“What kind of riddle is this?” Alaya’s arm had taken forever to stop hurting when she moved or touched it. Weeks at least. Time had less meaning in the Summerlands than it had after Alaya received her slow time implants. Now she couldn’t access any of her implants, from sensory recording to mnemonic. They still functioned, they had to, or she would have simply ceased to be.
Alaya sat along on a flat rock in the middle of the plains. If one of the skittering wee beasties moving through the grasses had stopped to answer her, Alaya might have not panicked. She would have waited for them to explain.
I have to do three things to get out of here. What fucking three things?
Wind. Invisible other than its effects on the grasses and on Alaya’s hairs blew a chill across her shoulders and carried the smells of Talani’s cooking with it. Weeks had gone by and the old woman had not once suggested or even hinted at what Alaya had to do to escape the Summerlands.
Nor were they idle. Excluding evenings, Alaya and Talani spent their waking time in lessons. Much of what Talani taught Alaya was useless outside of the Summerlands. Land navigation would do nothing to help in the void. Nor on a Loop station. Wildcrafted herbs tasted better than anything fabricated, but where in the hell was Alaya supposed to find wildcrafted herbs on any rock spinning around the Sun? At least not with her debt hanging around her neck. Martian and Venusian parks required the payment of fees, something Alaya simply wouldn’t accept.
And then there were the habits of the fauna in the plains. Father had been fond of mice, a trait he passed on to Alaya. Out here among the fields she’d found a mouse warren, complete with mouse mane and kits. Where would she find something like that out of the Summerlands?
She had no idea how much standard time passed while she languished in the Summerlands, but her time wasn’t exactly wasted. While the lessons lacked applicability to her life, the things she learned were interesting. Too bad they were useless.
A crow sounded her cry to the heavens as Alaya let her body relax into her seated position. It flapped its wings and alighted across the field, skimming over the surface of the grasses. As much as Alaya hoped both the crow and the mouse lived, she didn’t want to watch the crow catch the mouse for a meal.
So she closed her eyes and proceeded to meditate the way Talani had shown her. Thoughts of every stripe and color swirled through her mind, trying to distract her, pull her attention away from herself and generally mess with her serenity. This process had frustrated Alaya at first, but now it amused her. All of those disparate thoughts, she coaxed them over to herself in her mind’s eye. Then she coaxed them over to a small elevator car where she stood. Blue watercolor streaks, sadness over her parents’ death, roiling red magma: anger over the currents tossing her about, and a dozen different emotions flagged by colors or images all gathered in the small chamber with Alaya. The space grew thick and stuffy, as more and more cartoonish images, scenes, and memories filled up the room. When she could not call up any further baggage, Alaya slipped out of the elevator with quick, efficient strides, slammed the door shut, and hit the airlock release.
Several dozens misshapen forms spiraled away from the ship of her mind. Funny enough, it looked like the Mousehome and not like any of her older ships. Not her cylinder where she grew up or the ship Kowal had stolen. The room she’d used did not exist aboard the Mousehome, but everything else matched right down to the rivets at the top and bottom of the walls.
When the ejected feelings faded out of view, Alaya found herself light and free. All but floating atop her stony perch, she could have sailed through the Void like this, eyes closed and body floating with the power of her mind.
Alaya opened her eyes slowly and screamed. She hung half a meter over the rock, flying somehow. Breathing to continue her scream, she fell and hit the surface of the rock right on her tailbone.
Lightning roared out of the sky, hitting the plains next to the stone and when the afterimages cleared from Alaya’s vision, Talani stood where the bolt had struck. “What happened? Are you okay?” Sparks and blue bolts of electricity coruscated over Talani’s body, the sclera in her eyes glowed the same cobalt hue.
Feet and hands protecting her instinctively, Alaya scrambled back away from Talani on all fours as if gravity had shifted without warning.
Sparks flashed and burst along her skin while Talani furrowed her brow and examined the area around. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. The electricity faded as the last few blazing stars rolled over her skin and fell to the plain. “You’re unharmed.”
“What the hell was that?”
“I should make you answer my question first.” Talani smirked. “But no, this was magic, child. Theurgy of the highest form.” A few brushed passes down the front of her robes. “Now, why did you scream?”
It took Alaya a few seconds to remember what had happened in the time before a blazing lightning-covered woman appeared before her. “I was floating.”
“Were you? When, how?”
“I mean just now, while I was meditating.”
“Ah.” Talani walked over to Alaya and extended her hand. “That is the first task.”
“What? Floating? I was supposed to float?” She took Talani’s hand and the old woman pulled Alaya up to her.
“No, you were supposed to divest yourself of what was holding you down.” Talani examined Alaya from head to toe and nodded as if satisfied with what she saw. “And you do appear to be lighter. Very well done.”
She turned back to the shack in the middle of the plains where a circular fire pit provided the only light in the world other than the faint glow from the horizon. “Wait, what else do I need to do?”
“Keep practicing your meditations.”
“But to what end?
Talani paused in her step. “Leaving this place.”
“Why won’t you tell me how!” It wasn’t a question, but imprecation.
“I already have. But if you insist on a hint,” she pulled her head up and took a deep breath, “there is a thing humanity has done from the beginning of time. We do it when there is no other release from the pain. When all feels hopeless, this provides a single blade of light against the utterdark. It is the task performed before all matters of import.” Then she resumed her swift steps back to their fire and home.
“I don’t know what any of that means.” Alaya let the words out as a whisper, Talani probably still heard them.”
The next few days proceeded on with the same routine as before. Lessons in the morning and afternoon, leisure time in the evenings.
Most of the variety in Alaya’s life came from the meals Talani prepared.
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How someone, anyone, could produce such an incredibly broad menu of dishes with only a wood fire ringed with stones escaped Alaya. She’d lived off the food provided by fabricators with fewer dishes in their memories than Talani. They ate fried and roasted fish, fowl, and meat from the plains. Not once did Talani invite Alaya to hunt game. At least not so far. Alaya had gathered spices for their meals, because that was part of her training.
Weeks in now, she could meditate and clear her mind in less than a minute. Alaya could tell safe meat from its scent, poisonous mushrooms from their appearance and the texture of their flesh, and all manner of edible grubs and other delicacies from those which might turn her stomach or trouble her digestion. None of these still were useful in the real world, except maybe meditation.
Would she float in the real world if she tried this there? Alaya couldn’t say, but she’d grown accustomed to the sense of weightlessness at once. Though the void was filled with artificial and natural gravity planes, Alaya had long ago gained her void belly. Zero-G wrapped her in a blanket and gave her the best sleep of her life. Meditation wasn’t exactly the same, but it conveyed a similar sense of splitting off from the world and keeping it from touching her.
It was the surest way to stave off the sorrow, the guilt, and the rage.
Almost a week after her first floating meditation session, Alaya asked a question of Talani that had been burning in her mind. “Are theurgists supposed to be pacifists?”
“No.” Talani snorted and shoveled a few fried grubs into her mouth, crunching them with a smile. “I mean… there is a long thread of non-violence through the core of Theurgists.” She swallowed and grunted. “But I don’t like that word though.”
“Pacifist?”
“Theurgist.” Talani gave a frown as she spoke.
“Why?”
She reached down into a pile of herbs at her side and lifted them up to her lap. Alaya had seen Talani smoking her pipe before, but not usually with Alaya nearby, it was usually once Alaya wandered off into the plains to practice or woolgather. Pipe and herbs gathered together and prepared, Talani closed her eyes and whispered something in a language Alaya couldn’t understand over the bowl. With a nod, she ended chant and said, “It reduces what we do to the magic. Which is bassackwards.” A flame appeared on the end of Talani’s finger and the herbs in the bowl glowed red as she inhaled. Blue and pink smoke, swirled together as she exhaled. “The truth is that theurgy is incidental to what we are, what we truly do.”
Alaya watched Talani smoke from her pipe several more times before she grew impatient. “And that is?”
“That is,” another puff of smoke, “for you to discover yourself.”Talani’s eyes glazed over and she rose. “I am going to wander our circle and explore. You should stick to your rock tonight.”
The way she delivered those words, they were partly warnings and partly a command, Alaya didn’t respond right away. “Am I in danger?”
Shaking her head, Talani continued to trudge into the dark. “Have you not been paying attention? The Verse. Is. A. Field. Of. Death. Alive or dead, you are in danger.”
Chill winds punctuated her declaration and Alaya wrapped her arms around her shoulders. The thin, un-dyed robes she wore kept her warm in this place, warmer than she would have expected. But right then, Alaya could feel the cold penetrate to her skin as if passing through the gaps in the primitive weave.
She wasn’t just always in danger. No, she could feel it tonight. The danger was heightened, more real than normal. Her skin prickled and itched as Alaya stood near the flames and warmed herself. One side blazed with the heat while the other side felt as though icicles would start forming along her flanks. Maybe she could meditate here, near the fire instead of on her rock?
As if the Summerlands knew her thoughts, the wind roared with a great gust and the fire flickered out after a few desperate attempts to keep itself alight. Lightless now and momentarily blinded by how abrupt the change had been, Alaya froze.
Never before had the plains felt so menacing. Shadows hooded her sight as she stumbled in the direction of her stone. It was a refuge against the darkness, against the inherent danger of this place. All she had to do was find her way there. Without the benefit of her eyes.
Birds cackled in the distance and insects chirruped their dusk songs. Each part of the chorus blaring with the sound of proximity alerts. Heartbeat thundering out the lower register sounds, Alaya lost all sense of orientation. She stepped on a divot in the soil and twisted her ankle in the process.
She bit her tongue to keep from crying out. No sense in calling down Talani’s storms here. Or worse, drawing attention to herself where she lay on the ground. The rush of blood in her ears dulled the sounds of the plains as Alaya hunched down low, giving herself as small a profile as she could. At a pace half again as slow as her heartbeat, the ground shuddered.
Something was coming. And Alaya was blind, hurt and laying on the ground in the midst of fear paralysis. Transported back in time, Alaya was eight again and the malevolent white suited demon Kowal stalked after her with treads mighty enough to shake the Void itself.
Alaya squeezed her eyes shut down and began to hyperventilate. If he found her, he would murder her just like her mother and father.
Just have to be quiet and still. Quiet and still. The pounding steps grew louder and faster. Whatever it was approached with the weight of inevitability behind it. Not a year after her parents’ death, Alaya had witnessed a terrible accident while working on a crew of kids doing technical work in a void yard. A guidance system glitched out, frying itself along with a series of safety systems. Two of the ships they were repairing, both massive freighters intended for hauling iridium and lithium along the Loops, collided with each other with half the underaged crew stuck between them. The size and scales involved meant everyone in the dock could see the accident coming, but no one could move fast enough to save them. The crews tried, tug ships and other systems canned themselves trying to keep the two hulls apart while the kids stuck between them pulled themselves along the smooth metallic surface of the hulls.
They all died.
It had been a horrific memory for Alaya, almost as bad as watching her mother die in front of her.
The stalking beast about to eat Alaya’s soul as payment for her crimes brought with it the same sense of interminable end.
“Please don’t let it hurt,” Alaya kept her eyes squeezed shut, “please let me die quick Verse!” Her hushed words echoed forth from Alaya’s lips and reverberated over the plains. With that pulsing vibration, the thudding footsteps ended.
Alaya opened her eyes to find the sun shining high overhead. A ring of trees surrounded her and at her feet a small stone table the size of a footlocker appeared. “What the…”
Talani and eleven other men and women shimmered into view, as if stealth fields faded from around them. All of them wore the same white robes Talani did, but only hers bore gold fringe, only she wore a golden torque around her neck, and the only crown of laurels in the circle adorned her head.
“Before all matters of import, during all times of strife, and after all triumphs, what must we do?” Talani’s voice rang out with a clear tone and the others answered her.
“Pray.”
Talani nodded and a flame appeared over the stone bench in the center of the circle of trees. She pointed to Alaya though the golden fires. “I charge you to walk the unseen path, to tread the waters of time and bring forth the sweet wine of knowledge. I charge you to know.” An invisible force reached out from Talani and struck Alaya in the chest, making her stand and raise her head. “Will you accept this charge?”
Alaya opened her mouth to agree, but then her brain caught up with Talani’s words. She snapped her jaw shut and limped over to the stone bench on her knees. She closed her eyes and bent her head, not entirely sure mechanically how to pray. Please help me with this, Verse?
This time the wind at her back cooled and soothed. The sprain in her ankle faded, the fear clutching her heart vanished, and with it the sorrow of those children’s deaths from her past. Breezes plucked those aches away and carried them into the flame which shifted from golden to cobalt-blue, the color of lightning.
“Well done, novice. The Unseen Path is not tread lightly.” Talani floated toward Alaya, the sickle she’d worn and used everyday since Alaya met her, now in Talani’s hand. “And it is not done without sacrifice.”
A thrill of tension and fear thrummed through Alaya. What does she mean?
“Give me your hand and I shall render it to the Verse.” Her voice boomed over the ring of trees.
Alaya raised her gaze and looked over the other eleven people around her. They held up both arms, palms out toward Alaya. Uncertain of what Talani intended, Alaya mimicked the other’s gestures.
With a stroke faster than Alaya’s eyes could track, Talani cut off her right hand. One moment she held her hands up, the next one of them toppled to the ground. Pain didn’t even begin at first, not before the horror set in.
Alaya screamed and her voice was joined by a chorus of a dozen other shrieks. Then the pain hit and her vision clouded. Falling forward, Talani caught her and set Alaya on the altaron her back, where she could see the flame. How her mind kept her conscious and out of shock was beyond Alaya. She watched as Talani rounded the altar and lifted up Alaya’s hand. With a flick, she tossed the severed limb into the blue flame. “So mote it be!”
At last Alaya passed out.