumb over one shoulder in explanation. Along the road to Othrenis there were still two dark shapes, long-coated, hustling clumsy towards the horizon.

Tammunei crawled to a crouch as well, bleary-eyed, only half-awake.

Cast off now, the cloak had already started to look parched and threadbare. Its edges were ragged, unravelling. As the magic faded, the spell devoured itself, fading out of effect. As with fire, so with all magic — something would always be eaten.

Simra hunkered over to where it had lain and worked through his baggage. His joints complained. His right hand ached between its knuckles, fingers stiff and awkward as he teased open the mouth of his gathersack. He’d not been fool enough to wear the scale chestpiece to lie bellydown against the damp dirt all night. He’d paid through the nose for the blighted thing after all. Now he hurried it on, over the grass-wet cold of his clothes, and picked up his spear from where it had lain all night.

“What now?” said Noor as she strung her bow once more.

“You know what now,” Simra said. “They’re bait, running off ahead. We keep them in sight and wait to see what catches.” He fastened on his belt and bookbag — his satchel with two new purses inside. “D’you hear them earlier? ‘Think there were ever any bounties to start with?’ That was good.”

“You’re smiling…” said Tammunei, shrugging into the carrying straps of their yurt.

“This bit’s about as good as it’s going to get. The rest’s all graft. It’s smile now or start thinking about running after those flatfoots.”

In truth it felt clever and heady. Like throwing fits in Windhelm’s streets so Soraya could cut a few purses. Like throwing a gambit in a game of cards and watching the table as it takes. There was a hungry pleasure in it. Denying it would take a larger lie than Simra wanted to tell himself.

“We ready?” he said. “How’re you for strength? Magicka? You’ll need it.”

Noor looked blank at him and Tammunei said nothing. Hard to say if it was pride, stubbornness, or sleep and the risen sun that had brought them back to strength.

“I’m not chancing you running dry,” Simra said. “You risk yourself, you risk us all. At least take some fucking guljana for the road.”

He shared out the pink-red slices of dried root from his bag and took one for himself. No tea this morning, and little sleep that night. He’d need to borrow what sharpness he could. After that they set off at a trot, single-file, eyes always to the road ahead. No need to outrun the brothers, Simra told himself as his forehead and neck began to prickle and his lungs grew tight and cold. Just watch them and watch the horizon.

The poison lingered, grinding thick in the joints of his hips and knees and making his feet fall awkward. But if it hung on him so heavy, how much heavier would it be on the brothers? It would slow them, he reckoned. And that was one more in a host of reasons to pace himself now.

Noor and Tammunei were the better runners over distance. Simra’s gait was long. Simra’s body wanted to rush. Cityborn, he’d made himself a sprinter even before he was full-grown. But as much as Tammunei was of the Grey Quarter too, they’d lived as Velothi for longer. Where Simra wanted to bolt the leagues down, swallowing them whole, Tammunei and Noor had a knack of chewing them over with pace and patience, and in the long of things that was faster. Simra did what he could to mimic them, but quick the sound of his breath filled his brain til it almost felt like rage.

One league, two leagues, three. Simra’s throat grew ragged with panting. The day lengthened, one hour into the next, but grew no brighter. Grey light and linen skies. Galgas had been right at dawn. It looked like rain.

Four leagues. Tammunei slowed to a halt and gave a long blink as the others stopped too. As if by unspoken command they all moved from the road and half-hid in the grass once more.

“The wind says someone’s coming.” Tammunei spoke, breathless but not broken.

The horizon stuttered to the road’s distant right. There in the south, figures showed dark above the yellow-grey grass.

“There,” said Simra, squinting to southward. “Mounted. Fucking of course they are…”

“At least we’ll be riding the rest of the way,” said Noor. “If we do this the right way.”

Simra’s fingers itched round the shaft of his spear. “Hard to say how many.”

No matter how his eyes strained they gave him no numbers. A memory surfaced, from worlds ago and years away. ‘See anything?’ ‘Fuck… I don’t have special elf eyes, Kjeld…’ Simra swallowed the thought into silence before laughter or tears could seize him.

“This way,” he said, gesturing for the others to follow. “Best make up some distance while we can.”

They stayed low, making away from the road now, towards the horizon the riders had come from.

Sweat prickled at Simra’s neck. It troubled down from beneath his torn earlobe to finish, lost in the faded folds of his patchwork scarf. The ring of dull gold through his left ear felt hot and soft as clay. Winter cold – frost still on the grass and ice still on the road’s black shining puddles – but beneath his clothes Simra was all heat, all blush, all worry.

The riders were taking their time. More playful than patient though. Like wolves stake out their prey, knowing that if it bolts they can still run it down. Like dogs, waiting on that first sign of fear. They rode at a walk, straight for the road. So far as Simra could see, the brothers were trying to keep their pace, but one of them was moving hampered now. The other slowed to match his pace.

“Five,” said Tammunei. “There’s five of them.”

“We carry on til they’re done with the brothers,” Simra said. “They’ll lead back the way they came. Show us where they work from.”

The ache was in Simra’s thighs now, legs bent as they kept on. The tip of his sword’s wooden scabbard dragged along the ground — a rudder through still waters; a ploughshare through soft soil. He fought to keep a hiss of discomfort from his voice.

“What about them?” said Tammunei. “The brothers.”

Simra’s throat caught tight. “If we’re lucky they’ll soften those five for us.” Tammunei seemed about to say something, but stayed silent. “I know that’s not what you’re asking, but it’s too late to wonder now. Best not think on it.”

A whooping wail tore across the plain. It snapped Simra’s head about to stare. It started as one voice but the others took it up.

“Shit…” he hissed.

The riders charged. On the road, the brothers had stopped moving. Distance made black bristles of them, set against the sky, and the riders coursed closer, crying out as they came. In loose order the five of them spread from file and into a loose fan. Further and further from Simra, Noor, and Tammunei, the thunder of their charge turned silent and their warcry drowned in the noise of the wind.

“They have one Vereansu among them,” said Noor. “At least one.”

“You can tell by the wail?”

Noor touched her forehead, agreeing. “Most of them are mimics. Baelathri, thinking it makes them fierce — that a Vereansu can’t tell the difference. But the first at least, where they took their cue, that was real. Angkut clan, by the sound of it.”

“That tell us anything?”

“It means one bow at least and someone well versed in using it from the saddle.”

Simra grimaced. “Reckon you’re better from foot?”

Noor palmed an arrow from the quiver at her hip and nocked it to her bowstring. “We’ll see.”

“Dolgrassur… That an Angkut name, d’you know?”

“How should I know?” Noor hissed, fingers fretting at the flights of her arrow. Not feathers but stiffened leather. “You talk over your fear in hope that it will hide it. Stop. Listen. Watch.”

Simra grit his teeth and tensed his jaw, looking towards the road.

The shapes there whirled, rabbling round. One thrashed dark and panicked against the ground. Another split off, skirting a wide loop about the fight as it unfurled, only to thunder back fraywards. Some dark streak lashed out against the sky, splitting one dark blur apart — a rider knocked from their saddle. But the one who broke away to renew their charge coursed through the fight and out its other side now, a line drawn tight behind them. As they hammered a path away, curving across the plain, another shape struggled on the line behind them, dragged rough and fast through the grass.

Silence was one thing, staying still was all another. Simra’s knees bobbed as he crouched. His fingers twitched like stillness hurt them. Three against five. There was a time he’d have run straight from odds like those. Sometimes it felt like he’d gotten stronger, better. Sometimes it seemed only that he’d gotten greedy. A taste of fast coin and it was hard to ever go back to slow…

Tammunei sat with eyes closed, one hand open to the air. Noor jounced on the balls of her feet, nocking and renocking the same arrow, over and over. Simra felt the stiff lines of his scarred mouth begin to twitch. The stiff and always ache of his right hand’s fingers began to act out. At least one bow, Noor had said. The scarring between Simra’s neck and shoulder knotted too at the thought.

The fight on the road was over.

The rider who’d cast the line led their number now at a walk, back south towards Simra, Noor, and Tammunei. They drew into distance, growing as they came. The line was still taut behind their guar. A lariat, Simra reckoned as they drew nearer and into plain-sight — a rope with a body dragging behind.

A figure staggered on foot, bound up behind another rider. There were fewer mounts now than before. Of the four remaining, one had two to its saddle. By now Simra could hear their voices. A drift of laughter over the land, but not a full five voices in it. There were injured among them, or at least some hurt past humour. Their fighting strength was down. They were tired or else complacent in victory. That was good.

“Noor?” Simra hissed. “The ones doubled up, two to a guar. See them?”

Noor hummed in her throat. It sounded like agreement at first, but drew on, like the start of a song. “When?” she said.

“When we’ve got a sense for their bearing. Where the rest’re holed up.”

Simra tested the balance of his spear and swapped it to his left hand. With his right he slipped the wand from his boot. Better aim that way; a steadier hand, even for all it had been through.

The riders held course. Simra held his breath as they drew level with his hiding place in the grass, then rode at a slow and straight walk past.

“Noor?”

She hummed an acknowledgement.

Tammunei’s breathing had turned hard, eager. Their nostrils flared and their closed lips twitched in the peace of their face. Their other hand was closed round a thing of bone and horn, held together with red woven hair. Simra remembered back to the fight beside the river. He knew what the ghost trapped inside that fetish could do to a body.

Noor was ready. As she drew back her bowstring and loosed the arrow, something began to move in the grass nearby. The arrow took flight in a rush of air. The grass twisted and billowed like the wake of a shark through water. Tammunei’s bound ghost. It followed the arrow across the ground as it streaked throughout the sky.

Noor nocked another arrow and leapt to her feet. Heart in his mouth and ears full of its sound, Simra was up now too. She tilted back her head and gave a whooping wailing shriek as she began to run. In running too, Simra lost track of her. He charged. The world tightened round him, loud and lonely.

The distance narrowed in a rush of thumping foosteps. The sound of a second arrow hushed across the gap.

First, the guar with two riders bucked, tossed its head, fell backwards. It thrashed against the ground, like a mad-made mock of a dustbath. Simra could hear it groaning, begging ground or grass to pull the two arrows from its neck and side. No sign now of its riders.

The others wheeled out. Two split off to Simra’s right, skirting to flank him and Noor.

Another lagged behind. Their mount reared against a rope tied to it. Bandrys had the rope’s far end about his wrists. He pulled, hand over hand, as the rider struggled to untie it. The rider yanked a blade from their waist. In one silent moment, they rode down the length of the rope. The blade flashed once, biting hard. Bandrys stopped struggling.

The rider circled about, hacking down once more to loose the rope. Wind-troubled white hair, patchwork chitin armour, knees and off-hand straining to get their pony back in rein as it bucked and fought nervous circles through the grass. They raised their sword, bellowed, and spurred towards Simra. Then the air streaked dark. A long war-arrow bristled sudden from under the rider’s raised arm. The horse charged on in a lather of panic. Sixty paces, fifty, forty and closing.

Simra snarled a calling as he raised his wand. Four words formed still and clear in his mind and scorched his tongue when spoken. He jabbed the butt of his spear into the ground and felt the spell run free. A hungry draw on him, half-consuming him as the grass where his spear had struck began at once to smolder. Fast as oil-soaked cloth it took and billowed into hungry sparks. Not flame but bitter black smoke to blind the flanking riders. Bows, Noor had said — at least one.

But the charging rider had passed the sword to their other hand. Another arrow sparred out now from their thigh. Thirty paces, twenty, eyes flashing pain and murder, foam bearding the horse’s bared teeth.

Simra breathed deep, stood still, turned profile. Took aim as the smoke set in. Eyes stinging, he fought to keep them open just a moment more, and joined the runes on the wand. It jolted in his hand. The air screwed and blurred. A whirling force threw the rider at last from their saddle. As they struck the grass, Simra threw himself aside. The half-mad horse flew past and ghosted into the smoke.

“Breathe…” Simra heard himself say. He clambered onto his knees, thrusting the wand back into his boot. Bright and light his limbs, dizzy with distant pain. Head full of roaring silence. “Breathe and up. Get the fuck up…”

But his breath stung and choked him. Acrid smoke, fuelled more by magicka than by the burning plain. Someone, somewhere, started to scream. On knees, then knees and hands, then two running feet, he charged towards the sound and out from the smoke.

Blinding grey sunlight. The world blurred through Simra’s streaming eyes. Already the air was a-reek with blood. Simra dashed for the first figure he saw. Spear levelled in both hands, Simra shrieked, going for the rider’s flank. A dreamlike moment. The spear sunk into the rider’s side, and sunk Simra back through memory. A courtyard of mud and bodies and Moridene twisting on the ground. Then the spearhead carried the rider through the air to falling and their weight ripped the shaft from Simra’s hands as the guar bolted from beneath them.

On the ground they scrabbled like a pinned moth. Simra reached past his scabbard and to his knives instead. His fingers closed round a leatherbound handle. A spearhead once, with him since childhood, reforged into something leafbladed now, stiff-spined — sharp as he went to ground and stabbed point-down into the struggling figure.

Resistance at first. A hand raised against his dagger. A messy parting of delicate bones; dagger through desperate hand. Then the stubborn flex of mail. Then the savage accident of Simra’s point finding its way past the armour — to softness and opening skin.

After that there was nothing. No motion beneath Simra. Not even screaming anymore in the distance. Simra sat on his haunches, fist loose round the point-down grip he’d taken on his dagger. His shoulders shook. Sweat burned stiff on his scalp and shoulders.

He blinked the smoke from his eyes. On his scaled chest and the side of his neck and his jaw’s outward corner, blood was starting to dry. Messy handprints, smeared in blame-bright red.

By rights this was only half a victory. By numbers, less than half.

[dunmerofskyrim]

23

“We lost time this morning — your little red one lurking in the tent, breathing smoke I’ll say… So how much did we lose? How far?” Bandrys trotted to Simra’s side, feet falling heavy. “To the prize, I mean. How far?”

Simra looked ahead, taking a studied view of the horizon. The road twisted headwards, a mud-black bridge of solid ground in a sea of shivering grass. “Hard to say. No telling where they’re based out of.” A lie, but he made it sound reluctant, careful: an admission.

Galgas walked like a bodyguard, always a few strides behind his brother. Footstep, footstep, and on every third beat came the butt of his polearm, tallying out the leagues. Simra took up the lead, walking likewise, Velothi spear in hand. Beside him, Bandrys kept pace, in a leathery flutter of coat-tails.

“If you don’t know that,” he said, “what do you know? Kept tight-lipped on all this long enough that I’ll say it’s time you shared.”

“I know there’s twelve mer at least want taking in or killing,” said Simra. Bootshuffle. Sharp crush of the spike that butted his spear’s blunt end. “Four named mer amongst them. Meidryn Sadoro, Nephtah Themaryb, Tiamtar – what was it? – Dolgrassur, I think. And Moab the Soup… Most of them not so named that I’d heard of more than one before the last couple days, though.”

“Which was it?” Galgas put in. “The one you’d heard of.”

Simra twisted his neck to look back. Every word from Galgas came like an ambush, and questions worst of all. “The Soup. Get a name based on boiling people alive, guess that name’s more likely gonna travel… And far as I remember, his name’s been travelling – what? – two years?”

“The others?” said Bandrys.

“Nobodies, far as I know. Hangers-on. Petties. They’re two drams a scalp. Four for the named mer. Five drams and three for Moab, last I heard. That’s thirty-three drams and a bit, total. Just less than seven drams each in bounties. Might be less in Othrenis. Might be more. More likely more, seeing as it’s closer and the threat’s more theirs than Ouadabridge’s. Add loot to that as well and it’s pretty enough, as pictures go…”

Bandrys’ eyes flickered skyward a moment and he chewed the inside of his cheek. In time he nodded. “Right. And what about how we find them.”

“Like I said, no idea where they’re based from.” Simra put a clip in his voice. It wasn’t hard to ape frustration around the brothers. “Only word I have’s where caravans start going missing.”

“And where’s that?”

“Four days out from Oudabridge at cart-pace. Last stretch before Othrenis.”

A look crossed Bandrys’ face like a downturned grin. The corners of his mouth pulled tight, lowering to show the cram of his lower teeth and the black-red beginnings of his gums. “And you tell us this now?”

“Yeah.”

“We’re knuckles-deep in their territory, and you tell us now? Gods! And you’re just walking!” Bandrys gave a horselike huff. “Gods..!”

“Heard your brother voice some reservations yesterday,” Simra began, calm as cold water. “Sounded like he was uneasy over Tammu’s role in all this. Reckon you’re uneasy too, thinking I don’t look like I’m looking out, watching for threats after that admission. Wanna know why? It’s cos Tammu’s listening.”

“Well…”

“We carry different burdens but we all pull our fucking weight, right? Suggest you look at yourself and ask what yours is — what d’you carry?” A flash went into Simra’s voice, threatening thunder, and then it was gone. “Besides, takes a special kinda stupid to get properly ambushed somewhere like this. Big and broad and flat as a chap’thil board? That’s got a way of giving you fair notice.”

“And that’s your plan, is it?” said Bandrys. “When they ambush us, ambush them right back?”

“Master tracker, are you?” said Simra. “No? Then I’ll take it as read that, far as plans go, you’ve not got a better one.”

They walked a while onward. Simra weighed out the silence, measuring, judging, counting out its contents. Apprehension, sudden uncertainty. That was good. Leave them watching the horizon, not their backs. Leave them doubting his ability, not his honesty. There were truths stitched through all of what he’d said but in the end it hinged on lies: the distance and the day; the nearby threat. This wary new tension was part of his plan. Simra reckoned he’d sown his seeds about right and now he could watch them grow.

“You’re right, though,” he said, stopping to lean with both hands on his spear. “We’ll need edges keen and eyes sharp for all of us.” He paced around the spear-shaft to look backwards at the brothers, the horse and guar, and the two wisewomen. “Being ready for a surprise attack’s a surprise too, and that’s about what we’ve got on our side.”

The others had stopped. Galgas leaned on his polearm. Tammunei shied forward to stand close to Simra, their weight shared unfair between their raggy-booted feet. Around them all, Noor walked a restless circle; small strides and soft-falling feet in her brief simple shoes.

Simra ground his spear into the dirt til it could stand on its own. “Anyone’s got armour to put on, bows to string, I’d say now’s the time.”

He swung his gathersack frontwards on its strap and reached inside to bring out a rolled sheet of kreshweave. A stiff cloth, hardy, a little like linen and a little like waxed paper. He opened out the scroll into a kind of apron and fitted it to the front of his body. A moment’s fumbling as his fingertips searched for the fastenings that would tie it round his neck: a gorget of netch leather, stitched with verticals of steel wire. From there it fell in a ply of shimmering scales, chitin and brass and iron, irregular but overlapping, and threaded onto the tough cloth backing. With a sash that spread out from its sides, it fastened also at the waist.

Flint-eyed, Noor broke the circle she’d been pacing and move to her guar’s flank. She took up the Vereansu bow and belted its quiver round her waist. In her hands she held the bow, but stared up at Simra. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” she said to him in Velothis.

The tongue had no word for showmanship that he knew. No tradition of play-acting. With no right word to use he fell back on “Performance.”

The bow was a composite: a crooked crescent of blood-dark wood and varnished bone and dried sinew. Noor brought out its string and fitted it to one end of the bow. She began to mutter. The bow flexed and creaked as she spoke. It bent back on itself, straight at first, then further. At her asking it writhed into shape, horning round its arms. Neat and easy, she nocked the string.

“Well…” Bandrys breathed. “I’ll say…”

Noor grimaced and looked up to Simra once more. “Performance.” She hitched up, foot in one of her guar’s stirrups, and threw over a leg to sit on its back.

Galgas untied a helmet from his belt and slotted it onto his head. It was a dome of fluted steel that tapered towards its peak like the root-end of an onion. A curtain of butted rings hung down from its back and sides, decorated with blue cloth tassels, and with open cuts for the tips of merish ears. He untied the cloth cover from his polearm’s head. Beneath was a dagger-thin axehead and a short hammerhead at its rear. Above, following the line of the shaft, a spike jutted upwards.

Tammunei’s eyes were wide and wary. Their posture had stopped shifting and gone stiff, still and brittle as a drawing in pencil. Simra felt it like a vibration to his left.

Bandrys reached into his long leather coat, padded at the arms and shoulders, and brought out what looked to be a bundle of stout sticks. Holding onto one, the bundle fell open. It was a kind of collapsed flail, built like a staff of three sections, each length joined to the last with a few stout links of chain. The middle section was ridged pale hardwood. The outer two were ringed with iron at their tips.

Simra frowned. He’d heard of threshing staffs — read about them, mostly. Field-tools turned to weapons in the hands of farming folk, common before the Red Year but only storied since the start of this era. Since the coming of the peasant-communes and townships that had grown up as the Houses broke down, like mushrooms after rain. Hard to say whether it looked like nothing much, or something simple but deadly. It all depended on how Bandrys used it, he supposed. And in any case, it hardly mattered.

“That better?” Simra asked, troubling over one edge of his chestpiece where a twist of wire stitching had come loose and started to stick him through his shirt.

“I’ll say I’ve worried over worse…”

Through noon and after, on til evening, the waiting worry grew.

Simra began to feel a little of it himself, even causeless and pointless as it was. Fear of the empty horizon, daring it to form up into figures, but dreading it too. He’d made that fear; stitched it together with words and shows. But armoured now, and feeling more than ever the new strange weight of his sword, and edged all round with the others’ alert silence, the tension seeped into him too.

He tried to take it as proof maybe — a sign of work well done. But night fell, and with it the plain closed in. Stars overhead, but the open air immured them, turning black and solid. They stopped at the end of the sunset. Night buried them.

“Nothing…” muttered Bandrys as they laid camp. “All day and nothing. I’ll say, I could stand a fight far better than all this nothing. What are they? Gone? Watching all this time?”

“Could be,” said Galgas.

“Could be,” Simra said. “But they’d need a far-eye or spells to see us while we’ve not seen a thing.”

“Who’s to say they’ve not got either? I’ll say, how would you know?”

Simra didn’t answer. Just kicked together dry grass and dung turned half to fossils. With his soft-soled boots he felt for stones, hidden in the grass, but turned up nothing to hedge the campfire in. He could move the fuel he’d gathered, dig a pit, dump the fuel inside — but that was more work than he wanted.

He spat three times round the fuel-heap, marking three corners as he walked about it, counter-sunwise. He muttered a three-word calling, asking difficult things from the fire he’d light: stability and temperance, both bound together in obedience. Three: a good number for tying things together, strong and staying the same. He shrugged, hoping the spell would hold, but frowned before walking away.

Something had caught. A kind of friction — he’d felt it in his mind as the spell was finished. It formed the start of a shape. He glimpsed it, tried to grasp it, and then with the force of his focus it was gone. He remembered what Noor had said of Velothi sigils: ‘Found things, like spell-songs are.’ Perhaps one had begun to find him…

“And you go about lighting a fire!” Bandrys’ voice broke in on his thoughts. “A fire anyone could see!”

Simra bristled. “Anyone could, but nobody will.”

“Go on. More Ashlander magic, is it?”

“Right. Noor’ll see to it. Hide us.” Simra looked out across their camp – the yurt assembling itself as Tammu sat nearby; Galgas pitching the brothers’ own tent – and found Noor with his eyes. He carried on in Velothis. “Won’t you, Noor? Hide us?”

Noor touched her high forehead in a Vereansu nod. She walked in the night, hands brushing through the grass. Her every move was a whisper, and as she began to sing, soft, the plains whispered back. In time she gestured to Tammu who followed her out of sight.

“Then again…” Simra considered. “If anyone’s already seen us…”

“What? If anyone’s already seen us what?”

“The spell only hides us from stumble-upons. Not from anyone already searching. Shit…” Simra gave a humourless sigh of laughter. “Dunno about you, but I don’t think I’m getting any sleep tonight if I try or not.”

Galgas looked to Bandrys. Bandrys looked back.

“Us neither,” Galgas said. “We’ll watch with you.”

“Was hoping you’d say that,” Simra grinned. Relief made the gesture genuine. A flash of straight teeth through his crooked lips. “They come in the night, reckon we’ll stand a chance after all.”

Above them, the stars blinked out. The night sky turned black and blank as a shadowed ceiling.

Sparks then embers, Simra called the fire to life, coaxing light from the small pile of tinder. All for the better. The day’s cold had deepened. Sun’s Dusk was drawing to a close and the nights would fall in frost. Simra poured from his waterskin into his dark bronze kettle. The skin was slack now, almost empty. For all the rain they’d had, there’d been no standing water but puddles — no way to refill.

“You got water to spare?” he asked.

“Some,” said Bandrys. “What for?”

“I’ve got strong tea. Little bit of alchemy to it. Not enough to be awake all night, we need to be alert all night as well.”

“Tea,” Galgas nodded, walking over to hand Simra a leather water-pouch.

Setting the kettle above the banked flames, Simra took a paper parcel from his gathersack and ate, sparing, from its contents. Dried plum, black dried apricot, dried yellow plum. A dried brown ricecake, flavoured with green herbs.

The water boiled and Simra took it from the fire til the bubbles turned to beads in the flame’s amber light. He took a pouch from his belt. Not the main cake of tea he’d bought in Ouadabridge, but a shaving from it: crumbled black leaves, flecks of blue and flecks of white, speckled through with red and hackle-lo green. He fed half the pouch into the pot, hummed as he considered for a moment, then flaked in the rest to be sure.

“Probably taste like a well something’s died in, I warn you,” he said. “If you reckon you can stay awake without…”

The brothers shared a look again.

“Best not take any chances, I’ll say.”

The tea steeped. Simra brought out a cup. The brothers produced their own earthenware handle-bowls and set them beside the pot.

Simra poured the tea, dark and steaming. In his hand he held another paper parcel, out from his satchel, and poised it over the cups. “Sugar?”

Bandrys kissed his teeth and shook his head. “N’wah.”

“Suit yourself,” said Simra, and sweetened his own cup.

The sugar came out black and shining as jet. Crushed crystals, caramelised to burning, then reset, re-powdered that morning as Tammunei stayed in the yurt. Sugar, spraygrass pods, and whatever else they’d measured in.

‘Clever is the womer who adds always a third part,’ they’d told him. ‘I can’t promise the poison won’t touch you too, but you’ll be spared the worst of it.’

Together, the three of them drank.

[dunmerofskyrim]

20

“You speak any kind of Velothis?”

Lank-hair stuck Simra with a short fool-calling look. “Ashlander?” he said. His brother shared the look, mouth closed, but looking like he wanted to spit. “Do we look like we speak any ashlander?”

Simra shrugged. “Not so that I’d ask. Not on the ordinary, anycase. Thing is, my partners, they only speak Velothis. Well, not just Velothis. They’ve got enough of the Houses’ tongues in their heads to say please and thank you and hello. Not that you’d know it sometimes, to talk to them, but…”

He tailed off. They were nearing the edge of town. An open gutter crossed the dust trail that had skirted the western riverbank, and fringed the east side now. The rain fell on, turning the dust through dirt and into mud. Simra breathed shallow through his mouth to take out the worst of the stench and hopped across the two stride gap. Landing jolted him, up through his spine and into his skull, and set his brains to aching again.

“That a problem?” He looked back across the gap at Lank-hair and Oil-braid, asking into their silence.

Oil-braid grimaced, chucked his polearm over to clatter onto the far side. He followed, skipping easy over a moment later. “What kind?” he said.

Simra measured a response. Ashlanders walked a fine-teetering line these days, in the eyes of most Dunmer. The settled folk might grant them some token share of reverence – saviours of the old ways, keepers of sacred tradition, like the Temple said – but that was as a people. Theoretical.

“The holy kind,” Simra answered. “Good strong magic, I know that. Curses broken, ghosts sent to sleep. You’ve got to be green as Glass not to know that’s invaluable, line of work we’re in. So…is that a problem?”

“Not so that I’d make a problem of it, I’ll say.” Lank-Hair  looked over the gutter, then stumbled across, ungainly. He slipped, caught his knee on the gutter’s edge and came up swearing. “Fuck! Fuck you with your forebears’ bones and all..!”

By his heavy build and huge hands, Simra had him marked at first for a brawler, a wrestler, a close-in hard-hitting scrapper of some sort. Hard now to say just what Lank-hair might be, but if he was any kind of fighter, he was a clumsy one — hadn’t taken long to reckon as much. Simra was still yet to see a weapon on him, whereas Oil-braid had his polearm, a long knuckle-bowed dagger, and a hammer-backed hatchet through his belt.

Lank-hair clapped dust from his shoulders and pawed at the smear of mud left on the knee of his plenty-pocketed trousers. “Fuck…”

“Ashlanders,” Simra prompted, raising an eyebrow.

“Right.” Lank-hair grunted, cleared his throat dryly, taking back what composure he could. “Wouldn’t want my sister to marry one, but I’ll say, I’ve no problem with those as have no problem with me.”

“Admirable,” Simra said, mocking. He’d expected as much. Eras of prejudice don’t starve out in a century or so; not when there’s those still so well accustomed to feeding them, whether they know it or not. “Not far now.” Simra turned, on toward the riverbank, and the black stone span of the bridge a ways along it.

“And you?” It was Oil-Braid’s voice. “Halfbreed or something, are you?”

Fuck yourself, Simra wanted to say. His back was turned on them, hiding the snarl that pulled across his face. It turned to a grimace as his brains gave another aching throb. “Something like that,” he grunted. “Enough that I speak their tongue fine.”

Better still that they didn’t, he thought. He and Noor and Tammunei would still have a way to talk without their new travelling companions listening in. And with travelling companions he trusted scarce at all, that was as big a blessing as he could ask for.

“Come on,” Simra said. “You’ve made me late.”

The rub and rattle of belts and sheathed steel. The muddy tramp of boots. Simra walked, and as they had all morning, Lank-hair and Oil-braid followed after. The stump-stump of Oil-braid’s polearm punched out an off-beat to the rhythm of their gait, staccato against the dirt after every other footfall.

They’d told Simra their names. Lank-hair was Bandrys and Oil-braid went by Galgas. Hard to make them stick, though, when he had perfectly good epithets already smeared onto each of them. And perhaps that was better, all told. Good not to get too close.

The bridge rose up on their left. A humpbacked shelf of smoothed black stone, great blocks for its two thick-piled supports, and a smaller mortaring of neat-cut rock for the span itself. It was narrow, the better to defend, and off abroad the plains and into the easting distance a mud and stone road ran out.

Two figures were squat by the roadside. Brown and salt-grey hair for one, and the other a glaring red. Nearby the level shape of Simra’s pony stood, mouthing at the short grass. Tammunei’s head twitched round, cat-wide face and small sharp chin, staring as Simra and the brothers crossed the bridge.

“Blessings!” he called in Velothis. All sunny tone and smiling, he raised a bandaged hand to greet them. “These shit-soles don’t speak any Velothis, and I told them you don’t speak baelathri! Please fucking play along!”

Tammunei seemed to shrink further into their crouch. If the grass here were longer, they might have disappeared. Strangers – settled folk – and he’d brought them here. An itching finger of guilt poked round in Simra’s chest.

But Noor rose, gathering all her height. Wind working at her long hair, she looked every bit the ashlander witch Simra needed her to be. “Blessings.” Her voice was stiff but that could just as soon be ritual as surprise, dismay, restrained disgust. “Who are they, Simra?”

Blame, he realised. That was the rigid note in her voice. Easy as falling, Simra’s guilt twisted defensive and changed. A glittering splinter of anger. He kept it from his voice. “Shit-soles, like I said.” Reusing words – giving the brothers sounds to recognise – would make the exchange seem more what he’d say it was. “Followed me. Tried to rob me. I talked them round for now, but don’t trust either one any farther than I can spit.”

“And so you bring your problem home, to Tammu and to me?” Noor muttered something, too quiet for Simra to hear even over their closing distance.

Simra strained to make his voice stay smiling. “You’ll have questions. Doubts. I know. But please for pity’s sakes, keep them in Velothis and keep them for fucking later!”

The bridge ended. Black stone turned to dark mud road, pitted sometimes with slabs of split rock. Noor stood with hands on hips, robe huddled round her small and shapeless shape, ragged at the edges. She was staring now while Tammunei couldn’t look. The two guar lay down beside her, sturdy legs folded under them and big heads stuck out straight. One peeled open a brown-gold eye to join Noor in staring questions at Simra.

“What was all that?” said Lank-hair.

“Greetings,” said Simra in Dunmeris. “Tradition.” He didn’t turn round. The rain itched at his scalp and his head ached beneath.

“Long,” Oil-braid observed.

“I’ll say.”

“Tradition, like I said. Ashlanders come back after a while in the world, they share news, swap stories. Like a ‘how are you?’ only sometimes the answers are interesting.”

“So what’d you tell them?” said Lank-hair.

“I told them it’s fucking raining. And that I found some help might make our money problems disappear.”

“Hm. She doesn’t look any too happy about it.”

“She’s not nearly so fond of money as me.” Simra halted, the brothers behind him. He stepped from one stone to the roadside, smart away from the worst of the mud. “Sers, Noor and Tammunei. Tammu, Noor, this is Bandrys and Galgas.”

“They don’t have mounts,” said Noor. “They’ll slow us.”

“As opposed to me bleeding in a gutter somewhere,” said Simra. “That’d really put the wind at our backs, hm?”

“What’s she say?”

“That we’ll have to go on foot for now.” Often best to weave a weft of truth through the warp of your lies, Simra reckoned. “I told her it’s worth it, all considered.” He turned to Noor, changing to Velothis, realising he liked lying to these strangers better than he liked speaking earnest with her. “We can lead the guar, the pony. They can take our packs. Save our backs a while at least.”

“For how long?” she said.

“Long as it takes to bring about an ideal fucking outcome.” A nervous tide rose up behind Simra’s words. “Far as I know, I’m the one in a hurry here. Few more days for you to sow your bones on the plains — what’s that to bite at you? Thought you’d be happy.”

“Happy? When like one stricken with a fever you go amongst the clan and spread what ails you?”

Tammunei stood without a word and began to saddle the guar, hitch them with baggage, busying themself.

“What’d you prefer I do?” Simra’s smile didn’t falter. Only the pressure behind his words rose, between these two conversations: like a fox called to frenzy when it scents blood. “Be so considerate as to get stabbed in an alley, lose our coin, and to come back and haunt you at the earliest point of mutual fucking convenience? Fuck off,” he said, flat and featureless as any other words might be.

“What’s she say?” asked Lank-hair, again.

“That you’d best be worth the hitch in our pace. She’s not convinced. You want in on this, reckon you’ve both got some insinuating to do.”

“Hghm.” Lank-hair grunted. Paused. “Doesn’t say much, your other one.”

He was looking at Tammunei, eyes on their back. Simra’s scalp prickled. His head ached. “Nor does yours.”

Simra’s calm felt harder to hold each moment that passed. What he said all but broke into a threat. A morning full of demands; twists of fate and changing plans. It ought to have been tiring, taxing on him by now, but instead there was a whirring nerve-heady joy to it, bigger than the press and throb of his hangover. Playing those who’d prey on him, with lies and lures to their worst selves. All it wore on was his peace, his quiet, and the test to his patience was as much a part of this glee as it was a kind of pain.

“Time we got on,” he said. “We’ve lost enough daylight as is.”

Bright eyed and heart pounding, Simra went to his horse. Happiness. It almost felt like happiness. Or at least a high that could pass for it. Down the years he’d learnt better than to question that when it came to call. Here it had found him waiting, watching, weighing his options and outcomes. Talking and knowing each word could tilt to victory or disaster. They walked on, and led their mounts besides.

[dunmerofskyrim]

16

Words turned in Simra’s mind. Words turned and worked themselves over.

The gait of his shaggy-maned mud-brown pony almost made a poem of them. The gentle jolt through the hips, the floor of his body, and out into travel-vexed thighs. An abdomen sick of bending to keep sitting a saddle. The muffled knocking that beat through his spine and set his neck to aching. That was its metre. It was also three-fifths of what he hated about riding.

No denying though, it had halved the second half of their journey. This leg of it, at the least. They had ridden along the nameless stream til it paid out into the Dathan. A wide pale-watered river, but it sat shallow and flowed slow between its deeper sloping banks. That was one thing for which they could thank the coming Winter. Mountain headwaters, back to the west — they’d be lying cold and lazy now, in mountains already gone bleak with frost, bleached with snow.

Simra was wary of river-crossings. Had any number of reasons to be, and most of them good ones too. But crossing the Dathan at the ford they found was scarce enough to wet Simra’s boots, or wash against the ribs of his pony. No great trial, he told himself, as his heart clenched and the eyes behind his eyes remembered. And then they were over.

They dismounted to let the guar bask a moment in the cool bright sun, and the pony roll dry in the grass and the dust. They ate mouthfuls of wood-dark bark-stiff jerky from the saddlebags of the dead Vereansu.

Simra’s stomach still took uneasy to treating meat as a staple not a luxury. It growled and fidgetted, unquiet as they rode on.

In the nights, the mornings, and what stops they took to water and rest their mounts, Simra found time to write. He’d folded the parchment he bought in Bodram til he could see pages in each crumpled gather. Not a book nor quite a scroll, but he numbered each page as he wrote, planning for the day when he’d refold and cut and stitch the whole mess together — make it what it was meant to be.

Sixteenth months with no way to write, then thirteen more with scarce any time to do so — not like this, not for himself. The habit came back hard – harder on some days than others – but the one thing more bitter than writing badly was not writing at all. And all the rest was a chaos of peaks and pits, and misbegot conclusions. One day it would seem that, in silence, he’d somehow gotten better. The next, it seemed neglect had lost him whatever scraps of skill or talent he’d once had.

But the habit was there now, at root and at work. Even without paper or ink, in empty times, some part of his mind would start writing. Words turned. Words turned and worked themselves over.

Simra rode with Tammunei to his left.

His was a hunched shape, low and sloped in the saddle, contrasting the long straight spear slung across his back.

He’d taken the spear from among the fallen Vereansu, who had used it for both a lance and bannerpole. A shaft of reddish-dark wood with a strange and twisting grain, a little longer than Simra was tall, wrapped in leather at the middle and bored with holes at either end to take a carrying strap. Its point was a narrow taper of iron with a second straight spike hooking backwards off from it.

It rattled against his saddle, shoulders, and side as he went. A blighted inconvenience and a sly cruel reminder. Useful, no doubting that, but he’d told himself that he’d never rely on another blighted spear again as long as he lived. Not after all he’d done for the chance to make it so. So don’t rely on it, he told himself now. Use it when it suits you, and don’t when it doesn’t. Sell it when you get the chance for all you give a shit. Still, it felt like an indignity. Another piss poor joke the world was playing at his expense.

Noor went ahead of Simra and Tammunei on her grey and tan guar, the ambling point to their formation. She’d taken a bow from the Vereansu dead and it nestled unstrung, like a little horned moon, at rest in a sheathe by her saddle. Arrows rattled in a nearby quiver. Short and light and softish-spoken, fletched to bring down prey. Longer and heavy, fewer in number, three war-arrows grumbled in their separate compartment. Her long hair streamed idle behind, more wind than speed in its motion.

She sat her saddle upright. Flowed somehow with the jerking two-foot gait of her guar. Flowed somehow with the way its walk veered side to side with every step, as much as it rambled forward.

All motion on two legs is falling, Simra decided. Falling and catching, falling and catching. The kind of thing that if you ever thought about, instead of doing it thoughtless, you’d fail or falter in it — fail the fall, miss the catch.

A steppe-pony was a smoother ride – a more familiar one for Simra – but that didn’t make it a far cry better. Noor was maddening-perfect in the way she rode. Tammunei, natural and smooth, clicking and cooing to their guar all the while. Simra found it easier to slouch. He’d never be mistaken for a good rider. The next best thing was to be a poor but comfortable one, he reckoned. Not that there was any blighted danger of that. He could urge a fair smooth Riftfolk tolt from a horse like this, but any pace slower or faster would jar him. Most of their journey went on at a grating walk, while Simra fought to keep a mouthful of complaints behind his teeth.

The shadow of something winged hung black in the sky.

“One of yours?” Simra pointed it out to Tammunei. “Hired on to catch us dinner?” He’d seen Tammunei sing a hawk from off its glide and down to catch them a hare. Hoped this might be the same.

Tammunei gave a vague smile and shook their head. “I’m listening to the ground, not asking favours of the sky.”

“Alright…”

For all the haze and mystery when Tammunei talked of their magic, the aim was often practical, the goal a fish or scrib or marmot for the pot, or some sense of nearby water. Simra waited for Tammunei to explain.

“I can hear mushrooms,” they said. “Not far. Hiding in the tall grass. We might have missed them otherwise…”

“What does a mushroom sound like?”

“One mushroom? Don’t know. Too quiet. But lots? It’s… Hm… One thing, lots of voices, lots of senses, all talking to each other, but — No. Talking to itself. Like — Like if a spider’s web could talk, strand to strand, corner to join, then…it might talk like this.”

Simra raised his brows, slackened his jaw. He was never sure whether to be amazed or appalled.

“But…you don’t know? Because you’ve never heard a cobweb before?”

Tammunei smiled again. Remembered to nod.

“Fucking Princes…” Simra breathed. A soft curse that turned into a laugh. “Swear, if I could write like you talk…” Even after the laugh had ended, Simra felt a lingering smile twist his scarred lips.

The mushrooms weren’t far, only hidden.

Tammunei made a cooing noise and turned off their course, leaving Simra unsure if the sound had been for their guar or meant for Noor and him. Any case, they followed.

Slinging one leg over the guar’s big sad-smiling face, over the horn of their saddle, Tammunei slipped down onto the plain. Nothing to see. Only the grasses, almost an ordinary green here and hushing high against Tammunei’s shoulders.

Noor curled her legs under her, coming to sit her saddle cross-legged. Frustrating ease, unlimited patience.

Simra kissed his teeth and followed Tammunei. A clumsy mimic of how they’d dismounted, and Simra’s boots hit the ground. Landing, falling, at least, he could do. “Stay,” he told his horse, turning his head back to fix it with a stern frown. “Stay.” Again, sterner, in the closest thing his tongue would come to Deshaan Velothis.

There was no comprehension in the way it stared back. A single sidelong preybeast’s eye. Eerie how it put him in mind of talking to Tammunei sometimes. Same opaque angled look. Same hard time telling if they’d really understood.

The horse stayed, but more from its own will than Simra’s command, he reckoned. It dropped its head to champ at something on the ground, disappearing into the grass save the peak of its saddle and height of its withers.

Simra kissed his teeth again, planted his spear in the dirt with its blunt iron buttspike, and followed Tammunei a short ways into the overgrowth.

With a careful hand, Tammunei parted a wall of grass. Beyond it, the growth was shorter. Between the blades, a ragged circle of fungus grew, in yellow-white and spotted scab-red and the occasional tall spire of blue. Like soapbubbles, heaping over each other. Like a Telvanni town, sprawled in miniature.

“How many of those are any good to eat?” Simra peered through the parted curtain of grass, hesitant to step inside. He’d read stories about forest spirits, marking their sanctums with spirals or circles of small smooth stones, or else with rings of toadstools. Cradletales, but they still put an apprehension in him.

“The white parasols,” Tammunei said.

“The pale frilly ones? Good. That’s most of them!”

“The red spotted ones too. Only the stems though, and only if you plan to sleep soon.” Tammunei crouched, brought out a small sicklebladed knife, and set to harvesting the white mushrooms from off their stubby jaundiced stalks.

From behind them, Simra heard Noor begin to sing. A low quiet drone of noise, familiar by now as the moaning wind or whispering grass.

“What about the blue ones?” Simra asked.

“Bad to eat. Slack muscles, swollen ankles and wrists. A stronger extract locks the joints if you mix it with hackle-lo tea, boil it down…”

“And the reds if you eat the caps?”

“Bleeding gums. Bad dreams. There’s no virtue in them.”

“Less you’re cooking for someone you don’t like, or you need to play ill…”

“The second — why would you..?” Tammunei looked up, some small dismay on their face.

Simra shrugged. “Don’t know. Never know what you’ll need to do. Not til it’ll help to do it.”

Tammunei didn’t respond, but must have understood. Red spots and blue spires, they picked a little of both.

Simra brought out his notebook. Purple, clothbound, pretty, seldom used except to cram full of sidelined thoughts and things to remember. Not since he’d bought the parchment and started thinking bigger. He took out a twisted charcoal pencil and started to scribble down what Tammunei had told him.

“What are you writing?”

“Notes. What you’ve just said, mostly. About them.” Simra pointed with his pencil down at the mushrooms.

“Why?”

“So I don’t forget. So next time I’m hungry and have my choice of mushrooms, I’ll know which way to choose.”

“But why write? Might you forget if you do? Your mind won’t have as much need to remember.”

“Might do. Then I’ll have my notes to look back at, right?” Might do, Simra thought again to himself. Might do, but probably not. For one thing, the notes let him pretend it was otherwise. “Best to have them. Just in case.”

“What about the other writing?”

“What?”

“On the other paper, with the pen. That’s different? Different tools for different tasks.”

“That’s different.” Simra nodded though his gut sank, like being a child again, caught out in some secret mischief. “Kind of. That’s for remembering too, but for other people. Just in case.”

“Other people? To help others remember what?”

“Me, I reckon… Y’know, for if they need to.”

“Oh.” A sad thoughtful pause. “Can I read it?”

Simra had known that was coming. It brought a further sinking  with it. Colour burnt up hot across his cheekbones. “Maybe.” He forced calm into his voice. Attempted an easy smile. “Maybe when it’s done. Or if I don’t finish it. Maybe then.” The smile faltered. “Didn’t know you could read. Just assumed… After what Noor said…”

“Only slowly. Loudly. If I try to read your secret just-in-case memory-papers, you’ll hear of it.”

Simra’s lips parted. His throat choked up a laugh, catching the fact that Tammunei had made a joke a moment before his mind. Laughter was good. It hid the fear he felt for what he’d already written. How it was for everyone and no-one at all; strangers but perhaps never friends; for Tammunei, yes, but not for them to read themself. It was a book braver than he was. In that moment, braver than he felt by far, and off to the point of foolishness.

A thought came. He could burn it, every page, leave no trace. No thought had ever been so tempting or so unbearable both at once. He couldn’t.

When they sat later at their cookfire, cloaked to the night by magic and eating a fry of soft tart-tasting white mushrooms, Simra didn’t. Though the thought came back and the fire beckoned all the same.

[supermahipalsingh-blog]

Gifting and donation are the format of crowdfunding. In this everyone getting opportunity to become an entrepreneur and no need to worry about funding.  In helping system, people need to help each other to achieve everyone dreams.

[dunmerofskyrim]

Intermission, Marked: Part 5

The soil itself is cinders, sown with bones, overgrown with weeds. Fallen stones that once were walls, bricks, homes, now litter the caved-in streets. Other houses stand whole but empty, left only for the use of ghosts.

Blood cried out from Bodram before we came. It shall carry on long after we’re gone.  It floods the lungs with every breath here, thick as drowning.

We came hungry, down the river and downland from High Silgrad, perched in the hills. Our carts and wagons limp behind us on broken buckled wheels. A hamlet by the water told us:

“Bodram. You’ll find it not far now. Nothing to spare here, seras, but no doubt there’s them in the city’ll trade your stocks full again.”

And by the time I feel the wrongness on the air – the savagery set into the stones of this place – it’s too late.

First comes the near-silent sound of arrows. Shorn air. Then an ululation, singing out high between joy and mourning: their warwail. I’ve heard it in my dreams more often than in waking. Still, something in my blood responds to it, and sets my marrow singing. The oft-eclipsed aspect in my ancestry that, when asked Who are you? will answer: Vereansu.

A moment of elation, and then I am part of our crowd again, and drowned in new knowledge. A realisation. We have been trapped – tricked – and they fall on us like prey, driven fear-mad to the hunters’ close.

…

My eyes try to fix themselves. One finds focus and finds me staring. A corner of the horizon is curtained off with smoke from some distant source. So why do I smell its sharpness now, as near as near as near?

Simra. He’s here and has brought the reek of smoke with him. He wears it like a coarse grey coat, and like wet wool it hangs from him. He wears it like Bodram’s still clinging to him. I blink hard with both eyes and pinch my ear to make sure I’m myself and awake.

“You’re back,” he says. “Good. So am I.”

His voice is hoarse; red and worn as rust. Everything about him seems slack and starved and sleepless. He stands, moves in a desperate lurch to a new spot, stands still. He looks round to stare and then again he looks anywhere else.

He’d be pacing if he had the strength — I know him well enough to know it. But instead he’s spent the last of himself. No ease or energy remains in him. I still have a scrap of both, and together they feel a little like bravery.

“Is this why you do it?” I say. “Leaving, the way that you do. So that when you come back they’ll be so thankful you’re not gone for good that you won’t ever have to say you’re sorry and shouldn’t have gone at all?”

He stops and turns midstride. I’m under his eyes again, fixed under all their low bright fire. I might have flinched once. Now I only wait.

“Might be.” He kisses his teeth and his eyes turn laughing. “Fuck knows why I keep trying though…” The sound he makes after is a difficult one. It’s hard to call it a laugh or a sigh — it tries to be both and gets lost halfway. “Might be why I lie too,” he says. “Tell stories. Use different names. Simrin, Katharas, Lyros, Nimmun. It just…happens. I just do it. Been all kinds of person to all sorts of people just so I’d never have to be myself. Whatever my fake names did, and whatever stories stuck to them, they wouldn’t end up part of who I am for anyone but me. And the only ones that owe anyone anything are dead names I’ve left behind while I’m off and free and starting again.”

“And again. And again… For a mer who heaps so much worth on the things they own, you try very hard to go back to having nothing. No history, no name, no friends.”

He brushes a jut of rock almost-clean and sits down on it, arms hugged round his middle. “I set you right didn’t I? Told you who I was. What d’you make of that?”

“What were you trying to make of it? I’ve always wondered…”

“I was trying to make a friend!” He yelps like I’ve pulled the words from him. Yanked out like hair tugged up at the roots. “I’d lied for months to everyone I’d met since I crossed that fucking border. No-one in Morrowind knew who Simra Hishkari was and no-one gave a shit. And then every time you called me Katharas, it fucked with me, alright? I didn’t want to lie to you anymore.”

“So why did you start again?” I ask. “Not telling the truth can be a kind of lying too, just the same as telling untruths.”

“Tssht.” Simra pushes back. He is trying to smile. Brush me off with sweetness, like taking hair from the limbs with honey. “If failing to speak your mind the whole entirety of always is lying — fine, I’m a liar. But so are you and so’s anyone. Listen. I read something once – story, history, parable, hard to say which – but it said something…resonant, right?”

And after that his talking changes.

“The daedra are the truths we acknowledge to better know ourselves, and our world, and the trials we face just by living in it. That’s how it began, and that’s where we started. Our people woke to that when they achieved their Exodus. And that was the work of Boethiah, it said, Prince of Foment and of Overthrow. Boethiah let the followers of Veloth walk into chaos. Broke them so they might be remade. But on their journey it was Mephala who taught them to remake themselves.”

Rhythm and cadence — by now he is almost chanting.

“When all our people lived by was a scathing storm of truth, the story goes, Black Hands Mephala taught them lies. Among them were the lies that trust’s worth trusting in, and those who lead worth loving. Among them were the lies that help us hide desires, and grow to be more by chastising our lesser selves. The lies of patience and prudence. Society, Veloth’s followers learnt, is a web of lies, but one that ties together as much as it entraps. And by then they had forgotten the people they had been, for they had learnt to turn by truth and lies, and so became Ch—”

“I don’t care!” The sound bolts free of me. His voice turned telltale. His words milled their edges fine – polished their sides smooth – all so that they might be easy to swallow. And all the while the sound of me telling him to stop and see me and tell the truth struggled behind my teeth. “I don’t care, I don’t care!” Free now. “I don’t care what you’ve read. I don’t care about tricks and pretty distractions or puzzles…”

Simra stares at me. His eyes are sharp and flat as glass for a moment. He doesn’t like to be interrupted, but I will not be intimidated. Not by him and not anymore. He sighs a long sharp sound through his nose, then speaks on like I’ve said nothing. His voice is tight:

“Point is, lies show truths too when you look at them right. Listening to me lie taught you an important truth.”

“What?”

“You really need me to tell you? Shit…” He started by trying to smile but now his mouth is pulling downward. It tugs the false Harrowmarks on his face askew as he gestures to them with a restless hand. One Who Lies, they say. “Written on me, ain’t that right? But look at yourself while you’re at it. We’re both liars here, Tam. Didn’t know you even could lie but turns out you’ve been doin’ it this whole time. Either way, I’m the liar you’re stuck with, and the same for you to me, and without each other? Shit, we’d both have to give our plans a good fuckin’ rethink, wouldn’t we? I suggest we get the fuck on.”

He stands. Against the sky and the smoke that streaks it he looks like a broken thing bundle-mended together. A thing made of limbs and little enough else, like the ancestor scarecrows that kept watch on the hillsides near Stregaris. One hand closes over the grip of his sword. The knuckles flex white through the skin.

“Which way now?” he asks, blunt and tired and guarded. “Close, aren’t we?”

“Yes.”

We’re done here. I think it, but with every shift of his face and form he speaks it, loud as laughing.

“It’s Bodram, isn’t it? That’s where you’re taking us. Where she’s holed up.”

I am silent, shrinking, shrivelled round a seed of selfish guilt.

“Went off walking and I know what I saw, so don’t try tell me otherwise or just say nothing. Valley, riverfork, ruin. So tell me — is that where we’re headed?”

“Yes.” Smaller this time.

“How long’ve you known and not told me? Second thought, fuck it, I don’t care. Just proves my point. Come on. Still daylight left to spend.”

I stand too and follow him as he walks across the hillside. I think: How long did I know and not tell myself?

We pass through a swathe of blackened grass. A black stunted tree stands with a red-glowing heart of embers, still breathing threads of smoke. Even the stones are scorch-split, white as cinders where they’re not burnt dark as charcoal.

Simra looks at me over his shoulder. The glance is sly and secret, smug as blistered sugar but scrupled and muddled with something like shame. I think: He did this.

After that, he has eyes only for the valley below, and my eye follows his back. In his white hair, the restive wind. In the folds of his clothes, it comes and goes. Another day perhaps to Bodram.

…

“INSIDE!”

A hand closes round my elbow. The pull of it nearly breaks the joint.

My one good eye rolls in its socket. In a single split moment, it’s seen too much.

One mer tackles another to the ground, throwing themself on the other, overshadowing them. An instant later, their back bristles with arrowshafts. The child covered and trapped in their arms is one shriek among many.

A flash of white light. Someone stands on a cart-top, arms wide. In front of them the air is hazed, rippling like water, and full of arrows caught in their flight. My ears ring with the sound of the spell. A whirring whipcrack of sound and the mage sweeps the air in front of them sidewards. The arrows move again, veering off to stick and splinter against a wall.

In a thunder of feet and a wail of glee, a rider crashes into our caravan’s clamour. We are crammed into the street. Bones break and figures fall under the charging guar’s ramming head and stamping feet. A blade flashes. Blood streaks the air.

And more and so much more.

“INSIDE! NOW!”

Katharas has me. He pulls me almost off my feet and then I’m running with him.

We stumble into and past someone. They fall and tangle on the ground. Friend or foe?

Katharas drags us off the street. Under a broken arch and into a walled-off thicket of once-garden. We strike a cowering sprint through the shadows of a long porch.

He’s found a locked door. He curses, makes to kick it, remembers his part-healed feet, and looks at me with a plea in his eyes.

I step forward and the song I use to twist and slag the iron sounds a little like the screaming at our backs. The bolt on the door smokes and shudders.

Something clatters from the cracked brickwork beside me as I sing. The warwail sounds again. Something flashes on my blindside — a blur of hot light and a scuffle of feet, panting breath. Flesh strikes flesh. Then a wet and shallow tearing sound. Once, twice…

“Go!”

Katharas pushes me through the doorway. Follows. Slams it shut behind us as we pour into a narrow stairwell. The touch of his hand stains both of us red.

He turns to me, wild-eyed. “Up?”

“Down!” I hiss.

A cold blue-green ghostlight comes to life in my cupped palms. I make it light our way downward.

In the cellar, Katharas’ breathing rasps in my ears and the floor beneath our feet is broken pottery, drifts and dunes of cinder and dirt.

“Stormtunnels,” I whisper aloud. “They’ll have to have — Ah!”

I find the boards and bolt of another door in the darkness. I jolt it. It doesn’t budge. I heave til my arms ache and it springs loose. The door yawns onto a tunnel beyond.

We hurry aimless together through the channel burrowed under Bodram’s streets. Tight-cramped, we have to go one ahead and one behind, stooping under the low ceiling.

We pass turnings and splits in the tunnel until another door looms out from the darkness.

“No bolt on this side. Fuck this, we don’t have time!”

Katharas snaps in a language long-lost and familiar — almost Nordic. He moves me aside, plants his feet, and snarls something at the doorway. Flame answers what could only have been a Calling. The wood of the door glows low red, smouldering. He barks another Calling and it flares up furious orange. He lashes out a hand and it falls in on itself and apart, crumbs and embers and sparks spraying into the chamber beyond.

He draws his sword and steps inside. I watch his shoulders tense as he turns, scouring each corner, then his whole stance falls loose.

“Safe,” he says.

This cellar squats under a ruin, I think. Daylight slants through the floorboards above. A trapdoor hangs shut in one corner. And through the gaps the sunlight creeps through, sound carries too. Screaming, warcries, the stench of smoke and blood from the city overhead.

“It’s still happening,” I say, following him in. “I can hear them. Can’t you? We’re dying.”

“No. Not us. Them. We’re not dying here. Not you, not me. We wait.”

But I talk us towards the light. It is one of those rare times when purpose overcomes me and makes me calm. I know what to do. But my knowing takes what peace he’s found and casts it, torn, off towards terror.

“You’re talking crowshit! Madness and suicide. There’s no way…”

“I don’t want to leave them.”

“There’s no way. No way! You’ll get yourself killed. You’ll get us both killed!”

“Is there any other way?”

“Yes! Ghosts and bones and godsblood, yes! We stay! We hide! Here!”

“Waiting it out? Like a storm? No. I don’t want that. Could you live with yourself? After that? Knowing?”

“You don’t know half what I live with.”

“I don’t. But are you happy living with it?”

“Fucking what?”

“I wouldn’t be. I won’t be. They wouldn’t be. I know that. Not the dead, not the living. Do you understand? I know a way, I think. But I’ll need you to guard me, at first.”

“I swear, Tammu… I fucking swear…”

“Stay or leave. Whatever you want. But I need you to stay.”

Frightened. Both of us are frightened. Gnawed by fear like a plague of fleas. When it seemed we’d stay in the cellar, for him perhaps things were simpler. It made him calm. I grew worse. Itched by voices; pricked by the pang of new death after new death, constant as rain above us both.

He is wild eyed, wide eyed. His expression flickers like fire, from conclusion to question, to question on and on.

“You’ve saved me once,” I say, gentle as only those who can’t yield can be. “I’d trust you to do it again. Will you?” In my voice it murmurs like magic, like music — a certainty that scares me and leaves me unafraid.

“Stupid… Stupid… You don’t—… Trust me? You don’t even—”

I am losing him. His words are falling to pieces. He look younger now, all but a child.

“I trust you, Katharas.” I lay a hand on him, hinged open over his shoulder. He flinches once, hard, then stiffens, falls still. “I need you to trust me. Do you? Trust me?”

“That’s not my name…”

…

I thought: This place has known too much of death. This land has lost the ones who lived on it and been made to drink their blood. I thought: These people already have known death too well. First their oxen and horses, guars for the pack and the saddle, and then their kin, by choice and by blood. They were made to swallow their tears and walk on, and now this final horror too? I thought: I can’t change the loss or stop the losing, but I won’t let it worsen.

Five years are all that’s passed but I look back on the self that once I was and think I was far too young. Five years only, and already I think I’ve grown older, old. Has wisdom started to find me too? Is hardness, firmness, coldness a kind of wisdom? Too often perhaps, and not often enough.

Simra was younger still. Older now, yes, but still younger than me. But maybe he was the wiser of us when he told me it was too late for Bodram.

“A dead city,” he thinks aloud, walking ahead of me through the valley. “Not a big one, fine, but still a whole city. And all of it gutted or burnt or just fucking empty.”

There’s marvel in his voice. Or else there’s a marvel his heart feels, seeing this place, and he’s talking to tell himself why. Since this morning he’s started speaking again, afraid of the shadow our silence had cast. We pick through the stiff and waist-high grass that grows near this fork of rivers, blue-grey-green in black-grey dirt. He talks on. My shadow is still growing. I trudge along, half-here.

“Fucks with me, if I’m honest. Not the fact that it got that way in the first place. One lean Winter on the plains and the Vereansu ride farther afield, flattest way they can, to find someone whose harvest wasn’t utter shit — least compared with pickings in Deshaan. The kinband survives another year. Nasty, yeah, but it figures, right? Makes sense. I get that. Might not have, once, but… What fucks with me’s that it stayed empty after. Once the Vereansu were done with it.”

“They killed what they couldn’t take or burn,” I hear myself say.

“So did the Red Year up north. So did the Argonians in the South. People rebuilt. Reclaimed what they could. Last I remember, Bodram still had good empty buildings. Broken bits to build with. Good ground to plant in, for all I fucking know.”

“Dead buildings. Dead earth. Wrong in the soul.”

I see his shoulders shudder ahead of me. After, he kisses his teeth. “Reckon this makes sense too then. That a necromancer’d get herself nested up in a place like that. Like this. Not so empty after all.”

I concentrate on the sounds nearby so as not to hear what lies ahead. The long-moaning wind and the flutter of grass. The clatter and jangle of Simra as he moves, all bracelets, beads and necklaces, rings in his untorn ear. The heartbeat of our footsteps, never quite in time.

I concentrate on what is, but things that were sometimes blur in, and I see Simra as someone he’s not.

…

He walks before me. All too well, by days and days, I get to know his walking back. The cast of his shoulders, slumped and rolling, are known to me, and known to me are the rain-matted patchwork of pelts he wears, stitched into one motley with stretched dried gut.

“Not far now,” he tells me. And his voice is like sinews flexing under skin. “Be in the mountains soon.”

His unwashed hair is the colour of straw and it spikes and flicks in the wind.

“Think about it,” he says. “I’m taking you home, like as not.”

He drags me along behind. The manacles blister my wrists. The magic in the iron sucks the magic from me. They make my brain sluggish and my stomach feel wrong. Or is that the plan I keep behind my teeth?

He drags me, tugs hard when I lag behind, and I make myself stumble. It’s not difficult. I fall onto my side, next to the tangle of canisroot I saw and stooped for. I writhe like the tumble has hurt me. It puts my mouth near enough. Shoving the ball of chewed alchemy between teeth and cheek for safekeeping, I bite off as much canisroot as I can. It joins the rest.

As Amarin  yanks me upright again, by the rope attached to my wrists, I think how I’ll make myself free of him — hold his life in my hands and choose.

Soon, says the hate he’s planted in me. Soon.

…

It’s not the truth, this overlap of when and where. The ghost-images are easier to disbelieve as they overbleed into what I see. Easier, yes, but not always easy. What’s hard is to comb out the feelings I have: real and fake; remembered and current.

Simra is speaking. Simra, not Amarin. He says something I can’t make out, and turns to look over his shoulder. I fix his face in my mind, assuring myself it’s his.

I squint and tell myself, I do not hate you, just to test the truth of it, in silence on my tongue. I try very hard these days not to hate very many things, places, people, but sometimes the stronger sharpest feelings are the ones most clearly mine. Selfish, stubborn, I cling to them — they’re anchors in all the tide and ebb of ghosts that fill my mind.

Beyond him is the tight scurry and splash of buildings and ruins that make up Bodram, beyond us both but drawing closer with every step we take. We’ve taken enough that it’s near now. For me it’s in clear loud earshot already, and I try not to hear what it says.

Evening darkens the valley. The mountains that line it help the night to fall early. Around us the grasses turn to shadow, and the voice of the river, its fork, and the streams that feed it, all sound like the running of ink. All but deafening.

“Lights,” Simra stops and says. He points ahead and I follow his hand.

In the dark tumble of Bodram, lamps are being lit. Windows show as slits and squares of golden light. They hang close to the ground, in the deeper blacker darkness pooled beneath the first beginnings of starlight, the first gauzy seeming of moons.

“Not so empty after all,” he says. “Just took the night to see.”

“I don’t understand. How can they bear it?”

“What?”

“I can hear it from here.”

“Maybe they’re just not so much for listening as you. Or they healed it. Fixed it? Whoever they are.”

Most of the city still lies dark. Out of the small pocket that’s pricked through with light, a few detach and begin to move. They come closer with time.

“Shit…” Simra mutters. “Looks like we’ll find out soon enough.”

Strangers, I think.

Simra’s mouth is a hard line now and the evening is sliding fast into full night. He whispers into his cupped hands and calls a surly red magelight. With a gesture it wisps into the air overhead. It glows down as we walk on toward the moving lamps, and the dark between grows smaller.

There is wrongness in the air and a buzzing in my ears. I cannot feel my belly but know it’s twisting.

“Simra, I can’t…”

“It’s alright. I’ll talk to them.”

Was it always so difficult? Or is it only this place? This time?

“Who goes?”

To us they are figures now, wrapped up in the glow and dancing shadows of fire. To them, we are figures too, bathed in steady spell-light. Simra’s hand goes to the grip of his sword as he calls back:

“Two travellers.” He takes a step forward. “I’ve got a sword but I’d sooner keep it sheathed. My friend here’s unarmed. Neither of us means any harm to you or anyone else in Bodram.”

Liar, I think.

“What cause d’you have to be in Bodram?”

“We’re searching for a friend. Once we find her we’ll be back on our way.”

“Your friend…” They are drawing closer too. A different voice speaks, but their accent and tongue are shared. Mountain people; a flinty hillfolk edge in their speech. “She Vereansu like you? You’ll not find her here.”

Simra hisses under his breath before speaking back. “What makes you so sure we’re Vereansu?”

“You’re ashlanders, I’m sure of that. Marked as much.” A murmur of laughter from many mouths. “Two gravenfaces come in by night, here so near from the plains? Who’s t’assume you’re not skullshapers after that?”

“Assumption…” Simra snaps it, close and quiet like a curse, then carries on loud once more. “We’re on foot, not a bow between us, and coming in from the north. You want more proof than that, you can check my skull yourself!”

We’re close enough to see them now, and they to see us too. My one good eye made nightblind, I can make out little enough – the tapering cones of helmet-crests; a lantern-staff and pair of torches – but Simra has noticed something. It’s taut in his voice, making each word sound like a boast or a threat.

He strides out, over shorn-down stems of barley, fallow after the harvest that must have been and gone. “How long’s House Sadras held Bodram?” he asks.

A bearded mer and a lantern-bearer go out to meet him. “To look at you, I’d say since you were in swaddling clothes.”

“Bout as long as Sadras has been a House at all then, hm? Great or otherwise. What about recently? How long’ve you had it back for? Y’know, after you let the Vereansu borrow it a while? Gotta say, they didn’t keep it in the best nick, did they?”

“Careful, stranger. I don’t know who you think you are—”

“Simra Hishkari. Simra Seven-Fingers to you.” He raises his bandaged hand and flutters the five fingers on it. I feel myself frown. “Heard of me? No? Ask round, you might hear a story or two. Now — d’you mind?”

The soldier growls. Most of the sound is tiredness. “To your posts,” he barks. “Fall back in.” In a muddle of motion and bobbing lights, his company turns toward the city again and starts to march.

Simra looks back at me. He beckons.

I try to step forward. For a moment I press through a wall of noise. It scrapes me naked, sees and exposes me. Then only the nightsounds remain. The air is purged and ordinary.

“It’ll be alright,” he says again. “Trust me. A real bath. A real bed. It might even help…”

I walk towards him and say, “It might.” But the sounds are cold and heavy.