The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 3
A Thousand Seas - II
Content warnings (may contain spoilers)
This chapter depicts trauma responses.
“You’re right—Noma probably knows all about the band,” Pala quickly answers. “I don’t know if Orobelle can help us without her library and academy.”
Fen shakes his head. “But if Noma finds out, she might tell Liss. And Orobelle has more reasons to help…if she believes us.”
Pala frowns. “Maybe if we’re really quick about it…if we’re gone before Noma tells…” She wraps her arms around herself. “But if we escape, can’t Liss just use her machine to find us again, like the first time?”
“I don’t think so. If she could go anywhere she wanted, she wouldn’t need you.” He frowns, scrunching up his face. “We don’t have to tell Noma why we’re asking about it.”
“You’re right. But you know I’m no good at lying.”
Fen squeezes her hand tenderly. “That’s okay. You’re doing a lot already. Let me help for once.”
In the Temple of the Undying Ring, none of the dormitory rooms have locks, save Liss’s, altered by her own handiwork. All the other devotees lean on their code of honour, the pledge that bound them at initiation, guarded on pain of exile.
Pala doesn't take her sketchbook with her to meals, and when Noma pokes her head inside her deserted room to check, she finds it lying innocuously on the table-top. Picking it up by the edges, she takes it out with her.
If Pala has jeopardised their work, then her mistake cannot go unremedied. And Liss will know what to do, she always does. This is the thought that Noma assuages herself with as she takes it to her partner's study in the subterranean rings.
Wordlessly, Liss lays the book out on her desk. She flips through it, page by page, then her hand falters on the first blank one. Her face twists, hollow-eyed.
That is when a first knot of dread forms in Noma's belly.
That terror begins to strangle all her thoughts when Liss drags her through the halls and finds Pala in the sitting room with a picture book.
Liss snatches the book out of the Pala’s hands. As those eyes lift, glistening and wide, Liss flicks the false sketchbook onto the seat. “Where did your real sketchbook go?” she spits. “Why did you try fooling me with this replacement?”
It takes Pala several seconds of sputtering before any words form. “I…I lost it in one of the jumps, I'm sorry, I didn't want to make you angry—”
“You thought you could lie to me?”
The Traveller wraps her arms around herself. “I-I just wanted to do it right. I didn't want to make you angry. I promise it wasn’t to disobey you—I didn’t want to upset you.”
“Where did you lose it? Where?”
Tears roll out of Pala's eyes. “I…I don't know. I just noticed—when I was coming back.”
Liss paces back and forth, face contorted with something more akin to fear than anger. She kicks the couch and Pala yelps, breath coming in short bursts. “Go find it! Find it and bring it back! And don't you dare try hiding such things from me again.”
“Y-yes, yes, I will, I will do it! I promise!” Her head bows, her body shaken by sobs even as she rises to her feet and sprints away up the hallway, gathering her tunic in her fists.
Liss stands visibly bristling, staring at the empty couch seat.
“Liss…” Noma murmurs, inching closer. “If you keep threatening her, she's never going to see us as allies.”
Liss flinches away from the hand Noma offers. “I can’t give her any leeway on this! I turned a blind eye when she and Fen started switching rooms. I let it go when she gave the note to the wrong person. But this is different. She could have given away crucial information and ruined everything for us. Do you want our toil to come to nothing?”
“No, I don't. Not at all.”
Liss sighs, finally taking Noma's hand. “I swear this will all be worth it in the end. Just a little pain, to end pain a million times greater.”
Noma nods and exhales, but it is a short-lived warmth, for she realises, she feels the tightness of those fingers around her own, and for the first time, that she isn’t quite sure if she trusts Liss’ judgment.
She believed Liss when she said—all those months ago—that a Traveller would be the key to winning this war. She trusted Liss when she began to put Pala on this escalating regime of missions.
But she doesn't know what these threats have to do with the war, not when Pala has followed orders unquestioningly and to the best of her ability, save for a few mistakes. She doesn't know how to slot this into her mental picture of Liss' master plan. But that is hard to do when Liss isn’t giving her the whole picture in the first place.
That evening, Pala retreats wordlessly from dinner to the dormitories. Noma follows with flighty footsteps. She watches the Traveller's door squeak shut up the hall, then tentatively creeps up to knock, waiting.
The girl peeks out again, her eyes all dried and her face completely impassive.
“Hello,” she ventures shakily—then a few words that Noma cannot understand.
Noma closes her eyes. “Sorry,” she says in English. “For Liss.”
Her vocabulary is still not expansive, but that is all that the words she needs. Pala manages a mute nod. Noma spreads her arms in what she hopes is recognisable as an offer of a hug.
The girl leans out of the room, shoulders hunched, and lets Noma wrap both arms around her. Halfway into accepting the embrace, she begins to tremble with sobs, tears splashing on Noma's shoulder. “I don't know…I don't know how to do it right,” she whispers.
“None of us do,” Noma replies.
*
After she leaves, Noma makes her usual evening rounds. She strolls up the stairs within the central shaft and gazes out over a balcony at the works, carrying on well past sundown. Down below, she watches Liss order initiates about, all carrying metal machine parts, sealant, and bolts. This tapering chamber, once a deep well reaching down into the layers of some bygone civilisation, has been fully drained as of five days ago, and is now being remodelled under her command.
Liss has the entire temple under a cast-iron spell. No one here can deny her heavenward drive, Noma least of all. Her best friend has entranced her for longer than she can remember—grand, unfaltering, bright as the sun.
From here, Noma can see her poring over her notes and directing temple devotee to nail brackets into the wall, pulled along by the gravity of some grander design. But that design, even Noma is not privy to. Liss tells her most things, but not all of them. And the purpose of this sudden renovation is one of the dark spots in her understanding of that convoluted plan.
When she closes her eyes, she sees Liss castigating Pala again. Demanding apologies. Extorting deference.
No, things have felt off-kilter ever since Pala arrived. The marriage knot no longer stings in the way it did—but now that that pain is gone, something else, something more dreadful, has pricked through from beneath it.
Beneath, an initiate snaps a strip of wood with their boot. Liss’ head whips around at the sound, and she roars, “We don’t have infinite resources, fool!”
Has she always been like this? Is this the person Noma fell in love with? How has she never seen it?
“But I did,” she whispers, and it makes her body go cold. When she leapt off the waterfall on a dare. When she shot General Ylcor. When she slew all of Lacar’s crew.
Once she believes something must be done, she will have it done, no matter who her fire burns.
Fen finds that Noma spends most of her time in close quarters with Liss, but these past few nights, he has often seen her alone, sitting on the edge of the jetty that juts beyond the ring of islands, staring out at the sea, unmistakeable even from afar.
In the gilded light of the cloudy afternoon, he glimpses her from the temple terrace. He picks his way across the docks, beginning to construct his opening line.
Noma turns at the sound of his footsteps on wind-worn wood, her face going slack, curls whipping against her face. “Hello,” she says in halting English. “How are you?”
Noticing the storminess in her eyes, he finds he cannot hold his feelings of enmity for long. “Good,” he replies. “I have a question to ask. And I think you are the only one who can tell me.”
“Ah…ask?”
“I want to learn more about the…” he motions out a ring around his wrist with his fingers. “The cord that Liss put on Pala.”
She pauses, searching for English words for a moment. “Marry not?” she answers.
“Marry not?” he repeats. “No, I am not looking to marry her, I don't think?”
Noma shakes her head vigorously. “Knot for…marry,” she rearranges the words, and now it clicks.
“It’s for marriage?”
“Marriage. Yes.”
His face contorts. “Did Liss…marry…Pala?”
At this, Noma seems at once anguished and confused—more confused than he. “No. No for Liss.” Then a sympathetic smile. “Sorry. You love Pala…yes?”
“Oh, I mean—I—” Fen quickly realises that she has given him the perfect disguise. “Yes.” He lets his eyes sink. “I want to learn how to make one…for me. And Pala.”
At this, Noma smiles, tilting her head to one side—with sympathy or pity, nothing unkind. “I teach you,” she says, then shakes her head. “Fe…I can teach you.”
“Please do,” he replies.
“Tonight…in the hall.”
*
On the second floor over the eastern portal, there is a circular prayer hall into which a dozen arched windows gaze. Without the sun, it is illuminated by rows of lanterns, all tucked in a recess that runs around the perimeter of the wall. The candles are lit at sunset and extinguished at sunrise.
Noma arrives at the one-quarter mark of the night. Liss is again sleeping in the central shaft of the tower; she will not miss her absence.
She isn't sure what possessed her feet to take her here, or her mouth to promise this in the first place. Fen is not her friend. But she knows the desperation in his eyes like an old friend.
Fen is already inside, seated on the bottommost step to the altar. The entire hall gleams gold in the lamplight, cast in arcing patterns across the floor. He perks up among the shadows when she appears, waving a hand at her. He looks too at home in his local tunic; she knows he has been trying to come to terms with it all.
“Thank you ⋯ help me,” he says—she knows only those four words in his tongue. But it is enough to understand the rest of the sentence.
The truth is, Noma has an inkling that Fen is not only asking because he wants to make a marriage knot. He has never obscured his displeasure about the cord on Pala’s wrist.
But for so long, she has thought him to be the biggest loser in the arrangement between Pala and Liss. Fen, she is starting to realise, would be of no use to Liss if Pala weren’t so devoted to him that his presence alone could warm her up to this fate. What kind of history could have woven a bond so strong? Noma is content to never know the answer, if only because she doubts she would understand the words.
All she knows is that Liss is using it to keep Pala at her side.
They needed our loyalty. They had to keep us a king. The foggy memory of Lacar’s words flashes through her thoughts.
Somewhere beyond the walls, another chorus of crickets rolls through the night. Sitting with Fen, Noma pours out the contents of the sack on her shoulder: a thin blade for cutting, two sticks for anchorage, and two bundles of yarn, none of them in the traditional colours.
He studies the objects as she lays them out. “⋯ this all we ⋯?”
“I know, looks easy,” Noma replies in her best attempt at his language. Even having scoured English dictionaries and studied the words she knows she will use, she still lacks much of the vocabulary she needs. “The power…is your feelings in the stitches. We knot the string—then feelings go in.”
She cuts four segments of yarn, each the length of her arm. She hands the blade over. He repeats her motions. “Feelings?” he asks. “What feelings ⋯ I feel?”
“What you feel…of Pala,” she says, tying the four strands together with a knot. “Think of her. Every stitch. Then, you start…”
Noma begins to show him the stitching pattern for the rope. She picks up each strand and loops it over the last, round and round, over and over. Slowly, the ropes lengthen between their fingers in the firelight; Fen’s hands move so deftly and delicately that she wonders, briefly, if he has made a marriage knot before.
“You do it fast. Not first time?”
He smiles sheepishly. “I used to make ⋯ for friends…” One of those words sounds like friend-ship. Friendship. A ship is a sea vessel, no?
Noma returns his smile. For the next half-hour or so, they stitch their ropes together. He learns quickly, perhaps having related experience. They start to trade cries of dismay whenever one or the other misses a stitch, quickly laughing it off.
Then, he meets her eye and says, “Noma, will Liss worry that you are not in your room?”
Noma sighs. “She sleeps in tower.” She twists the end of a strand, trying to keep the fibres together.
A gentle sympathy fills Fen’s gaze. “She’s ⋯ busy ⋯ the tower.”
“Mm.” She stares past him at the island night glowing through the arched windows. “I worry for her.”
She does not know how to phrase her thoughts in full—something about this obsession chills me to my core. Ever since she found Pala, she has been of a single mind—as if every single person around her were either an instrument or a liability to her plan. I understand why she feels so strongly, and yet…
Noma only manages to say, “She is changed.”
Fen’s gaze sinks to the half-formed rope in his fingers. “I am sorry. I know you love her.”
They meet eyes again, and Noma recognises her own dread mirrored in his eyes: that there is something at work here beyond their understanding, that they are watching the people they love get dragged into the tide.
With a clenching of her heart, she realises that Fen must want to pull Pala to safety, too.
“Last,” she says, plucking hair from her scalp. “You too. Hair from you and Pala, in the knot.” As she speaks, she starts to stitch her hair into the last few inches of her own rope. Then she picks it up, now long enough to loop around her wrist twice. “When done, tie one end on you, one end on her.”
She loops it around her wrist, waiting for the stiffening of the cord as it meets itself—though, of course, she has not been focusing enough on the knotwork to invest it with the Being’s will, and nothing changes. “Tie it tight. It hardens. Then…cut at middle.”
Fen tries looping his rope around his arm, but it too doesn’t harden. “It will become hard? If I do it right?”
“Yes. When done, you cannot cut it.”
“No way at all?”
“No way we know.”
He nods slowly, but there is a speck of frustration in his eyes. For a minute, he fusses over his rope, looping and unlooping it around his wrist, but it is too short to tie. Noma sits watching him as he inspects his rope once around.
Then she says, “I know why you learn. You want to run away.”
At these words, Fen goes rigid, and Noma knows she was right. A deep horror washes through his face—akin, perhaps, to what she felt as she watched Liss leap from the top of the waterfall. Her head spins as if she were the one plummeting through mist and foam.
The arithmetic is simple, but the heartache is a river impossible to ford.
She cannot help Fen without lying to Liss.
The wise thing to do would simply be to disclose their treacherous secret. If Noma turns them in now—if she nips their plan in the bud—then nothing has to fall out of rhythm. All will proceed as it was meant to, the wheels of reality thundering on. And Liss will be pleased, and Noma will prove herself beyond a doubt as a partner and an ally.
She shudders. Deed after deed, mistake after mistake, through storm and strife, she has striven to prove herself reliable. For all her life, she has wanted nothing more than to be trusted.
But that isn’t true, is it? There is something she wants more than trust. She wants to save lives. And although she loves Liss more than herself, some incomprehensible, errant, iron-clad conscience holds her fast.
Liss always did say she cared too much about strangers, and perhaps she is right.
“No tell.” The words are leaden. Her body feels hot and cold at once. Her voice drops to a whisper. “Liss thinks much of how trick Pala. Pala is…strong.”
Fen’s eyes widen by the second, all the lamps glistening in them. His fingers curl around his unfinished rope. Noma’s next words catch in her throat. Is this too much? How can she do this? How can she not?
“Go to Orobelle’s home. She helps cut the knot. No knot, Liss cannot follow.”
He nods, gaze troubled. “How can we make sure it's done before Liss finds out?”
She pauses, wrestling with herself. “Liss has knot of Suna—dead man—in pillow. Take it, give Orobelle, she prepares.”
Fen’s eyes glisten with surprise. “What if we fail?”
Noma’s face scrunches up. “Liss angry.”
He wraps his arms around himself, his frown deepening. “ ⋯ she be angry at you?”
“No worry for me,” she replies.
Still, his expression stays taut as he whispers, “Thank you for all this. Be safe.”
Hearing those words, she feels as if a thousand seas were rolling by, a thousand lives she could have lived, perhaps ones where the two of them are friends, where they met sooner, where they do not have this deathly plot hanging over their heads.
But Noma only offers a smile with cold, trembling hands. “You, too,” she replies.
Fen pushes Pala’s door open a crack. She is lying on her bed with her eyes wide open.
“Pala,” he whispers. “I…got the answer from Noma.”
Pala sits up in bed at once, eyes round as the sun.
“She said she thinks Orobelle might be able to help us cut the rope. And that Liss can't…follow us to Orobelle's home, once it is cut. Liss has the knot of some dead guy in her room, so if we steal that and show it to Orobelle, they could have the time to figure it out while we prepare to escape.”
“Oh! Oh…maybe that's why she needed me to leave the message to Orobelle for her. And that means we're safe once we're inside her palace. Right?”
“And have the knot cut.”
Pala nods shakily. “I think this is the best chance we've ever had. We have to time it properly. Make sure we’re never gone too long—oh, will Noma tell on us?”
Fen frowns. ”She said she wouldn’t. But I really don't know how long that will last.”
“Then let’s do this over a few jumps. You should stay here. It’ll help me get back faster.” She curls her arms around her knees. “Can you stay with me tonight? I know there’s not a lot of room…”
He nods. “I’ll go get my sleeping bag.”
Liss wakes the next morning in a hammock above a stack of pipes, her arms sore from days of piecing this place together. She blinks her eyes open to find the initiates already at work—caulking pipes, hammering fixtures into brackets.
Up above, the tower soars and soars, a hole without end, a hole through the universe. So far, she has told them that this is a necessary upgrade to the axis machine’s function. But that is not entirely true. No one questions it, for she is the only one in the tower with the full knowledge of how to operate the machine—and the ability to do so.
No one except for Noma, that is. Noma isn’t quite done with the texts yet, but she did start almost a year later, and already she understands the physics of the machine, the power it channels, the dance of particles through matter.
And though Noma might eventually learn how to calibrate the machine, she cannot power it. It was designed to operate with the heat of the volcano below it, channeling every time it erupted, but the drake that spits fire from its vents has long died away.
Only Liss can activate it now, with metal fuel and an explosion in the shaft. She is the drake god, renewing the world from the inside out.
And she inches closer to her vision every day. Her hands reach for tools by rote, as if they were made to that purpose alone. She resumes as if she has never left, her sleep now barely a blink in the back of her mind.
*
Noma brings lunch to Liss, but Liss barely offers conversation these days, her eyes always on the next step of her plan. Leaning towards her, she gives Noma a one-armed hug. She smells of salt, metal filings and wax, the scent soaking into her body as if she were made of it. “We’re almost there,” she says with a grin. “Thank you for being beside me. We could not have done this without you.”
Noma pushes a smile onto her face, leaning into the embrace. “I’m so proud of you,” she answers.