The Sorcerer's Concubine (The Telepath and the Sorcerer Book 1) (14 page)

Lieutenant Dlara sighed loudly as Kellen went to comfort Flower.

“I’m not so sure Velsa should be reading,” Kellen said.

“She has a brain,” Dlara said. “It’s utterly pointless for her to sit around staring at the grass all day when she could be learning about medicine or tracking or useful plants, or in this instance, her own construction so she may be able to repair her injuries. There is no law against a Fanarlem reading.”

“I’m not so sure,” Kellen repeated.

“I am extremely sure, because I studied law before I came here and I had a class devoted entirely to the rights of slaves,” Dlara said. “And in fact, you know perfectly well this is true because we’ve hired Fanarlem slaves to record documents for us. Velsa and Flower can do anything their masters permit, besides owning property, voting, and matters of that nature. She can read all the books she likes, and in fact, I am inclined to think Kalan Jherin would approve. He encourages literacy and a Fanarlem who can read will surely have a better understanding of their place in the world.”

“This one sure doesn’t seem to understand her place in the world,” said the man who had fought Grau. 

“She could occupy her time in other ways that would be equally useful,” Kellen said. “Mending uniforms, for example.”

“Do I need to remind you all that Velsa is reading on
my
order? We are sorely lacking in education around here.” Dlara gave Velsa and Grau a serious look. “Sorcerer Thanneau, you’re dismissed. Take Velsa to the barracks and see to her hands.”

“Yes, sir, thank you,” Grau said.

T
he skin
of Velsa’s hands was ruined. Some of her fingertips had crumbled away, and a few of her fingernails had broken off. The fire must have burned off the spells that gave her skin more of a soft, human quality because now her palm wrinkled in a weird way when she flexed her fingers, which she kept doing, because she was ever so slightly fascinated by her own deconstruction. 

“What should I do for your hands?” Grau asked.

“I’m sorry,” she’ll said. “I’ll need new skin. And it will cost a bit because of the spells… Where is the repair kit Dalarsha gave you when you bought me?”

He dug out the bag under his bed and found the smaller bag within. She found the seam ripper and cut the stitches at her wrists, pulling skin and stuffing off her skeleton until nothing remained but polished wood and tiny screws. She flexed her finger bones.

“They work?” Grau said. “Without skin?”

“Sort of. I can move, but if I touch something…” She rapped her fingertips together. “It doesn’t feel like much.”

“I didn’t think you could move without skin. I thought that’s why Fanarlem can’t move when they’re wet.”

“Well, we can move a little, but imagine trying to move if your muscles were suddenly replaced by sodden wool sweaters. My framework has motion on its own, but not much
strength
. Flower will probably make fun of my hands at dinner, too…”

“She’d better not. Your little skeleton hands are cute. But you should have let Flower go. It’s just a book. What if she’d shoved your whole face into the fire?”

“But it’s a book about me,” she said. “About Fanarlem, I mean. It’s written by a man who used to be flesh and blood, and I think it’ll help me learn how to pretend I used to be real, someday.”

“What a snake that girl is…” Grau paced angrily.

“I might be a snake too if I was treated that way.”

“Obviously I see how he treats her,” he said darkly. “But that can’t be helped. It can’t be helped just like everything else in the world.” He sat down, his face darkened, and took one of her charred hands, but he was looking into the distance. Despite the cold day, his hair clung to his brow from sweat; his uniform was grubby from the fight.

“Some things can be helped,” she said. “I wish Flower would let me help her. I would teach her how to read.”

“Don’t you dare,” he said. “She’ll only hurt you. I have to worry about you first. You understand, don’t you? We have to be selfish just to survive.”

Painfully, she did. Just like the Fanarlem slaves at his house…she felt like she should help them, but she didn’t know how. She didn’t even like them and she didn’t like Flower either, but she
felt
for them. She thought of their eyes, in the middle of the night, the memory of their dead gaze like a spoon hollowing out her own insides. Not her stuffing, but her soul.

W
ith Grau’s training finished
, he started joining Lieutenant Dlara’s squad on patrol. Velsa was allowed with him, although she had to ride behind him to keep his hands unencumbered. It was for the best, she thought grimly. Her body could help to protect him from arrows, since they refused to give him any armor.

Within a week she found herself dreaming of arrows. Not
too
seriously, but it certainly would be exciting to see a single arrow fly into a tree, because the patrol proved just as dull as everyone had warned. They walked the same path every day, along the steep bank of the river, watching the Miralem nation on the other side. Every day, the same. Not only was each day the same, nearly every hour was the same, because the river offered almost no change of scenery. Rushing waters, rocky bluffs, barren trees. The skies whispered of winter. Occasionally, a Miralem village or stone guard tower offered a landmark.

“You look so bored,” Grau said, lifting her onto the horse on a cold morning. His breath emerged in puffs.

“Because it’s so boring.”

“You know what else is boring?” he said. “The marshes.”

“The marshes aren’t boring. We went on canoe rides and picnics and looked for animals. But here we’re stuck plodding along.”

“Remember your crystal,” he said. “This is our chance, now, when it’s quiet, to study the energies of this place. Even from the back of a horse, you can get a sense of the ground, the rocks—what minerals do they hold? The trees, the plants…it might be autumn now, and they are quieter than in the spring, but if you listen long enough, they’ll start to tell you what they’re about.”

Velsa wished she had Grau’s patience. She loved the sensation of activating the crystal and sensing all the life around her, but then her mind would wander. She couldn’t seem to listen the way he did, holding his crystal in one hand for an hour at a time and staying very quiet.

Even when they stopped for lunch, Grau would poke around, gathering rocks and seeds and the skull of a small animal. She enjoyed doing this in the marshes, but she had grown restless here. Maybe she just couldn’t relax with the other men around all day, and Flower waiting in the camp every night. 

When they stopped for lunch, she watched Grau turn over a rock with his boot and stoop to examine what was beneath it, and could only think how handsome he was, and how she wanted to have a different life with him, building a house of their own.

Velsa had taken to playing cook. She didn’t really know how, at first, but the men in the squad seemed to find it a lot more fun to teach her how to cook than to simply cook themselves. She flipped sausages and stirred onions and cabbage, singing Dlara’s harmonica songs as she went, because they never seemed to leave her head. “City ladies sing this song, doo-da, doo-da…the palace walk is five miles long, oh de doo-da day…” And if she made the food, no one cared if she tasted it as she went.

O
ne of the
most difficult adjustments to the Fanarlem form is losing the need to eat, drink, or digest food. At first you might imagine this to be a positive. Most of us have had a day when the coffers were low or the harvest poor, and the food supply is short. At other times, our days are so burdened that we resent taking time from our work to eat.

One of man’s great satisfactions, nevertheless, is the enjoyment of a good meal after a day’s labors, and the rejuvenating properties of a glass of wine or spirits.

The newly reborn Fanarlem is likely to experience a sense of having a tenuous hold on the physical world, now that one’s body is no longer signaling these needs.

Spells are available that allow a Fanarlem to eat, by way of creating a passage in the throat that will make food vanish. But eating without saliva makes for a foreign and unpleasant experience, and one may find that without the sensation of food traveling down into a hungry stomach, all pleasure is lost.

H
er book
, which she read while the men were polishing off the meal, offered strong opinions on eating.
Velsa wondered if this was true for every flesh-born Fanarlem. She had adored food from that first bite of pastry.

The dream of posing as a real woman and being treated as such seemed ludicrous sometimes. It was so much more than getting false papers. It meant pretending she had a family, and acting as if she expected to be treated like a real woman with rights. It meant never slipping up and mentioning the House or anything about her childhood.

“Always buried in that book,” Rawly said, sitting down next to her and taking a swig from a canteen.

“I’m almost done.”

“And have you learned anything about Fanarlem life? It seems to me you could write the book yourself.”

“No, I don’t really know anything.” It was always fun to rile Rawly up so she said, “I learned how lifelike skin spells are made. Take the flesh from one freshly deceased Daramon or Miralem, boil it for an hour and then strain out the solids…boil until reduced for ten more hours…”

Rawly almost spat out his drink. “Just when I was starting to think you were attractive, Velsa, I find out you’re made from corpse juice.”

“Not just corpse juice. You didn’t listen to the rest. The reduction is then added to a fresh pot of water with rose petals and birch bark and boiled down again. Just a small amount of this potion is needed, it says. You would never know if I didn’t tell you. I don’t feel corpse-y, do I?” She squeezed his arm. Rawly was the only person besides Grau she would dare to tease like this.

“I suppose not, but I have a rule to never touch a corpse, so I can’t say for sure.”

“Trying to steal her away?” Grau had come over to sit with them too. “I can’t leave you two alone for a second.”

“Nah, I prefer a really buxom girl.” Rawly held up his hands like he was groping large breasts.

“Good luck with that,” Grau said. “Sounds more like a Miralem than a Daramon.”

“Well, maybe you don’t get out enough, Grau. I have a girl at home just like that. Have you ever seen her?” Rawly took a tiny painting in a frame from his pocket, of a girl with curly hair, large breasts pushed up above the edge of her waist sash, and an awkwardly proportioned face.

“Are her eyes like that in real life?” Grau asked.

“Like what?”

“One higher than the other.”

Rawly squinted at the painting. “
No
. I painted it myself.”

“You detailed her breasts very nicely,” Grau said. “I can see where your focus was.”

“What’s she like?” Velsa asked. She was growing more curious about real women. She had only ever spent time with Preya and Grau’s mother, and the House-mistresses, and none of them seemed much like her or each other. 

“She’s loads of fun,” Rawly said. “You remind me of her a little, sometimes.”

“Do I?” Velsa said, excited.

“Only when we’re talking like this, though. You’re very quiet in groups, which I guess is only proper, but it’s too bad. Grau, did you know she’s made from corpse juice?”

“Can’t be much. She’s not very juicy,” Grau said. “Look what I found.” He held up a shimmering blue thick sliver of something about the size of his palm.

“A crystal?” Rawly asked.

“No. A dragon scale.”

“Really?” Velsa reached out to touch it. It had a comfortable weight, and a satisfying shape that could have been a small plate for holding bread at dinner. “Where was this?”

“In the grass.” He looked up. “Maybe the rumors were right. A dragon did pass through here.”

“You’re making me nervous,” Rawly said. “Patrol is boring but that doesn’t mean I’d want dragons coming around!”

“It was dropped months ago,” Grau said.

“Months? That isn’t enough distance between me and a dragon.”

“Hmm.” Grau turned the scale over. “I think it’s long gone,” he said, but he sounded wistful.

W
eeks passed
, each day the same. She understood now why the men were happy to see Flower’s flute performance every night, and why Dlara’s harmonica brought such excitement, even though he only seemed to know five songs.

The longest day of the year brought celebration. The Daramons in the city usually celebrated Ancestor’s Day with their families at this time, but the girls at the House of Perfumed Ribbons had never celebrated because they had no ancestors. No one had family at the camp either, but a wooden crate had arrived at the base, wrapped in red and black ribbons with the seal of the Wodrenarune.

The men clamored to see it opened. The camp had no room large enough for an assembly, so they stood out in the cold. Grau and Velsa were close to the front because of Grau’s rank as a sorcerer. Two of the men gently pried open the top. Lieutenant Dlara lifted out a large painting of Kalan Jherin himself.

Everyone gasped.

The painting was utterly lifelike. The tiniest detail of Kalan Jherin’s proud, beautiful face was so perfectly captured that it might be expected to speak. He wore his black winged headdress and a sharply pointed collar that framed the graceful shape of his cheeks. His expression was noble, his eyes looking off into the distance. Really, it was disturbing—almost like the real Kalan was trapped within the frame. He never seemed to look older, in all of his two hundred years—not in paintings, at least. She wondered how long a Daramon might live, if they could afford to have healers tending to every small sign of age.

Velsa kept thinking with a shudder of his
Treatise on Fanarlem
, but she couldn’t deny that he looked like a great sorcerer should.

Next, they unwrapped a protective cloth from a curious object, a wooden box with a crank on the side and a large, beautifully painted purple horn mounted to it. A magical implement of some kind, no doubt. Velsa stood on her tiptoes to see.

Lieutenant Archel held up a letter with Kalan’s seal and read it aloud. “‘There is no greater strength among the Daramon race than our fighting men. I know how difficult it is to be far away from your families for months and years on end, and I hope you will take some joy this afternoon in this taste of the wonders of our clever people. Here in Nalim Ima, we have been developing all manner of devices that will change our world—and they don’t rely on sorcery at all. They can be used by anyone. First, there is the ‘pho-to-graph’ which captures a picture of the world exactly as it looks to our eyes. I have had a photograph taken of myself to demonstrate to you all.’”

“That’s what you need,” Grau told Rawly, who stood near them. “Kalan’s eyes are right on the level.”

“You’re a cruel man to knock another man’s artistic skills, Thanneau,” Rawly said.

“‘There is also the ‘pho-no-graph’ which plays music over and over again, without wasting a single crystal’,” Archel continued. “‘They are already popular in Nalim Ima and soon will be all over the Daramon nations. The music is contained within cylinders, much like a singing crystal, to hold different songs. A cylinder is included with a song called a Cake Walk that I hope you will enjoy.’”

The room was tense with anticipation as the officers read the directions. They took the cylinder from a little paper box and mounted it at the base of the horn, and turned the crank.

After all of this, Velsa expected to hear the most glorious music of her life.

Instead, it was a strange tinny noise, like it came from far away.

“What
is
it?” Grau asked. “If these things don’t work with magic, how
do
they work?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Is it like a clock?”

“But even clocks are powered by magic crystals,” Grau said.

“Some things work without magic, don’t they?” she asked. “What about the wheel of a mill?”

“Hmm.”

“Maybe we could look at it more closely later.”

Lieutenant Dlara played the Cake Walk several times through, until many of the men began to wander back to their tents, some of them muttering that they’d expected the crate to hold something a lot better. Others had come closer to poke at it.

Later in the evening, Lieutenant Dlara permitted them to inspect it. The phonograph had been moved into the library. Velsa looked through the manual at the instructions for disassembling some of the parts while Grau ran his crystal over the horn and box. “It’s true,” he said. “No magic at all.” He wound it up again. “No wonder it sounds so dead.”

“I think it sounds a little better now, without so many people around, when we can really hear it. It reminds me of ‘Oh Su-za-na’ in a way.” Velsa couldn’t help pumping her hands up and down to the merry beat.

“Why would it be called a Cake Walk?”

“Maybe it’s how you walk when you’re excited to have cake.” She offered him her hands. He laughed and marched her across the room.

“It lends itself to a very different sort of dance, doesn’t it?” he observed. 

When the song finished she followed the instructions in the manual to turn the crank backward and release some sort of mechanism made of metal parts. They were unusually smooth and uniform, as if shaped by a sorcerer, but she didn’t sense the slightest trace of magic clinging to them either, besides what remained from the material itself. The phonograph reminded her of the diagrams inside
Fanarlem Life
showing how to put a skeleton together. 

“What is going on in Nalim Ima?” Grau asked. “Who is figuring out how to make this magic? It has to be magic. There’s no way you could make music and pictures the same way you’d build a mill wheel.”

“What about…a printing press?”

“Tell me how you could make music with a printing press! No, this must be some sort of magic that can’t be sensed with a crystal or with regular sorcery. Some test he’s sending out to military camps to see if we understand what it is, that will eventually lead to cloaking weapons of war.”

“Maybe it really isn’t magic, though,” Velsa said. “Look at the label. The Victor Talking Machine. It’s a machine. I really think so, though I have no idea how it works…” She couldn’t imagine anyone would put so much specific detail into a mere test for a war weapon.

Grau scratched his head, sliding his hat sideways. “Maybe you’re right. But it still doesn’t make any sense and there’s something about it that makes me uneasy.”