Black Halo

‘And let me have a look inside?’

Something reached out, slid past Naxiaw’s brow and into his brain. He threw his head back, pricked his ears up. In a word without sound, a noise without speech, he let out a long, meaningless scream.

Twenty-One

THE KING OF TEJI

‘She did it again.’

The voice came subtly this time, without cold fingers of rime. It came this time as soft as snow falling on his brow, accumulating and growing heavier.

‘She thinks you don’t see her.’

Growing impossible to ignore.

‘Thinks we don’t see her.’

Still, Lenk tried.

He focused on other distractions in the hut: the oppressive moisture of sweat sliding down his body, the stale breath of the still and humid air filtered through the roof of dried reeds, the sounds of buzzings, chirpings, the rustling of leaves.

And her.

He could feel her, too, just as easily as the sweat. He could feel her body trembling with each shallow breath, feel her eyes occasionally glancing to him, hear her voice bristling behind her teeth, ready to say something. He could feel the brief space of earth between them. When her hand twitched, he felt the dirt shift beneath his palm. When his fingers drummed, he knew she could feel the resonance in hers.

He felt her as he sat, felt her smile as easily as he felt his own creeping across his face.

‘She isn’t smiling.’

He furrowed his brow suddenly, resisting the urge to speak to the voice, to even acknowledge it. Try as he did, though, he couldn’t stop the thought from boiling up in his head.

She isn’t?

‘Look.’

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her for the first time since they had entered the hut. She was not smiling, not even looking at him. Her stare was tilted up to the roof, along with her ears, rigid and twitching with the same delicate, wary searching that he had seen before, once.

But she had been looking at him, then.

‘She listens.’

That makes sense. He was distantly aware of a voice in the room. Someone else is talking.

‘Not to them.’

Why wouldn’t she be listening to them?

‘You aren’t.’

Point.

‘Watch carefully. She searches for something that you can’t hear.’

But you can …

‘Only fragments of … wait, she is going to hear it again.’

As if she had heard the voice herself, she suddenly stiffened, her chin jerking. Her neck twisted, face looking out somewhere, through the stone walls and beneath the soil. He followed her stare, but whatever it was that she saw, he obviously could not.

‘She does not see it, either. She hears. It is loud.’

And at that cue, her ears trembled with a sudden violent tremor that coursed down her neck and into her shoulders. He saw her lips peel back in a teeth-clenching wince, as though she sought to hold on with her jaws to whatever it was she had found with her ears. He felt her shudder, through the soil, as she clung to it.

And he saw her release it, head bowing, ears drooping and folding over themselves, seeking to drive it away with as much intensity as she sought to hold on to it.

He listened intently and heard nothing but the frigid voice.

‘Didn’t like the noise. Pity.’

You … did you hear it?

‘Mmm … are we on speaking terms again?’

Did you or did you not?

‘Heard, not so much. Sensed, though …’

Sensed what?

‘Intent.’

What intent?

No reply.

Whose intent?

Silence.

‘Whose?’

It was only after the snow had flaked away, after the numbing silence in his head passed and was replaced with the distant ambience of the village outside, that Lenk realised he had just spoken aloud.

She turned to regard him with a start, eyes more suited to a frightened beast than a shict.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘What?’ he repeated, blankly.

‘You said something?’

‘We didn’t.’

‘We?’

‘Well, you didn’t, did you?’

‘Nothing.’ She shook her head a tad too vigorously to be considered not alarming.

‘Are you …?’ He furrowed his brow at her, frowning. ‘You looked a bit distracted just now.’

‘Not me, no,’ she said, her head trembling again with a tad more nervous enthusiasm. Just before it seemed as though her skull would come flying off, she stopped, her face sliding into an easy smile, eyes relaxing in their sockets. ‘What about you?’

‘What about me?’

‘Are you well?’

‘I’m …’

‘Calm.’

What?

‘When was the last time we felt like this? No concerns, no fears, no duties …’

‘You’re what?’ Kataria pressed.

He opened his mouth to reply, but became distracted by the sudden, fierce buzzing that violated his ears. A blue blur whizzed past his head, circling twice before he could even think to swat at it. And as he felt a sapphire- coloured dragonfly the size of a hand land on his face for the twenty-fifth time, he was far too resigned to do anything about it.

‘I’m a tad annoyed, actually,’ he replied as the insect made itself comfortable in his hair.

‘You could always swat it off, you know,’ she said.

‘I could and then its little, biting cousins would flense me alive,’ he growled, scratching at the red dots littering his arms and chest. ‘The big ones, at least, command enough fear that the little ones will flee at the sight of them.’

‘Perhaps it’s for the best that we’re leaving,’ Kataria said, ‘if you’ve been around long enough to figure out insect politics.’