05. A Familiar Stranger (Vaye)¶
Vaye cursed under her breath as she searched for another place to set up shop. The Sihiri usually left mundane law enforcement to the city watch. It was bad luck that the shopkeeper had chosen to summon them today, and it would require an equal measure of good luck for Vaye to attract the attention of any traders worth talking to. In her experience, the world was rarely so fair-minded.
She entered Daybreak Yard and wove through the crowd. Glancing back, she spied the shopkeeper, who was scanning the crowd intently. Vaye doubted the Sarmalan was looking for her, but paranoia had often paid off in the past, so she doubled back just in case.
Arriving back at the Fringe, she scanned a few areas, but other displaced vendors had beaten her to them. Space was always tight on Market Days, and the Sihiri had made things worse. The Cantereian vendors tolerated her presence as long as there was room to spare, but she had no illusions about her place in their hierarchy.
She spied a family of Anashi scribes standing patiently in a corner, hoping to attract customers while avoiding the attention of the city watch. Their clothing was as humble as their stooped posture, their gray skin evoking in the ink they wrote with. In Edeweri, the Dzharian border town where she’d grown up, Vaye and her mother had been the only Anashi. Even before the Conflagration, her people had been enduring a slow, inexorable decline, their birth rates unable to keep up with their losses. Their insular, secretive nature and their refusal to breed with outsiders left them helpless as their culture melted away like a snowbank in springtime.
Thelenza boasted a sizable Anashi population, although it was still miniscule relative to the rest of the city. Upon arrival, Vaye had snuck out of Belosveka’s compound and sought out the community, naively excited to find a home among her people at last. But she’d been a child, still a year shy of her Dozen. Not understanding the rules, she’d made a terrible mistake: she had spoken of her personal relationship with Grandmother. She’d thought the community would share her excitement about restoring Anash.
Instead, they’d cast her out, terrified of association with her dark secret. Any whiff of the supernatural could turn neighbors into a mob like the one that had come for her mother, Nashara—or, even worse, draw the attention of the Sihiri. Desperate for sympathy, Vaye had shared the story of her mother’s death, but at the mention of Nashara’s name, Vaye had finally learned the truth: she and her mother had already been cast out of Anashi society once before, during her infancy. The Anashi of Lietna, Dzhar’s capital, had decided that Vaye was a threat to the shallow niche they’d carved out for themselves. Her father hadn’t died, as Nashara had always told her, but instead had stood aside as Nashara and her young daughter were banished. Years later, the elders of Thelenza made the same decision, calling it a mercy not to hand Vaye over to the Sihiri themselves.
She tried not to resent them for their cowardly self-preservation. Tried and failed.
Clenching her jaw, she lowered her head and hurried past. She finally found herself in a dim, disused triangle jammed between buildings, the kind of place where a tourist might end up after getting lost. It was so far removed from the high-traffic areas that she might as well have stayed indoors.
After setting out her blanket and halfheartedly arranging her merchandise—some knitting needles, a few bracelets and pendants, and a number of kitschy animal sculptures—Vaye sighed, simultaneously drained and agitated, bursting with restless energy. Her legs felt like they were full of wriggling snakes. When she got this way, the only cure was focused movement, working up a hard sweat until her mind grew calm.
Aside from allegedly summoning an all-powerful demon and dragging civilization to the brink of collapse, Anashim were chiefly known for three things: militant protection of their sacred knowledge, a general love of scholarship and language, and a passion for dance. Often misunderstood by outsiders was the link between fighting, prayer, language, and dance. To Anashim, they were all the same thing, the holy tongue known as Anashic existing as much in physical space as on the page. Kravadi, the Anashic system of sacred dance, was a stylized form of writing, its movements inscribing letters in the air. Curvatures became grammar and pacing became inflection, meaning derived from the syntax of momentum. Combined with speed and force, Anashic words literally became weapons.
At the bottom of her pack, carefully wrapped in stiff leather, Vaye kept her tzashim. The pair of razor-sharp ornamental daggers were the only fine witchglass items she owned. Aside from the small set of Anashic holy books she kept in the ruined temple, they were also her only possessions of any value, and her sole material connection to her mother. It remained a mystery how Nashara, a poor washerwoman living in a backwater border town, had acquired them.
Vaye unsheathed the tzashim and let the sunlight bathe them. As talented as she was, the craftsmanship that had gone into the daggers was far beyond her skill. The narrow, curving blades were composed of many transparent, subtly prismatic layers, each inscribed with subtle Anashic letters. The arrangement appeared random, but as the blades moved, the letters caught the light in sequence, spelling out passages from the holy texts in jewel tones. Beneath the blades, the daggers narrowed to form long, textured handles before flaring out again at the base and morphing into thin, arm-length woven cables, terminating in twin rings that slipped over her first two fingers. The cables had the milky hue more typical of raw witchglass, but their genius was in their combination of strength and suppleness, the tough outer layer shielding a soft and springy core.
She took off her boots and set them aside, moving into the middle of the courtyard. Closing her eyes, she recited the prayer over the tzashim, whispering as she carved the holy names of Grandmother into the air. She had no idea if the goddess heard her prayers, but the ritual served to attune her mind and draw her closer to the Balance Point, the elusive state of perfect focus that was the ultimate goal of Kravadi. Arriving at the Balance Point was impossible; the holy books taught that each step toward the mystical goal took you half the remaining distance, which meant you got closer and closer but never actually touched it. But touching it wasn’t the point—reaching for it was.
She slowly began swinging the daggers in long orbits around her body, weaving her wrists together and apart. The tzashim were sharp as broken glass, and when she’d first transitioned away from wooden training daggers, she had cut herself many times, once almost severing a finger. But now the tzashim felt like a part of her, no more dangerous than her own teeth.
Eyes still closed, she snatched both daggers out of the air, flipped them around the backs of her hands, and reversed their direction, each movement drawing her deeper into the trance. The cables transmitted her intent to the blades, and they responded to her will, reshaping themselves like a falcon’s wings. They twisted and curved, gliding over dense bubbles of cold air or slicing through the warm drafts rising from her body. As her focus deepened, she sensed more and more of the surrounding space, each whorl and eddy grasping at the tzashim like ghostly fingers.
She became a prayer as she flowed through the Kravadi form, punches and kicks punctuating the graceful sentences of her blades. A smile lifted her cheeks as she was washed clean of tension by the currents of her quick-moving blood. As the trance intensified, her circle of awareness contracted, the raw sensations flooding her consciousness and forcing the broader context of her life to spill over the lip. Ripples of wind spread outward from her accelerating daggers, whispering to her of their infinite complexity. Beneath her feet, each tiny pebble shouted its texture as she stepped and spun.
Her eyes still closed, Vaye grinned, immersed in the wild joy of the dance. Her consciousness contracted as the Kravadi form guided her inward toward that singular, mystical point. She caught one of the tethers with her foot and slung the dagger around her body, creating tension before shooting it back out with a leaping kick.
The tzash stopped with a meaty thunk. She stumbled and snapped her eyes open. A massive Dzharian woman stood holding the dagger just in front of her breastbone, wearing an expression of polite bemusement. Her other hand was behind her back, her posture relaxed.
“Grandmother’s tits!” Vaye gasped.
“I see your sense of decorum hasn’t improved,” Belosveka replied evenly. She stepped forward, smoothly flipping the dagger and handing it back handle-first. “Nor your awareness of your surroundings.”
Vaye snatched the weapon. “I haven’t seen you in years, and the first thing out of your mouth is a fucking lecture.”
The Dzharian winced. “Forgive me. I’ve rarely seen anyone execute the Viper’s Dart with such balance and grace. I should have started with that.”
Vaye scoffed, although she couldn’t help but enjoy the praise. The first few years after arriving in Thelenza, she’d lived in Belosveka’s household, not quite a servant and not quite a guest. Among other lessons, the Dzharian had helped Vaye refine her Kravadi technique, incorporating Dzharian and Sarmalan moves to create a style all her own. Even with the way things had turned out, Vaye remained grateful for that.
She turned away and crouched over her blanket, sheathing the tzashim and winding the cables around the handles, hiding her face from her old mentor. “What are you doing here?”
Belosveka moved closer, uncharacteristically tentative. “I wanted to see how you were. I thought perhaps it had been long enough...” The uncertainty in her voice sounded strange, like a cat making bird noises.
Vaye glanced over her shoulder, one eyebrow raised. She was on the small side, but even the tallest of her people would have seemed like a child compared to Belosveka, whose massive head seemed to dispense with a neck entirely as it merged with her warehouse of a torso. The Dzharian was dressed like a caravan trader, tiny silver bells lining the fringe of her brightly-colored woven vest. A tall, brimless hat of red felt, lined with white fur, was pulled down tight above her narrow, hooded eyes, shadowing the thick battle scar that curved across her blueish forehead. Her loose pants were tucked into broad boots caked with mud, completing the illusion.
Vaye’s eyes drifted down to Belosveka’s waist, where the thin ribbon of witchglass lay coiled like a gaudy belt. She still remembered the first time she had seen the Dzharian wield her taspara. Watching her descend on the Grandchildren had been like watching a thunderstorm approach, the witchglass flickering as she tore her foes apart. But that hadn’t been the first time Vaye had seen the woman kill.
The day she’d rescued Vaye from the mob, Belosveka hadn’t even bothered to unfurl her weapon. She had simply used her hands and feet, breaking the bodies of the village headman and his son like kindling. The men had just finished drowning Vaye’s mother in the river, and Vaye’s hatred had been volcanic, but she had still been horrified at Belosveka’s casual brutality. Even after living in the Dzharian’s household for years, a part of her had never stopped being afraid of her savior.
“You look well,” Belosveka finished, smiling awkwardly.
Vaye stood and dusted her hands off on her trousers. “No, I look like I’ve been living in a burned-out tomb, scrounging in the trash to earn a living selling fake handicrafts to a shady Cantereian middleman. But at least I’m driving my own wagon off this cliff.” She shrugged as Belosveka’s smile deflated. She knew it was petty to throw her presumed frailty in the older woman’s face, but sometimes she couldn’t help herself.
Two years after they’d arrived in Thelenza, Vaye had started experimenting with nownow. There had been... an incident. She’d taken things too far and ended up comatose for several days. Since then, the Dzharian had treated Vaye like a half-tamed animal, with a mixture of wariness and manipulative optimism. It hadn’t been an accident, though. Vaye had overdosed on purpose—not to harm herself, but to reach transcendence. She hated being seen as a broken thing, but she couldn’t explain what she had really been doing, and that secret had become yet another brick in the wall between them.
“You could have come back,” Belosveka said softly. “The door was always open.”
“The door to your compound, maybe,” Vaye replied. “But your intentions? Those were always shut tight.” She leaned forward, searching the older woman’s eyes. “Unless you’re finally ready to tell me what you want from me?”
The softness drained out of Belosveka’s expression, leaving it as hard as a dry creek bed. “You know I cannot. The lives of thousands depend upon—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Vaye interrupted. “Same old shit. You want to know my secrets, but when I ask you for a scrap of information about your work, or your plans, or what you even do all day, you give me nothing. Because I can’t be trusted. And then you expect me to fall in line and obey orders like one of your ‘workers’, whatever the hell they actually do. But I never signed up to work for you, Bel. And trust is supposed to go both ways.”
The Dzharian straightened. Her face was an impassive mask, although Vaye thought she spied a flicker of regret behind it. “I didn’t mean for things to go this way,” she said. Perhaps she was referring to the conversation, or perhaps their entire relationship.
“Well, even you can’t control everything,” Vaye said quietly.
The older woman studied Vaye in silence for a long moment before finally nodding and breaking eye contact. Although Vaye had stood her ground, her victory felt empty, almost as though she’d actually lost. Belosveka crouched down, inspecting Vaye’s wares. “This is fine work. Where did you get the material?”
“Scraps,” Vaye said. “Trimmings from workshops, broken pieces stores throw away. If you know the schedule, you can grab them before they get collected for the refinery.”
Belosveka chuckled, assuming Vaye was joking. It was supposedly impossible to revert witchglass to its previous state once it had been shaped and cured. In reality, the process was merely difficult and time-consuming. When Vaye got close enough to the Balance Point, she could send her awareness deep into the material’s structure and break the tiny bonds between the filaments, no matter how thoroughly it had been cured.
The Dzharian saw that Vaye was serious. Her eyes widened as she picked up a sculpture of an owl in flight and held it up to the light, watching its tiny wings flap up and down as it responded to her body heat. “Marvelous,” she murmured. “To make things like this with scraps...” She carefully set the owl back in place. “You have surpassed all expectations.”
“Easy to do when the expectations are at the bottom of a ditch.”
Belosveka rose, smiling. “Not from me.”
Vaye looked away, uncomfortable. Insults and criticism she could handle, but she didn’t have much practice with compliments. “Yeah, well, a lot of good it’s done me. The middleman pays me a pittance for these.”
“And if you had access to virgin witchglass, I have no doubt that you could rival the very best craftsmen in Sarmala. But what else would you do with it?” Belosveka asked. “Open your mind, perhaps?”
The question seemed innocuous enough, but Vaye knew better. “You didn’t come here just to catch up with an old friend.”
“I can help you,” Belosveka said. “I have resources—”
“I’m not interested in being your weapon,” Vaye snapped. “Or your whore, or your pet, or whatever it is you want from me.”
Belosveka swayed back, her careful impassivity slipping. Even living in her household, Vaye had rarely seen the Dzharian lose her composure, and it was odd to see her so uncomfortable. “I know you don’t trust me,” the Dzharian said. “But I want to make things right between us. Please, let me help you.”
“You want to help me?” Vaye said, gesturing at her carpet and the empty courtyard, the utter lack of traffic. “Buy something. No one else is likely to.”
Belosveka was silent for a moment, then pulled out her purse. “Yes, all right.”
“Which one do you want?” Vaye said, crouching down and reaching for one of the more elaborate pieces. If the big woman thought she was getting a discount, she was about to be sorely disappointed.
“I can’t decide,” Belosveka said. “So I suppose I’ll take all of them.”
Vaye froze. “Come again?”
“How much for the lot?” She hefted her purse, which, as always, looked heavy. Vaye had given up a great deal of luxury when she had left Belosveka’s household, a fact that had been hard to forget. But if the Dzharian felt burdened by her heavy purse, Vaye was happy to lighten it for her.
“Seventeen aurei,” she said quickly. “Eighteen and I’ll throw in the pack.” It was an outrageous price, closer to what she might fetch if the pieces hadn’t been counterfeits at all, but Belosveka didn’t even blink as she withdrew a loop of money. The hexagonal gold coins had holes punched through their centers for convenient threading, their edges inlaid with prismatic witchglass that refracted the sunlight in glorious reds and greens. The Dzharian casually slid eighteen of the precious coins off the string and held them out as if they were mere copper.
Vaye took the payment as calmly as she was able, trying to maintain the illusion that this was a perfectly normal transaction and definitely not the most money she’d ever held. “Thank you,” she said curtly, pocketing the coins before they could sprout legs and scuttle away like the rest of her good fortune.
She knelt and began swiftly wrapping the pieces in scraps of cloth and putting them in the pack, her hands trembling with excitement. Belosveka was probably used to paying such exorbitant sums for weapons or bribes or whatever it was that she spent her money on, but for someone in Vaye’s position, eighteen aurei was a life-changing sum. With it, she could certainly find someone willing to sell her top-grade witchglass, good enough to start experimenting with making her own thorns. She glanced at Belosveka’s exposed wrist, the subtle glint of the witchglass embedded in the Dzharian’s blueish skin. Teaching herself how to make them would take Vaye years, but it was a step forward at last. The real trick would be figuring out where to start.
For that, though, there was someone she could ask.
“I can help you,” Belosveka said again, almost as though she knew what Vaye was thinking.
In response, Vaye rose and handed her the pack, everything but her tzashim securely wrapped up inside. “I’m sorry, but I don’t accept help from strangers. And until you tell me who you really are and what you want, that’s all you’ll be to me.”
As she walked away, she couldn’t suppress a prickle of guilt for the hurt in the Dzharian’s eyes, but she had long ago walled herself off from those feelings. She retreated behind that wall now, focusing instead on what was in front of her, as she’d always done. Soon, she’d begin her search, but first she needed to pay a visit to a certain Cantereian lowlife. She couldn’t wait to rip the smirk off his ugly face.
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