“The claw marks aren’t dangerous, if cleaned properly. Only the bites contain poison.” Sivan leaned closer, inspecting Tokela’s injuries. Following her gaze, Tokela saw they were indeed smeared with indigo-hued blood, and seemed less like rotting flesh than before. Sivan asked, “Are we timely, Vox?”
Vox replied in the flat talk; a look from Sivan, however, forced him to translate. “It is too long dead. But its organs should suffice. We can but hope your little animal responds to treatment.” Despite the dismissive tone, Vox quickly rose and approached with bowl in hand, hands smeared blue-black. It did not look appetizing in any fashion; in fact it looked to be more poison. Tokela couldn’t help a recoil.
Once again, Vox muttered something to Sivan. Tokela didn’t need translation to hear the dismissal: superstitious primitive. Looking Vox in the eye, Tokela made a silent vow: that one would not again see him succumb to so much as a twitch.
“I imagine your people have also found poisons growing beside cures,” Sivan said. “The shigala’s blood seems to follow that rule. I’m sure a bio-shaper could explain, but for now we’ll just go with what works.”
Bye-oh…Shaper?. Tokela refused—refused—to react, instead offering, “When someone is bitten by a poison serpent in the DryLands, they will use organs to draw the venom.”
Kneeling, Vox raised his eyebrows at Sivan, then offered, “This will sting.”
“Worse than the bite?” Tokela retorted, and had to tuck a smirk behind his teeth when Vox blinked. Even with the small eyes and too-pale lids, the expression was familiar—as was the frown that replaced it. Without another word, the Chepiś began slicing and layering bits of what looked like a heart onto Tokela’s leg.
And if that was what a Chepiś considered a sting?
“It will leave a nasty scar. I imagine such holds no distress for you, considering that.” Vox nodded towards the carmine wyrh tree tattooed across Tokela’s ribs, received by all a’Naišwyrh when their voice first broke or their breasts began to bud.
I imagine you haven’t much, Tokela retorted—silent, of course. Imagination, that is. Instead he revisited the smirk. The new scars would indeed be worth showing off when he removed to the oških den.
If he made it back.
“Do you—?”And it was nigh the same time as Sivan asked her own question:
“What are you called?”
Vox grumbled something that for a half heartbeat seemed intelligible. “—brother kept pets, and now you would do likewise. Your father would—”
Tokela frowned as Vox’s talk gibbered off into nonsense once again. Sivan’s response was terse. It drove Vox to his feet. He looked angry.
“Go wash,” Sivan told him.
Vox tilted his head. It might have been courtesy, or it mightn’t, but he went. He passed Rann and Maloh as they returned, shaking his head when Rann would have stopped, spoken.
“Forgive him,” Sivan said. “Sometimes we are quite”—she thought upon it, shook her head then continued—“temporal?” When Tokela frowned, she tried again, “In this place? With our reactions. And how would it be otherwise, when we have become so like your kind?”
Tokela blinked at her. Some of her talk he didn’t comprehend, some sounded insulting, and the rest simply confused. The meat upon his thighs oozed, prickling his skin. The whiff of decay made him all the more woozy.
“If it’s beginning to rot,” Tokela asked, “does that mean it doesn’t work?”
Sivan frowned, peering down at him. “It hasn’t begun to rot.”
“Can”—surely his tongue hadn’t been this thick even four heartbeats previous—“smell it.”
“Sivan!” The name, then a string of their talk as Rann hurried over.
Sivan’s answer scaled upward as she knelt, her hand gripping Tokela’s chin, hard. There wasn’t a thing he could do about it, either; no protest, not even an evasion as his head fell back, his neck limp as a newborn’s.
And somehow Grandmother opened up beneath him, took him into Her silent womb-darkness. Not yet, She hummed, cradling him close. You will be mine, but not yet…
Voices, sharp and tense and somehow fearful. He is pulled from Earth’s embrace, limp and small. He doesn’t want to leave, fights…
Instead something stinging-feathery-cool spreads across his breastbone and sinks down—sinks in—as if he has been cut open for fingers to grab hold of his heart. Ice filling his veins. Pain, yet also abrupt pleasure, melting into a rush of warmth as his heart starts to quiver within caging fingers. As if he is a vessel left dry for too long, cracking along the rim from the sudden flood of this whatever-it-is, this… neverending.
A jolt strains his muscles, brings the taste of blood to his tongue as those icy fingers upon his ribs—within his ribs—force his heart back to beating. His protest is hoarse and emptied of breath. His eyes are open, yet all he sees are Stars. Wind swirls about his open mouth then floods his chest, as the ice-chill fingers give another insistent… twist, and as voices flood behind his eyes to set Stars to Dance, and as Sky opens up to…
Swallow him…
By the Bonds of Atvan…
A whisper, but not, floating astonished in the Deeps, then another, echoing beneath:
Who are you, Tohwakelifitčiluka? Who are you, Eyes of Stars?
They know his blessing-name, somehow, and dare to speak it aloud, twisted free and Power-Full. It skims the surface of panic, and the sound of it—his, Spirit breath and body—returns to him one instinct never long absent:
Fight.
And with every sense he has Tokela twists, kicks out—not only body but heart and Spirit-will. There is a cry—dismay? horror? surprise!—as his defiance takes form in the void-called-neverending, a shield of obsidian to repel, a flood of copper waters carrying him away on a swift current, safe…
Tokela kicked free from the Matwau’s firm hold, fell, and hit rolling. Coming to a crouch, he hunched there, fingers reaching for a knife but instead clawing at skin: his weapon still wasn’t there.
Rann had fallen back, her small eyes wheeling-white. Sivan too was staring at him. Maloh was cursing—in the flat talk, yet of its foulness there was little doubt—and holding her
