"I," he said, "am painting." And then he set the nib of the pen to the smear at the side of his wrist and went to work.
I slid back onto the chair, thinking that I had earned this queasiness: I had told him to make art, and so he was. I should have remembered all the stories of blood and grief in the journals of his Corrections, and his comments about his ease with knives... ancestors! I had not thought he'd be capable of turning one on himself...! But truly, I should have known better. A man who'd undergone a scourging in order to be permitted to scourge others was not going to have a weak stomach. Not, apparently, like his ajzelin, who was having trouble even watching. Particularly when he went back to the smear at the side of his wrist to refresh the pen.
"There's no need to be distressed," he said absently as he worked. "The side of the wrist, between the end of the arm bone and the beginning of the wrist bones, is poorly supplied with blood. You can cut there and not bleed almost at all."
"Which, of course, you know."
He looked up then. "Of course I know."
My mouth ran ahead of my thoughts too often, particularly with Shame. "When we first met, in the Bleak. You said a body can only bear so much. Is that what you were doing? Bloodletting?"
He set the pen down and rested his hands on the edge of the table. And said nothing at all, until at last I said, "I'm just trying to understand."
"For some things," he said at last, "to bleed is the only way to be reborn."
"Always the knives," I said, ears slicking back.
"Don't be so literal, Farren," he said, taking the pen back up. "There are other ways for a spirit to bleed. If an actual knife will do the job, then I use a knife. But you can't tell me that you haven't bled yourself in your art."
"I have never," I whispered. "Until I came here."
"Are you sure?" he asked, head still bent. "Sometimes the cut is deep, and gushes, and everyone sees it. But sometimes the cut is shallow, and seeps, and it may be years before anyone realizes it. And then they look back on it and say, 'how could I not have seen.'"
I shuddered. "Kor, for the sake of the gods."
"You were depressed," he said. "Didn't you bleed into your work?"
I looked away, and thought of a piece here and there... including one that now hung in the study of the heir to my city district, which had been painted initially without people until that youth, in his innocence, noticed its emptiness.
Kor was kind enough not to press. Or perhaps he realized he had made his point. More likely both; I have yet to meet an Ai-Naidari in whom compassion and candor mixed so easily. Most of us have to grind that pigment almost to particulate to distribute it into the binder.
We kept our silence as he worked, until he set the pen down and said, "There." He turned it on the table to face me and blotted his wrist with the towel, leaving me to my perlustration.
I am told that one of your great writers, aunera, once said that perfection is achieved only when there is nothing left to take away. To us this is an important principle, sufficiently that we have a word for it. We have spoken earlier of habits and customs and traditions that no longer serve us, something we call vuqerin, and that the act of removing them is uvrel, to cull. But the concept that civilization needs such refinement is known as ukulij... and the act itself, as udar vabanil. The literal translation of the latter, aunera, is "the Correction of society." It is strange that I never truly thought about it... to wonder at the name, and at the notion that Thirukedi was the source of all Correction long before there was a Shame. Perhaps it is no wonder that Shame is His osulkedi, and has always answered directly to Him; for if Shame Corrects the people of Kherishdar, he does so only as a reflection of the hand that refines civilization itself.
The word Kor had chosen, then, was ukulij, and he had painstakingly written it in his blood. Let it not be said that he had no sense of artistry, either, for he wrote it much as he had some of his own notes in his journal... long past when the ink of his blood was opaque, so that the letters seemed to be seen through the eyes of someone on the verge of fainting, fading in and out of consciousness. It made me realize that from an individual level, the act of Correcting society—of refining it by paring away all that did not belong to it—would feel, a great deal, like vertigo to one being pared away.
I looked up at Kor and met his eyes across the paper. I could not even give voice to what I learned from that piece of calligraphy, rendered so starkly in his simple, bold handwriting... and in his own blood.
He knew how it would all end. Perhaps not the particulars. Perhaps not the nuances or the reasons. But he was Kherishdar's Shame, and he had spent his life Correcting the wayward so they might return to the arms of society; had, in effect, been Thirukedi's helpmeet for so long that indeed, he had become something like the master.
It would hurt. It would hurt past all bearing. But civilization must be given primacy over the individual, or society will serve no one. Perfection is only approached when there is nothing left to take away... and for that something must be removed.
"How will he bear it?" I asked, soft.
"Perhaps he won't," Kor said, and finally I understood the depth of his grief. He watched my face and nodded slowly, then offered me the pen. "Do you have anything to add?"
"No," I said. And then, "Yes." And uncapped the ink. With lines that started out tinted in rust red I described the shape of the black blossom: the alien bloom that had begun all of this, and drawn us here and entwined us in this grief, the flower that represented all that would have to be culled for Kherishdar to remain.
When I was done, Kor said, "So... is it different when it is someone else's ugliness that is on the page?"
"Your grief is not ugliness, Kor," I said. And then sighed, shaking my head. "Gods, you are doing it again."
He laughed and leaned over the page to kiss me on the bridge of my nose. And that was the end of our first collaborative work; it was not the last, though the ones to come would be executed in media far less tangible than paper and ink, and more lasting.
The knock on the door drew us from our communion, and then the bells jingled as the door opened.
"May I enter?" Haraa said, head lowered.
I rose immediately and went to her, concerned. "Haraa? I thought you would..." And then trailed off. Frowning, I said, "Did he send you away?"
"No," she said. She stood with her hair parted in front of her shoulders, like a stole; she even folded her arms over the curls so that they remained flat in place on her breast. "No, osulkedi. He did not." Looking up at me with her burning-ember eyes, she finished in a flat voice, "But I have some pride. If they do not even notice you leaving, then you aren't really there, are you."
This took me aback, for fathriked were often installed in rooms as living statues, and while you were aware of them, it was not always the intent that they draw your attention actively. I have heard that the point of such exercises is difficult to explain to aunera, but suffice to say that Haraa's comment was... not something I would have expected from the mouth of a fathrikedi, and from her eyes she knew it.
"I'm sorry," she said, softer. "I just... I can't watch anymore. I can't... be excluded, when I wasn't before. They don't need or want me there. I would rather be useless here, where I never expected to be useful, than useless there, where I used to be... the lord of Qenain's only fathrikedi, for he needed no other."
"You are useful here," I said firmly.
"I doubt I am even welcome here," she said. "Given my behavior earlier." She looked past me at Shame. "I am sorry."
I expected some dissertation on how he understood that her actions had been affected by the extremity of the situation. But instead, he merely inclined his head, and beside me Haraa breathed out so softly I would have missed it had I not been so near her.
I closed the door behind her firmly and said, "You are welcome here, and we are glad of your company."
"He speaks for you?" Haraa asked Shame.
"You don't belong there anymore," Shame answered, quiet. And that was both reassurance, and doom, and well we all knew it.
