‘Father never prays.’
‘Who else would he be talking to, except some five-headed Imass god?’
‘Really, which head?’
‘What?’
‘Which head was he talking to?’
‘How should I know? The one listening. It had ears on stalks and they turned. And then it popped out one eye and swallowed it-’
Storii leapt to her feet. ‘So it could look out its hole!’
‘Only way gods know how to aim.’
Storii squealed with laughter.
The dirt-faced runt looked up from his playing, eyes wide, and then he smiled and said, ‘Blallablallablalla!’
‘That’s the god’s name!’
‘But which head?’ Stavi asked.
‘The one with poop in his ears, of course. Listen, if we can really find out his secret name, we can curse him for ever and ever.’
‘That’s what I was saying. What kind of curses?’ ‘Good ones. He can only walk on his hands. He starts every sentence with blallablallablalla. Even when he’s twenty years old! As old as that, and even older.’
‘That’s pretty old. That’s grey-haired old. Let’s think of more curses.’
Sitting oblivious on the ground, the son of Onos Toolan and Hetan made curling patterns in the soft dust with one finger. Four squiggles in one particular pattern, trying again and again to get it just right. It was getting dark. Shadows walked out from stones. The shadows were part of the pattern.
The Imass possessed no written language. Something far more ancient was buried deep within them. It was liquid. It was stain on skin. It was the magic of shadows cast by nothing-nothing real. It was the gift of discord, the deception of unnatural things slipped into a natural world. It was cause in search of effect. When the sun was gone from the sky, fire rose in its stead, and fire was the maker of shadows, revealer of secrets.
The child had a secret name, and it was written in elusive, impermanent games of light and dark, a thing that could flicker into and out of existence in the dancing of flames, or, as now, at the moment of the sun’s death, with the air itself crumbling to grainy dust.
Absi Kire , a name gifted by a father struck with unexpected hope, long after the death of hopeful youth. It was a name striving for faith, when faith had departed the man’s world. It whispered like a chill wind, rising up from the Cavern of the Worm. Absi Kire . Its breath was dry, plucking at eyes that had forgotten how to close. Born of love, it was a cry of desperation.
Patterns in the dirt, fast sinking into formless gloom.
Absi Kire.
Autumn Promise.
Storii held up a hand, cutting short a list of curses grown past breathless, and cocked her head. ‘Some news,’ she said.
Nodding, Stavi reached down and snatched up the boy. He struggled, tilting his head back until it pressed hard against her chest. She blew down, stirring the hair atop his slightly elongated head, and he instantly settled.
‘Excited voices.’
‘Not happy excited.’
‘No,’ Stavi agreed, turning to look in the direction of the camp-just beyond a sweep of tilted rock outcroppings. The glow of fires was rising beneath a layer of woodsmoke.
‘We should get back.’
Hetan cursed under her breath. The girls had kidnapped their half-brother yet again, and no one had seen their escape. When they were out of her sight, the vast pit of her solitude opened its maw beneath her, and she could feel herself tumbling and spinning as she fell… and fell. So much darkness, so little hope that the plunge would end in a merciful snap of bones, the sudden bliss of oblivion.
Without her children, she was nothing. Sitting motionless, wandering inside her skull, dull-eyed and weaving like a hoof-kicked dog. Nose sniffing, claws scratching, but there was no way out. Without her children, the future vanished, a moth plunging into the fire. She blinked motes from her eyes, hands drawn together and thumbnails picking at the scabs and oozing slices left behind by the last assault on the ends of her fingers, the tender skin round the nails.
Frozen in place, sunken, in endless retreat.
Another bowl of rustleaf? Durhang? A resin bud of d’bayang? D’ras beer? Too much effort, every one of them. If she sat perfectly still, time would vanish.
Until the girls brought him back. Until she saw the twins pretending to smile but skittish and worried behind their eyes. And he would squirm in a girl’s arms, reaching for Hetan, who would see those strangely large, wide hands with their stubby fingers, clutching, straining, and a howl would rise within her, lifting out of that black maw, blazing like a skystone returning to the sky.
