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ROAR OF INCANDESCENCE
delved trenches in the matted clouds. The seared trenches bled light, ink into wool, a fibrous stain that veined the overcast with silver. An afterthought of thunder wrenched the viscera, seized the heart. Something nearby collapsed inward under the pressure with the crack and rumble of an explosion. Fuming balls of impossible metals burst liquid against the magewardings. Spears not wood, not metal, not fire—more quicksilver than iron, too rigid to be molten, ablaze without flame...not even spears, not really, except as light could be a spear, or terror—launched arcing from unseen, unknowable sources. Missiles changed trajectory unaided, veered in midflight on a day as still as a dead man's heart. They defied sense. They defied the senses.
Cett slammed down prone and covered. Someone nearby shrieked at the suck and crunch of rent flesh and bone and kept shrieking, then cut off with a muffled grunt, followed by a sticky spray and the patter of chunks falling. Cett bit down on a rotten tooth that she would not let the touches heal, welcomed the lance of agony. It drove away the taste of iron, the taste of echoes.
She fought an arsenal of delusion. A foul dream from which the only waking was into death. A phantasm of war. It could not be real. Yet the lowland air smelled not of dreamweed but of solvents and lampblack, a bite of storm within a smoky pall. These seeming delusions would kill you sure as the arrow or the blade you could understand.
At last a few breaths of ear-ringing quiet. Cett shook blood-spiked bangs from her eyes and shouted "You!" at a clutch of fresh visants.
One looked. Visants were cracked as a rule, and the visants willing to suffer exile were the ones with the least sense—or the least to lose. Desperate times, to resort to lunatics in defense of Eiden Myr. But visants were solitary folk, and Eiden Myr, their island home, floated alone on the briny deep, in the rising dark. There was logic in defending isolation with the isolated, battling madness with the mad. And this one, now, he might have some wits about him. The others—all sweet-faced with childlike luminance, that ageless silvery soft something that turned her stomach—wandered the salt marsh like three-year-olds on a field of sport: one staring gape-mouthed, one jiggling with giggles, one playing peekaboo. This one accepted eye contact, pointed to himself in silent inquiry...stepped toward Cett when she nodded.
An explosion out to sea hit them as a wall of air, spilled them out of the scrub brush onto the sandy crescent—shielders, menders, stewards, mages, touches, visants, the lot. Jarred from their chocks, catapults toppled. Vellum scattered, and castings with it. This one was bad. So bad that, once Cett had retrieved her face from the sand and reoriented earth and sky, she couldn't help glancing inland.
The threshold shimmered there, invisible, unshifted, the midder lowlands clear and calm beyond it. As long as her shield held, the threshold did not move. If the shield fell back, the threshold did too. As long as it was there, then so were they. As long as they were here, the world beyond it was protected. She would have known if it had moved; even deafened, blinded, numbed, she'd have sensed change or absence. She could have traced its sinuous footprint in her sleep. Was that awareness something like what a visant felt? That extra sense, like an extra pair of eyes or ears, an extra skin? Why did she never trust it?
She should have. Glancing over her shoulder was a mistake. Naïve as turning her back on a human attacker. Blast-driven seawater breasted the maur, swelled marshland like a sponge, lifted her then sucked her down hard. Mud plugged one ear; sand gritted in the corners of eye and mouth. An afterswell slammed saltwater fingers up her nose. Spitting, blinking, she fought upright from a sucking sandy hole. Waterweeds slimed under her shirt. Fish flopped in the cordgrass. A shoulder-width block of driftwood had just missed her head.
Blindsiding was the worst. Even the smallest preview gave time to brace, or duck, or take the wave and ride it.
That was what visants were for. To see, and warn.
What she was for was to deploy them.
"Fresh casting materials!" she ordered the mages, and a steward struggled back toward the threshold, to where they'd anchored warded crates of inks, pigments, brushes, quills—what the triads would need to renew their efforts after every assault that destroyed the materials in use. "Sweep for injured!" she ordered the touches, and former wrights and farmers left their warded, weighted shelter to check the mages and the others, healing small wounds on the spot, coaxing the more gravely injured to the shelter for thorough treatment. "Reset the retorts!" she ordered the frontline, and wood creaked protest and metal groaned strain and rope sang tension, as projectiles were torqued back for blind hurling into the unknowable.
Cett slogged to the visant. "What can you tell me?"
"What can I...what?" His voice had the high croak of some exotic frog from the jungle they'd dredged him out of.
"Tell me," she said. "That's what you bleeding walleyes do, isn't it? Tell futures, secrets, when it will rain, who thieved the mince pies from the sill. You tell where the attacks will come. So tell me! Where next?"
He was shaking his head and looked to swell into a howling wail. Weren't they initiating these clods? This one had no idea what he was for. Teased down from some Toe treehouse and plopped here without instructions. Bloody procurers. Half-lives, they were called, half-worlders, the only ones permitted back inside. Death's shills, they were called, too, on harsher days. Soon enough there'd be a simpler word for them, with no wordsmith's whimsy to it: Dead. That described them all sooner or later, all the severed: lights and lightless, killers and healers, guilty and innocent, volunteers and convicts, sane and insane. All the same, in the end and now. Damned was damned.
"The last good visant I had could tell me right before something came at us," Cett told the new one. "Might not be able to tell me what it was—I can't tell you what they are even after I've seen them—but she could point, or say 'left' or 'right' or 'seaward' or 'overhead.'"
"I don't...I...can't..."
"One before that could tell me where the siege devices were. We call them gibes, right? And ours are retorts. An argument to the death. You tell me where they've positioned their gibes today, I lay down cover. Get them off us for a while—long enough for you to settle in. You're in for a rough night otherwise." She would have promised him a treat at supper, but he hadn't been here long enough to hate the food more than the hunger. She had nothing else to lay on the saltgrass between them except despair: "It's not like you'll get to go home now. You're past the go-back. You might as well do what you came for."
"But I didn't come," the visant said. Typical visant gibberish. He opened his mouth to say more, then cast a glance toward a farther hump of dry ground. Cett followed his gaze to Fyldur Greasehair, the man who'd brought him. He sensed her regard and returned it. She scowled at the greased hair, the swart complexion, the white-flash leer.
Procurers had to be part visant themselves, in order to see whatever it was they saw in each other. Procurers came in all three lights, in such minute degree that they were good for nothing but seeing those lights in other people. For Fyldur Greasehair, being death's shill held more appeal than any craft. He twisted guilt and desire like a hayrope. Lights followed where he led.
He had claimed that he would put an end on this war. He had claimed that he would bring back the strongest visant Eiden Myr had ever known.
We've only known of them at all for a dozen years. Cett checked a reflexive surge of hope. Sacrifice meant nothing if there was any chance of reprieve. As long as she fought and suffered and survived—because she fought and suffered and survived—Eiden Myr would endure in safety.
"I didn't come," the visant insisted. "I just didn't stay."
He should have. He should have stayed perched in his jungle treehouse and never climbed down where someone like the Greasehair could catch him. "Moot now," Cett said. "You're here. You can't go home. Your knack is sight. Take a good look. Tell me what you see."
He turned a slow circle, surveying the full scene with an unfocused, nearly cross-eyed look, as though his attention were not only divided but divided into equal points around a sphere expanding from his view. As though he was focused not on something behind his own eyes or beyond the world before him, but on everything at once.
She couldn't guess at how many years were on him. He had the face of a child in a writhe of mist-colored hair, its clearest feature a pair of inkdrop eyes. Touches had a fleshy vitality, mages an elegant grace. Visants had that ageless softness. As though they blurred a little in the beholder's sight. Seers who could not be clearly seen.
Cett hated it. Hated them. They knew what you would do before you did it. Some said they could see the thoughts in your head. You weren't safe inside your own skin with them around. Some said that Torrin Lightbreaker made them when he killed the last mage ennead and extinguished the old light—that he opened realms Galandra's warding had repelled, and things that had been afraid of the magelight crept out and took root in the weak, the outcast, the aberrant. Others said that mages and touches drew on warm human powers and made a cold space where that warmth had been, and the visants' powers were born of that place. Powers no human vessel was meant to contain, no human mind to command. Cold powers that drove them mad, or left them hanging only half in this world.
Well, Cett would use whatever came to hand. Better the walleyes should be here playing peekaboo than somewhere inland ruining lives.
"Shelters," her visant reported at last. "One canvas tent, the rest lean-tos and huts and driftwood shacks. Crates. Wooden contraptions. Cruel jumbled metal things, with chains and spikes. Pennants on poles. Red silk people, yellow silk people, blue silk people." Those last were the touches, the mages, the visants; they tied on hanks of dyed silk so that those of other lights would know their roles, and so that their own would know them in death. "The sea, the sky, the marsh." He paused. "Dead things. And you. And me."
Cett liked to confront a man straight on, but her eyes kept sliding from this one. Frustrating; but no matter. His report was poor. "Dead things"? Blood and scattered body parts, wildlife blown from nests and burrows, touches working to heal damage beyond their scope. "The sea, the sky, the marsh"? Out to sea, the ghosts of ships that never landed, the shades of ships that had sailed away from here and never returned. Above the tideline a snarl of twisted elders and intermittent trees she couldn't name. Groundsel and bayberry bordering low-tide sandflats, mudflats. The sky could at the least have been described as "cloudy." No ripple in the air, no tail-eye glint, no sign at all of the next attack?
You could see for a nonned leagues, you could see clear into the next life, and if you couldn't interpret what you saw, you were no use.
Beyond the threshold on the landward side, Eiden Myr—whole, serene, unaffected. Somewhere out in the Dreaming Sea—and in the other eight seas, surrounding the man-shaped mass of earth that was their home—another threshold, beyond which their enemies lay unseen, ineffable, their motives unknown. Twin curtains, and between the two this none's-land steeped in nightmare, reeking of death. It was all the home Cett Shielder had now, and would ever have.
This visant couldn't help her protect even that. I ought to kill him, she thought. I ought to earn my exile.
She had never bedded those chandlers. Never coupled with them in the flesh. Only in the mind. But her pledges had sensed the struggle in her, as she bushwhacked her way back to them through the thickets of her misplaced longings. Helpless, impatient, determined to divine the source of her troubled mood, they had sought the shy visants in their secret places, asked their reckless questions. Cett hadn't worried; visants were pitiful lunatics incapable of the feats folk credited to them. Soothseeing, foretelling, mindreading? Bafflegab. Then her pledges came back with wounds in their eyes and accusations on their lips, and how could she deny the names that made her pulse leap? She had betrayed them in her heart; once they knew, the hurt it caused made a crime of what had been nothing.
Although she hadn't acted, her lifemates would never again trust her. Some craven visant had spoken as if thought and deed were one, as if she'd cuckolded the both of them, and packed them home to her brimful of pain. I love you, she'd protested, I controlled myself, I chose you, the two of you; it only sank her in a morass of defensiveness worse than any confession. She'd cursed herself for her indulgence: she should have shut the chandlers from her dreams at the first twinge of desire. She'd cursed her pledges' weakmindedness in trusting a visant's claims over hers. But most she'd cursed the visant who'd divulged her private yearnings just as she was finding the strength to abandon them.
Where they'd lived, a secluded vale in the Heartlands, death alone dissolved a pledging. The three of them could separate, but there was only one way short of suicide to free her loved ones to pledge again.
She set off seaward, bound to join the shield. On her way, she ran those visants to ground in their earthen den, held her accuser by the throat against the rooty crumbling wall. "I'm severing myself," she told him, as his throat apple bobbed in the crook of her hand. "Not because there's nothing left here. Not because you've destroyed my love. Because severance is for those willing to kill. If longing for a thing is the same as doing it, then I have killed you, visant. If imagining an act is the same as committing it, then you are dead."
She'd left him sputtering excuses. From the inland side, the inside, nothing was visible beyond the threshold; when she stepped through that unearthly shimmer, she left the rest of it behind—the rage and the heartbreak, the empty places beside her in the night. She was as good as dead to the world, taking that step. She had died, and freed herself, and pledged anew, to death.
I could kill this one, she thought again. It would be a start.
A subliminal wrongness shivered the ground beneath her. She turned, and heard outcries, and saw three linear bulges in the sand converging on the tufted bank where she sat with the visant. She dragged the visant to his feet and dove, twisting in midair so that he would land on her and she would take the brunt of the fall. The narrow, straight churnings intersected seven or eight threfts on. A tumbling geyser of mud and salt and scrub erupted where they met, and a bloodcurdling shriek, as of something alive.
"Their aim is off," Cett said. "They'd have missed us even if we hadn't jumped." Part of the shield's function was to draw enemy attention. However the incomprehensible weaponry worked, it was through some ability to find living targets—homing on warmth or movement, perhaps, though after two years of this Cett was convinced it was consciousness the weapons sensed, and sought. They never went for lures, however convincingly crafted. They might not be aware, but they could find awareness, and end it.
She looked up at the visant and saw fear in his black eyes. Not fear of the weapons of madness or the field of mutilation. Fear of her.
He knew the murder she cherished in her heart.
Again there was silence, more earsplitting in its way than assault. No sound of bird or animal; most were dead, blasted from the air, their holes, their nests. No brush of leaf on leaf; there was no wind to move them. Rich and piquant odors released by gored bark, crushed leaves, delved earth hung where they'd emerged. Thick air held all still within itself—movement, sound, scent.
Move bubbled up from deep within Cett, as it came to her that she had been in the same twisted, half-risen posture for more slow breaths than she could count. One leg was bent at the knee, the other stretched out; one hand held her weight, the other lay crossed over her hip; her head was turned to the visant. He was on his rear, knees drawn up, rocking forward and back. Marvelous, Cett thought, with a bitter detachment. Now this one's gone too.
"Get," the visant was saying. He'd been saying whatever it was for a long time. Out with it! she thought.
But it wasn't fair, to blame procurers or stewards—any of the lightless at all, or any of the lights, either, bluesilver visants or yellowgold mages or even the redcopper touches who wouldn't lift a violent finger in their land's defense. As well fault Kazhe n'Zhevra l'Keit, who could melt weapons of iron or stone or wood but could do nothing against these. She, Cett, was the lead shielder along this ninemile stretch of the Dreaming Sea. The coordinator, meant to rally the three lights and their lightless support to hold out against the cataclysms. Salvation was down to her and the other firsts of the human shield around the coast of Eiden Myr. Some she'd heard of—Boroel Bladespirit on the Windward Sea, Kivya the Silent on the High Sea, Purlor One-Arm on the Sea of Wishes, Verlein Who Watches on the Sea of Sorrows—but most she wouldn't have known even by family names, much less the monikers of exile. She would meet none of them face-to-face. Forbidden to travel across Eiden's body, constrained to travel around the periphery, few shielders traveled at all. Severed mages circulated as they could, to trade materials and techniques around the irregular coastline. Severed touches stayed put, but kept contact with their counterparts to either side, like sleepers reaching to be sure of company and comfort. Shielders kept to themselves. They tucked in tight and dense, dedicated to each other, wary of new arrivals and their sorry odds, superstitious to a fault. Shielders had cradled the old too many times to open their arms to the new.
At first it was a battle they would win or lose. They would die unpassaged or live and go home. Moon after moon, season after season, the end was always just over the next hump, just after the next, climactic battle. But as year supplanted season supplanting moon, as futile howls of Why? and Who? and What did we ever do to them? ended in breakdown or grim resignation, it became this grinding attrition. Cett had long since lost all those she called her friends. Her current shielders were replacements for replacements. She was as severed here, among her own, of her own doing, as she was from home and hearth.
"Get," the visant said—again, or still. Louder.
It was the job of the condemned to lay sacrifice on top of sacrifice. No one in Eiden Myr—no head of any group, no guiding body, no alderfolk, no Khinish hall—had established or enforced the concept of exile. That had grown all of its own; as if through some tacit agreement, communities had simply stopped accepting those who'd been to the coasts to defend them with violence. Killing was anathema to the fundaments of Eiden Myr society—the rule of compassion, the mages called it—and rather than declaim or debate like seekers, Eiden Myr society had done the simplest possible thing: excluded those who might have taken lives. None's-land, already on the fringe, already a ruleless world, became the realm of exclusion. Cross the threshold, and whether you killed or not, you could never go home again. Except for mage binders who harvested animal flesh for vellum and parchment—materials outlawed on the mainland for a dozen years now—there was no knowing if they had killed, sending their blind retorts into haze and ignorance. But because they might have, because they intended to, they would be met by stony silence in the interior. No one would speak to them, trade with them, serve them; anywhere they tried to settle, they would be gently, firmly uprooted and sent on their way.
Some stain must mark us, Cett thought. Some shadow, like a reverse of the light in folk of power. Because they always know us. It should not be possible to tell one of the severed from anyone else; they bore no brand, no paint, no outward sign. But perhaps it was something like scent. Cett had never noticed the smell of pipe smoke on her father until she left home, but thereafter she'd know him in the dark, the stale pungence in his hair, his clothes, on his skin. When you were close to a thing, part of it, you could never sense it. Mages couldn't see their own lights. Neither could touches, or even visants.
Only someone else with the light could see it in you. Did that mean that everyone in Eiden Myr had some killing instinct? That everyone had some murder in them, that they could smell it on the severed and drive them off?
I'm still sitting, she thought. One leg extended and one bent, one arm pushing her up and one crossing to grab hold of the visant. Her muscles trembled with the fatigue of maintaining the awkward pose, and still she was rising, not risen, and still the word Move bubbled up from the bottom of her mind. She tried to relax, go limp—stop resisting, let her own weight break her free. Still she was rising. Still not risen.
"...up!"
The space around Cett shattered, as though she had been encased in a clear solid block of air. The visant's voice had cracked it and the cracks had bloomed into fractures and forked and forked again until the block was only tiny fragments that burst apart and dusted the surface of the marsh. The visant had shoved her through her rising movement so that her suspended foot and hand touched earth. She staggered. The visant offered no support. He swayed away, afraid to touch her or be touched.
"A new weapon," she said. Her tongue slurred. She was still half gripped by paralysis. "Help me." He had helped all he was going to; he stood and watched while she hauled and pushed the nearest shielders out of their trance.
Then the shattered air itself attacked them. Crystalline plates spun razor edges through trunks and limbs. The winds flattened into sheets, like metal, and sliced across the emplacements, sectioning all who stood in their path. There was no ground firm enough to dig holes in. Some shimmied down into the muck. Not one of those came up again. Her folk were scythed into bloody shreds.
The visant was crawling toward a lone tree so wind- and war-beaten it was more shrub than tree, a thin, scrubby bush impaled on a stick and shoved into the marsh, then crushed and torqued and plucked nearly bare, what branches it had left splayed all askew, a fan of broken fingers. He dragged himself with dogged desperation, as though toward shelter, or safety. He grasped for the gnarled trunk like a drowning man. He craned his neck so he was looking through the tortured branches. Trying to obscure his view, warp it...
Transform it—into something familiar. Something like the view from among the moss-draped, liana-tangled weep of trees in his jungle home. In the dwarfed vegetation of these low, wide-open lands, he sought to...what?
To re-create the way he saw things at home.
It's because he's outside the swamp. He can't do what he does in a place so different from where he comes from. "That blue power's like a bloody rice plant." The words came out of her with awe—at the realization, and at herself for having it. "It won't root here on the shore. It can't grow. It won't work."
She turned in the sucking blood-drenched marshy ground, trying to take stock of her forces, count the flutter of red silk thighbands and yellow, but all had fallen or taken shelter. Acid rain was singing on metal, steaming on cloth. She came farther around and saw the other visants. They stood unscathed, bareheaded, unarmored in the burning rain; no wind lifted the girls' hair, no blood drenched the boys' plain clothes. Dung-smeared scabbing visants, pus-filled reeking useless visants—
"Go home. Go back to the stinking swamp where you belong!"
They focused on her the way a crowd would on a madman. She dragged herself toward them. In brief glimpses the sight of them was overlaid by something else, something clear, some version of these folk in downy golden haze on some serene coastline. Did they stand half in some otherrealm, like the bonefolk?
She had never seen the bonefolk here. Never seen the green phosphorous glow of their feeding. Where do the bodies go?
She blinked hard, dragged a rough-gloved hand across her eyes, drew blood in long welted scrapes across lids and sockets, relished the reality of that pain. Still the visants wavered between this nightmare plane and some dream of peace. Bloody scabbing visants and their puking secrets—
A great, half-seen pendulum, like a spiked mace the size of a hayrick, conjured of salt and smoke, swung into her from the side. It knocked her airborne, but she stayed upright, landed two-footed in the muck, dragged one foot free to plant again and keep from falling. She windmilled balance from the solidifying air—but only in time for the backswing. The mace caught her again, spikes driving deep into bone, and this time she landed flat on her back with a sucking splash. Each gasped breath was a lungful of razored dust.
A man's face came into view. Did she know him? He looked a mage, somehow, yet not so arrogant or learned; a touch's empathy gentled his features; but no silk adorned his thigh, he was no one of hers, and there was a soft agelessness to him, like a patina on old silver.
"You see it," he said. "You see it as it is, now."
Cett could feel blood or pus oozing in her throat and was afraid of what would come out if she spoke. He was one of them. Ageless, silvered. He could hear her thoughts, couldn't he? Wasn't that one of their powers?
"Our powers," he said, dabbing at her lips with a plain cloth. "But no, it isn't." The linen came back crimson. "No one ever saw the blue in you."
"No," she choked, on a gush of foul fluid. "No one told me I'm...blue."
"Perhaps you weren't. Perhaps it was latent. Suppressed. You scorn us so. You would not have let it manifest if you could help it. Your powers are trying to protect you, Cett. They are trying to show you that this cannot kill you."
She rolled her eyeballs toward the others. They were visants. They must have heard her. But they seemed terribly far away now, receding into their land of shining peace. She could go with them, she supposed; if she had the light she must have access to that realm. But it would mean leaving her post, and she was needed here. Already some of her remaining folk were ducking from their shelters, running low along wooden planks to cart her back for touches to heal. For a moment it seemed that their planks were laid across a field of grotesquely twisted, rotting corpses, and in the next eyeblink it seemed that there were only planks, only empty planks, decaying and splintered....
"You're the last one," the kindly visant said. "Can you see it now? There is no one here but you. The rest are dead of their own belief. They didn't have a mindlight to shield them. But you do. You can live, Cett. If you choose to."
He stood then, and the sun came out from behind the clouds of delusion and haloed his silver hair, and her heart broke with longing to take the hand he extended to her.
Someone has to be here to take the fall, she thought. Someone has to stay till reinforcements come. If I'm the only one left, and I go, then the shield here will fail. I can't tell where the dream ends and the truth begins, but maybe the dream is its own kind of truth. My duty's clear. The only clear thing.
The visant was backing away, his hand still extended, his body engulfed in light. When that faded into the familiar drifting smoke and reek of death, the other visant was kneeling beside her.
"Who were you talking to?" he asked.
Who was I...what?
"One of the people you thought you were giving orders to before?"
No one, she thought. No one there. I was talking to myself.
Talking to my own grieving light.
"I tried," he said. His voice broke. So brave. So pathetic. "I tried to make it like home. I heard what you said. I don't believe you. I have powers. I do. The strongest in my region. People fear my powers. I hate it. So I let the Greasehair have me. I don't know what's gone wrong with the minds here or why the touches couldn't heal it with their hands, but I can fix it, I can, I know I can. Just give me a chance. Give me a chance to see what you see. That must be how your last visant did it. She must have watched how you behaved and...figured out what you believed would come...and told you, to warn you, before you knew yourself. People give things away, you see? They have no idea. A twitch of muscle, a tic of the eye, a nonned tiny things that only visants notice. It can't be that my powers only work at home. How could that be? It's because I don't know you. I just met you. Let me know you, let me watch you, I can help you once I learn what to look for, please, shielder, give me a chance...."
She grasped the visant's wrist to halt the flood.
"What?" he whispered, leaning down.
Her lips parted.
"My name? Ioli," he said. His tongue tripped over his family name and left it where it lay. "Ioli...from the Toes. I don't have a shieldname yet."
"Go home before they give you one," Cett said. "Go home, Ioli. Maybe it hasn't stained you yet."
His look of accusation only made her hate him. I can't go home, it said. You know that. As though it were her doing.
"Then go somewhere else—but you can't stay here. Go on, get!" Her growl was made hideous by the terrible things happening inside her body. "You're no good to us, you puking useless walleye. Get out of here! Go!"
He just stared at her. Mindlight—hah! They were supposed to be so smart, these visants, and he just stood there, rejected, still trying to take in that rice plants couldn't root in sand. Know her, indeed. Know her innermost thoughts, her innermost fears. Did he think she would allow that? Did he think for one moment that she would permit such intrusion ever again, even if it meant her death? Even if she was one of them?
All the powers of self let you down, in the end. Should have expected it. Only things you can trust are stropped iron and a good ash shield. And death.
A thick vertical line bisected her vision. For a moment it was as though the world had truly split in two. Then it was as though her chest had split in two. Her arms spasmed, her hips bucked, her legs kicked out into a sprawl; she gasped; and only once she had reacted to it did she feel the penetration, a numbing punch, an agony of impact. Death had courted her for a long time, but she hadn't expected to be swept to climax with such abruptness. The spear that pinned her stretched six feet up, like a rope deployed to haul her cloudward; when she raised her head, its shaft, scant fingers from her nose, gave the world a left side and a right side, a right side and a wrong side. Which one was she on? Those who killed were on the wrong side. Those who killed were sent to the wrong side, expelled from Eiden Myr, made peripheral, exiled to none's-land and thence to death. Those who came to the wrong side became killers. Had she killed? She wished she knew. Had she answered delusion with murder? If I did, she said to the spear that impaled her, then I deserved you long ago.
Cett knew there was no spear. But the spear was real. The agony was real. The guilt was real. The two-sided world was real—both sides of it. Now, because all things of power came in threes, she would be treated to a view of the third side. That was the least her death could buy her. That glimpse.
She saw the visant staring at her mouthing pleas of forgiveness too late too late beyond that now save your rancid breath you worthless scab and a touch hurrying to her side too late too late you cannot get to me in time it pierced my heart no more no more no more and a triad taking note of her too late too late I'm a haunt already how could children have the wisdom to cast passage
Then they, too, were gone, the remnants of her shield and her belief, and Cett Turnheart drew her last breath alone in a lowland marsh on a gently overcast day, with seasparrows bickering in the bayberries, a pair of sand rats packing food into a burrow, dowitchers sailing the inverted sea of clouds, and the edge of none's-land a gossamer scrim, her distant home secure beyond it.
The last thing she saw in the realm of flesh was the soft shimmer of the threshold, fading away.
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