[PM to Join] Gains the More it Gives

[Tom Cooke]

Old Marlingspike Bridge • Over the Arova

Evening on the 10th of Ophus, 2719

H
e can’t imagine what it’s like to spend a bochhood alone. Alone – the word, lilting, blows a strange wind into his mind; he’s the impression of a vast blue sky and empty air all around. It scatters, like grain tossed to the breeze, and he doesn’t know why he felt it, or where he’s remembering it from.

He can’t hold it; he thinks only that it’s so far from his own childhood, where there was always noise. The chatter of the ladies – and all the other noises – at Greene’s, the talk and laughter through the walls of the tenement. Even in your own place – and he thought, then, it was a benny thing, that Meggie had half a room instead of a dressing-room and a cot; that there was a curtain, at least, between them and the Bastian family always coughing and talking and laughing just by. Noise from the streets, streets full of bochi, thickets of buildings…

Alone. Nkemi says it cheerful enough, and Tom can’t guess much more. Maybe it was pleasant. He thinks he’d’ve given birds to have some space as a lad, not to be fighting the other boys for scraps.

Maybe it was lonely; he watches her smile, and he remembers all the old sailors that went quiet and stone-faced on the open sea. AAF who’d talk about the singing of the sands, in the desert. A loud sort of silence, always.

Maybe, maybe not. He doesn’t let himself dwell. There’s more to look at, to think about. Nkemi knows the weight of it, when she speaks of lines. Some places where the lines are clear, some places where they blur. Negotiations. Sharing. There’s at least talking, in Mugroba, he thinks. There’s at least reaching-across, sometimes, though even that dizzies him, beyond his comprehension. Harder to grasp than any desert scene.

She speaks carefully – with a careful clarity that surprises him, in a galdor, though he wonders what Uzoji’d’ve had to say about it. City boy, him; a pirate on top of it. He’ll never know, he knows, but he wonders.

And he finds himself – eerily; creepingly – feeling something like sympathy. He expected to be angry. He suspects he will be, off and on, once he’s had time to think; there’s a gift in the not-knowing, in the not-thinking. He doesn’t think there’s a time he didn’t know the line.

But he knows something, now, of learning its contours, of crossing it and turning and seeing. His heart aches for all growing pains, he thinks.

“A feast,” he murmurs, rapt. Wicks and galdori at a feast. And dancing - with drums, of course.

Nkemi has eaten the last lovely bit of mushroom, and he’s glad of it. They’re coming to the end of the skewer, now, the rough mean-looking spire of it laid bare in the pale yellow light. He savors the crumbling of the charred bit of steak between his fingers a moment more; he pops it in his mouth with relish, tries to hold onto all of it, the taste and the texture and everything around him rolled into one color.

Pffpffpffpff, snores the dog, shifting and settling deeper into Nkemi’s lap. Two hands on him at all times, ever-vigilant: taking turns scratching and petting and patting, always attentive. There’s the smell of charring meat, sizzling vegetables, salt and oil and spices; wafting strange perfumes; the faintest hint of wet dog.

No, there’s no bitterness, no anger he can hold onto, here. That will be for later; it comes, it goes. So strong he thinks it’ll never end, then – he doesn’t know where it goes. It flips onto its belly; it reveals that it was sadness, all along. Bone-dry and tired. Growing pains.

But she’s unfolding all this for him, unfolding it like a map. He’s tracing the lines; he’s coming to name the landmarks. He remembers how she corrected him, poa’xa, though he still doesn’t quite get it; he will, he will. How she respected him enough to correct him. And he is bastly-grateful, warm as a hearth.

He thinks of lines he remembers. “It wasn’t done, when I was young, playing around the spokes,” he says, “when they visited. You know what sort of a lad I was. I spent a lot of time sneaking round the kint and ubo.” He smiles wistfully, playing with pup’s ear; unexpectedly, pup sneezes.

He laughs. “There’s a gitgka – old woman; grandam, informally – who has a stall here, who reads the lines on your palm for Evers as I remember a spoke doing, when I was younger. I thought we might –” He hesitates.

Mugrobi spokes – do they fortune-tell? He thinks of truth, of what can and can’t be done with magic. It’s well for imbali to lie, to wear masks and play on a stage; he doesn’t know where wicks are.

He looks up at Nkemi, tries to read the extent of intent in her eyes. “Have you ever met a tekaa fortune-teller?”

They come to the last of the skewer, just enough for two.

He lightens. “Do you care for the mushroom, or the pepper, Nkemi?”

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Evening, 10 Ophus, 2719
Marlingspike, The Dives

Anetol talks of his boyhood, then, a little wistful. Nkemi looks at him, and tries to imagine. She thinks of the lovely home in Uptown; she tries to trace the man sitting next to her back over the years. She can imagine a small boy with a messy head of red hair and wide gray eyes, she thinks; she isn’t sure she can imagine him setting a Seventen’s coat on fire, or slipping free of tutors and wandering through a camp of Anaxi spokes.

It is easy to imagine in the Rose, Nkemi thinks. She thinks, too, of the text of printed speeches she has read in some of the Viendan papers; there are archives which are not hard to find, and incumbents give many speeches. She is not sure whether she should have looked; she is not sure whether she wished to know. She has not told him, yet, that her letter was answered; she has not told him, yet, that permission was granted.

She had thought of doing it when she left the book; Ruedka sent Ediqa’s book along with a thoughtful letter. As she copied out the exercises onto a paper for him, Nkemi thought of adding a postscript – a few words – she did not. She folded the paper, instead, with only her name signed, and tucked it into the cover of the book; she left it at Anetol’s house, for him to read when he returned. She is glad he tried the meditations.

Nkemi does not ask; she chooses, instead, to smile.

“I have,” Nkemi turns her hand over and studies the lines on her palm, and the calluses too, on her fingers from holding a pen and on her palm from holding a baton. Wrinkles arc through the center of them, curving from one end to another, and fold up when she tucks her fingers against her palm. She looks back up at Anetol; she grins. “The pepper, please.”

Nkemi takes the last sliver of green pepper with a happy smile; the skin is burnt and curling off. It looks as if in another moment in the fire, it would have blistered and split away, as if it were removed just in time. Nkemi nibbles on the edge of it.

“One of the tribes had a woman who read palms. My mother,” It is strange to call her that here, with the dog snoring on her lap and Anetol watching her, carefully, thirstily drinking in every word she offers him. “My juela,” Nkemi says instead, and smiles, “told me that the woman’s words were not lies, but…”

The Mugrobi’s brow furrows, slightly; she eats the rest of the pepper, and curls her fingers up once more over her palm, taking a few moments for herself to think. “She told me that she had heard of cracks, sometimes, between the Evers,” Nkemi says, looking up at Anetol, “and that if we speak too much of what is not, we can find ourselves slipping between. She told me that to have your palm read while the path of your life is still forming might tempt the cracks too much.”

“She did not forbid me to go,” Nkemi says, uncurling her fingers once more and looking down at the small, rounded shape of her palm. “But she asked me not to, then. I do not know what she would say now.”

She has seen fortunetellers in Thul Ka, since. There are some who do lie; there are some who misrepresent what it is they do in a careful way which is only a lie if you let it be. There are others; Nkemi draws a line between them in her mind without knowing quite why. She knows, without knowing how, that there are others whose words are not lies, as her mother told her. She shivers a little; there is still smoke and steam drifting from the tents.

“What do you think?” Nkemi asks, and offers Anetol another smile. The dog shifts in her lap, and snorts, and his hot breath washes over her hand. Nkemi giggles at the brush of it.

[Tom Cooke]

Old Marlingspike Bridge • Over the Arova

Evening on the 10th of Ophus, 2719

N
kemi is looking at her palm, and he looks at it, in the corner of his eye.

A galdor’s hand, he knows now, can have many shapes. Tell-tale calluses on the palm; he wouldn’t’ve been able to tell you what calluses like those meant, once, even when he felt the other end of the baton. It’s darker than his – and no freckles to be seen – but lighter than the back of her hand. The lines themselves, he doesn’t know how to read. He’d have to look at them close, in this light, and there’s something strangely inappropriate about it, looking too close at Ever-lines on someone else’s palm.

One of Anatole’s hands is turned over in his lap. He’s looking at it, really looking. The tracery of lines is scattered with freckles, though not so many as on the backs, as on his arms. It’s hard to focus on the lines themselves; there are so many. He closes his hand, just a little, and they narrow to three.

If the life-line is short, is it because the incumbent is dead? Or did his body know, somehow, who’d come to find it?

The pepper, please. He grins up at Nkemi, and the dog snorts and shifts, and it’s easy to shuffle those questions away, for now. He lets her take the pepper, spots of deep green round wrinkled, charred skin; he can’t say why he had a feeling she’d take the green one. The mushroom, glistening russet-brown, smelling of the onions and steak it was fried with, is his, and he savors the feel of it as he listens to her.

Juela. This word, he knows. But he tucks away the sound of it in her speech, too: the way a man says mother (or ma, or umah, or Meggie) is almost like a name, of itself. Not lies, she says, and eats the pepper. He eats the mushroom, finally, feeling oddly as if it would be unfair to hold onto it longer.

He shivers, finally, when Nkemi does.

She’s smiling at him again. She giggles, when the dog stirs; he smiles back, though he’s turning over her juela’s words in his head. Trying to take them out of the frame he can’t help but hang round them; trying to find a new meaning for cracks between Evers. A galdor from Serkaih.

He does think, briefly, of Kzecka. There are things mothers and fathers know that they do not tell their bochi; not even Ezre knew who Lreya was, until he was old enough. But he can’t picture this woman who lives in the desert, any more than he can picture the man who tends Serkaih. There’s no knowing, no telling.

So he thinks, instead, frowning with thought. “I’m not sure,” he says. “Maybe it isn’t well, for children. There are so many Evers spread out in front of you, when you’re young, and so little behind you. If you don’t know the path you’re on, it can be – easy to drift away from all paths.”

He looks down the alleyway, strung with lanterns and drifting with delicious-smelling steam. Distantly, he can hear another dance starting up; the echo of it is somehow ghostly, like a happy Ever not taken. Like a party through a wall, or a life you’re not born into.

“Maybe as we get used to standing by our choices, it’s less – tempting, to look at other Evers. Maybe once we know who we are, there’s less chance of slipping through the cracks.” He thinks of the calluses on Nkemi’s palm. You know who you are, he thinks.

Too, he thinks of a mother not wanting her solitary, thoughtful child to worry over endless Evers. Cracks. He thinks of Nkemi’s jara, too; worry can lead to lots of places.

He smiles at Nkemi, now. “She’s never read my palm, Miss Ette. I come and sit with her, just for her company and her stories; I buy incense or odds and ends. She said I wasn’t ready, the first time we met. She’s cautious; she handles her art with respect. I don’t presume to know what your juela,” he pronounces, careful as he can, “would advise. But I don’t believe such a one is lying.”

Pup whines, yawning out a curl of red tongue and the smell of dog-breath. Suddenly, there’s a snuffling nose again. Tom laughs softly, ruffling the white curls at his crown.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Evening, 10 Ophus, 2719
Marlingspike, The Dives

Nkemi thinks of herself in the kitchen, standing on a chair next to the stove, stirring the boiling milk with the big wooden spoon. Her juela had been cooking; Nkemi cannot remember what she was making, not anymore, but she remembers smelling something over the edge of the milk, and her stomach grumbling. She remembers, because it was thinking of food and looking down at her hand on the spoon which had made her ask about the fortuneteller.

She remembers her mother kneeling on the floor before her, her hands wrapped together around Nkemi’s; she remembers her mother’s voice low and soft, and her eyes a little wider.

She remembers the hissing from the stove behind them, and her juela snatching the pot up, off of the heat, just in time, and Nkemi climbing back up on the stool and scraping all the foaming bits carefully from the side of the pot, intent, her juela’s hand on her back. That was when her juela had asked; not demanded, not ordered, not commanded, but asked, quietly, that she not go.

Drift away, Anetol says, carefully. Nkemi watches him, and watches him watch the steam wafting through the air, up through the lantern light, drifting off into the distant dark. Sometimes, above the street, there is a little glimmer of candlelight from a window; sometimes a draft of smoke catches in it, puffs through and up and away towards the covered sky above. It is a rich, textured sort of darkness, tonight; Nkemi cannot see the moon from their quiet sliver of alley, nor any stars.

Nkemi smiles at Anetol, too, when he smiles again. “I do not think my juela worries I do not know my path,” the prefect said, cheerfully. She wonders about Anetol; she wonders about the new strands of snowy white in his hair. “I would like to meet Miss Edhi.”

The dog climbs up off her lap, and Nkemi follows him up to her feet. She carries the skewer with her, until she can find a little pile of kindling to leave it upon, next to the tents. The smell of charring and frying drift and wander through the smoke, and Nkemi thinks longingly of sharp-sour yogurt, and the harsh bitterness of burning milk.

They walk arm-in-arm again, and the pup’s warm body follows close, pressing at Nkemi’s legs sometimes, and Anetol’s too, sometimes.

The festival seems endless, from the middle of it; like a rushing river, it overflows the banks and spills, gleeful, along any space in the ground which will accommodate it. There is another square; through a press of bodies, they can hear the quick, sonorous tunes of fiddling. There is not so much dancing, this time, but two men, standing opposite one another, building higher and higher with each subsequent pass, and the crowd’s laughter, like an accompaniment, as they trill over the notes and try to figure out where the other will go. It is more of a duet than a competition, Nkemi thinks, from the glimpses she sees of the hard-won smiles on their faces.

Anetol seems to know where they are going; he sets their course, and though they drift rather than swim, Nkemi understands that it is purposeful. She walks alongside him through pools of blue and yellow and green and red and purple and orange; she walks alongside him through smells of charred meat and spiced wine and boiled sugar. Sometimes the little white dog drifts off towards some tempting adventure; Nkemi does not begrudge him his own path, either. But he comes back; he comes back, and finds them again, although once he is licking his lips and looking more than a little self-satisfied.

It is not, exactly, that the festival around them grows dimmer. The lights are as bright as they were; there is still plenty of noise and smoke and life, teeming all around them. But they turn, and they make their way down another nameless street – and Nkemi knows, even before Anetol turns to smile at her, that they have arrived. Maybe it is the smell; it reminds her of the brazier in his office. Maybe it is the way he draws himself up, a little straighter than before, and speeds up, just a half a beat.

Nkemi grins at him, and tucks her head against his shoulder, and looks around, unafraid.

[Tom Cooke]

Marlingspike • The Dives

Evening on the 10th of Ophus, 2719

N
o, he thinks. I’d imagine she doesn’t. Nkemi’s smile is bright and broad; all of her is color, the lamplight dancing over her face, dancing through the gold in her headwrap. He smiles back brightly, and when pup decides he’s had enough of all this sitting-around, they’re on their feet again. When a wet nose pushes itself back into his hand, sniffing out steak-smells, he laughs; he keeps laughing as they drift through the swaying press and back into the square, into brighter Evers.

He thinks of it, still, as they drift on benny-smelling steam and follow familiar lanterns. There are lights in windows, sometimes, that he catches in the corner of his eyes, in the dark above the lanterns. Cracks. But Nkemi’s chosen to meet Ette, and he stays on his own path; and as he turns familiar corners, there’s a lilt in his step and certainty in the line of his back and the set of his jaw.

It’s the smell of lavender and patchouli, finally, and sage, and all the oldest things, drifting from a plain tent at the edge of a square. The twining melodies of the fiddles are behind them; the fire-eater’s glow is lost in the mist.

He turns to her, before he opens the flap, and smiles. He sees her looking round, the lanterns glittering in her eyes; he doesn’t see any doubt on her face, now, either.

He ducks through, holding the flap open for Nkemi.

In the midst of the cluttered kint sits a woman. She is very heavyset, wrapped up in a tangle of furs and coats. Her face is a map of deep lines; her skin is the color of oak. Not unlike Nkemi’s, there’s a cloth wrapped round her head in deep blue, the same color as the stones that dangle in a rainstorm of glinting metal from her ears and flash on her fingers.

In the low light from the lanterns outside and the braziers inside, and the burning coals in the fire pit, her eyes are milky-white. What hair escapes her headwrap is wispy and grey, but here and there is a shockingly-red thread.

She’s a knack, he thinks, of looking right at you; of knowing where you are, before she’s even had the caprise of you. It’s so now: even as his eyes adjust to the gloom, he hears her. “Auntie, Auntie,” comes a deep, rasping voice; “ye brought a friend, ent ye?”

“Ette,” he says warmly, and smiles at Nkemi, shivering the flap of the tent shut behind them.

“Oes, benny,” she murmurs, as he comes into caprising range. “Mendin’ the cloth.” Her serious look drops off; there’s a wicked smile in every line of her face. She turns that uncanny gaze on the prefect. “He yach me, ye chen, when he’s feelin’ like it, this toft.”

If he’s concerned how Nkemi will take her tone, he remembers the dance, and all her thoughtful words about lines; it’s nothing more than a thought.

He takes one of Ette wrinkled hands in his and bends to brush the knobbly knuckles with a kiss. “Can you forgive me, Ette? The weather kept me in Frecks half a week longer than I’d planned.”

Ette wheezes and crackles with laughter. “Toffin talk,” she says. “Boemo, boemo. I already knew.” She waves a hand, jangling and tinkling. “I knew.”

The spark and jingle of her bangles draws pup trotting closer, as if from nowhere. Standing on his hind legs, finding those bangles and then her hand with an inquisitive snuffling nose.

“Wo chet, who’s this?”

“We don’t know his name,” he replies, “and he’s been rather tight-lipped, except for where yats is concerned.”

“Nanabo.” Ette smiles broadly, finding the curly-haired head in a nest of lapping tongue and nose and teeth, scratching pup behind the ears. “Got some tekaa left in ye,” she admonishes Auntie, with a grin.

Rising, he throws a glance over his shoulder, at the other galdor standing in the close, cluttered space. The smile in his eyes is reverent. If the nickname embarrasses him, he shows not a hint of it. He gestures to Nkemi – closer, closer, if she will come closer.

Ette starts at the brush of another golly field. Some misgiving knits itself into the lines of her face, before it can relax into a smile.

He slips his hands from hers, because she’s pushing herself up on the arm of the old wooden chair. It creaks under her weight; she reaches for a stick nearby, and it wobbles as she stands fully upright. She’s taller than both galdori by at least half a foot, standing, and in her broad shoulders and the square of her jaw are shadows he can only guess at.

“Etåtha te da’Bevue,” she pronounces, flattening a hand against her chest, “of the Deep Water, long since driftin’. Ye look on no tyat, madam; ye’ll be findin’ papers there,” and she gestures to a cluttered table nearby, on which sits a dusty wooden box with inlaid flowers, “if yer lookin’.”

Her milky eyes settle on Nkemi for a long moment; she stares through the dark. Then, slowly, a broad smile creeps across her face. She dares not caprise, but he feels the curious brush of her field against the prefect’s.

She says something in another tongue; he catches Tek, here and there, but in a different shape, more guttural, with no resemblance to Estuan or Mugrobi. “Junta, seeker an’ shaper,” she says, “an’ finder,” and extends one hand to Nkemi.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Evening, 10 Ophus, 2719
Marlingspike, The Dives

The tent is plain; the fabric is a little worn, and the flap has faint wrinkles running through it, where it has been held back, time and time again, by many hands. There are little dots of fingerprints, here and there; it does not seem dirty to Nkemi, not quite, despite that. They are like a clamor of voices; they are like the rush of the river, droplets surging against one another. They are different shapes and sizes; there are some close to the ground, stained with grease; there are others, much higher than Anetol’s hand reaches, tinged with black soot.

Nkemi ducks in through the flap.

Light gleams in through the seams of the tent, glitters and fragments in the places where the thread knots the fabric together. It glows up red-warm from the braziers and the firepit; there is only a little smoke inside, drifting and twining, but it wraps around them and Nkemi breathes it in deep, with all its mingled scents.

She waits, by the door; not because she is unsure, but because she understands that this is Anetol’s place, and she is a guest; because she has, now, been in Vienda long enough to wonder at the friendship between any galdori and a wick fortuneteller, and long enough to begin to guess at something of what might be felt at the sight of a second galdor – and, Nkemi knows, after several years as a prefect, that something about it seems to cling to her. She is not sorry – she does not wish to wash the scent away – but in this place, surrounded by lavender and patchouli and sage, she is aware of it all the same.

Edhi is wrapped in a brilliant deep blue, and more of the same dangles from her ears and glints on her fingers. It is the deep blue of still, silent pools; it is the deep blue of the sky at night, far away from the lights of the city. The light gleams in it, like it does in pools, like the stars flicker in the skies. Her eyes glow gray-white, but her head turns unerringly towards Anetol.

Auntie, she calls him, and Nkemi smiles a quick little grin, ducking her chin. She meets the sightless eyes when they turn her way, and she is still smiling; it widens a little at the teasing of Anetol, although she does not presume to interrupt. The pup likes the fortuneteller; Nkemi thinks he has been spoiled, to like so easily, but she remembers his careful cowering against the steps, not long earlier, and does not begrudge him his open-heartedness, nor the little lingering greasespot on his muzzle.

Anetol is smiling; Anetol is warm, filled with something Nkemi cannot name but knows nonetheless. He beckons her closer, and she comes as invited. Nkemi stands straight, and watches solemnly as Edhi stands, aware of the firelight flickering over the stick as the woman stands. She makes no move to interrupt; she does not so much as think of it. She watches still as Edhi introduces herself, and does not follow the gesture of the wick’s hand towards the nearby table, not even with the flicker of a corner of her gaze.

“Junior Subprefect Nkemi pezre Nkese of the Windward Market District of Thul Ka,” Nkemi returns the introduction with the lengthy fullness of her title, and she works her way steadily, clearly, through every word; her voice does not waver one iota, though it fills with warm, aching pride on the name of her city, tonight more than usual. She bows and comes back up a little straighter, her chin lifted, still meeting Edhi’s gaze. Her field brushes back, not quite a caprise either, but warm and soft.

“Sana’hulali, madam” Nkemi says, and takes the offered hand. She smiles a little wider, her gaze bright and curious; her own grip is firm and sure. Seeker and shaper, the woman calls her, and finder. “I am,” the Mugrobi says, always honest and now unflinchingly direct, “very pleased to meet you.”

[Tom Cooke]

Marlingspike • The Dives

Evening on the 10th of Ophus, 2719

J
unior Subprefect,” Ette pronounces, carefully, in her broad tekaa way, with just a hint of something else, “Nkemi pezre Nkese, of the Windward Market District, of Thul Ka.”

He is hanging on each pause; he can’t help the pinched look that comes into his face. But Ette doesn’t flinch at the word prefect, to his surprise. Nkemi speaks, and the set of her jaw relaxes; he can’t say, but he thinks the lilt of her accent is a relief.

And Nkemi hasn’t even spared the box a look – he’s a feeling, if she did, Ette’d know, somehow – and now the prefect is closing the distance between them, taking Ette’s hand firm and warm as she’s ever taken his. Unhesitating, though he knows much of the kint has seen better days, and there’s a smell of soot and dust and other things underneath the charred coals and the incense.

He smiles, tentative, watching them in the shifting dark. Nkemi with the red of her sweater deepened in the warm-painted gloom, the orange at her chin rich and vivid, her wide dark eyes echoing with what lamplight creeps in through the tent walls.

“Sana’hulali,” Ette says, then again, “Junta.” There’s a mant smile spread across her face, in the full lips and the thick furrows round the eyes, in every spiderweb line. “Benny strong hand. Ye chen the worth of sharin’ a name, too.”

She looks Nkemi unflinching in the face. Setting the cane momentarily aside, she takes the small dark hand in both of hers and presses it. He knows the feel of those hands, callused and surprisingly strong.

Her hands slip out of the Mugrobi’s; instead of retrieving the cane, she heaves back into her seat with a deep sigh. “I given you all mine.” She’s still smiling. “Ent so long a name, these maw in urbo. No callin’ me Durg-daoa; them days gone to the water. Etåtha, sapper or spitch, ye chen?”

For all the smile, he knows the bitter twist of the words. He glances at Nkemi’s face; he can’t know how much she’s understood. He doesn’t know, after all, how much he’d hope for.

“Sit, birds,” rasps Ette, gesturing with a sweep of one sleeve, a rustle of furs. “Sit.”

It’s him moves, very intentionally, to pull up chairs. If Nkemi offers her help, he won’t refuse; but he has the look of a man who knows and cherishes his role, set jaw and matter-of-fact motions.

He smiles, still, when he finds a chair for the prefect. He knows she does not lie; he remembers what she said, and how she said it, and there is no end to the grateful warmth in his chest.

Even if he still can’t help the flutter of fear, when the coat shifts and the edge of her baton catches the low light. Ette can’t see it, but he thinks she knows it, in her way. The name brigk is itself a baton; the baton takes many shapes. He wonders if he’ll ever see it without feeling the old sting.

“Mujo ma,” murmurs Ette.

Perhaps she’s heard the chairs creak and pop. They’re rickety enough, though two bird-light galdori have little to fear. He still remembers it, that winter a year ago, the first time he sat here. Lowering his erse into the seat all delicate-like, thinking it’d break. Numb-cold in his fingers and toes, aching like this for the first time, grateful for the warmth that the bochi have drawn him to, calling him dagka. Feeling more than anything the kindness of eyes that can’t see.

Ette’s still scratching pup behind the ears. “What ye come here seekin’, ada’na?” Her milky gaze is on Nkemi; the lines in her face have gone thoughtful. “Ye’ve a strong aura; I feel it. Ye step from the water wi’ clean feet.”

Tom smiles. Ette’s got a sly look; he knows it.

“Would you have me read the lines?” she asks, shifting in her seat.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Evening, 10 Ophus, 2719
Marlingspike, The Dives

Edhi repeats Nkemi back to her, slow and careful; she pauses in the spaces between, between title and name, between name and district, between district and city. The vowels are soft and smooth; Nkemi would not have known the difference, before, but now she can say that they are more like Mugrobi vowels than Anaxi, she thinks, although the broad long r on pezre, on Windward Market, is distinctive and all its own. The k is a careful, heavy pause, but not so deliberate as Anaxi say it; Edhi does not stomp down on the k and made it known, but skips over it, pressing down only a little harder than Nkemi herself would.

Nkemi’s hand lingers in Edhi’s. She does not pull away; it is almost like a caprise, this handshake, although her field still holds separate from the other woman’s glamour in the air, polite and warm, but separate all the same. Nkemi can feel the scratch of the other woman’s calluses against her skin and her own, where their palms meet. Edhi’s fingers are a little knobbed, only slightly, with the same weight of age that has carved so many lines deep into her weather-worn skin, but her grip is strong; but she smiles, and all the lines lift.

Nkemi smiles too.

She holds, curious, and she watches Edhi with wide eyes as both of the fortuneteller’s hands find hers. Her hand flattens out, curls soft between Edhi’s; she does not fight the press, or flinch away from it. It is the other woman’s face Nkemi watches, curiously; she can see the twitch of movement in the eyelids above those sightless eyes, and the faint deepening of the laugh lines around her lips. Some of the others – the thin lines between her eyebrows, the pinching lines at the bottom of the eyes – are stretched thin by the smile, almost invisible, but never truly gone.

There are many words Nkemi does not know, but she does know enough to understand, she thinks, as Edhi sits again. “Etatha te da’Bevue,” Nkemi says, very carefully. If the vowels are long – if the consonants are soft – at least there are no rs, in this name, for her tongue to trip over, “of the Deep Water, long since drifting.”

Anetol moves for the chairs before Nkemi can. She does not offer him a hand, this time, but lets him find one for her and settle it into place. Nkemi grins at him, all the same, as she settles into place, and offers a quiet “Thank you.” She sits with her feet down, first, and then as if of their own accord her boots come up, and tuck into place beneath her knees, and whatever mud they deposit against her pants is invisible against the muck of the stairs by the river, the stoop in the alleyway, and the gifts left behind by damp, eager paws.

Nkemi shifts too; she looks at Edhi, and then down at the hand she had offered her. She uncurls her fingers and looks at her own palm; the dark red coal light gleams off the pale lines.

“I seek understanding,” Nkemi says, looking back up at Edhi. Her fingers curl up, a little, as if of their own accord. “There is a map before me; I know my own shape, but the rest is unfamiliar, as if its lines are made of smoke. I want,” Nkemi’s brow furrows; she swallows, just a little, but does not look down, “to begin to make sense of them.”

Carefully, Nkemi shifts forward; carefully, she uncurls her hand once more, and offers it out to the fortuneteller. She meets her smoky gaze once more, and if Nkemi is afraid, now, it is the good kind of fear, she hopes.

“If you would, madam,” Nkemi says, and she is solemn; the weight of the request pulls on her voice. Her hand does not shake in the air between them, but holds steady, and she does not look away. “Please,” The Mugrobi adds, politely, and she smiles.

[Tom Cooke]

Marlingspike • The Dives

Evening on the 10th of Ophus, 2719

H
e knows the prefect’s careful pronunciation of her name has won at least one smile. He’s not surprised, but Ette is, he thinks: not much (nothing much surprises the gitgka, anymore), but enough there was a faint widening of her eyes, enough she sits that pina manna closer to the edge of her seat, even though every line of her speaks the burden of her maw. She listens, as Nkemi speaks. She does not yet look at the palm, though she has watched Nkemi study it carefully.

He looks at Nkemi, still; he studies her profile. He struggles to make out her expression in the dark. There aren’t so many lines to help him, as on Ette’s face, as on her palm. Her legs are crossed, though, and her boots up in the seat with her. He sees the flicker of something in her throat, as she pauses.

Ette feels it, he thinks. As if its lines are smoke. “A lifeline is like a path through the brush,” she says after a moment, nodding. “Ye’ve the wisdom to look for a map, instead of a path. Ye’ve the wisdom to yield, instead of seein’ lines that ent there, out of a want to see lines. I chen ye turned more than once, ada’na Nkemi, to see the path yer feet made, an’ the paths that crossed it.”

The parable of the road through the brush. He knows it well; he reckons every Circlist does, golly or natt or tekaa.

Ette doesn’t patronize Nkemi by telling it again. Instead, she shifts to the edge of her seat, finally, a great effort that sends all her bangles to singing. Pup fidgets, snuffles at her hands.

She waves pup away, momentarily irritable. A look of pain crosses her face, but then she has a smile for Nkemi, and for her please, and for her offered hand. “Ye come to me rightly,” she says. “So young, to chen such.”

He sits by, watching, as Ette folds Nkemi’s small hand in both of hers. She holds it, for a moment; she breathes in deep. Pup is sitting by, watching, too.

Careful, Ette uncovers Nkemi’s open palm and runs her fingertips over it.

“Clear, strong lines, ada’na.” Her face is a crease of concentration.

The pad of her thumb wanders in an arc across Nkemi’s palm. “Roa’s line crosses yer qalqa,” she goes on. “Neither’s broken at the crossin’, but every Ever’s caught there, like rain in a bowl. Some folk they travel together, some folk the lifeline denks off from the qalqa, though they both be long an’ strong. But yer own, ada’na –”

He’s seen her do this before, read the lines. Ette never shuts her eyes. Even now, they’re wide; she doesn’t look at Nkemi, but casts her gaze up, up toward the roof of the kint, as if she can see through the shadows and the canvas and up into the stars.

The low light glints in her milky, glassy eyes.

“One runs up on the other, like two shootin’ stars. There’s ne heaven without this qalqa; ne hell without it, neither.”

Ette’s head tilts, silver and precious stones rattling and tinkling at her ears. Two fingertips search the rest of Nkemi’s palm, tracing lines further up. “Clear, strong lines,” she says again, “clear as a summer day sky.” A sudden smile quirks her lips. “Yer hama an’ head lines’re almost to meetin’ in the middle – close, but ne. Close. Boemo, may be for the best; if Vespe an’ Hulali, yer wisdom an’ yer heart, dance to the same drum, ye’ll be findin’ heaven, an’ none of us do. Every other Ever hangs on what ye do wi’ the gap.”

Her blind gaze falls, finally coming to rest on Nkemi’s face. Ette’s still smiling, and her fingers are still tracing the map, but there’s a new lightness crinkling round her eyes.

“Mant travel lines, ada’na. Some deeper than others. One’s well-creased; there’s a path ye take often. If yer lifeline stays strong, ye’ll deepen plenty more.” She pauses. “Ye want to know the map in front of ye, but the page is blank,” she says. “What of the one yer drawin’? What d’ye want it to look like?”

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Evening, 10 Ophus, 2719
Marlingspike, The Dives

Edhi comes to her, too, shifts forward in her seat. She wraps Nkemi’s words in hers, and she wraps Nkemi’s hand in hers, too, takes it inside the space where they meet. Nkemi holds still; she watches, and she feels. There are calluses against her skin, the rough and the smooth. She breathes in deep when Edhi does, and she tastes incense and other thick mingled smells; she tastes sage on her tongue, and musty fabric, somewhere deep in the back of her throat. The brazier smoke rises up and swells over them; pale white-gray drifts over Nkemi’s gaze. Anetol is a breath somewhere out of sight, the memory of a gray gaze and a sharp inhale.

Nkemi does not shiver when Edhi’s fingers trace her palm. She looks down, as if she can understand what the fortuneteller sees with her sightless eyes; she feels their slow wandering movement. She lifts her gaze, then, and it is Edhi she looks at, and all the lines of her face. Kalikah, Edhi says; Nkemi does not know the word the first time, nor the second.

The third, and Nkemi understands. Kalika; she thinks she knows. She thinks of Edhi’s deep, smokeworn voice, reciting back her title piece by piece, and she thinks of Anetol’s darting gaze to the baton resting on her hip, as she sits. She thinks of her path, and her purpose, and she understands the meaning of kalikah.

Dhama is another word she does not know, but Edhi goes on: Vespe and Hulali, she says, wisdom and heart. Nkemi understands. If her head is her wisdom, dhama must mean heart. Every other Ever hangs on what you do with the gap, Edhi says. Nkemi nods her understanding; her gaze is still quietly fixed on Edhi’s face, and she smiles when the other woman’s gaze comes back to her. As if she sees – Nkemi thinks perhaps she does – Edhi’s smile crinkles up around her eyes, a little lighter than before.

Travel lines, Edhi says. Nkemi thinks of her paths; she thinks of sitting back to back with Anetol, her eyes shut, and coaxing her mind out through Ugoulo’s connection and into Anetol’s vestibule. She thinks of paths taken again and again, and she thinks of ink spilling from her fingertips along a map, and the shivering whisper of clairvoyant and static mona in the air around her. Her field shifts; it does not sigil nor tense, but seems to sigh, and settle in around her, a little closer against her skin.

Nkemi holds Edhi’s gaze, or perhaps Edhi holds hers. She is not sure of the difference. The fortuneteller wraps her in words once more, and Nkemi’s eyes flutter shut. She thinks of a map of drifting smoke; she imagines the white-dark smoke from the brazier twining together, thin lines of drifting white that twist and shift. What does she want it to look like?

What is it she wishes to find?

“A map is a place of connection between landmarks,” Nkemi says, serious. Her eyes come open again; she smiles at Edhi, although there is a serious set to her face, too; they exist together, the smile and the weight, and Nkemi rests in the middle of them with the ease of long practice. “It takes all the pieces of a place, and it lets them fit together. Sometimes there is only one path; sometimes there are many. Sometimes the landmarks are obvious, and sometimes they are not.”

She thinks of a small girl wrapped in books in a Thul'Amat library; she can see her fingers tracing different lines, a long time ago and very far away.

“But,” Nkemi says, carefully, “in the end, a map is both its landmarks, and the connections between them.” She takes a deep breath; she breathes out smoke, too, or at least a little drifting heat, into the air of the tent. “Life, kalika, dhama and head,” Nkemi says, carefully. She looks back down her palm. “I think they are the pieces of my map.” She offers, quietly, studying the small dark palm nestled still in one of Edhi’s hands, and the fingertips hovering just above it.