Red Echoes
When he could at last sit up and raise his head, Asaau found her looking at him.
For a while, they simply regarded one another across the distance between them, in a near-silence broken only by the faint hissing of distant sea and breeze-riffled leaves. At last Virenina opened her mouth to say something. Asaau braced himself to hear whatever it might be, but instead she looked at him silently a moment longer, then closed her mouth and dropped her gaze. That felt wrong enough to reach Asaau even through the fog of his own fear.
He noticed then, too, that there was no blade hovering behind her head. She'd left the spear behind. Relief welled up in him, and gratitude – and a stranger, half-painful feeling that lay beyond his ability to name.
She left the spear. It was considerate. It was as if she'd cut off her own arm and nailed it down before going to him. It fit, somehow, with the rest of what she'd done. Left the spear. Tried not to touch me. Warned me of her movements…
There was something tying her actions together, something that ran deeper than mere consideration. If he could only –
"Do I disgust you now?" Virenina asked him quietly, and all at once Asaau understood.
"No," he said, immediately, truthfully. "No."
It did not feel like enough, yet he could not think what else to say. His eyes kept finding the emptiness at Virenina's shoulder. She looked so strangely alone without the spear at her back.
"How…do you feel?" Virenina asked, then hesitated for the barest second before continuing: "Other than – afraid. I know what I – "
She's about to cut herself with her own tongue, I can sense it. Somehow, the idea was more than Asaau could stand.
"More than anything," he cut in, "I feel…I feel lost." More than anything was barely even a lie; by now the fear had gone from an all-consuming feeling to something that registered more like background radiation. "I've seen," he went on, "but I don't understand. How did you…?"
"Ai Naa," Virenina said. Her voice was half bitter curse, half lover's sigh. "My paired spirit. My other half. I didn't lie about that, at least. Everything else…" She ran one hand through her hair and gave a short dead laugh.
"That's – " Impossible, Asaau nearly said, and caught himself only just in time. Whose soul is it tethered to, Seket, yours or hers? " – Difficult," he said instead. "A difficult idea to – to take in. I believe you," he hastened to add, "but…"
"But you can't accept that a spirit could do that. Your mind rejects it, even after you saw it yourself."
Asaau could only nod.
"I know how it looks," Virenina said to him. "I do. But what else can it be?" She tapped off joint after joint on her fingers, counting. "He found me seven days into my seventh year. We made contact at a pale spire. He's bound to an anchor, the anchor is part of me. We share my life between us." She brought her hand down, clasped it around her other wrist. "If it's not a pairing, it looks enough like one to fool everyone I've met. To fool you. Fool me."
Her gaze fell to the ground again.
"The forms fit," she said. Almost pleaded. "Of what we are. It's just the scale that's wrong."
The whole thing was madness, yet Virenina's words made a certain sort of sense. Which was harder to accept: that she had some sort of freak anomaly for a paired spirit, or that the thing paired to her was no spirit at all? What else could it be?
God, some part of him whispered. But no. No. The time of living gods was long past. If a god had clawed its way from the grave, surely the world would have felt it.
"You've always told others that Ai Naa is unawakened," Asaau began, "but if that was part of the lie…"
"Oh, he's awake." Virenina said, and grinned sickly. "Awakened. That's what you really want to know, isn't it." Her shoulders shook, as if with laughter, though she voiced none. "What woke him. What called to him in the dreamsea."
Again, Asaau could only nod.
The unseen world of spirits shadowed all of Tei Ura – layered upon it, saturating it to the core, the animating soul to Tei Ura's anchoring body. Each world bled into the other, colored it, shaped it, fed it. One such bleeding was the dreamsea: a shadow dreamed upon the unseen world by humanity, pooled together from the uncountable liquid fragments of their thoughts and fears, their dreams and desires. An awakened spirit was one that had fixated on a handful of fragments from the dreamsea and then accreted a sense of self around them, layer by pearllike layer. To know those fragments was to know – or at least glimpse – an awakened spirit's nature.
"Red hunger," Virenina said at last.
Horror froze Asaau's heart in his chest. No, he wanted to say. A fragment that old, shared across myriad minds, fed for so many thousands of years by humanity's bloodiest dreams… No, that can't be, mustn't, it runs too deep. He wanted, needed, to deny it, but his breath had stilled in his lungs.
And Virenina was still talking.
"Sacrifice upon the Court," she was saying. "Throats torn open under fangs. Flesh devoured on the pyre. As long as it tastes of blood." Another laugh fell like a dead thing from her lips. "But it's funny. He never knew that taste until me. Until he had my tongue to learn from. It's kind of an honor, really." She was trying to grin again. "If you think about it. Thousands of years dreaming in red, but I gave him his first taste, I…he…"
One hand rose slowly to her face. Pressed itself over the black patch that covered what had once been her left eye.
Asaau wanted to say – to do – something – but seeing Virenina like this left him feeling as unsteady as the sea that hissed and swelled below them. Should he offer sympathy? He could try – but Virenina might well taste it as pity and spit it back in his face. Comfort her? But being comforted had always made Virenina squirm and snap, even as a child. Why should that change now? Perhaps he should simply ask her to keep going – but the way she kept trailing off made him hesitate. What if even the slightest push was too much?
Yet as worried as Asaau was about saying the wrong thing, the fixed and distant look in Virenina's lone eye worried him even more. And her face…her face had gone terribly still in a way that made Asaau think of Vene. Vene, consumed by his own red work, too entranced to eat or sleep. Vene, wandering forth from the Tauhrelil family crypt, drained half to death by a days-long neural dive into his ancestors' secrets. Vene, who had tried to stop for Asaau, tried to keep himself tethered…and in return, Asaau had failed him, let him slip away, and Vene had disappeared from Asaau's world entirely.
Not his daughter, too. Asaau looked at Virenina sitting in hollow silence and felt something like a rusted fishhook catching between his ribs. Why else had Au Melai drawn this thread between them, if not for a chance at restitution?
The gods may rise from their graves if you think it over much longer, just say something – !
"Virenina?"
He hadn't meant to use her given name unasked, but he could beg forgiveness for that impropriety later. At least now she was looking at him. Asaau scrambled in his head for something to say next – anything, anything, just get it out before she drifts away again – and came up, finally, against the reason that had brought them here to begin with.
"You would have taken this secret to your pyre if you could," Asaau said. "Am I wrong?"
Virenina shook her head slowly, shallowly.
"Perhaps there's another world where you've managed to do just that," he went on. "But in ours, they're still rebuilding the trial chamber – " At that, Virenina's lone eye filled with silent hurt. "For which I do not blame you," Asaau said quickly. "Not remotely. You did what the chamber was designed to make you do, nothing more – in fact, now that I've seen what you're…what you're capable of…I'm amazed that nothing worse happened."
They'd placed someone paired with a spirit grown on red hunger in the trial chamber. Now that he knew… Oh my dear dead gods, it could have been so much worse. The column of killing light flashed again in his mind. She could have…we could all have been…
"I could've killed everyone," Virenina said in a low, choked voice. "I shouldn't…I should never have…"
Part of Asaau agreed with her, but to say so now would have been too cruel. And the selection cycle – the final act is so close at hand. To abandon your candidate this late in the campaign would be suicide. What else can you do now but help her see it through?
Well – he could betray her. Tell someone else the truth of what Virenina was paired with, of what she could do. A doctor, a channeler, a scientist, a seer – someone who could help…yet even as the notion surfaced, Asaau was already discarding it. Finding someone who'd believe him would be a trial all its own, and that someone might tell another in turn; if word got out, even a twice-royal pedigree might not be enough to save Virenina from being made a research subject. Whatever she was, whatever she was paired with, it was beyond a rarity. Should they learn of it, even some of her own Tauhrelil relations might find scientific curiosity outweighing blood affinity; if not them, then someone, somewhere, was bound to be mad or greedy or foolish enough to try.
Then Virenina would of course attempt to escape. Asaau could see no way for that to end but in slaughter. Another laboratory piled with corpses, painted in red, and again it would be his fault –
No. The only way he could bear to go was forward.
"You've told me before," he said at last, "that you were made to be a Spear. That you can't see a life as anything else. Is that still true?"
"Yeah." Though Virenina's voice shook slightly, she answered almost at once.
"And I am your instructor," Asaau said. "Your sponsor in this campaign, here to help you succeed. Yes? So don't…" His hands twisted themselves together in his lap. Words usually came to him as easily as silk to a spider, but right now all the threads felt so hopelessly snarled. "That is – you're already forcing yourself by telling me anything at all – I don't wish to make this harder for you than it is already…"
He almost wished Virenina would interrupt him, but she only watched and waited. Asaau pulled his hands apart and refolded them on his lap, straightened his spine, breathed inward.
"You told me about – about your partner – for the sake of your career," he started again. "Whatever you still need to tell me…perhaps doing so would be easier if you thought of in that way. If I were to ask you, How does this affect your campaign…?"
A shift in Virenina's lone eye told him she'd gone from merely watching to thinking. Now it was Asaau's turn to wait and listen.
"That's…easier," she admitted. "Yeah. I can answer that. But first I – "
And then her face and body fell into sudden stillness as a strange movement seized her flesh – a kind of flinching underskin ripple that passed down the length of her, gone almost as soon as it began. Asaau wondered how violently Virenina would have let herself shudder if he hadn't been watching.
"Need to go back," she said, with a ragged edge to her voice that hadn't been there a moment ago. She paused a moment, swallowed sharply; when she spoke again, it was gone. "The spear."
Asaau's heart lurched; he'd been so focused on Virenina that he'd all but forgotten about her partner's anchor.
"I can't leave it any longer. I'm sorry."
"Don't be, it's part of you," Asaau said automatically, and started to get up.
"You don't have to come with me," said Virenina. "You'd see the aftermath of that – " She pointed skyward – "if you did. I can get it alone. You saw enough already, I don't want to make you…I can get it alone," she said again. "Or call it back to me from here."
He could wait alone in the dark for a second time. He could sit in place as a hungry blade came flying at him through the night.
Or he could go with Virenina, and see.