Pearl in the void, p.1
Pearl in the Void, page 1
My name is Keshul Akkadin-emodo and I am a diviner, so naturally I didn't foresee the ruin of my life before it consumed me, my town and all of Ke Bakil. This was particularly irritating because the Void, the god charged with destruction, was also the god who'd bestowed my damned powers on my unwilling head. You'd think He would have given me a little more warning of His plans.
But the Trinity doesn't work that way. Thus, the theme of my life: unwanted gods, unwanted change and my very much unwanted role in all of it.
It began on a very normal night, with me coming home after I'd sent my last postulant away, contented with his fortune.
"Why the dour face?" I asked as I stepped into my courtyard.
Dekashin, childhood friend, neuter, and usually sprawled, was less lazy grace tonight and more disgruntled flop. It was nursing a cup of tea—well, trying to scrape it raw with its fingertips—beside my fire. "If you'd been here...," it began.
"If I'd been here, I wouldn't have been at work," I said, tossing the pouch to it, and this time it almost missed the catch. Surprised, I said, "Dekashin? What's wrong?"
"What isn't," Dekashin said, scrubbing its long nose. "The last few caravans the Head of Household's run south have been... less than productive."
"Less than productive," I repeated, sitting across from it and reaching for the teapot.
"We're now in debt," Dekashin said bluntly, and I almost burned myself dropping the pot.
"What!" I said.
"Yes," it said, and gently separated my hand from the handle so it could swab the slopped-over tea off my hand. I let it, stunned.
"How can that be?" I said. "In debt! Void take that, Dekashin... the House can't run in debt for long. What is he planning? How is he going to fix it?"
"I don't know," Dekashin said, sitting back. "I only found out by accident. The pefna-eperu's been surly lately. I thought it was all the late nights we've been putting in, so I was trying to be helpful... you know, staying up for the late arrivals and helping with the rikka. I was leading a brace away when I overhead it arguing with the Head of Household about finances." It took a deep breath. "I'm afraid you are now House Akkadin's most profitable enterprise, Keshul."
...and I did make a lot of money. But not enough to finance an entire Household, month after month!
"Dekashin," I said, then stopped myself. "When was ke Rashal planning on telling us?"
"I don't think he is," Dekashin said. "Maybe he hopes he can turn things around before Akkadin has to be dissolved."
Akkadin dissolved. The idea was beyond imagination. I stared at the night-blooming flowers drooping into the courtyard, the scattered petals on the stones. I was one of the few emodo, one of the few males to have a courtyard of my own, to have an apprentice to brush my hair and make my supper. Rashal, the Head of Household, had repeatedly offered me a spinal ring, the one given to the most valuable emodo in the House, but I had always turned him down. Before it was because no matter how much I earned, I still believed I was making all my fortunes up and I didn't want to accept a ring to celebrate being a fraud. After... after, it was because I didn't want to attract the Void's attention, and receiving accolades for speaking His words seemed just the sort of thing a god of emptiness and destruction would take issue with.
"Maybe things will turn around," Dekashin said, finally.
"Maybe," I said. But I doubted it.
From the door leading into the house, Bilil appeared with a clay pot. "I have supper, master."
"I love you," I said, obedient to ritual.
He smiled and set the pot down in the fire, carefully, holding it by the handle. His golden braid slid over his narrow shoulder as he twisted toward me. "Hand me your bowl, master, and let me serve you. You must be hungry."
"Yes," I said. "Thank you." And glanced at him as he spooned the stew into my bowl. So serene, my apprentice. I'd had him for two years now, and even on that first day it had felt unnecessary. Bilil was a true believer in the Trinity, and he seemed to possess some magical knowledge I didn't. When we first met, in fact, he was the one who insisted I was a Void-touched diviner and not just a fake, and I scoffed and ate the food he made me and let him lull me to somnolence with his long-handled brush... and never realized that he was right until a particularly ugly affair made it clear that sometimes the stories in my head weren't the result of common sense and a good imagination, but rather something more sinister.
Bilil had seen me clearly before I'd seen myself. If anyone had asked, I would have told them he'd make a far better diviner than me. But he never asked permission to leave and establish his own practice, even after I insisted he knew more than I did. So he remained, and so did I.
I wondered now if I would be able to afford him, and where he would go if Akkadin foundered.
"Why so troubled, master?" Bilil asked, sitting equidistant from us both, as if he was completing the Trinity's triangle... though for that we'd need an anadi. Emodo, eperu, anadi—male, neuter, female—that's how all our religions are built. Around the sexes we can Turn, and the way they order our lives and thoughts.
Shaking my head, I said, "What, you can't tell?"
"Another difficult client?" he guessed.
"All clients are difficult," I muttered.
"His mane is knotted," Dekashin said. "That's his problem. One day you should just braid it flat to his spine, Bilil. Or cut it off."
"Don't even joke about that," I growled.
Bilil just laughed. "If Keshul didn't have long hair, he'd have no reason to ask people to brush it, and then he'd be absent one of the pure pleasures of his day."
"See?" I said to Dekashin. "He understands."
It snorted. "I understand that it's a lot of trouble." It reached over to tweak the dark lock hanging over my nose. "Face it, Keshul. You're vain."
"You would be too, if you had my mane," I said.
It sounded a great deal like the badinage that usually happened over my fire, and for that I was grateful. But meeting my eyes across the fire, Dekashin's gaze made a lie of it, and I knew mine did the same.
The following day was very much like all my days. I woke in the late morning when Bilil brought me something to break my fast. I nibbled on it while he set out my clothes. I washed in the communal pool set aside for the males and neuters of the house, the females having their own below-ground, and then returned to my room to allow Bilil to brush my hair and help me dress.
By then the day had lost its noon-sun brashness, sufficiently for me to feel comfortable being out in it. So I went out into het Narel. To walk, mostly. To get the scent of the warmth of the afternoon. I clove to the shade of awnings from houses and then shops as I drew closer to the center of town; it was harder for an emodo to be stricken by the mind-sickness that mostly frequently afflicted the breeders, but I preferred not to tempt fate.
I was House Akkadin's diviner, but during the day no one recognized me. That suited me fine. I liked to take my second meal of the day in a cheldzan, undisturbed. It's not that I disliked people. It's just that my work involved dealing with them from sundown until nearly truedark, and inevitably they brought me all the intimacies and pedantries of their lives, from the most trivial worries to the most devastating confessions. They came to me because they thought I channeled the voice of the god of night, and sometimes... sometimes I might have. But most of the time what I actually channeled was my own common sense, dressed up in portentous words and be-ribboned dances. Being sympathetic took enough out of me that I didn't really want to engage people during the day, Dekashin and Bilil being the exceptions. The first, because I'd known it for as long as I had memory, and the latter because... well. What would I do without Bilil? And if his unsettling beliefs were the price I had to pay for his company, I would pay it, and had for years now.
So on this day, like every other, I sat at a table beneath an awning and watched the Jokka walk past, on their way to errands in the center of town, or on their way home from those errands or day-time work if they had it—usually farm-work or construction, all done before the heat of the day. I sipped broth from a bowl. And perhaps I noticed more acutely how few of us there were.
I had once told Dekasin when I was in an acid mood that civilization was dying, just too slowly for us to notice. I began to wonder if I'd been right.
Near sun-down I paid the cheldzan's owner a handful of small clam shells for the food and stopped home to pick up my supplies before heading for the temple of the Trinity. I was not affiliated with the temple, but I found it best for business to set up near enough to it that my postulants assumed the connection, but far enough to avoid inciting the irritation of the priests. My work benefited from a sense of mystery and danger, anyway, which being at the edge of town magnified, near the unbroken horizon and its uneasy vastness. We don't fare well alone beneath the sun. Even an eperu can die if left too long without shelter or water.
So I went to my habitual spot, marked only by the lack of rocks—I had long since picked them all out of the sand to spare my feet—and dug my staff into the ground so that the ribbons fluttered with the occasional wind. I poured oil into the firebowls and lit them, then set out the bowl for my clients' offerings. And then I sat with my hands on my knees, and I waited.
I always wondered what the evenings would bring me. I usually got a spread of topics: a few postulants—emodo, inevitably—asking about love, a few about business ventures. At least one person who wanted to know if they'll Turn, and to what sex. Once in a while, I got something unusual, but it was rare. Most people
Each of my clients got a drawing: I traced a box in the sand and then filled it in with a pattern, usually one I'd created long since for the kind of question they asked me. And then I danced, letting the ribbons from the staff add their element of chance, and when I was done, they cast stones from a pouch I offered them, and I made up a story based on the characters on their painted faces and where they fell on the drawing.
It was a good living for a storyteller. Better than I could have made as a clay-keeper, spelling out histories and fictions on the sand, stone by stone. People will pay more for stories they think are about themselves. My only regret was that my choice of profession seemed to have attracted what appeared to be divine attention, though so far that had happened only once, and I was grateful.
This evening was much like any other. I did not want for clients, and I worked them quickly. My offering bowl filled with shell as the evening waned and the heat drained from the sand beneath my feet. Watching my earnings accrue usually pleased me. Tonight I only looked at the mound and wondered how long the House could run on a cowry the length of my thumb.
And then the night brought me something new... and unwelcome. For as I crouched beside the bowl, studying its contents, the wind that ruffled my mane over my sloped nose was not warm, but cold: cold like life departing the body, too cold for the warm spring night. I shuddered and looked up, and found an emodo standing at my square. I thought I recognized him from my afternoons at the cheldzan, people-watching; his profile seemed familiar, as did the short silvered curls of his ear-tufts. His clothing proclaimed him someone of rank and wealth, though the House token depending from his sash had turned so its face was hidden against his thigh.
"Fire in the Void," he said, his voice betraying his uncertainty. "I have heard you speak truth with His voice."
I straightened and faced him. "You have come with a question," I said, because he hadn't asked one yet and I wasn't about to admit to otherworldly wisdom... especially not now, when it might actually descend.
"I have," he said.
"Tell me your name," I said, and held up a hand before he could speak. "A name."
Not a dumb male, for he understood me immediately. "I am the Sentinel."
I frowned. An unusual choice, taken straight from truedark tales where there were still cities on the back of Ke Bakil, rather than the ruins and dilapidated towns that now strove for survival. "And what have you come to ask the Void, Sentinel?"
He hesitated but didn't shift from foot to foot. A more composed client than my usual, then. Older too, now that he had drawn closer and I could mark the lines at the corners of his eyes. There was a single spiral mark beneath one of them. "There is change coming, Fire in the Void. Change, and I am not sure whether to oppose it or smooth its passage."
Typically I told people not to resist change—how stupid was that to even try? Change is life. And I was already planning how to communicate that to this rich old male when the staff in my hands began drawing its own pictures.
I don't want this, I hissed, but that whisper in my mind was swept away by the cold wind that blew my hair back from my eye. And so I drew, cutting the divining square in half along a diagonal and darkening one side while leaving the other untouched. I didn't dance; the ribbons didn't cut into the field. I left no foot or claw marks. I just stepped past it to hand the pouch of stones to my now very much unwanted client and said, "Throw."
He glanced at me and whatever he saw in my eyes made him look away. The stones in the pouch shifted as he reached inside, and then he threw. Five stones only, of the fifty I'd painted, but he threw them far and they fell in a perfect spread, two on the darkness, two on the pristine sand, and one on the exact border.
We both stared at it for a heartbeat, knowing it was too perfect a cast for any mortal hand.
"What does it mean?" he asked, voice hoarse. He cleared his throat and asked again, more normally, "Star of Night?"
I bent over the field and turned the stones over, reading their faces. This time I didn't bother to protest—or dare, maybe. The cold on my back was so severe I could feel it through the thin cloth of my vest, and I had the sense that if I was unwise enough to resist the reading the Void would visit me with less debatable signs of His presence.
"On the side of light," I said, and did not bother to choose tactful words or poetic ones, "where nothing has been changed, I find grief and sickness. On the uncertain dark field of change, I find cruelty, and hope."
"How can cruelty and hope live together side by side?" the emodo asked, distressed now.
I ignored him and finished, "In the center, I find death. There is no walking a line between these choices, Sentinel. You must be bold and speak for one or the other." I looked up at him, trying not to resent him for the words that were using my throat to reach him. "Now choose your final stone, the one that represents yourself."
Reluctantly, he reached into the pouch and withdrew a stone, tossing it lightly onto the field. It rolled to a stop on the dark side, and I looked at it. So did he.
"I suppose I've made my choice already, haven't I," he said as we studied it.
"So it seems," I said, and bent to retrieve it. And it was, "—change."
He stared at it for several moments, then deliberately set a shell on top of the night's offerings, one as large as my fisted hand. "Thank you for the Void's counsel, Star of Night. I know now what I must do."
As I watched him walk away, I trembled, wondering what on all the world had happened, and what the Void had used me to do.
I did no more divining that night. If any more postulants came seeking the Fire in the Void, they found nothing beneath the firmament but silence and an enigmatic drawing on the sand, left as warning of what was to come.
As usual, both friend and apprentice were awaiting me when I arrived, and both knew instantly that I had had a long night.
Bilil said, "I'll get tea," and vanished before I could protest that I loved him. That left me to Dekashin, who said, "Something uncomfortable."
"Is it so obvious?" I asked.
It just shook its head and said, "Keshul, Keshul. How long have we known you now?"
"Long enough," I admitted, and sat across from it after pulling off my pants and vest. The long-cloth I left on, but after wearing the rest of it all day I got tired of the drag at my hair, which sprouted all the way down my spine to my tail. I scrubbed my face with cold hands, wondering if the Void would ever leave them so I could be warm again. "I don't suppose you've heard anything in the het."
"Heard anything?" Dekashin asked. "That's remarkably vague."
"Anything about... changes," I said. "Big changes."
It clicked its tongue against its teeth. "Nothing like that, no. But I haven't been out in town for a few days, with the pefna working us all so much. Why?"
"I had a client..." I said, and trailed off as Bilil joined us. This time I finished the ritual: "I love you."
"I know," he said, smiling, and poured us all tea.
"An emodo came to me," I continued after my apprentice had settled, bright tail folded over his feet. "Asking about whether he should fight some change. And the... Void... was interested in it. I think."
"You think?" Dekashin asked carefully. Neither of us were true believers... or at least, Dekashin wasn't and I didn't want to be. But the incident last year with Running Rikka and the Unnamed had given me a bad turn on the subject. Since then, I'd had occasional inexplicable knowledge that I tried not to examine too closely.
"I think," I agreed, trying not to sound as miserable as I was. "I told him—or something told him—that there would be no fighting this change. It seemed more significant than just some internal matter or personal decision."
"Who was it, did you know him?" Dekashin asked.
"I couldn't even read his house token," I said. "But he was rich. Very rich. And not young." I thought. "I've seen him in the center of town, maybe. Short ear tufts, curled. Pale in the starlight. And a ridged profile, not sloped."
"Ke Eduñil," Bilil said promptly.
We both stared at him.
"Ke Eduñil," Bilil repeated. "Who heads the House of Transactions. His mane was short, cut at the shoulders? And dark eyes, with one spiral under the left."
