CHAPTER 10

  When she’d been small, the first week in the tower and her fingers barely popping off little green bubbles, she’d found it, tucked between floors, a space between a space.

  It had come a long way from a pillow a lantern a cooler and some water-bottles. Couches, benches, tools, all these and more were buried within the guts of the tower as she spent years cutting away, safely except for when she got shocked damn you all, and patching into different systems.

  She'd learned to reason in those blessed alcoves. Learned to build.

  Here was E's real home. Climbing through one of the many hatches scattered, each to a different ladder or corridor, E flipped the wall switch and beamed as her it buzzed with movement. Four benches running the lengths of all the walls, all covered in half-finished skeel-powered designs. These too hummed as she drew near. Beginning something was always such a high.

  Ending? Meh.

  Above the couch against the far wall hung her magnificent great-sword, whom she called beauty.

  She peeled off her jacket, and cool air against bare arms raised gooseflesh. Throwing aside the coat she took up beauty, shivered as she sang against the metal hooks. She ran her hand across her rippling metal. Never cold, skeel. At distance her baby looked dull gray, but in direct light, especially of the sun, the metal might as well have been cut straight from the roof of sky-blue noon.

  Light skipped her mean edge now, rippled down the opposite serrated one, caught in the many grooves of skeel-smithing that made her no mere sword. Heavy. Strauss hadn’t liked that, but he let her keep it. Study of the metal, years of study of the metal, yet its secrets remained, like her shine, locked away. She’d long ago abandoned it. Refined skeel reacted with, somehow responded to, only shine.

  She attached the flat of the blade to the skeel piece she had crafted to the back of her belt. A green blink later and the blade might as well have been fused to the piece. She didn’t know why she did this. That wasn’t true. Strapping for battle but the only problem is there ain't one.

  Then she saw the watch.

  It dangled at the end of its silver chain wrapped around a simple nail, which was fitting. The pocket-watch was simple, ugly in fact. Dull, unpolished gray the day he'd shown it to her. The day E let him into her gauge day he’d ceased being the master who kicked her ass and became her friend, he'd given it to her.

  E pulled up a stool, sat at the bench, pawed the watch, smiled as it gently swung and spun. "The expanse is simple, Ealasaid.” He might as well have been next to her. "They say it isn’t. They talk about how complicated and big it is. Makes them feel better. How can someone be faulted, they think, for not fixing a problem that is just too big? But, really, the expanse is tuned like this watch. There are rules and when you learn them you,” he’d spun the hands, "change it whenever you wish. It is not magic, but merely progress to a better watch.”

  His voice that finally conquered the last shred of her considerable will. She lay her head upon the bench, and E closed her eyes.

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  Rina opened here eyes, narrowed them up into the night's tingling Field.

  Death was at her neck, said paranoia or hard-won experience. She looked about.

  Ante reveals the good and great buried in dark, for dark, too, is His. Gam's voice.

  More useful to her immediate situation was her shine that showed her everything about them: white cell counts, basic health, arough analysis of whatever they ate last. Rina gagged. Really? Were the Given so depraved? If not them, the narokks?

  They moved like highly trained athletes, breathing steady despite their varied sizes and expected metabolisms. No wasted motion. She sensed no shine.

  She’d been spotted, cursed her stupidity. She'd been spotted, despite setting a shinasshu about her. How? The weariness had come on so suddenly that she’d laid out her coat, wrapped herself in her blanket, and slept.

  Her gauge rumbled, sapphire continents ground at one another as she focused and. . .There. So fine and utilized so economically that she could barely track it. Curious. Amazing. Scary.

  Rina had never fought another shiner. Never even met one. Little Addive, said Maim. Every day is the first time for something. Slowly she slid Doe from its scabbard. "Wait,” she hissed to the air. A new color. Pink, no, Salmon really. How ugly. "The maw did you come from?” How had this many shiners come so close to her and she not know it? At least this last was afar off.

  The old worry that she was not equal to a shiner when she finally fought one, for she herself had never been directly trained in shinarts, did silent violence to her calm

  How stupid. She relaxed, for she’d had Maim and Gam.

  The biodata of the closer group suggested that the first mystery shiner was using an advanced shinasshu. An illusion? Could this be the shiner she’d sensed all those months ago? Rina did not think so. That had been bright, though quivering with fright, and brimming with life. This small, colorless sample was petty, greedy, sad.

  Illusions or camo, huh? Rina rolled onto her stomach, breathed in deep, blew into the ground so gently it might as well be that her breath belonged to the deep, cold dirt, and was simply returning to its place.

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  A reservoir of stars. The forge from which they are birthed and somehow, also, a river and a lake. They flow through the deep Field, becoming greater or lesser, and mark the spirals, releasing with their turns the lightening that buffets the Nameless World.

  Ran swam them.The backstroke, specifically.

  He knew its absurdity, as fire spheres flowed over and around. He kicked many up where they stayed and lovingly hummed for their own worlds.

  Wonderful, the spheres sang but in color and emotion. . .wonderful. . .wonderful. . .wonderful. . .

  Without understanding why, Ran suddenly stood on the belt of a gas giant, and spun about it with a hearty laugh. The belt suddenly flung him, end over end, toward a shiny blue world whose name was taken.

  He landed on a large hunk, noticed the great crack that ran across it, sniffed at the pieces that used to be its whole suspended around it.

  I’m on the moon. Weird. The waking world was another life, and he recalled with embarrassment how frightening he’d always found the simple, the elegant, Field with its infinity, its cold, its barrenness. But now that he was in it he knew happiness too great to bear drenched it and pierced him and would buckle him. What a great way to die.

  Then he saw it.

  An unheard hiss slid through black above him and it murdered all such silliness. It was alive, huge, wriggling. Its horrible hood flexed and a seeking tongue struck out. The thing regarded him with an idle eye, as if he were so far beneath its notice that all that Ran was, maximized as much as he ever could be, bored it.

  "There’s only madness here!” Ran screamed. "Madness and death in the ink. IT'S A BLACK HOLE, A MAW FOREVER EVEN WITH NO ROKK!”

  Woooow, the incomprehensible horror somehow hissed, you got issues, kid.

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  Reduke wanted to scream for happiness. Nightmaster would hurt him, so he didn't.

  Nightmaster’s power let him see her now, in the moonlight, lying in the valley grass, face up, beneath a blanket. . .Her delicious night hair was undone and laying carelessly around her.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Pretty meat.

  Five others, Fair-friends all, shot across the night field with him, pulsing, though not as he, with Nightmaster. This he didn’t care for. He’d wanted to do this alone and didn't like sharing. Nightmaster’d hit him many times.

  The woman was silent and still but for her slow, sleepy breathing, and this confused Nightmaster, so Reduke came skidding to a halt. With him Nightmaster looked, listened, sniffed at the air.

  I’m getting paranoid. Kill her!

  With the power of his patron Reduke sprinted, launched his massive self twenty feet into the air. He came crashing down onto the woman’s chest, moaned to feel her ribs splinter beneath his wiggling toes. With his fingers dug into her beautiful face he ripped flesh from her in strips, one after the other.

  His friends arrived then, and descended upon her remaining limbs.

  What? This ain't right.

  Reduke had not heard Nightmaster, cause he was too deep in the truth. Like a lover bending to kiss her neck he instead bit chunk from her cheek, waited for the warm to fill him.

  "Blech.” Tasted like dirt. He pulled back, spit some into his hand. He’d spat up dirt. He looked down just as the woman collapsed beneath him into a big pile of dirt. "Nightmaster? Dirt?"

  Move, fatboy, move!

  It seemed to Reduke as if she walked out of the moonlight, and her eyes leaked bright, living, clear blue dust.

  Reduke sighed for her beauty, and then in a bright arc of blue, the bitch cut off his right arm! Then she was amongst his friends, spinning like a top, blue slicing off legs, fingers, a head. Two heads.

  Well this sucks, thought Reduke.

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  The sky above E’s ocean erupted. No longer the green-tinge, but like a normal, bright, cloudless day.

  E woke.

  Beauty in hand she sped from her workshop, into the nearest hall, up the emergency stairs, exploded out of the roof exit of Regent Tower, sent the door flying, surrounded all the time by great, cresting green waves.

  "Finally!" She cried as she leapt. "FINALLY! I’m gonna protect the shit out of this place!"

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  Nail strolled the roofs of Wordheal. He couldn't sleep. Did Given ever sleep? So much of this place was still alive and buzzing.

  "So uneven,” he complained after leaping one side of the street to the next. How he missed the strange symmetry of Mirror. Mirror had become his, even as he had been born elsewhere.

  Babekset was beautiful in its way. One above he’d like to see the golden shores of Break again before Water Spring. His mother’s voice as she recited the Cave Tales from memory, she knew them all, with Nail at her feet and Adhil cooing in her arms. The smoke from oil lamps curled about him in the shadowy room, and he felt every bit a part of the tales. A boy who outwitted the wagers of they-follow-in-smoke, who danced in stars with the monster Quetsep.

  The shine blew up near his raging sun, turned its edges blue. Never had his gauge knew such pressure. He could only gasp.

  "Amalric,” he whispered, and his hand flexed on his sword's handle. How foolish. Amalric was dead. Nor was Amalric this powerful.

  Nail wound one of the tails of his mantle around his left arm, focused. Where?

  Children, babies, hacked, little severed toes stuffed. . .

  Stop, coward! You fool! he thought and slapped himself. It is not Amalric! It is blue. Concentrate! He had never been a tracker. His own combination of rashin and shinmardu, as close to him as his own life, had taken long enough to master. Still, there was enough of the azure that he was able to follow its twisting path over the wall and outside the city. South.

  He hissed through his teeth. Had he simply remained in his room with that, that, amorous girl prowlig about, he might now be able to reach it. Now? Too much shine, too easily sensed, to reach it now. This was not orange, and he, consequently, was unwilling to reveal his position to it. Perhaps a traveler encountering one of those roving bands of nuts. He dismissed this. The simple, most probable truth he just did not like. I have competition. Someone else felt it, then.

  He growled, crouched down on the building’s edge, balanced on toes sixty feet above pedestrian and pavement. This clandestine shit was not his way. No spy but a Rock warrior; mind for the Speech, body for the grim battle. "One of the few things that war makes easier,” he mused, "is knowing who your enemy is.”

  What was that?! Nail stood, blinked. An afterimage from one of the massive floodlights surrounding the wall? What else? His gauge was unhelpful. The receding, lightest blue and in the farther distance the barest hint of green. Wasn't that enough? Yet, Nail would have sworn something had just gone up and over the wall. Not possible. Too fast. Shine would be ringing through the sky like thunder. This oncoming green distracted me.

  In the dark space between the city’s, two strong shiners were about to collide. He would sit and await its conclusion. One, let them slay one another. Nail couldn’t help but look up at the wall again. One Above how a man never knows how much he enjoys peace until the day war comes again.

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  Ran had closed his eyes. No longer could he watch, or hear the indescribable, unimaginable, surprisingly sassy thing circling Nameless. Despair, chaos, alone. Rokk,it was here. The enemy was here! Even in space, in sleep!

  A putrid odiousness invaded his nose, his mouth! Every breath redouble it, until he heaved great gulps of air. He stopped breathing; it was the only choice.

  Someone screamed into his ear. He dared not open his eyes. On his other side another scream. All around! How had he never heard them? I’ve had it! No more! Wake up! Around him a chorus of wails rolled like the ocean. Despair. Unmaking. Despair. Alone.

  He’d sooner die than breath again, though his lungs begged, pleaded.

  "You want it, but you don’t. You'd muder for it and yet hate it because it kills you!” someone said. "How split you are. Pathetic.”

  In his mind he saw a brown eye, a cloudy one.

  "No. . .” You’ll have to breath sooner or later. C’mon. Sooner or later. You’ll get used to it. Everyone does. You know you will. Why fight? You’ll only die tired. Breath. Breath despair.

  With a whimper, Ran opened his eyes into his bedroom. Cold on his face, he touched it. Tears. His throat was a furnace.

  Beneath, Tek took nice, measured breaths.

  Ran wiped his eyes and stared out his little window at a sky just beginning to redden above the wall with morning.

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  By the combined light of dim dawn and her own, pulsing shine, E saw where it had gone down. Stumps and tatters littered the ground like clothes on the floor of a teen's bedroom. The bloodied remnants of at least three wailers.

  Hand holding tightly to beauty she worked her way through the maze of torn flesh and blood-slick grass, kicking over the ones that had ended up face down. The wailers were covered with the same filthy rags E as always, but their wounds were all laced with the same blue shine E had spied above her ocean.

  She knelt to examine the closest corpse. No hesitation, perfect cut after perfect cut. Good skeel in good hands.

  E, rokkdamn it, how can you plan on being a warrior of note if you can’t track an enemy’s shine? "Yeah, yeah,” E waved off her teacher's scorn. "You shouldn’t have died. We all make mistakes.” She didn’t need to be a sensory type to see the beginning of the trail, and where it lead: Wordheal.

  "Ok then, no big deal. Only worst fears being realized, is all. Be smart.” As she moved her foot kicked a large pile of dirt she hadn’t seen, and it puffed into the air in a dark cloud. She noticed then other such piles, about ten in number, neatly arrayed around her, and then one giant shaking crater! Crater? No, they weren’t like the results of her explosions. Had the wailers been digging? She stepped down into it but found no trace on the ground but more blue shine. The shiner. . .digging? Using Nameless?

  She looked up out of the hole toward Wordheal again, nearly died for shock. On the ridge a hooded figure stood feet away, towering above her kneeled form, covered head angled down at the corpses. He’d been looking over her shoulder.

  E was shamed, also terrified, so she sprang back, dumped shine into her arms, swung beauty in a simple vertical slice. The claymore crashed down, vibrating green, more hammer than a sword, and hit nothing. Like shake all.

  The hood was to her left, its head cocked to the side, quivering. No. The shaker was laughing. At her!

  This so enraged E that she bounded back again, this time out of the hole. She needed distance.

  Emerald shine began to race down the many grooves in beauty like rivulets down a tiled roof, pooled where precise skeel-smithing had designed them to. She swung, and from beauty fired two rolling balls of exploding death. "Volley," said she. They blew right in the hood’s dumb face.

  E waited for the dust to clear but heard an annoying rasping over her shoulder. She turned to find the shaker. . .AGAIN!?

  In her mind she began to panic, but only just. I can’t even see their color!

  She extended her shine, engulfed them both in a great bubble, covered her own body with a thicker layer. Her shine knew her explosions, and would shield her. Strauss had named this rashin. "Boom-bubble." The hood poked at the green bubble childishly, and she could feel, more than see, a wide, doofy smile. "Dodge this!” Lava curled around her like a blanket, spilling against the bubble. Everything went dark.

  Moments later, as the smoke peeled up and into the pink morning sky, she stood, breathing hard, sweating, braced for the unpleasant smell of burned fl. . .

  "Where’s my burned flesh?”

  She looked left, right. Someone behind whistled. Fingers, jaws clenched, she turned. Hood was looking at Wordheal. It cocked its head toward her.

  A glance to her gauge--her great ocean was dimmed, not as roily, if that were a word. This might require truly dangerous stuff.

  "Well?” E called, and pointed beauty to the hood across the length of herself, body and eyes shining green. "C’mon! Let’s go!”

  The earliest dawn was breaking rise. The figure turned toward it.

  "Don’t ignore me! Come, fight! Coward! Loser!”

  The hood’s shoulders shook again, but it wasn’t laughing this time. In the silence, so low E at first thought it was the wind, the figure began singing, badly, just really badly, like a duck being strangled.

  ". . .the day that I became. . .” was all she heard before the field was empty, and she alone.

  "THE MAW!?” E Reno screamed, screamed, screamed and stomped and swung beauty until her arms burned.

  She shrunk to one knee. Gasping. "Doesn’t feel like a loss.” She stood, stalked up the hill and looked to Wordheal. "Definitely not a win. Damn.”

  The hood was not blue, and blue was not orange. Blue had gone to Wordheal, and she knew nothing at all about the other two.

  There had to be something she’d gained from this. Anything.

  "Shiners in Wordheal,” said E.

  The wind rushed up the hill and broke against her back, and the only thing she wanted in the whole wide Nameless World was for the wind to die and leave her alone.

  END OF PART I