He moved back until he felt a Janne touching the bare skin of his neck. He felt the kiss of its blossom, but it was cool and moist, rotting rather than growing. The Janne reveled in sunlight and now they were being starved. This will happen everywhere, O’Gan thought. Grasses and herbs, trees and shrubs, our spice farms, they’ll all start to die. This will become a world of rotting things. The spreading shadow paused, as if listening to his thoughts.
“What are you?” he asked again. “What do you want?”
The shadow whispered and flexed like thick water, darker waves forming on its surface. It flowed closer to O’Gan but paused several steps away. He could smell nothing, see nothing other than the shadow, and yet he heard the constant whisper, as though a sea of sand were being stirred by an unseen hand.
“If you’re here to help, then I’m ready to listen,” O’Gan said. “The other Mystics have given up on Hess, but there is fight left in the Shantasi.”
The shadow began to rise higher before him, taking on depth and tone. It formed the shape of a person, and gave it color and character: the dark rents of wounds, the fading light in its eyes.
Her mouth opened and closed as if trying to speak or breathe.
She was Shantasi. And O’Gan knew her. “A’Meer Pott!” She had been one of his first students over fifty years ago, before going out into the land and never returning. Now here she was again, a living corpse rising before him, showing him her wounds, shouting a plea he could not hear.
She did not react to her name. Her eyes did not change, and her mouth continued opening and closing, dripping lines of dark blood and clear saliva silvered by the moonlight. She had lost teeth, and an eye was gone. Her head had suffered a terrible injury. She was surely dead.
Yet this was no vision. “A’Meer, are you there, can you hear me? Are you A’Meer’s wraith? Have you come for me to chant you down?” Her one good eye glittered with tears. “Are you really there?”
O’Gan reached out. A whisper, a hiss, and her image retreated across the roof before him, remaining a steady five steps away. He walked faster and still she retreated. He stopped and backed away, the image of A’Meer following as though bound to him.
“What is it?” he said. He squinted, trying to make out what A’Meer was saying or whether she was actually saying anything. Her mouth fell open, cheeks sucked in, lips pressing together before the whole movement began again.
O’Gan backed away to the edge of the roof and turned to sniff at a Janne. He chose a bloom that had withered and died, and the smell that came from it was one of rot and surrender. He winced, turning to the next plant in line. This one was tall, its blooms few, and a couple of them still seemed to be drawing strength from the ancient stone in which it was buried. He pressed his face to a bloom, closed his eyes and breathed in.
Hope…a voice whispered, but it was like no voice he had ever heard before. It was a breeze through the bare branches of a tree, the wash of foamy waters on the shores of Sordon Sound, the whispered exhalation of a lover passing seed and giving life. It was the language of the land.
Panting, he breathed deeply of the bloom. He felt the pollen abrading the insides of his nostrils and the sting of rupturing blood vessels, and he tasted the blood that dripped over his top lip. But he did not hear that voice again. He moved to another bloom and inhaled its pollen, glancing back at A’Meer’s image, upright and dead, listening for the single word that had been breathed to him from the first intense vision.
“Hope!” he cried, his mind buzzing from so much pollen. He walked toward A’Meer, swaying across the Temple roof and falling to his knees. “Hope? Is there still hope, poor dead A’Meer?” To see her like this was distressing, but to hear that word uttered at the moment of her death, tofeel it, seemed to justify every Shantasi death. “Hope!” O’Gan screamed, and for a few seconds the bustle of the streets below the Temple died down, and he imagined pale faces looking up to see who dared shout this word.
A’Meer began to grow indistinct and hazy and O’Gan reached out to save her. She was coming apart before him, fading as though she were a painting splashed with water. He moved forward quickly, and this time the image of the dead Shantasi did not drift away. His fingertips reached her and passed inside, pressing against her fragmenting chest and finding a subtle resistance that surrounded his hand, like a thousand flies alighting on his skin. He gasped and pulled back, and for a second a smear of A’Meer came with him, dropping from his arm and merging with the shifting shadow at his feet.
The whisper came again, and the shadow filtered back over the edge of the Temple. O’Gan sat nursing his hand and repeating that word again and again, hoping the repetition would imbue it with some power, some truth.
There was hope. He had not been wrong. Now he only had to spread this knowledge.
WALKING DOWN THE steps from the Temple, O’Gan entered a world he no longer knew. He had been on the roof for almost two days, and in that time Hess had changed forever. It had once been a city of contemplation and consideration, a calm place where street markets sold food and drink to the many people lingering in the communal gardens, musing on the problems of life and death. Mystics had wandered the streets, eyes closed and hands folded as they considered the meaning of a vision from their last time on the Temple. Sometimes they would pause and begin to talk, using their Voice to gather an audience. Their words would have depth, their depths would give meaning, and a dozen people would move on possessed of more knowledge than before. The Mystics were the brain of Hess, the rest of the Shantasi living there its blood. The Mystic city troubled some; its atmosphere did not suit everyone. But of all the places O’Gan had been in New Shanti, Hess had always felt most like home.
Now it was strange to him, and he was a stranger within it. Halfway down the Temple staircase he paused to look down into the streets. He could make out more detail than had been possible from the Temple roof, and he could see just how much Hess had changed. Not only the city itself, but the people. Panic had overtaken contemplation, fear had usurped thoughtfulness and the streets had grumbled with the last of Hess’ population of half a million fleeing. He had been watching from the Temple for some time, but this close he could make out individual expressions and hear muttered curses rather than apologies when people walked into one another. One family pulled a large cart behind them, their belongings piled high, and they shouted at people to move out of the way, tugging the cart through a street barely wide enough to contain it. The father kicked a market stall aside, pushing it against the wall and stomping on spilled fruit so that the cart would not be slowed. The mother argued with the fruit seller, while two children sat wide-eyed in the back of the cart, surrounded by what their parents believed were their whole lives. Lamps still hung outside most buildings in an attempt to drive away the night, and the flames gave the children’s eyes a haunted look.
Many Mystics had joined in the flight. He still could not understand. “There’s hope,” he said, but he wondered how he could make them believe.
At the foot of the Temple, stepping down onto the ground for the first time in two days, O’Gan realized that the land itself had changed. It felt different beneath his feet, as though ages had come and gone. It was strange to him now, the rock beneath him unknown, the sand between his toes unfamiliar.
“Mystic,” a voice said. “Mystic!”
“O’Gan Pentle,” he said, already turning to confront the voice. A woman faced him, the hood drawn over her head barely hiding the bruising around her mouth, the dried blood beneath her nose. “What happened?”