Shadowplay: Act One, Scene Two

The fourth-class Tanor train wheezes as it drops off the usual assortment of students, livestock and thugs, and one gnarled creature so stooped that its species and profession can only be guessed. The clerk with the naked knife on his desk takes note of the students and livestock, nods at the thugs, and turns to scrutinize the ancient.

Lumps of spine jostle on the bent back as the cloaked creature raises its head. Its cloudy eyes don’t seem to find the clerk, and it produces a querulous creaking sound. When the rattling voice drops the word “Kumani” among other questions, the clerk tenses up and finishes the rest of their business in quiet haste. 

The creature wants to know which way is Lion’s Reach, and how far, and he tells them. They want a carriage and he tells them what a carriage costs, and then they don’t want one anymore. They hobble toward the door and the clerk squints after, nonplussed. What a geezer might want with the Kumani would be more interesting to ponder if they looked at all likely to survive the trip up the mountain.

The old woman’s filthy toenails finally tear through her shoes as she makes her way up the pitted, winding track. She started out shivering for show, but before she passes the first guardpost the snow begins again. At the switchback she pauses to heave and hack a bit - also for show, a show with no audience but the crows. But someone’s always watching. The eyes that take in the bleak, grey-brown foothills are clouded but not vague, eating up a grim view with a young woman’s hunger. For a moment her spine straightens, and the knotted stick in her hand hovers an inch above the road, its purpose forgotten. Then the old woman doubles up again, shrivels up again, and plods on up the hill.  It’s colder than she’s been in a while, and she’s never been this far north, but that’s all right. The cold feels clean, and she takes great gulping breaths of it, as if she’s been drowning for decades.

She’s looking for the guards long before she spots one. As fallow farmlands turn to the rambling outer estates of the city, she’s joined by others coming and going on the road. They’re ordinary enough -   farmers with carts, merchants and scientists in contentious caravans, students, engineers, mercenaries. The Kumani guards are among them, and they don’t have anything particular in common; there’s no uniform, no insignia, and only household weapons in sight. But Keshena has worn others’ faces too long to miss the way people move when they’re pretending, the subconscious consciousness of being watched. She’s seized by a wild impulse to reach out and twist the wrist of the sloppy young man twirling a knife with his foot up on a fencepost, to see how quickly and from where he’ll produce all the other knives. She swallows the urge, only gives him a wandering smile when he looks her way. His eyes slide off her and she grins into her cloak. The Kumani can be fooled.  Good to know.

When the mounted traffic veers off and the road underfoot changes from pitted, ancient stone to cut pavers, the going gets less painful but more treacherous. Several times she skids on a puddle and has to jab her walking stick into a crevice to keep from toppling over. Pretending to break a hip would take time out of the day, but by god she’ll do it if she has to. 

The guards at the Inner Gate watch her much more obviously than those before, and these young people do wear uniforms, grey and green and gold, as well as shining blades probably not as sharp as the ones hidden in their boots. They squint at her as she draws into the shelter of the wall to fumble a crumpled page out of her cloak. It doesn’t matter. Her destination isn’t something she can hide now, and her other secrets will keep themselves. With a bitter smile, she thumbs the last few coins in her pocket. It’s not enough for another train ticket.  There’s nothing to go back to in Capria anyway.

She mumbles through the directions in the letter just above a discreet volume. The sharp-eared fellows at the Gate overhear, as she means them to, and their scrutiny slacks, but it never entirely fades. The sense of being watched is usually her private hell; it’s not reassuring to be certain for once that it’s not paranoia. The citizens all seem to feel it - this is not a city where a person strolls, or promenades with head held high, although that might have as much to do with the vicious weather.

“Northwest on Axiom Road, down to the end of the western atrium, then south before the last shopfront…” She shuffles on. Pale granite walls hem passersby together until the heat of their combined commercial exertions melts the falling snow at shoulder level. The shopkeepers offer the same blandishments as everywhere else - clothes, candies, gifts for your lady - but as she peeks into crates and over counters in her way, she sees that these clothes are clotted with fur; these ladies seem to like knives as gifts. One of the trays held before her nose offers colorful lumps of sugar with fat black spiders entombed inside.

All roads in Lion’s Reach end up inside, by one archway or another; mottled grey sky gives way to arches and lamplit naves. The facade of the ancient cathedral was long ago subsumed by encroaching development on every side, new towers and wings growing steadily more modern in style as they climb. The city doesn’t have avenues and boulevards within the Basilica, but stairs and hallways honored to be called “streets,” endless concentric interiors burrowing deeper into the mountains beneath and behind. They say people get lost in Lion’s Reach, never see the sun again, and then others say, “Never seen the sun in the Reach yet,” and everyone laughs and drinks to that.

The intersection of Axiom Road and the Basilica, and every other intersection along Basilica Street, is smoky, noisy, and clogged at all hours: short-term hawkers shouting from carts, booths and stands; trainees from the Numerologists’ guild checking vendor permits and setting the Wolves on infractors; busy establishments serving food and drink in the chapels and disgorging drunken Reach farmers arm-in-arm with lecturers from the Academy too drunk themselves to argue with their colleagues holding forth about new numbers and the rights of harpies from the hallway.  The Academy of the Apse (yes, thank you, very droll for an academic) caps Axiom Road on the north end with half an acre of grand staircase leading up to a library that has claimed more lives than plague, or so they like to tell you in first-year classes. It’s true that the Lions’ Library stacks are the second-deepest catacomb in the Citadel, but no one has ever been proven to have died there, excepting members of the city’s guilds. And guild work is dangerous, any physician will tell you that; that’s why the Kumani have the best pension plan in the world, because they never have to pay it.

An Engineer is crawling along the scaffolding that mars the Academy’s elaborate facade. In other cities scholars might tend toward the paunchy, but no job in the Reach is less than aggressively physical, and those whom the elements obey must also be sure climbers.  Mezzanines alternate with clerestory windows for many stories above the Basilica floor, and crossing the yawning void between them, the Engineers’ wire and girder webs. They maintain the electric lines that fill the Citadel’s halls with blazing light right through the sunless winter, making it a wonder of the world. Though Lion’s Reach exports toys and machinework, and sun-lamps now decorate the finest houses in every city, the Reach is still the only place where the common man can read by electric light in his own home. Above the Engineer on the mezzanine, a broad-shouldered man with a square black beard leans out at a precarious angle, shouting down numbers and things that definitely aren’t among the numbers Keshena knows. They let Numerologists be foremen here? No wonder the spires curve.

Shop doors siphon off portions of the crowd all along the western atrium as she works her way out of the intersection and down Basilica Street. She smells sausage and beer and bread, and tries to remember the last time she ate. In some roadhouse outside Capria, just before catching the train to Tanor - two days ago, then.  The jewelry she’d been able to grab didn’t sell well - didn’t have time to not get cheated - but she’d taken more time to load up the battered leather case knocking against her knees as she goes.  It’s heavier than it’s ever been before, and that’s worth a lot more than gold to her.

The second-to-last shopfront is a stuffy tailor’s, ill-lit and deserted but inexplicably solvent. Keshena turns left down what would be an alley in an outdoor city - here, little better than a crawlspace. No more electric lights; she sees two oil lamps and then that’s done with, and she’s groping her way by torchlight. None too many of those either. The crawlspace turns, and there are some stairs, and another turn, widening all the while, and then her hand skimming along the wall detects a change in texture. It isn’t the same ancient granite as the rest of the Citadel. Ahead of her the hallway is black, floors and walls giving back a dull gleam in the inconstant light of one torch. She rubs at the wall, her thumb smearing decades of dust and smoke to expose a surface like glass. Obsidian.

The Basilica that became the city of Lion’s Reach was built, over a thousand years ago, on a granite crag at the base of Glass Mountain, and this is why. The Lions reinforced the obsidian caves they found and then bored further into the black glass depths. When their civilization fell, they left their worst excesses and experiments in their labs down here in the dark, and no-one living knows the barest fraction of these catacombs - except the Kumani. When the Lions fell, the Kumani moved in, and turned the cruel technology they found to the protection of the city’s people.

Keshena passes through three hallways, all torch-lit but less than you’d like, and otherwise identical but for the crates and debris that obstruct her path. She pauses to lift the lid of an unsecured box and finds a colony of spiders living among what would seem to be… the complete tax and tithe records for three generations of Tanor grain merchants named “Spinesman.” She grins. The Kumani hide, as she often does, beneath the insufferably boring.

She flattens out the note that’s been in and out of her pocket about two hundred times since Capria, and turns it toward a torch’s light.  Selannor’s writing is regimented, like an architect’s, a terse series of directions, divided from the bottom portion by a large scrawled symbol. Above the symbol it reads, “When you see this sign, enter. Meet Speaker Lin al-Akir in the library.”

What follows is meant for Lin, presumably, because Keshena can’t read it; it’s more geometric symbols. She’s starting to spot them on the walls around her, etched into the obsidian and hard to discern through the years’ detritus. They don’t seem to be connected to anything in particular, single characters out alone in the middle of the wall, clusters in formal arrangements at odd intervals, whole strings without spaces marching around doorways, and this makes it frustratingly slow to make sure she’s not missing the one she’s looking for. In the end, it’s more clear than she fears - the symbol in the letter appears only once, part of a long inscription along the ceiling on her right, and directly beneath it there’s a door. It looks just like all the other doors she’s passed, metal and rusty, but when she pushes it, it swings silently out of her way. The passage on the other side looks utterly dark, and Keshena pauses, not afraid but rather wondering, vaguely, if this is the sort of thing a person should be afraid of. Then she steps through and closes the heavy iron door behind her.

The walls of this passage are natural stone, obsidian unworked by any hand except where it was necessary to support the roof or clear the path. This is visible because it’s not utterly dark in here, it’s just much darker than the torchlight in the hall. The light is a sickly phosphorescence that seems to emanate from the fungus on the walls. Keshena looks down at her hands and curls her lip. Something about this light makes the makeup on her skin, every bump, every scar, every hair stand out, makes her look ghastly. It gets better as she moves on - the fungus is joined by a few other varieties with kinder shades of bioluminescence, and then she turns a corner and there are electric lights again, winking in corners, tucked into clever carved hollows in the black glass walls. The cave is abruptly beautiful, a flickering labyrinth of light and shadow that widens, some way ahead, to a cavern whose enormous size she can hear in the echoes of falling water ricocheting off the walls.

She wants to go on, to see where the water’s coming from, where it’s going, but her destination is maddeningly convenient, the first door on her left if its stamped label doesn’t lie. When she opens that door, a gust of air hits her like the breath of an oven, scorching and dry. Keeping books down here in these caves must be a constant battle against mold and damp. 

The library is large and unexpectedly busy with young people, mostly, dressed in grey. She knows the librarian not by his smock - it’s also grey - but by his reproving look at Keshena letting out all his hot air. They learn that look in librarian school. It’s true, and when you leave the profession, they pluck out an eye so you can never perform the Librarian Look again. She hastily shuts the door.

If he’s going to glare at her, he might as well be useful. Keshena approaches the librarian and inquires after Lin in her creakiest voice. Now he’s suspicious as well as irritated, but the old lady foxes everyone - she doesn’t look like she could stand up to a stiff breeze, so she’s often permitted to do outrageous things, just because she appears harmless. Being Madame makes Keshena feel safe.

The librarian points through an archway into the next room where a circular firepit ten feet across occupies the center of the floor. Around it, more Kumani sprawl in ancient, battered chairs, talking quietly, reading, sleeping in at least one case. As she turns away the librarian adds, “You want the underdressed girl with one eye.”

Pale as milk and skeletally thin, the very hand of Death, Keshena’s hand looks a fright on the girl’s brown skin when she finds her. The girl with one eye sits on a chaise close to the fire, legs crossed, a pile of notes filling the bowl of her skirt. She’s not dressed in grey like nearly everyone else, but sky blue, a wrapped garment that leaves her shoulders bare, and that’s where Keshena’s hand lands.

Lin whips around wearing a scowl that looks habitual, already beginning to leave its tracks on the woman’s youthful face.  Her right eye is a brown so dark it’s nearly black, the same color as her hair, and the left one is a black stone, a polished sphere of onyx set into her socket.  The operation couldn’t be done anywhere else in the world, not and leave the girl use of her face.  Beautiful work, barely scarred at all.

    “This is a private guildhall, ma’am,” the girl snaps.

    Keshena offers Villi’s torn page.  Lin double-takes at the symbol and scans the incomprehensible mess below, her frown only deepening.  When she reaches the end, she growls in her throat and turns a skeptical eye on Keshena.  “You must be the new recruit.  Or a joke.  Villi might be playing another prank on me.  Are you a joke?”

    Her manner is harsh; another Keshena might wilt.  Madame is amused.  “Not professionally, it’s more of a lifestyle.  I am your new recruit, though.  Not what you were expecting?”

    Lin purses her lips, visibly trying to control her tone.  “I don’t mean any disrespect, ma’am, but our work and training requires a great deal of physical activity, and -”

    “Does your entrance examination feature a timed jog?  Shall we head out to the fields?”

    The girl’s temper lives close to the surface, and flares again.  “It features whatever I decide to require, and as of this moment, the best recommendation I have of you comes from Villi, who tells me you’re a murderer!”  She doesn’t take care to lower her voice this time, and gets a few glances, but the word ‘murderer’ certainly provokes less of a stir here than it would in most libraries.

    Keshena grins, showing off Madame’s yellowing teeth.  “If that’s not a testament to my physical qualifications, what is?”

    Lin scoffs and looks to the letter for guidance.  “Murder can be terrifyingly easy,” she mutters, “But I suppose I don’t have anything to teach you about that.”  She frowns for a long moment, then leans forward to drag the chaise clear of her strewn paperwork.  “...All right, if you genuinely want to work for us, sit down.  Explain yourself to me.”

    Keshena sits with more gratitude than she shows, gathering her ragged coat tight about her to keep it from brushing against Lin’s sky-blue silk.  “How much time have you got?”

    She sees the Speaker’s temper rise again, and sees the girl control it this time, with grace.  “Not a great deal, so I hope you’ll begin giving me straight answers fairly soon.  You come from…?”

    “Most recently, Capria.  I was born, to the best of my knowledge, in Blackwell.”

Lin’s changing face almost makes Keshena laugh, as she tries on various forms of shock, suspicion and confusion.  “Blackwell was destroyed almost -”

“Two hundred years ago, yes.  By a plague.”

“A war,” Lin corrects her.

Keshena smiles an ancient, tired smile.  “It was a plague, but never mind.  Yes, I was born in Blackwell before it was destroyed.”

“How old are you?”

“Isn’t that rude to say to a lady?”

Lin grins in answer, and her smile makes her look older, wickeder, wilder.  “Are you a lady?”

Keshena laughs, startling herself.  Suddenly she realizes that she hasn’t enjoyed a conversation this much in seventy years or more.  “Well, no, I wouldn’t say that by any means.  Fair enough; I’m two-hundred and twenty-one years old, or near as I can reckon.  My memories of childhood are a little vague these days.”

Lin digests this for some time.  When she speaks again her tone is more respectful, almost reverent, and Keshena likes that no better than when they greet the Called with stones.  “And, ah… whom do you serve?”

Always that same question, with no good answer.  She grits her teeth.  “No one.”

The Speaker doesn’t look disgusted, merely puzzled.  “But… then who Called you back from the Halls?  Who protects your life?”

Her innocent confusion is infuriatingly adorable, so it’s hard to get annoyed with her for making Keshena spell it out.  Voice flat, her words dropping like stones into a well, she says,  “I… don’t… know.”

Another subtle wave of emotions passes over Lin’s face, and Keshena can’t help but be captivated.  It’s like watching flames, or fish, something incapable of stillness, constantly in elegant motion.  There’s a great deal of sorrow in this sea.  The girl reaches out and lays her fingers on Keshena’s wrist.

“I didn’t know that could happen.  You must be so lonely.”

Startled, Keshena looks up from the hand on her wrist to meet Lin’s great dark eye.  She forgets Madame’s characteristic squint, and the eyes that reflect in the black gem are blurred - a kind of ink she made herself, dripped in the eye, only stings a little bit - but not remotely aged.  “What makes you say that?” she murmurs.

“I just - well, because I was, before I came here.  I can’t imagine being lost for so long.”  Lin smiles again, and the frozen tension Keshena has held since the hand touched her wrist melts just a bit.  “Perhaps your recruitment method was a little… non-standard, but that’s actually quite standard for Villi’s recruits.  It seems as if, whether or not this is where you intended to end up, it might be where you need to be… at least for a while.”

Keshena grins to cover her own disarmament.  “Why does it sound like you’re trying to convince me to join up?”

With a sigh, Lin slumps back against the chaise.  “Because I am, let’s be frank.  There was a time when the Kumani ruled this city, and there wasn’t a thing that went on anywhere in the world we didn’t know about.  Now we’re little better than cut-rate city guards and an easy path to civil service for the lazy children of other civil servants.”  Her tone is venomous, her dark face alive with outrage as she jerks a hand at the grey-clad bodies reclined throughout the library.  “We’re flooded with incompetent novices, with not enough hands to train them, barely enough to keep ahead of the trouble they cause in the city… the rest of the Hand doesn’t care; Hanna and the others are all either on the city Council or part of Nieran’s order, so the guild is just an afterthought.  And this guild is the reason the city still exists at all!  It used to be legendary!  Even in Lochria they’ve heard of the spies who toppled kings and ended wars, Akal, Nahasa, Anfini, Missari!”

Her rage turns to rapturous reminiscence so quickly that Keshena bursts out laughing.  “Look at you!  Girlish hero-worship and all.  This really matters to you.  Why?  What do they pay you?”

Lin snorts.  “Oh, don’t get excited, it’s got nothing to do with that.  It’s just…”  She drops her hands into the sky-blue pool of her folded knees and looks up at the obsidian ceiling, the same depthless black as her eyes.  “I grew up in this city, and I can’t remember a time when I felt anything like the kind of pride in it that those old stories made me feel.  I went looking for it, and when I got down here, I realized there’s something more profound wrong with the city.  It’s not just me.”  She shakes her head, her troubled eyes narrow.  “It’s like the people at the top think it’s all a big game, and they can’t even see things falling apart down here.  This guild used to represent the common people of this city!  The Kumani were born protecting farmers and builders with pitchforks and horsewhips!  Against the kind of people -”  Suddenly she realizes that her volume has been climbing to an un-library-like level, and drops her voice considerably before finishing, “- the kind of people who rule this city now.  People like the Lions.  Our guildmaster and her cronies sit at their tables every day.  Haven’t deigned to even visit the guildhall in months.”

In the silence following this rant, Keshena is thankful that Madame is her traveling face.  Wearing all her years on her skin makes it easier to hide the kind of emotion that moves across Lin’s face like lightning over the sea.  She feels it moving through her too, a slow charge awakening numb nerves for the first time in decades.

“All right, then.  If you want to change that, it sounds like something I’d be proud to be a part of.  I accept.”

Lin glances down at her paperwork.  “Oh!  Well, that’s good, because Villi said to issue you a three-year contract, and I don’t… believe… hm, no, there’s no option to decline it.”

“Indentured, am I?”

Lin winces.  “Nnnot exactly?  I mean, you’re welcome to leave, I certainly won’t stop you.  But Villi enforces her contracts herself.”

With a grin, Keshena asks, “How are my chances, d’you think?”

Lin opens her mouth, then closes it, then laughs.  “Well, ah… I hope you like Lion’s Reach, because they’ll bury you here.”

Keshena nods.  “That’s what I figured.  It’s all right, I understood what this was before I got on the train.  I can give you three years.  What’s three when I just wasted seventy-five?”  She clicks lumpy fingers.  “Where do I sign?”

Suddenly Lin is all business, tucking the other papers away to flatten out the contract, and bringing a small, ornate case from a pocket of her dress.  “The terms are laid out here; much of it’s standard for guilds in the Citadel - can you read?”

“Yes.”

“Oh yes, of course you can, you read Villi’s writing.  None of this should be surprising to someone who’s been around as long as you have.  This document is witnessed by our Father Nieran, so it requires a sacrifice to complete.  Least favorite finger, please!”

Keshena hesitates on the verge of presenting the smallest finger on her right hand.  “Am I getting it back?”

“Yes, I just need a small amount of blood.”  From the case comes a needle, with which Lin jabs Keshena’s fingertip before it can escape.  As blood wells up, Lin opens a small inkbottle labeled in spidery symbols, and lets a single black drop fall on the line at the bottom of the page.  Taking hold of Keshena’s hand, she tips it, dripping blood into the ink.  Instead of swallowing the red into the black, the ink fizzes, bubbling over the line.  Lin looks surprised, but turns Keshena’s hand over and aims her fingertip to smear the bloody drop over the line in a broad stroke.

“...That’s it?”

“That’s it.”  Lin smiles and leans down to blow on the mark, encouraging it to dry.  “Do you have any questions for me?”

“Is there accommodation for your novices?”

Lin nods.  “We have a barracks in the guildhall; it’s the first hallway on your right as you circle the cavern.”  Her eye flashes with enthusiasm as she jumps up, only just catching her paperwork before it spills from her lap onto the floor.  “I should give you a tour!”

Smiling, Keshena rises more slowly.  “I’d love that.”  As they gather Lin’s things and exit the library, she adds, “Not meaning any disrespect at all by the question, but… ‘Speaker’ here means you’re in charge of novices and training, yes?  How long have you had the job?”

Another nod from Lin.  “If only that were all I have to manage, these days, but yes.  I’ve been Speaker for about two years.”

“And how old are you, assuming you are yourself not a lady?”  Keshena winks, and Lin grins at her.

“Twenty-six.  I know I’m young for the job.  That’s the trouble; most of the old-timers aren’t interested in the drudgery of running the guild anymore, so anyone who looks like they want to work gets slapped with a title and a decade’s worth of unfinished projects.”

“They’re lucky they found you, then,” Madame murmurs, and the smile she offers Lin is sincere.  Lin looks embarrassed, and then grateful as they reach the place where the hallway opens out.

The cave is staggeringly large; Keshena can’t see the far wall or the roof for the darkness.  Before them, a cataract of white water falls from the gloom to crash into a small lake bordered by clusters of luminescent mushrooms.  The mushrooms grow first huge, then man-sized and more abundant toward the eastern end of the cavern, where a copse of them like bulbous trees nearly obscures a little domed folly.  On the west end, a knot of obsidian structures, glittering in the luminescent light and that of cleverly hidden electric lamps.  And to the north, across the lake, she can see the end of the smooth shelf they stand on, and the lake’s outflow falling into a truly unfathomable abyss, the black heart of the mountain.

“So this is the main cavern.  Offices are in those buildings - technically that’s where I’m meant to work, but I prefer to be more available if anyone has questions, so mostly you’ll find me in the library.  That building’s empty most of the time these days.  Over there is the mushroom garden and the lake; we hold gatherings in the Retreat.  Or try to.  The novices attend, anyway.”

They move along the curving black wall to one of several passageways branching off into the mountain.  “Barracks is through here; you’re welcome to stay there as long as you’re a novice.”  Lin turns a handle, activating a small electric lamp shaped like a fist-sized beetle clinging to the wall.  “It’s… basic.”

The barracks certainly is “basic” - Madame would rather say “cell-like.”  The bunks are bolted to the walls, dressed in bedding the same dingy grey as the uniforms strewn around the floor.  There’s a table spread with books and notes, but no chairs to sit at it, and no light but for the insectile lamp at the door.  Phlegm-colored wax drips from guttered candles in little alcoves here and there, evidence of the novices’ attempts to study, but it seems few wish to linger here - the place is deserted, barely any personal touches to indicate which bunks might be taken.  Keshena automatically moves toward the dimmest corner of the room, and selects a still-made bunk to test with a sit.  It’s dreadfully uncomfortable.  She bounces a little and grins at Lin’s chagrined expression.

“Oh, don’t worry, dearie, I’ve slept in worse.”

“I’m honestly intending to have it fixed up some; funds are limited and the Hand feels that these… arrangements… will promote resilience and alertness among the novices.”

“Alertness indeed; I’d have to be drunk as a lord to sleep deeply on this.”

“Well, that is how most of the novices manage,” Lin says with a sigh.  “The guild makes its own whiskey, if that’s something you’re interested in.  One of our few remaining streams of revenue.”

“Oh, do you.  That is interesting.”  Keshena casts around and then ducks to peer between her feet under the bunk.  “Regarding my personal effects…”  She taps the leather case currently resting on her insteps.  “Do I need to be concerned about thieves?”

The Speaker’s face darkens and she shakes her head.  “No.  Absolutely not.  Kumani do not steal from one another.”

    “Lie, spy, and murder one another, yes,” says a deep male voice, “But not steal.”

    Lin rolls her eyes but doesn’t turn as a short man pokes a balding head around her and grins at her less-than-amused face.  “We don’t lie to one another either, Ishin,” she says in a warning tone.

    “Yes, yes, of course.”  The old man straightens up next to her and folds his hands.  “You must never lie to your superiors,” he says sternly to Keshena.  “Only your superiors are permitted to lie, for your own good.”  His eyes glitter at the bottom of wrinkled pits, and Keshena finds herself grinning back at him.

    “Of course.  I understand completely.”

    Ishin winks at her and claps his hands, turning to Lin.  “I like your new recruit!  We need more geezers with guts down here.”

    “She’s Villi’s new recruit, actually.”

    “Oh, my sympathies.”

    “Ishin is our weaponsmaster; he’ll train you in blades,” Lin says.

    “Mostly which wrinkles you can hide them in,” Ishin stage-whispers behind his hand, then turns to leave.  “Come round to the sparring ring tomorrow afternoon and we’ll have a go.”

    “Right, the ring.  Come on, there’s more to show you.  You can leave that case here.”

    Keshena stands, the case still clasped at her side.  “It’s no trouble,” she says, keeping her tone light.  Don’t argue with me, girl.  Lin doesn’t argue, only gives her a curious glance and shrugs.

    “Villi will be back in the city tomorrow as well,” she says as they return to the main cavern and continue their trek around its outer edge.  “She spends about half her time in Capria or on assignment, but you’ll see her regularly for training.”

    “And what does Villi teach, besides best practices for murder?”

    Lin laughs.  “Well, that, certainly.  Illusions, too, and the construction and maintenance of threads.”

    “Tell me about these illusions?”

They’re just south of the mushroom garden now, and the blue-green light emanating from the largest specimens makes Lin’s skin almost black, gleaming along the smooth lines of her face.  “It’s one of our Father’s gifts to us - a way of shaping light.”  Turning to Keshena, Lin cups her hands between them, creating a pool of shade.  She closes her hands around it and squeezes as if trying to crush an apple.  Then she opens her hands, and each finger looks as if dipped in oil, dripping darkness that dissipates like smoke before it hits the ground.  Tilting her palm so that Keshena can see the effect, she murmurs, “Go ahead and touch it.  Illusions can be tactile, although it takes more skill to make something that will stand up to a lot of touching.”

Keshena feels something cold and liquid on her fingertips when she touches Lin’s palm.  “This is… magic?”

Lin nods.  “Nieran’s magic.  That’s why Villi’s the best at it.”  She sees Keshena’s confused glance, and adds, “Villi is Nieran’s Eyes, leader of His order.”

“Are all Kumani part of the order?”

    Lin’s frown returns.  She shakes the gloom off her hand, leaving nothing behind.  “No.  The guild is not the martial arm of the order, much as Villi might like that.  Your contract is with the city, and your service is to Lion’s Reach and its people.  You are in no way obligated to serve Nieran to work with us.  Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, okay?  And tell me if anyone tries.  Including Villi.”

    The invisible roof of the great cavern comes very low at the eastern end, creating a looming overhang that shelters half of a long building, the other half carved back into the cave wall.  It opens on a ring, cut into the obsidian underfoot and padded with sawdust stained to greyish-brown over months or years of scuffing.  “Armory, and sparring ring.  There’s a small forge that Ishin uses time to time, but we also requisition equipment from smiths in the city - talk to him about anything you need and he’ll get you a good price.”

    The black folly among the mushrooms is never more than half visible as they circle the fungal garden and come to the north verge of the lake.  Toward the lip of the obsidian shelf, the darkness beyond that unprotected brink grows seemingly deeper and more magnetic with each breath, each step, a yawning mouth that Keshena reminds herself is almost certainly not whispering imprecations to her.  A tooth of stone stands right at the edge, eight or so feet of ragged, unworked obsidian.  The nearest side is smooth and etched with line after line of silvered words.  Approaching, Keshena squints and tilts her head to make out a few:

Trust is the death of insight. 
- Cita Teras

We swim in the dark sea of Your vanity.  Bless us, Father - let us be Your reflections. 
- Rayn Rogers

Make love loudly.  Make war silently. 
- Lin al’Akir

Even the brightest light casts a shadow.  That is why we will prevail. 
- Konnorn Ket’Heth

    Keshena grins.  “Does everyone get to make their mark on this rock?  I must say I like yours.”

    Lin blushes and smiles.  “When you pass your trial and become a full Kumani, I’ll bring you back here to write whatever you think future Kumani should know.”

    “Oh, gracious, that’s dangerous.”  Keshena turns from contemplating the etched stone to look over the edge of the shelf.  Her spine and neck prickle, and she stays well back, tilting her head to keep Lin at the corner of her eye at the same time.  Trust is the death of insight, is it?

A cataract of water rushes out of the clean-cut channel flowing from the lake to the cliff.  Half of it turns to mist, drifting out into nothingness, and the rest is swallowed so utterly by the dark below that it looks like an illusion.  No sound, no sign of the stone walls that must enclose the cave... the black heart of Glass Mountain is empty.

“How far down does it go?” she murmurs.  Even the flat sound of her own voice makes it feel like she’s outside, the sound dying long before it finds a surface to bounce off.

Lin approaches and peers over herself, no sign of fear as she regards the depthless void.  “You know the myth of the Artificer?”

Raising an eyebrow, Keshena steps away from the edge.  “Haven’t heard Him called that in centuries.  Not since I lived in Blackwall.  I think I remember the story, may even have played a part in it a time or two.”  Catching Lin’s glance, she adds, “I was an actress.  Once upon a time.”

With a grin, Lin says, “I believe you.  But I doubt you acted in this one; it’d have to be a one-man show.  The Artificer was a worker in the Citadel, a thousand years ago when the Lions were at the height of their power.  They were offended by his art, found him insufficiently reverent.  So they threw him into the obsidian mines below their laboratories, and sealed him in the cave.”

“Let me guess - this was the first Kumani?”

“Far from it.  I’m getting there!”  Lin laughs at her impatience.  The sound is crystalline and bright, echoing back from the walls around the compound and then swallowed as it spills out into the dark, like the water.  “So the Artificer turned away from the exit they closed against him, and began to explore the cave.  He had no light, so he had to imagine everything, and he built glorious, scintillating galleries, halls of unimaginable sincerity and beauty in his mind.  His designs lead him deep into the dark, to the heart of the mountain, where he found another stone like the one that sealed him in.  He dreamed for nine days and nights, filling the space with his vivid thoughts, until he dreamed that the stone cracked and fell to pieces with a sound like the hammer of a world-sized heart.  He knelt in the darkness and felt the shards on the ground at his feet.  The black-glass shards cut his hands to ribbons, and he cried out, not in pain, but in loss, for he could not move his hands, could not build or shape or paint or carve.”

Lin sways a little at her side, swept away by her story.  The words seem like a recitation, and along with her clear joy in the tale, Lin looks proud to know it well - it’s a performance.  Something in Keshena’s chest turns over painfully, watching the girl’s fragile grace.  Like a deer.  Something wild and new.  For a moment it feels as if she wants to step closer, or to stand where Lin stands, see through those eyes.  Feel the lift of the hand, if the bones really are as light as they look.  As if she could almost fly.  The voices in her head nearly crowd out Lin’s as she resumes the telling, and Keshena shakes her head hard, shedding a little brownish powder from the raddled slope of her cheek.

“...he felt suddenly that he was not alone in that blackness.  There were hands on his head and shoulders, lifting him from his knees.  His visions, strong enough to lead him all the way here, where men were never meant to come, suddenly bloomed around him into shattering reality, blinding light pouring from his mind into his eyes.  All around him the world changed, and he saw that it was not exactly as he’d imagined it - it was inspired by his creations, certainly, but stranger, an elusive abstraction that seemed constantly on the verge of shifting when he looked away from it.  And then he saw the being that had raised him to his feet.”

Lin glances at her, then holds out a hand, palm out and flat, her fingers widely spread.  She curls her other palm around the spread fingers, shading the wedge-shaped gaps between them, then parts her hands to spill three hard-edged gouts of gloomy fog through her fingers.  Following its movement with her left hand, Lin tugs and kneads the mist, something like baking, something like weaving, and the light percolating through it from the mushroom garden and the luminescent lanterns begins to discolor and blend.  Keshena can see intricate caves forming in the smoke, glittering walls of crystal and stone, black pools of obsidian, like being trapped inside a geode.  When Lin speaks again, she is still flexing her fingertips, held loosely before her, but the illusion seems to obey her words more than her movements.

“It was a great beast, a man twenty feet tall and strong enough to shake the mountain.  His shoulders were each the size of horses, his arms like great trees, and his head was that of a black bull, a beast with horns so broad they curved beyond the limits of his mountain prison and drove holes in the fabric of the earth.  When he spoke, his voice deafened the Artificer, but the Artificer found that he could not escape that voice, not ever again, for it was in his own head, in his own throat.  His bleeding hands were healed, and he saw that they were vast and stronger than they had ever been.  His darkened eyes were clear, and he saw further than he had ever seen.  He realized, as the minotaur spoke to him, that it was he who spoke.

“For my freedom… I give you yours.  We will depart this place together, and build a new world.”

Keshena blinks at this turn of events, and Lin’s mouth twitches at her expression, but she continues, concentrating on her illusion.  The great minotaur disappears, and then the flourishing caves grow even more elaborate as the Artificer makes His way back out of the mountain, His feet replaced by great hooves, His torn fingers by the hairy and dextrous hands of the beast.  Those hands push the dark back, and when they find the stone the Lions thought would contain him, they shatter it with a touch.

“The light that poured out of the cave was brighter than the winter sun, but in that light only one man stepped forth.  One monster.  An Artificer went into the cave, and the Minotaur came out.  The Lions tried to imprison Him again, and for their hubris He changed their city about them, set them quarreling amongst themselves.  When they fell, the Artificer protected the laborers and the builders, the common people of the city He loved, the city that had been His cage and His womb.  He gave them His gifts, to shape light, to conceal themselves and see to the heart of things, to create beauty from nothing.  He bid them - bid us - to protect Lion’s Reach as long as it stood.  And that’s where the Kumani began.”

    Surprised, Keshena laughs.  “I see.  So you’re saying that Nieran is a giant minotaur with the brain of an artist, and He was at one point imprisoned somewhere far down there in that hole, and then He got out and gave you the power to create pretty lights.  So when I asked, ‘how far down does it go?’...”

    Lin’s lips curve with a mysterious smile.  “To the bottom of the world, as far as I know,” she murmurs.  She wiggles her fingers, and the smoky images before them disintegrate in the wan green light of the mushrooms.  “I have to get some work done, but I’ll check in on you soon, see how you’re getting settled.  Feel free to explore.  Maybe you’ll find another god.”

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