Django Wexler - The Thousand Names

This was nothing like those services. The archaic form of Khandarai used in religious ritual was grammatically complex and difficult to speak, but still basically comprehensible. As Feor’s voice slowly rose, Winter began to catch her words, but they sounded like no language she had ever heard. She wasn’t certain if there were words at all. Certainly the girl didn’t pause in her recitation, even to breathe. Each syllable flowed into the next in an unbroken stream of gibberish, and yet. .

And yet, oddly, Winter felt as though she could almost understand. That there was meaning there, so clear that it lurked just below the surface, nearly comprehensible, slightly out of reach. As though-the thought crept in, ridiculous but still true-it wanted to be understood, wanted her to reach out and grasp it, like plunging her hand into an icy stream. .

Feor raised her hand from the kettle. It ought to have been dripping wet, but the water clung to the surface of her skin, as though she’d dipped her hand in translucent tar. The tent had grown shadowed around her, the full light of day fading into twilight, and in the semidarkness motes of light darted and spun around her fingers.

Without ever halting in her recitation, the girl leaned forward and touched the tip of her index finger to Bobby’s eyelids, each in turn. Winter had to stifle a gasp. Where Feor’s wet finger had been, Bobby’s skin glowed , a shifting miasma of color that wavered from brilliant blue to sickly green and back again, like paint swirling in a bucket. She paused, still speaking quietly, and studied the effect. Then, carefully, she started to draw.

Wherever her finger passed, it left those eerie, glowing traceries. The pattern she built up, line by careful line, started from Bobby’s eyes and spread across her face, down her neck, out across her shoulders. It was abstract, asymmetric, a complex map that ran over the girl’s skin with a geometrical exactitude, as though the design took the contours of her body into account. The lines thickened, thinned, began and ended, but never crossed or touched, no matter how close Feor drew them.

Feor passed her hand along Bobby’s arms, the underside of her chin, her collarbone, her slight breasts. Winter wasn’t sure if the tent had darkened further or the pattern had gotten brighter, but everything was fading away except for the glow of the lines and the rising sound of Feor’s voice. Every syllable echoed as if she were speaking from the pulpit of a grand cathedral. Even Bobby’s skin vanished, leaving only the pattern, a glowing web hovering in the void. Once again, Winter had the odd feeling that there was order there, an understanding that beckoned to her beneath the apparent chaos.

Finally, with great solemnity, Feor turned Bobby’s right hand over and pressed it to her own. Light bloomed between their palms, and when Feor took her hand away the blaze from Bobby’s skin outshone even the rest of the pattern. Her recitation rose to a crescendo, the sound of her voice crashing around them like waves against a rocky shore, and almost lost in the rising roar were a few words that Winter recognized.

“ - obv-scar-iot!” Feor’s eyes glowed with reflected light from the thing she had drawn. All the sound vanished at once, as though someone had dropped a velvet rug across the tent, and the light on Bobby’s skin flared so bright it was painful to look at. Winter tasted blood in her mouth where she’d bitten her lip.

And then, apparently, it was over. The light disappeared, and for the first time since she’d begun to recite Feor was silent. For a moment Winter thought they were still in darkness, but as her eyes adjusted she realized it was only the dim half-light of the tent in daytime. Bobby lay still on her pallet, and Feor sat equally still beside her. For a long while, nothing moved.

Eventually, Winter could no longer restrain herself.

“Saints and fucking martyrs!” she exploded, the sound of her own voice alien in her ears. “Brass Balls of the Beast, Karis Almighty on a fucking crutch. Holy. .” She ran out of breath, and by the time she’d gotten her wind back her composure had at least partially returned. “Feor? What happened? Was that-did it work?”

The girl didn’t respond. Winter shuffled forward on hands and knees. “Feor?”

Hesitantly, she prodded Feor’s shoulder. The girl toppled over, nerveless and boneless, falling across her broken arm and lying in a tangle on the floor like a discarded puppet.

• • •

Winter dragged Feor to her bedroll and laid her out, trying not to jostle her wounded arm. Her eyes were screwed shut, and her breathing was so shallow that Winter had to bend across her face to be certain it hadn’t stopped entirely.

As for Bobby, Winter couldn’t tell if anything had changed one way or the other. She’d peeked under the bandages, but there was so much blood that she couldn’t see much, and she didn’t dare investigate. The corporal’s face had relaxed a little, at least, and her breathing seemed steadier. Winter covered her with a blanket up to the neck and worried.

The tent suddenly seemed stifling. With a quick glance at her two sleeping companions, Winter slipped out through the flap. She was surprised to find Folsom standing just outside, stiff as a sentry. He saluted grimly and looked at her with questioning eyes. Winter sighed.

“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “Graff says he’s not going to make it.” She’d almost said she . “I’m hoping he’s too stubborn for that. We’ve done everything we can.”

Folsom nodded. He cleared his throat and proffered a folded sheet of paper, which Winter took curiously. Only when she opened it did she remember the errand she’d sent him on to get him out of the tent. In his broad, neat hand was a list of names, most of which Winter barely recognized. Beside each was the notation “dead,” “missing,” or “wounded,” with the last bearing additional notes on whether recovery was expected. Winter folded the paper again and noticed that the list continued onto the back of the page.

“Thank you, Corporal,” she said. “You can go. Get some rest.”

Folsom nodded and lumbered off. Winter cast about for something to sit on and found an empty hardtack box, which she dragged in front of her tent. She would have liked to sleep herself, but she felt too keyed up for it, full of the nervous, manic energy that comes with the promise of a vicious price the next day. Besides, it was only midafternoon.

Her mind kept going back to what she’d witnessed in the tent, but her thoughts skipped off the surface of it, like a rock bouncing across the thick crust of an icy lake. When she closed her eyes she could still see that tracery of blue-green fire hanging in the darkness like an unfathomably complex equation. It seemed . . unnatural somehow that after witnessing that she could emerge into the sunlight and see the camp spread out around her as though nothing had changed, stacked arms and hardtack boxes, the distant sounds of horses and shouting men. She would have been less surprised to find that the tent flap had opened onto a fairy-tale kingdom full of dragons and talking animals.

Feor. . Her mind shied away again, but she forced it back. She’s the real thing. A wizard, or a naathem , or whatever you want to call it. It wasn’t that she hadn’t believed in such things, exactly. After all, the Wisdoms preached regularly against the evils of wizardry and the vile practice of congress with demons. One whole order of the Sworn Church, the Priests of the Black, had once dedicated their lives to rooting out the arcane in all its forms, though they hadn’t existed for more than a century. Still, everyone knew magic existed, somewhere.