"When they had finished they made me take notes of whatever conversation they had quoted
So that I might have the exact words, and got up to go, and when I asked them
Where they were going and
What they were doing and
By what names I should call them ―
They would tell me nothing, except that they had been commanded
To travel over the world continually, and upon foot and at night,
That they might live close to the stones and the trees
And at the hours when the immortals are awake."
― W.B. Yeats
The sun had melted to a stripe of copper and the sky was deepening blue when the aerialist made her appearance. She was hooded, her sable hair hidden beneath an indigo tagelmust, her eyes cast downwards, but she was not the kind of girl that you could look away from for anything less than an apocalypse. Gules-damask ribbons laced about her wrists, tight as a noose, a sabretache hung at her belt alongside her sabre. The girl who called herself Ekaitza Neska Hezur said the sword had been her grandmother's, but then she also said she came from a family of assassins—or else a family of acrobats, or maybe she was the lost heir to Elinvier, depending on her mood—so it was hard to know what to believe.
The market spilled across the city centre. It was hard to be glum in such a place, even with the knowledge of the goddess Lysha's death weighing upon the souls of those assembled. In some derbs, as the wending alleyways were called, the world seemed draped in carpets. In others, freshly dyed silks dripped scarlet and cobalt on the heads of passersby. Languages crowded the air like exotic birds: the lowland dialect, the northern accents, the tribal tongues. Women chivvied children home to bed, and old men in tarboosh caps leaned together in doorways, smoking haxixa. A trill of laughter, the scent of cinnamon and donkeys, and color, everywhere color.
The aerialist made her way toward the streets to the square that was the city's nerve center, a mad, teeming carnival of humanity: snake charmers and dancers, dusty barefoot boys, pickpockets, hapless tourists, and food stalls selling everything from orange juice to roasted sheep's heads.
None of these attractions, exotic and esoteric as they were, could compete with Ekaitza Neska Hezur the silkjinn, of course.
She drew the eye and she drew the crowd and by the time she had reached the square, where the sky was blotted out by the towering, slightly ragged buildings that aimed unerringly for the sky on every side, she was as the piper leading the rats to their slaughter. All terracotta and spires and narrow apartment buildings pressed together; tourists crowded the square, but natives crowded the balconies, like vultures watching carrion.
And despite that, they lost her. It didn't seem feasible - when all eyes followed her, when faces turned towards her like sunflowers spin towards the sky, when she made herself a spectacle as she was. But she vanished into the crowd, a ghost dissipating, a tantalizing bleed of shadow at the edge of sight, and then for an instant—one gliding misstep that brought her clearly into view - a girl with eyes like jewels and stars. Then, gone. And yet all spectators who had trailed her paused and waited and faced the empty space at the very heart of hearts of the city. It was the precise geographical centre of the city, where (rumour had it) a murdered god lay beneath the concrete, his hair growing, growing, growing despite his dead blood lying heavy in his veins.
The city was known as Hiriburua, a name plain enough to be hardly a name at all. Neska's people had always called it Villananzanj, in that lilt-and-keen half-dead language of the kasbahs and the wastes. And before that it had been, quite simply, the silken city, and the reason for that was quite elemental, and quite beautiful - the city had no sky. Not any sky that could be seen from the ground, that is; between every window on every floor of every building, ribbons stretched from one finial to another, slender, ravelled, frayed where generations had darted their way across from one spire to another, from rooftop to rooftop like illicit thieves with stars in their pockets.
It was an old tradition, one which harkened from the days in the wastelands when singular points of colour were the only bits of beauty in the world. The nomads - Neska's people - had brought the custom into the cities when the cities were born, and they practised it still; the ribbons formed a spider's web and impenetrable lattice of silk upon the horizon.
And it was from those ribbons that Ekaitza Neska Hezur, the silkjinn, fell like a shot, like an angel from the heavens with wings ripped away, shedding blood and feathers.
She spiralled in her fall, her hair flying even as she dropped, the jewel-toned fabrics of her clothing streaming and pulling at the air as though attempting in vain to slow her descent. It seemed inevitable that she would meet the ground, quite painfully, quite permanently, but then she swung, fingertips grazing the cobblestones, and the slender lapis lazuli ribbon anchoring her to the unapproachable splendor of the empyrean. It broke, of course, as all threads do, and for a moment Neska was airborne before she caught another of the hanging silks and arced upwards again, flipping backwards as though the mortal elements of gravity had no claim on her, could have no claim on her, not for as long as she lived and drew breath.
Most of the crowd were too enthralled to applaud, although some sparse cheers erupted every time it looked like Neska was moving a little bit too close to the ground, like there might still be a chance to see bruises and blood and bone yet. The two most invested watchers, and yet the two least fearful for the silkjinn, observed from the balcony of the Huntress' Fane, a limestone and red-brick building with spires that extended almost high enough to scrape the undercarriage of the heavens. There was a black wrought-iron balcony running the perimeter of the platform, and the slender, slightly translucent figure of a young girl balanced lightly on the rail, looking back over her shoulder to watch the silkjinn fly. Leaning against the balustrade beside her, his brown skin very warm and his curls reflecting bronze and gold in the light, Buxiu watched the crowd rather than the girl.
"She suits you well enough," he said, almost reluctantly, as though the words had been torn from him.
"Well," Ilargi replied, her starlight hair blinding. Her dress moved gently in a nonexistent breeze, undulating like a cloud into as many shapes as there were styles. "Well enough."
She nudged the older god with the edge of her dari shoe - for Buxiu was her elder, both in time spent immortal and the appearance of his vessel's human skin.
"You are distrait, Bu."
"I am. I confess myself concerned with the others. A murderer among our ranks."
"I know who I suspect."
"As do I."
A significant look passed between the two. Ilargi was patron of liars, while Buxiu claimed all the secrets of Elinvier for his own, and between the two of them there was little illicit that passed unknown in the world.
"Furthermore," he said after a moment. "I do believe grief has driven Anthe to the edge. She appears non compos mentis."
Ilargi paused, and made a face, and shook her head. "That doesn't sound like Anthe." In the pale white light of the eastern sun, Ilargi was a ghost without colour, looking distinctly ill at ease with washed-out colours, her eyes closer to grey than their true deep, stygian hue. She rarely ventured this far from the frozen wastelands she commanded at the edge of Elinvier, to the very northern edge of the world. Certainly she never stayed for long. Buxiu wondered if that aggrieved her - had she been a northern girl prior to her Selection? "That would require her to have some semblance of a heart with which to grieve."
"Her candidate." Buxiu turned the inkpot over in his hands, his dark eyes assessing. "She's demented."
"She'll fit right in, then."
"Murderous, even."
"Oh, you can't exactly condemn her for that, can you?"
"Hush, my passerine. This is something else altogether."
So Anthe had chosen and Ilargi had chosen and Jedan had chosen and Gjsard had chosen, and the world was narrowing inch by rotten inch. Nearly half of the Selected had been identified, even if they did not yet realise it.
On the ground below, Neska moved like she was performing an ancient dance, reciting a memorised poem - lowering her hand in a graceful gesture to gently brush her fingertips across the hilt of her sabre before selecting a knife instead and drawing it, moving it in a serpentine shape in front of her so that it captured the dying light as reflected it back towards the sky. Ilargi broke the silence a second time.
"Grandfather has chosen. A priestess' daughter, of course."
There was a dark delight in Ilargi's voice that made Buxiu squint at her with suspicion clouding his watchful eyes.
"Something special about this priestess' daughter?"
Ilargi's lip curled. "Nothing at all."
"Nothing at all," Buxiu echoed, a hint of mirth colouring his voice.
"Nothing at all," she answered him again, and below them the assembled crowds broke into sparse applause as Neska moved from the sky to knives to fire, more a wraith than a girl. "She's good, isn't she?"
"Are you really looking for validation, little rabid one?"
She considered this for a second, her tar- black eyes reflecting the mid-noon light like so many radiant stars, her argent hair wild in wisps. "I'm not sure," she said distantly, and flicked her coal-black eyelashes towards the earth as Neska vanished as abruptly as she had appeared. "I'm the indecisive sort."
She fractured, as only a goddess could, and it was easy - she was already etiolated, her colour drained wan by an unfamiliar heat and light that could not exist in her northern home, so it was easy for her to crack and to vanish as dramatically as she typically did. Her skin flaked away, becoming white-hoar feathers which became white-gold grosbeaks and pygmy falcons, and her hair became silver silk like that which hung, flower-like, from the spires and the balconies. Her eyes fell as beetles and her teeth, white and sharp, melted into snowflakes and ice which fluttered down onto the heart of the city below. If the crowds assembled wondered where the snow had materialised from, they did not bother to look upwards; it wouldn't have mattered if they had, because Buxiu was a shadow and the eastern sun was unforgiving, utterly, to shadows.
In the garden of Jedan there existed a gargantuan tree, old, its canopies dripping star-shaped leaves. Gold, green, tipped in stark white. It was heavy with a crop of yasakmeyve fruits on the cusp of maturity and independence from the bough. Arvoh had seen many such trees on his travels, but never one of such sheer size; they didn't grow just anywhere, resisted every vain attempt at concerted cultivation. Only at the liminal edges did they flourish, where another, more ethereal world hovered and seeped into city, black loam making sludge of asphalt, green radiance splattering traffic signs and sidewalks. Where birds flew too close to that border they disappeared, the dirt-crusted pigeons and smoke-stained crows.
Accordingly there were no birds here or butterflies, no ants or amphibians. All was clean. Not a blade of grass was too long; no weeds or infestation of fungi touched the earth, no mark of worm or insect hunger on petals. Frangipani, lotuses—either Jedan favored those, or no other flower would grow. Symbols of passing on and peace, respectively. Appropriate, perhaps.
Myth and legend told that yasakmeyve fruits were alluring and sweetly scented. Reality was less glamorous. Their scent was faintly vegetal rather than like palm sugar, jasmines, or some heavenly blossom. On the ground one of them lay fallen and premature, ivory skin bruised from impact and seeping blue sap. Arvoh turned it in his palm, tracing the contours of a pareidolic face in the bruised surface - rough, a work in progress, but there was already a nose and mouth defined, eye sockets deepening. The ones on the bough were shaped similarly. All yasakmeyve fruits from the same tree looked alike, replicated over and over in some internal mold, the way dolls emerge as identical strangers from a factory.
These were the western islands, wild and damp, thoroughly discouraging of any life or light, and yet the tree flourished. The garden was small, high-walled and cramped, and utterly ironic - that the mortals and the devout should put down roots for a god who was determined to do the precise opposite, attempt to contain him even through metaphor within high walls and four foot by four foot patches of soil.
Really, Gjsard had claimed this place for his own. The branches dripped with paper folded into delicate origami shapes, stars and snowflakes hanging from every bough like cherry blossoms. Arvoh stepped forward and plucked one - out of curiosity or malice, he could not quite say. Unfolding it revealed a splintered fragment of a recipe, or was it a broken snippet of poetry? Knowing Gsjard, it could be either, or both, and truth be told his writing remained so cramped, sharp-edged and scrawled that the meaning was impossible to divine. Was it even English?
"Is it yourself, or is it the other?"
Gjsard retained his lower-class accent, despite his godhood. There was always some little remnant of who they had once been, even if it was a frayed and ragged and pale facsimile of what humanity they had possessed. It faded over time - Gjsard had evanesced swifter than the others. Toamn blamed it on his isolation. Himno was of the opinion that the sage was just weaker than the rest.
"As much myself as I ever am."
Behind the tree, crumbling stone steps led in a tight curlicue to the tops of the garden walls, and then beyond into the narrow stone round-tower which rose as the highest and sharpest point of the skyline along the western coast, which was crowded in the main by cottages and farmhouses and low stone barns. "The Pavilion of Thought waiting for you in the lowlands and you choose to sequester yourself in ostracism here?"
That was the grandiose name for the ballroom beneath the palace that now housed the library of the high priest of Gjsard. It was a sight to be sure: shelves rose forty feet under an astonishing painted ceiling, and the spines of books glowed in jewel-toned leather, their gold leaf shining in the glavelight like animal eyes. The glaves themselves were perfect polished spheres, hanging by the hundreds and emitting a purer white light than Arvoh had ever seen from the rough, ruddy stones that lit the western shores.
"The Fade slinks low," Gjsard said, his broad accent making it into a threat. "There is no thought."
"You've been too long isolated."
"And you don't sound like Arvoh."
The space was dark, but not ominously so; merely a careless kind of shadow, the gloom of recklessly disregarding mortal matters such as light. Occasionally there would be a fulguration of light, a flash akin to that of lightning, and Gjsard's outline would become visible, shuffling dog-eared papers and scrawling with a long-plumed owl feather, quickly and carelessly enough that Arvoh thought it unlikely it would be legible at all the next morning.
"It's done," the deceitful god said, putting his frost-bitten hands into his pockets - as much as he had hands, as much as he had pockets. It was all hard light, a matter of tricking the mortal eye. Did any of them really have a body? If they did, it was not human and it was probably not pretty. "She agreed. You have your Selected."
Gsjard returned the quill to the inkpot, and, dipping gently, began to trace again. "Her name is Lilth."
"Penillion, to be sure."
"And yours?"
"I have yet to choose." Arvoh stooped to pick up a discarded book; not Gjsard's, although all knowledge was his. This wasn't really a book, but a diary, maybe, a set of notes, blue ink on yellow paper. Curled writing. Wild dots on the i's.
"But your choice is obvious."
"Obvious won't win me the wager."
"Nothing will."
Arvoh turned the diary over in his hands. A man who was not a god may have felt ill at ease, dressed as he was in the kind of mortal garb that suggested propriety and decorum, a waistcoat and a shirt whiter than Ilargi's hair, shoes blacker than ink, but Arvoh, though he appeared out of place, rarely knew the discomfort of an awkward situation, even here. Gjsard still, after all these years, dressed as a farmer or a fisherman, a shepherd or a smith, a labourer, perhaps. He still had callouses and keloids on his hands. He still wore his hair shaved clean, as though with a straight razor. He still squinted slightly, as though facing the sun, and wore his shirts rolled to the elbow.
"Is that a prophecy or mere cynicism?"
"You want a prophecy, ask for a prophecy."
"No," Arvoh said measuredly. "There are so few mysteries left in the world. Let us preserve the future."
"As you wish. Where dwells the Fade?"
"In a golden crown. He prefers Adam, as well you know. And - " Arvoh cut Gjsard off before he could speak. "The rest are assembled and scattered and waiting. It doesn't matter, does it? It can't matter. That is not why I'm here. You know of the wager, so you also know that I am in need of... abetters. Buxiu and Toamn will not turn against Ilargi for such a petty matter, and Jedan is too much in nighted colour -"
"And Anthe favours you not, and Himno does not choose sides and the Fade wants nothing more than to see you fail and fall."
"Just so."
"Well, I shall join Himno in his neutrality. You should know I have nothing to offer you, anyway. You want secrets, chase Buxiu. You want lies - well." Gjsard did not look up at all. The nib of his pen moved across the paper as something possessed. "Chase storms if you want a liar. But you're here, so you want facts, plain and simple."
"I'm willing," Arvoh said, a hint of dark mirth in his voice. "To haggle."
"I'll give you one for free." Gjsard drew quick, violent slashes through what he had written, and glanced up from his page for the first time. His right eye, swallowed by the white film of blindness, his left eye the brightest and most brilliant blue, and both of them piercing. "What was her name - you know the one, the flower girl..."
Arvoh addressed his gaze to the rafters. "I know not."
"It's a wonder you and the passerine don't get along better. Liars, the both of you." Gjsard shrugged, and stood. "Well, you'll learn it soon enough. Toamn has Selected her. Valennon, is it not? The priestess' daughter."
"Toamn did this?" The expression that flitted across Arvoh's icy eyes was closer to anger than unhappiness, something bitter like cyanide seeping into his voice, and yet Gjsard could not tell if he was displeased with Toamn, with Ilargi who had no doubt machinated this decision, with the girl herself for being Selected or with Gjsard himself for informing him. Arvoh was not an easily read figure.
"Correct." Gjsard, unlike many of his immortal brothers and sisters, smiled often and smiled broadly - the kind of expression that could cleave the sky open end to end, so sudden and coruscant. "I suppose I might choose a side after all. There's always such wondrous trouble when you two fight."
"There'll be no fighting. Ilargi has no concept of subtlety. She believes us to be playing chess, with man as pawn, with moves to be made and plays to be played. She is incorrect, as ever she is." Arvoh glanced at the sage. "You changed your mind quick enough."
"It occurred to me that I have neglected my duties. I know all. I must. And yet I do not. So I should."
"You speak of Lysha?"
"Of her death."
"Yes, yes." Arvoh's smile was not a friendly expression. It had teeth. "Why, I had nearly forgotten."
The Selected
Anthe: Amaterasu Min
Ilargi: Ekaitza Neska Hezur
Toamn: Annora Valennon
Gjsard: Lilth Rose
Jedan: Marzanna Petrova
If I have not yet got back to you, my apologies! It does not mean your character is rejected, only that I am still working my way through the backlog. I shall endeavour to do this as soon as possible. I hope you enjoyed this chapter, and please do review and leave your thoughts! The first Selected are going to be introduced in the upcoming chapters, so the plot will then begin to progress.