Chapter 13

  A color priest still commanded enough influence to procure a one-man submersible and deep-sea survival suit. Derxis motored out onto the still, cold waters of the Chelonate Sea. He left the windows open to enjoy the sunlight, the fresh air. Out here, no minds crowded his own. Up, down, in all directions: no sentient beings. Only him.

  She would not be happy to see him. Especially when he surprised her. She hated surprises. That was why he had to do it. Better get used to surprises, Rosma!

  We all need to get used to surprises, right, Derxis?

  That’s right D-man. That’s exactly right.

  So he needed to check on Rosma to make sure she wasn’t too crazy. He considered it his duty to manage her mental health. If he couldn’t manage his own, he could at least take care of someone else’s, right? But he also wanted to check on Ma’Turin. He’d never tried to read the turtle’s thoughts before. It might finish the job, make him totally insane. But he had to try. He had to know. The gods were dead, and the norns would tell him nothing; neither would the sphinx, not really. The turtle might.

  He and Rosma weren’t the only ones he needed to worry about. Jeronimy stood in significant danger of a mental breakdown in the future, which could be terrible for all of them. And Akkama, well…she had just murdered a princess, hadn’t she? Out of boredom.

  We’re a bunch of psychos, Derxis.

  A pack of raving lunatics waiting to happen, D-man.

  Somehow, there was a way. He knew it. He believed it. And he would find it. He would save everyone. Because they deserved saving? Well, more because it would be a big surprise. It would be the biggest trick of all.

  The thought put a smile on his face. He grinned at the cloudless sky, the crescent moon overhead. Here in the neritic zone, the edges of the sky looked pink and faded to a purple over the horizon, up to the deep blue overhead. The purple hue, enhanced by the smoke from inland fires burning out of control, filtered the sunlight into a rich claret. The peculiar coloration of the otherwise familiar scenery had an intoxicating effect on Derxis. A violet sea, a sea of royal blood. A sea of wine, of amethyst. It made him want to paint.

  He browsed through his backpack. Paints/pigments? Check, including waterproofs. Masks? Check. Zurna? Check. Reed-making tools? Check. That was really all he needed, but he also had fishing line with bait because he wanted to try fishing underwater, and red arda just to see what it would do in the cold depths of Ys.

  The submersible informed him that Ys lay below. He took a look around. Nothing but horizons of sea and sky in every direction. The sun declined toward the west; the moon followed after. He wouldn’t see the stars tonight. A pity. They never saw the stars in Ys. Perhaps that explained their touchiness. Maybe Rosma just needed to see more stars.

  He flipped a switch. The portals of the bathysphere sealed shut with a satisfying hiss and a slight squeak. The pod creaked a bit. Derxis patted the spring-steel hull. It would hold. It would.

  He began the descent. It always shook him to see the water close overtop of whatever craft he used to descend to Ys. Then it always filled him with wonder to see the placid sunlit waters below the waves. Then it always chilled him to watch the light fade and fade as he dropped into the depths of an element hostile to him. He had never descended alone before. And he was very alone. Some sentient creature of the sea, not a daimon, flitted briefly into Derxis’s range of mental perception, but promptly vanished before he could get a read on it, leaving him adrift in a space devoid of other minds.

  Ys, which is to say, Ma’Turin, did not slumber terribly deep. The great turtle lay not in a trench or even a deep valley of the seafloor. It slept at the very brink of the aphotic zone, where some light barely filtered down from the surface. In upper Ys at midday, one could look up and see a vague glow, the faintest hint of illumination from somewhere overhead. Depending on local turbidity, of course.

  Down, down, down.

  The bathysphere beeped as someone detected his arrival. He sent out his own friendly ping to make sure he stayed true. Sonar ping; Ys outlawed the use of arc-wave ping in their waters. They said it gave Ma’Turin nightmares, and that meant sea monsters.

  The control panel blinked to light with a received message as the pod continued its descent: “Welcome, Color Priest.”

  Wait for it…

  “What bringest thou to Ys?”

  He put on a brightly painted wooden balan mask in case they wanted to vid-com. “Come to visit a friend,” he replied after a moment of consideration.

  A long pause.

  “She desires not to meet with thee,” came the reply.

  He considered explaining that this was in large part the problem, and therefore his reason for being here. Also, so much for the surprise.

  Derxis understood in a flash of intuition that the person to whom he spoke had also been informed that he and Rosma were not friends, but had refrained from adding this morsel of information out of politeness.

  “I have also come to observe Ma’Turin,” he said. His trump card; the reason he had bothered to make this journey. The keepers of Ys could conceivably turn him away if he came for no greater reason than visiting one of their number who didn’t wish to see him. It would be disrespectful, but it could be done. However, they would not prevent a Color Priest from attempting to commune with the great turtle, no matter what state the priesthood stood in.

  “Docking coordinates are being sent,” they replied after a moment. “Welcome to Ys.”

  Derxis allowed the coordinates to upload and leaned back in the webbing as the submersible drifted down to the docks. The water above was clear; enough light filtered down for him to discern the hulking shapes of ancient structures looming around the vessel as it descended. Some tall buildings here on the back of the turtle. The city of Ys was almost completely empty; the Bell Ringers occupied only a fraction of the structures built onto the shell.

  The ancients had carved most of the city directly out of Ma’Turin’s shell, which was hundreds of feet thick in places. A network of flooded tunnels and catacombs burrowed through the shell just as through the Great Tree Annunciation. Of equally mysterious origin, those tunnels. Turtle and tree, one aslumber, the other long dead, yet the both of them still alight with power, both held equally sacred by the color priests. And there were other sacred places. The Dragonmount in the east. Frostfound. The Starbound Rail. Others. All dead, or dormant, or haunted, or lost.

  It was difficult to tell the line between structures built atop the shell of Ma’Turin and those built of the shell, for the shell was so carved that it had no clear topography. Yet the time came, as the submersible descended into a landing zone among blue and green lights, when he truly felt that he was inside of the great turtle. He became part of it, like a tiny harmless coral on the hull of a sunken battleship.

  “What are you waiting for?” he asked the darkness. He pressed a hand against the cold glass. “What could possibly wake you up?”

  He had been here before, but he had forgotten the weight. Not the weight of the thousands of meters of crushing waters above, but the weight of the mind of the turtle. Murky and dull, making the minds of all daimon lucid and sharp by comparison, it pressed in upon Derxis with an unnerving force. The thoughts of this mind were like the turning of the spheres, like the shifting of tectonic plates, like the growing of a tree. The thoughts of this mind, imperceptible to all but a color priest, pulled at Derxis like a deep river. It was a frightening sensation. Derxis imagined that if Ma’Turin were awake, his thoughts more active, those thoughts would crush his own like grain in a mill.

  A knock on the exterior of the bathysphere jolted him from his soft laughter. A shadowy figure stood outside, outlined by the lights beyond and lit faintly by a rippling blue luminescence from the arda on her body. Was it Rosma? He tapped gently at her thoughts and at once met resistance cold and tough like ice. A mind firmly set against outside influence. A mind rigid, immobile, decided. Yes, it was Rosma. He could chip through that ice if he wanted to. But he certainly did not want to.

  Derxis waved back at her. She pushed herself back and made a rough motion with one arm. Come out.

  He removed the wooden mask and strapped a breathing device on over his face and double-checked the seal on the pack he had brought. Time to get cold and wet. After a moment’s hesitation, he put the painted wooden mask back on overtop of his breathing apparatus. It did not fit at all, and he could hardly see, but he left it.

  With a flick of a switch, the bubble of the submersible slid open. Derxis let the water jostle him, and he gasped at the shock of cold even though he knew it was coming. He grabbed for the dislodged mask and put it back on his face. Why didn’t he have a mask designed to accommodate a re-breather? He should check on that.

  He drifted out of the sub and looked up. Above him, through the crooked eye-holes of this mask, he saw the blackness of countless tons of water. Somehow, it did not crush him. This was a result not of technology, but of the will of Ma’Turin. Many such conveniences made it evident that the great turtle desired, or at least accommodated, a civilization existing on its back.

  “Why hast thou come, priest?” Rosma’s voice was muffled through the water. She required neither dive suit nor breathing apparatus. She stood at ease, arms folded, spear planted at her side, braided hair adrift. She carried nothing else but her conch shell. Derxis’s gaze lingered on the spear. Fashioned from the tooth of a nightmare she had slain.

  “Can we talk on the way?” The breather was designed to transmit his voice via radio, but Rosma had no trouble hearing it. “And can we get to…warmer waters?”

  “But these waters are pleasant, priest.” She spread her arms to demonstrate. Though she did not smile, she clearly enjoyed his discomfort. “And whither do thy desires lead thee?”

  “To the head, bell-ringer,” he said, echoing her formality. Almost as he said it, the water vibrated around him. Somewhere, near or far he could not tell, a bell had been rung. It tolled four times. Given that it was mid-morning, Derxis guessed it was not counting the time.

  Several other blue daimon emerged from unseen portals in the darkness. One of them approached from above, swimming down with ease, her body rippling like an eel, seemingly boneless. They gathered around, curious. He brushed their minds almost without thinking. All of them were sunny and warm in comparison to Rosma, though perhaps more resilient than average. The bell-ringers were set in their beliefs.

  He adjusted his mask again. It had been trying to float up and away. He chuckled privately at the thought of how silly he must look with the mask askew and his priestly robes ballooning around him. But he bowed solemnly to the bell ringers of Ys, and it required only a slight tweak, just a minor flicker of thought, just a shift of perspective, for them to perceive him as mysterious and alien rather than awkward and absurd. Such little difference. His arda smoldered orange for a moment in the water.

  They saluted in return, the four of them. Each cast an arm out to the side and swept it back across their bodies. The movement propelled all of them slightly to the side as though it was part of a synchronized dance routine. Derxis snickered.

  “One of my sisters will take thee,” said Rosma. She turned to go.

  “Why so cold, Rosma?” It was only partially a joke. He dug in his voluminous pockets for pigments, for light, for color. The tide of Ma’Turin’s thought pulsed, and for a moment he thought he had been physically pushed to the side. He closed his eyes to shake the disorientation.

  “I have nothing to say to thee,” she replied. But she did not leave.

  “Everyone has things to say to a color priests,” he replied. “That’s what we’re for.” Partly. “Watch this. Watch.”

  Facing the watchful bell ringers above, he threw an object down on the smooth carved shell of the great turtle. It shone, illuminating particulates in the dark water for yards upward. He drew his other hand from inside his robes and released pigments as he swept his arm out in an arc, dragging color across the light. The pigments flared like flame.

  The bell ringers gasped and clapped, delighted at the shining colors in this dark place. But Derxis wasn’t finished. He didn’t create colors; that was already done by nature and the gods. He had found these pigments. They had already existed. No, he created something else. He created order from chaos, sense from nonsense, form from void. He could take those colors and turn them into shapes, and those shapes, meaningless in themselves, would be seen by the bell ringers, and then those shapes would be processed by their eyes and delivered by synapse to their brains. And there the magic would happen as the meaningless gained meaning, and a cloud of pigments in the water became reality in the mind of the observer. A reality more real than any color, than any sensory input, would be formed. A reality of the mind, the only reality of any meaning or substance. A protean, volatile, eminently fallible reality.

  And the beauty of it was that he hardly had to stir the colors into coherent shapes at all, though he did pass his hands through the cloud of mingling pigments. Why waste time with that when he could cut out a few steps and shape the idea of the visual data as the brain processed it? This way, the effervescing bloom of brilliant color here in the cold depths was a mere tool, a seed of an idea.

  And he selected faith as his idea. Believe, said his colors. Believe in me, a color priest. Believe in the sacred Ma’Turin. Believe in the gods, even in their death. Believe and do not despair. Be assured. Be calm. Laugh. All will be well. This is not the end.

  The mass of underlit colors looked rather like a butterfly when he’d finished with it. When he realized this, he understood that he had unconsciously used its emergence from the cocoon as an illustration. The example pleased him. Maybe the caterpillar thought it was dying when it made the cocoon? It was a question for Fiora.

  Thoughts of Fiora proceeded to occupy his mind for the next moment, shunting out more immediate concerns with a forcefulness that seemed to increase every time he thought of her. He analyzed this phenomenon from a remote position even as the majority of his thoughts turned to that wonderful little tree frog.

  Can’t even control your own mind, D-man.

  What color priest worth his sand ever could, Derxis?

  A cold hand on his shoulder shook him harshly, snapped him back to his present situation. He stood still in the light, the colors dissipated to a faint shimmering mist. His mask had floated up to be caught by one of the bell ringers, who held it awkwardly, cautiously. He gestured for her to bring the mask to him as he clicked the light off with a foot. He turned to Rosma. She did not look happy. Of course, his little display had not affected her in the least. Her mind had to be either opened from within or broken through by force. One option unlikely, the other extremely dangerous.

  It usually made him uncomfortable to be closed out of a mind. It was like being crippled. He had told Anthea it was analogous to standing outside a door, looking through a window. Seeing but not interacting. Granted, with Rosma being shut out hardly mattered. He knew what was going on in there, and it was pretty simple.

  “I thought you didn’t want to see me,” said Derxis. The bell ringer with his mask, the one who moved like an eel and who was dealing with the emotional trauma of losing something she loved very dearly, came down and gingerly handed him the wooden balan mask. He closed a gloved hand over her arm for a moment. “A riddle,” he said, voiced so that only she and Rosma could hear. “Who calls the dawn at the ocean’s edge, and what stirs the stars amid the waves?” He layered meaning thickly onto the words with a flare of his arda. This is important, he said to her as he spoke. This will help you. This will heal you. Then he released her cold hand and allowed her to drift away. She wandered as though in a daze back up to her sisters, already deep in thought about the riddle. She was a sharp one, her mind keen and quick when it wasn’t gummed up by the sticky emotions of grief.

  “As I was saying,” he turned back to Rosma. “I thought you didn’t—”

  “I do not.”

  “And yet…”

  Rosma folded her arms. “I am here because I wish to be done with thee in haste.”

  “Haste! Faster than anyone, yet always in such a hurry.” Derxis shook his head in sorrow. “Won’t you even offer me a meal? I traveled a long way to get here. Also,” he wrapped his arms around himself and shivered theatrically. He exaggerated the gesture in order to give the impression that he wasn’t that uncomfortable from the cold. But in fact, he had to resist the urge to huddle in on himself even tighter. His toes and fingers were numb. He didn’t have to look to know that his chameleon’s skin was a deep frigid blue-grey not too different from Rosma. Even the air he breathed through the re-breather was cold, chilling him from within.

  She gazed at him with her narrow blue eyes. Shark’s eyes, with a similar degree of compassion. Oh, Rosma. So very different from…

  He manhandled his train of thought onto another track. How to prepare for his attempt to touch the dreams of Ma’Turin? If Rosma’s mind was difficult to penetrate because it was encased in a glacier, then Ma’Turin’s would be difficult because it was the sea itself. Where to start? What to look for? Maybe he would spend hours swimming through a single thought without comprehending it. Maybe it would overwhelm him, crush him down like the tin can of his submersible in the deep abyss. Maybe he would have to ride out the turtle’s thoughts, surf them, swim atop an avalanche. Maybe he had to cut it out with all the analogies.

  A rough shove brought him back. Rosma watched him, a look of profound annoyance on her face. Ah.

  “Were…you saying something?” he asked, stifling his urge to giggle.

  She growled in response. “Thou vex me, priest.” She turned and waved a hand for him to follow.

  She led him down into smooth round tunnels lit by turquoise lights that gleamed and rippled off the nacreous shell. Rosma darted ahead through the waters, then waited for him, as elegant as an empty keg in comparison, to catch up. Derxis was getting sick of water and swimming already, but at least it was warmer as they went down. The body of Ma’Turin himself warmed the city of Ys from below.

  They traveled in silence for several minutes, past whispering corridors, waters warm and cold, murmuring clusters of watchful bell ringers, and elaborate murals of vitreous enamel wrought into the material of the shell itself by one of Derxis’s priestly forebearers in the distant past. Derxis spent this time probing Ma’Turin’s mind. It was all around him like a thin fog. Like faint music he could almost understand. Its currents seemed calmer now than they had at the sub. Could it be that the great turtle had detected Derxis’s display? No, that was silly. He was less to Ma’Turin than a fly on the back of an elephant. Less than the light of a crescent moon on a cloudy night to these sunken ruins.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “What is the answer?” asked Rosma suddenly when he caught up to her for the tenth time.

  “Hmm? Oh. The norns won’t tell us and the Iterators don’t work.”

  She sighed through gritted teeth. “The riddle, priest.” Ah, the riddle he had told the other bell ringer.

  “Haven’t you figured it out?” He grinned at her, knowing that she would hear the grin even though he wore the mask again.

  “If I had…no matter. If thou wilt not reveal it, that business is not mine.” She turned to continue.

  “There is no answer,” he said. “Or I should say, there wasn’t, when I told it to her. I just made it up! Heh heh.”

  She turned to stare at him, and for once her gaze was more curious than fierce. Derxis’s heart jumped at that. Excellent! Progress! Curiosity in Rosma was a good sign, a very good sign. He chose his next words carefully. “The answer wasn’t the point,” he said. “The point was for her to think about it. To come to her own conclusions and draw her own wisdom and healing from within herself. Believing, you see, that the wisdom and healing came from me!” He couldn’t resist a giggle of delight at his own cleverness. “The belief is the key. The expectations. Really, when it comes to helping people, I often don’t have to do much at all. I’m just…a gardener.”

  Rosma considered this, her mouth turned down in a skeptical frown. “How did you know about Lutharc?”

  Lutharc? That must be the one that the bell ringer grieved. “I saw it in her mind. I knew a thoughtful riddle would help. For someone else, I would have done something different.”

  She thought her expression was neutral and unreadable. To most, it might have been. But he saw it in her posture, her hesitation, the inner conflict on her face: gratitude. She was thankful to him, just slightly, for helping someone she cared about. Yes, Rosma cared about someone. It was enough to give him pause. Would she ever meld? Likely not. But thoughts like that turned his skin green, so he changed the subject again.

  “You like riddles, Rosma?”

  “We both know I do not.” True, of course. She had met a sphinx once, in a barren wasteland, and had not enjoyed the encounter. But she was still curious. Even she wondered about the mysterious powers of the Color Priests. As something almost like a priest herself, she knew the reality of such powers.

  “Then here’s one I know you’ll like,” said Derxis. “What’s a drink with ice, but hold the drink?” He snickered. “Here’s a hint: it’s your favorite word.”

  Rosma bared her teeth at him, unamused. Oh well. He’d known she wouldn’t find it funny, but it had been worth a shot anyway. He was wrong sometimes.

  “Not your style?” he continued. “Want something more serious—more dramatic? Then how about this:

  No ledger, no purse, no sheath for its blade

  But pen, and coin, and pain duly weighed—

  Not vengeance bestowed, but debt rightly paid.

  Rosma knew the answer at once. But she thought about it, and that was the important thing. She did not bother replying verbally to Derxis.

  “It’s close,” she said as she turned to lead him on. “You…can…” She stopped speaking and swimming. She stiffened; the hard lean muscles in her back, legs and arms violently contracted. She made a very small sound despite herself, the tiniest whimper escaping her lips only because the body-wide cramp had caught her by surprise.

  It was over in a moment. She drifted limp in the water, breathing deeply through the gills at her neck. Slowly, carefully, she tested her limbs, began swimming again. The fear of another cramp was evident in her every movement. But the feared resurgence did not come, and soon she was far down the corridor. She never looked back. Derxis decided to pretend that he had not seen that.

  They surfaced a minute later in a room full of steamy air. The place was not objectively all that warm, but it felt like a sauna compared to the cold waters. The boundaries of this room extended beyond his perception, but he detected a few others milling about in the fog. A wave of giddiness, maybe from the warmth, made him cackle with laugher as he peeled off the mask and the breather. His thoughts skittered out, touching the other minds nearby. He saw them like shifting lights, like spinning machines, like changing clouds, like fish schooling in the sea or raindrops on still waters. He could shape those clouds, guide those fish—or catch and eat them!

  Food, yes. This was where they ate, the bell ringers, when they did not hunt their own food in the depths. Tables and benches carved from the shell of the turtle populated the chamber. Rosma, annoyed by his laughter, nevertheless procured salted meats and baked kelp, along with a bland ale, from casks in a side room. She glanced around as she took him to a table. He saw everything in that glance: so few. So few left here at Ys. Rosma was glad, in a way, that the world was ending so soon. She didn’t want to outlive everyone else at Ys. The thought of that responsibility being hers alone frightened her, even though with that strange disease she wouldn’t outlive her sisters in any case.

  She set the food before him, thunking the loaded wooden plate firmly onto the smooth shell surface of the table. She sat across from him and gazed at him fiercely. “Now thou hast thy meal. So let us speak and be done with it.”

  “Aren’t you going to eat anything?”

  “I ate already.” Lie. She was thin. She ate exactly as much as she had to in order to keep up what remained of her health. Probably she took pills or injected nutrients directly into her bloodstream so that she couldn’t throw them up. Her eyes were drawn to his food, hungry, but there was no point offering it to her.

  Derxis felt his skin relaxing as he began to eat. He absentmindedly phased through a few color patterns, shivering as warmth trickled back through his veins. The food was all bland, very bland. Of course. The bell ringers were almost as ascetic as the monks of Nazkhar.

  Rosma glared at him from across the table, waiting for him to begin so that they could be ‘done with.’ He placed the mask on the table, paused, balanced it upright so that it was watching him. Then he began to eat.

  “Do you have someplace to be?” he asked between bites of the baked kelp. “A pressing engagement?” He knew she did not.

  She looked away.

  Derxis considered asking her why she didn’t like him, but it was a dead question. They both knew all the answers there, and they both knew they knew. He opened with a leading observation instead. “You don’t like me much, do you?”

  “That is obvious,” she replied.

  “The only one of us you do like is Fiora.” In a remarkable feat of mental acrobatics, for which he would later congratulate himself, Derxis mentioned Fiora but managed to keep his mind focused on the present conversation.

  She waited, her expression unreadable but her thoughts churning beneath that placid surface. Suspicion, mostly.

  “I think,” said Derxis, “that this is because you share a common love of sea creatures.”

  “What is thy aim, priest?”

  “You are going to need us, Rosma, and we are going to need you.” He watched her, paying more heed to her mind than her expression. Doubt. Frustration. Anger. Why anger? And of course, still suspicion.

  “Why are you so suspicious of me, Rosma?” he asked. The urge to laugh came over him, but he knew that this would not contribute to her trust in him. “What have I ever done to harm you?”

  She leaned forward and bared a mouthful of sharp serrated teeth at him. “Thy very presence,” she said, “is an invasion of privacy. How can I trust one who knows my thoughts? Who can change them? Who is a—a trickster?”

  “It’s no invasion of privacy,” he told her. “You see what people look like, how they act, and from that, you can discern things about them. It’s no different for me, just with minds instead of bodies. I can’t know all your thoughts, either. I can only see the broad patterns, the strong feelings and emotions. It’s nothing personal, Rosma. I could not do it, true, but…what if someone asked you to swim around with your eyes closed just because they were blind?”

  Rosma scowled at the table and muttered something about it not being fair.

  “Want to hear a secret?” he asked. That got her attention. For just a moment, a bright flame of childlike excitement and curiosity flared in her icy eyes. “Even if I could read people’s thoughts like a book, every word…it wouldn’t matter. Or to put it differently, every daimon in the world, including you, is just as powerful as me in every way that matters.”

  “Explain.”

  Derxis tapped the table with an orange-spined finger. “Reality is not an external thing that happens to us, Rosma. Reality is something that each person constantly creates in their own mind via interpretation of sensory data. There is an objective truth to things, but each person’s reconstruction of it will be varied and subjective.”

  She rolled her eyes and leaned back. “I ought to have known better than to expect a clear answer from a color priest. Naught but more riddles.”

  “It’s the most important riddle. There is nothing beyond the individual. Every person is the whole world. There is nothing more; nothing greater. This is why an alteration in objective fact doesn’t necessarily correlate with—”

  “That’s enough,” she interrupted. “If thou camest here only to philosophize, then be gone.”

  “Take yourself, for example.” That caught her attention. “Your mind is rigid and inflexible, and this carries itself into how you process new information.” She narrowed her eyes at him, but he kept going. “You are obsessed with justice, but you either don’t realize or don’t care that other people—most other people, actually—have different ideas than you about what justice means.”

  This was a dangerous gambit. Rosma was entirely devoted to a strict code of ‘justice,’ but it was so obscure, so obtuse, and so subjective, that it made her unpredictable even to him. It made her dangerous. And where the hells had it come from, anyway?

  “…and?” she said. He heard death in her voice, saw it in her eyes. She would kill him in a moment if she thought that was necessary. And who knew what her ideas of ‘necessary’ were? Even he, a color priest, could not figure it out. But they needed her. Anthea had told him, and he knew it himself: they needed Rosma. Ideally a more reliable Rosma. Less capricious. Less deadly. They needed a Rosma capable of introspection; capable of doubt.

  He had to answer. But what to say?

  How about a risk, D-man?

  A gamble, you suggest, Derxis?

  Let’s try it, then.

  “What if Fiora did something unjust?” he asked.

  She was standing; she had swept his half-finished plate from in front of him. And holy hells she was fast, deathly ill or not. He had scarcely registered her movement.

  “I could kill you, priest,” she said. “Easily.”

  Derxis tried to appear calm, although he knew his skin had shifted to the bright red of alarm. “We both know you can, and we both know you won’t.”

  “Won’t I?”

  He smiled at her. “Please, don’t play mind games with me. You can’t win.”

  She sat back down suddenly, and Derxis breathed a slow breath.

  “I would enforce justice,” she said. “On Fiora.”

  Not ‘kill her.’ Well, that was a start. “Is there…” he spoke carefully, “anyone who currently requires such enforcement of justice?”

  “Rasmus,” she said without hesitation. Of course. Rasmus the deserter. Rasmus, who refused to follow orders to slaughter civilians. Everyone knew about Rosma’s opinion of Rasmus. But what could she do? Was there any creature alive that could ‘enforce’ anything upon Rasmus? Maybe a dragon. Maybe the Majesty. Maybe the shrike.

  “Anyone else?” This was an important question, one of the main reasons for his coming. He had to know whether Rosma intended to kill any of the ten. Besides Rasmus, obviously.

  “Emmius,” she said.

  Derxis’s surprise was so great that his skin faded to a dull yellow. “E…uh, Emmius?” By the gods, what could Emmius have done to incur Rosma’s wrath? “What…why?”

  “He is responsible for the deaths of my seahorses.” She said this with a completely straight and serious face.

  Derxis looked around for inspiration and noticed his mask on the floor a few steps away, faded by the misty air. Still watching him. “That…is surprising.” And bad—very bad. Rosma loved her seahorses. He sensed the anger, the pain, the sorrow.

  Killing a bunch of seahorses, especially Rosma’s, didn’t sound much like Emmius. He must have had a good reason. Or perhaps it was some kind of accident? No circumstance or excuse would alter Rosma’s determined course of action, however.

  “How do you know it was him?” he asked.

  “Akkama informed me.”

  Suspicious. Why would Akkama care? She and Rosma were far from friendly. “And you’ll…act on her word alone?”

  “Thinkest me a fool?”

  Derxis almost died here, because he barely stopped himself from responding with ‘…yes?’ The comedic timing called to him, but his sense of self-preservation intervened at the last moment.

  What he actually said was, “Well, good. Just…make sure you have all the, uh, the facts.”

  Derxis saw problems looming, but he didn’t know what to do about it. In most cases this would be a simple matter of adjusting one’s perceptions, promoting reflection and peeling emotion away from the conscious decisions. He didn’t dare try any of this with Rosma.

  He began to say more, something along the lines of a suggestion that she talk to Akkama before confronting Emmius, but at that moment Rosma shuddered violently. She spasmed, curled in upon herself, and then threw up onto the table. Little came out, save for a trickle of clumpy black substance like partly coagulated paint that drooled onto the carved-shell surface. She hacked and retched, some of the worst-sounding noises Derxis had ever heard, scattering the table with flecks of the black stuff.

  He closed his eyes, searched for people nearby. There was one bell ringer close by in the fog, and the concern in her mind indicated that she had heard Rosma’s coughing. No doubt she knew about Rosma’s condition. He sent a thought her way: get help, augmenting her own desires. She hurried off.

  Derxis stood and stepped around the table, careful not to get too close. Rosma’s mind was a bitter brew of frustration and shame, all clouded over by pain. He shook his head. What could he do? He could remove the pain, but only if she let him in. And she wouldn’t let him take her pain. He didn’t even bother to ask.

  He spotted her conch shell fallen to the floor near her feet, unguarded, and a brilliant idea came to mind. Pink, he thought.

  The Speaker arrived soon after Derxis had finished with the conch shell and collected his belongings. By this time Rosma had recovered, taken her shell and spear, and disappeared without a word back into the cold waters.

  The Speaker was a blue, but her skin changed colors like his because she had bonded to a cuttlefish. She was short and squat, and her arda shimmered in random clusters all up her arms and over her back. She glanced at him when she emerged from the darkness, but then she saw the table flecked with black blood. The table held her gaze for a moment before she turned to Derxis.

  “Welcome, color priest,” she said. She bowed a slight, exact bow.

  He returned the bow. “Thank you for your hospitality,” he replied. He saw the remains of his food that had been scattered when Rosma struck his plate from the table, and he laughed.

  “I understand thou hast come to look into the dreams of the great turtle,” said the Speaker.

  “If I can.”

  “Then follow me.”

  She led him away. Distant bells rang as they went, and Derxis heard the faint chanting of song when they neared the front of the shell, close to the head of the slumbering turtle. They had to return into the water for part of the journey, but at last they emerged into a vast, dim chamber.

  She showed him how to light the braziers full of cold turquoise flame. She showed him the meaning of the complex runes and bass-reliefs carved into the iridescent shell walls. She told him what she knew of Ma’Turin’s recent behavior and what, as far as she could tell, he had been saying in his dreams over the past century.

  Then she left him to his own devices.

  He wasted no time in putting his mask on and entering a state of meditation. Like a capsizing rowboat, he slipped down into the mind of Ma’Turin. The currents of an overwhelming mind, too slow and too vast for his comprehension, pulled him inexorably to other places.

  He became lost there for a while. The experience of being a tiny fragmented piece of something so much greater overwhelmed him. But at length he remembered his purpose, and he clawed his way down, down past the thoughts into the dreams.

  And the dreams were too much for him—far too much. They were beyond him. Scenes of the future, hope and despair, of nonbeing and worse than nonbeing, of other worlds and other minds, of beginnings and ends and of the cessation of both. Of cycle upon cycle ad infinitum.

  He awoke terrified and cold and alone, and he remembered nothing. The cold fires in the braziers had burned down to crackling embers, and the distant song had ceased. It was like waking from a dream he could not afterward recall, a cosmic and frightening dream. He understood now why the nightmares of the great turtle became monsters in the depths.

  But he had prophesied while in the thrall of that great mind. It was there at his feet, on the wall before him. He had painted, and his paintings carried meaning. He read them as though for the first time.

  He saw a monster, blacker than black, one which had been created. A terrible mistake.

  He saw a creature, thin and pale, like a daimon but without arda. A color priest, like himself.

  He saw a potentiality in which Rosma kills many of them, driven to madness by her obsession.

  Derxis sighed. He pondered all this for a while before concluding that, essentially, he had learned little of value.

  Well. He had learned one thing of great significance: Ma’Turin did not appear to entertain any hope for the future.

  Derxis left the city of Ys troubled and shaken, plagued by worries and doubts. He dared not sleep there in the presence of the great mind. The submersible quivered with his laughter as it rose back up to the surface.