CHAPTER TWO
C HAPTER T WO
Inside our breast
Amid our walls.
Among the bones
We dealers call.
Dealt are ends
Of pain or peace
Of withered cries
Of sweet release.
Strangled pleas
Or tender falls.
Inside our breast
Amid our walls.
Somehow, the lament had filled her as she’d slept. It seeped inside her. An insidious melody she had never heard before. She fell asleep in the dark and awoke in that same darkness, brimming with verses not her own.
Dawsyn blinks sleep away and hears the song still. It drifts off slowly, fading into something insubstantial. It disappears into the blackness, becomes nothing at all. A dream. Intangible.
She rolls her head to the side, until her cheek meets the ash and grit. Particles of it drift into her nose. It smells of fetid earth, of damp decay. Something long ago buried, never meant for the surface.
Ryon lays beside her, his back to her front. He is unmoving in sleep.
Dawsyn lifts a hand. “Igniss.”
The slow-flickering flame in her palm illuminates the inky outline of blood on his torn shirt, where the blade punctured through. Dawsyn touches the fingers of her other hand to it now and feels the hybrid, her hybrid, shudder delicately. He does not wake.
The iskra magic stirs within her, already summoned by her thoughts. Her mage blood sings, alight and ready. Together, the two sides of her, dark and light, fuse willingly. No longer combative.
Ishveet to repair, Baltisse had taught her. Bones or blades. Anything broken. They are not so different.
“Ishveet,” Dawsyn murmurs now, her voice as ashy as the earth beneath her. Her palm glows with the magic, growing steadily brighter. She feels it flowing through her blood, but before it can do much to mend Ryon’s wound, the glow flickers. It recedes.
Dawsyn feels the depletion. The magic crawls back to its crevices inside her.
She sighs. Then she sits. She tries to see.
At first, the only discernible things are the pockets of glowing amber – torches left alight, ends buried in the ground. But soon, Dawsyn can make out other things. The darkness isn’t so absolute. It strangles one’s sight at first, but soon envelopes you, welcomes you into its folds, and shapes begin to emerge. The blindness lifts.
The bottom of the Chasm stretches out before her. Its width is less immense than she’d imagined. Littered between walls are the slumped and sleeping forms of maybe a hundred people, layered in furs. They lie with their heads on sacks and bags, bundling their children into the curve of their hunched bodies. Others sit alert, watchful, unable to sleep for any amount of time in a place so strange, so odious.
The walls of the Chasm glisten where the torch light reaches its sharp edges. The rock cuts inward and juts outward, slicing jagged patterns up and up. There is only a narrow strip above them that reveals the day. A thin belt of white she can only see if she squints. There is, oddly, no teeth in the cold. The air is close and still, not biting. It does not reach the bones.
Every sound in the Chasm echoes on and on, following those cutting paths of the rock face to its escape. Moving bodies, hushed conversation, the languid tumble of water that meanders down the middle. The living vein of the Chasm.
Soon Dawsyn, Ryon and the others – Tasheem, Rivdan, Hector, Salem, Esra and Yennes – will need to wake the rest. They will need to begin the journey to the Chasm’s end.
Dawsyn prays another end exists at all.
She stands and dusts the strange dirt from her body. It seems to cling to her. She hates to think what particles might reside in it. Every so often, she sees the remnants of what might be white bone half-buried in the ground. How many have fallen off the Ledge in fifty years? How many have been thrown in from Glacia?
Dawsyn paces carefully over sleeping forms. First, she passes Esra, rolled up on his side, huddled inside a thick fur-lined cloak, then Salem, who frets in his sleep.
She passes Yennes, who does not appear to have slept at all. The older woman sits with her back against the rockface, hands trembling, mouth pinched and eyes alert.
Two paths, both are filled.
Dawsyn nods to the woman. She knows Yennes defies all sense in being here, helping them. She prays that Yennes, so timid and meek, does not need to suffer the Chasm long.
Finally, she comes to another familiar body. One that’s perfectly still. Covered head to toe in a cloak, and unflinching at the permeating cold of this place.
Baltisse.
Dawsyn lowers herself to the ground beside the mage and reaches for the cloak. She pulls until it reveals a vacant face.
Dawsyn Sabar has seen many unsettling things in her life, but none are so unnerving as the sight of a once powerful sorceress reduced to nothing but a shell in the dust. Baltisse’s fair hair has already lost its lustre, the sheen from her skin is marred in dirt. Her eyes, always so molten, so visceral, are now a pale innocuous blue. She is here, and not. Dawsyn hopes she has already found her way to that other realm, into the arms of a Holy Mother who showed her little mercy while she lived.
Dawsyn swallows and traces a vein at the mage’s neck with her fingernail. “I am sorry,” she whispers to her. And she is. She is made only of her remorse. Her regret. She feels it in every single cell. Every trace of her. Her being shakes with it.
“Dawsyn?” comes a voice. She turns to find Esra, his eyes swollen and red. The man, his face ruined and then put back together by the dead mage before them, blinks in rapid succession. Usually so tall, his spine seems curved with the strength of his sorrow. “Is she…” He hesitates, swallows thickly. “Can she be moved? Must we leave her?”
Dawsyn’s fingers clench around the mage’s cloak. No. We can’t. But what she says is, “She must stay, Es.”
Esra kneels beside Dawsyn, the tears shining on his cheeks. “She would loathe it here,” he says. “Though I think it an appropriate grave for a witch.”
Dawsyn smiles wanly at him, placing a hand on his trembling shoulder. “She isn’t here, Esra.”
“No.” He clenches Dawsyn’s fingers. “Already, it feels different. Do you feel it?”
She does. There is a… hum missing from the air around them. A vibration they had once taken for granted leaves an eerie, hollow silence in its absence. She nods to Esra, the action painful.
Silence consumes them, heavy and slow. But when Baltisse does not rise from the earth with ethereal redemption, Dawsyn asks, “Why did she do this?” The words have been stuck in her throat for hours. She has been unable to swallow them.
Esra seems uncertain when he responds, as though it is the easiest of answers, the most obvious of the lot. “To save you,” he says, eyebrows lifting. “To save Ryon.”
But Dawsyn shakes her head. She rejects the thought. It is an intolerable one. She grips her thighs until it hurts.
“I don’t want it to be for me.”
Esra sighs shakily and wipes his wet eyes. In a hollow way, he says, “She was a desperately unhappy woman, Dawsyn.” He gently holds Baltisse’s fingers. “She spent much of her life blaming herself for the misfortune of many. She lived with blood on her hands. There was not a single word to be said that could save her from her own persecution. Salem and I had long ago accepted that.” Esra sniffs, peering down at the woman he had claimed as family. “I think she would be happy now, knowing that she helped these people. She freed herself from that guilt that had festered so long inside her. For that,” Esra muses, his voice weak and without conviction, “we must forgive her.”
Dawsyn takes her last look at the mage. She wonders how it feels to be released from responsibility. Released from self-persecution.
Ryon is suddenly there beside her. He kneels gingerly on Dawsyn’s other side, his pain evident. He presses a kiss to his fingers and rests them on the mage’s cheek for a moment. “Sleep well, my friend,” he says, his deep timbre reverberating. He lifts the cloak back over her, shielding Baltisse from the ugliness of this place in the world’s middle.
Esra muffles a sob. “Couldn’t we just–”
“She cannot come with us, Esra,” Dawsyn says once more. She tries not to let the steel find her voice. Not this time. “She isn’t here at all.”
Salem comes to pull Esra to his feet. His own face, illuminated by torch light, tells a story no better than theirs. “C’mon, lad,” he says gently, wrapping an arm around Esra’s hunched waist. “Leave Baltisse be. Yeh’ve harassed ’er enough fer one lifetime.”
Esra leans into Salem’s substantial frame, and the older man guides him away. Dawsyn cannot yet bring herself to follow.
She still hopes for a shiver of presence. She lingers in the vain hope to absolve herself. I’m sorry, she thinks. And even deeper. I won’t let another die.
An impossible promise.
“You always reminded me of her,” Ryon utters. He stares at the cloaked body, his jaw tight, dark eyes clouded. “She carved a place into a world that refused to make room for her, just as you have.”
“As we have,” she corrects him. But if there is a place within any kingdom they can claim as theirs, she is yet to know it. “I am unsure the world will ever make room for people like us.”
“Then we must insist it does,” Ryon says, standing to his full height, despite the pain it causes. He holds his hand out to her.
The people of the Ledge begin to wake. They stir in groups. Dawsyn passes intermittent fearful faces, thrown into haphazard relief by orange glow. They stare up at the thin line of daylight above, then around at the expansive nothingness.
Slowly, some make their way to the water that runs through the Chasm’s middle. They cup their hands into its shallow depths and feel it slip over their fingers, moving of its own accord. Their eyes widen, seeing for the first time water that flows, water that sings. They marvel at its strange dance.
“Will you speak to them?” Ryon asks her as they carefully traipse around the groupings.
Dawsyn supposes she has little choice. “They will need to be made aware of the provisions we have. There will need to be… agreements.”
“No fighting?” Ryon asks, though his expression tells her there is little hope for the endeavour.
“Yes,” Dawsyn says. “They’ve lived fifty years fighting for rations from the Drop. Now, they will need to… share.” Dawsyn sighs at the word and looks around once more. Already, the group shows how insistent old habits can be. She can see a woman named Helenia shoving the chest of an older man until he falls over backwards. Another group are tussling on the ground, likely over something as meagre as a torch.
She feels the enormity of the task ahead swallow her once more.
Then, Ryon’s fingers slowly slip between hers. She feels the pulse at his wrist jump alongside her own. When she looks up, his face is turned down to hers, reverent and gentle. She isn’t alone.
It will be like the slopes of the mountain, the untraversable plane they walked together to reach the ground. This newest undoable task will not be a solitary endeavour.
Dawsyn presses her lips to the back of his hand, holds it there for a moment, then lets it fall away. “Pass me a torch,” she says.
It does not take long to acquire the silence she needs to speak. Her voice, when raised, catapults from wall to wall, amplified by the Chasm as it climbs. The people within stop almost immediately when she calls out. They turn to her, their faces expectant.
Dawsyn stands beside the stream. In every direction she turns, she is met by the face of someone she recognises. All of them are here because of her.
She takes a deep breath. “Before we leave this place,” she calls, loud and gravelled. “We must make certain that we are of the same mind. We have provisions.” Dawsyn points to the sacks at her feet. “A small amount of food, and water from the Chasm. But the food will not last for any long period of time. Even less, should our desperation overcome us, as it did on the Ledge.”
There is a slow rumble among the crowd. Old neighbours eye one another. Grow defensive.
“The food will be dispersed fairly among us when we stop for rest. There will be no stealing. No fighting. If we are going to find safety, we must do so together, in a way we have never sought to unite before. Let our past quarrels be put to rest here. If we are to survive, it will not be the few. It must be the many, or we might as well have remained on that Ledge and let the Glacians continue to pick away at our numbers.”
Some faces look determined. Of what, Dawsyn can’t be sure. Some seem suspicious or resigned.
“The length of the journey…” Here, Dawsyn stumbles. “The length of the journey will be long. Prepare yourselves accordingly. Mind your sick, your young.” She pauses again, hesitant. She looks up to see Ryon; Rivdan and Tasheem are at his side. Yennes waits behind them. Her hands tumble over one another, her lips moving as though chanting a prayer.
Dawsyn squeezes her eyes shut, then opens them once more. “We… we are not alone in this Chasm,” she calls, and hears her voice echo back. It is soon joined by a resounding shudder of shock, a rumbling dissent. Dawsyn speaks again before it can grow any louder. “There may be creatures, here at the bottom. Should we meet them, we will defend ourselves, just as we were never permitted to do upon Selection. Here, you will fight your way through any obstacle. Any–”
“What creatures?” someone calls.
“We were not made aware!” Another shouts, and the sound of fear rings through the rest, stirring them. Bridling their own uncertainty. The tremors multiply. Breed.
Dawsyn grits her teeth. The magic within her bristles. “Quiet!” she calls, but the crowd takes no heed. The fear swells.
Dawsyn fills her lungs. “QUIET!” She bellows, and her voice rings down the Chasm, further and further, replaying in a continuum as it follows the water downstream.
She huffs, surprised once more by the immediate effect it has on the people. They stare, waiting, mouths still.
“We have met enemies before,” Dawsyn calls, ensuring her words reach all the way to the brink. “And when we meet them again, they will be unprepared for our ferocity. We can no longer allow fear to rule us.”
Some nod. Chins jut in the air.
“How many times did we stand before our homes, obedient lambs waiting for slaughter?”
Another rumbling, of assent this time.
“We are freed of that now! And if we are threatened on this path, it will not be met with compliance.” Dawsyn turns to Ryon, to Rivdan and Tasheem, to Hector, Salem and Esra. She finds them watching her, waiting. Grinning. “Hand out the weapons,” she calls. “And we will be on our way.”
The people raise their fists, cheer. They converge forward toward the Glacians, not away from them.
“Watch the Chasm!” one shouts.
“Watch the Chasm,” others chorus in reply. The chant slowly grows, turns to a war cry. It chases the songs that mumble to Dawsyn of blood and bones and ends.
“Watch the Chasm! Watch the Chasm!”
“WATCH THE CHASM!”