II. Away from
I live in the third terrace now, where assassin-trainees spend their final circle of training. This part of our training is to be still. To listen. To wait for the first real client to take a chance on my skill. If the assassination succeeds, I will graduate, but until then, I must stay here. In this land, the land of the nameway, I learned about verbs, about movement upon ground—but all I do is sit in a room with almost no water. There is a small pool for me, in the corner. I can almost feel the water evaporate into the desert air, drop by drop, leaving only salt. My gills are painfully dry. I am still.
I wait for a month for someone to come. Then I wait even longer.
It is noon, and someone is climbing up the sandstone stairs. I hope for a client, but anyone will do after six weeks of sitting.
I listen to the sounds and attend. The visitor’s steps are noisy and unguarded. Their body’s heat is wrapped in the incessant heat of the sun-streaked air. It must be a client. Please.
They climb to the top of the third terrace and stop.
I am desperate, not that I’d show it. Still, my lips move, and sounds emerge from my mouth. “Come in.”
It is still so strange to attend to the movement of lips. To notice the body. Even the way I think keeps changing, flickering between the language of the desert and my old siltway speech. I already think too much in the nameway tongue. So many verbs. Soon I will be without my birth words, and it feels . . . strange—not grief-like, not peace-like, though perhaps both, flaring and subsiding like the magic of my deepnames.
“Come in,” I say again, louder.
“Thank you.” The newcomer’s voice is resonant and deep, and pleasant to hear. Shadows are slanting against the round opening to my room. In this final circle of training, we do not get a door.
A person comes in. They are nameway. They are of medium build, somewhat taller than me, and dressed in dun-colored traveling clothes, plain but clearly well-made. Their skin is olive-brown, lighter than the desert nameway. The newcomer’s long, dark hair is braided into a single braid. They are young. No, old.
I swear at myself—still, after all this training and time, I can’t tell the nameway apart.
I strain my senses, squinting the way the Headmaster taught me, to see the visitor as a body I can kill.
They are about thirty.
They remind me of someone, but most nameway people look alike to me.
I am distraught, and I do not understand why. So I make a movement with my hand, motioning to the bare sandstone floor. “Will you sit with me?” I ask.
“Gladly.” The person’s face is in shadow. It is bright outside, but my room is dim. I wonder if they really are glad, or if this is a quirk of nameway speech—to lie. I never learned how to do this, either; I can only keep silent.
They sit down. Perhaps they would want coverlets or cushions. Other assassin-trainees acquire them, but I see no need for such things. Except now I feel strange, as if I have broken a rule. Nameway people like soft things. This person has no carpet with them, just a small bag.
I speak over my hesitations. “I am called Stone Orphan.”
“I am Ulín.”
“Ou-leen?” I drag out the vowels, knowing that I am misspeaking. My lips move, and it is a strain to notice them.
They do not seem upset. “Ulín. Short vowels—first, you draw the corners of your lips together for a short ou. Then, the stress on the short ee. Ulín.”
I repeat, and get closer this time.
I say, “I have not thought before how the corners of my lips can shape sounds.”
“All sounds can be described that way.” Ulín’s face lights up, animated by excitement. “Most vowels are about the tongue and the lips. Is your tongue up at the roof of your mouth? Is it down? Is the shape of your lips rounded? And so on. If you want, I can say more.”
I understand, with sudden clarity, that this is technical knowledge, like the skills of the body and the blade I learned here. This person reminds me of someone, yes—of my elder Old Song—and my heart catches.
I want to say, Yes, teach me.
Instead, I go for the center of things. “You must have come here to purchase an assassination. So name your target, and let us come to terms.”
“Wait,” Ulín says. “Please. May I ask why you’re here?”
I blink. “I am here to kill your target.”
“No—” Ulín says. “I mean, you are siltway . . .”
I try not to recoil. And to think I liked her—them—enjoyed the sound of their voice—they reminded me of Old Song. But this person is not my elder. They are some random nameway, a client, as callous and terrible as the rest.
I do not want to be angry, but it happens regardless. “I am an assassin, and this is the School of Assassins. Where else would you want me to be?” Nowhere, not to exist? Call me fish already and let’s get this over with. It’s how you people know about us anyway. Fish stories from a remote land. Fairytales about the world’s strange places.
“I’m so sorry,” the visitor says. And here it is again, the soft, deep voice. Their hands spread on their knees where I can see them. “It’s my fault. I was startled to see a siltway person in the Great Burri Desert, and I wondered about your water . . . It was wrong of me. Please forgive me. Anybody can be anywhere.”
Ulín surprises me. Their words are the ebb and flow of the tide. But I am still angry.
“Anybody can be anywhere,” I echo. “That’s right.” But all of my people are elsewhere, and I am far from the sea. I explain, needlessly. “There in the corner—it’s a shallow pool of water mixed with salt. At night, I immerse in it to sleep.” If the Headmaster heard me blather so, he’d fail me all the way back to second circle. Maybe even the first. “Anything else you want to know?”
