Atharaisse was gone. There was only one way to go now. She picked herself up and stumbled away into the dark.
At the bottom of the stairs, on the step above the curse-ward, lay the amulet, as though it had been thrown up from below. The chain was wound firmly around a roll of paper, only slightly charred at the edges by the action of the curse-ward. Csorwe hunkered down on the steps, unfolded it, and read in disbelief:
No hard feelings.
Tal Charossa
There were no more curse-wards like the first one, only a silvery blue seal a few feet farther in. She flinched back from it, and it emitted the soft sound of bells, exactly like the ones that had distracted Psamag before. Talasseres Charossa must have passed this way, and inadvertently saved her life.
The stairway opened up on a cavern. In places you could see the cave had once been graciously paved and vaulted, a broad underground boulevard. There were two archways, more or less whole, and beyond the arches two passages branched off from the cavern, pointing in opposite directions. There were waymarkers at the mouth of each passage: CITY and OUTLANDS.
Csorwe had no idea how she made it out of the caves. She emerged from a crack in the outland hillside half a mile from the fortress.
It was midmorning. After weeks in the dimness of the fortress, the sunlight was blinding, and she half wanted to recoil back into the darkness and hide again.
She had found her way through. She could get Sethennai back into his city. But it was hard to feel triumph when her mouth was full of her own blood. She could hardly think in a straight line long enough to tell what success meant.
Morga must have closed all the doors to the fortress, because the traffic tailed back a good two miles into the desert.
Csorwe crept nearer to the queue of wagons. Somehow, there were still people in the world talking and laughing. Somehow, people were still selling food at the stalls. The smell reminded her of the curse-ward—hot fat, burnt meat, charred bone—but she was so hungry she would’ve eaten her own leg if someone had put it on a skewer.
She stumbled toward one of the stalls, trying not to cower any time someone looked at her. She must have been quite a sight, caked in blood and dirt and rags. The stallholder backed away from her, holding out a fan of meat skewers to her as if to ward off the devil. She took them, turned her back on the fortress, and walked away into the desert.
7
The School of Transcendence
“YOU SHOULD BE DEAD,” said Sethennai.
“I know,” she said. “I made some mistakes.”
She was lying on her bed in the boardinghouse, stiff as a corpse. Her arm was in a sling. Sethennai had given her some kind of draught that numbed the pain, and she felt dull and puffy. The cold air tugged at the open wound in her face, and she observed it with detachment, as if it were a feature of the landscape. She probed the place where her left tusk had been and found the ragged socket. Nothing but a splinter of enamel remained, half-buried in the gum.
“I’m sorry,” she said, although really she was too tired to be sorry for anything, too much in pain, and too surprised that she was still alive.
“If a man breaks his sword on something it was not made to cut, he can only blame himself,” said Sethennai, somewhere above. He faded from her vision. “Csorwe, you are my sharpest edge. We will repair you.”
She curled her hand at her side, testing whether she could make a fist. Blood was drying in uneven sediments on her palm.
“Go back to sleep,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she said again, mangling the words around the gap in her gums.
“Sleep,” he said, and touched the lip of the bottle to her mouth again. The drink was just as bitter as before, but this time she fell asleep at once.
When she woke again, Sethennai was still there, and he held out a mirror so that she could see herself. On the left, her one remaining tusk curved up, strong, white, and shining. On the right was its mirror image, wrought in yellow gold. Where it met her gum the flesh was still raw, and there was a tightness of stitches in her slashed lip, but she seemed more or less whole. She snapped her teeth and the golden tusk rang with a reassuring solidity.
“How?” she said.
“Gold outside. Living bone inside, apparently. I contributed a little sorcery. Don’t ask me where the doctor found living bone. The gold is a little bit of showmanship. It’s stable, but not very strong. Don’t try to gore anybody.”
“Expensive,” she said. “How much?” She didn’t even want to think about sorcery. Sethennai used his power so sparingly that she had spent her first two years in his company half-believing he called himself a wizard as a joke.
Sethennai smiled. “I told you. Sharpest edge and all that. Consider it a gift.”
Csorwe nodded, and winced. She was beginning to regain sensation in her face: the stitches that curved down her cheek and through her lip looked and felt like a black centipede crawling on exposed flesh.
“I’ve asked the doctor what we can do about the scarring,” said Sethennai. “Here, drink again and he can take a better look at it.” Again he held up the bottle of sleeping draught. Csorwe tried to shake her head, and raised a hand.
“Don’t need,” she said.
“Exalted Sages, Csorwe, drink. I’m not letting the man sew up your face while you’re awake.”
“No,” said Csorwe. “Leave it.”
Sethennai eyed her, clearly doubting her reasoning. Whether it was the pain or the drug, she could not make her mouth move fast enough to explain properly. She had always been a plain thing. If she had earned her adult tusks she had earned this too. Some part of her, she noted with a little click of recognition, relished the idea of being marked, the way the hilt of her sword was notched for her fingers.
“Leave it,” she said again, and this time Sethennai didn’t argue.
* * *
Csorwe woke in the darkness, and for a few unending moments couldn’t remember where she was or what had happened to her. In her dream she had been trapped somewhere, pinioned and unable to escape. Now even the sheet covering her was too heavy, but somehow she couldn’t throw it off.
After a while, someone came into the room with a lamp. The light obliterated her vision, but she recognised Sethennai’s silhouette and his footsteps.
“Hush,” he said. She realised she must have been crying out. “What’s wrong?”
She couldn’t explain, couldn’t really move her lips to form words.
“It’s all right,” he said. He sat down in the chair by her bed. “We’re almost home, Csorwe. You did this for me.”
She still couldn’t get out from under the sheet, but she began to understand and remember where she was. The bedclothes were wrinkled and damp from thrashing around, and the room smelled of sickness. She wished someone would brush her hair and bring her a warm towel to wash her face, as Angwennad had when she was a little girl, but even half delirious she knew she couldn’t ask Sethennai to do these things.
“It’s all right,” he said again, in a low, soft voice, as though addressing a frightened animal that threatened to bite. “You’ll be well soon. In Tlaanthothe you’ll have your own room in the palace, looking out over the gardens. We’ve spent too long out in the desert. The city is more beautiful than you can imagine, I promise.”