Tell me what happened, Tawaddud says, and for a moment she does not want to. But Tawaddud coaxes and she feels so safe now, a part of her in the bird jar, a part of her in a warm body.
I lived on an island once, by the sea. I was good with patterns. I could see them in the clouds. I wove them into socks for my grandchildren. Then my hands ached and shook. I did not want to get so old. I gave my mind away. They sent me an uploading kit. I said goodbye to Angus, at his grave. I sat there and swallowed the pill and put the cold crown on my head. I thought maybe I would see him, on the other side. But my hands still ached, afterwards, for ever.
Ssh. Don’t think about that. Think about Alile.
I miss Alile.
I know. What was it like to be Alile?
I helped her see patterns in the desert, in the wind, in the wildcode. We found treasures. There are ghosts beneath the earth, you can dig them up if you know where to look. We loved to fly. We climbed into the rukh ship’s tackle. They shouted us to come back down, but we don’t care. Look at them below, how frightened they look, Velasquez and Zuweyla, all of them. They can’t see the lights beneath the desert’s skin, but we can, and the boy can. Look at the lights!
She lifts her hands, presses them against her eyes. Lights flash more as she presses harder. Look at them!
No, no, no. Look at me. And there she is, looking at Arcelia, smiling. There are tears running down her cheeks, but she is smiling.
Think about Alile, not the lights.
Tired. Aching hands. Council. Meetings. Cassar wants to give the lights away, to the diamond men. Perhaps it is time to give them up. I am too tired to go to the desert. I was never tired before. I want to be tired again. I want to sleep. I want to dream. Can we dance until I get tired? I can hear music.
She tries to get up. Her feet want to dance.
Later. I know how it feels. Where did Alile go?
The Axolotl took her.
No. It can’t be.
The shock is like a tight wire cut in her mind, snapping and stinging. She clings to the entwinement desperately, lets Arcelia’s memory wash over hers – waves lapping at a hard rocky shore on a cold cold morning, wind and salt on my face, a hand in mine – and in a moment she is inside the bird’s mind again.
Are you sure? He was in my story, Arcelia. Are you telling stories as well?
No, I did not know his name before. But it was him, the jinn from your story. The Axolotl.
Where did he come from?
He was us and we were him and he said that it would be all right, that Alile would go to a better place, like I thought I would, at the grave. But I saw the wildcode take her. Insects made of black ink. They wrote over her. The Axolotl lied. The stories always lie.
What stories?
I saw it in the lights. There is a circle. It wants to jump over a square. It tries and fails, tries and fails. The square is in love with it and does not want it to go. The circle is looking for something that is lost.
Where did you hear it?
I don’t remember.
Where did . . . where did the Axolotl go?
I couldn’t see. She put me away. When he came, she put me into the forbidden place. There was a wall around it, in the athar. I miss Alile. I am her qarin. She is my muhtasib.
Yes, you are. You will always be.
She should have given me more. She could have lived inside me. She always took me out to watch the lights and then put me away. She should have given more. Now she is gone. She only left me one thing.
What is it?
I can’t tell you.
Show me and you can sleep. Show me and you can dance.
It echoes in her mind, a word that is like a labyrinth. A Secret Name whose syllables shine in her mind’s eye like a string of pearls. It is long, a melody almost: like all Names, it brings a feeling, a serenity: Father’s kitchen, just before the food is ready, his hands on her shoulders; waves on the shore of an island long gone. The smell of Angus’s hair in the morning.
It is time to go back to sleep, Tawaddud says. Arcelia feels her lips saying words that become music in the athar, and then she is back in her bird-shaped jar, dreaming that she is dancing, dreaming that she is Tawaddud.
Tawaddud gets up and gently places Arcelia the qarin bird back on her perch. The joints in her hands ache. Artificial entwinement is temporary, but it always leaves a trace. She hopes whatever part of her self-loop is left in the qarin’s mind provides her with some measure of comfort, even if she herself is filled with more disquiet than before. She removes her beemee and sits down. Her legs shake.
Why did he do this? Images of the Alile thing flash through her head. How could he? And why?
He is the father of body thieves. But he said he would never do it again. Is it because of me? Because we could not be together?
She can taste him in the story fragments from the qarin’s mind. The circle and the square. There was something very strange about it: the bare-bones abstraction, like written by a child. Usually, the forbidden stories of the body thieves are addictive, full of danger and cliffhangers and characters that insert themselves into your head and become you. But this is raw, full of a simple desire, a dreamlike need to find something.
And then there is the Secret Name that still echoes in her head like a brass bell.
Sumanguru is staring at her. She looks at him mutely and presses her aching hands against her forehead.
‘My apologies, Lord Sumanguru. It always takes a while to recover.’ What do I tell him? That it was my lover? Who knows what he will do?
She rubs her forehead again, trying to appear weaker than she is – not a difficult task after a night of little sleep, a missed breakfast, a carpet ride and an entwinement. ‘Please give me a moment.’
She gets up and goes to a small pond in the shade of a windmill tree. Tiny rukh birds skim its surface, disturbing her reflection with fluttering wings. She washes her face, not caring that she is ruining her makeup. Her gut is a painful knot. Her skin feels numb. The girl who loved only monsters. But I did not believe he was one, not really. Even if he tried to tell me.
Sumanguru sits very still by the qarin, watching it. She walks back to the circle of sunlight beneath the dome and puts on her smile.
‘Well?’
‘It was noise, for the most part. But Alile was possessed. A body thief took over her body, but she was able to hide her qarin before the invader was in complete control.’
‘What did you learn about this . . . thief?’
‘Only echoes of the story it used as a vector.’
‘That was all?’
‘Yes. But at least we know it was not a suicide.’ She looks down, lets her voice waver, wipes her eyes. ‘I am sorry, Lord Sumanguru. Lady Alile was a family friend.’
‘And the story you told the creature – what was its purpose?’
‘Like I said, it was meant to provide the entwinement with an anchor, a seed of my self-loop in Arcelia’s mind. A children’s tale, nothing more.’