Reclamation (6 page)

“Trail,” said Cups severely, “if you’re going to teach the apocrypha, do it elsewhere.”

“What are you fools doing out there?” The fire’s orange light showed Branch in the River’s face poking out of the shadow. “Get back in here!” She brandished a leather tent flap.

Cups groaned. “If your sister had any proper feeling,” she whispered, “she never would have left her family where Branch could get her claws on them.”

Trail’s hand smashed across Cups’s cheek before she even knew what she was doing. “Unsay that, Empty Cups, or I’ll have your guts for breakfast!”

“And I’ll have yours, Broken Trail, if you don’t get back in here and quiet down!” hissed Branch.

Cups, holding her cheek and wrinkling her forehead, slunk back toward the tent. Reluctantly, Trail gathered her poncho hem around her and followed. She could feel Branch’s smug satisfaction like she could feel the wind whipping around her head.

Trail bowed her head and ducked back into the tent, shuffling on her hands and knees until she found a blanket corner that wasn’t snatched away when she tugged on it.

See what a good obedient girl I am,
she thought as she rolled herself up in the threadbare fabric.
I always do as I am told.

And I have been told to find my sister.

Memories of pain chased each other around Arla’s skull. The needles that drew the scars down the backs of her hands burned. Cobblestones dug into her knees as she groveled at the city gates. Her jaw ached from keeping her thoughts silent. Childbirth tore her in half.

Gradually, Arla became aware that the pain was more than memory. It burned in her deflated stomach, pounded in her head, throbbed in every joint. Old bile and metallic heat weighed down her tongue.

Other memories. The woman of the Skyman with her strange green eyes and skin that turned red under the light of day. “I’ve heard the apocrypha, too, you know. I know your family’s story. My people are looking for a way to take the Teachers down where they belong. You can help. For your help, you’ll lose those hand marks. All you’ve got to do is bring your stones over the World’s Wall and talk to my people.”

She is not Shameful Blood. I would know. I would know. Of all people I would know ….

They led her up one of the dark canyons, to the threshold of a white building that looked like a gigantic mushroom squatting in the permanent night. The palest, hairiest man she had ever seen had walked up to her. She forced herself to hold her ground.

Dispassionate eyes looked her over. There had been more words and she had agreed to everything unconditionally. A needle bit into her arm, and there had been blackness, until she woke surrounded by bald, babbling children and realized her namestones were gone.

The fear brought by the memory of that waking kept Arla’s eyes shut while she sorted out her physical sensations. She lay on her side. Her arms were behind her. Something soft cushioned her right shoulder and her back. The air was as cool and dry as the inside of a Temple. It smelled of nothing at all. She could hear a whirring noise from somewhere underneath her, soft, but constant.

Gentle pressure rested against her ankles and knees. She tried to separate her wrists and couldn’t.

Blast him! He’s got me tied!
The realization overrode the fear and her eyes opened. First, she saw Teacher Hand sitting in front of her. His square chin stuck out a little too far and his black eyes held the glimmer of anger.

A sensation of absence crept into her consciousness.

“Where are my namestones?” she croaked around the sand that seemed to be clogging her throat.

“I have them.” Teacher Hand clipped off each word as he spoke it.

Oh thank you, all the Nameless.
Arla craned her neck to try to see her surroundings more clearly. Tan walls and a tan floor enclosed them. The place was furnished with big, rounded lumps of stuff, some white, some clear like glass.

“We’re hidden from those Bald Children then?” she asked, twisting her head so she could see him better.

Teacher Hand’s mouth twitched. “For the moment.”

“Where is this?” Arla rolled her eyes to gesture around the room.

“My ship.”

“Ship?”
She tried to match his accent on the meaningless sound.

“The means by which I went over the World’s Wall,” he explained through clenched teeth. “What did the Rhudolant Vitae want with you?”

“Why should you care?”

Teacher Hand leaned over her. “It’s not a good idea to be snide with me, Notouch.” He clenched his fist so the knuckles pointed at her, the first gesture to call down the curse of the Nameless Powers.

Arla’s mouth puckered. “You’re too late. I’ve already been cursed. Twelve times, by the First Teacher himself.”

His eyebrows crept together as his face gathered up into a frown. “And what could you have possibly done to merit such attention from the First Teacher?”

“Nothing much.” Arla let her gaze travel to the ceiling. It was made up of tan squares broken by patches that glowed with a light clearer than any oil lamps. “This despised one was merely inside Narroways’s walls when the curse came down upon the whole of the city.”

That plainly puzzled him. “Sit up,” he ordered.

“As your Lordship commands, this despised one shall do.” She knotted her water-weak stomach muscles. Despite the protest of every inch of her, she rocked into a sitting position. The effort broke a fresh sweat on her brow. Her head spun, but she managed to hold herself upright.

Arla glanced around uneasily. She could see the room better now. The white lumps were obviously for sitting on. The clear lumps with legs that melted into the floor were tables, even if Teacher Hand sat on the long, low one in front of the couch she occupied. The wall to the left had three long niches and an open doorway in it. The wall to the right was smooth and unbroken. The wall behind Teacher Hand had been sectioned off into neat squares and decorated with elaborate mosaics. A fat chair stood in front of it.

But she had seen something else before she had passed out. Something formless and huge and …

She shook her head, trying to focus her thoughts on things she could understand.

“Where’s the other one?” she asked.

“The other what?” Teacher Hand’s frown deepened.

“Person. Your friend or bondsman, or whoever you called before …”
Before the blackness and the roar. Before I fainted.

His frown folded into a wryly amused expression. “Cam, you mean? I don’t think I’ll let you meet Cam just yet.

“Let’s start over.” Teacher Hand sounded almost as tired as she felt. “Why’d you attack me?”

Arla shrugged her aching shoulders. “This despised one assumed that as she was of no further use, her Teacher would abandon her.”

Against all expectation, his expression looked pained. Arla felt taken aback. Perhaps Teacher Hand was not so much the high-house fool she had taken him for.

Don’t relax too far yet,
she warned herself.
You still know nothing at all about what’s going on, and he still has your stones.

“How did you end up in the … that room?” asked Teacher Hand.

She measured him again. If only she had enough strength to fight. She could kick for his head. She could find the door to the outside. If only she knew something, anything about this place she was in, about this “Cam” who lurked out of sight. If only she wasn’t so dizzy and thirsty …

Stop whining and think of something you can tell him that he might believe.

“I was following you, Teacher,” Arla said.

“You were what?” His voice broke on the last word.

“When your Lordship vanished, a lot of rumors started ’round First City. You’d been caught thieving. Your older brother’d killed you to save the family later embarrassment. Teacher Fire in the Dark had finally caught you sleeping with his wife …”

“Where in the Realm of the Nameless did you hear that!” Teacher Hand roared.

“There’s very little the Notouch don’t hear.” Her mouth twitched. “The rumor that stuck was that you’d decided adultery and misusing your power gift were too small a set of heresies and that you’d gone with a gaggle of the Skymen over the World’s Wall.” That part, at least, was true. “This despised one chose to believe that rumor and wanted to find out how your Lordship had managed it. She succeeded.” Arla hoped he couldn’t tell how much that idea unsettled her.

He looked at his naked hands, then at her, then at his hands again. His face went sick and angry about something he didn’t voice.

“Would your Lordship be so merciful as to give this despised one a drink of water?” Arla bowed her head.

“You are free to stop that crap any time.” Teacher Hand stood up. “I do not know where you got the nerve, Notouch. It doesn’t go with your hand marks.” He paused. “You never did tell me your call name.”

“Arla,” she answered, hoping civility might speed up the process of getting her water.

He snorted. “It would be. Listen, Arla, Teacher Hand is dead and washed away. I am called Eric Born.”

“Eric Born” crossed the room with a careful sideways step that never completely turned his back to her. He drummed his fingers against some mosaic tiles on the far wall. A hole opened underneath his hand. Out of the hole, he pulled out a clear cup of water.

Despite her best intentions, Arla felt her jaw flap open.

Eric Born’s mouth spread in a sharp grin. He seated himself back on the table and held out the cup to her.

Waiting to see how I’ll react,
she told herself.
Keep it reined in, Arla.

As smoothly as possible, she swallowed the water. It swished uncomfortably in her empty stomach, but she drained the cup anyway. She needed it, badly.

“Thank you.” She added neither honorific or insult.

He set the cup down. “What did they, the Rhudolant Vitae, do after they put you in that room?”

“Kept me there, mainly. Every now and then one of them would come in with a box of some sort and wave it around in the air and babble at me. It sounded like they were trying to talk. I thought they were insane. Then I thought I’d been wrong and they were Aunorante Sangh. Then”—she shrugged—“I started to wonder if I would be stuck in a single room for the rest of my life. Then they brought you to me.

“Is there anything to eat?”

Teacher … Eric Born made a gurgling sound as if he was trying to keep down a laugh.

“You do not have any idea what you have gotten yourself into, do you know that?” He looked down into the empty cup. “No matter. I suppose I had better feed you.” He rubbed his chin. “But I had better show you something first.”

“What?” New fear squeezed against the water in her stomach as she watched Eric approach the room’s far wall.

“Where you really are.” He laid his long hand against the tan surface.

The wall vanished. Where it used to be hung a formless blackness streaked with minute rainbow lights. It stretched up, down, and on all sides. Her eyes strained to find an end, a boundary, anything to give it shape and sense, but there was nothing. Endless, it yawned at her. An open mouth waiting to engulf her mind and soul.

She screamed. She threw herself backward and curled up into a tight little ball, knees pressed tight against her forehead, her belly muffling her shrieks. A voice gibbered at her, said her name, and finally shouted at her, but she could not look up. The blackness waited to swallow her whole. There was no end. No end.

“Arla Born of the Black Wall!” A hand jerked her collar back. The fabric dug into her neck and hauled her head up. “You blasted Notouch, look up!” The Teacher’s open hand crashed against her cheek. “Look up! It’s gone! LOOK!”

Through the tears of pain, she saw the solid wall back in place.

“Wha … Wha …” Her whole body shook like leaves in the wind as he let her sag back against the couch.

Eric folded his arms. “That is the space between the worlds. There is no Black Wall and no arlas in it. It’s all emptiness. There are other worlds in it, though. Other places where people, like those in the Realm of the Nameless Powers, live. We are flying between them, like insects flying from grass to flower. Do you understand this?”

Arla did not, but she nodded. She could sort the explanation out later. What was important now was hearing it.

She tried to stop the trembling in her limbs and completely failed.

“Why show me this?”
At least I’ve quit stammering.

“So you wouldn’t get any ideas about trying to attack me when I let you loose.”

She thought about herself left alone in this place with no one but a corpse and an unseen presence, lost in the middle of infinite blackness. She bit her lip and humiliation came on the heels of the fear. This was worse than being tied up.

“Turn around,” Eric ordered.

Arla wiggled herself around and held out her wrists. She felt the bindings loosen. She pulled her wrists apart and brought her arms back around to her front in a riot of creaking, popping joints. She yanked off the remains of the sticky, clothlike stuff that still clung to her skin. She stretched her legs toward Eric. He slit the black strips neatly with one blade of an open pair of scissors. Arla kept her eyes on him as she rubbed her wrists and arms to get some feeling back. He did not look up.

Eric stepped back, keeping hold of the scissors. Arla, wasn’t fool enough to try to stand. Instead, she chafed and flexed ankles and knees. She yanked the sticky strips off her leggings and dropped them on the floor. Eric watched her for a moment before he backed toward the window-wall.

“How do you stand it?” Arla straightened her back. “Wha … what’s out there.”

He shrugged. “I got used to it. The shakes vanish fairly quickly. The rest comes with practice.

“Now, you wanted something to eat.”

He drummed the mosaic and another hole opened. Out of this one, he pulled two packets of an unfamiliar shape. He ripped something off them, made yet another hole open in the wall, and dropped both packets inside.

When he came within arm’s length again, he was carrying two plates, each topped by a palm-sized slab that might have been made out of the same stuff as the sofa.