Chapter 5
Familiar
Lyric wakes with his face smooshed against Iriset’s hip, neck at an unfortunate angle, and one arm draped over her thighs. She smells like sweat and blood and he sits up with a deep frown.
However long he passed out, nobody touched them. He’s torn between thanks and offense. It takes effort to peel his mouth open, and several tries to wet his tongue. He feels like a desert grew inside his lungs as he slept.
Rolling off the bed, Lyric’s feet clomp against the floor, still encased in boots.
The room itself is plain blue-washed walls, with a honeycomb ceiling of blue-green.
The large bed sways as he stands. Its corners are attached by thick silver wires to metal beams, and the platform drifts only a handspan over the tiled floor.
The tiles are dark blue, like the dome of the Moon-Eater’s Temple back home, and climb up the inner wall.
Humor floats in the back of Lyric’s mind at the similarity. Then suddenly Lyric can hardly breathe.
The Moon-Eater, the chimeras, Old Sarenpet. The Apostate Age. He is back in time; he is in the past. Somehow. There was no pink-silver moon of Aharté watching from the vertex of the sky.
Pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes, Lyric takes a deep breath.
Then another. Or he’s gone mad, or this is the most elaborate dream.
A trick of the numen? Something unknown like a power to create illusions and trap him?
Lyric’s inner design twists and pops, uncertainty and fear making ecstatic and falling twine jaggedly together.
The forces here are so difficult to understand because they batter at him chaotically.
It isn’t like Silence. It isn’t Silence at all.
This is before Silence, before the city was reshaped to Aharté’s will. To Holy Design.
But Lyric’s dominant force is rising. He breathes, imagining a line of pink moonlight from the center of his hips up his spine, tugging up and up, through neck and skull and out of his crown to lift into the sky.
All his unstable inner forces drag toward the pillar of rising, untangling, threading into the patterns his body knows.
Lyric focuses. He feels everything from the pressure of the floor against the soles of his feet to the twinge in his hip from sleeping soundly, from the pinch of his pants at his waist, his overfull bladder, the tickle of cloth on his shoulder blades, to the gentle warm ache of his neck and his dry mouth, cracked lips, the hum of soundlessness in his ears.
Strange that he hears nothing. No buzz of life, of movement or conversation, no birds. The room is dead with silence, not living with it. The wide bubble of dark blue glass that might be a window lets in spare light and no sound.
He glances at Iriset, sprawled on her back, head tilted half off the pillow. Sleeping. Breathing.
Lyric strides to an inner wall where there’s the impression of an arched door. He skims his fingers along the seams, up and down the smooth glass-like texture, seeking a mechanism to open it.
Nothing.
“Hello?” he calls, not too loudly for fear of startling Iriset awake. He knocks. Then again.
The wall shimmers like slipping rain, then the rain vanishes into the floor and leaves behind an arched passage.
Two Sarenpet-brown women in violet tunics and skirts wait.
One speaks a word Lyric thinks means something like honor or integrity.
It’s said with a questioning lilt, so he decides it must be a title like “honorie.”
“Lyric,” he says, touching his chest. “Lyric needs food and water and, ah—” He doesn’t know the word for toilet or relief, either. But his bashful glance down must do the trick.
The woman who spoke, with brown curls in several relaxed buns down along the base of her skull, smiles. “Come this way,” she says.
“Iriset—” Lyric glances back at his wife, and the younger attendant touches his arm in a few quick pats.
“This servant will see to Lyric’s wife.”
“I—” Lyric gathers himself. “Lyric will care for Iriset, change, feed.”
“Yes,” the older attendant says. “Bathing room is just here. Lyric Aharté can care for Lyric Aharté, then take care of honorie’s wife.”
He is reluctant to leave Iriset, but steels himself to go with the older attendant. She leads him along a rounded corridor and to a nearby archway. Two shallow steps lead down into another round blue room. Lyric asks her name.
“Saff,” the attendant says. She’s his mother’s age, by the delicate wrinkles on her warm tan skin and a few wiry silver curls puffed out from her buns.
Thinking of Diaa of Moonshadow sends a sharp pang through Lyric’s chest, grief stopping up his throat.
She’s only been dead for a few days, dead by his wife’s hand and—Lyric presses his tongue hard to the roof of his mouth.
His eyes feel too wide as he watches Saff patter around the washing room, pointing at a toilet alcove, a long washing stand, wardrobe, and heated towel rack, before crouching at the edge of a sunken bath to run water from four massive spouts.
The floor is strange and Lyric focuses on it: a thick layer of rippled glass over a mosaic of hundreds of colorful fish.
It’s beautiful. Lyric counts the fish—four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four—before the knot of grief melts enough he can breathe evenly.
Saff is still pointing out soaps and oils, then flings open the wardrobe to reveal robes and plush towels.
Lyric nods and strides to the toilet alcove.
The design is unlike what he’s used to, but simple enough to figure out.
The forces don’t ping and tug in the same way they do at home; instead he has to focus in order to sense them at all—a tangle, a mash of ecstatic and flow, maybe…
Iriset would know. He’s going to have to rely on her here, whether he likes it or not. Rely on her to survive, and to get home. (Can they even go home?)
Lyric decides not to wash himself first. He goes back to the bedroom to find the younger attendant standing beside the bed with her hands folded. Lyric nods and sweeps Iriset up into his arms before taking her to the bathroom.
There he instructs Saff to lay out a few towels for him to settle Iriset upon, then he gestures for her to go.
Stripping, Lyric folds his robe and trousers to indicate he wants them washed not discarded, and his loincloth, too. Then he kneels on the smooth glass to undress Iriset. Blood is crusted to the remains of her tunic and stuck in her hair. Those clothes he tosses aside like trash.
A soft tapping sound alerts him that something fell out of Iriset’s shirt: a smoky quartz coin.
An echo coin, commemorating someone’s death by unraveling.
Lyric holds it in his palm and stares. It could be her father’s.
Or the real Singix’s. Closing his eyes briefly, Lyric chooses to suppress his feelings and sets it on the dressing table.
Lyric shuts off the water valve, tests the temperature, then carefully lifts Iriset up and climbs into the bath with her.
For a moment, he settles her against him on his lap, back to front, her head lolled against his shoulder. He closes his eyes and holds her. Her weight is so familiar to him.
The grief returns, and Lyric presses his temple to her dirty hair, letting a few tears leak out because she can’t see.
It’s all so much, too much, the last few days and now this completely unbelievable circumstance of being hundreds of years in the past. That such is possible seems beyond reckoning, and yet here is Iriset, who lived undetected in the heart of Silence. In his heart.
The edge of the pool is rounded and, aside from the stairs leading into the water, is rimmed by a long underwater ledge for seating.
Brief exploration shows the ledge to undulate at various heights.
He finds a suitable place to prop Iriset so that she’s submerged to her collarbone, then hurries to wash himself with a variety of the soaps Saff left on a tray beside the stairs.
The softest of the soaps smells dry and spicy like sugar sage, and Lyric takes that with him back to Iriset, along with a syrupy oil scented like desert jasmine.
It’s slow and occasionally awkward as Lyric washes his wife.
First her body, and oh how strange—most of it is so well known to him he could conjure it in any lonely darkness.
Through the distortion of water, Lyric watches his mirané-brown hand against her dark peach skin.
When Iriset changed herself to play the part of Singix Es Sun, she changed her skin color to pearl white, and the thick, knotting texture and rich brown of her hair to silky-straight, fine, lustrous black.
She wore a craftmask on her face to widen her cheekbones and change the shape of her eyes, straighten her lashes, thin her bottom lip into symmetry and sharpen the bow.
A million tiny changes to her ears and nostrils, the eyebrows, the arch of her hairline.
But aside from the veil of Singix over hair, face, and skin, this body is her body and always has been. He is so familiar.
Lyric knows the line of her clavicle, the slope of shoulder, the curve of breast, and the soft fold of her belly when she slouches in relaxation.
He closes his eyes again, dropping the soap so that it sinks onto the ledge.
He washes her and he knows her, his wife.
Lyric doesn’t think he’s ever washed her hair before.
Just under her left breast, the pagoda cap rests.
It tingles merrily, keeping to its work of recovery.
Lyric slides his fingers between the threads to feel that the skin’s texture slicks where the dart pierced her.
Lyric presses against the strength of ribs to either side.
Iriset breathes slowly, so slowly. Her skull is a weight on his arm, and the rest of her body drifts, skimming against his thigh occasionally.