Tane and Asara found themselves rooms in Chaim’s single lodging house, a bare and draughty construction that catered for the few outside visitors the town received. Neither intended to leave, or even spoke of such.
‘She decided to go on alone,’ Tane said. ‘If she makes it, she’ll come back here.’
‘You are chasing false hope,’ Asara told him, but she did not argue further, nor make any move to depart herself.
There was nothing to do in Chaim. The unfaltering rudeness of the locals began to wear on them after a time, and they talked to nobody but each other. At first, there was little for them to speak of. Too many barriers existed between them, too many deceptions. It was just like it had been with Kaiku.
Gods, do we ever take our masks off, even for a moment
? Tane thought in exasperation.
But gradually their enforced solitude bred conversation, as the slow trickle of water through a holed dam will erode the surrounding stone till it cracks. After what might have been a week of waiting and wondering, they found themselves back in the makeshift bar where they had first met Mamak.
‘You know what I am, Tane,’ Asara said.
The statement, put casually in the midst of the conversation, brought the young acolyte up short. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
‘No games,’ she said. ‘The time has come for honesty. If you are to walk the same paths as I, as seems increasingly to be the case, then you should face up to what you already know.’
Tane glanced around the bar to ensure they were not being overheard, but it was almost empty. A bleak, wooden, chilly room with a few locals in a corner minding their own business. A scatter of low, rough-cut tables and worn mats to sit on. A grouch-faced barmaid serving shots of rank liquor. Spirits, he hated this town.
‘You are Aberrant,’ he said quietly.
‘Well done,’ she replied, with a hint of mockery in her voice. ‘At last you admit it to yourself. But you are a strange one, Tane. You listen. You are ready to learn. That is why I will tell you this, for you may one day come to my way of seeing. So swallow your disgust for a moment, and hear what I have to say.’
Tane leaned forward over the table, his cheeks flushed. With the lack of anything to do in the town, Chaim’s inhabitants had a lot to drink about, and the potency of the liquor attested to that. Asara was dead sober, as always; her Aberrant metabolism neutralised alcohol before it could affect her, and she did not know how it felt to be drunk.
‘I am old, Tane,’ she said. ‘You cannot guess how old by looking at me. I have seen much, and I have done much. Some memories bring pride, others disgust.’ She turned the wooden tumbler of liquor inside the cradle of her fingers, looking down into it. ‘Do you know what experience is? Experience is when you have handled something so much that the shine wears off it. Experience is when you begin to see how relentlessly predictable people are, how generation after generation they follow the same simple, ugly pattern. They dream of living forever, but they do not know what they ask. I have passed my eightieth harvest, though it does not show on me. Since I reached adulthood, I have not aged. My body repairs itself faster than time can ravage it. That is my curse. I have already lived the span of a normal lifetime, and I am bored.’
It seemed such bathos that Tane almost laughed, a bitter hysteria welling within him; but the tone of Asara’s voice warned him against it. ‘
Bored
?’ he repeated.
‘You do not understand,’ Asara said patiently. ‘Nor, I think, will you ever. But when so much has become jaded, all that is left is the search for something new, something that will fire the blood again, if only for a short while. I was purposeless for a long time before I met Cailin tu Moritat, seeking only new thrills and finding each less satisfying than the last. When I found her, I saw something I had never seen before. I had thought I was a freak, a random thing; but in her I saw a mirror to me, and I saw a purpose again.’ ‘What did you see?’ asked Tane.
‘A superior being,’ Asara replied. ‘A creature that was human and yet
better
than human. An Aberrant whose Aberration made her better than those who despised her.’
Tane blinked, wanting to shake his head and refute her. He restrained himself. Her words were preposterous, but he would listen. He had learned her opinions on the subject of Aberrancy over the weeks they had spent together, and while he did not agree with much of what she said, it had enough validity to make him think.
‘I saw then the new order of things,’ Asara continued. ‘A world where Aberrants were not hated and hunted but respected. I saw that Aberrancy was not a fouling of the body, but merely a changing. An evolution. And as with all evolution, many must fall by the way for one to emerge triumphant. If I am to live in this world for a long time to come, I will do all I can to make it a more pleasant experience for myself. And that means I must work towards that new order.’
‘I think I see,’ he said, recalling other snatches of conversation they had shared over the period of their self-induced confinement in Chaim. ‘You help the Red Order because they represent Aberrants whose abilities make them greater than human. And the Libera Dramach… they work for the same thing you want; so you help them too.’
‘But the Red Order and the Libera Dramach are working together for the time being, with one common goal in mind,’ Asara said, enmeshing her fingers before her.
‘To see the Heir-Empress take the throne,’ Tane concluded.
‘Exactly. She is the key. She is the only one that can reverse the blight on our land. She is the bridge between us and the spirits, between the common folk and the Aberrants.’ Asara grabbed Tane’s wrists and fixed him with an iron gaze. ‘It
must
be this way. And we must do what we can to make it so.’
Tane held the gaze for a moment, then countered with a question. ‘Why did you watch over Kaiku for so many years?’
He regretted it almost immediately. It had come out without thought, seeming to trip from his subconscious to his tongue without routing through his brain; and yet he knew by some terrible prescience what would be Asara’s reply.
Asara smiled faintly and released him. She sat back and took a sip of liquor. ‘I became her handmaiden at the behest of the Red Order. Her previous one met with an accident.’
Tane let this one pass. When he did not react, Asara continued.
‘They found her through whatever method they have; their ways
are a mystery to me. They knew she would manifest… powers sooner or later, and they asked me to watch her until she did. There was no way she would be coerced to join until she had her first burning. Who in their right mind would believe they were an Aberrant without any evidence?‘
Asara’s words dropped into Tane’s consciousness like a stone into thick honey. The world seemed to slow around him, the whispering of the other denizens of the bar becoming a meaningless susurrus in the background. Across the coarse wooden table he could see Asara’s beautiful eyes watching his face, evaluating the effect of what she had just told him.
‘But you knew that, didn’t you?’ she asked.
Tane nodded mutely, his gaze falling. She relished it, he realised. He had asked her a question he already had the answer to, and she was amused that he still felt her response like a pikestaff in the ribs.
‘Small things,’ he murmured, when he could bear her wry silence no longer. ‘When first I met her, she was raving about a woman named Asara. She told me you had been killed by a demon in the forest. Later you reappeared. No explanation was given, and I didn’t ask for one.’
‘You thought it was not your place to enquire,’ said Asara scornfully. ‘How like a man.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I suppose I didn’t want to know. I was cowardly. Then there was you. I suspected you from the start. Add to that the lengths you went to to bring her to the Aberrant woman Cailin, the secrets you held between you that I was not privy to, the way you seemed to change…’ He sighed, a strange noise of resignation. I’m not feeble-minded, Asara. I’ve been walking with Aberrants since my journey began.‘
‘Yet you believe your journey was ordained by your goddess, that you were spared for a purpose; but there is no greater foulness to Enyu than an Aberrant. Reconcile these things, if you can.’
Tane bowed his head, his shaved skull limned in dim lantern light. ‘I can’t. That’s why I’ve been avoiding them.’
‘Here it is in the open, then,’ said Asara, brushing back the red-streaked fall of her hair behind one sculpted ear and leaning forward. ‘She is Aberrant, gifted with the ability to mould the Weave as the Weavers do. But she is dangerous to herself and others; she needs schooling. I came to Fo for several reasons, but one was to stop her committing suicide. Every day she spends here
increases the risk that her powers will break their boundaries again. Eventually, she will either burn herself or be killed by those that fear her.‘ She relaxed back, her gaze never leaving Tane, never ceasing to calculate him. ’I told Cailin I would bring her into the fold, and I will. Assuming she still lives, of course. I will wait in this spirit-blasted wasteland until hope is gone. That may be weeks, it may be months; but age has a way of foreshortening time, Tane, and I am a patient woman.‘
Tane was silent. The sensation of drunkenness felt suddenly unpleasant, having soured within him.
‘Join us, Tane,’ said Asara. ‘You and I share the same goals. You may hate Aberrants, but you would see the blight on this land stopped. And the Heir-Empress is the only chance we have.’
‘I do not…’ Tane began, feeling the words stall and clutter in his mouth. ‘I do not
hate
Aberrants,’ he said.
‘Indeed not,’ Asara said, raising one eyebrow slightly. ‘For you love one of them, I suspect.’
Tane flashed her a hot glare, forming a retort that died before it could be born. Instead, he became sullen, and did not reply.
‘Poor Tane,’ Asara said. ‘Caught between your faith and your heart. I’d pity you, if I had not seen it endless times before. Humankind really is a pathetically predictable animal.’
Tane slammed his hands on the table, spilling their liquor. He arrested himself just as he was about to lunge at her. She had not moved a muscle, staying relaxed on her mat, watching him with that infuriating amusement on her face. The others in the bar had their eyes on him now. He wanted to strangle her, to hit her, to slap her hard and show her that she could
not
speak to him that way.
Like father, like son
, he thought, and suddenly he went cold, the rage in him flickering and dying out. He slammed his hands on the table again in one last, impotent display of frustration, got up and stalked out of the bar and into the night.
The chill air and knife-edge wind sawed through him eagerly. He welcomed the discomfort, hurrying away from the bar, away from the lights in the windows, seeking only to distance himself from Asara and all she had said. But he could no longer avoid it now. There was no question, no element of doubt any more. He had been treasuring that margin of uncertainty, for in that small space he could still stay with Kaiku and not offend his goddess, could still
protest that he was never certain she was Aberrant. Now it was gone, and he was forced into a quandary.
There were few people on the rough trails that passed for streets in Chaim. No lanterns burned except through grimy windows. The moons were absent tonight, and the darkness was louring and hungry. He let himself be swallowed by it.
After a time, he came to a sloping, craggy rock atop a slope that looked out over the faint lights of the grim village, and there he sat. It was bitterly cold, but he had his coat on and his hood pulled tight. He meditated for a time, but it was hopeless. No enlightenment could come to a heart in such turmoil. Instead he prayed, asking Enyu for guidance. How could she have sent him on this way to ally himself with Aberrants, if Aberrants were corruptions of her plan? What was he supposed to do? So many uncertainties, so many unanswered questions, and he was left scrabbling for purpose once again. How could something as simple as faith be so contradictory?
It is my punishment
, he thought. /
must endure
.
And there it was: his answer. This agony of indecision was only part of his penance. He must accept it gladly, and act as he thought best, and bear the consequences of that.
/
owe the gods a life
, he told himself. It was a phrase he had been using to account for his suffering ever since he was sixteen harvests of age, and he had murdered his own father.
He had no clear recollection of anything before the age of eight or nine, except of the fearful dark shape that lumbered through his embryonic memories, and the crushing inevitability of the pain that was to follow. Pain was a part of the jigsaw of Tane’s childhood as much as joy, hunger, triumph, disappointment. In some form or another it visited him daily, whether it were a sharp cuff on the ear while he ate his oats or a thrashing in the corner for some real or imagined mischief. Pain was a part of the cycle of things: random and illogical and unfair, but only in the way that illness was or any other misfortune.
His father, Eris tu Jeribos, was a member of the town council of Amada, deep in the Forest of Yuna. Politics had always been his ambition, but while he was shrewd and clever enough to make headway time and again, he was forever dragged back by those facets of his personality that alienated him from his fellows.
He was pious, and nobody could fault him for that; but his
extreme and puritanical views met with little favour among the other councillors. He made them uneasy, and they feared to let him gain any more power than he had in the council; yet though he knew this, he was a man of such conviction that he could do nothing but continue to expound his beliefs. And so he was always frustrated, and each time a little more of the humanity inside him shrivelled to a bitter char.