He releases the wet thing in his mouth and lies back, careful to keep his face within her shadow. As he examines her some more, the rush of sensory input is exhilarating. Instinct gives him the ability to acknowledge and understand certain aspects, though there is little beyond that understanding-no reference points, no historical benchmarks. He recognizes much about his helper without recalling ever having seen anything like her before.
(my mother wiped my mind, she made me a blank, and was it for me or…?)
The woman's robe is light and thin but looks strong. It is tied around her waist, wrists, and ankles with fine silver wire, similar to that which frames the clear film covering her eyes and face. Her skin is dark against the white robe, speckled here and there with pearls of perspiration, and the fine hairs on the back of her hands shine with the remains of some cream or salve. She wears boots with heavy bottoms, and around her waist hangs a loose belt. There are knives here and other things that Rufus does not recognize.
(I know now, but I didn't know then, because even my mother could never have guessed at the wonders of the Heartlands.)
While he examines his helper, Rufus is aware that she is drawing in the sand before him. He looks past her and sees the thing she brought with her. It is large and wide, steaming and breathing, and he cannot conceive of what it might be.
She taps her finger on the back of his hand until he meets her gaze again. Then she points down at what she has drawn. There are two marks in the sand; she points at them, then at him and her alternately. Rufus nods. The woman shuffles back, smoothing the sand she has disturbed until it is blank. She quickly makes marks and slashes, mounds and dips, creating a landscape before his eyes and marking it here and there with landmarks only she can know.
She draws something from her belt and whips it at the air-a long thin stick, appearing as if from nowhere. It's hollow and pierced at regular intervals with oval holes, and though Rufus cannot guess at its true use, his savior uses it now as a pointer. Again she indicates two small shapes, and then she moves back a little, thrusting the stick into the ground between a range of low sand humps she has made. A series of grumbled sounds comes from her mouth, which Rufus assumes to be a name.
A stab of pain slashes at his stomach. Thirst scorches his throat just as the sun burns his skin. He yearns to touch those water bulbs in her long hair again and for the wet thing she held to his mouth while he sucked the moisture from it. But her face has grown stern now, and he can sense a rising disquiet in her manner.
(she took away my memories but left all my senses, all my human knowledge. She wanted me to survive… but turned me into nothing.)
She holds the long pointer across the impromptu map, and Rufus knows what he has to do.
Taking the end of the proffered pointer, he climbs slowly to his feet. He knows he can be healed; he knows this strange woman will take him and do that. But first she wants to know where he has come from.
She is looking down at the rough landscape around her feet as he takes the first few steps. She glances up and freezes. Even her loose robe seems to catch the sunlight and pause, motionless in the still desert heat.
Rufus takes more steps back, eye on the map she has made, and he's aware of the drag marks his feet are making in that desert landscape. Soon he is walking across the marks he left coming here moments or days before, and the woman-his rescuer, his savior-has taken one of the several metal and bone things from her belt. She's holding it in both hands before her, raised as if to gather the heat of the sun, and something glints in the object's concave well.
She starts talking, and though he does not know the words, he recognizes the raised inflection of questions.
Back some more, back, way beyond what he can judge to be distance in the out-of-scale map she has made. But he knows that there's something staggeringly important about where he is, who he is, and what he has done, and suddenly he needs to make an impression. He's not just a young, naked boy dying in a desert. He is something far more.
(if she'd told me I would still have come. If she'd trusted me…)
He stops and plants the pointer in the sand between his feet.
His savior is shouting now, her strange guttural words stumbling over one another as she steps forward, stamping out her map as she moves closer.
(she made me what I am… she sent me out to this…)
Rufus turns and points his skinny arm out into the desert, back the way he has come.
(whatever happens now is all her fault.)
The shouting ceases, and now his savior is muttering again. He feels a sudden charge to the air. Every hair on his head stands on end. A thrill passes through him, aggravating every nerve and setting his whole body spasming, kicking up sand. As he turns fully to face her, there's an intense flash that is, for the blink of an eye, brighter and hotter than the sun.
And then a darkness and silence he has never known before.
Nophel soothed the Scopes, lifting their leather shrouds, rubbing ointment into their unnatural joints and creases, and his condition did not seem to bother them at all. Perhaps they did not even know that he could not be seen; their giant eyes, after all, were aimed out at the city. Or maybe this strange curse left in one of his mother's sample gourds did not affect their chopped, inhuman minds. Dogs and rathawks did not see him, but they were natural things whose minds worked in very defined ways. These Scopes were not conceived in the eyes or minds of gods known or unknown.
Just like me, Nophel thought. Though born a very natural birth, he considered himself offspring of a monster.
He had been watching for half a day, and Dane had not returned. He'd said that he needed to speak to the Council and, ever since he'd left, Nophel had sat in fear of what might come. His life had changed so much: the Blue Water, meeting the Unseen, and then the revelation that the Dragarians-not the Marcellans and their Scarlet Blades, as he'd always assumed-had killed his mother more than twenty years before. That disclosure had stolen some of the comforting satisfaction that playing a part in his bitch mother's death had always afforded him. Absorbing such changes was hard enough, but awaiting the inevitability of more change now was almost unbearable. If he sends them to kill me, they won't be able to see me, he thought. But Dane was not foolish. If he sought Nophel's death, he would lull him first. Unseen he might be, but he was as far from safe as ever before.
And then the Dragarian shouting, Baker! What did that mean?
Watching the viewing mirror for hours on end, his eyes had become sore and his mind jaded by some of the secret minutiae of Echo City's existence. Although guilty of matricide-at least, he'd once believed that was the case, and that belief had made him sleep easier-that had been an honorable murder, revenge for being shunned by the one woman who should have held his deformed face to her bosom and loved him unconditionally. The petty, sordid acts he sometimes witnessed from up here, and the resulting waves of effect that spread out from these acts, had planted a sickness in his soul. Most days he could purge that sickness by watching for only short periods at a time and then cleansing himself by longer moments of contemplation or study. But today he had been looking for too long. A visit to the roof, tending the Scopes, being among his own kind-though he was unchopped, they were products of the dead Baker, and bastard children to her-was already serving to erase some of those sights.
There was good, of course. Kind gestures, signs of benevolence, like the porridge kitchens set up around the many entrances and exits through the wall around Marcellan Canton, run by volunteers and renowned for the quality of the free food they gave away to the homeless, dispossessed, and streetwalkers of the great city. Such signs comforted Nophel immensely, and yet they sometimes troubled him as well. He could not watch a family playing in one of Marcellan's many lush parks-father and mother throwing catchballs, children scampering after them-without musing upon how his own childhood should have been. His life was missing a great part, a pivotal slice of existence. She had sent him away. He had been a bitter and angry child, and no one in the workhouse had ever thrown a catchball for him.