Chapter 27 #2
There is a labyrinth tucked inside low walls of stone, with a broad gate swung open in welcome. The sun is setting and they’ve yet to find a place to sleep tonight, but Lyric hands Setka his pack and shade umbrella, unlaces his boots, and goes in on cold feet.
The labyrinth is built of gray slate, with ferns and moss roses growing between.
The path is an eight-pattern spiral turning and turning exactly at the measured pace he learned at the Silent Chapel when he was a child.
Lyric breathes in eight-count; he draws his inner design into elegant balance.
He breathes carefully, stepping light and eager.
Lyric finds a smile on his lips.
When he reaches the center of the labyrinth, a voice calls to him and he sees a priest standing as far from Setka as possible while remaining within the gate. The priest’s face is painted blue. From across the labyrinth Lyric can see the widening of her dark eyes. “Moon-Eater?” the priest breathes.
“Lyric,” he answers. He waits as the priest ignores Setka and steps into the labyrinth. Lyric closes his eyes and breathes, letting the cold air pull through him, and he imagines the labyrinth is on his body, the priest’s steps against his chest in the eight-count rhythm.
He feels the moment the priest stops before him. The priest hums. It could be a hum of curiosity, of contemplation. But Lyric knows it. She hums the tone of flow: Move, she hums, move moving have moved will move always flow no choices made, just flow.
Lyric taps his teeth together and quietly snaps his fingers: ecstatic, the equalizing partner of flow.
The priest lifts her tone into rising, and Lyric’s inner design answers with a high breath. But he sighs into falling, a descent scale.
Between them, they move in and out of all four forces, weaving a quiet humming song of forces, of power, and Lyric feels his skin pebble, even on his newly exposed scalp.
He feels the flow of breath in his lungs, the rising heat of excitement, and the ecstatic charge of realization. The falling pulling him toward her.
They end simultaneously in a neutral note, the symbol of balance, the best they can do with only two of them.
“Lyric has questions,” Lyric murmurs.
“Then stay,” she answers, guiding him toward the gate. “The chapel is near.”
“For Setka, as well?” he says, flicking his glance to the chimera. The way the priest avoided her is the clearest indication this is a true cult of Aharté out here. They would consider someone like Setka anathema. Though Lyric understands, he cannot agree and won’t leave Setka alone.
The priest’s blue expression pinches.
“Setka knows Silence,” Lyric says, unable to hold the chiding tone completely tucked away.
When the priest turns back to him, her mouth pops open with a click of shock and she strides closer, until she is right in Lyric’s face. Lyric, feeling a push of power to back away, holds his ground. What has he done wrong?
“It looked like only the firelight before,” the priest says, peering at his face with a look of growing horror. “Like natural heterochromia!”
Cold dread coagulates in Lyric’s throat, sinking into his stomach.
“But that is human architecture,” the priest says.
“Yes,” Lyric admits. There is no other answer. “But—”
She stares more baldly at him. “The forces, the rhythm of this man’s Silence is so smooth, this priest thought to be in the presence of another priest. It is impossible to be a priest of Aharté with such apostasy embedded in one’s own body.”
“Oh,” Lyric says. A handful of arguments present themselves: It saved his life, he didn’t consent, he didn’t want this; no, because it saved his life, it should be holy.
That is what he said to Iriset. She either is part of the Holy Design or is not.
The same can be said for Lyric, and he knows what he is. Doesn’t he?
(Doesn’t he?)
“Oh,” he says again, more softly, resigned.
Some small thing inside him clicks as it breaks.
He thinks, oh, Iriset was right, and also she ruined him.
And he’s better, even though he can never fit perfectly into Aharté’s Holy Design again.
Not in it, yet without it he’s dying. Lyric belongs nowhere.
A long time from now, and only four quads ago, Lyric sat with his wife on the balcony of their suite in the palace of the Vertex Seal as he turned over the topsoil in the largest box of flowers—mostly desert gentians—because the late-summer flowers were coming up, little green shoots unfurling, and he had learned that shifting the surface soil loosened the particles of nutrients for the plants, and helped water reach the roots.
Singix asked about the fertilizer, and he explained it was from the menagerie, from several types of animal waste mixed with plant waste and ground grass and beer, of all things.
She had leaned her head on his shoulder and misquoted a line from Word of Aharté.
The line is: there is only waste where it is willed.
What Singix said was, “There is only waste where I want it to be.”
Lyric had smiled, rather surprised, and put his nose to her hairline, breathing in her scent. “You read it,” he said. He’d given her his own copy of the slim book several days before.
Singix tilted her head to press her eye harder into his shoulder. “I, um, I liked that line, and it is… something similar to the wisdom of my demon of beauty. That beauty is determined by the one wielding it, or that… ah, anything that contributes to beauty could not be a waste.”
“So there is no waste, if it feeds the flowers?” Lyric had teased her, and she giggled, holding tighter to his arm.
Lyric thinks of that evening, and the sex the conversation had evolved into, as he leaves the town with Aharté’s labyrinth under a gleaming silver-pink moon.
He thinks of it because in the darkness he can smell the precise scent of dark soil around them, damp and fallow.
He thinks of it because when he takes Setka’s hand and holds it perhaps too tightly, pulling her away, he says, “We can’t stay with them,” and Setka, who heard, tugs gently on his hand.
She says, “It’s all right to have different feelings about what happened to you at different times. ”
The wisdom of this child reminds Lyric he himself has rarely been wise.
They walk through the night, until the moon sets and it is too dark, and Lyric tells Setka about Word of Aharté.
He tells her about the demon of beauty, too, and finds himself smiling because it was Iriset speaking with him that evening, not Singix, and Lyric wonders if the demon of beauty really knows anything about waste and fertilizer, or if Iriset made it up on a whim to sound more like Singix than herself.
But he can’t let go of the idea that in that moment, Iriset had been honest: She did like the line from Aharté’s words about the lack of waste in balance, in the Holy Design.
Maybe it’s something Iriset appreciates in design, too. A perfectly crafted force array has no waste. It is itself, it uses every charge, every angle, every heat and gravity and slide of flow.
Lyric promised to write to her, and the next time he and Setka stay in a village, he asks if they send letters back to the capital and if he can partake.
The letter he writes starts the way Word of Aharté starts:
“There is no beginning for me…”