“He would have us notice him,” spoke Redgait from the opposite niche.
I was startled at the sound of my brother’s voice. It had been decades since I had heard it. “I thought you had deserted the ring,” I said to him. “It has been such a long time since I last saw you.”
“And I you, Ahnli.” There was bitter humor in his voice as he took form, filling the niche with deep orange light the human could not see. Redgait’s attention wandered to the creature standing in the center of the ring. “Ahnli, what do you think of this misshapen thing?”
I looked at the boy human. He was respectfully motionless beside his blades, his face toward the east. “He has cleared the ring. It needed to be cleared.”
“Leave it to you, my sister, to concern yourself with housekeeping while the universe crumbles around this ruin.”
“The universe is not crumbling, my brother. Change is unchangeable, the stars burn and die, new stars are born.”
Redgait’s spindly black form stood out from the drape of his orange haze. “Where are our brothers and sisters? I have wandered every ring on the world. The niches are filled with Gezi demons, video cameras, and spectators with sticky faces as they swill their poisons and pack their bellies with disgusting goo. The prayers on the sand are now prayers to the Gezi, and the throwers pray not for the test, but for deception, victory, fame, and money. It is all false! A mire of vice. These sham champions of the blades, these exalters of petty demons, now have powers and honors surpassing those of ancient kings. The gods have died and forfeited the Mieura to the Gezi, and you say the universe is not crumbling?”
“The gods have not died, brother. I am alive, as are you.”
“Bah! Two petty spirits of an unknown ring.” The scorn in Redgait’s voice did a poor job of veiling his pain.
“Our brothers and sisters are alive too, my brother.”
“Alive?”
“They are within me, asleep,” I answered.
For once I saw that I had impressed my brother. After a long time he asked, “You hold them? How?”
“I stole them. As each one weakened and quit the Mieura in defeat, I wrapped it in love and peace and stole it. The gods didn’t die, brother. They did what we did: they quit.”
“You have stolen all of the ring gods?”
““All of the gods, Redgait. All but you.”
There was a great silence as Redgait fought with his confusion. “Why do you keep them? No one on Mieura has any use for gods.”
“Unless it’s this one,” I said, pointing at the human.
“You have taken a great deal upon yourself, sister.” Redgait was silent as he studied the repairs and the cleaning the boy had done. “He has replaced the stones in the wall. He did well. That must have been what brought me back.”
I saw my brother’s face fill the niche. His confused look turned to one of mischief. He meant to tease me. “I know what you did to the stone cutters, Ahnli. The Mieura have written books about it and the humans have even made what you did the subject of one of their silly video plays. In Diram Village they say you are an evil spirit.”
“I do not apologize for what I did to the masons.”
“I did not ask for one. Indeed, why did you let them live?”
“Should I have killed them for disrespecting gods that even the gods abandoned?”
“It is no matter.” I had spoiled his game by not getting angry, which had angered Redgait. His orange mist filled the sky as he examined the boy human. “Tell me, Ahnli. Will we guide his blades?” Out of Redgait’s mist I could see a spindly arm of black, a dark face of sadness. Redgait had not grown old, for that we could not do. But he had grown bitter and tired. That is age for a god. “Do we guide his blades or drive the splinters of his bones deep into the sand and end it here and now?”
The boy human stood as still as the blade he had thrust into the sand. He knew how to wait. I reminded myself to ask him who had taught him his manners, should we let him live.
“Let us see.”
As I drew my energy from the sand and stones, Redgait moved from the north niche and allowed the human to see him as a window that flew through fields of stars. The human did not move. I stepped down from my niche in the wall and came up behind him. “We command and are of the universe. You would have us notice you, small one.”
I walked around him as his dark brown eyes remained fixed upon Redgait’s window. “Where you now stand is a place reserved for those who give their lives and their deaths to gods that the gods would return life for life, death for death. If you seek fame, wealth, power over others, or the favor of Gezi, you are in the wrong arena. Flee, boy, while you still live.” I spoke to the human in high dialect Mieuran, the language of the ancient priests and blade throwers. I reached, pulled the upright blade from the sand, and threw it across the other where it rang when it hit like a bell of fine cast silver. They were excellent blades.
“Ahnli, Redgait,” said the human. “I place before you my faith. My faith in return is all I ask,” he answered in high dialect. Someone had taught him well. Did his heart match his words?
“Without acts,” said Redgait from his window on the eastern edge of the ring, “your faith is but a word. As you would test the gods, the gods would test you. Let us test each other.”
The boy human retrieved the blades, stood upright, and with a practiced throw sent both blades whirling high above the ring, directly over his unprotected head and body.
I froze time to look at my brother. “See? They are perfect throws, Redgait. Unless we intervene, his blades will strike and kill him.”
“There is no trick? No plastic tips on the blades, no hidden transmitters allowing the fraud to sneak from beneath his deceitful prayer?” Redgait’s thin black arm reached out of the mist, took the blades from the air, turned, and examined them. “These are Giya’s. They are his blades.”
I took one from Redgait and examined it myself. They were indeed the blades that had once brought Giya to faith, then fame and fortune, then fatality. Sadness filled my every corner. I said to my brother, “He could only have gotten these from one of Giya’s grandchildren.”
“One of his great grandchildren.” Redgait released the blades and we left them whirling in time above the boy human’s head, awaiting our decision. “Ril. He had to be the one. The second son of Giya’s daughter, Jyn. You remember, Ahnli.”
“I remember.”
Redgait turned his gaze from the blades and looked through the blue sky at the stars. “It cannot be. Ril must be dead. If he is alive he must be the oldest Mieuran within memory.”
“He was born the same year Giya died,” I confirmed.
“Ril was to have been secretly buried with his grandfather’s blades. No one but Ril could have supplied these edges, and someone with a lengthy reach to the past schooled the boy human in high dialect and in how to approach the ring.”
“For what reason?”
My brother gave a bitter laugh. “To test the gods? To be tested by the gods? Why else in the world would one toss blades without armor?”
I thought upon it for a moment, wondering if the boy human was the form which a daughter’s revenge against the gods might take. When Giya’s blood soaked into the sand of the Jaffri Ring, Jyn had been there to witness his death. Giya’s daughter was not capable of believing her father had an imperfection. Hence she had seen what she thought to be the failure of the gods to shield Giya from the falling blades. Jyn was dead, her spirit part of the hills above Jaffri. The mob had been outraged at Giya’s failure, but Giya was dead and could not be hurt by their words or sticks. Instead the mob made Giya’s daughter pay for her father. She had been torn to pieces. So long ago.