A Different Kind of Despair (4 page)

"Are you sure she was just a doll?"

"
Just
a doll?" His hands stopped. I'd
upset him... or so I thought.

Marvin saw that I'd bunched my shoulders, in
anticipation of an angry outburst. It prompted him to think of what
he was saying, and who he was saying it to. 

"She's dead, Miraj."

The words sat between his lips and my back,
sinking into the air. I wondered how a doll could possibly die, but
the resolution in the manner he said it told me that was the one
question I was not allowed to ask. I recalled what my mother told
me about honorable people being entitled to their secrets. This was
the one Marvin had to keep above all others.

"...my condolences," I muttered.

Marvin put a hand on the top of my
head.

"Thank you, Miraj'a."

The top of the tent crashed down
on us.

Marvin swore under his breath, but he'd
covered me from the wooden poles.

"LEO!" his voice boomed.

"That was an accident!"

I heard him sigh directly overhead. Once
again, I tilted my head back, smiling at my unwitting husband. I
wrapped my arms around his neck, taking advantage of this
opportunity.

"I love you," I reminded him.

His eyebrow twitched. The corners of his mouth
quirked into a frown.

"Is my love that repulsive to you?"

"If I said yes would you knock it
off?"

"No."

He sighed. His breath carried the scent of
wheat, barley, and lemongrass.

I kissed him full on those unguarded
lips.

"
Mff?!
" When he pulled away I was
pleasantly surprised by his horrified look, turning beet-red in
fractions of a second. I felt a genuine grin return to my
face.

"I. love. you," I repeated sweetly.

"GODS DAMMIT, MIRAJ!"

The tent finally came off of us. Marvin
staggered back and to his feet. Leo and Will both caught sight of
his face right before he could hide it in the crook of his arm. Leo
watched him storm off with a measure of awe, turning to me as I
rocked back and forth, quite pleased with my
assertiveness.

"What did you do?"

"I kissed him," I giggled in spite of myself.
"Did you see the way he left? It was like he's never kissed a girl
in his life."

Leo's expression blanked.

The gears turned in my head.

My hands covered my mouth in
horror.

"
No,
" I gasped.

Leo scratched the back of his neck looking
sheepish, saying nothing to confirm or refute my conclusion. The
gears turned along some more. If Marvin had never even kissed a
girl then...

"He's never...?" I began. "So he's...?" I
pressed my face into my palms. "I've done something unforgivable,
haven't I?"

Leo and I peered into the distance, where we
saw Marvin rapidly relaying the events that had just transpired to
Will. Once he'd stopped with his exaggerated gesturing, there was a
brief moment of silence.

Will then circled one arm around his abdomen
while pointing at Marvin, laughing so hysterically we could hear it
from where we were standing.

"BWAHAHAHAHA!"

"I'm a despicable
woman."

"Pretty much," said Leo. "Help me finish
packing things up so we can leave once Marvin is done mourning his
lost innocence."

I cursed myself profusely.

"He's twenty eight!" I said, aiding Leo in
rolling up the tent. "What man past the age of eighteen hasn't yet
kissed a girl?"

"A live one? Over half of them."

Now it was my turn to gape. Leo looked up at
me, wondering why I stopped working.

"What?" he asked.

"A... live..." I cringed. "You mean you...
kiss corpses?"

Leo shot me a disparaging glance. "If you'd
seen the selection in Nethermountain then you wouldn't be judging.
To be a man is to endure!"

I bowed my head to the grass. "My deepest,
sincerest, most humbled condolences."

"Marvin's my best friend," he fumed, "but damn
him for getting a wife before me. If I was kissed by a living girl
I guarantee we'd be doing a hell of a lot more than touching
lips."

I coughed, mortified.

The emu wandered over to us, offering Leo a
comforting rub of its head. Leo smiled.

"Thanks, Tully. At least you're not going to
betray me like that, right?"

I watched the emu nod, recalling its skeletal
legs.

Huh. So these are necromancers.

The pitiful virgins from hell.

5: Return to the Moor

Leo and Marvin were several paces ahead of us,
with the latter avoiding me in particular. I cursed myself over my
priorities, and the fact that that this all felt like a dream. Our
group of four was heading south. I saw the Cascadian Plains, their
low-lying fields and prairie grass patches, giving way to arid
earth and pockets of sand.

It felt wrong to me. The loss I'd just
suffered didn't feel real. I saw the fire and the brutal attack,
but in my heart I still believed I could return and there would be
my mother discussing some matter with the women soothsayers of our
tribe. I felt impossibly selfish for being here in the company of
these very strange men, for not taking more time to appreciate the
culture of my own people -for being too weak to do anything other
than run.

Despite his obvious aversion to my affections,
I hope that one day Marvin can understand why I'm behaving the way
I am.

Words of love were not as common as they
should have been between Hikari. I myself shied away from my
mother's affections in my tent the day before. The ghostly weight
of her lips remained on my skin, and I kept bringing my fingers to
my forehead and cheeks, as though I could pick up a more physical
trace of her existence.

Though I died of embarrassment a little every
time I said it or pulled him close, I want Marvin to know that I
care for him. For however short a time, he was Hikari. I loved his
willingness to learn our ways. I loved the way he cared for our
people. I loved the scent of his tent with all its pungent
tinctures and ointments -I even loved the way he scolded me without
a second thought, where most men in our matriarchal setting
reserved their concerns for private discussions.

Until I could fully comprehend the loss of my
home, Marvin was my only real constant. He was there when my world
was still standing. He is became my world when my old one had
died.

Ma'man, am I doing the right thing in going to
the home of necromancers? Did you know that Kurai would attack us
as they did?

We stopped at an outcropping of rocks. I
watched as Will and Leo shoved a weighty set of boulders to the
side, parting the matted tufts of grass beneath them. A set of
natural stairs came in view, leading somewhere beneath the
earth.

Leo and Will made their way down this passage,
with Marvin grudgingly falling into step beside me.

"Come on," he said. "We'll have to make a stop
at Purilo's. It's only an hour away."

I did not know what a Purilo was,
but I did have serious misgivings as I stepped underground. Leo and
Will resealed the passage, and I felt a trill of fright once the
last ray of sun disappeared.

"This place is unnatural," I muttered, barely
able to make out the shapes in the dark. I tripped over something
and sucked in a startled breath.

"Can you not see?" Marvin asked beside
me.

"You can?" I balked.

"Since necromancers are born and mostly raised
underground our eyes just adapted over time," Leo explained ahead
of us. "Marvin, you might have to carry her. The passage only gets
harder from here."

"Marvin, carry?" Will snorted. "He couldn't
even carry himself last time he was here."

"I did some reinforcement surgery two years
ago."

Marvin didn't ask to pick me up; he just did.
I flailed uncomfortably at first; I was tall for a woman, standing
at six feet in height, and packing nearly 180 pounds in fat and
muscle (or so Marvin said once, when he was running some tests on
the tribe as a whole). It was normal for my kin to be built this
way, but I still worried as Marvin was slight as far as our men
were concerned.

The Hikari had the leanest frames
among the Four Tribes as we spent so much time running across the
flat lands, breeding horses, and trading with merchants of the High
Cities. Outsiders, while still thinking us barbaric, also
considered Hikari to be the most civilized of our kind.

Kurai, or those with Kurai blood,
like Leo, were mountains unto themselves. Living in shadow of
Drahk'onil, the High City of militaristic ophidians, demanded
strength of the most primal kind in order to survive. Men and women
were equal there in terms of sway, but ultimately decisions were
made through contests of strength rather than cunning. They made
their homes in the hollows of the mountain ranges, and were
notorious for robbing and sacrificing any wanderer that could not
hold their own against them.

Akatsuki members were our dark-skinned
relatives, and they sustained themselves by moving from one oasis
to the next. They doubled as guides for travelers looking to find
their way to the High City of Isoviel, and as peace keepers on the
sands. In the past, long and bloody wars were waged by the High
Cities in order to control the oases for their trade caravans until
the Akatsuki grew weary of the struggle and finally took
guardianship over the precious watering holes. The fighting
stopped, for while no High City would cede resources to another,
the Akatsuki represented a neutral party between them.

Last but not least, we have
Shinya, but I did not know much about them. Hardly anyone did. If
my mother's words rang true, then they were a very strange bunch.
Unlike the other Tribes, our Shinya kin did not travel as one large
people, but often in very small groups. They preferred to blend
with other cultures, their identities more whispered suggestions
than bold flags of heritage. Supposedly, members were
Ori'tua
, or moon-marked,
often bearing streaks of gray, silver, or white in their hair. They
were a mysterious bunch. At the Feshoun Urah, they would camp on
the outskirts of the festivities. While the other Tribes danced and
made merry, Shinya people tended to keep to themselves and their
beloved shadows.

I gasped, "What are
those
?"

Marvin tilted his head at the ceiling. "Those?
They're glow worms."

"I've seen worms. They're
pink and slimy and live in soil. And they definitely don't
glow
."

"This world is completely different from the
one you're used to, Miraj."

"I guess it is a pretty severe contrast to a
topsider," Leo interjected.

"Topsider?" I asked.

"It's what we call the people who live above
ground." I saw his outline huff over an obstacle in our descent. "I
never really thought about it before, but I guess necromancers
aren't very relatable to other people."

Marvin laughed sharply at the observation. "I
could have told you that!"

"
You
weren't relatable among
necromancers," Leo added. "Just let that sink in for a
minute."

I shifted my weight so I craned a bit closer
to the back of Marvin's head.

"You were an outsider among your
kin?"

"Outsider?" I heard the sneer in Will's voice.
"Marvin is a living contradiction. Nethermountain hasn't seen a
genius like him in at least three generations, yet he's a
necromancer who's afraid of the dead."