When I stopped throwing up and I lay in a small sandstone cave where a pool of water was poured for me, I experienced hope for the first time—a feeling of sweetness under my tongue. All colors brighter. A quiet but persistent melody. I was an orphan now, but in a place of orphans—this much I understood. This place, I thought, would be different from the Shoal. A place where nothing watched you from underneath. A place of warm earth, like Old Song’s tales of the forests of Lysinar, where small multicolored flowers grew like a carpet in the glades. A place where orphans came for refuge.
Nothing much grew here—not even moss, and the colors of green and mist were replaced by the scorching of sun—but I accomplished what I had wanted. I had traveled toward your people and their lives, like those old warriors of Stone and singers of Song who wanted to travel—and I was no longer imprisoned in the Shoal. I was free.
I met other students, too. Most were much younger than me, a few barely children. Some were my age back then, or older still. They lived separately from me. At first, I thought it was because they did not need water to breathe at night. Later I learned that they roomed with each other, ten to a room in the first circle of training, but nobody had wanted to share with me.
Back then, I wasn’t bothered. I reckoned I’d meet them all later, when I learned the language well enough to converse. I did not know yet how many students die in the first circle of training.
He was patient with me, Ladder was. And I wanted to learn. He taught me the ancient ways of the Stones.
“Was this when you became lovers?” Ulín smiles at me. It’s a small, tentative smile, but it’s there, as if she wants to show me that she has accepted my words from before. That I chose this, of my own free will.
I tell her, “No, that was later. And that word, lovers, it is wrong. He is the Headmaster—there are things he can only teach through his body. You would understand if you chose that path. You heard his song, like me.”
She shudders.
“You do not want to become an assassin—or is it that you do not want to share your body?” I ask her.
She is silent again, and I regret pushing her after she tried to be kind. I say, “You do not need to answer. I will continue.”
The ancient ways of the Stones are the ways of warriors. It was easy and joyful for me to learn how to move my body to avoid and trick my enemies, how to move soundlessly, how to identify the points of attack, how to strike and to kill, and yet never be sullied with blood. To learn all these skills, he taught me the nameway language, too. Verbs. I did not understand, at first. To move. To strike. To kill. To fuck. To be.
This I understood later—verbs are motions. You move, covering ground. You are a figure on this ground, just you alone against the backdrop of the landscape. Both nameway and dreamway people think this way, the exact same way. The magic might be different, but the minds are the same. The nameway and dreamway are the same. Bondless. The siltway people do not need to talk so much about motions, because we have bonds. We flicker along these bonds, from self toward other, from where the self is toward where the other is. Landscape is not important. When one is alive, the land is hardly noticed. Dead, it does not exist—just the waters in which the Star of the Shoal floats forever.
But the nameway and dreamway people are all orphans. So you pay attention to limbs, you shuffle your feet over rocks and sand and forest glades, hoping perhaps at the end of this journey to see another person, but that’s only sometimes the case.
Haltingly, when I could, I asked Ladder about death. “When we leave the body,” I said, “we simply move to the Shoal. The just-dead ancestors are closest to the isles, but as generations are added, we sink deeper. Souls are bonded in life and in death, and there is almost no difference. Where do your people go when you die?”
He grimaced. “The goddess Bird takes most. Where she takes them, I do not know. If you had three deepnames, you could see her coming for the souls of the dead—each person sees her as a different Bird. I saw her once as a raven.”
I thought about it as I lay alone in my sandstone cave, where the water kept getting shallower from heat no matter how much I added to it. That night I dreamt of a presence beneath me, a vast globe made entirely of embers that burned so brightly. Then it ashed over into darkness. Again and again the red embers flickered and faded, and I was filled with despair. A sense of vast beauty and also meaninglessness, like nothing mattered in the end. No matter how I tried and how much I learned, the burning coals would wink out into bitter flakes of ash. And the song was coming from them, a song I recognized.
I thrashed in my cave, suffocating in the too-shallow water. I was foolish to think I was free, that there was no presence underneath. This was like the Shoal, only worse—all red and forever dying.
Below, I asked Ladder in the morning. “What is there, below?” My speech in your language was still halting, see.
“Ah,” he said. But he did not explain yet.
When he was ready, he made me spar with the others. He taught me how to gauge an opponent’s intent from the tells of their body, but I found it easier to trace the patterns of heat. Bodies are unimportant, but bodies are what I focused on now that I had no family and no afterlife, and I noticed all kinds of things. Bodies were motion. I, too, moved against air, making minute sounds and changes as I moved. If you notice how heat wraps around bodies, you can predict how motions will go.
I did not notice any of that in the siltway isles. All we looked at was bonds. And the magic of deepnames, too, we used only for bonds. All we noticed was our togetherness.
Here, my two deepnames served me as weapons. Assassins take balanced deepnames—one and one syllable, or two and two, or three and three; I was unbalanced between my one-syllable and my two-syllable, but my magic was powerful and fast when I wanted to strike.
I killed my first person on the training grounds.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I tell Ulín. “I am an assassin.”
She looks abashed. Did she forget that she wanted to hire me?
I say, “We slay each other in training. This is normal.” Although I am not sure what normal means anymore. “This is expected.”
She nods, as if unconvinced. I go on.
When I killed for the first time, Ladder praised me, but all I wanted to see was the goddess Bird coming for the soul of that nameway youth I defeated. But instead I sensed something else. That vast presence under the ground—a star, as if made entirely of coals—reached up, and caught the soul as it tumbled away from its bodily shell, and pulled its ember underground.
