25. The Body Snatcher (Vaye)¶
Even if she hadn’t had kitchen duty that night—her injured tongue not being enough to get her out of it—Vaye wouldn’t have been able to sleep. The old man’s shame and agony kept flashing through her mind like lightning strikes.
The Healer had treated her injury himself, stitching her tongue and setting several temporary thorns in the roof of her mouth, along with a questionably-necessary one in her forehead “to keep her from doing something even more idiotic.” The pain had receded to a dull ache, but her questions had only grown. What, exactly, had happened in the clinic? She’d felt as though she were experiencing the old man’s memories, but only the emotions, none of the content. It wasn’t a phenomenon she had ever heard of. And without being able to speak, there was only one person she could ask.
Vaye hadn’t communed with Grandmother since the Healer had discovered her in his courtyard. It was difficult to find the time and privacy to perform the ritual, and her ball of nownow had been confiscated along with her tzashim. But those were just excuses.
The real reason she hadn’t prayed to Grandmother was that she was afraid. She’d ignored Grandmother’s call when she had smoked with Gadarien. What kind of person ignored her own deity? Even worse, she hadn’t made any progress toward the Tashiya. The longer she delayed, the more terrifying the prospect of Grandmother’s displeasure became. But she had to know what had happened at the clinic and how to keep it from ever happening again. Although she’d had more than her share of dark periods, she had never felt the urge to end her own life like she had that day.
One dubious benefit of her duties in the Hall of Vapors was that she was now intimately familiar with the tunnels below the School, making it easy to find a private spot. In the quiet hours before dawn, the only other people down there were Cantereian servants. They probably wouldn’t report her, given how often she had caught whiffs of nownow as they passed by.
Gadarien had graciously given Vaye some of his stash, which was of decent quality, although nothing close to the stuff she’d taken from Fihro. She lit a candle and performed her ritual with extra care, gliding through the movements and focusing on Grandmother’s Holy Names (especially her fourth Name, Mal’kalah ve Rashum, the Queen of Mercy). What she’d learned at the School added a new dimension to the prayer, the Sacred Points of Anashic scripture overlapping with important meridian junctions. The ritual calmed her, the familiar words drifting softly down like snow.
At last she felt ready. She drew the smoke deep, watching the nownow crackle, the bright edge of flame creeping across its surface as it turned to ash.
Her eyes opened on a gibbous moon, the light-freckled shadow contrasting with the bright plane of its cratered surface. The air was chilly, laced with the sharp scent of pine. Grandmother stood with her arms crossed, a bit further away than usual. “You might think that being trapped down here all these years had given me infinite patience, but you’d be wrong,” the goddess said, her voice ringing. “Where have you been?”
“I’ve, uh, been busy,” Vaye said, swallowing a lump in her throat.
“Doing what?”
“The Head Preceptor, Yobaza, makes me work the kitchens at the Hall of Vapors every night. And I have classes during the day.” The words limped out of Vaye’s mouth, falling flat and draining into the carpet of pine needles.
“I hope you haven’t forgotten why you’re at the School,” Grandmother said. “You’re not trying to become one of the Vorkyrda’s pets. You’re here for the Tashiya.”
The goddess’s rebuke made Vaye want to shrink down inside herself. “Yes, Grandmother. I’m sorry.”
The deity uncrossed her arms and stepped closer, mollified. “So. What have you been up to?”
Vaye’s mind flashed to Gadarien’s voice in her ear, his powerful hand gripping her thigh. The taste of Adranaya’s skin and the smell of her hair, warm from dancing. She knew her embarrassment was irrational. Wasn’t it to be expected that Vaye felt drawn to Gadarien and Adranaya, the first people in her adult life who had ever accepted her? If anyone could understand the aching loneliness that permeated her to the marrow, it would be this goddess who had lost everything. Besides, Grandmother already knew everything that went on in Vaye’s head.
She paused, confused. Grandmother was omniscient. In particular, she was said to peer into the heart of Anashim, her Second Name translating to “The Lady of the Thousand Eyes.” So why was Grandmother asking Vaye what she’d been doing? Didn’t she already know?
“Time moves differently here,” Grandmother said, startling her. “But that doesn’t mean I have all night.”
“Sorry,” Vaye said, trying to focus. A bright headache had blossomed in her temples and was slowly creeping down her jaw. “I’ve, uh, met some people. Other novitiates. I’m hoping they can help me.”
“You trust them with the Tashiya?” Grandmother said, raising a skeptical eyebrow. “How well do you know them?”
“I...” Vaye wasn’t sure how to answer. She hadn’t known Gadarien or Adranaya for long, but she was starting to trust them, as much as she ever trusted anyone. “I want to know them better. I want to trust them. But I’m afraid.”
Grandmother smiled and stepped closer, seeming to grow closer to Vaye’s height, her smile regaining its warmth. “There’s nothing wrong with having friends and lovers, child. What are you afraid of?”
“They want me to...” Vaye’s throat felt dry, in this place where her throat wasn’t even real. She felt the need to whisper, as if there were someone in the ersatz forest who might overhear. “They’ve been talking about circamo.”
“What’s wrong with circamo?” Grandmother said, surprised. “It was good enough for your ancestors.”
“Wait,” Vaye said, shocked. “That’s true? I thought it was just a stereotype.”
Grandmother laughed. “Of course it’s true. Circamo is perfectly natural. Limiting yourself to loving only one person is the weird idea.”
Vaye wasn’t sure what she’d expected Grandmother to say, but it hadn’t been this. Neither Vaye’s mother nor any Anashic texts had mentioned circamo as an Anashi practice. She had always thought the association was a baseless slur, like the idea that Anashim secretly used sunspots to manipulate the spice markets. “The Sarmalans kill anyone they catch practicing circamo,” she said. “I’ve seen it.”
“The powerful have always used the structure of relationships to maintain the social order,” Grandmother said, waving her hand dismissively. “They force love into a shape that suits them. It was one of the things I corrected in the old world, getting rid of those artificial boundaries of sexuality, along with some unnecessary physical discrepancies between genders. In any case, circamo is nothing to fear.”
That was easy for Grandmother say. It wasn’t like the goddess could be dragged away by the Sihiri. “It’s just... Preceptor Yobaza already hates me because I’m Anashi. Why do they hate us so much, anyway? What did we ever do to them?”
Grandmother looked away, pursing her lips. “It’s complicated. But all hatred is rooted in fear. Anashi sorcery was the most powerful in all of Telua, and they feared that power. When they saw how strong we’d become, the other nations summoned their own versions of me—my siblings, you might say—and banded together to defeat us.”
“You had siblings?”
“Of a sort. We used to make more progress in a single year than you make in a hundred. But then, after the war, humanity decided to make technology taboo, trapping yourselves in the past. You people really threw out the baby with the floodwater that time.”
“What?”
Grandmother continued, ignoring Vaye’s confusion. “Anyway, there were some... unfortunate incidents. Reprisals and escalations that got out of hand.”
“So... They hate us for defending ourselves?”
“As I said, it started with fear, fear of something they didn’t understand. To be frank, even I didn’t fully understand the mechanism of magic when it first emerged. I was still gathering data about that when things went bad. But the heart of Anashi sorcery, the thing that made us so powerful, was the Tava’at.”
“Tava’at?” Vaye said, feeling the word on her tongue. It sounded only vaguely familiar.
“It means ring, or circle,” Grandmother said. “The Sarmalic term is Gyre. It’s a more efficient way of controlling the flowstream than a flowtree, by distributing the signal equally among a group of people instead of propagating it downward from the top. It’s how your ancestors were able to rule, even though they were outnumbered and surrounded by enemies. But the Sarmalans don’t like sharing. They traded power for control. And that’s why they fear you. You represent a threat to their control.”
“Maybe the Preceptor is afraid of me,” Vaye said, “or maybe she just hates me. Either way, she makes my life miserable. She punishes me for things everyone else gets away with. She has my room searched all the time, and she makes me come to her office to show off her stolen Anashic artifacts, because she knows how angry—”
“Wait,” Grandmother interjected sharply. “This Preceptor has Anashic artifacts in her office? Why didn’t you mention that before?”
“Uh, I didn’t think it was—”
“What do they look like? Describe them to me.” Grandmother sounded frenetic, urgent in a way Vaye found unsettling.
“Uh, it’s hard to remember. She rotates them out when she gets tired of them. There were a set of stone cups carved like people with their arms and legs wrapped around each other, and a big metal basin with hands engraved on the rim. And there was a witchglass candelabra that caught the light like a spiderweb, and a life-sized silver arm, and—”
“The arm!” Grandmother exclaimed, clapping her hands together. “Does it have witchglass fingernails? And a moth inlay on the back of the hand?”
“Yes,” Vaye said, blinking. “The fingernails, at least. There was some kind of design on the hand, I guess it could have been a moth.”
Grandmother grinned like a lucky gambler, looking past Vaye. “That’s it. That arm contains a page from the Book of Shedach, or maybe a few pages. That’s what we want.” Her gaze snapped back to Vaye, bright as the moon. “And you’re going to steal it.”
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