Chapter 5 #2
The warm water and caretaking lull him into a meditative state. He can hear his pulse in his skull, and every tease of water on his skin, especially where the surface laps his chest and back, the curl of Iriset’s hair around his arm, a tentacle, clinging. Under her eyelids her eyes are still.
Lyric imagines letting go. Allowing her to sink down to the glass fish swarming in loops across the floor of the pool.
He threatened to kill her once, two, three nights ago—thousands of nights from now—the night he discovered her alive in the arms of the Saltbath rebel. She told him it would set him free.
“I’ll never be free of you,” he says again. Except there’s no voice to it, only the movement of dry lips. He can’t let her die: He needs her. He—
Water streams loudly away from them as he stands and sets her on the bed of towels Saff prepared.
Drying himself, Lyric spends a moment at the wardrobe toying with a semi-triangular cloth with string-ties at two corners that he guesses is a loincloth of a very different style to his own.
He makes it work. Then he chooses a pleated skirt that falls to his calves and reminds him of his childhood.
They have no vests or sleeveless robes, so he puts on a tunic that might be backward.
Lyric tells himself it’s only strange fashion, and not that he’s helpless without Garnet or palace attendants.
It feels pretty, anyway. He takes a loincloth and a long tunic to Iriset.
After patting her dry he puts them on her, then wraps her hair in a smaller towel.
The bedroom is empty, but the soft mattress has been redressed, several blankets replaced and pulled back at the pillows temptingly.
Lyric tucks Iriset in, then sits on the edge, looking toward the door with a frown.
He doesn’t want to leave her, but he needs to ask for food, to ask how long they’ve been here, where they are, exactly, what the rules are for their stay, and if there is a chapel of Aharté at all.
Anywhere. They know her name, they must know her.
Before Lyric can choose between driving himself into a spiral of anxiety or getting up, Saff appears with a tray of food. Behind her comes the younger attendant with a tray of cups and narrow jugs.
“Thanks given between friends,” Lyric murmurs.
The younger attendant uses the toe of her slipper to press the corner of one of the large floor tiles, and it shifts aside with a spark of ecstatic force to reveal a shallow cubby with a low table and two cushioned floor chairs.
Saff steps down to set bowls and small plates from her tray onto the table.
They’re thin glazed ceramic that catches light.
Lyric smells fishy broth, something spicy, and roasted vegetables.
When they finish, the attendants back up. “Does Lyric require anything else?” Saff asks.
“Do the windows open? Where are—where is this? How long has it been since Lyric and Iriset arrived?” The questions tumble out lacking in prioritization.
The younger attendant smiles. “Lyric Aharté has questions.”
“Name?”
Surprise lights her face, but she says, “Peace.”
“Do Peace and Saff have the authority to answer? Can these attendants take Lyric where Lyric wishes to go?”
They share a glance, then Saff says, “Eliri will come. Eliri is the Moon-Eater’s Adept Hand and knows what Lyric needs to know.”
“Soon?” Lyric asks. “Will Eliri come soon?”
“Yes.”
“Can Lyric have a comb?” Lyric asks, glancing at the spill of Iriset’s wet hair half wrapped in a towel, half soaking the pillow.
“Peace will bring it.”
They turn their faces and look down in a little bow, then leave.
Lyric sits cross-legged on the chair and explores the food and drink.
Water, and a pale golden herbal infusion, lacking real tea leaves from the southern coast. The soup is clear, with a few green onions floating on the oily top, and the base of the bowl is covered with a quad of tiny red river clams the size of Lyric’s thumbnail.
Not for eating, he assumes, but for flavor and nutrients.
Then there are vegetables showing slight char and smelling of chilis, pickled greens, and a yogurt or soft cheese speckled with more spice.
Friendly food to him, recognizable—not that they could know he’s from four-hundred-years-in-the-future here.
Munching on some of the vegetables, he picks up the soup and takes it to Iriset.
The bed sways as he sits, balancing the soup in one hand. He lifts Iriset, propping her against his lap, and ladles broth to her mouth. He makes a bit of a mess, but at least she’s fed.
Just as he finishes, Saff and Peace return, and behind them, Eliri.
Lyric stands as the attendants clear up the table and food, though they leave the water and tea. Peace sets a comb beside the water jug.
“Lyric Aharté,” Eliri says. Her voice is soft. Even. She studies him expressionlessly.
“Eliri. This, ah… Lyric was told Eliri is the Moon-Eater’s Adept Hand. Does that mean Eliri is an architect?” He uses the Old Sarenpet word for building designer, because their word for a force designer has fallen out of his head.
“Designer,” Eliri says, using the correct term. “Lyric asked about the window.”
He blinks. He did ask that. And so Lyric nods.
Eliri strides past him. “These windows do not usually open, but this designer can change it.” She touches the tip of one fingernail to the smooth blue wall in several places around one window, and in her wake, the bubbled glass rains away much like the door did.
Eliri hooks design threads with several fingernails, only visible to Lyric once she touches them, as if her fingers are styli.
She maneuvers them, pinching them off with her other hand—which glints in the new light. Styli built into her bones.
Pulling the threads across the opening, Eliri secures them in a complex spiral web.
The threads melt together like water forming puddles in between the lines, and the window is a bubble again.
“Touch here,” she says, indicating a flower-shaped carving that has appeared beside it.
“And the window will open. This door”—Eliri indicates the balcony window—“functions the same way. The lock is here.”
Lyric steps closer and can see a tiny carving.
Eliri brushes her finger against it, and the tall window drips away to reveal the sky beyond, and a narrow balcony with a glass rail.
The warm breeze slips inside, and a knot between his shoulder blades loosens.
He hadn’t realized how trapped he’d felt.
“Thanks given between friends.”
“One can say, ‘thanks given,’” Eliri says. She turns to him, her blunt haircut swishing against her neck. “Has Lyric’s wife woken?”
“No, but Iriset is nearer to waking than before.”
Eliri peers at Iriset, and her whole body seems to lean in that direction. Based on her expression, Lyric has no idea if she is merely curious, or if she views Iriset as a threat. “Would like to examine Iriset’s wounds when Iriset wakes.”
“Yes,” Lyric says. He knows without a doubt that Iriset will grant Eliri permission to examine her—and likely more.
Iriset will thrive here, he thinks, followed by a wave of melancholy he doesn’t care to examine.
This is the Apostate Age, and all manner of wondrous and terrible things were designed in the name of art and progress and medicine.
In the Moon-Eater’s name. Iriset’s apostatical god.
Lyric tries not to frown. “Will food be brought, and water, and everything needed until then?”
“Yes.” Eliri looks at him. Her eyes are stormy gray, almost flickering with light of their own, as if the flecks in her iris are crystal like her fingernails. For all Lyric knows, they might be.
“You know the name Aharté?” he asks quietly.
“The breath between words,” Eliri says in a nonanswer.
“But is Aharté beloved? Worshipped? Is there a labyrinth or chapel?”
Eliri shakes her head. “Perhaps somewhere outside the Moon-Eater’s fortress, but not within. It is a Sarian god, yes? Most Sarians live south of the crater, and in Ribbon fortress.”
Lyric nods, vaguely surprised there is a place in the crater named the same way as one of the small king precincts in his own time.
It’s Ribbonwork under the Vertex Seal. But the lack of Aharté’s chapels is only what he expected, if not what he hoped.
“Until Iriset wakes, this one will remain here.”
The Adept Hand approaches him, gray eyes wide.
Beneath them her skin looks delicate, yellowed with exhaustion or grief, and Lyric feels the urge to ask, to offer breath work.
If she could know Silence, she might be nearer to peace.
But given what he knows of history, Lyric cannot imagine peace in the court of the Moon-Eater. He holds out his hand, palm up.
Eliri places hers against his. Her desert-peach skin is paler than Iriset’s, with a few veins visible along the back.
Her hands are soft and smooth, unblemished and unwrinkled, even at the knuckles.
But from the tips of her fingers extend those delicate clawlike nails.
Lyric’s pulse pops to see the evidence of apostasy so close.
He looks up at her face, unsure what kind of expression he wears.
Eliri bares her teeth to reveal the same quartz-like mineral make, though the shape of her teeth is as human as any.
Her entire skeletal system, Lyric assumes, is made of a quartz or silicate like so many of the styli used by designers in his own palace. Eliri the Adept Hand was built for design. Created to create in turn.
Gently, she removes her hand from his and her lips fall into a neutral line again.
Eliri says, “The Moon-Eater called Lyric’s wife a sunderer.” She says the mirané word.
Lyric frowns. “It is an unfamiliar term, but Iriset is a designer.”
The trace of a smile appears and vanishes on Eliri’s thin lips. “This Eliri looks forward to meeting Iriset the Sunderer.”