The Singer's Story
The next night, before we had begun to travel, my pants tore for no apparent reason. One of the crotch seams simply gave up. Embarrassed, I asked the Hunter for her needle and thread. When she pulled it out of her pouch, something else came with it and fluttered to the ground.
Instantly polite, I snatched it up and barely suppressed a gasp when I realized it was a mask—a piece of black cloth with two eyeholes. I recognized it immediately.
> Dear Human, I was (as always) watching. The moment I saw the black cloth flutter to the ground, I drew the obvious conclusion just as Nial did. This woman, Asuana, “the Hunter,” was the same person who had stabbed me back at the inn.
>
> I considered killing her that night. But I decided to wait, and in retrospect I am glad that I did. My curiosity was too strong: Who was this person? And what forces had conspired to intertwine her fate so tightly with my mission? How did she know so much about what came before the founding of the South Sea Nations. Fun fact: at the time, in morlish, many of my people used to call the South Sea Nations a word that roughly translates to “the Farm.” Some of us called it “The Experiment”. Suffice it to say that we’d had a hand in shaping the books available to the masses within said Experiment.
>
> Another fun fact: My mother was one of the morlish generals who convinced the Emperor to allow this utopian cluster of human society to exist. I tell you all of this because the reason I was on my mission in the first place was that a consensus among high-ranking morls had been reached about fifty-four years ago: the time had come to reap what we had sewn, to end the experiment. The ending had, however, taken longer than expected. And many of these pilgrims were (though they had not yet learned this) here to help us finish things up. Asuana, I was beginning to suspect, might be here for the opposite reason! And if the sheep on the Farm had somehow learned of our plans to shut things down, then I needed to know how this information had leaked.
I handed the cloth back, hoping she didn’t notice the tremor in my hand. “Thank you for the string,” I said.
I went behind a dune to repair my pants. But the shock of what I had just seen made the task impossible. It took me five minutes to thread the needle. When I finally succeeded, my stitches were jagged and would never hold. I stabbed my thumb.
“Damn!” I muttered.
“Having trouble?” said a musical voice. The Singer came around the dune.
I positioned my torn pants over my underwear and exposed skin. I was painfully aware of how the moonlight made my thighs the color of eggshells. During my years at sea, I had developed a striking tan line—a formerly unproblematic consequence of always having worn knee-length shorts. My face, by contrast, was blushing like crazy. The Singer took no notice and sat down next to me. I tried to scoot away, but she adjusted so she was even closer.
“I’m a pretty good tailor,” she said. “May I?”
I was not about to give up my pants. “I’m okay.”
“Oh, don’t be shy,” she said, snatching the clothes away.
My skin and undergarments were both painfully pale in the moonlight. Instinctively, I tried to flex my abs, to make up for the paleness. The breeze gave my legs goosebumps. I tried to simultaneously cover myself with my arms and to look casual doing so. The result was a twisted, uncomfortable position that evoked the Singer’s musical laugh. At the sound, I felt my heart skip a beat.
“You are so modest,” said the Singer. “I like that. Strength with restraint. Capability with humility. Have you ever been in love?”
I thought about Lilly and the catastrophic consequences of our brief union. I shook my head.
“That’s good,” she said. “It only leads to trouble.”
“I know.”
She laughed as if I had made a joke. “That’s funny. I like that. A sense of humor.” She seemed to have forgotten about my pants. The needle gleamed in her fingers.
“I guess so,” I said. I suddenly could not help but notice how soft her hair looked—even after days of traveling through the desert. My own hair was filled with sand.
She put a hand on my leg. Her warmth sent shivers through me. “Sir Mau doesn’t seem to understand anything I try to tell him. He’s as dumb as the big deaf man.”
“You were getting along fine,” I said. “Maybe you could talk it through? No need to give up on love so quickly!”
“Love!” she laughed. “Would you believe how few people understand what love really is?”
I just shrugged.
“Strong and silent,” she said. “You’re well educated too. I like that. Do you read a lot?”
“I used to work in the book trade.”
“Have you read Only on Summer Nights?”
I shook my head. “No, but that was a best-seller across the port towns of Lopesa.”
Her warm hand slid further up my thigh. “What about Forbidden Passions of the Heart and Skin?”
“I like history and poetry, mostly,” I said. “Are you going to help me sew up my pants?”
“I spent some time in the book trade myself,” she said, making me pause as I was about to redirect her hand. “I’ll never forget the smell of printing presses down in Seadom. I like love stories. They remind you of all the things life doesn’t. Like, that love can be wonderful, and that life has purpose, and that maybe, just maybe, we aren’t just ‘meat bodies’ desperately trying to delay the moment we begin to rot.”
I was speechless at this. “What did you say you did in the book trade?” I asked.
“Ha!” she laughed. “I was a novelist for a time. Then an editor. Do you know the little press just down the street from the Seadom lighthouse? They make books, some board games, maybe a card game or two…”
“L-lighthouse Tomes?” I stammered, still processing that this woman was a novelist.
“Wow, you really do know the leisure industry. Then, unlike Sir Mau, I suspect you’ll actually appreciate it when I tell you that I was a ‘novelist in residence’ there for four years. I wrote Only on Summer Nights over the course of a bleary Seadom winter, in the back room of that printing press, with the big lighthouse visible right out of my bedroom window. I followed that one up with Forbidden Passions of the Heart and Skin one year later. I don’t like to brag, but I put Lighthouse Tomes ‘on the map,’ as the merchants say.”
“H-how did you… I’ve been sending letters to the presses in Seadom for two years,” I said. “I never even landed a job sweeping up scraps, let alone a book deal. No one even bothered to return my letters.”
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She laughed again. A musical sound. Like singing. It made my chest burn. And I realized that my anatomy was slowly betraying me; I now had more to worry about than the paleness of my skin. I contorted further, leaning forward, placing my folded arms over my crotch. Her hand brushed the sand from my back and returned to my thigh, farther north than ever. She licked her lips, making them sparkle.
“I could give you some names,” she said. “I know some travel book publishers that would literally fight each other over a book about this trip. It’s not every day you have to kill twenty-five nomads with snake smoke, am I right?”
“D-do you really think so?” I stammered. “I mean, would you really give me some names?”
“Nial,” she said, seriously, looking at me with eyes so blue in the starlight that they made me want to cry, “ever since I was a child, people have told me that I have it easy. My father used to tell me that being born beautiful gives you a free pass through life. And sometimes it’s true. I mean, everywhere I go, people are nice to me. People offer me help even if I don’t need it. So it’s the least I can do to pay it forward, you know?”
“We ‘meat bodies’ have to help each other out, I guess.”
The sound of her honest laughter at my joke was a sound I’ll never forget. She used the moment to slide her hand farther up, and once again, just before I could move to stop it, she said something that took my mind off of it. “I purchased my voice from a morl,” she said, suddenly. “You probably don’t care about stories like that though, do you?”
“You bought it? Where? How?” She had pinpointed the one thing I could never refuse—a story. I was a story addict, like millions across the South Sea Nations.
“There was a morlish witch rumored to live in a shack at the top of the tallest of the Lopesan Mountains. Or… I guess we call them the Morl Mountains now. Anyway, she was rumored to be willing to give humans magical gifts.” She took her time with the story, spinning it like a spider, knowing her prey was trapped. “I was only sixteen and I was already getting tired of having that free pass through life, so I left home and went to see the witch.” She licked her lips again, a fascinating process that left them glittering in the dark. “And guess what? The rumors were true! I saw her with my own eyes, as much as anyone can. I couldn’t quite tell, but I think underneath all the shimmering morlish magic, sometimes her face was like… like a toad’s. And her mouth was wrinkled into the shape of a prune. But sometimes she was so beautiful it made my chest hurt.
“I told her my problem—about how even at the age of sixteen, I couldn’t even go into town without men, and even sometimes women, stopping to ask my name. I told her how I’d once received two marriage proposals from perfect strangers. Two! And both in the same week! I told her was looking for something, anything to keep people off of me.”
Her lip quirked at the way my eyes seemed to keep dropping to her lips, and she went on: “Unlike human wizards, she told me, who have various active magical abilities, like charming animals or making sparks, morlish magic users are called ‘gift givers.’ They call it ‘gifting’ when a morl gives a human some form of magical ability.” She paused, as if recalling the details. I could not help but hang on her words. I had once read a six-hundred page tome of research on morlish magic, which had turned out to be a bunch of philosophical speculation (bullshit) and had mentioned nothing about ‘gifting.’ If what she was saying was true, this morlish magic was a closely kept secret. I wondered how I had ever pegged this woman as just ‘the Singer.’
“So you’re saying,” I asked, “that this morl gave you your ability?”
“She said most morls can’t even give gifts. But she told me that all human magic is just morlish magic gifted to humans and passed down through generations through family bloodlines. But she didn’t exactly just give it to me,” she said. “She gave me a list of names of human criminals. She told me that if I brought…” She leaned closer, conspiratorially. “…brought their heads to her, she would give me something that would solve my problems.”
“What? And you trusted her?”
“Of course not!” she said. “She gave me what she called a ‘temporary gift,’ like a magical loan, for ten years, a voice that can make people love me, or the opposite. It’s quite versatile. She said that if I came back with that sack full of heads before then, she would make it permanent.”
She paused, apparently waiting for me to ask the obvious question. I did: “Did you?”
“I climbed that mountain when I was sixteen,” she said. “This year, I’ll turn twenty-five. For a time, I tracked down the people on that list, just to watch them. I was curious. One was a politician in Drymar. Another ran a drug cartel in Lopesa. Another was the owner of the biggest printing press in Seadom. That’s how I got acquainted with the leisure industry and books.”
“Did you do it?” I insisted. I could hear, from the other side of the dune, the sound of the Knight orchestrating the day’s travel plans. If she didn’t finish the story soon, I would have to wait until the next day. “Did you kill them?”
“Not yet,” she said, winking. Suddenly, she took her hand off of my thigh, leaving a cold spot there. It was so sudden, in fact, that I almost cried out and found myself yearning for her to put it back. It weirded me out that I wasn’t sure when her hand had morphed from uncomfortable to desirable. “I’ve definitely thought about it over the years. I’m going to the shrine to ask if it’s the right thing. Should I kill these people and keep my gift? Or is killing always wrong? Maybe the universe knows the answer.”
Knowing that our conversation was coming to a close and suddenly wanting very much for her to like me, I said, “You know, I really misjudged you at first. As I keep getting reminded on this pilgrimage, no one here is what they seem to be. Maybe you most of all…”
She smiled as she dusted herself off and stood, but she showed no signs of staying. It made me wonder why she had bothered to tell me her story at all. Was she just teasing me, trying to get me to pursue her?
Desperate to keep her there, I said, “I think someone killed Madam Bela.” She froze. “I saw bruising on her neck. So… be careful. We ‘meat bodies’ can use as many friends as we can get.”
She didn’t laugh this time. She handed my torn pants to me and seemed lost in thought as I pulled them on.
“Who did it?” she said, face unreadable.
I knew I shouldn’t tell her—not on the flimsy evidence I had. A mask? That could mean anything. The Hunter was the kind of person who caught giant lizards with spiders; a mask wasn’t so strange in that context. On the other hand, I was beginning to realize I’d already made a big mistake: If the Singer were the murderer, I was already an idiot for bringing it up. My imagination took this thread further: Maybe this whole session had been her attempt to suss out what I knew, which is exactly what a smart murderer ought to do. If that were true, perhaps it would be prudent to let her know I suspected someone else.
“Asuana has a mask,” I finally said. “Like the one I saw on whoever tried to kill Father Ori.”
“First Father Ori, then Madam Bela?” she said. “Why would Asuana want them both dead?”
“It might not be her. It might not be anyone. Whoever it is, the odds of them having a motive that includes anyone else on the pilgrimage is pretty low. Unless, of course, we let them know we suspect them.” I did not add: And unless, of course, they happen to be a sociopathic serial killer who just does it for fun.
I walked in silence over the dune, the Singer lingering just behind, which made my skin crawl. When I’d hastily followed our own footprints back to where the rest of the pilgrims were preparing for sunrise, Lilly looked at the torn crotch of my pants and rolled her eyes. “I thought you were fixing that,” she said. And when the Singer came into view a moment later: “Oh, I see.” With that, she was back to ignoring me with renewed energy.
“Give it here,” said the Hunter. I handed back the string and needle. “I mean your pants. Hand them over. I knew you’d mess it up.”
“I…”
The Hunter snorted and yanked down my pants in front of everyone. “Step out of them,” she said. I flushed and stood there while she repaired the rip. Luckily, she was quick and efficient. For that, I was grateful—whether she was a murderess or not.
> There is a law in the Nation of Night: whenever a morl bestows a ‘gift’ upon a human, we make a record of it. This is, of course, how I knew of Gwen Florence and her gift, which was bestowed by a powerful morlish gift crafter whom I happen to know quite well. (She is my mother, and we will speak of her later.) For now, suffice it to say that she gave to Gwen one of the strongest gifts on record, so our operatives have been keeping watch on her for years. I can say with confidence that contrary to what she told Nial, she has brought a head or two up that mountain in the last decade, a politician here, a drug cartel leader there. You may think that this (combined with the fact that she is a twenty-five year old woman seemingly hitting on a seventeen year old boy) makes her a bad person.
>
> I think you’d be wrong there. Whereas Gwen probably feels (like Nial or any of us) that she is the “hero in her own story,” in reality, she has been acting as my mother’s Shadow Mercenary since she was sixteen. Those heads she brought up the mountain were generally those of people that I’m sure you’d agree are bad and deserved to die. In those days, we morls generally had your society’s best interests at heart. As proof of this, consider the following: my mother’s job title in morlish loosely translates to Arch General of Human Happiness, given that she was in charge of “making happiness-maximizing changes” across the South Sea Nation (the Farm) as the Emperor saw fit. Suffice it to say that Gwen killed a bunch of bad people and, according to our data, was actively making the South Sea Nations a better place. That said, whether one can forgive her for coming on rather strongly to our friend Nial is another question entirely. My mother definitely has a type. You’ll understand when you meet her.