"Some people hear a lie when they're told the truth. You're so proud of your status as the son of Rasa and Wetchik, but obviously whatever genes you got from your parents, they weren't the right ones."
"While I'm sure you got the finest your parents lad to offer."
She looked at him with obvious contempt, and then she was gone.
"What a wonderful day this is going to be," he said-to no one, since he was alone. "My entire family hates me." He thought for a moment. "I'm not even sure that I want them to like me."
For one dangerous moment, alone on the portico, he toyed with the idea of slipping past the screens and going to the edge, leaning out, and looking at the forbidden sight of the Valley of the Holy Women, casually referred to as the Rift Valley, and more crudely known as the Canyon of the Crones. I'll see it and I bet I don't even get struck blind.
But he didn't do it, even though he stood there thinking about it for a long time. It seemed that every rime he was about to take a step toward the edge, his mind suddenly wandered and he hesitated, confiised, forgetting for a moment what it was he wanted to do. Finally he lost interest and went back inside the house.
He should have gone back to class-it's what he expected to do when he went inside. But he couldn't bring himself to do it. Instead he wandered to the front door and out onto the porch, into the streets of Basilica. Mother would probably be furious at him but that was too bad.
He must have been seeing where he was going, since he didn't bump into anything, but he had no memory of what he saw or where he had been. He ended up in the Fountains district, not far from the neighborhood of Rasa's house; and in his mind, he had circled through the same thoughts over and over again, finally ending up not very far from where he started.
One thing he knew, though: He couldn't dismiss this all as madness. Father was not crazy, however new and strange he might seem; and as for Mother, if her vision of the burning of Earth was madness, then she had been mad since before he was born. So there was something that put ideas and desires and visions into his parents' minds-and into Luet's, too, couldn't forget her. People called this something the Oversoul, but that was just a name, a label. What was it? What did it want? What could it actually dot If it could talk to some people, why didn't it just talk to everybody?
Nafai stopped across a fairly wide street from what might be the largest house in Basilica. He knew it well enough, since the head of the Palwashantu clan was mated with the woman who lived there. Nafai couldn't remember her name-she was nobody, everyone knew she had bought the ancient house with her mate's money, and if she didn't renew his contract then even with the house she'd be nobody-but he was Gaballufix. There was a family connection-his mother was Hosni, who later on became Wetchik's auntie and the mother of Ekmak. Between that blood connection and the fact that Father was perhaps the second most prestigious Palwashantu clansman in Basilica, they had visited this house at least once, usually two or three times a year since as long ago as Nafai could remember.
As he stood there, stupidly watching the front of that landmark building, he suddenly came alert, for without meaning to he had recognized someone moving along the street. Elemak should have been home sleeping-he had traveled all night, hadn't he? Yet here he was, in mid-afternoon. For a panicked moment Nafai wondered if Elya was looking for him- was it possible that Mother had missed him and worried and now the whole family, perhaps even Father's employees as well, were combing the city looking for him?
But no. Elemak wasn't looking for anybody. He was moving too casually, too easily. Looking in no particular direction at all.
And then he was gone.
No, he had turned down into the gap between Cabal-Infix's house and the building next door. So he did have a destination.
Nafai had to know what Elemak was doiog. He trotted along the street to where he had a clear view down the narrow road. He got there in time to see Elemak ducking into a low alky doorway into Gaballufix's house.
Nafai couldn't imagine what business Elya might have with Gaballufix-especially something so urgent that he had to go to his house the same day he got back from a long trip. True, Gaballufix was technically Elya's half-brother, but there were sixteen years between them and Gaballufix had never openly recognized Elya as his brother. That didn't mean, though, that they couldn't start behaving more like close kinsmen now. Still, it bothered Nafai that Elemak had never mentioned it and seemed to be concealing it now.
Whether the question bothered him or not, Nafai knew that it would be a very bad idea to ask Elemak about it directly. When Elya wanted anybody to know what he was doing with Gaballufix, he'd tell them. In the meantime, the secret would be safe inside Elya's head.
A secret inside somebody's head.
Luet had known that Nafai was in love with Eiadh.
Well, it wasn't all that secret-Luet might have guessed it from the way that he looked at her. But there on the front porch of Mother's house, Luet had said, "Tou're the bastard," as if she were answering him for calling her a bastard. Only he hadn't said anything. He had only thought of her as a bastard. It wasn't an opinion he had expressed before. He had only thought of it at that moment, because he was annoyed with Luet. Yet she had known.
Was that the Oversoul, too? Not just putting ideas into people's heads, but also taking them out and telling them to other people? The Oversoul wasn't just a provider of strange dreams-it was a spy and a gossip as well.
It made Nafai afraid, to think that not only was the Oversoul real, but also that it had the power to read his most secret, transitory thoughts and tell them to someone else. And to someone as repulsive as the little bastard witchgirl, no less.
It frightened him like the first time he went out into the sea by himself. Father had taken them all on a holiday, down to the beach. The first afternoon there, they had all gone out into the sea together, and surrounded by his father and brothers-except Issib, of course, who watched them from his chair on the beach-he had felt the sea play with him, the waves shoving him toward shore, then trying to draw him out again. It was fun, exhilarating. He even dared to swim out to where his feet couldn't quite touch the bottom, all the while playing with Meb and Elya and Father. A good day, a great day, when his older brothers still liked him. But the next morning he got up-early, left the tent and went out to the water alone. He could swim like a fish; he was in no danger. And yet as he walked out into the water he felt an inexplicable unease. The water tugging at him, pushing him; he was only a few meters from shore, and yet with no one else in the water, all by himself, he felt as if he had lost his place, as if he had already been washed out to sea, as if he were caught in the grasp of something so huge that any part of it could swallow him up. He panicked then. He ran to shore, struggling against the water, convinced that it would never let him go, dragging at him, sucking him down. And then he was on the sand, on the dry sand above the tide line, and he fell to his knees and wept because he was safe.
But for those few moments out in the water he had felt the terror of knowing how small and helpless he was, how much power there was in the world, and how easily it could do to him whatever it wanted and there was nothing he could do to resist it.
That was the fear he felt now. Not so strong, not so specific as it had been that day on the beach-but then, he wasn't a five-year-old anymore, either, and he was better at dealing with fear. The Oversoul wasn't an old legend, it was alive, and it could force visions into his own parents' minds and it could search out secrets inside Nafai's head and tell them to other people, to people that Nafai didn't like and who didn't like him.