I shut my eyes. I did not echo him. I named myself inside where no one else could see.
'Mage,' he repeated.
Sword-dancer, I said.
In, or out of the circle.
In the morning I wasn't a mage. I was merely a man sick unto death. Fever burned my bones, wasted my flesh, turned my eyes to soup in their sockets. Lips cracked and bled. A layer of skin sloughed off. My belly, bowels, and bladder expelled what was left; after uncounted days atop the spire without nourishment, little enough was left. I was weak and wracked, joints ablaze. What moisture remained spilled out of my eyes. My tongue swelled and filled my mouth, then cracked and bled like the lips. I drank blood, until Nihko gave me water.
He bandaged my eyes, because I could not close them.
He splinted fingers and toes, because I could not open them.
He restrained the skull that risked itself in frenzy against the ground.
He did what was necessary to bring me across the threshold, and when that much was accomplished he did even more.
He made me rise.
I stood upright again for the first time in days. Felt the earth beneath bare feet, felt the wind in my hair. Saw-everything.
Nihko heard the ragged gasp that was expelled from my mouth. 'Clarity,' he said.
It was too bright. Everything, too bright. Too rich. Too brilliant. I thought it might well blind me. My skin burned from the sun. Ached over the bones. Everything hurt. Everything was too much. I quivered like a child, trying to sort out things I could not comprehend. Things I had comprehended for most of my life, such as taste, touch, odor, sound, light.
All of it: too much.
'What do you hear?' he asked.
It thrummed inside my head. The whisper was a shout. I recoiled. 'Too much,' I said, then hissed. Then winced.
'All the senses,' he said, 'Everything is more. '
More was too much. I stood for the first time in days and was blinded by the world, deafened by the world, filled with the scent of the world, tasted all of its courses, felt it impinge so much upon me that the flesh ached from it.
Everything was more.
I sought escape inside. But more existed there. I beat against the cage that was my own skull, attempted to withdraw, escape. And knew defeat.
'You cannot,' Nihko told me. 'It is you, now.'
I barely spoke. 'What is?'
'Everything.'
I stood there and trembled, while the man's hand steadied me.
And then I knelt. Sought solace in the soil. Its scent was overwhelming. 'I can't,' I mouthed.
'You can.'
'I can't. '
'You will.'
I bent, pressed my hands into the earth. Put my brow upon it, so that the sun beat on my spine. It made its way through flesh into muscle, into viscera. Into my very soul. It illuminated me, betrayed my frailties.
'You can,' Nihko told me.
The world was too large. And everything in it too bright, too loud, too much.
To the earth, I said, 'I want.. .'
Nihko waited.
'I want,' I said with difficulty, 'to go back.'
'You are dead.'
'I'm alive. ' I rolled back onto my haunches then, rose to my feet. Confronted him. 'I'm too alive to be dead. I feel it in me. Taste it in me. I can hear my blood!'
'Yes.'
I clamped palms across my eyes. 'I want to go back. To be what I was.'
'You are what you were.'
My hands fell away so I could see his face. 'You said I wasn't!'
'You were unborn,' he explained. 'For forty years, the vessel was shaped as it was shaped. The magic was dormant. But it began to rouse two or three years ago. The seeds of it were in you. As you approached the threshold, the seeds began to sprout. Atop that spire, you celebrated your birth forty years before. And the magic manifested.'
I remembered unfolding. Unfurling. Within me, and without. The imminence that burst into being as I whelped it on the rock.
'You knew,' I said abruptly. 'That day on the ship, when you first took us aboard. You knew. '
'As you will know it in another. Others will come. And you will serve them as I have served you: lift them up, nourish them, help them across the threshold.'
'I want to go back.'
'There is no 'back.' '
'I'm not you, Nihko! '
It echoed against the spire. I recoiled and slapped hands over my ears.
Nihko smiled. 'Quietly,' he said. 'Control is necessary.'
'Like yours?' I threw at him; but very quietly.
'My control is negligible,' he said with irony. 'It is why I deserted my brothers.'
'And now you're back?'
'Am I not here?'
'Helping me,' I said bitterly, 'across the threshold.'
He extended his arm. 'Take my hand,' he suggested, 'and cross.'
'Haven't I already?'
'A step or two.'
I laughed at him, though there was no humor in it. 'The first step I took off the spire was a killer.'
'Yes,' he agreed. 'For many men, it is.'
'Then if they have no magic, why are they up there?'
'They have magic,' he answered, 'and it manifests. But some vessels are not strong enough. They do not survive the annealing.'
'Gods,' I said, remembering. Recalling how I begged.
Anneal me.
Nihko smiled. 'Precisely.'
'No,' I blurted. 'No, not that…' But to speak of what happened wasn't possible. It was too new. Too-large. 'How did I get up there?'
'Sahdri.'
'He took me up there?'
'Took you. Left you.'
'How?'
Nihko's brow rings glinted. 'He is a mage, is he not?'
'I want to know how. How exactly? '
His tone was devoid of compassion. 'And how exactly did you come down from the spire?'
'How did I-?'
'Come down,' he repeated. 'Should you not have broken to pieces here upon the ground?'
I inspected a hand. 'Didn't I?'
'How did you come down?'
'I leaped.' I grimaced. 'Like a madman.'
