“Keep it?” he asked.
“Too small,” Churls said. “Feed it to the sea.”
Berun nodded his great, eyeless head. “Yours, too.”
Churls pushed the cat over the edge, and Berun threw the fish after it. The wind pushed both out from the cliff wall as they fell, arcing down to the distant waterline. Churls turned away when she could no longer see the cat’s tumbling body, and climbed into Berun. The water was warmer than she had expected. A month’s worth of grime floated free and mixed with the blood. Berun rearranged the floor of the tub, molding it under Churls’s body.
She slept, and for the first time since leaving Nbena did not dream of Vedas.
EBN BON MARI
THE 23rd OF THE MONTH OF CLERGYMEN, 12499 MD
THE CITY OF TANSOT, KINGDOM OF STOL / JEROUN ORBIT
Every few years, she painted a new sigil on her voidsuit. The paint, a mixture of pigment, ground elder offal, bonedust, and reconstituted blood, soaked into the black leather, tattooing it nearinstantaneously. The bond was permanent, and thus one had to be careful painting a sigil. A single misstroke and it was ruined, precious space and paint wasted. The elder skin needed to construct one voidsuit cost the academy nearly as much as a new building. Alchemical paint alone sold for forty times its weight in bonedust.
Ebn had never erred in her painting. For seven decades she had possessed one suit, the very same suit she had worn on her first jubilant ascension into orbit—a remarkable feat of preservation even among her peers, all of whom cared for their suits as if they were offspring.
Others constructed studios for their suits, directing sunlight through mirrored channels into mirrored rooms. Some kept theirs in cold storage closets, forcing a kind of stasis on the material. A few even doused their suits in alchemical light far more intense than nature provided. They hoarded their recipes, striving to reproduce the sun’s spectrum of light exactly.
Ebn disapproved of these artificial means. She considered natural light more than sufficient for the nourishment of elder skin artifacts, and so kept her suit on a swiveling table enchanted to track the sun across the sky.
The demonstrable success of this technique, which seemed so crude compared to others, confounded many of her peers. Some attempted to replicate her setup, but ultimately could not rationalize leaving such a valuable possession out in the open.
It had not occurred to Ebn to worry about thievery for some fifty years. She had stitched spells of defense and detailed automation into the seams of her suit and sealed them with elder synovial fluid. The suit could defend itself physically and cast preprogrammed spells to ward off sophisticated attacks.
Like all articles of clothing composed of elder skin, the voidsuit developed a strong telepathic bond with its wearer. Ebn knew its condition at all times. With enough concentration, she could make it come to her. It lumbered like an ill-made construct, but it would power through enemies and walls in order to reach her. On an autumn afternoon in 12457, she had collapsed on the floor of the gymnasium, muscles unresponsive, the victim of a usurper’s poisoning. Before the solution dragged her under completely, she summoned her suit.
It had carried her to safety, saved her life.
Though she knew it was not technically sentient, Ebn had never been able to stop herself from cooing to hers as she worked. Painting a sigil was an act of intimacy, a rare occasion to remove her gloves and let her tongues taste the air. They strained out of her palms, an oddly pleasurable sensation akin to stretching the tightness out of one’s wrist, trying to lap at the paint as if they possessed minds of their own. By the time she finished painting, her hands were pleasurably sore from gripping the brush and keeping her tongues in check.
Her self-control all but spent, before capping the paint jar Ebn usually allowed her tongues to taste a tiny bit of paint. She dipped the straining tip of each organ into the thick brown fluid. The vague taste of iron and loam seemed to linger in her nose as her quivering tongues retracted into her palms. Bright motes, daylight stars, swam before her eyes. Her wrists twitched and she clenched her fists against the faint stirrings of nausea that preceded the euphoria.
She waited.
Though prepared for it, the wave always caught her by surprise. It lifted her off her feet and swept her away. Adrift in blackness, the sun nonetheless seemed to shine upon her. The same heat bathed her skin, invigorating her. She moved her arms as if she were swimming, though she had never before swum and never desired to. She opened her mouth and the heat entered her body, tasting of lemon and rose and marrow. Time stopped and she swam.
She would wake hours later, encased in her voidsuit, arms and legs sore from the unaccustomed exercise.
Today, she painted a sigil of influence—a simple, almost elementary character designed to increase its wearer’s persuasive faculty. Her tongues remained oddly quiescent during the process, only venturing forth from her palms briefly to taste the air.
Sigil completed, she sewed twelve spells of compulsion into the joints where the suit’s armored plates met at underarm and groin. Hopefully, for all of their jealous watching, not one of her lieutenants would notice the slight alteration. Certainly, they would wonder why she had painted what seemed such a simple sigil on her suit, and conjecture among themselves.
Only Qon knew the full extent of her plan. The spells would increase the sigil of influence’s power, allowing Ebn to draw the god’s attention and amplify the mages’ message of goodwill—to seduce him into looking kindly upon them, in effect. A risky maneuver, surely, yet she believed it would work. She had diagrammed and re-diagrammed the spell’s thaumatic output, proving its grace and subtlety.
She wondered what Pol’s reaction to the plan would have been. Approval, possibly. Certainly, it was a more aggressive approach than she had ever espoused before.
She and Pol were not yet lovers as she had planned. In truth, her mind balked at the thought of using the spells of compulsion—the sex spells, as Qon had crassly labeled them—on him. But for the twelve she had incorporated into her suit, she kept them in the jar in her office, away from view. Maybe she had overthought the whole process of seduction, which should be quite simple in theory. Always in theory.
Slip them under his door, a voice urged. Act!
She imagined calling him with her mind, followed by his arrival at her doorstep. Undressing each other. His body under hers. Afterwards, the feeling of his long torso against her back, his lips brushing her shoulders.
The spells she had created were flawless. She examined them daily. They would bend him to her will entirely.
Banishing these thoughts, she returned her suit to its table. Before capping the jar of alchemical paint, she held her right hand over it. The tongue refused to emerge from her palm. She tried the left hand, to the same result. A good thing, perhaps. The aftereffects of tasting the paint were mildly disorienting, and she needed to keep her mind sharp for the evening’s ascension. Possibly, the tongues had picked up on her restive mood and responded with a rare show of empathy. Their lasciviousness had limits, she knew. They were a part of her. They understood fear easily enough.
Ebn had good reason for fear. She had failed to seduce the god once already.
‡
Of course, history proved that many before her had been equally incautious. Even those whose statues now lined the Avenue of Saints had been fools in their own right—murderers, rapists, manipulators, acting in the name of Adrash. The world celebrated men and women of violent conviction, but ultimately the actions of such individuals had driven the god from the earth. Read with a discerning eye, the story of the world was one of brutishness, impetuosity, and spite.