Nigredo: Caput Mortuum

Morning reached the Axis Mundi late and sideways, without a sun to show for it. The pale line at the window widened into a band, and the band into a gray wash that took the blue out of the glass and laid it thin across the dark stone of the vault. From the chest against the wall, Drosia saw almost none of it. She saw the stone in front of her eyes—she had been looking at it since midnight—and she could have drawn every hairline in it.

She hadn’t slept. Her body lay where she had placed herself at midnight, curled on the far edge of the mattress with its back to his side of the bed, and she had felt all of it, all night: the sheet creased under her hip, her knees drawn up against her own ribs, the cool air on the open seam at her neck. What she couldn’t do was see it, because she couldn’t spend the whole night staring at him. Her eyes were on a wall across the room, and anything that came for her body from behind would come unseen; she would know of it only when the mattress tipped, or a hand arrived. So she had kept the watch through her skin, every muscle down her back set to listen. She had kept that kind of watch once before, in a tent with the flap tied shut from outside, and it had saved her from nothing. Now her eyes burned, and her limbs had the heavy, sanded feel that comes after a night without sleep, and some part of her kept trying to fold down into it like a tired horse folding at the knees, and she kept refusing it.

Behind her, across the room, he was breathing.

She had listened to it all night. For hours it had been the breath of a man lying awake on his back and taking care to be quiet about it: too regular, the pause at the top of each one held a little too long. Somewhere in the gray it had changed—slower now, and deeper, with a small catch at the bottom, the breath of a man who had finally let go of the rope. She tried to fix the moment it had happened and couldn’t, and that irritated her more than the sleeping did. “I don’t really sleep,” he had told the ceiling, and she had taken it for what men said when they slept badly and wanted credit for it. Half the sentries she had ever posted had sworn the same, and she had found them at dawn with their chins on their chests. Tonight the sentry had been her.

She knocked once against the side of the bed, knuckles to the dark wood, hard enough to carry, and lay still to hear what it bought her. Across the room the breathing went on as before. In, the long pause, out.

She sat up, stiff from a night held rigid, swung her legs off the edge, reached out, and lifted her own head from the chest in both hands. She turned it toward the bed, and the room swung and settled. Adrien lay on his back on the near side, on top of the covers, in the clean shirt he had put on at midnight, eyes closed, arms at his sides. He might have been laid out for the women with the oil and the linen, except that his chest rose. She found his hands first: open on the cover, a long arm’s length from where she had lain, and the fabric was still crumpled. Then the rest of the inventory, because it cost nothing and she had paid for skipping it before—jaw slack, lids still, nothing under them following her across the room.

So. The healer slept, and she had kept the watch for both of them, and she was in no condition to keep anything.

She would not walk the halls of this place carrying her own head in her arms like a reliquary on a feast day. Nor would she do the other thing in front of him, rules or no rules, sleeping or not. The bath opened off the bedroom and nothing else. She carried herself there with her face held against her own breastbone, so that for six steps all she saw was the weave of her tunic and a slice of floor, and all she felt was the warmth of her own breasts, and she pushed the door shut with her heel and stood with her back to the wood until the latch caught.

Warmth came up through the stone underfoot, and a little steam hung low over the carved basins even with nothing filling them. His shirt from the night lay balled on the floor where he had thrown it—stiff, and dark at one shoulder. She turned her back on that too.

Then the work. The head could go back only when she was not at war with herself. The rule did not ask for peace. It asked only for the absence of dissonance, and absence was a thing a soldier could manufacture. She had manufactured it for three days running, and kept her head on by arithmetic.

She set the count going. One, on the breath in. Two, on the breath out. Her hands closed around her own jaw and the back of her skull until the knuckles ached, and she let the ache be the thing she held instead of everything else: instead of onion and lentil still in her hair, instead of the hilt going in to the guard, instead of the man asleep on the other side of the door who had let it. Ten. Twenty. She was tired enough that the count slid out from under her twice, and twice she took it back to one without forgiving herself. Ten, twenty, thirty, and the roaring in her ears had thinned enough that she could hear the stone tick as it warmed. At forty she sat one fraction below the line, and she knew it as surely as a rider knows the moment a horse stops fighting the bit.

It was not calm. It was a lid held down with both hands. It would do.

She lifted her head and set it on her neck.

The seam took. She felt it close, cold and then not cold, a ring of heat running around the join and then down—through the throat, through the breastbone, the whole length of her, faster than fire along a trail of oil—until it reached the bottom of her and broke.

Her back hit the wall. Her knees went. A sound came out of her mouth, long and open, a sound she had last made in the amphitheater with every one of them watching, and behind it, from somewhere under her ribs, the growl came, low and grinding. Her hips jerked against nothing. Her hands scraped at the stone for something to hold and found nothing. Three heartbeats. Four. Five. It wrung her out like a fist wringing a cloth, and she had no say in any part of it.

Then it let go of her.

She stayed where it had left her, braced on one hand against the wall, the other pressed flat over her mouth far too late to be any use. Sweat cooled on her upper lip. The muscles in her thighs wouldn’t stop shaking. It had been pleasure—not pain, which she could have carried in silence as she had carried everything else, but pleasure, pulled out of her by a vote of strangers. Her body had been made to do a thing she hadn’t chosen, again, and so soon after the last time that she could still feel the last time in it.

She put her ear to the door. Nothing came through the wood but her own pulse, coming down. She counted ten breaths and heard only the suite’s silence, the even, tidal kind. The relief came, and there was nothing she could do with it. It sat in her like a meal eaten standing up.

She wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist, pulled the tunic straight on her shoulders, worked her neck once from side to side and felt the seam hold, and opened the door.

He hadn’t moved. She crossed to the bed and stopped beside it, closer than she had let herself come all night—close enough that he could have reached her, if he had been awake to reach. His chest rose and fell; his hands lay where they had lain. Her eye went to his shoulder, to the clean linen over the place where her knife had gone in a hilt’s length above the joint. There would be nothing under it—she had watched it close, red line to whole skin in the time it took him to draw the blade out and set it down.

He had given her the bed and kept to its edge on top of the covers, like a man told he could sleep in the stable if he didn’t trouble the horses. She couldn’t repay that, and he had not asked her to. There was no account between them, and she found that she would rather have owed him. She could not have said why.

She leaned over him. Her hand came up toward his shoulder, and her mouth opened on the first word—and there was no first word. She drew the breath to say it anyway, as if the breath might bring the word with it, and held it, and let it out slowly through her teeth. Her hand closed into a fist over the clean linen, a finger’s width from touching. What would she have said? What did anyone say to a man after that, at that hour, with the light coming? You did not wake a sleeping man to find out what he was. You did not open a conversation you had no way to end.

She straightened, and went out to the lounge. The knife lay on the arm of the couch where he had put it, within reach of where her right hand had been, the blade rinsed clean, as if it had never been anywhere else. The glass of water stood full on the low table. She looked at them both, once, and kept walking.

At the entrance she put her palm flat against the metal and pushed along the seam where the door met the stone. It held. She pushed again, harder, along each seam in turn, and it held again. Curfew, then, and she had no way to know the hour except by the light, and the light in this place lied. Against her ankle the spare sat where she had strapped it the evening before—a weight she had stopped noticing hours ago, and noticed now.

She turned her back on the room and folded her arms and fixed her eyes on the point where the door joined the wall.

So this was the shape of it. A cell with a stove and books on the shelves and a man asleep in the next room, and the door shut on her until some clock she couldn’t see decided otherwise. She wanted to pace, and would not. If she sat she would sleep, and she would not do that either, not here, with the room at her back. Without turning she could be sure that the knife was still on the couch’s arm, because nothing in the suite had moved and nothing would.

The light on the brushed metal changed by a shade, then another. She waited until she had counted three hundred breaths, and then she put her palm to the metal again.

This time the seam gave under her hand. The door opened with the sound of metal on stone, and the cold of the Axis Path came in around her ankles.

She looked back once, across the lounge, at the knife and the glass. Then she stepped through and onto the glass, and kept her head up, and the door closed behind her.

Adrien lay on his back on the near side of the bed with his eyes closed and listened to the entrance door open.

It made the sound it always made—a long low slide of metal on stone—and then the cold of the Path must have come in, because he heard her first step on the glass and the second, quick and even, a soldier leaving a town she had no reason to look back at. The door closed. After that there was only the faint ring of the glass carrying her weight away from him, and then not even that.

He let five more breaths go by, slow, from the bottom of the chest. Then he opened his eyes on the shallow stone vault of the ceiling and lay there a while longer without moving at all, as if the lie had not quite finished being told.

She had not slept. He had known it all night from her breathing, which never once lengthened into sleep, and before the light came he had known what she would have to do before she could leave. The head would go back on, and the orgasm the Audience had voted onto her would happen when it did, and she would want no one to see it. So he had let his breath slow and deepen, loosened his jaw, turned his hands palm up on the cover—and become furniture.

The knock against the bed frame he had known for a test, and he had kept breathing through it. After it, three things. After it came the bath door shutting, and the few seconds after that, which he set down where he had found them: she had made him promise not to react and not to speak of it, and he saw no reason the promise should stop at his mouth.

The last thing he could not set down.

She had stood beside the bed for longer than anything else had taken that morning, and he knew exactly how long, because he had gone on counting her breaths. Once, the air above his shoulder had warmed, as it does when a hand comes close and stops. Once, she had drawn the breath people draw before they speak, and held it, and let it go.

One word from him, then, and her leaving would have turned into a conversation she hadn’t chosen, with a man she had stabbed the night before, on the morning after the worst night she had spent in this place. He had kept his eyes shut. He had given her the silence instead.

He did not know whether that was kindness. “I would rather you were a coward,” she had said, standing in his kitchen, and he had taken it then for an insult. He had lain still under her raised hand and had not been sure it wasn’t simply a description.

Whether she had believed him was another matter, and one he had no way to settle. She had not said anything, and his eyes had been shut. Whatever privacy he had given her existed only on her side of the bed. She had been unseen, as she had asked.

He sat up and swung his feet to the floor. The stone was cool, and his shoulder, when he rolled it, was only a shoulder, the linen over it clean and dry. Across the room the chest against the far wall stood empty. On the far edge of the mattress the sheet still held a shallow crease where she had lain curled with her back to him. He looked at it and left it as it was. The bath door stood open a hand’s width; through the gap he could see the edge of a basin and a corner of dark floor, and he did not go to see the rest. Last night he had cleaned the kitchen to give his hands something to do that wouldn’t frighten her. This morning there was no one left to frighten, and he found he did not want to straighten anything.

In the lounge the gray had come as far as the balcony glass. The rest of the room still lived on the magma’s light, which put a dull red edge on everything it touched—and never quite reached the corners. Through the balcony glass the far wall of the caldera had begun to show its terraces, one above another, still unlit. The air still held the night: scorched lentil, onion, and under them, faint and metallic, the blood he had wiped from his hand onto his trousers. The knife lay on the arm of the couch, exactly where he had laid it, within reach of where her right hand had been. The glass of water stood on the low table, full to the same line. The ruined pot sat in the sink where he had put it—the lentils dried to a brown crust along one side. By the door his coat hung on its hook, and beside it the second hook was empty.

He stopped at the couch. He had put the knife there so that it would be hers to take or to leave, and she had left it: the only fact in the room. It kept turning into a reading. She had refused what he offered, and the knife was the refusal. She wouldn’t carry to her room the thing she had used on him, so she had handed it back. She did not expect to need it in here, and leaving it was the closest she would come to saying so. Or it was an accusation: the knife was his now, his to keep, and every time he looked at it he was meant to remember what he had let her do. He could build a good case for each of the four. He had no way to choose among them, and she had left nothing on the couch to choose by, only the knife lying where he had put it, its blade catching a little of the red from below.

Picking it up would decide for her. Hanging it on the wall or slipping it into a drawer would decide for her too, and so would carrying it to her. He left it on the arm of the couch, where it was.

He found himself at the kitchen counter with a clean pot in one hand and an onion in the other—a small one, firm, from the basket by the stove. The blue flame was already hissing up where his knuckle had brushed the burner, and his thumb was on the papery skin of the onion, looking for the place to start peeling.

He set them both down and put the flame out.

“You do not get to feed me.” Her count had come apart when he held out the spoon. Feeding people was what his hands did when they didn’t know what else to do, and for most of his life it had been the right thing to do with them.

Not last night. Last night it had been the one thing in the kitchen she could not bear to be handed, and he had not seen it until the spoon was already between them. He put the onion back in its basket and the pot back on its shelf, and stood with both hands flat on the cool stone of the counter, looking across the room at the knife.

If not his hands, then someone else’s. The thought arrived with the relief of a practical problem, and he took it up gratefully: which of the women could he ask to look in on her? Not to manage her, not to report on her—only to be somewhere near when she came back from wherever she had gone. He went through them one at a time, standing at the counter, as if they were a list of supplies to be gone down.

Selene had given him most of them in mime, on the first night, in this same room. For Drosia she had signed soldier and sword and taken Drosia’s stance—weight forward, the fury held in—with nothing mocking in it, and when he guessed that the fury was meant for him she had corrected him: it was aimed at the whole shape of things. When he asked for a verdict, she had turned her palms up and looked into them. Not yet. Selene watched everyone, and had been trained since childhood to watch a household and say nothing of it, and he would not be the one to make a report out of that.

Nebet-Hedj, at the second night’s dinner, had asked him about four of the women in turn, as though the house were a board she wanted to learn before she played. Of Drosia she had said, “She might sleep with a weapon beside her,” and then, looking at him, “You cannot help her.” Not unless she wants it, he had answered. Well. There had been a weapon on her half the night, for all he knew, and she had not once reached for one while they lay on the bed. And by day Nebet-Hedj wanted nothing and felt nothing; she would answer anything he asked before dusk, honestly and to no purpose.

Summer and Autumn had sat with him in the Athenaeum on the third morning while he told them as much of the game as he dared, and somewhere in it Summer had glanced at her sister and asked, “What about us?” They had wanted to know what this place wanted with the two of them. He did not blame them for it.

Chiara, on the Upper Walks that same day, had asked whether more women would come, and then, standing very still, whether he would remember her kindly if she did not reach the end. Chiara traded in what she learned. She would find out who sat near Drosia faster than anyone and hand it to him with a smile—and he would owe her for it, in a currency he had already spent too much of.

Oudemia, on the Path at dusk, had let him talk. She had told him he would see the warrior in the Axis, as if it were weather, and when he said Drosia was here only because she refused to let go, she had said, “That is not a bad thing.”

Magda he had last stood with on the glass of the Path on the second day. She had heard him out on the scoring and its end and told him that what he really wanted to know was whether he would become a danger to them, or was merely incapable of not being one. She had not mentioned Drosia at all.

He stopped there, because the list had run out, and he saw what it was.

Every one of them had given him something. Selene had given him most of the others in her hands, Nebet-Hedj a warning, the twins their fear, Chiara her question, Oudemia a kind of permission, Magda an audit of himself. And not one of them had told him who sat with Drosia at the long table in the Refectory, who walked back with her from wherever she went in the day, whom she laughed with, if she laughed, or whom she let near enough to see the seam at her neck when it was bad. He had not asked. He did not know whether the women were becoming anything to one another at all, or whether they simply passed one another in the halls on the way to their nights with him.

He had spent three days on the Athenaeum’s shelves and in the Corridor of Ages, yesterday on a notebook of six theories for why Nebet-Hedj’s ba had stayed past sunrise, and on each evening’s visit and the dread of the next. He had looked at every one of the women as closely as he knew how, one at a time and always facing him, and in all that looking he had lost sight of what they were when he was not in the room.

He took his hands off the counter and wiped them on his trousers, though there was nothing on them. Beyond the glass wall something shifted in the magma, a slow brightening that came up red across the floor and faded again.

And if he had known? If Selene had mimed him a name, if Chiara had sold him one?

He thought of Drosia in his lounge the evening before, refusing every chair, saying she wanted to see how far she could get before she was reduced to a set piece. Choosing a woman, sending her along the corridor with a kind face and a pretext, arranging comfort around Drosia the way a stage is arranged around a player: it was the Athanor’s own method, done gently, and gentleness would not make it any less his hand moving the piece. He had told Nebet-Hedj the truth across her dinner table. Not unless she wants it.

So the question had been the wrong one. Who could help her was not his to answer. What she already had, and how he could keep his hands off it, was.

From the counter he could see the knife on the arm of the couch. Whatever it meant, she had chosen it alone, with no one arranging anything around her, and that was more than could be said for most of what had happened to her since before the wheel.

He could do one thing. He could pay attention, starting this morning—not to who might help her, but to what he had been too busy to see: who sat where, who waited for whom, which doors stood open between the women and which stayed shut. And he could ask each of them, openly, about herself and about the others, and take no for an answer from any of them without arguing for it.

It was not much. It would be slow, and some of them would see it for what it was and close up, and that would be their right. It was still more than he had done in three days.

He crossed the lounge without hurrying. At the couch he kept his pace and his eyes on the door. He took his coat from its hook by the door and shrugged it on, settling the collar with both hands, and the second hook stayed empty beside it. The bedroom door stood open behind him on the empty chest and the creased sheet, and he left that as it was too. Behind him the knife lay on the arm of the couch and the glass of water stood full on the low table, and he left them there, and the smell of the night with them. The door opened as he reached it, with the same slide of metal on stone he had listened to from the bed.

The Path ran out ahead of him over the slow red light of the caldera, the glass pale with the morning and empty from end to end. He stepped out onto it, and the door closed behind him.

The Upper Walks ran along the top of the world like a rampart walk built by giants who had forgotten to cut the arrow slits.

On the outer side the rim wall rose in a single face of dark rock—well above her head, too high to see over even on her toes—and above it there was nothing but sky. On the inner side a low stone parapet, no higher than her hip, kept the path from the drop. Beyond the parapet the whole hollow of the Athanor fell away in terraces and bridges and lit windows, down and down into a haze that was still dark at the bottom. Pale daylight lay along the top of the rim wall and on the far curve of it across the caldera, thin and colorless, as if the morning had come only as far as the edge and was deciding whether to bother with the rest. Below the parapet it was still night, near enough. The cold up here was a clean cold, a mountain cold, and she breathed it in with her mouth open after a night of stone and blue glass and onion.

She touched two fingers to the seam at her neck, from habit. Closed. Smooth, and only a little warm still. She took the hand away.

It dropped to her belt and closed on leather. The sheath was empty, and her fingers stayed on it a moment longer than they needed to, as though the knife might have come back on its own. It lay on the arm of a couch in a room she had walked out of, and it would stay in that room. Against her ankle the spare rode where she had strapped it the evening before, a small, steady weight that went with her when she moved and asked nothing.

She set off along the path with the rim wall at her left hand.

She counted. It was a habit older than the Athanor, older than the wheel, and it had kept her on her feet across the Axis Path the evening before, when nothing else would, and this morning it was doing the same work. She had not slept, and the climb had found every hour of it: her eyes were gritty, her mouth tasted of iron, and on the stairs she had lost the count more than once and had to begin it again. Forty paces to the first bench—a slab of rock left rough on the underside and polished smooth on top where people sat. Another sixty to the place where the path widened into a ledge and the parapet dropped to the height of her knee, and the wind came up out of the caldera hard enough to flatten her tunic against her ribs. She marked it. A poor place to be caught, or a good place to catch someone, depending. Past it the path bent left with the curve of the rim, and she couldn’t see beyond the bend until she was at it, which she also marked.

Her thighs were still not right. They had steadied on the glass and on the stairs, but under the effort of the climb they kept a faint tremor at the top of each step—the last of what had gone through her in the bath. She took the next bend at the same pace as the last.

She had been up here once before, alone, early on. She walked the bounds of every new camp to find out where the wall was weak, and this one had been no different. That day she had found what she was looking for and had not stopped at it, because anyone watching would have remembered her stopping there. She had kept walking and counted the bends to it instead. Four from the stair. This was the third.

At the fourth bend she saw the golem.

It stood against the rim wall exactly where she had remembered the crack, one of the stone servants, tall, arms at its sides, its black obsidian face turned out toward the caldera and the two flat amethyst insets where eyes should have been catching the gray light. It stayed as it was when she came around the bend, and when she stopped. Golems carried towels in this place, and sliced bread, and brought coffee to anyone who asked them nicely, and she had not seen one stand still on purpose before.

She stopped a dozen paces short of it and gave it the inspection she gave a sentry at a gate she meant to pass: the set of the feet, the weight, the hands, what it was looking at and what it was not. It was looking at nothing. The feet were planted square. The hands were empty. If it had orders, they were not written on it anywhere she could read.

Posted, or left? Someone had put it there, or it had wandered up here and forgotten itself, and she couldn’t tell which, and she disliked both answers about equally.

She walked toward it. When she was within reach of its arm she kept walking, slowly, angling past its shoulder toward the rock at its side, close enough that if it meant to stop her it would have to do it with its hands. It did nothing. Its head stayed where it was. She stood beside it, close enough to see the fine banding in the obsidian of its cheek, and it held its place and paid her no more mind than the rock did.

Her jaw set. There was nothing she could say to a thing like that which it would hear the way she meant it.

She looked at the crack. It ran up the rim wall from a little above her knee to well above her head, a black split in the dark rock, about as wide as her forearm at its mouth, its edges sharp where they had not been worn. Air came through it. Cool air, cooler than the Walks, moving steadily against her face, and it smelled of green things and wet earth and, under that, of salt. With the air came birdsong. Not one bird but many, high and busy and far off, the sound of a morning that was getting on with itself somewhere she hadn’t been invited.

She leaned in. For the first length of her arm the split ran straight through the rock. Then it jinked, a sharp turn to one side, and beyond the turn the stone opened on light. From where she stood she could see past the bend only a long, narrow wedge of the outside, as if through a door left ajar in a dark house, and how wide the split ran at the turn, or past it, the rock kept to itself.

The wedge was enough.

Forest, first, dropping away below: the kind of forest that would swallow a column of men whole and give nothing back, so dense and so green that it looked like one living thing breathing in its sleep, mist lying in its folds. Beyond the forest a line of pale sand. Beyond the sand, the sea—wide and gray-blue and wrinkled with light, running out to the edge of seeing with nothing on it at all, except some faint black shapes on the horizon that could be other lands. It was no sea she could name.

And in the forest, halfway down the slope, where a fold in the hill made a little flat ground, there was a village.

It took her a moment to be sure it was one. The roofs were the wrong shape. They rose steep from low walls and swept up at the corners like the prows of boats, and they were dark with old tile or old thatch, she could not tell which at that distance. The walls under them were timber, dark and square, raised a little off the ground on posts. Near the edge of the trees stood a gate with no wall to belong to: two posts, two crossbeams laid across the top, the upper one curving up at its ends, and on it the ghost of a red paint that the weather had nearly finished with.

Half the roofs had fallen in. Moss had taken the rest. A pale wall leaned out of true with a dark hole torn in it, and the paths between the houses had gone to grass. Nothing smoked. Nothing moved—not a dog, not a goat, not a woman at a door. She watched for the length of twenty breaths, the way she had watched villages from ridges on the eastern border with men waiting behind her for her word, and she saw no one at all.

Whoever had lived there had gone, or had been taken, or had died and been left where they lay. She had seen all three, from far off and close up, and from this distance they looked the same. What kind of people built their roofs like that, she had no idea. Nor whether this island had ever had a people of its own, or whether that village had been brought here whole, like her, with everything in it, and then forgotten by whoever had wanted it. The thought sat in her and would not settle into anything she could use.

How far down? Farther than it looked; slopes always were. The forest would hide a man from the sky and from anyone watching from the rim, and would also hide anything waiting in it. The sand would show every step. The sea would go on doing what it was doing whether anyone came down to it or not.

She took her face out of the cold air and laid her palm flat on the stone beside the crack.

The rock was cold, and very slightly damp from the air that moved past it, and solid under her hand. She left her hand there. She counted ten breaths, slowly, in and out, and felt the cold go into her palm and up her wrist and stop at the elbow, and the birds went on singing on the other side of the stone as if nothing on this side had happened to anyone.

The golem stood a forearm’s length away and looked at nothing.

At the end of the tenth breath she lifted her hand from the stone. She turned from the crack, and her face was still, and she kept it still. She walked back past the golem’s shoulder, close enough to touch it, and it held its post behind her exactly as it had held it before she came.

The path took her along the rim at a slow, even pace, and she counted her steps again, starting from one. The wind came up out of the caldera at the low ledge and pushed at her and let her go. The light on the rim wall above her had grown a shade warmer while she stood at the crack, and below the parapet the haze was paling at last, so that she could make out the nearest bridges and the dark mouths of the corridors under them.

She came to the first bend, and walked into it, and the rim wall swung around between her and the place she had been, and hid the crack and the golem from sight.