The robe hadn’t been there more than a couple of days, going by its condition. Unless some other Initiates had been out in this dangerous part of the swamp, it was from one of the students we’d been sent to bring back.
I walked out onto a muddy outcropping stopped at the water’s edge, staring out at the robe. Gail came to stand beside me a minute later. She followed my gaze to the tattered fabric.
“It’s probably from one of our runaways,” I said.
“Agreed. They must have tried to wade out.”
She reached up and twisted her hand in the air. Her maja flared, and the robe shot up with a spray of rot-scented water.
The fabric hung in the air, slowly unfolding. It was stained in places with blood.
“They were injured,” Gail concluded.
“So one of them is dead, at least,” I said, looking at the bloodstained robe.
“It’s possible,” Gail said.
“If we agree that he’s dead, then that’s one less runaway we need to account for.”
She thought about that for a few seconds, before saying, “You’re right. This is the start of screamer territory. They probably drowned him.” She released her grip on her maja and the robe fell, hitting the surface with a wet clapping sound.
I surveyed the way ahead. The only way forward if we wanted to follow solid ground was to our right, a winding bank of mud and stunted trees that looked like it might go around for miles just to reach the far bank.
The other side was no more than forty feet away in a straight line, but there was no visibility in the muddy water. It could have been ankle-deep or deep enough to disappear into and it would look the same.
If we were going to catch up, this is the place where Gail wanted to leave the path and enter the water. After seeing the bloodstained robe, I had reservations.
“What are the screamers like?” I asked.
Gail slowly approached the edge then stepped out, dipping her foot into the shallows. She waited for a minute, watching the surface.
Just when I thought she’d been wrong about screamer territory, the fluttering of brown wings caught my attention at the edge of my vision. I turned to see the pierced bird spirit flitting through the air. Behind it, the water was churning. Something was emerging from the surface.
“Like that,” Gail said.
A mangled form slowly rose out of the water, the shape of it setting my heart racing.
My first thought was that it was a corpse. A misshapen head sagged on top of a bloated torso, while a wrapping of aquatic plants and dead leaves bound its stunted arms and legs to its body, like it’d been dressed for burial. Its skin was the same murky green as the water and its long hair was the black of rot. Its eyes were closed, and where its feet met the water a thick vine emerged from the legs before disappearing into the murk. The vine was supporting it.
I drew my sword, but the spirit didn’t move from the water. It stayed where it was, swaying gently like a cattail stalk.
As soon as I could think past the pounding in my ears, I started to see problems with the body.
The arms and legs weren’t fully formed, just approximations of limbs that were amalgamated into the central trunk. Its face was barely human, the eyelids bulging too much to be natural, the nose just a triangular stub, with asymmetrical cheeks and a mouth that was nothing but a ridged slash above the chin. It wasn’t a corpse. It was child’s clay sculpture.
“That’s part of it, anyway,” Gail said. She reached out with her foot and dimpled the water further in with the toe of her sandal.
The false mouth of the corpse-thing bulged open. A noise emerged from the hole. The scream didn’t sound human or animal, more like the blowing of a whistle, or the ringing of a crystal glass. The noise jabbed at my ears like needles. My skull tingled, and even my blood felt like it was shaking. It was a noise suffused by maja, a magical attack as much as an unbearable noise. I dropped my sword to cover my ears, but it barely helped.
Gail stepped back out of the water and the sound stopped.
I lowered my hands. I noticed they were shaking when I crouched to pick up my sword.
“That’s just one,” she said. “The spirit that makes them will throw up more if we step out any deeper. If we block our ears and strike before they can scream, we can probably fight our way through.”
I stared at the corpse-like thing, my heart pounding, needles of pain still lodged in my ears from the noise.
“How big is its territory?” I asked.
“Several miles across, at least.”
I shook my head. Maybe Gail could do it, but I’d had enough trouble with the behr. I knew from experience how difficult and exhausting fighting in the water was, and I didn’t even know any aspects that would hurt it. I turned to the right, looking down the land bank.
“If we ran along the path, we might still catch up,” I said.
“I don’t think you really believe that,” Gail said.
The water started thrashing a little further out. Another of the corpse-figures rose above the surface. This one was different to the first in small details, but broadly the same.
I looked from one to the other.
“I can’t fight through miles of water.” I said.
“You feel like you have the strength to.”
I looked up at her, then away.
My accumulation had come a long way since my last big expenditure of maja, when I’d revolted against Master Sectus. I estimated that I’d at least doubled my stores from the time I’d arrived.
Practice had made me better at accumulation, and the more maja I had, the more I could drag back from the fold when I accumulated. I still didn’t have the power to fight a running battle for miles.
Gail had been here longer than I had. She’d probably been accumulating for longer, with more access to resources like the maja spring. She might even have a spirit siphon of her own, and she didn’t seem like someone who’d feel bad about using it. I wasn’t surprised she had more power than me to throw around.
“I don’t think I have the aspects,” I said instead. “I know Force and Wheel, but I don’t think either would help much here.”
“That’s it? How long have you been here?”
“Six months.”
She wrinkled her nose. “If we build a fire, we can teach you the Fire aspect. That’ll do some damage to them.”
“I’m not putting my hand in fire,” I said.
Gail made an annoyed sound. “Then you suggest something.”
More of the screamers appeared while we talked, like town guards coming to investigate a noise. Each one that rose above the water was the same kind of deformed corpse, all misshapen and clearly unnatural on a second look.
Now that I knew they weren’t about to just throw themselves at me, I was able to look at them more carefully.
They all had the same vine emerging from their legs, each one coiling away in the same rough direction.
“Are theses all one spirit?” I asked.
Gail followed my gaze. “If it is, the central body is out of our reach, and probably too powerful to face directly. Unless you have a poison or something like it that will spread through those vines.”
I continued following the vines with my eyes, trying to track them through the murky water. Whatever the spirit was, it must have been huge. With a lot of work, I might be able to get my spirit siphon scroll onto one of the false corpses, but that would barely be a pinprick to something this big.
“Is it intelligent?” I asked.
“I don’t know how you’d tell. They don’t speak, only scream.”
“I’m going to try speaking to it,” I said.
Gail raised an eyebrow, then held out her hand for me to go ahead.
I turned to the closest corpse, thought back to Lectuous’s riddle, and threw a burst of Thought aspect maja at it.
A second later, another corpse rose out of the water, this one only a couple of feet away. I got a good look at it as I stumbled back, watching the water drain away from its bulging features. This close I could smell rot and stagnation rolling off it, maja smells that tingled in my throat.
When I was sure that it wasn’t going to scream or attack me, I sent another thought.
The water started churning. More of the mud-molded corpses appeared, rising out of the water like soldiers waking up in camp.
“What are you doing?” Gail asked.
“Trying to communicate with Thought aspect,” I said.
“Well, it’s not working.”
“I think it’s working. It’s just not helping.”
After a few seconds, no more of the corpses had appeared. I took it as encouragement.
“Do you have any idea what it wants?” I asked Gail.
“It wants to scream at us until we lose our balance, and then it wants to drown us in the water.”
“Does it eat the people it drowns?”
“How could I possibly know?” Gail said, then after a second added, “I’m going to start burning them soon.”
“Just hold fire for a minute.”
After another few seconds, the corpse thing closest to me started to change. Its torso bulged, then rippled, then burst open. A single dark green vine extended from the cavity, supporting a hairy head-like clump at its tip. The vine extended out over the water, then reached out over the muddy ground. It stilled for a moment, then the hairy shape at its end cracked open. From inside, something dark fell to the ground.
The tendril withdrew to the water, hovering around the body. I leaned forward to peer at what it had dropped.
The object was about the size of my hand, brown, approximately rectangular with bulging sides. It was covered in a tough-looking hairy skin that made me think of boar hide. Without any other context I would have thought it was someone’s rawhide coin purse, but after seeing the vines, and smelling the pond-scum stench of the spirit, I couldn’t see it as anything other than a seed.
“What’s that?” Gail asked, interested.
The vine still protruding from the corpse-thing’s chest made a sweeping motion, then plunged and slapped the water.
The motion repeated, this time hitting the water more emphatically, making a splash so large that the spray dusted the bank.
At that the vine slowly withdrew into the corpse-thing’s chest, the clay-like flesh of the extrusion closing up around it. Message delivered. It wanted us to throw the seed into water. But not this water, or it would do it itself. It wanted us to bring it somewhere it didn’t already control.
“It wants us to help it spread,” I said.
Gail thought for a few seconds, then shrugged one shoulder. “Easily done. I’ll leave it to you.”
I swallowed, then stepped down to the edge of the water. Crouching, I reached out and picked up the seed. The surface of it was wet, but the hairs clung to my skin, reminding me of seed burrs. It felt strangely warm in my hand, like a freshly baked pie.
I rose slowly, watching the water for any more disturbances, but the remaining corpse things just floated above the water.
I waited for any kind of reaction. Eventually the corpse furthest from us started to sink slowly into the water. Another followed, disappearing into the murk with a went slopping sound. Another two sank, and then the rest. Within a couple of minutes there was no sign of them. It was the clearest invitation I could imagine.
I turned to Gail. “I think I’ve negotiated our passage,” I said.
She looked from me, to the water, then back at me. She looked pleasantly surprised.
“I’ll let you test the strength of your negotiations,” she offered, not moving from where she stood.
I stared at her for a second, then turned back to face the water. Screamers aside, I really didn’t want to get wet again.
“If the screamers come for me, will you help me get out?” I asked.
“No,” she answered. “I’ll use your distraction to rush past them.”
“What if you need my help with the runaways?”
“I won’t,” she said. After a second she conceded, “I promise not to throw rocks at you while you’re drowning.”
“Thanks,” I said. I turned back to the water.
I reached out and tapped the water with the tip of my sandal. When Gail had done it, it had prompted a reaction. This time there was nothing.
I took a step out into the water.
The mud under the surface bubbled slightly as my sandal came down. My foot sunk to the ankle in silt then stopped. I could feel something under the muddy bottom, like ridged stone or hard roots. It felt sharp enough that I’d be worried about it cutting my feet if I weren’t wearing sandals, but it seemed to be supporting my weight.
I took another step out, this time the water coming up to my knee.
Against the hot summer air, the silty water was a mixed comfort. The muck in it clung to my skin and pants legs, and I knew from experience that washing it out would be a nightmare, but at least it was a relief from the heat.
A few more steps took me ten feet out from the bank. At its deepest, the water didn’t come up past my stomach and I continued walking. I kept imagining my toes touching one of the sunken corpse shapes, imagining the rough slime-covered skin against mine, but so far I hadn’t met anything but silt and the strangely ridged surface at the bottom.
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I turned around and looked back at Gail.
“I think we have permission to cross,” I called to her.
She looked at the water, eyebrows raised speculatively. She stepped down the bank, repeated her tapping the water test, then after a few seconds of silence started wading out. There was no reaction from the spirit.
The two of us continued wading across the water. We dragged ourselves out to walk across the next bank of muddy ground between wet stretches, then struck out across the next shallow stretch of wetland. I occasionally caught sight of shapes moving just below the surface, and ripples crossing our path with no obvious source, but the screamers themselves didn’t make another appearance.
With the spirit placated, the journey became no harder than my trip out to fight the moonrise Behr for Tom. Easier if anything, since this part of the swamp didn’t seem to have any leeches, mosquitoes, or other pests. There wasn’t even any other local spirit life.
With every stretch of water, we bypassed miles of meandering muddy pathways. My concern went from being that we wouldn’t catch up, failing our assignment without ever exercising a choice, to the fear that we would catch up, I’d be forced to choose what to do. Eventually that morphed into the fear that we’d already passed them, and were now traveling out further than they could possibly have reached on the land trail.
We were making so much progress that it was a surprise when night fell. One minute we were wading across the water in a deep purple dusk, the next the sun had disappeared below the horizon, casting the swamp into shadow.
“We should stop for the night,” I called back to Gail.
“Agreed,” she shouted.
I led us to the bank and hauled myself out. The land here was muddy and the warm air smelled of something fetid.
I reached the next bank and hauled myself out. Gail followed a minute later, soaked up to her shoulders.
I busied myself looking for a good place to set up. The ground between stretches of water was soft, but the layer of grass covering it here would stop it soaking me through if I sat on it. There were trees with places to sit in the branches as well, but having tried that before I knew how uncomfortable it would get.
I left Gail behind to walk out into the trees a little way to a place I could wring out my shirt. It was still damp when I put it back on, but even after sunset the air was still warm. It would probably dry before I fell asleep. I dropped my pack to the ground and opened it, checking on my supplies.
Everything important was wrapped in a waxed canvas sheet. It wouldn’t survive being immersed for more than a second, but it had protected the food and writing supplies from the splashes it’d been hit with so far. The hair-covered seed was there as well, still warm but otherwise inert.
I hoisted the pack back onto my shoulder and headed out to find Gail.
She was standing with her eyes shut and hands pressed together. As I broke out of the trees, her maja surged in a flare of dry needle-points. A wind blew up out of nowhere, shaking the grass and pulling up dead leaves. The artificial wind flapped at her clothes, and even from ten feet away I could feel the heat of it blowing off her.
She maintained the magic for minute before lowering her hands and opening her eyes. She saw me staring and shot me a glare.
“What are you looking at?”
“Just wondering what that was,” I said.
“Fire and Wind aspects.”
She turned away, pulling the robe she was wearing as a cloak off her shoulders and throwing it over a branch.
“You know a lot of aspects,” I said.
“Yes. I collect them,” she replied over her shoulder. “You should too, unless you want to die.”
“I would if I could,” I said. “How do you learn Wind?”
“Climb to the peak of the mountain and throw yourself off.”
I stared for a second, then turned away. I went to a patch of ground under one of the trees and sat down on a raised mat of dry earth that had formed between the roots.
A dozen feet away, Gail was climbing into a tree and settling down on a spot where two branches met. Either she had a magical way to ignore discomfort, or she’d just been conditioned to it. Before settling down, she pulled a long pin from a hand-sewn pocket and placed it on the branch next to her. When she pulled her hand away, it stood where it was, balancing upright on its tip. I wondered if it was a spirit-scrived object, like my ring.
I looked around for any sign of the pierced bird spirit, but it was nowhere to be seen. If I was in any danger here, then it was too subtle for the spirit to see.
I moved my pack so I could lean back on it and pulled out my notes on the Wraith’s Lantern trap. I spent a while studying the connections between the eye design and the rest of the canto.
When I glanced up at Gail a few minutes later she seemed like she was already asleep.
I couldn’t help but feel jealous of her command over magic. She was so much more advanced as a sorcerer than me. Was that just the difference spending a year here made? If that was it, then I should have been at least as half as advanced as her, but I wasn’t. She’d demonstrated three aspects that I would have classed as rare. Corrosion, Wind, and Winter. She had Fire and Force as well, both relatively easy to learn.
I only knew Force, Wheel, and Thought. I’d never been tempted to try and learn Fire, and I hadn’t picked up Agony even after being subjected to it by Mira. Thought was my only rare aspect, and it had limited uses.
What was the difference between us? I was studious, and I’d studied, and my bet that focusing on structured magic would give me more flexibility had been right. But flexibility wasn’t necessarily what counted here.
Our assignments expected us to travel, search, find, and fight. The ability to heat a room or amplify light didn’t come into it. I’d come here as a village scribe, and I couldn’t help but think I’d been learning the magic useful for that scribe’s life.
I comforted myself that no matter what happened, I at least wouldn’t be much help bringing the runaways in. I wouldn’t be able to prevent it, either.
What would happen if we actually caught up with them? How would I stop Gail from killing them or bringing them back?
However I imagined it, I wouldn’t be able to. I could push her around with Force, assuming she hadn’t learned Stillness, but I had no defense against Corrosion. Winter would slow me. Fire would burn me. Several minutes of preparation would get me a Storm’s Gate canto to use, but it would be a single bolt of lightning in terrain that didn’t favor it.
Had I wasted my time at the academy?
And if I couldn’t fight a student just a few months my senior, how would I ever fight a graduate sorcerer, or a Reeve, or a Master?
It was a surprise to realize I’d even been considering fighting with the staff, but now that I had, confronting the thought made me even more hopeless. If I hit an academy master with my most powerful Storm’s Gate, would it even land, or would it hit a hidden defense? If it landed, would it hurt them? Could even lightning stop a Reeve’s heart?
Beyond knowledge of aspects, I was lacking knowledge of how mages fought, what they were vulnerable to. Short of experimentation, I wasn’t sure how to find out. It wasn’t information available in the library. But there was no other source of knowledge here. Trying to get it from anywhere else was like trying to get blood from a stone.
I found myself wishing I had my journal. Writing helped me order my thoughts. Sometimes I felt like my hand was as important as my head for my ability to think.
I glanced over at Gail. Shock ran through me when I realized one of her eyes was open, a point of bright blue in the fading light. She was watching me.
“You’re in over your head, aren’t you,” she said quietly.
“It’s the first assignment where I’ve had to hunt someone,” I answered.
Her eye rolled up to gaze at the foliage above her.
“It will be familiar enough work, soon enough.”
“I don’t want it to be familiar.”
She sighed.
“I was like you, back at the start.”
I puzzled over the statement for a few seconds, wondering exactly what she meant. She spoke again, removing the need to ask.
“A moralizer,” she clarified. “I came from a village in northern Cortiss. I said my prayers every night, and honored my elders every day. I’d even reconciled myself to marrying the dolt the village chiefs picked out for me. I was chained to that pathetic life, and how I wailed when the Reeve scout came for me.”
She turned to lay on her side across the branch, looking as comfortable as if it were a feather bed.
“Did they have arranged marriages where you came from?” she asked.
“Not in Kirkswill,” I said.
I’d heard of things being that way in some other Losirisian villages. Kirkswill had a mayor chosen from among the townspeople, but there were villages run by chiefs or councils of elders. The more rural the towns got, the more deeply stuck in their old ways they were.
“Well, let me tell you, what I saw then as a nightmare was actually my salvation.”
“What about the assignments?” I asked. “What about gentling? Isn’t that just as bad?”
“The assignments? I’m not talking about the freedom to ignore my responsibilities,” she said. “My freedom here started with what I was able to think. I grew up in a place of very narrow thought. Here, my eyes were opened. ‘It is not to receive, but to take.’ The Path spoke to me. I didn’t have to suffer through what the world had foisted on me. I had it in me to take the future I wanted.”
“That’s not how it was for me,” I said. “I was taken from a good home. I’d already chosen my future. So had the others in my group. The people I knew who got the failure’s fate would have gone back home, if they could.”
She twisted on the branch, turning to look away.
“I won’t disagree with you about the war beasts,” she said. “I’d kill Sectus if I could.”
I sat up, looking at her. “Would that even put a stop to it?”
“It might. Grandmaster Korn must know how it works, but beyond that the knowledge is kept secret. I think Sectus guards it to protect himself from being replaced. The ceremonies are private. Only Sectus, the failures, and whatever apprentices Sectus can control are there for it.”
I thought back to the account I’d read from Reeve Paladius’s apprentice, Saverell. The transcript had been from a hundred years ago, before Master Sectus had been in charge of the infirmary and gentling. The details of how it worked hadn’t been common knowledge even then, even among the Reeves.
Having read about the spirit that dwelt in the gentling scar, what Saverell’s subject had called the Companion, what it did and how it worked, I might know more about gentling than some Masters.
“How far would you be willing to go to stop it?” I asked her.
She turned back to face me. She stared for a few seconds and turned away.
“You’re really in over your head.”
“The gentled are so docile because a possessing spirit eats all of their negative thoughts and feelings,” I said, venturing the information to see how widely known it was, first of all, and to show her that I was serious.
She didn’t move her eyes from the foliage above her.
“What type of spirit?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
Some sources called gentling the Gift of Kuhxos, so I’d been thinking of it as the Kuhxos spirit, but I was aware that wasn’t the name it had for itself or how it identified itself to those it controlled.
“Interesting, nevertheless.” After a minute of silence, she went on, “I wasn’t lying, earlier. There’s a recipe for a fulminating draft in the library. Drinking it will bring you close to death, but you’ll have a good chance of learning the Corrosion aspect from it. Any experience that brings you close to death has a chance to relate an aspect. The moment between life and death is reality at its most extreme, where the mortal experience is its most pure. That purity is what resonates through maja. Weaker experiences are usually muddied, or contradictory. They unleash too many competing influences to properly crystalize.”
I sat in silence as she spoke. When I replied, I tried to pretend she hadn’t just taught me more about the underlying function of aspects than I’d learned in the last six months.
“Can any pure experience become an aspect, or are there only a limited number?”
I’d told Adrian that there wasn’t just an aspect for everything. I’d feel stupid if I’d been lying to him.
“The types of aspect are limited, from what I’ve seen,” Gail said. “But I think that has more to do with the limitations of mortal experience. We can only fully comprehend so much. Force and Fire are easy to grasp. They’re pillars of the world that we encounter every day. If we drink acid, we start to understand what corrosion is. Opening a lock is so varied and complicated I doubt anyone could understand it well enough to develop a lock-opening aspect.”
“You implied you’d learned Winter aspect from an experience before you came here,” I said, treading carefully around what I thought was a delicate subject. “How did you recognize it as an experience that could become an aspect?”
“Because it never left me,” she answered. “In some ways, that moment became part of who I was. Of course I’d try it.”
I turned away, making a routine scan of the swamp for any threats. I didn’t have any experiences like that. I’d lived a sheltered life, before being taken from the village. Staying awake until dawn reading a law text probably didn’t translate into any aspect I’d want to use.
The only moment that had really stayed with me in that way was the night of the failure’s fate. The night I’d spent frozen in darkness, Stilled by Sectus.
I didn’t want to touch the memory with my maja, but I forced myself to focus on it. When it was chillingly clear in my mind, I pushed it onto my maja.
There was no reaction. The energy continued to swirl, giving off its cold, deep sensation.
“What about learning aspects you were the victim of?” I asked.
Gail had her eyes closed now, but she answered anyway.
“Some aspects impart their understanding. Force is the one people always mention.”
“I know Force. What about Stillness?”
“Stillness isn’t the experience of being made still,” she said. “To wield Stillness, you need to learn it in a way that gives you power over it. It needs to be your choice. It has to be something you impose, on yourself or others. Sit or stand in a place that makes you want to move. Stay there until you know what it costs to be still.”
“You’ve learned that one, too, I suppose.”
“Force is so common, and Stillness is a good defense against it,” she said.
“Are there any that you can teach as easily as Force?”
She opened her eyes and looked at me as if she’d just thought of something.
“Where did you hear that fact about gentling?” she asked.
I blinked at her. I wasn’t sure I wanted to answer, and I wasn’t sure why she suddenly wanted to know. As I thought back on the conversation so far, I noticed a pattern.
“Are we trading information?” I asked.
“Cordially,” she confirmed.
I decided I could give her the overview without exposing anything I wanted to protect.
“Around a hundred years ago, a gentled war beast killed the Reeve it was assigned to. The investigators found that the possessing spirit was to blame.”
“The spirit took control of the war beast? Why?”
“To protect the secret of its existence.”
Gail sat up and twisted on her branch to face me.
“Are you giving me information that could get me killed?” she asked. In defiance of all reason, she seemed excited at the prospect.
I thought back to the transcript and the attack from the war beast just when they were making progress in the interrogation.
“It’s possible,” I said. “It depends how similar the spirits riding with each war beast are.”
“It’s probably just one spirit,” Gail said. “Powerful spirits aren’t restricted to a single location. They can exist in multiple places at once, connected through the Fold.”
I swallowed, chewing the inside of my cheek. If that was true then all of the gentled war beasts could be tied to a single entity, the spirit that did the work of keeping them docile. But even if it was true, it didn’t represent any grand revelation. I’d already known a powerful spirit was involved, and I still didn’t know much about it.
After a minute I realized I’d been sidetracked.
“Were you going to tell me something about teachable aspects?” I asked.
Gail was lying back down on her branch, eyes closed, with one arm slung over her head. If she’d responded by pretending to be asleep, I’d have believed it. Instead, she answered.
“Force, Fire, Weight and Wheel can be taught through infliction,” she said. “Strength, Blade, Fear and Steel can only be taught through experience, but the techniques are quite reliable.”
“Will you share those techniques?” I asked.
“They’re in the library,” she said flatly.
“We don’t currently have access to the library,” I said.
Not to mention that every author in there buried their insights in a mountain of waffling.
She sighed, but didn’t sound annoyed.
“The ritual for learning Strength involves breaking bundled sticks with your fists. You start with five bundled twigs and go up from there. The thicker your go, the easier it is to coalesce. The trick is to stop before you hit something you can’t break. That locks you out of it forever. Blade, you have to stab through different materials until you coalesce the experience of piercing through something solid. Steel I haven’t learned, but I know it comes from blocking blows with a steel plate. Some students carry small bucklers to gradually learn as they defend themselves. As for Fear, I don’t know the details. I haven’t found anyone who knows who’d share it.”
I listened politely at first, then pulled out my scrap papers and pencil and started making notes. What she’d said about the Blade aspect matched up with what Jason had said, which was enough to convince me that she was telling the truth about the others, or at least not knowingly lying.
My last round of questions seemed to have exhausted her patience. She didn’t speak again while I was scribbling on the paper. By the time I’d finished she was either sleeping, or doing a perfect impression.
It was still early in the evening, but I was tired enough to sleep, and uncertain enough when my next quiet night would be that I wanted to take advantage of that.
I checked my reed ring, looked around to make sure the pierced bird wasn’t anywhere in sight. Despite being out in the open, I couldn’t see any spirit life, or any other life. The screamers were nearby, but I decided to believe in the deal I’d struck. Trusting the pierced bird to wake me if there was trouble, I leaned back and closed my eyes.
Thinking about my journal, and spirits, and how I could possibly put any of the techniques for learning aspects into action, I pushed through the heat into a shallow sleep.