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83. Quandary @Quibble

So we parted ways with Sah-uhn-say-luht, a man of bewildering contradictions – a killer out for justice, an honest trickster, a softhearted brute. And again, as with Vega, I was left to contemplate how I had been so wrong about him yet so sure I was right.

In my mind, Luht had been a villain. But his appearance of villainy was, after all, pure happenstance. I recalled thinking, when Nuah told the Aht how Vega zeroed him and stole him from family and tribe, that a villain could be someone you don’t know well enough. I had believed the lesson learned. It was unsettling, now, to realize I might never learn it, fully and finally. People were such messes, labyrinths, quandaries. Could it be that within them lay no quiddities, no essences, no intrinsic truths?

Yet at the same time, Quibble, I reflected, you can’t reserve judgment about them. When we stand on different sides of things and when lives hang in the balance, we must act. If we’ve misjudged those who stand against us, then we’ve misjudged them – and that’s that. We can change afterwards, but we can’t take back what we did. So, we live with the mistake.

Miles of desert moved beneath me as I puzzled this out. At dawn, we camped in the eastern lee of a high dune beneath a dilapidated structure – a giant, twisted husk of stone and deeply rusted iron. The tower’s western side lay half-buried where wind had pushed sand up against it, and I suspected much of the tower was underground, buried long ago. Even so, what was exposed rose overhead higher than any man-made edifice I’d ever seen – higher than the walls of the Dazed monastery, higher than the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon. Looking up at it from its base made me a bit dizzy.

“Here?” I said when Lurah halted us. “It could fall down and bury us!”

“It’s stood like this for thousands of years,” Alnasl pointed out.

“Before we reach the glass of Ahnk-nuh-qah-say,” Lurah told me, “higher ruins than this will rise above us.”

“The towers of the city itself make this seem but a trifle,” Alnasl added.

For all my trepidation, I was glad to be out of the sun. My skin was a deep red, peeling badly. It felt raw, roughening, sometimes like it was on fire. Over my back, especially, it felt shriveled, stretched taut. I was now in greater agony than I had been in the Sen-an-dah on the last day I led the helpless, figure-blind vision in search of the Aht. That was only five days ago. I’d hardly recovered during my sojourn in the box canyon, and despite the precaution I took to tent my cloak over my head against sunlight with a long stick, two days of travel had brought my sunburn roaring back to life.

Exhausted, sleepless, I lay in the ruins’ dim interior, gritting my teeth against the pain. Twice, I managed to doze, but each time I woke after what could only have been a few minutes, and the second time, I began to cry aloud. Strangely, for surely Lurah was wearier than Alnasl, my crying woke her while he slept on. She came to me.

“Nightmares?” she asked.

“Sunburn. Oh, kindness, Lurah!”

“Let me see.”

I stiffly got to my feet, just as stiffly disrobed. My thin, tattered shift felt coarse on my skin, and when I dropped it to the sand and stood naked, a chill spread over me and goose pimples rose. Lurah stood back and appraised me.

“Oh, Quibble! Why did you not tell me it was this bad? Lie down just as you are, and wait for me. I will only be gone a minute.”

She returned holding a ceramic jar with a tight-fitting lid, which I recognized as a gift of one of the Aht – he had been a teenage boy with unusually light skin, though not as light as mine, who wore spectacles like Gienah’s and cocked his head as he looked at me. I had accepted the jar without asking him what it was. Lurah opened it, dipped her fingertips inside, and brought out a pale cream. She began to rub it across my back, and almost at once, my skin cooled and the pain began to ebb.

“I thought you knew what it was, since Halim-aht-itzil has albinism, too,” Lurah remarked as she doused my shoulders and neck, where the burn was worst.

“I’ve never seen a Far with it,” I said. “All Ones are albino. I just assumed we’re the only people like that. Is that why Hnefn’s skin is so pale?”

“No. He is Sqoh by birth. The Sqoh live farther north than any other Far. Theirs is not a desert land. It snows there. The lore of the Qahlif says the Sqoh grew pale to blend in with snow and hunt with stealth. I do not know if I believe that. But it appears Hnefn at least is a stealthy hunter.”

“He fooled me! When he stopped Luht from fighting you, he looked heroic – ‘the knight in shining armor,’ as the scrivener says. But if it’s true he plotted to marry Asreh, there’s something I don’t understand. His name now is Sehlim-sah-aht-ri-hnefn. So isn’t he already married to a Sehlim?”

“Yes,” Lurah said. “What is unusual about that?”

“Two wives?”

“Or two husbands, or even three.”

“Doesn’t that get very complicated? I mean, the names, just for a start!”

Lurah chuckled. “It does not work like that. You only hear two family names in a betrothal, where there may also be two tribal names. Turn over, please, let me coat your chest. There is always a primary spouse, most often the first. Far do not own things, not many anyway – just personal effects. The family owns everything. So, in polygamy, it is rare for great disputes to arise about property. But it can get complicated, I guess, when it comes to other matters.”

“Love. Intimacy. Sex.”

“And children. Who is whose? That is why the law of the Isleh bans polygamy in the case of a woman with multiple husbands. Their families descend father to son. All other Far tribes are matrilineal. Nufra-qahlif-nah-qehl has two husbands – or had. One died. Qehlim—” Lurah fell silent a second. “—knew not which of the two men fathered him. They both treated him like a son. There. You can coat your legs. Be sparing. There is little of the ointment left. You must use the rest tomorrow.”

Lurah left the jar by my side and rose. She was turning away when I said, “Sah?”

“Yes, Qeht?”

“How did you know about Luht?”

“Know what?”

“Well, that you could trust him, if that’s what you did. We could’ve ridden on.”

“I did not know, Quibble. Surely I did not trust him. But I believed.”

“Believed? In what? Kindness?”

“In him.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Nor should you, I guess. It will take some time to explain. I will tell you tonight. It is the tale of a journey in Ayn-qesh, so it is fitting I tell it as we travel.”

“I’d never have thought it of such a man,” I told Lurah once she finished her tale. “But I don’t quite get Luht’s joke. What made the Qahlif-nah so clever?”

“She knew us as well as we knew ourselves. She guessed what we would steal.”

“But how did she know you’d steal anything?”

“We were uhn-say,” Lurah said.

“When Far are made uhn-say,” Alnasl explained, “they may take some lore, since knowledge is unfettered by say. Before they depart, uhn-say go to a ri. They hear the ri’s wisdom or a story, or perhaps they have a scroll copied. During the visit, uhn-say steal something useful, something easy for the ri to replace. If the ri catches them, they give it up. But if they take it and leave with it unnoticed, they keep it. If the ri discovers a theft afterwards, he doesn’t send a sah after the uhn-say.”

I laughed. “What a game!”

“It’s a test,” Alnasl corrected me. “The uhn-say find out if they can live without a law. They are proving to themselves they can. So, the ri humor them. If you’re uhn-say, getting away with theft may be getting away with your life.”

“Certainly it is so among the Qohl,” said Lurah.

“A bloody people,” Alnasl remarked. “I didn’t know you became Qohl.”

“Sah-uhn-say-lurah,” said the sah. “That is the Qohl style. We make no mention of family or tribe. We put the word ‘uhn-say’ in our names. Most uhn-say are ashamed of it, but the Qohl wear the word like armor.”

“Well you might,” the vision said, “for you have little else.”

“We have each other.”

The moon was up, waning gibbous. Telling the tale had indeed taken a while. By now, we’d been riding for a few hours. Our course at first undulated gently among the dunes. Then they grew taller, longer, and we made detours northeast and southeast in a more parabolic course. Nearing the desert’s eastern edge, we had come into the midst of Iron Trees, as Zeros called the decaying cities of the Ancient. Edifices, some erect, many toppled, grew more numerous all the time. They seemed as haunted as the say-uhn-qah by which we’d camped on the first night of the journey. Ayn-qesh was desolate, but this was truly a desolation, not merely empty and lifeless but abandoned.

Alnasl and Lurah steered with the stars, consulting the sah’s chart by the light of the amber glass. From the top of an especially tall dune, practically a mountain of sand, up which we’d ridden to get our bearings, we saw a glow on the eastern horizon.

“Moonlight reflecting off the gossamer-glass,” the vision said.

“Can it irradiate us at this distance?” the sah asked.

“We’re safe. Closer in, the rubble around the city should shield us. Tomorrow night, we must trek into the perimeter, where the ruins are most dangerous. If we make headway, by dawn the next day we’ll be near the glass, and then we’ll need shelter. We can’t camp where the glass sees us. If just one ray of reflected daylight hits us full, that close, it’ll sicken us. Then, going on would be suicide. Sorry, Lurah.”

“It is well behind me,” she said.

We journeyed on. The moon sank westward, and dawn approached. The edifices of the Ancient were all around us now. We saw the Divided City’s light only once more, at sunrise on the third study at the hottest. As we rounded a massive pile of rubble, day broke and in the east, between us and the sun, the glass glinted like the spark of Fear. It was almost blinding.

“Back!” Alnasl cried, spurring the gray mare. “Back to the shade!”

We camped that day under an overhanging stone shelf in the rubble heap which afforded us shade only until mid-afternoon. Lurah decided the animals had traveled far enough and we must let them go while there was still some chance they could find their way back to water and vegetation. As we unburdened them, she let first the horses and then the camel drink as much water as they wanted.

“We’re running low,” I objected.

“This is im,” she said. “They have as much right to water as we have – more, for they have borne us here.”

As Sehlim-sehl ate the last meal I would give him, I said ef-suhl. He understood perfectly: he nuzzled my chest. Then we pointed our companions west, slapped their rumps. “May you who are water find the sea!” Lurah called out as they trotted off. Her eyes brimmed with tears.

We emptied our packs and discussed which of the Aht’s gifts to carry onward. A lot of things were useless to us. We put them in the sandstorm tent and cached it under the stone shelf. Alnasl assured us night in the Divided City was warm – “Warmer than you’d wish!” – and there was no need to haul wood for fires. At dusk, we shouldered our packs, struck camp, and again rounded the rubble heap.

Eastward, before us, lay masses upon masses of rubble. Here and there, far apart, rose towers that had survived the collapses of their neighbors, now monstrous cairns of stone from the tops and sides of which protruded gnarled, rusted iron like the stalks of wilted flowers. Even as we stared at the ruins in the fading light, a tower in the distance away to the south fell, crashing down in a billowing cloud of dust, and the sound of its demise reached us like faint thunder.

Fear gripped me, stole my breath. I tightened my grip on the yinman glass in my cloak pocket, made myself breathe deeply and steadily. We have each other, I told myself again and again, like a mantra, as we walked into the ruins.

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rem

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It’s been a long time since I asked for feedback on Quibble. I stopped doing it because, aside from someone asking if the novel could be found in print, I never got responses to the first seven calls for feedback I published. So, I gave up on the prospect, however much I cherished it, of having conversations with readers.

But I’m trying once more — I still want those conversations. Please comment. Tell me what you enjoyed reading. Tell me what you hated reading. Or just tell me you’re there and maybe share a book recommendation.

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Chapter 82, “Qah (ii),” was something of a farewell to the Far, the non-transhuman people of Quibble’s world. In part 15, “return,” with Alnasl and Lurah, Quibble will traverse the Divided City, which the Far call Ahnk-nuh-qah-say (“the place of the frozen bones”). Both names suggest dystopia and darkness.1 Indeed, “return” is the dystopian heart of Quibble. It discloses the entirety of the backstory. At last, Quibble gets the answers she wants about the Infinite, about how they shaped her world and set the stage for her life. As this happens, connections and parallels to our world also come to light.2

Soon, I plan to write a reflection on dystopia. I’m gathering thoughts for it as I revise “return” and read two novels, I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman and After World by .

In the real world, here and now, dystopia seems ever-present. Believing the presidency to be his playground, America’s mad king has begun a war against Iran — and by all appearances, without a cogent reason that comports with evidence, without attainable goals or realistic expectations, without strategy other than “bomb the hell out of those people,” without forethought about even the most obvious consequences for the world and the American people, without any concern at all for the fate of common Iranians, and finally, without a vote for war in Congress as required by the U.S. Constitution.

Even many of Trump’s most ardent supporters feel betrayed, and for good reason. He swore, time after time, to keep the U.S. out of wars. He explicitly ran for office on the promise that he was the “peace” candidate, and now that’s been shown to be a lie. Just how many boldfaced lies can MAGA swallow? When will their fever finally break?

And how much longer can the United States survive as a nation when its leaders treat the Constitution’s most fundamental provisions — they can get no more fundamental than who has the power to declare war — as optional?

As ever when people are dying needlessly and senselessly, I can’t say anything pithy or new or insightful about it. All I know to do now is stand among the gravestones, point at them, and appeal for humanity. This doesn’t feel like much in the face of it all.

At least I’m not doing it alone. Today, published a piece — a tight prose poem interspersed with news photos — about the girls’ school in Minab, Iran, which our country destroyed with a Tomahawk missile on the first morning of this war, the first morning of the school week in Iran. Called “Our Daughters / In Rainbows,” Ian’s poem juxtaposes the carefree lives of his own children with the horrific deaths of the schoolgirls — and the many more people who will die “but slower.” Here’s an excerpt:

In the morning, our daughters picked their favorite stuffed animal to take to school. Bunny again this week. Kissed its face and shared their breakfast. Buckled it into the car. Safety first.

In the morning, we watched excavators dig perfectly measured tombs for incomplete bodies of our daughters covered in white dust. Two feet wide, four feet long. Dirt lot pockmarked, rectangular openings without true bottom. They continued forever into an abyssal understanding of industrialized human violence.

They don't all have to be good

Our Daughters / In Rainbows

Our Daughters / In Rainbows…

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2 months ago · 18 likes · 15 comments · Ian Patterson

I’m contemplating what to do after I finish bringing out Quibble at Singular Dream. The reader who asked where to find the novel in print hasn’t been the only one. And, of course, I’ve always wanted to publish it in print — I aimed for that before I began to publish it here.

In my mind, there are impediments to publishing in print. Doing it without relying on Amazon is a big one. I refuse to give this corporate behemoth a penny, especially now that Jeff Bezos has prostrated himself before Donald Trump. Beyond that, financing a book in print is a massive hurdle. I have very little income, no disposable income. I’ve never published my own book in print, too, and I’m keenly aware of my ignorance.

So, I’d really appreciate thoughts and suggestions about this from any knowledgeable people. How have you self-published in print? What did you learn?

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That’s all for now. As ever, happy reading!

Joshua

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Index of chapters

82. Qah (ii) @Quibble

“Jeh-qahlif-sah-luht, how did you come to wander here alone?”

At Lurah’s perplexing question – I was more perplexed by the name she gave her adversary than by her allusion to the story of the proud Qahlif-sah – Luht stiffened. He looked up at Lurah, at me, at Alnasl, each in turn, as if amazed to see us. But he didn’t answer Lurah’s question. With an agility I hadn’t expected in such a large, hulking man, he snatched up his sword and sprang to his feet.

“Twice denied a fair fight!” he said, spitting the words. “This time, you will not deny me, Lurah!”

“Twice?” I said, confused, in Far.

“For your own good, Ayzhed, stay out of this,” Luht warned me with the briefest glance. “If you and your Djer would go in peace, then go.”

I wanted to protest that Lurah was my friend, that any fight with her was a fight with me, but now I was more baffled than ever by the game afoot. I decided silence was best. Lurah had chosen to confront Luht. She had a reason.

“A fair fight,” she repeated, shaking her head. “You have always sought the fight with others, Luht, but it is not with them you contend. It is with the cruel and cowardly man who made you uhn-say.”

“He is dead.”

“No. He lives within you still. Your fight is with yourself, only yourself, but he is your foe. When will you realize that?”

“Enough!” Luht snapped. “If I wanted wise words, I would go to a ri.”

Alnasl snorted. “Take it from a ri, you do want wisdom.”

“Enough! I will have your qah, Lurah, or I will follow you forever. Im-hel-qah!”

Lurah released a loud sigh and tapped her crop lightly on Qeht-qahlif’s shoulder. The camel sank, rocking forward to his front knees, then backward, folding his rear legs and tucking them close to his belly. Lurah hopped off him.

“Do you need a qahli?” Alnasl offered.

“We fight to the death, so in this, Luht and I are each other’s qahli,” Lurah said as she unfastened her sword’s sheath from her belt. “Do not take him at his word. He will not let you go in peace. If he kills me, flee as quickly as you can.”

Luht squinted at her. “You insult my hel, woman,” he said.

“Have you any hel left?” said Lurah.

She drew her sword, flinging away the sheath, and then she was sprinting over the sand at Luht. He drew back, swung at her midsection. She tossed her sword high into the air, ducked below his blade, somersaulted beneath him, and came up on her feet behind him, reaching skyward. As soon as she grasped the hilt of her falling sword, Lurah spun completely around, arcing her blade in a whir of speed. She aimed at Luht’s neck, but now he spun, too. Their swords clashed. Luht bore forward on Lurah with his greater weight, forced her back. In a moment gone before I could register just what he’d done, Luht knocked Lurah’s sword out of her hands. It flew away from her. She took a single step towards it, reaching earthward, but already he’d brought his blade up again, checking her. His sword hovered at her throat, the steel barely touching her skin.

“Qah,” said Luht.

Disbelief wrote itself on Lurah’s face as she stared at him. “Qah,” she breathed.

Yet, victorious, Luht did not move. He did not spill Lurah’s qah. He stood stone-still, hesitating, as if indecisive.

“Qah,” Lurah repeated. “You came for qah. Now you have it. Take it.”

“I did not come to take qah but give it!” Lurah exploded, angrier than ever. “Do not call me so cheap, Lurah! I came for them, and for justice.”

“For whom? Justice for what?” I cried. “For Sen-aht-nah-lapi? A cruel nah, a war, your precious honor and spoils—”

“For you, Ayzhed, you and your Djer!” Luht told me, though his eyes remained fixed on Lurah. “And for Wahn-aht-jah-nefri. For her qah, which Lurah took.”

At this accusation, Lurah’s eyes widened. “Did you not kill her?” she said.

Luht looked affronted. “I?! You wormed your way into the Wahn’s trust—”

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Index of chapters

81. Qahlif (ii) @Lurah

I woke to darkness, but only the darkness of night. A fire crackled nearby. By its glow, I looked up into the face of Luht. He sat leaning against the flank of his camel. My head rested in his lap.

“I am sorry,” he said.

“What?” I whispered.

“I am so sorry, Lurah. I was selfish. I thought only of my pain, my oath. I did not try to imagine your pain, your loss. I did not journey with you in im, as I ought to have. I let you go into Ayn-qesh alone. I could have been kind, and I was not.”

He was crying.

“Luht,” I managed, but then I could say no more. I curled on my side, away from the fire, and retched, though nothing came up. Luht urged water on me, made me spit it out. The hem of his robes served to wipe my mouth.

“Now drink,” he said, again bringing the waterskin to my lips. “You are starved more than dehydrated, I think. Lie still. Do not speak for now. I need you to drink. Then you must eat and drink again. And then we can talk in im.”

Now we sat across the fire from each other, reclined against the rumps of camels, talking. At first, we gave im, taking turns as we talked. But then, seeing it pained me to extend my left hand towards him, Luht insisted we forgo im.

“Are you sure,” I said, looking at a wrist wrapped in a makeshift bandage, “the stitches will not loosen?”

“If you do not bother them,” Luht said. “Trust me. It is my work.”

“Healing? Ri is not in your name. As sah-nahli-qah, I knew all the ri and sah-ri. I would have known you.”

“I was not yet sah-ri, but I was learning to be one.”

“Healers are needed now in Say-qahlif,” I observed. “Are you sure, sah, you did not abandon your post? Only the Qahlif-nah could give you leave of it, and she would ask your intent. If you told her in im—”

“She gave me leave. She said, if I sought revenge upon you as I swore, I would trade the Qahlif for your qah and become uhn-say. Now I am Uhn-say-luht. No, do not say you are sorry, Lurah. It is my fault. And it was wrong of me never to tell you. Who was I to ask for im-hel-qah when I could not give you the simplest im? Honesty?”

“Parting, the nah called me her daughter,” I said. “I believed she still loved me.”

“She may,” Luht replied, looking uneasy. “I gave her no real choice in this, if that is a comfort to you.”

“It is. But now I do not understand you at all, Luht. You sought im-hel-qah from me. You followed me all this way to get it, and then you did not kill me. Now, you have saved me from killing myself and I learn you are a healer, not a brawler as I took you to be. It is as if you are two people. The man talking to me is kind, sensitive. He shows im. Where is the Luht who scowled at me and called me a Halim bitch?”

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Index of chapters

rem

Trigger warning: suicide. If you don’t wish to read the story of a suicide, skip this chapter.

If you’re thinking of taking your life, please talk to someone about it. Whatever you’re going through, going through it alone is a choice and you can make a better choice. I did.

If you’re in crisis, talk to someone immediately. Call the national mental health hotline at 988.

80. Qesh (ii) @Lurah

Except for rodents, lizards, snakes, and the occasional stunted cactus, nothing at all lived in Ayn-qesh. Mountains to the west cast a rain shadow over the land. Within it, life was scarce, short, brutal. It was plain why no one, neither Far nor Djer, lived here. It was not a land of the living.

Dune upon mountainous dune in every direction, the desert swallowed me. Day by day, having ceased altogether to eat, I grew weaker. Recalling the tale of the lost sah who in delirium ate sand, I did not deny myself water, but I drank as little as I could. In any case, Qeht-qahlif needed to drink. There was no reason for the camel to suffer.

My belly became an empty, yawning cave. I gave my hunger no heed. It seemed a trifle. I began to waste away.

Still Luht shadowed me, nearer now. Earlier in the journey, I stopped Qeht-qahlif from time to time and gazed back at my shadow. No longer. I knew he was nearer only because now and then I heard him yelling, loosing his rage. No threats reached my ears, only denunciations, insults. I ignored him. What he intended did not interest me.

Impossibly large – or perhaps its size was merely a trick of my mind – a buzzard alighted atop a dune and watched me pass below. Far-nah-qesh, I reckoned. If indeed it was the Far-nah, she did not transfigure herself. I did not care to see her womanly form, to hear any offers of mercy and help.

Hours later, as I noticed a sidewinder slithering down a dune, I saw the buzzard again. She perched on the dune, watching my progress. Then her wings beat the air and her talons tore the sand as if tearing at a carcass. And then the bird took flight, but not alone. The top of the dune went with her like a morsel of flesh or a ragged storm cloud. It overshadowed me, raining sand. Out of the wound in the earth poured thousands of vipers, rattlesnakes sliding over each other in a massive tangle. They spilled over the lip of their pit and sped down the dune towards me.

Faced with this avalanche of fast, venomous, rattling death, my heart knew terror and wanted to flee. I whipped Qeht-qahlif’s flanks. Rather than run, though, he came to an abrupt halt. I whipped again, cursed at him. He refused to move. I balled hands into fists around his reins, set my jaw, and stared at the swiftly approaching vipers.

Then come and claim me, I thought. As well this way as another.

The vipers vanished. All but one: the sidewinder crossed our path several yards ahead, went away on its own errand. Then Qeht-qahlif trotted on as before, nonchalant. I looked up at the dune: no hellish pit lay there. The dune was whole, only a hill of sand like all the others. I scanned the sky. The buzzard was nowhere in sight.

“Is Far-nah-qesh tricking me,” I said aloud, “or am I tricking myself?”

Qeht-qahlif grunted noncommittally.

That was only the first of my visions. The sun transformed from radiant fire to a pale moon, seeming to bless, not burn me. Black tar bubbled from the sand, spread into a viscous lake that solidified as a floor of glass. Qeht-qahlif trod the glass.

One night, the stars grew in size, becoming large, variously colored orbs. They flashed, fell, frothed to nothingness in the sky like meteors.

The next day, in late afternoon, people appeared on the horizon. The forms of three people wobbled in the heat haze. For no reason, I knew they were the uhn-qah of Qehlim and our children. They held each other’s hands. They seemed to be walking towards me. I rode on, but I never drew nearer to them.

Qeht-qahlif anchored me to sanity. Each time I saw a vision, I spoke to the camel. Whether or not he knew I needed to hear him, he answered me with a grunt.

As my third day in Ayn-qesh ended, I woke from a stupor in which I was riding to notice a long shadow across the sand ahead of us – the shadow of a camel and rider.

Now, Luht was riding in company with me. He saw me glancing at him and said, “You did not lie.” We passed the rest of the day in silence. That night, he camped with me and built a fire which we shared.

Luht had killed a rattlesnake, and he roasted its skinned, headless length over the fire. The meat’s aroma tantalized me, and my belly complained of its emptiness.

“Are you not eating?” Luht said.

“I want nothing,” I muttered.

He grimaced. “You should eat, but suit yourself.”

The next morning, against longstanding habit, I woke late. The day was already hot, and I lay bathed in sweat. Over me was the shadow of a foreboding, fearful dream, but I had forgotten what it was. I rolled over. The fire was cold, only ashes. Luht sat his camel nearby, ready to travel, peering down at me.

“You had nightmares,” he remarked as I got up. “Thrice you woke me with your cries. I am amazed you did not wake yourself.”

Without a word, I rolled up my bed, packed it, saddled Qeht-qahlif. As we rode on, Luht said, “If you wake me tonight, woman, I will kill you with your own sword in your sleep.”

“Do you swear to it?” I said. “Then I hope to dream again.”

He only scoffed.

The terrain was changing. For days, I had ridden among high dunes, but now the land began to open out and flatten. Mesas rose in the distance. By noon, we were riding into a country of windswept sandstone. Far-nah-sol remained merciless. I felt like hot steel under the blacksmith’s hammer. In the sun’s glare, what had been just a headache grew into a piercing pain behind my eyes.

The uhn-qah of my lost family reappeared, but now there were four people in the heat haze – my sister-qeht Rasalah had joined my husband and children. Hand in hand, the specters beckoned to me. Every moment seemed laced with the promise they would speak to me, if only I could lay aside some burden and listen. They vanished, appeared, vanished again. A voice came to me as if from very far away: “Lurah!”

Then I knew the voice – Luht’s – and woke from yet another stupor. No specters led me. I looked at the vengeful sah and croaked, “What?”

“How far are you going?” he said hotly.

“Do you wish to turn back, sah?”

He scoffed again.

“Kill me,” I suggested.

“Without a fight? No. You will take back your sword and face me in im-hel-qah.”

I halted Qeht-qahlif, took a long gulp from my waterskin, and reconsidered his proposition. I was weaker than I had ever been, now certainly no match for Luht.

“All right, im-hel-qah,” I agreed.

“What? Why now? Why here?”

“How far, you ask. You are right. This only ends one way. With a death. If that is so, I might as well get it over with.”

We barracked our camels, dismounted, faced. Luht unchained Ilay’s sword from his belt and formally presented it to me in its sheath. We stepped apart, drew swords.

At first I took a tail stance, but seeing Luht was not lured in, I brought my sword forward and raised it. I moved slowly, and the sword wobbled. I tried to focus my eyes on Luht: he was growing blurry, dark, like a specter himself. He approached me, lifted his sword, and swung. I was again slow to move, reacting late, and his sword was just a few inches from my face when I managed to parry it away. Now darkness was creeping in on my vision from all sides, turning day to night.

“Halim bitch!” Luht barked. “That is no way to fight. Do not insult my hel.”

“This is as well as I can fight.”

A silence. “Are you that weak, Uhn-say-lurah? When did you last eat?”

“You wanted to fight,” I said, my own voice sounding distant, removed, no part of myself, as I stumbled towards Luht’s voice. “Now we fight.”

“We are not equals!”

Out of breath and on the verge of collapsing, I halted, lowered my sword, closed my eyes. This craven will not do it, I thought. He will follow me to the very ends of Ayn-qesh, but he will not keep his word.

As I dropped the sword and sank to my haunches, I knew the burden I carried – a desire, in spite of everything my life had become, to live still – and finally let it go. The darkness was yet all around me when I opened my eyes, but I heard the voice of a child, a girl – it was Rasalah. Do not be afraid, she said. Come. We are waiting.

I felt numb all over. With my last strength, I drew my dagger, pressed its edge to my wrist, and slashed. Then I fell, spent. “Lurah!” Luht yelped, and I felt him clutching me, but then I felt and knew no more.

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Many thanks to filmmaker and photographer Michael Shainblum for use of the image accompanying this chapter. Click here to see more of Michael’s stunning work.

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Index of chapters

79. Qesh (i) @Alnasl

The fury of Far-nah-qesh was all around us, the storm’s blast a red hell. Stinging, choking sand was now so thick I saw only a few yards anywhere I looked. Beyond that, all else was indistinct blur. It was as if I was again figure-blind, stumbling through the desert in Quibble’s wake, confused, witless.

The gray mare had slowed. Her flanks heaved with her labored breath. I prayed she wouldn’t collapse beneath me. Then the blurry shapes we were following – Quibble on horseback, Lurah with the camels – stopped moving, and we passed between them. I drew the reins, turned in the saddle. Quibble and Lurah were dismounting. At once, the sah directed us to unload the sandstorm tent Yahn and Yuni had given us.

Relieved of their burdens, the camels lay down of their own accord, seeming at home in the sandstorm. But, unsaddled, the horses still needed Lurah’s coaxing. She worked with reins and riding crop to bring them to their knees, then their bellies. Quibble knelt between the horses, an arm over the neck of each, stroking them, soothing them, as Lurah and I constructed the tent above them, propping it on poles and holding it taut by cords tied to anchors we buried in the sand. Once the tent was erect, we took as much water and food in as we could. Low to the ground and streamlined to let sand blow off, the tent grew cramped, the air inside stuffy. Once it was sealed, we stripped off our bandannas.

“How long,” Quibble huffed, “will this last?”

“Hours or minutes, no telling,” I said as I squatted next to her, rubbing her back. “Deep breaths, deep and even. That’s it, Quibble. You’re fine.”

“The sah-uhn-say had to stop as well,” said Lurah, faintly visible in the dark. “I wonder how many followed us after all.”

“I espied three, all on camels,” said Quibble. “Luht was one of them.”

“Hours or minutes,” Lurah echoed me, musing on something. There was a long silence, and then she announced, “I am going.”

“Going?” Quibble and I said in unison.

“I must do a sah’s work.”

“You mean you’re going to kill them,” Quibble said.

“That’s madness!” I objected. “You’ll just get lost and die out there. And even if you don’t suffocate, even if you find them – one against three?!”

“Listen, both of you!” Lurah said harshly. “If I have not returned by the time the storm passes, do not wait for me. Take the tent – Far-nah-qesh may come again. Go east, quickly. In a day or two, you will see Ahnk-nuh-qah-say on the horizon, a glint of light like a star. When you reach it, set the camels and horses free. Qeht-qahlif will lead them to water, for he is wise in the paths of Ayn-qesh. As I hope you will be. Ef-suhl.”

And then, deaf to our pleas, she left.

“Magenta,” Quibble said, facing me in the dim light of the oil lamp. She shut one eye behind her goggles. “Now I see red.” She opened that eye and shut the other. “Now I see blue.” She opened the eye and stared at me. “Together, they make a different color, just like the light of opposing glasses.”

I thought of Gienah. He might have given us an encyclopedic lecture on how the mind interprets vision, but something else intrigued me: “You can blink with either eye independently? Just as easily with one as the other?”

Quibble opened and shut alternating eyes, repeating the trick three times.

“I’ve never seen that!” I observed. “Extraordinary.”

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Index of chapters

78. Qahlif (i) @Lurah

When the Qahlif made me uhn-say, unwelcome among all the Far, Nufra-qahlif-nah-qehl gave me three gifts – a camel, a sword, a warning. I knew the camel already, for he was the nah’s best, a hardy, intuitive creature. I knew the sword, too. I won it on the battlefield from Nufra-aht-sah-ilay. Since it was a sword of the Nufra, I gave it to my nah after the battle at the pyramids. Only her warning – “Remember you are water, only remember this, and find the sea” – meant nothing to me.

I will never find the sea, I thought as I rode Qeht-qahlif north with my hand resting on the hilt of Ilay’s sword, and indeed the faces of the Far I passed on that road seemed to confirm this truth. I knew some of them, but none greeted me. They glanced my way, then looked elsewhere, sideways into the faces of others or down at their feet or off into the distance. The news of my disgrace had gone forth among the Far before me, and all the Far now scorned me so much that not one of them would even speak to me.

Not one, that is, but a certain sah I did not know. He sat on his own camel not far beyond the gates of Say-qahlif, waiting for me. As I passed him, I noted the scowl set on his face, unchanging as if hewed from stone.

“Worthless derelict!” he accused me.

I ignored him and rode on.

“Uhn-say-lurah, stop!” he bellowed.

When still I did not stop, he followed me. As our camels bore us away from Say-qahlif, he shouted a litany of worsening abuse at me: “Traitor! Faithless, foul scum!”

And many more such epithets. In agreement with him, I only rode on, reacting to nothing he said. Everyone we passed on the road ignored our parade. Soon, though, the sah was barking threats: “Get off your camel! Face me, you Halim bitch! Get off or I will kill you where you ride!” Then I could ignore him no longer.

I halted my camel, barracked him, and dismounted. The sah did likewise. Once we were facing each other, I said, “What do you want?”

With a smirk, he drew his sword and said, “Im-hel-qah.”

“You look for im-hel-qah in the wrong place,” I told him. “Neither im nor hel are satisfied. I am uhn-say. We are not equals, and I have no honor.”

“You still have qah,” he answered, “and now I will have it!”

I bethought a moment what to do. Perhaps this wrathful sah was another gift, the Far-nah’s gift to me. All I wanted now was to die. He offered me an easy way to die. All I would have to do was make a show of fighting him without really trying. Then both of us would have our hearts’ desires, mine to die, his to kill me. Yet something in my heart forbade me taking this journey with him. Maybe it was pride. I was humiliated enough already without letting him kill me while I barely raised my sword in defense of myself. Or maybe it was guilt at the thought of Nufra-qahlif-nah-qehl receiving news I had died in a pathetic squabble with an angry man just outside her city. Even now, Numberless, I am unsure why I finally did what I did.

The smirk on the sah’s face turned to a grin as I reached for Ilay’s sword, but the grin faded as, instead of drawing it, I unchained its scabbard from my belt and laid it on the ground. I turned away and remounted Qeht-qahlif.

“Wait!” cried the sah in surprise. “Where are you going?”

“Ayn-qesh,” I called over my shoulder.

“Liar!”

“What is your name, sah?”

“Jeh-qahlif-luht, Jeh-qahlif-sah-luht.”

Understanding dawned. A small family, the Jeh are famous with all the Far for their quick, volcanic tempers. Now that I knew Luht’s grievance, I also knew it was not one he could set aside or resolve with anything less than my qah. In his mind, not only his own hel but his family’s hel was at stake. Only blood could restore it.

“Jeh-qahlif-sah-luht, perhaps it means naught to you, but I am truly sorry,” I said as I turned Qeht-qahlif to face him again. “I knew Jeh-qahlif-sah-lin. He was a good sah, trustworthy, honorable, the first to arrive for his duties and the last to leave. I have lost my family to the Djer, just as you have lost your brother—”

“Do not think to make us one in loss!” Luht interrupted, incensed.

“If you believe my qah atones for his, then kill me,” I said. “You will suffer no loss in hel, for I am uhn-say and the law does not protect me. But is there no other place, sah, that you ought to be right now?”

“I am relieved of my duties,” Luht said, a bit haughtily.

“Then do as you will.”

Swatting Qeht-qahlif’s flanks with my crop, I turned him and rode away.

Though long, the road was safe, my going uneventful. People and their abodes grew ever sparser as I traveled first north, then northwest to strike out for the vast sea of sand which is the largest part of Ayn-qesh. Always, Luht trailed me, riding in sight but out of earshot. When I camped, he camped, never closer, never farther away. Since he seemed now uncertain in his aims, at first I thought he might give up, go home, and return to the duties he was surely neglecting. But he never did. As the vestiges of life numbered fewer and the desert encircled us, I grew used to Luht’s presence and came to think of him as a shadow, following yet never overtaking me. Occasionally, I would turn Qeht-qahlif and gaze back at him. Each time, Luht stopped and returned my gaze. We never exchanged a word.

Perhaps he was not a man bent on revenge but rather uhn-qah, the specter of my guilt. So it seemed to me, more and more, as on my way I ate and drank less and less. Such a haunting as this seemed only right, a fitting punishment for me. What else did Uhn-say-lurah deserve – Lurah who, knowing better, let husband and children fall prey to Djer? What else did she deserve, now, but slowly to starve to death, shadowed into the womb of sandstorms by a ghost who carried two swords?

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I’m trying something new: significantly shorter chapters. I had planned to deliver all of this as a single chapter, “Qesh,” but its structure was already unwieldly in previous drafts and it’s only grown harder to manage as I try to weave together the backstories of Lurah and Luht. For a couple of days, things got so overwhelming that I only wrote a handful of sentences. Of course, I can’t maintain a publication schedule at that rate! So I’m breaking the material up, working on it piecemeal, and publishing it as short, interspersed installments, now titled “Qahlif” and “Qesh.” Each installment will come out as soon as it’s ready. Two of these chapters will be free to read in their entirety. jl

Index of chapters

else

77. Uhn-qah @Quibble

Shaken awake where I lay by a fire now cinders, I gazed up in predawn light into the dark, tattooed face of Lurah.

“Qeht, I know you can ride a horse,” she whispered, “but how well?”

“Well enough!” I groaned, rolling over.

Lurah shook me again. “Come with me,” she insisted.

I had been enjoying a dreamless sleep, untroubled by Unity’s control. Huffing in annoyance, I threw off the deerskin blanket and wrapped myself in my gray protégé’s cloak. I begged the sah’s patience for me to visit the privy – only a small tent with a box set over a hole – and when that errand was accomplished, she led me away not out of the box canyon but deeper in. We came to the pond, walked a trail through the cattails, and arrived at a low portion of the wall where horses had gathered, their heads down. I heard slurping: the horses were at breakfast.

Lurah stopped before one of them and whistled a tune of four notes. The horse lifted his head and stepped back a pace to regard her. A stallion, he bore a bay coat that shimmered to a burnished gold even in the canyon’s faint morning light. In no way did he resemble Moth, only a plodding draft horse. This was a warhorse, built for speed.

“Sehlim-sehl,” the sah said seriously, “this is Quibble, the Qeht-uhn-far-jah-im-li-djer. She will ride you.”

I almost laughed at such an earnest introduction, but Sehlim-sehl turned his head slightly as if to appraise me and I found myself silenced by his gaze. I stepped forward, feeling awkward, wishing I had Nish’s way with horses. Sehlim-sehl stamped the earth once and bent again to his breakfast.

“On second thought,” I admitted, “I’m not sure I can ride this horse.”

Lurah chuckled. “By the time we leave the Sen-an-dah, you will ride Sehlim-sehl well. He is Sehlim-aht-jah-salah’s gift. You will need his speed and strength.”

“I must thank Salah,” I said.

“She could not see you, Qeht. She has become the Sehlim-jah, and moreover, the nah appointed her and Sen-sah-aht-ri-yahn to oversee the Sen’s restitution to the Wahn. Salah is much too busy now for thanks and farewells.”

“Wait! By the time we leave the Sen-an-dah? Then you’re coming after all?”

“Obviously, yes.” Last night, strangely, Lurah had been quick to anger, but now she was grim, resigned. She shook her head as if dismissing a thought and said, “Only I have seen Ahnk-nuh-qah-say, though that was from a distance. I must take you there, if anyone. And I believe Sah-uhn-say-luht will seek vengeance on you in the desert.”

“On me?”

“Your ploy robbed him of Lapi’s war – spoils, hel in battle. He swore to see me in Ayn-qesh, but he was also threatening you.”

“Have you told the nah you’re going?” I asked.

“She knew before I did. She said there is no way out but through. It grieves me to leave her facing such a game of bones. I owe the Wahn more than this. Nefri made me a Wahn in all but name. Now they need me and I am forsaking them. I am becoming uhn-say again. I hope you appreciate that, Quibble.”

Now, understanding why it had provoked Lurah’s wrath, I truly regretted what I said about reuniting with her sister and looking for her children. As a sah, she wore her mask of equanimity well. I’d never suspected she and Asreh were family to each other.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Let me tell you something I’ve left out of my tale, something I’m ashamed of. To look for my mother, I left my father alone. In pain. To protect him, I didn’t tell him where I was going. For all Quandary must know, I’m dead.”

Lurah nodded. “So you are uhn-say, too,” she said.

We never spoke of it again.

Though perhaps hardest for Lurah, saying goodbye was hard for everyone. Only three days of journeying together, as the Far put it, had drawn us close – just how close became clear as, mid-morning on the second touching at the hottest, Lurah, Alnasl, and I led our mounts out of the box canyon.

Whereas the Aht once looked on me and Alnasl with suspicion, now they gazed at us with gratitude and, it seemed, embarrassment. They all gave us im. Several people presented us with parting gifts – bags of food, camel-hide canteens of water, a magical device which turned out to be a compass, and so forth. I realized these gifts were their way of making amends for snubbing us. At last, with copious gifts stuffed in packs and dangling from our saddles, we had to refuse any more.

When Yahn approached, trailed by a girl – shabbily dressed, about Index’s age – and a camel with two large, canvas-covered packs balanced on either side of his hump, I cried out in Far, “Really, this is too much! We cannot accept!”

“But you must!” the girl objected with an anxious frown. “It is a tent for traveling through Ayn-qesh. A sandstorm tent.”

“We give what we ought,” the sah-ri said gravely, seconding her insistence and looking at Lurah in appeal.

“But—” I began.

“We accept,” Lurah interrupted. “It is a very thoughtful gift. Sen-sah-aht-ri-yahn, thank you. Aht-nahli-yuni, thank you. Ef-suhl. May you who are water find the sea.”

Once we were traversing the canyon mouth, having left the swarm of Aht behind us, Lurah leaned close to me and said, “We could not refuse.”

I skanced her. A smirk, there and gone. “Who’s Yuni?” I asked.

“The right question! Quibble, how is it you always ask the right question?”

“It’s in my name! I just put a few things together. The way I heard Yahn speak of Yuni yesterday, I assumed she was his daughter, but you called her nahli. What’s more, there’s no qah in Yahn’s name. He never married.”

“No, he did not, and Yuni is not his child, but she has adopted him as a father of sorts,” Lurah explained. “Their gift is a demonstration of im. You should see the absurd gifts that go around when girls compete to become nahli-qah!”

“So, the nah must choose a nahli-qah,” I guessed, “and Yuni—”

“—is a natural choice,” said Lurah. “For the nahli-qah of a Wahn, at least, who is unlikely to bear children of her own.”

“That’s rather devious of Yahn, isn’t it?”

“He is Sen.”

Already, the Sen had struck their tents and moved into the canyon, and the Aht-sah had drawn the semicircle of small guard tents closer in, forming a tight ring around the canyon mouth that offered better protection against the roving sah-uhn-say. We met Asreh, Qahf, and an Aht-sah contingent led by Hnefn in the semicircle of tents. Hnefn and the other sah sat horses. A large black bird perched on Asreh’s shoulder.

“I wish you were staying,” she said, looking at the three of us sadly.

“I wish you were not going into a pit of death!” grumbled Qahf. “That ahnk-say is terrible. Make speed through it to the door you seek. The deeper you go into the heart of the ahnk-say, where there is glass, the greater your danger. If you go so deep that the glass is everywhere, you must find the door of night – or you will be uhn-qah!”

“We will find it, ri,” Alnasl said, giving im-li-im to his father in qah. As he turned to face Asreh, the vision looked pained. “May you who are water find the sea.”

The nah held her head high and stiffly repeated the words of farewell. Her stare was heartbreaking. She looked away momentarily, at a loss, and when she looked at her father again, her eyes brimmed with tears. Her voice cracked.

“We do not really know one another.”

“No, daughter, we do not. But believe me, one day I will return, and then we will put that to rights.”

Asreh only nodded. Then, finally turning to me, she stroked the downy, jet-black head feathers of the bird on her shoulder. “This is my raven, Qeht-zil,” she told me. “It’s a pity you’re only meeting him now. I don’t know just where he’s been all this time!”

I blinked. “Asreh! You know my language!”

“You’ve given me quite the lesson on contractions, Quibble. Far scholars know they exist in Djer but not how they work. I’ll issue a scroll on it.”

“Why didn’t you ever say you speak Djer?”

Now Asreh smiled conspiratorially. “But who would’ve journeyed with us then? Qeht-zil, qeht: Aht-jah.”

“Aaaah-jaaah,” the raven croaked, picking at her hair with his beak.

“I haven’t yet taught him to say tuhn, and now I have to teach him nuhn! Thank you, Quibble, thank you for my life. You’re my qahli. Never forget it.”

Asreh seemed strangely ill at ease, as if she neither knew what more to say to me nor how to turn away. A storm of mixed feelings clouded her face. She clasped my arm, squeezed, and as if it was a cue – much to my own shock – I grabbed her by the back of her neck, pulled her close, and kissed her. Qeht-zil fluttered, and Asreh shuddered as if chilled by my embrace, but she didn’t pull away. Even after I let her go, she hugged me. We lingered in the spell of the kiss.

“If I didn’t have someone—”

“But you do, Quibble,” said Asreh with a sigh. “How I envy her! But I hope she’s alive. I hope you find her.”

When the Aht-nah let me go, at her encouragement I stroked Qeht-zil’s breast.

Accompanied by Hnefn and his contingent, we rode northeast into the mouth of the Sen-an-dah. Every bit in her element now that we’d left camp, Lurah rode her camel Qeht-qahlif with gusto, the pack camel Yahn gave us in tow. Rather more warily at first, I rode Sehlim-sehl, who showed himself perfectly amenable to me. Lurah gave me some instruction, and by dusk, I’d grown so comfortable with him that we sped off at a gallop out into the salt pan and back again – an exhilarating spurt of speed, though by then my backside was sore from the day’s riding. Alnasl rode a dappled gray mare who spooked when she got too close to the camels.

At Lurah’s insistence, we camped that night next to a patch of baked sand where I imagined water once stood. The Far called it say-uhn-qah: some Far had died there, unconsecrated, not finding the sea. The Aht-sah were unhappy with the choice of camp, feeling it invited bad luck. They pitched tents and made their fire uphill of us.

“Superstition!” Lurah retorted when Hnefn bore their complaint to her. “You are all too used to traveling with the tribe. Trust me, this is the right place. The sah-uhn-say will keep their distance. They are superstitious, too.”

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I’ll only glancingly litigate that question here. I’m no authority on it. But I’ve taught college-level writing at three institutions of higher education, so I feel I have standing to talk about this aspect of the controversy.

What’s more, I think what played out at OU offers us a dystopian vision of the future. I’m thinking of what widespread adoption of writing by large language models (LLMs) presages for the future of thought.1 If the controversy is as prophetic as I believe, the prophecy is as bleak as Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones — except, I fear, this time no god will show up to restore flesh to the bones and breathe life into an army of the intellectually dead. Or, more likely, we’ll be appalled by the gods we get.

Before someone gets the wrong idea, let me clarify I’m not accusing Fulnecky of using AI to write her reaction essay. It’s plain she wrote it herself. Oh, is it ever plain!

For instance, it contains a glaring contradiction about its key idea that I’d expect of an undergrad. In the first paragraph, Fulnecky says, “Gender roles and tendencies should not be considered ‘stereotypes.’” In the second paragraph, though, she argues, “It is perfectly normal for kids to follow gender ‘stereotypes’ because that is how God made us.” A bit later, she appears to accept that gender roles are stereotypic: “If leaning into that role means I am ‘following gender stereotypes’ then I am happy to be following a stereotype that aligns with the gifts and abilities God gave me as a woman.” Well, are they stereotypes or not? Fulnecky doesn’t seem to know.

Caught up in religious fervor, she has leapfrogged over defining “stereotype,” which would be a crucial step in arguing against considering “gender roles and tendencies” to be stereotypes, in order to land on the word’s connotations and its place in a culture war. It’s a significant hole in her argument, as written. It’s not impossible at all to fill the hole, but Fulnecky gave filling it no thought.

And that — the lack of thought — is my concern. The very first sentence reads: “This article was very thought provoking and caused me to thoroughly evaluate the idea of gender and the role it plays in our society.” But given the essay’s content — its ideas, its single source (the Bible), and its refusal to engage substantively with the scholarly work to which it’s supposed to react — this first sentence is just a lie. If Fulnecky read the article in full (an interview she gave suggests she only read its abstract), reading it didn’t cause her to think about much of anything, much less “to thoroughly evaluate the idea of gender and the role it plays in our society.”

Quite the opposite! Her essay is only a recital of the ideas about gender she received from her religious upbringing. She didn’t invest a moment of actual thought; she just parroted some received ideas.

The problem wasn’t that Fulnecky had received religious ideas — virtually all students do, in my experience — or even that she gave voice to them. The problem was that the essay isn’t academic in its approach to the topic. That’s the crux of Curth’s criticism of it, for instance the objection that it cites no scholarly sources to make its claims. From a teacher’s point of view, Fulnecky just didn’t engage in the field of study, psychology, to examine any ideas, either her own or those in the article she reacted to. She treated her psychology class as if it was church and she was called upon to “witness” for God. She completely failed in her job as a student, which was to learn.2

Personally, I disagree with Curth’s decision to award Fulnecky no credit for her paper. I would’ve given her some credit, maybe 10 points out of the total of 25, for producing a paper that was at least on-topic. But I appreciate the point Curth was making with a 0 as well as the subsequent offer to let Fulnecky rewrite the paper for credit.

All the student was being asked to do was to engage in good faith in the course’s field of study. She wasn’t told to reject her religion or its ideas. She was free to believe what she wanted. But she wasn’t free, nor should a student be free, to make personal belief and only personal belief, nothing else, the benchmark for judgments in her academic writing about the ideas in psychology.

If a practitioner of a scientific discipline behaved as Fulnecky did, they’d be hounded out of the field by their peers, rightly so. And, of course, the entire point of studying a discipline — of being a student — is to become a practitioner of the discipline. So, the discipline’s standards apply as much to its students as they do to masters. They must apply, or else the students will never become masters.

Afterward, stirring up a stink in public about her failing grade, Fulnecky made it clear she doesn’t feel her job as a student is to learn. She’s there to have her preconceptions and beliefs coddled — anything less is discriminatory.

Now, caving to political pressure and dismissing Curth from teaching, the university has endorsed Fulnecky’s view of the job all of its students have in the classroom.

Students aren’t there to learn. If anyone’s learning anything, it’s the teachers. Students are there to have trifling encounters with their fields of study, encounters bounded by each student’s personal system of belief, which is held sacrosanct. Beyond that, they’re just doing busywork for four years, walking across a stage, and collecting a diploma.

Then why attend college at all? What’s the point? Acquiring a piece of paper that only grows more worthless with every decline in academic standards?

Why even have a university?

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What does this have to do with AI writing and the future of intellectualism, though? Of all the takes on the OU essay controversy, this one by Ana Marie Cox intrigued me the most as a writer:

An editor by instinct (like me), Cox picked up her red pen to mark up Fulnecky’s essay, which really needs an editor (or a writing tutor’s guidance, which Fulnecky could have gotten at the university’s writing lab). But Cox found herself foiled by the very spirit in which the essay was written. Finally, she realized, “You can’t make something better if the person who wrote it doesn’t want it to be better.”

“The inadequacy of the writing is the point,” Cox tells us. “Because this essay isn’t just an essay with ugly ideas. It’s an essay that rejects the idea of being good — that you need to try, that persuasion matters, that clarity matters, that craft matters. The real argument of this essay is that, as long as you have the power to enforce a belief, there’s no point in making something beautiful or even competent or coherent. You don’t have to convince anyone. You just have to make them accept it and call it good.”

A little clarification is wanted. Fulnecky believes the Bible’s prescriptions should rule academia — and society writ large — without justification. “Faith is the be-all-end-all” is the pivot for her worldview. So, for her, what’s “good” isn’t about what indicates an effort to learn or think — what’s persuasive, clear, and well-crafted. She likely took her best stab at writing something adequate for her purpose. The trouble arose from her mistaken notion of what a student’s purpose is in an academic setting. Her actions illustrate that her purpose was to assert her own “power to enforce a belief” and make people “accept it and call it good” without justifying it, the way a student — indeed a teacher too — would have to justify any other belief in academia.

From there, Cox delves into an analysis of the aesthetics of current American politics, the intentional ugliness of authoritarianism. I won’t unpack her analysis. That’s worth hearing in its original form. But she immediately made me think about two things.

The first is how the craft of writing is one way — and not an inconsiderable way — in which we develop and shape our ideas themselves.

For most people who haven’t made a deep study of writing, it’s usually assumed that a writer’s ideas are sitting fully formed in the writer’s mind and the crafting of the ideas in a piece of writing is only an effort to communicate them coherently and effectively. Well, craft is that effort, but not only that. In practice, attempting to get an idea across coherently and effectively forces the writer to probe the idea, to form it more fully, to alter and refine it, and sometimes even to abandon it.

So it should be no surprise that ugly, unexamined ideas are almost always expressed in ugly, unexamined writing.

Not only does the lack of craft in Fulnecky’s paper — how it rambles and repeats itself unnecessarily, how it unwittingly contradicts itself, how it mistakes the purpose of the assignment to be going on a rant rather than reflecting intellectually on another piece of writing3 — show what a paltry effort she put into conveying ideas, but the thinness of her ideas is also a product of her lack of attention to craft. She didn’t think through the organization or sophistication of what she wrote. She just “spilled” her thoughts. So, they came out poorly shaped and underdeveloped.

When merely “spilling” is the bar to which Fulnecky holds herself for conveying ideas, is it any wonder her warrant for them boils down to “the Bible says so, and I take what it says to be true as a matter of course”?4 And isn’t it rich that Fulnecky thinks, in the context of her psychology class, if her classmates are “trying to conform to the same mundane opinion,” that’s obviously a bad thing, but if kids bully each other to enforce conformity to stereotypes, that isn’t a problem at all?

Who’s really surprised to see such flimsy warrants and egregious contradictions in an essay this poorly written? When there are no standards for writing, why should there be standards for logic? Anything goes.

The second thing Cox’s analysis prompted me to think about is AI writing. And let me tell you, those were some dark and hopeless thoughts!

When writers hand over to AI the process of crafting ideas into a piece of writing, the assumption that their ideas are already fully formed and only need communicating — that grappling with craft contributes nothing to the formation of their ideas — is so pervasive that it becomes invisible to them. They don’t know what they’re missing. And how smart the writing AI produces sounds breeds an undue reverence for it, as if these not-writers can also assume the AI thinks about ideas the writing contains just as those ideas exist and function in reality.

In case anyone’s in doubt, no AI is capable of this. Only human beings can think of an idea as it exists and functions in the real human world, because only human beings live in the real human world. AIs don’t. They live, if you can call it that, in a world of pure logic and statistical probability.5 They live light-years from our frame of reference.

More than the flood of AI slop which is now threatening writers’ already precarious livelihoods, these terrible assumptions about both writing and AI are what bother me when folks argue “AI is just a tool.” By sheer dint of not practicing the craft of writing (or practicing it lackadaisically), these folks are blind to one of its cardinal virtues — namely, that it’s a testing ground for ideas. Need we remind them of the etymology of the word “essay,” which surely an English teacher told them at some point?

I shudder to imagine, along with the crafting of thoughts in language, how much of our thinking itself is being handed over to inhuman machines. Intellectually, society is already stretched thin. We’ve got more access to information than ever before, yet we find ourselves baffled at how to handle so much misinformation running rampant, a problem AI only amplifies. Now, to boot, we’re facing the prospect of a ship of fools sailing into port, totally unaware of how bad their ideas and beliefs are simply because they’ve passed up — and they continue to pass up — chances to wrestle with them.

What’s worse, because these fools will have grown used to being unreflective, just like Fulnecky has, their priority will be not justifying their ideas and beliefs — that is, the search for truth — but acquiring the power to enforce their ideas and beliefs, to make the rest of us accept them and call them good. Like Fulnecky, their intellectual project will be manufacturing deference to and legal enforcement for their viewpoints.

When we talk about religion, there’s a word for that: theocracy. In this case, we’re only talking about a theocracy where AIs are the gods.

For me at least (and I suspect it’s true of many people), the whole drama of writing is wrestling with ideas as I try to communicate them. What’s the best expression for this idea? How does the idea’s expression change it? Is it nearer or farther from the truth? Do I accept that “beauty is truth, truth beauty”? If I don’t accept it, then what balance must I strike between truth and beauty?

Without this drama, am I a writer? Without it, why be a writer?

Why even have writing?

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Index of chapters

75. Sacrifice @Aladfar

No dream of images but one of meaningless minutiae. Pixels randomly changing color. A constant noise like someone endlessly saying shh!

Asuja’s control was a chaotic novelty, unknown to me. I pictured Epigraph and poured memory into my lit kindness: “But now, behold, Unity is no more, Within is no more – now those Ones are all vindicated. And now I come forth by day!” My dream brightened, but against a dream of nothingness it found no hold. Then Asuja’s dream abruptly fled. In its place shone piercing amber light, the brightest I had ever seen.

My glass-dream unfocused and I staggered, unsteady on my feet. Asuja grabbed Definition’s arm and they popped away. Espying, I could locate them nowhere.

No time to think about it. Espying had also shown me the lord Algol locking his dagger with Imay’s sword. Before I could pop, three red-cloaked adepts materialized before me. I had just time to refocus my dream before their lit controls blazoned in my face. I dispatched the first two with a double pop, forcing the second pop despite my amber’s reluctance. I didn’t grasp them, only touched. My first victim melded with the second in a grotesquerie of flesh and bone, and they fell together. I kindled the yinman afresh and swung it to the last adept, putting my hand on his shoulder, but his control was now lit fiercely and for one panicked moment I believed he would overmaster me. Then he stumbled and fell to one knee. His glass died entirely.

Behind him stood Imay. To my amazement, the dwarf spun agilely on his feet, almost in a pirouette. Whisp! His sword slashed at such speed that it took the adept’s head clean from his shoulders, and I was splashed with blood.

The Adroit had said Imay was a pathetic figure at work, but in this fight he was a terror. No wonder he’d wanted a Sen sword! Whisp! it went in the air before and behind him as he carved a path of carnage through his enemies.

Everywhere, a clamor of popping and cries. Adepts in red cloaks swarming out of the arc. Snow spattered with blood.

Vega popped in next to me, and I offered her my hand. She swapped her glasses between hands and slipped her left hand into my right. Then, our ambers touching and working together, we went forth into the fray, fighting as kindness fights best.

Asuja was disguised as a vision. No yinman. He might have lost it. Did you see where he took Definition?

Door in the floor. I didn’t espy which. Algol cloaked them.

We must rally and push through this! They’re outnumbering us here.

You get Imay, I’ll get Gloss, then forward!

In a flurry of intonations and pops, we advanced into the arc. Rasalased, joining our rear, had her adepts form a shield wall of light – scarlet, crimson, maroon – against which our foes were forced to switch their glasses, to fight with the few kindnesses they had. We began falling back through the night-door, bound for Egg 10. Three red cloaks popped in together with lit controls only a yard from the door, but surrounded as they were, their dreams soon failed, and again two died sundered while Imay dispatched the third with his keen steel. The enemy didn’t try again.

The last through the door, Imay, Rasalased, and I emerged into the field of Giza to find, once again, the Pyramid of Khafre deserted and a large array waiting for us atop the Pyramid of Khufu. As Rasalased ordered our rear defense, I took a count. We’d lost fifteen: eight Adroit, including one of the Sen swordsmen, and seven Zeros, five of them adepts of control. Our array numbered forty-one. There was no telling how many of our foes lay either before or behind us. Still, I couldn’t stop to think about it: waiting cost us more time than I’d guessed, and here, the moon was already setting in the west and the gray of dawn growing in the east. I strode forward through our ragtag array.

“We must speed up!” I barked at them. “I’m calculating the next pop. I’ll vision it to all of you. When we go, we all go together!”

“But the door!” cried Rasalased, still standing before it with a raised and lit glass.

“Damn the door! We’re out of time! And there’s still the second field!”

“He’s right,” Vega seconded me. “Forward fast, or it’ll be all for nothing!”

But to my surprise, as soon as we popped in among the array of utter control on the other pyramid, they began to retreat through their door as if already running away in a rout. A few red cloaks didn’t even bother to light their glasses, only popped at once to the door, laid their hands on the black stone, and disappeared. Espying, I saw no red cloaks atop the Pyramid of Khafre, behind us.

Why aren’t they chasing us? I thought.

You know why, the sad voice of Ankaa said.

I ignored my amber glass. Forward fast.

An arrow whizzed past my ear and through the neck of an adept kneeling by the night-door. The other red cloaks were racing through the door in disarray now, reckless of their defense, and we killed several before they managed to quit the field. Once we’d reached the door, I halted our forces to regroup. Now would come the real test.

But it didn’t. The second field – the mountaintop ruins of Machu Picchu – was all but empty. I gazed across the terraces, lined with a fine dusting of snow that glowed in the moonlight, and espied. Two adepts of utter control stood by the last door, downhill of us. They waited until our total array had arrived, then vanished. Scouts bearing news of our advance? Would we face all of utter control’s remaining forces in the corridors of the Egg itself, where popping was impossible and they couldn’t be flanked?

Now, since guarding our rear wasn’t a pressing concern, I sent Rasalased and the adepts of control, along with Imay and the swordsmen, ahead through the last door in a final ploy to breed confusion among the enemy. But we joined them to find only silence, an unnerving silence, in the Egg. A single adept lay rectified in the corridor before us.

Glossary wobbled on his feet and laid a hand to the white polypropylene wall to steady himself in the Egg’s weak gravity. Imay, also wobbling, suddenly went down on both knees and vomited. I turned to Vega.

“Where are they?” I murmured.

“If they put the bulk of their total array forward at the arc,” she theorized, her voice low too, “we may win the Egg without much more of a fight.”

“For what purpose?” I countered, now forced to agree with Ankaa. “We’re in the wrong Egg and you know it.”

“Or they’ve overplayed their hand and they know it. We can’t second-guess now. It’s too late for that.”

“It’s not too late to back out of a trap.”

“And back out to where?” Vega said, frowning. “They have the Arc of Edict.”

There was no arguing with that. We split our total array up, leaving two Adroit swordsmen with a small array of kindness at the night-door to Earth. Imay, as good as the other swordsmen together, stayed with the vanguard. We progressed from door to door in the Egg with growing speed, still meeting no resistance.

An array of eight Zeros guarded the narrow corridor at the end of which lay the night-door to the hub’s airlock. They quickly fell back. Three escaped through the door. Four others fought and died. The last, giving up, tossed her control away, pocketed her amber, spread her open hands in the air, and gave assent. We hadn’t planned on taking any prisoners. Glossary stepped forward, nocking an arrow to his bowstring.

Vega checked him angrily: “No, Gloss! We kill when we have to.”

We sent the prisoner back along our route under the escort of an adept of control. Then we decided who would advance into the airlock. Glossary had three arrows left – a useful advantage even in the dark, since our enemies would be obliged to light glasses and reveal themselves. Imay was eager to go, but I refused to let him. In zero gravity, he would probably only retch again. Rasalased was a valiant fighter, but I preferred for her to remain and oversee our retreat. In the end, only the Dazed bowman and three adepts of kindness accompanied me and Vega through the door.

We met five lit controls beyond it. The bowstring twanged, there was a gurgling cry, and one of the red glasses went dark. All the other glasses died, too. A whooshing came from the other end of the airlock as moonlight shone in. The array of utter control fled into the spindle. Glossary loosed his remaining arrows and struck the last adept in the small of the back. He writhed but pulled himself through the hatch. It closed behind him, and then we were alone. I brightened my amber and gave Vega a stern look.

“Much too easy!” I said. “It’s obviously a trap.”

“Yes,” she conceded. “But of what sort? Why give us an Egg?”

“Dazed, and you three,” I ordered, “go and tell Rasalased we must retreat. She’s to take all our forces through the door to Earth and secure the other side.” When they’d left and Vega and I floated in the airlock alone, I cried out, “Utopia!”

“How may I serve you?” said a voice.

“May we enter the hub?” I asked.

“Of course,” 10-Utopia said.

A second whoosh of air struck our backs as the hub’s hatch slid open. One of the white Utopian interfaces hovered invitingly just beyond. I made a grab for it – too slow. The orb sped away into the hub. A hoarse laugh faintly echoed from somewhere within. We pulled ourselves half through the hatchway and gazed around. A black sphere lay to our right – Earth’s night. In the hub glowed a brilliance of white light. The full moon lay to our left, its light eclipsing the stars.

The laugh came again. A black-cloaked Zero drifted an untold distance from us. Lesath. Around his throat was a neckband like the one Asuja wore. He clutched another interface in his right hand. His left was hidden in his cloak.

“I daresay I can take you both on!” the lord called out in challenge.

I began to pull myself forward into the hub, but Vega grasped my arm and held me back. Look! she intoned, nodding to the left of Lesath. I saw nothing but empty space there, so I espied. The bubble of vision made no contact with the hub’s edge, as if there were no edge, but it revealed a large sphere of clear glass. A depth charge.

Now the trap was plain. I drew back into the airlock and placed my hand on the night-door beside the hatch. When Vega didn’t lay her hand atop mine, I glanced in her direction, but she wasn’t in the airlock. With my hand still on the door, I peered into the hub again. Vega was floating towards Lesath, but she didn’t face him. She was looking back at me. Her right hand blazed with amber fire, and from her left there emanated the strongest kindness she could give.

“Come back!” I shouted.

Go, Aladfar! she intoned in answer. I love you. Go!

What are you doing?!

Righting the wrong. Tell Quibble—

Vega’s last thought was lost in a piercing shatter of glass as the depth charge flew apart and became a fireball, swallowing her.

Filigree, harp—

Fire erupted through the shutting hatch.

—sacrifice!

I stood frozen in the corridor, staring at the night-door in shock. The floor shook under me, then tilted as the Egg listed off its center of gravity, and I fell against the wall at my back. An arm encircled my shoulders.

“Off the Egg!” Glossary yelled in my ear. “We’ve got to get to Earth!”

Silences live close to death, to grief. Even with faith that the Ones we rectify are joining the Ones already transcended to join Utopia, their deaths seem like a pit, a void opening at our feet. Most silences bear the burden well, but I never have.

That’s why it was so easy for Ankaa and then Vega to sway me to kindness. They didn’t convince me of the wrongness of edict or the rightness of their cause. Ankaa only showed me what it was to drop the mask of equanimity, and then Vega taught me to be tenderly attentive, to care for another person’s life not as an article of faith but as a habit of my very being. With her, love became as natural to me as drawing breath.

Now I know why Vega did what she did. For your sake, Numberless. Yet even knowing it was a kindness to you makes my grief no easier. Not when grief is this near, this heavy, and I know it will last the rest of my life – and that, for me, may be endless.

Once, Definition told me what she knew about grief, and she should know about it, but I can’t say she was right. My faithfulness is not a crumbling statue waiting to pop back into existence at a word or gesture. She exists in my amber merely as memory, but the memory is fixed, unalterable. It doesn’t change as I change. It’s a shadow shut away from light. Carrying this shadow, I wonder if I am any longer capable of change.

Vega’s amber is lost, and with it, her relic. Now she is only a voiceless spark in a glass. She will never say a new word, never think a new thought.

It’s as if she has died a second death.

76. Infinite @Vega

nothing

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I haven’t posted a new reflection in a while. I’ve written something new, though, and it’s forthcoming. I hope you’re having happy holidays!

Index of chapters

74. Night-door @Definition

“Lie still!”

“I’m getting a cramp.”

“Do you want this to work or not?”

“How can I fight with a cramped leg?”

“For kindness’ sake!”

Aladfar and I lay on cold stone beneath two gray protégé cloaks. From the arc’s porch, Vega had assured us, the cloaks couldn’t be seen at all, hid as we were by juts of rock. Aladfar had insisted we use gray cloaks, though, to blend with the rock face.

I peeked through a crack between the jutting stones. A confusion of footprints crisscrossed the porch, where we’d trampled snow to disguise our prior movements. Aladfar had directed it done on the glacier’s surface as well, though I couldn’t tell the difference from this far, even with my goggles off.

The wind shifted, blowing across the glacier towards us. We scrambled to pin the cloaks down and hold them against the gusts.

“I hope they hurry!” Aladfar muttered when the wind fell. “Our folk will freeze if they must endure hours of this!”

Whereas in the northern hemisphere it was Hottest, here in the southern it was Freeze. Winter was well afoot. Rasalased made much of it in our preparation for war, so we had winter gear, borrowed from the Dazed. As the monastery lay at nothing like the elevation of the Arc of Edict, though, our best gear was unequal to this cold.

Lying on stone, mostly immobile, my hands were turning to icicles. But our total array waited on the glacier’s surface, hidden by penitentes, shaded by icicles stretching for the sky. Since they travel widely by night-doors, Zeros are used to abrupt changes of season, but Adroit are not. The Adroit down there were surely suffering. Worse, no one there, either Adroit or Zero, could wear their mittens or gloves. If our enemy gave us a chance to spring our trap, they would have no time at the signal to cast a thing off. They could only blow on their hands and stuff them in cloak pockets.

“Maybe this was a bad idea,” I admitted.

No sooner had I said it than a red-cloaked figure emerged from the arc. He took down his hood, turned side to side, then crept towards the lip of the porch, crouching lower all the time. He peered over the edge, stood, motioned with an arm for someone to follow him out. A white cloak appeared – a vision. Now we would learn whether the penitentes indeed masked our force from a vision’s strong espying.

The vision stood beside the adept a while. Then an array of red cloaks came out of the arc, numbering eight with the adept already on the porch. So far, so good.

A second vision emerged and joined his fellow. They faced each other, stared in each other’s eyes. In their open right hands, ambers waxed to brightness, halos of light overlapping. A second array exited the arc, then a third. Twenty-six Zeros now stood in formation on the porch. I lowered my goggles into place, pulled the straps tight, tapped Aladfar’s hand. He tapped twice in response: Wait.

Minutes passed. Zeros stood like statues on the porch, as mute as in my dream of them. The two visions espied together in strength again. Then those two faced the arc, and a last Zero emerged. His black cloak stood out starkly against the snow. Like the visions, he kept his hood up. I saw no face.

Aladfar grasped my hand and squeezed once. I squeezed back. Then he bellowed our signal to the others – “Quibble!” – and popped us out of hiding.

There, not-there, there.

We had practiced the pop, but I still stumbled, suddenly vertical with naught to lean on as I had lain on the ground. The two visions were beside us. Aladfar released me and sprang his yinman aglow in their faces. I found my footing, crouched at his side. Innumerable pops echoed all around me.

The goggles worked. This low, the strip of one-sided mirror atop them shielded me altogether from glass-glow. I unsheathed my dagger. I expected the vision nearest to me to light a potent glass, but instead he brightened his amber and slipped out his own dagger. Then he stood stock-still, apparently tranced by Aladfar’s dream. I darted in, stabbed, jumped back. The vision staggered away to the lip of the porch and fell over it.

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Index of chapters

let

73. Feint @Aladfar

Numberless, forgive my reticence. While others spoke to you, I have kept silent – that is a silence’s wont, after all. We live close to death. Grief clings like a cobweb to our recollections: so many Ones rectified before their time, so many summaries yielding only disappointments, so many lives spent in vain. We are silent not out of unfeeling sternness, as oft supposed, but because we feel too much, more than Zeros should. We remember, but we do not recount. We do not tell the story even to each other.

Now I must tell the story. Greater grief gnaws at me and urges me on, but I realize too that I have been silent as much out of shame as out of grief.

We – Vega and I – put you in a trap. Rasalased thought it unwise, Alnasl thought it wrong, and Utopia warned us an excelsior is not a tool. We listened, but only that. We did as we saw fit, without apology to any One.

As we learned to depend on the Adroit and especially Definition for our survival in a war, we saw our own arrogance and how it had led us into errors.

Definition never demanded to know why we’d kept her in the dark about the life of her child. Her silence was more unsettling than any accusations could have been. We knew she hadn’t forgiven us. She’d set the matter aside, that was all. Now, committing ourselves to this desperate war against utter control, we were doing penance. Perhaps it would decide whether she at last chose to forgive us.

So we told ourselves. So we told each other. But what could we do, Numberless, to earn your forgiveness?

On the second labor at the hottest, a small array of utter control – just five Zeros – traveled through the night-door from Egg 10 to reconnoiter the Arc of Edict. Finding we held the arc, the array quickly fell back through the door. Only minutes later, a second reconnaissance array poured through the door from Egg 17, likewise retreating in haste. Fortunately, our allied forces wouldn’t gather at the arc until the next morning, so utter control still had no inkling what we were planning. However, the near-simultaneity of forays to the arc suggested our enemies could now communicate between Eggs. It was possible the forays were prearranged and utter control was trying to trick us, but it was safer to assume at least one of the Eggs’ Utopias had surrendered, maybe both.

We convened another council in Bibliography’s cottage. The blacksmith and the resurrectionist were in high spirits: their work was going well, and by the morrow, our forces would be fully equipped for battle. Definition and Imay were perturbed at being called away from training, but they grew grave as I delivered my news.

“This changes things,” I told them. “We can’t attack an Egg with our whole force. Part of our force must hold the night-doors at the arc, or the arrays on the other Egg will follow us when they get word of our attack. They’ll make us fight a rearguard action at some time when our forces are split, probably at the second night-door.”

“A trap between two fronts,” Vega said.

“Any more stragglers coming in?” Glossary asked her.

“None today.”

“Then we’ve got everyone we’re going to get,” said Definition. “Fifty-six. What’s the strength of the force we’re facing?”

“According to the night-doors they traversed Within,” Vega answered, “the total array of utter control numbers one hundred twenty-eight. There’s no knowing how the lord Lesath would have split them up. Evenly, if I’m to guess. He couldn’t know which Egg we’d attack.”

“We’re outnumbered, that’s true, but we have tactical advantages,” I reminded the council. “Only strong control infiltrates our mirrors now. Our enemies have to focus intently to overpower the Adroit.”

“You Zeros could wear mirror-goggles, too,” Glossary suggested.

“We have enough glass,” Marginalia said.

“No,” I said. “We must see their dreams clearly.”

“Without imbibing the whole of their dreams, we can’t fight them with our own dreams,” Rasalased explained. “It’s why we’ve never used mirrors before. Frankly, it’s why I don’t expect the Adroit you’ve given kindnesses to do much with them.”

“Nor do we,” Definition remarked. “We’re not depending on them.”

“Nonetheless,” I went on, “if only we maintain surprise and speed, we will have more mobility on the battlefield. Two enemies to face – a Zero and an Adroit, attacking in different ways – means utter control’s forces will struggle to pop, vision, intone, and maybe even espy. And then there are your swordsmen, Imay.”

The Far blushed at the mention. Though not as well trained as he wished them, his array knew the basics of their swords and, moreover, how to fight as a group.

“I beg you again, Djer-nah, send us at the head of the vanguard,” he said. “A fear of steel will scatter our enemies away from the first night-door.”

“Too risky,” I said. “We have no idea yet what lies beyond that door. It’s wiser to keep the swordsmen safe until we can deploy you strategically.”

“But if Imay is right, if they scatter, then we’ll have an easier time taking the next door and getting to the field beyond it,” said Vega. “Surprise and speed, you said. If our only real chance is confusing our enemies in order to move quickly through them—”

“Very well,” I granted, still not liking the idea. “But keep the formation tight. On the first field, we’ll play for shock and awe. After the first two arrays of kindness have gone through, an array of control goes. Then we alternate kindness and control. All the arrays of control will wear red cloaks, even lords and ladies. We’re marking them so we can tell friends from foes. Rasalased, you’ll command the rear and come through with the last array. I want utter control to think control has wholly joined our side.”

“They’ll think they’re outnumbered!” Bibliography exclaimed.

“I doubt it,” Vega said. “They wouldn’t have taken the Eggs if they didn’t believe control would wait to see what they’ll achieve before taking a side.”

“Maybe,” I rejoined, “but what they’ll see is a lot of red cloaks. In the glass fight, they won’t have time to rethink the question. This ruse won’t hold up once we’re in the Egg, but it might help us win the fields. The first field, at least.”

Definition skanced me. “The second field’s going to be harder, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said. “Their scouts in the first field will have reported to them, so they’ll have some idea what’s coming. They’ll get reinforcements from their rear. And as I said, we might face a counterattack from our rear. And if they didn’t evenly divide between the Eggs, we might arrive on the second field to find most of the total array there. It’s all guesswork, really. We may not even make it to Egg 10.”

Definition frowned.

The second speech at the hottest dawned. Our total array met in the Axle of the Adroit consensus half an hour after sunrise, and we all popped Within. Taking the short way to the Arc of Edict, we crossed two spirals. In the first, we lit our ambers, and Ones fell away from us, calling out – “Zeros! Zeros!” – as they fled the chambers we crossed. Fear was abroad in the second spiral. Its Axle lay abandoned, bright with its tarry-not’s admission of sunlight, which struck the floor in a circle almost reaching the walls.

“It’s unnerving!” whispered Definition, who strode at my side.

We reached the night-door. Popping through it, we let our Adroit hear the key – dazzler, trance, penitent – so they could make their way back as far as this spiral alone if necessary. The force of kindness holding the Arc of Edict made way for us on the other side. Once all gathered there, we reformed our total array inside the cave in the order in which we would go into battle. Then we marched the array out of the Arc of Edict and onto the porch of stone overlooking the glacier. It had snowed recently, but fortunately not much. The snow on the porch stood only a couple of inches deep.

We formed seven phalanxes with four Zeros and four Adroit in each. I surveyed the field of jagged ice below and visioned particular places to the Zeros in each phalanx. Then, phalanx by phalanx, we popped down to the glacier’s surface. Popping in among the penitentes, there were spills but no injuries, thanks to the snow on the ice. The array was messy, though. We popped back up to the porch, this time with orders to maintain formation. It didn’t go well. Only lords and ladies and a few adepts popped in precisely where they were supposed to be.

I admonished the adepts: “Do you want to stand with allies or stand alone? Want solid ground under your feet? Calculate the damned pop!”

We popped down to the ice again, back up to the porch. They got their minds in their ambers, and this time it went much better. A third trial arrayed the entire force just as intended. Then Vega, Glossary, Definition, and I strode forward and turned to regard our troops.

“The Adroit aren’t looking me in the eyes,” Definition told me. “They’re afraid.”

Self-dreaming with my yinman, I lifted off the ground a few feet and said loudly, “Zeros! Adroit! Hearken!” Then I let myself drop and looked at Definition. “You speak to them,” I said. “They need to be One. Only One can make them so.”

She was silent a moment. I think Iklil was telling her something. Then, in a flash, before I even knew her left hand was out of her pocket, she blazed forth her kindness.

In the dream, Dazed chorused as sunlight burst through the stained glass of their chapel. Adroit, many of whom now stood before me, hurried along the cobblestones of their consensus, speaking to each other, gesturing. Rasalased and Alsephina sat at a fire, holding hands. Quibble leaned over a desk and took up a quill to write. Index walked a path in the forest, one hand resting on the shoulder of the wolf at his side.

“If you think we’re fighting for our lives, you’re right, we are!” Definition said as we lived her memories. “But we have kindness on our side, and I don’t mean glasses or Zeros. Remember all your kindnesses, all the love you’ve given each other!”

The glass dazzled us as Definition poured all that she loved into this dream. Each memory was more than itself: the dream overflowed with her fondness, her hope. Then her glass abruptly died and released us.

“Utter control has none of that!” Definition proclaimed. “They want power for its own sake, not to help any One but to dominate Ones. They’re zealots. They’ll fight hard for their beliefs. But in their hearts, there’s nothing really worth fighting for, and what’s more, they know it. They are empty shells, nothing more, and we shall break them!”

Adroit and Zeros both raised a cheer. Then a voice rose in song somewhere deep in the ranks. All the Adroit joined in:

     ‘Tis a gift to be simple, ‘tis a gift to be free,
     ‘Tis a gift to come down where you ought to be!
     And when we find ourselves in the place that is right,
     ‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight!

They sang the second verse, then the first again. When the song ended, their eyes were all upturned, and some even looked eager. We let everyone stand at ease and talk. Rasalased left her array of control, walked up to us, spoke to Definition.

“Thank you, Nish! This lady—” Rasalased flashed her eyes at Vega. “—has been speaking to me of kindness for as long as I’ve known her, but I never understood it like you just made me understand it. If I live through this, I’m giving up control.”

Vega laughed.

“I’ll be your adept!” the lady of control promised, and they both laughed. Then Rasalased grew serious again and said, “Hearing the Adroit sing made Seph happy. We thank them for that, too.”

“You’re taking Alsephina with us?” Definition said, concerned.

Rasalased bared both her hands, showing her amber as well as a blue glass. “I’m fighting with a kindness. Seph is lighting it. We’ll have strong dreams.”

Definition smiled.

Traveling through the first night-door on the way to Egg 10, Vega and I emerged kneeling on a bare platform of rough limestone. No Zeros waited for us there, only our own swordsmen who had gone ahead of us. One looked at me and shrugged.

It was night. A moon nearly at its full stood high over the eastern horizon. As more arrays arrived through the floor-set night-door at our backs, I walked with Vega and our Adroit to the platform’s northeast corner, where Imay stood, sword in hand.

Below us fell away two sides of the pyramid on which we stood. Near its shorn-off top, the sides were smooth, but not far down, the smoothness gave way to rows of massive blocks, a giant’s staircase leading down to the desert sand. At its northwest corner, the pyramid’s base rose in a hump, the glassy surface of which gleamed in the moonlight. A globule of superheated gossamer-glass had fallen there. To the east, well below us, stood a sphinx with a well-eroded face. To the northeast, there rose another pyramid with a flattened top nearly level with us. Beyond it, moonlight reflected blindingly off the glass shroud of a city that stretched away for miles eastward.

“Can you see them?” the Far said, pointing with his sword at the other pyramid. “Two Djer were here. They popped over there to join their comrades.”

Squinting against the glare, I made out a blur atop the northeast pyramid. Then I espied. Arrayed Zeros stood in one large column facing us, no doubt espying, perhaps waiting for us to attack. Their pyramid’s night-door, like ours, was situated at the center of its apex, but the columned array obscured it.

I maintained negativity, wondering what utter control was doing. Their column suddenly split apart into two columns and I saw their pyramid’s night-door. Two Zeros crouched there. They disappeared without a pop – they’d traveled through the door. At once, the array of utter control began to run around the platform in a spiral, tightening inwards upon the door, shrinking as they went.

Aghast, I spun back towards our door and intoned: Stop!

The first few pairs of control had just come through. I ordered a blue cloak back through the door to halt our forces at once, then turned back towards our enemy just in time to espy the last Zero on the other pyramid vanishing through its door.

“Damn their eyes!” I cried aloud for all to hear. “If only we had a vision! Alnasl, I miss you! You’d have seen this coming!”

“What?” asked Glossary.

“They’re giving up the first field without a fight.”

“And that’s bad?”

“Very. Those two at the night-door were their visions. I couldn’t see through the array’s mask, but they could. We just showed them how we’re coming – who, in what order. They got a good look at our Adroit, the mirror-goggles, the swords and daggers. Now they’re visioning all of it to the array on the other side of the second door.”

“Did they see us arrive?” said an adept of control.

“Best to assume so,” I said.

“Surprise at least is lost,” Vega said slowly, “if not our whole strategy.”

There was a collective sigh. Definition removed her goggles and gazed all about. “Where are we?” she asked.

“Giza,” I told her. “We’re atop the Pyramid of Khafre.” I pointed northeast to the other pyramid. “Utter control was on the Pyramid of Khufu.”

“And what about that glow? All those buildings?”

“A city of the Ancient, coated in gossamer-glass,” said Vega. “Put your goggles back on, Nish. The light is bad for your eyes.”

I beckoned Vega, Definition, Glossary, and Imay close for a huddle.

“If we advance now, we can expect to meet all the forces of Egg 10 on the second field,” I said. “They may feint again to draw us forward, but when they change tactics, it won’t be two-on-one anymore. And doubtless they’re sending word to Egg 17. When they pincer us, it will be a nightmare! Their numbers will win.”

“Then what bones do we throw against this?” Imay said.

We stood a while in silent thought. At last Definition suggested, “Let’s give this field back and try to draw them out.”

“Use their strategy against them?” Vega said doubtfully.

“It might work,” I posited, “if we leave no spies here as they left for us.”

“And if we retreat all the way back,” Definition added.

“Onto the arc’s porch?” Imay asked.

“Down to the glacier. We’ll use the penitentes as cover, and we’ll keep our hands off all our glasses. The ambers, too.”

“And lay down all our armor?” Vega cried. “We’ll be defenseless!”

“No, we’ll be invisible,” I countered. “Even their visions won’t see us.”

“But will they really believe we just ran away?” Vega said.

“If they do,” Definition said, “they’ll seize the chance to take the Arc of Edict and prevent our coming back. That means they’ll have to bring out a sizable force. Then we attack on the ground we know and try to zip through. If they don’t believe it, if they just send out a spy or two, then we regroup and come up with a new plan.”

“And attack tonight?” I said.

Definition winked.

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rem

This chapter gave me considerable trouble in revision, and I’m still not sure I like it. Sometimes I have to say, “That’s all I can give it.”

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Index of chapters

72. Qeht @Lurah

Numberless, I have told you almost all I know of Quibble’s sojourn with the Aht, yet one thing remains. Even now, as I tell you of it, I do not understand what I saw that night. I can only say what I saw. Perhaps you know what it means.

Quibble remained troubled by Sen-aht-nah-lapi’s bloody demise. So I led her into the canyon and up a granite stair just within its mouth to a promontory overlooking the Sen-an-dah. The jah Nefri had led me there some years ago. It’s the right place to take her, I thought. At first, Quibble huffed as we climbed the steep stair, but then her spirits rose and she began to pepper me with questions in the tongue of the Djer.

“Emissaries!” she exclaimed, recalling Wahn-aht-nah-asreh’s decision to contact the Djer. “Obviously, I’m one of them. What about you, sah?”

I did not answer. I was keen on no such task. The nah was ignorant of much that would be asked of her now. If I belonged somewhere, it was at her side, advising her on the law. Sehlim-aht-ri-qahf was wise but growing old and feebler every year. Moreover, the sah-uhn-say who flocked to Lapi’s shield and now roamed the Sen-an-dah would be a threat for some time. Qahf did not know them, but I did.

Also, regardless of Lapi’s disgrace, the Sen were Aht. Im must be given them; the nah must use tact. I thought she would do well to ask Sen-sah-aht-ri-yahn to oversee the Sen’s restitution to the Wahn. Devoted to im, he would be fair. Yet the nah must not ask too much – for instance, ask the Sen to name Yahn their ri. If Yahn himself aspired to be Sen-ri, the nah must not help him or even seem to help him to it. As nahli-qah, I learned from Nufra-qahlif-nah-qehl that being nah came with dangers, and some concerned not substance but appearances. Ignoring appearances, a nah could act rightly yet still turn people against her.

Oblivious to these ruminations, Quibble pressed me: “You’d see Rasalah again! Don’t you want to see your sister?”

Still I said nothing. What I wanted of family had been a matter long absent from my thoughts. It had been a relief to learn my sister-qeht, though a Djer-nah, was a good person who took no part in abducting and murdering children. I wanted to believe this knowledge sufficed. It did not, though, and that nagged me. Quibble’s assurances of her goodness and even her very existence, alive, seemed to stand in judgment of what I did and became after her disappearance – of my failure at Say-qahlif, of my journey to Ayn-qesh and the spilling of my qah by my own hand, of my criminality as a sah-uhn-say who plundered and killed, of my selfish choice to lay my sword at the feet of a nah who would be a tyrant. My whole life looked like a gross, ugly mistake.

“Then will you go to look for your children?” Quibble said as we reached the top of the stair.

Suddenly angry, I rounded on her.

“What do you know of my children, Qeht? Have you seen them? Do you know who they are? Unless you can look me in the eyes right now and tell me aught of them, do not speak of them!”

Quibble was confusion, pain, shame, and fear, all at once.

I realized my hand rested on my sword hilt. I had threatened her. I stepped back and let go of the hilt.

“I am sorry,” I said. “I do not know what took me.”

“We’re walking in im-li-suhl,” Quibble said.

“I know. That is what bothers me! It is clear you are my friend, Qeht, but I do not know how I know it.”

“Do you need to know how?”

“Can you tell me?”

“No, of course not. I mean, what need is there?”

That left me mute a third time, and now Quibble grew exasperated. “Won’t you answer one question I put to you?” she said, drawing her cloak close against the cold.

“One!”

Quibble laughed and rolled her eyes. Even in the dark, their different colors were visible. Now they came alive, made her seem more alive, as if merely a moment ago she was the weird being in one of her stories, the iso, and now she was human.

“All right, Lurah. One. Are you afraid of the future?”

“That is the strangest thing you could ask me, Qeht. Often I wonder why you are not afraid of it. Have you learned nothing from the past?”

“I’ve learned I can’t change the past. There’s only changing myself. Whatever the future holds, whatever comes next, you can’t hide from it. You can only change yourself and hope the person you’ve become is wise enough to weather it.”

Like water, I thought.

“My adroitness Definition was afraid of the future, like you,” Quibble continued. “That’s why I asked. I didn’t understand it when I was with her, and I still don’t. I want to understand it.”

Here, then, was Quibble as I first saw her. In want.

Now we stood at the very ledge at which Nefri and Nuah once stood as a young couple learning to be like water with each other. Far-nah-luhn had risen, an eye open almost full. Star by star, the galaxy’s white arc lit up as night deepened. I gazed up and shrank away to a speck of spirit. Thinking of the boy who fell in love with night, I said, “Qeht, if the stars are not Uhn-far, what are they?”

“Orbs of fire, like the sun,” she told me. “Some are small, some large. You would not believe how large! Some are bright and some dim. There are stars so small and dim we can’t see them, though they’re a great deal closer than the ones we do see. And some stars are really more than one star. Binary systems. Two stars orbiting each other.”

“Do they have names in Djer?”

Quibble chuckled. “Yes, and the Djer have names in them.”

Once again baffled by the Qeht’s words, I sought the depth of night for anything unusual – perhaps another planet – and I picked out a bright star quite close to Far-nah-luhn. “What is that one called?” I asked, pointing.

Quibble looked where I was pointing, closed her eyes. A few seconds of silence passed. She opened her eyes and said, “That’s not a star. It’s an Egg.”

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Index of chapters

71. Im-hel-qah @Lurah

The sah gathered around the fire in a wide circle two ranks deep, the nahli-sah forming one group and the Aht-sah another. Many looked anxious, but they kept silent. The rest of the Aht fell back a ways behind us, talking excitedly.

As the challenged, the nah could ask someone to fight in her stead, in which case the jah could appeal for her own champion. As I foresaw, Lapi chose to fight herself. So now the jah had to find a sword comparable to the nah’s whispering sword. The two of them strolled together like friends within the circle of sah.

Asreh pointed. “That one.”

The nah agreed and walked off to speak with Nahli-aht-sah-luht, opposite the fire. The Aht-sah unsheathed her sword and handed it to the jah. It was straight, less wieldy than the nah’s curved sword, but it was double-edged.

Asreh stabbed it in the sand, disrobed to cotton jerkin and leggings, and turned to Quibble. She drew her dagger and, extending a bare forearm, laid the tip to her skin and gently described two lengthwise lines from halfway between wrist and elbow to the heel of her hand. She changed hands, did the same with her other forearm. Quibble gave im, took the dagger, and stepped back into the circle of sah next to Yahn.

Now she was Asreh’s qahli. I had explained to Quibble what it meant, but I was unsure she was ready to do what hel demanded, should her plan meet with disaster. She was brave, I knew, but she was softhearted. It was one thing to offer her own life, but could she kill Asreh?

Lapi swooped her sword twice through the air. Asreh took her sword from the sand, raised it, and widened her stance.

Now I regretted that I had not trained Asreh alongside Hnefn while she was still young. By law, as a jah forbidden to embrace the sword, she wore only a dagger. I only began training her with the sword, in secret, after her mother died. Asreh was inept at it and our secrecy made her training infrequent, so now she knew the theory of the sword but little of its real use. She knew stances, basic defense and attack, but she was not yet intuitive and creative in combat. Though her grip was loose enough to let her move the sword, her movements were stiff, unpracticed. She clasped the pommel in her left hand, trying to steady the blade. It shook from her fear.

Lapi began circling the fire. Asreh stood still and waited. Almost within range, Lapi lunged. Asreh parried. Steel cried. The nah stepped back, still cautious, testing the jah’s skill and nerve. Asreh backed away slowly around the fire, enticing Lapi to follow.

Instead, the nah turned, circling to come from the left. Asreh glanced at her feet. She was changing her stance when Lapi sprang over the fire at her, shouting. No doubt the shout was meant to make Asreh panic and misjudge her defense. Rather, it alerted her, and she backed quickly to her left, just out of the way of a swing at her midsection.

Lapi’s swing was too fierce. The weight of her sword dragged her forward and exposed the right side of her back. Rather than pounce on her opponent’s mistake as a practiced fighter would, Asreh scurried away, apparently rattled by the surprise attack. Realizing her weakness, Lapi swung back around with a wild, uncontrolled slash. Her sword whispered through empty air. Then, perhaps seeing herself as humiliated by an inept foe, Lapi lost her temper and ran at Asreh head-on.

Another wild slash, a clumsy parry. Asreh’s sword was knocked clean from her hands. The sah chanted in unison, “Hel!”

Lapi took three steps back, frustration on her face. Asreh stepped sideways to her sword, keeping her eyes on Lapi as she knelt to retrieve it. They began circling the fire once more. Asreh’s brows dripped with sweat. She wiped them with her pommel hand as she gave ground before Lapi.

Do it now! I thought. Do it or she will grind you down!

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Index of chapters

70. Dyay @Quibble

Asreh wanted the full story of how Lurah spilled her own blood, but the sah said it was too long, so instead Asreh interrogated me about my plan. The jah adjourned her council without making a clear decision. Now she sat and talked with just Nuah. After his behavior in council, that would be a difficult conversation. I didn’t need to be in the middle of it. I wandered towards the Aht-sah – more warriors had joined Hnefn’s contingent – at a fire a little deeper in the canyon.

Lurah and Hnefn were there, speaking close in their own im off to one side. All the other sah but one sat around the fire. Struck by the loner’s incongruity, I sat down in front of him. “Qihbel,” I said, giving im.

“Sen-aht-yahn, Sen-aht-sah-yahn, Sen-sah-aht-ri-yahn,” the man replied.

Yahn was gruff. Though not yet an old man, he looked careworn. As a rule, Aht-sah were clean-shaven, but Yahn had a long, grizzly beard. I could not see his lahn-jep. His face bore a few scars, including a long, ugly one over his right eye. Though I’d seen sah with such scars, trophies of battle, I still wasn’t used to the sight. Dazed and Adroit had scars, of course, but from working, not fighting.

Yahn had not given me im, so he was free to say more. I waited. After a while, he sighed and said, “What do you want?” Still he didn’t give im.

“Company.”

“For aught I know, you are my enemy,” Yahn said. Unlike other Far, he didn’t look at me as he spoke. The evasiveness of his gaze reminded me of a Dazed. Glancing at the talkers in im at the fire, he added, “And for aught they know, I am theirs.”

“Then why not join them in im and let them get to know you?”

“They know me,” Yahn muttered, scratching his beard.

“Why are you here, Sen-sah-aht-ri-yahn?” I said, feeling it was time to push forward a pawn. “Tell me plainly, and I will tell you plainly why I am here.”

“You first,” he suggested.

“I am trying to get home. It is a long way from here. I have to cross Qahn-dah.”

“Your Djer-stone will not take you?”

“Only amber glasses travel like that. My yinman blue glass is for other things.”

“Djer magic,” Yahn said with clear contempt.

“It is not magic. It only seems magical to you. Really, it is a technology.”

“Dyay,” the sah-ri insisted.

“Do the Far not have metallurgy?” I asked. “But now tell me why you are here. It is plain what your feelings are. If you agree with the nah, why come to the jah’s aid?”

Yahn loosed a loud, bitter laugh.

“Agree with the nah?! Who said that? I am a sah-ri of the Aht, not a nahli-sah out to fill his belly and his purse. Perhaps the jahli-ri Nuah is Djer, perhaps not. At the least, I recognize the man who was Nuah. Is he a traitor to the Far? I cannot guess. But I know whence Nahli-aht-sah-luht’s orders come, and I know what Luht did today was wrong. The nah cannot defy the law. So here I am where I must be.”

The talker with im at the fire had fallen silent at Yahn’s outburst. All the Aht-sah were now regarding Yahn with some annoyance but also, I thought, respect for what he had said. Billowing my cloak, I turned slightly and gave them im. They stared at Yahn a moment longer, then returned their attention to the talker, who picked up his tale.

I faced Yahn again. “It costs nothing to give im,” I pointed out.

“Qahn-dah is indeed large,” he said, softer, “and full of Far. Qehb, Sqoh, Uhta. If you cause them this much trouble, you will die long before you reach home.”

“I do not doubt it, sah-ri, but I have to go anyway. There is somewhere I must be, and there is no night-door to take me there.”

Now Yahn looked at me. “The door of night is set amid the stars,” he said.

I stared at him. “What?”

“In the city of glass uhn-qah called Ahnk-nuh-qah-say.”

The place of the frozen bones.

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Index of chapters

69. Qah (i) @Lurah

Far-nah-sol had crested to midday when two riders were spotted. They rode the flanks of the southward dunes, one on a camel, the other a horse. Luht and Emrah made the camp by early afternoon. I watched from the canyon’s mouth as they rode in. Emrah handed off his horse’s reins and walked up to the nah’s tent. Still stone-faced, Luht rode past me into the canyon. I saw no lamp.

I wanted to hear Emrah’s report myself, but I had to hurry back to my charges. I had left them alone with Qahf. It seemed little enough risk. Quibble had given me her knife, and she assured me that the Aht-ri, nearly blind, was immune to the magic of her Djer-stone in any event.

Why do you trust her? I wondered as I rode Qeht-qahlif to the tents of the Wahn.

But I found them just where I had left them, chatting amiably with the ri at a fire. Only now, I discovered, they had an audience. Two more Aht had joined them. Around the pentagon of sitting talkers, loosely ringed, were others, standing or sitting, listening. With Nuah translating, Quibble was telling a long story. Her story.

I sat and listened.

She did not tell it all in one part but occasionally stopped and gave im. Talk went around in im. Some commented; all except Nuah asked questions. Getting im, Quibble answered them. She recalled their questions and her prior words perfectly, as if she read all that was said from a scroll in her mind. She gave clear answers. I felt myself to be left in no misapprehensions about her tale, which she now resumed.

A throng was gathering. Quibble nodded to me once, after giving im. When im returned to her, she asked if I wished to join the talkers in a hexagon. I held up my hand and stayed where I was.

The magic of the Djer in Quibble’s tale was mysterious. Looking into the eyes of uhn-qah as Nuah translated only doubled the mystery. In places, it was a ghost story, a tale of uhn-qah, and then those eyes were a frightful visage. They engrossed the hearer, though. So I did not notice anyone creeping up on me.

“It’s quite a tale, isn’t it, sah?” Asreh whispered in Djer.

I shifted in the sand, making space for her.

“You have heard it?” I said in Far.

“Last night,” the jah said, “when you were spying on the nah for us.”

“Ah. The Qeht told you the law’s disposition.”

“You are on our side, too.”

“I wish people would stop speaking of sides. I am a sah, learned in the law. Also, I have hel.”

“Hel would recall my mother’s—”

“I recall her kindnesses well! It does not matter. Nefri knew that for the law to be im, the sah can take no sides in disputes. I wish I could, but I cannot advise you, Asreh. I can only bear witness to facts and explain the law. Now let me hear the Qeht’s tale.”

My focus was broken, though. I let my eyes wander the throng. Turning where I sat, I noted Luht lurking, further back, afoot. Also, the jah of the Halim was moving at the back of the crowd, person to person, peering into faces. She stopped and spoke with a couple. After what could have been but few words, the couple turned and left. The jah moved on, seeking.

“Asreh, something is about to happen,” I whispered in Djer.

“What is it, Lurah?”

“I do not know, but it is happening here.”

She took the hint. “I’ll go find Hnefn.”

Surreptitiously, I watched Asreh leave. She knew not to run. Luht did not follow her. He scratched his beard as he gazed at the talkers.

More people were arriving. Fathers quickly sought out their children and herded them homeward. Other new arrivals mingled with Quibble’s listeners, spoke to them. A couple stopped a departing Halim and gave him im, but rather than return it, he ran off. The couple looked around in confusion, then hurried after him. People nearby took note and began to rise and walk away.

I needed to move before the whole crowd of listeners was leaving in droves. I got to my feet, glanced behind me for Luht. He was already to my left, shouldering people aside as he moved with purpose towards the talkers. I pressed forward against the tide of departing people. Everyone was now on their feet, and with the crowd’s movement, I could catch only brief glimpses of the pentagon. A din of voices was rising.

I dashed forward, weaving. I reached the pentagon just as Luht walked between the talkers sitting opposite Quibble. I sprang over someone’s head into the midst of the pentagon, almost landed in the small fire, and spun to face Luht. Loosing my sword in its sheath but not yet drawing it out, I shouted, “Nahli-sah!”

The listeners were panicking and running away now. Luht took a step. I pulled my sword halfway out, baring steel. The talkers Luht walked between rose and moved to flank me, also barring his way.

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Index of chapters

68. Jah (ii) @Lurah

“—not be seen, so take care the lamp is always shut,” the nah was saying to Luht as I entered her tent.

“Nah, I am here,” I said, giving im, before either of them could notice me.

Sen-aht-nah-lapi spared me only a glance, then pointed to the large scroll spread before her and said, “We found water here. It is the most likely place to find him now. If you do, hurry home with him as quickly as you can. He is in great peril.”

“I go, nah,” said Luht, and he left the tent, his face stony as he passed me.

The nah moved the silver paperweights on the table and rolled up the scroll, then sat back in her chair with a sigh and said slowly, “Holding court, I would think I may at least count on my nahli-sah not to steal im from me.”

When I did not reply, the nah glanced at me with annoyance and made a careless gesture of im in my direction.

“I am sorry, nah. I was distracted with translating, several people were speaking, and I forgot your im. It will not happen again.”

I gave im. The nah pursed her lips.

“Very well, Lurah, it is forgiven. Let us forgo im now. Tell me what you know of this Ayzhed who calls herself Qeht.”

“She is a good listener and a quick learner. She has perfect memory. If her Djer-stone is any use to her, I have never seen her take it out, but I believe she often touches it. Her hands are ever in the pockets of her cloak.”

“A Djer’s cloak,” the nah mused. “I wonder if the Isleh know of this – an Ayzhed who is really a Djer. It is possible she has given the stone to Alnasl, though.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Enough of what you know, Lurah. Say what you think of her.”

I considered it. “I think she tells the truth. For her own part, at least. She knows nothing of a plot by the Djer.”

“You are so certain she is no liar?”

“I am well acquainted with liars, nah.”

The nah smiled, but her words were laced with scorn: “I do not have your luxury of certainty. What do you think of the Djer? Is he honest, too?”

“He seems so, but I cannot be sure. No one can read such eyes as his. And I have not forgotten what Djer do, either.”

Now the nah’s glance was sharp, probing. “Yet you stay my hand when I would kill a Djer,” she observed.

“When you would kill an unarmed wanderer asking for say,” I answered. “As a sah, I enforce the law.”

“Then enforce it!” the nah scoffed, rising from her chair and facing me squarely. “Return to your charges. Learn if the Ayzhed still has the Djer-stone. If not, send word to me. And of course send word of any emergency, but do not come again yourself until I send for you.”

“I go, nah.”

I turned to leave, but the nah said at my back, “You have become a friend of the Wahn, but remember whose side you are on, Nahli-aht-sah-lurah. Soon, there will be a war. This game of bones only hastens it. When it comes, you will lead sah in battle. You will have great hel, not to mention spoils.”

Rounding on the nah in surprise, I said, “Nah, you disfavor Nahli-aht-sah-luht at some risk. He will not take it kindly.”

“I have my uses for Luht. In you, the Qahlif gave up a good commander.”

Descending the dunes to the mouth of the box canyon, I pondered what the nah’s uses might be. Luht’s mission to find and fetch home Halim-aht-sah-emrah puzzled me. Emrah knew to be on the lookout for signs of Djer. We all knew Djer could travel where they wished at the speed of thought. Sending rescue after Emrah seemed more likely to place him in peril than deliver him. The nah was impetuous but not such a fool. So what was Luht’s real mission? And why did the nah think it necessary to warn him to shutter his lamp as he rode abroad?

“Quibble.”

“Qihbel.”

“Quibble. Qwah, qwah, qwah. Qah. Wahn. Qwuhn. Quibble.”

“Qih— Wih— Qihwih— There is no qwuhn!”

“Then how can you say qwuhn? You have no problem saying ‘question.’ It’s only names you struggle with.”

“Qwuhn! Qwuhn! Qwih! Qwihbel!”

“Better. Quib, not Quih. Like in Itay’s name.”

“Qwibel.”

“Buhl, not bel.”

“Qih— Qwibuhl. Qwibuhl.”

“Now faster. Quibble.”

“Qwibuhl, Qwibuhl, Quibble. Quibble.”

“Yes, that’s it! Now, what did you want to know, sah?”

“Two things. First, do you still have your Djer-stone with you?”

“Of course,” Quibble said, producing the stone from her cloak’s large left pocket. “You told me not to let anyone touch it.”

“Good.”

“And?”

My thoughts wanted to fly everywhere like rain.

“Sah?”

“In the jahli-ri’s story, Vega spoke of another Djer, her friend, who bore the name Rasalah as a Far.”

“Rasalased, the lady of control.”

“Lady?”

“She’s a Djer-nah.”

“Is?”

I had tried to be like stone, but perhaps my face or voice betrayed me. A sudden change came over Quibble – the dawning of a realization and, close on its heels, a look of sympathy.

“Is,” Quibble insisted. “Who is she to you?”

My grief too much, I turned away to gaze out over the dusk-shadowed valley. It was the hour before dawn, and the waking birds were filling the air with song. I closed my eyes and let the sound wash over me.

“My sister-qeht, born with me,” I said at last. “I believed she was uhn-qah. But if she is now a Djer-nah, then she must be my enemy.”

“By no means! She took Vega’s side against utter control. I knew her in the Large Spiral. I’ve known her a long time, sah. She’s a stern lady, yes, and I think she must be a fierce fighter, but she’s no murderer.”

I did not know what I felt. Grief had not left me, but happiness was with me. Joy and sorrow sang together like sky and earth in a sandstorm.

“Now, sah, you’ll answer my questions,” said Quibble.

“They were a tribe, and that is why, of all Far, the Sen hate Djer most,” I told the Qeht. I spread my hands to encompass all we saw under Far-nah-sol, who was peeping at us from the peak of a distant mountain. “The Sen ruled this valley. They prospered on the route between the North and East, but Djer kept stealing their children. Perhaps because Ahnk-say-ur is so near, the Djer preyed on the Sen more than on any other Far. The Sen fought the Djer a long time, but at last they had to appeal to the Aht for a place in the East where they could live in greater safety. To gain say with the Aht, they gave up their wealth to the tribe. Though now the daughters of the Sen have grown wealthy again in war, they have never forgotten the Djer’s war on them and what it cost.”

“A genocide. That’s it. Lapi fears a genocide.”

I put my hand on my sword hilt and gave Quibble a sharp sideways look – what she called a skance.

“Never say the nah’s name unless you say it all,” I warned. “Either call her Sen-aht-nah-lapi or just nah. Whatever you think of her, she is nah. She will not suffer insult from you, jahli. Any other nahli-sah would bring you before her now.”

Quibble nodded, then went on: “What did the nah take from Asreh? You know what I mean.”

I had dreaded this question.

“The nah laid claim to everything of real value belonging to the Wahn – almost all they had but their tents! That is how you have found Asreh so impoverished, hardly able to give her jahli anything.”

“Why?”

“Sen-aht-nah-lapi is planning a war, a great war. Her mother Sen-aht-nah-lupah left her much wealth. She recruits nahli-sah with it. But now that she has everything of the Wahn’s too, every year she travels north to trade it for the Uhta’s steel. The steel of a thousand whispering swords.”

“And what are you doing about it, sah?”

An even more dreaded question.

“I am not sure I can do anything. The nah has an argument sound in law, though she cited the law of the Isleh to take her nahli-qah’s possessions. Sehlim-aht-ri-qahf was opposed to that, but the nah put it to a vote of all the Aht. It was impossible for the Aht-ri to win. You see, the nahli-sah also get votes.”

“And, as a sah, beyond the law you can do nothing?”

“Yes.”

“You’re the nah’s spy, correct?”

“Spy?”

“You’re answering every question she asks you about us.”

“Yes.”

“Which means, if I grasp things rightly, you’re our spy as well.”

“In im, if I am candid with one party, I must be equally candid with the other. The nah asked both my knowledge and my opinion of you, and I answered. I am now at liberty to tell you all I know and think.”

I bared my blade and kissed it.

Quibble smiled. “Tell me about im-hel-qah.”

“Equals honor blood,” I said as I sheathed my sword. “It is ritual combat, a fight to the death only if the first drawing of blood is fatal. Qah ends it. There are strict rules, which we sah enforce. In im, the strong may not challenge the weak, since they are not equals. The weapons have equal range. In hel, no one may give a combatant a weapon, and if a weapon is lost, the opponent must let the combatant pick it up. When the sah see blood, we shout qah. Then both combatants must drop their weapons at once and move away from each other. If a combatant is mortally wounded, it is a qahli’s duty to give mercy. Before im-hel-qah, each combatant selects a way to die and a qahli to do it.”

“A friend to kill you?” Quibble said, her mismatched eyes widening.

“Would you rely on your enemy’s mercy?”

“What happens if someone breaks the rules?”

I laid hand to hilt and sliced a fingernail backwards across my throat.

“If Asreh challenges the nah to im-hel-qah, do you think she can win?”

“No. According to the law of the Aht, the challenged may name a champion, and then the challenger may do likewise. But I doubt the nah would name a champion. Why give up her clear advantage?”

“And supposing Asreh loses but she doesn’t die, what becomes of her?”

“Having challenged the nah to im-hel-qah and lost, she will lose her shield as jah outright. All her jahli will have to find other shields. If Asreh finds no jah willing to take her above their shield, she will become nahli, at least until a new Aht-ri is elected. Then, if the nah has her way, the Aht will cast Asreh out. She will become uhn-say.”

“And then?” Quibble said.

“I cannot speculate about what the nah intends to do,” I replied cautiously, “but I can tell you, as uhn-say, Asreh would not have the protection of the law.”

“The nah could have her murdered, you mean?”

I nodded. We journeyed in silence a while.

“The law of the Aht,” Quibble mused. “Tell me, sah, what are the rules of im-hel-qah among other tribes?”

“Much the same. What I have told you is common with all the Far. Beyond that, there are only a few minor variations.”

“Tell me all of them.”

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67. Jah (i) @Lurah

“Water rises from the sea, verily the sea, and it abides in the sky. But the sky-nah look upon the living things on the earth and, seeing our need, they give the water back. We hold the water, and thus we flourish. When we who are water can hold it no longer, we die and let it journey onward. Others hold it and die in their turn. Thus at last water returns to the sea, the source of life. Thus all living things are bound, one to another, in a great journey home.”

So the ri tell all the Far. Yet my mother in qah, Nufra-qahlif-nah-qehl, saw deeper meaning still in the story of rain. Two aspects intrigued her. First, the sky cannot return water only to the sea, where it belongs, but must let it fly everywhere. And secondly, as it falls where it must, the water never complains. Water is happy to journey home over the surface of the earth and within the bodies of living beings.

“Happy?” I said to her. “Nah, why do you believe water has any feelings?”

Laughing, she answered, “It sings as it journeys, nahli-qah! And think: have you ever heard aught but pleasure in its song? Listening to it, have you not felt happy?”

It was obvious to me then that my mother in qah was trying to teach me a lesson. As ever, her method was gentle and oblique. She believed in gentleness.

This served her well as she sought to pacify the warlike Qahlif. She told us all it was better to try to understand our enemies than to fight them, for fighting leads only to more fighting, more suffering and death, while understanding leads to peace. Ever have all her lessons been difficult for me, but this one most of all.

Nufra-qahlif-nah-qehl desired peace with our enemies, even the loathsome Djer who prey upon us. I favored her peace with the Isleh, but I believed peace with the Djer was impossible. They had stolen my sister-qeht, my womb companion, when we were children. I hated them. I could imagine nothing but hatred for them. I made no secret of this when the nah and I spoke of them, and plainly it grieved her. So what later befell us only multiplied grief, both hers and mine.

Once again, the Djer raided the Qahlif, this time not in our camp abroad but our stronghold at Say-qahlif. They took many captives, among them my two children, and they slew the nah’s son, my husband Nufra-qahlif-sah-qehlim, when he tried to defend his own. And where was the commander of the Qahlif-sah when this raid occurred? At the hot springs, bathing myself, unaware anything amiss was happening.

For my dereliction of duty, the Qahlif cast me out, making me uhn-say. For once, the nah was unable to withstand their wrath. So, in one fell swoop, she lost her son, her grandchildren, and her nahli-qah, her heiress. She could do nothing for me but give me three parting gifts – a camel, a sword, and words of warning.

“Lurah, my daughter,” she said, her hands shaking as she held them out to me in im, “do not let this happenstance consume you. I give you this sword for your survival, not your vengeance. Remember you are water. Only remember this, and find the sea.”

Those words were only wind to me then. Qehlim and my children had been my salvation after the loss of my sister-qeht, and now that I had lost them, I went into the Waste little caring whether I lived or died.

Yet I lived. I did many wicked things to live, and I am ashamed to think of some of them. I stole. I killed. I hired out my sword to plunderers, and in their company, I too became a plunderer. Then word reached me that the Aht-nah was recruiting an army of sah-uhn-say. Seeking her out in the green mountains of Aht-lan-dah, I laid my sword at her feet without a thought for what sort of person she was or what she wished me to do. So I might have continued in my wickedness until the day I was slain in turn, and then I would not have found the sea, but a jah intervened.

Even then, when there were few nahli-sah in the service of Sen-aht-nah-lapi, the Aht distrusted us and kept their distance. Some Aht-jah vocally opposed recruitment of the nahli-sah. So I was astonished when one day, months after my arrival, the loudest of the dissenting jah came to my tent, sat down to face me across a dying fire, and gave me im. I didn’t return it.

“Wahn-aht-nefri, Wahn-jahli-aht-qah-nefri, Wahn-qah-halim-aht-qah-uhta-nefri, Wahn-jahli-aht-qah-nefri, Wahn-aht-jah-nefri.”

I remembered my manners and with a sigh repeated my name. Then I stared at the fire and grumbled, “Jah, you cannot know what it is to be uhn-say. I will not return to that! So if you have come to ask me to leave the nah’s service, then you are throwing the empty bone.”

At such a harsh opening gambit, I expected Nefri to rise and leave, but she only sat quietly a while. Then she began, “The honor of the Halim is—”

“We are not kin,” I interrupted. “I am no longer a Halim. You only married one. Do not think you can appeal to kindred spirit.”

“I would not dare to!” Nefri rejoined. “But I do know something of the honor of the Halim. I know it is not always what it seems to be.”

I glanced up at her. She wore a slight smile, bemused but sad. Not to be cajoled, I said, “You know nothing of me.”

Nefri slipped a scroll from the sleeve of her robe and held it up. It bore the seal of the Qahlif-nah, a buzzard on the wing.

“I received many scrolls in response to my inquiry,” the jah went on. “Some are a gift to you, nahli-sah, containing the learning of the Qahlif. They recall you were fond of study and curious about astronomy. But this scroll – your nah’s – interested me most. It relates what we have in common. The nah says you too have lost family to the Djer.”

Finding no words to answer the jah, I stared at the fire again. She stood and gave me im. I returned it.

“Come to see me when you are ready to receive your gift,” she said. “You will be the honored guest of the Wahn. I would like to read with you. Ef-suhl, nahli-sah.”

It was some time yet before I accepted the invitation, and even then, I was wary, cold, and formal with the jah and her family. Though I was no longer uhn-say, I still did not believe I was worthy of anyone’s compassion, but the Wahn showed it to me, and in time I learned they thought first of how to be kind, then of whether I deserved it.

As the Qahlif-nah had, the jah of the Wahn said I must be like water, like the rain happy to fly where it will. The jah’s lessons were harder than the nah’s had been. In im, duty-bound to return each favor, I trained the jahli Hnefn as a sah and saw him become an Aht-sah, and I cared for the old jah, Wahn-aht-jah-asnul, through her last illness.

Yet always I remembered I was nahli-sah sworn by my hel to the service of Sen-aht-nah-lapi, and there were bones I could not throw.

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At the conclusion of Nuah’s story, a collective murmur went up among the Aht ringed around their nah’s fire. Nuah lifted a hand to call for silence.

“My story contains mysteries, and surely the Aht want them explained,” he said. “My companion, the Qeht-uhn-far-jah-im-li-djer, can explain them better than I can.”

He gave im to Qihbel.

“If the Djer can’t have their own children, why don’t they let themselves die out instead of stealing from the Far?” the Qeht said. “The Djer are responsible for the Uhn-far, the people from whom we Ayzhed come. They care for the Uhn-far. If the Djer were no more, all the Uhn-far would die. So the Djer are forced to do you a cruelty in order to do us a kindness. But they don’t all agree on this. The lady Vega is trying to end it. I am the Qeht-uhn-far-jah-im-li-djer, the excelsior she spoke of. As a vision, Alnasl was my protector. At my insistence, he also became my teacher. That is our im.”

There is no word in Far for “excelsior,” so as Nuah had, I used the Djer word. As I finished translating, Sen-aht-nah-lapi lifted a hand. Qihbel gave im to the nah.

“What a Djer is to you does not concern us,” the nah said, “but we all know what a Djer is to us. Djer are thieves and murderers of our children. You are making excuses for them, Ayzhed, but the story we have heard does not refute what we know. The Djer killed Far. Djer-jah-vega kidnapped a Far. These are the ways of Djer. So we shall hear no more excuses. My questions now are for the Djer alone. Tell the Ayzhed to be silent.”

I translated word for word.

The nah looked at Nuah coolly. “The lahn-jep on your chin declares you Far, a ri, but your eyes of uhn-qah say Djer. Are you not a spy the Djer sent? Is this not all a ruse to infiltrate the Aht?”

“I am no spy,” Nuah said, now speaking in the tongue of the Djer as the nah had ordered him to do. “Nor is this any deception. I did not intend to return to the Aht now. Becoming Djer, I lost all memories save those of my childhood. I believed I was only an Uhta-nahli with no home.”

“Or you were uhn-say,” said the nah. “You may yet become that, Djer.”

“Nah, please do not threaten my jahli,” interrupted Asreh.

The nah sprang to her feet and whipped the air to whispering with her sword.

“Silence, nahli-qah! The Sen fought Djer in this very valley. You may forget what Djer do, but we do not, and I will not forget you are harboring one. The Aht can look in his eyes and see the truth about him. And about you, who call him your father.”

“You look into eyes, but I hear a voice,” the Aht-ri said, his own voice hoarse and soft. Again the nah’s sword whispered in air, but Qahf only chuckled at the sound. “Go on, nah, cleave an old blind man to bits. I know my son in qah, and I hear a good man. You imagine uhn-qah to frighten us with, mere specters. Your ears are full of wax.”

Laughter went up here and there among the Aht. The nah scowled.

“Aht, can you not see what this is?” she cried, now striding back and forth. “It is the prelude to an attack! Not a mere raid! Worse! The Djer are coming to kill us all!”

“That’s not true!” Qihbel said.

I echoed her, translating, without thinking. The nah’s eyes flashed at us in fury.

“Qeht, you do not have im,” I muttered hurriedly. “Remember this is the nah of the Aht and you are a guest at her fire. You are neither ri nor jah. Respect her im.”

“But she’s—”

“Do not weaken your jah,” I added.

Qihbel fell quiet.

“I have im!” the nah barked.

“I have told her, nah,” I said.

Sen-aht-nah-lapi held my gaze a moment. Then, to my surprise, she did not continue her diatribe. She did not bid ef-suhl to the gathered Aht, either. Sheathing her sword, she nodded to the captain Nahli-aht-sah-luht and strode up the dune to her tent.

A tactical retreat? Was planting suspicion her only goal? With the weight of the evidence against her, would she now only let the Aht peer into Nuah’s eyes of uhn-qah and wonder? Was her scheme as threadbare as that?

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It has been over a month since I published to Singular Dream. I apologize for this long hiatus.

I stayed a few days at a state park, then went to stay at a friend’s empty house on the outskirts of Athens, Georgia. I’ve been trying to land a job in town, and it hasn’t gone well.

Also, I’ve been in limbo about needed revisions to this and upcoming chapters. Some events and themes in this part of the story are allegorical. But events in real life have been too closely mirroring them, clouding my vision.

There was the matter of solidly introducing Lurah, too. She will be with us for the rest of the story, and with her, I wanted to write a very different sort of narration than what characterizes other narrators in the novel. To do so, I had to rewrite a few chapters top to bottom. So, in the midst of some depression, I struggled with the material.

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66. Djer @Nuah

Aht lore tells of the boy who fell in love with night and wed Wahn-jahli-aht-qah-nefri, but the Aht also remember the man he became, Wahn-sah-aht-ri-nuah. He fell in love with many things. From the Aht-sah, he learned to love bravery. From his father in qah the ri, he learned what justice was among the Aht, to love it and care for it. And from his wife the jahli-qah, who taught him to write, he learned to love learning itself. These gifts lasted when he became Djer. They decided what sort of Djer he became.

The Aht were coming north in the spring of that year. Nuah rode ahead with a friend, Nufra-aht-sah-ilay, to scout the passages to the Sen-an-dah. The two sah reined their horses on a hill south of Ahnk-say-ur, the evil arc of stone where Far children die. Djer-stones were flashing atop the arc. The sah debated the right thing to do.

“The Djer may have captives,” argued Nuah. “We must try to rescue them!”

“We must tell the Aht-nah at once!” argued Ilay.

“You ride back to the Aht,” said Nuah, “and I will see what can be done.”

So the two friends parted ways. Ilay rode south. Nuah galloped through the ravine to Ahnk-say-ur. Coming in sight of the arc, he saw Djer and captive children standing on it. The Djer were performing a rite of some sort with their captives.

Each child was held fast from behind by a Djer who put to the child’s neck what Nuah thought must be a dagger. Other Djer faced the captives and held Djer-stones before their faces. The stones burned bright red. In the ravine, Nuah could do nothing, so he sought a way up, leading his horse into the hills to the west. At last, the terrain grew so steep that he had to leave the horse behind. He went onward afoot towards the top of the ahnk-say.

He reached it too late, though. The Djer and their captives were gone, save two Djer with a lone captive, a girl. They all stood at the edge of the arc. One Djer held the girl by the hand. Yellow light shone out from between their hands, and before her face the Djer held another shining red stone. Though not yet near them, Nuah drew his sword, cried out, and ran. Both the Djer faced him; their stones went dark. The one holding the girl clutched at something in her hand, released her, and said a word. Then his companion pressed his hand to the girl’s chest and shoved her off the arc’s edge.

Horrified, Nuah forgot all fear and sprinted recklessly at the two Djer. They put their hands in their cloaks, and just as he closed upon them and raised his sword, they vanished in a dazzling flash of light and a sound like a blacksmith’s strike on cold iron. Then he found himself on Ahnk-say-ur alone with no enemies to fight.

Nuah fell to his knees in great sadness and anger at his failure to save even one captive. Yet he did not yield to despair. The flight from the ahnk-say was surely deadly, but below it he had seen heaps of bodies and bones. If these heaps had cushioned a fall, he thought it possible the girl or perhaps other captives the Djer had pushed from the ahnk-say might live still. So he hurried down again into the ravine, meeting his horse on the way. But under Ahnk-say-ur, he came upon a surprising and mysterious sight. There, another Djer was moving from one corpse to the next, as if seeking something.

Nuah leapt from his horse. This time, he did not reach for his sword. Instead, he fitted a stone in his sling. Then he stealthily approached the Djer. When he was close, he began to spin the sling. Hearing its whir, the Djer turned to face him.

“Do you guard these ahnk?” the Djer said, speaking in the Far tongue. It was a woman’s voice. The Djer slowly raised her left hand and pulled back her hood. She was not much older than Nuah. The moonlight revealed a bald head but lovely features and, to Nuah’s greater surprise, sadness. The Djer’s cheeks were wet with tears, and she seemed unafraid of him.

The Djer’s demeanor so suprised Nuah that he nearly lost control of the sling. It thrummed the air so close to his left ear that he feared to brain himself and do the Djer’s work for her. So he let the sling coast in its circuit, though he kept it at the ready, and he said, “I will gladly kill you.”

“I believe you,” the woman said. “I saw what you did atop the arc. It was a brave attempt, but foolhardy. You do not know the nature of that with which you contend, or you would know I am not your enemy.”

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65. Nahli-qah @Quibble

“I am glad of this!” Asreh told me as we walked with Nuah in im-li-suhl towards the mouth of the box canyon, heading for the Aht’s communal fire. “You seem wise, Qeht-uhn-far-jah-im-li-djer. I believe you will understand how I feel. And of course I want my father’s advice.”

“Your father?” I said.

“Me,” Nuah said.

Lurah had said they were kin, but I had assumed distance – cousins, perhaps. It was somehow unsettling to learn that, as Nuah, the vision had been a father long before I met him. I thought again of my father, whom I abandoned when I went Without, with a pang of regret. Fearful it would cause him trouble, I didn’t tell Quandary what I was doing. Now, recalling his tears when I returned from the Large Spiral and we reunited, I knew without a doubt I’d left him in pain.

“I have not betrothed myself for a reason,” Asreh went on. “You mentioned the Uhn-far’s law, confession. Far also have laws of marriage, though Salah and Itay seem to forget it. They and the few others still above my shield call me their jah, but I am also nahli-qah. When my mother the jah died, her shield should have passed to me, but the nah adopted me until once I have married. Until then, Sen-aht-nah-lapi claimed, I am a jah only in name. She went on to present me with a series of suitors, all men I judged of bad character. The nah says I am making trouble because I try to be like Nefri, doing just as you said, Qeht, following my own dictates. But when she presents me with sah-uhn-say, what am I to say but no?”

I looked at Nuah. “Sah-uhn-say?”

“Uhn-say have no tribe. Sah-uhn-say are mercenaries who hire themselves. The men riding with the nah when we met the Aht are sah-uhn-say. Jah, when did the nah begin to retain sah-uhn-say?”

“After you disappeared. She cited the law of the Isleh to make sah-uhn-say her nahli-sah. My mother the jah opposed it. I think the Aht-sah were on her side, but the nah had her way, and over time the force of nahli-sah grew. Two years ago, when we journeyed north, Halim-uhta-nah-qasreh implored Nefri to become her nahli-qah, for she was old and knew she would soon find the sea. But Sen-aht-nah-lapi recruited many more sah-uhn-say on the journey, and of the most roguish sort – not honorable people such as Lurah. The jah would not hear of abandoning her people to their mercy. As we returned south, things were rapidly coming to im-hel-qah. Then the jah died suddenly, carried off to the sea in great pain. I believe the nah poisoned my mother. And now I am caught between four shields. On one side, the families above my shield urge me to marry soon, lest the shield itself be lost. On another side, I am above the nah’s shield, and I cannot get her to free me to court on my terms. The third shield is mine. I am Nefri’s daughter, and my mind and my body are my own!”

“Why can’t you free yourself?” I asked.

“Nahli-qah!” Asreh repeated. “Because I was orphaned before I betrothed, I am the last of the Wahn. The nah says I am hers to command. Jahli-ri, your arrival defeats her scheme, if only she will admit you are my father. She insists you are dead.”

“The Aht-sah recognized me.”

“That may be the only reason you are alive. At the nah’s fire, I would like you to tell the Aht how you became Djer. I believe that is how the nah will attack you. Already, at last night’s fire, she spoke evil of the Djer.”

While Nuah brooded on this, I brooded on home and Nish. By asking for say with the Aht, we’d unwittingly embroiled ourselves in the tribe’s intrigues. I was jahli, though, and as I understood im, if I wanted Asreh’s help, I had to give her mine.

“You needed our advice, jah?” I said.

“I am afraid, Qeht. I do not like to say it, but this nah is bad, much worse for the Aht than her warlike mother. Because she bears the whispering sword on her lap, she thinks she is her mother. But Sen-aht-nah-lupah only waged battles she could win. Sen-aht-nah-lapi speaks of raiding in the North, warring on Qehb and Sqoh and even Uhta. She even speaks to her nahli-sah of war against the Djer! She is Sen, and she remembers what the Djer inflicted on that tribe. You will see anxious faces tonight. The nah raised an army to sate her bloodlust, but the Aht have had enough of the Sen’s wars, and now we want peace with our neighbors. People look to me to lead dissent. That is the fourth shield. I believe the nah poisoned Nefri to avoid a fair fight and now she has put me between these shields to provoke me to im-hel-qah. I am trying to avoid it, for I know I will lose, and then I will die. By the nah’s whispering sword or my qahli’s dagger, I will find the sea! That is the nah’s game of bones.”

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