Aliyah

“Tell me she was joking when she told me to swallow those,” Aliyah said, slouching into the comfortingly familiar plushness of her armchair. It wasn’t hers—it belonged to Zahir, but after the first year or so of on-and-off study, she’d started thinking of it as hers. She picked uneasily at a loose stitch in the upholstery. “I feel like I’m going to throw up just looking at them.”

They were back in Zahir’s office and he was threading different colours of ribbon onto each key.

“Mm, you’re not thinking like a Healer,” he said with a small shake of his head. “Terrible, terrible idea to involve internal mucosa if you don’t have to. The thing to do with relatively small objects is to create a sheet—more of a flap, really—of skin, stick the object inside, then seal it to your actual skin such that it forms a continuous pocket. I recommend either on the stomach or upper thigh, depending on where the buttons or fastenings are placed on your uniforms. Mind you, it needs to be disassembled within a day or two, or it’ll start to fester.”

It did sound like the sort of thing a particularly unhinged Healer would do. Zahir had told her tales of elderly Healers who kept stacking fresh kidneys inside their bodies as each successive one failed; she didn’t know why she was surprised.

“Lovely,” she said, grimacing. “I’ll get started, then? Do I do it like a graft? Except, err…double-sided over most of it?”

“Yes, double-sided. But wait a minute. You’re going to need to fit a couple of extra spell-slips in there,” he said, tossing the now beribboned keys to her. “Red to violet, top to bottom. I wish I could undo the ownership runes for you, but it’d be too suspicious. You can give it a go yourself, but it’ll be a waste of a headache.”

“I’m flattered by your high regard of my spellworking abilities.” She scowled as she caught the keys.

“You’d need unraveling, not spellworking. Cheer up, almost no one can do it. And if they could, they’d be begging me for horse tranquilizers afterwards. And here,” he said, passing her a small, stoppered vial. “Anti-haemolytic concentrate. Don’t drop it. It took three months to brew and another yet to distill. Take it with your supper.”

Aliyah frowned at the vial; the substance within looked a lot like pale honey, though streaked with dark red. Not the most palatable of appearances. Zahir was circling around to his desk. He flipped through one of his books until he found what he was looking for.

“Aha. These should work just fine.” He tore out two rectangular slips of spell-paper, both inscribed with words of power. “They’ll melt away most enchantments—one for your restraints and one for Lady Kionah’s. Don’t drop these either, they’re expensive. Also the only ones that I have.”

She caught the spell-slips as they fluttered towards her. “Maybe you shouldn’t flick them around so carelessly if they’re so special.”

As if to spite her, he tossed another thing at her from across the room—a small, clear pouch. Within it, dozens of spell-slips huddled together like a nest of papery desert grubs.

“I also prepared an assortment of spells for Lady Kionah. Make another skin-cache on the opposite leg to balance it out.”

“Um. Great,” she said slowly. “Do you have a seam ripper?”

“Do I look like a seamstress to you?” he asked.

“A small knife, then. Or some sharp scissors. And don’t throw them at me, please.”

“Why cut a hole? Can’t you just, oh I don’t know, hitch up the skirts or something?”

Her jaw dropped open. “Do you not see that this is fully ankle-length? It would be—noticeable, if someone walked in on me simply ‘hitching it up’ to the thighs.”

“Still, cutting holes into your clothing from the very beginning is hardly inconspicuous.”

“Not if I open the inner seam of the pockets. Did you seriously never try that?”

He snorted. “Highborn clothes don’t have pockets.”

“I almost feel sorry for you,” she bit out. “Running around doing espionage with holes in your clothes because your dressmakers were too fashionable to add pockets.”

“It was nothing so exciting as espionage,” he said, sounding almost offended. “It was for sneaking alcohol around during my unruly apprentice days. No holes in the clothes either; the old uniform shirts had buttons down the front.”

“That’s all very cool of you, but I need to ruin my pockets now. Do you have knife-scissors, or not?”

Zahir sifted through the jumble of quills and parchment on his desk and passed her a letter-opener; or at least, it was about the right size and shape to be a letter opener, and she’d seen him use it that way. Otherwise, it seemed more like a miniature dagger, the way it’d been honed to a too-sharp edge. “Will this do?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

She retreated into the bathroom and shut the door. The air inside was scented with rosewater and lemongrass. A further clash of fragrances emanated from a large dish piled high with bars of soap.

“…my word, you have a lot of soaps in here,” she said, starting on the questionable graft. She was suddenly glad that she’d eaten the sandwich, earlier; the synthesis was going to be tiring in of itself.

“People always gift me scented soaps,” he grumbled. “I do believe it started after I had to attend a function immediately following a lengthy session with an unfortunate individual who had been projectile-vomiting blood, among other substances. It was years ago and just the once. Just once, and now all I receive are soaps and little clay ornaments with trite sayings engraved onto them.”

“And the multiple jars of bleach in the bathtub, are they gifts too?”

“Our ceremonial clothing is usually white,” he said. “Very impractical.”

“Why are there pills next to the sink?”

“Why are you sticking your nose into my personal belongings?”

“It’s just, uh. That’s a lot of unlabelled medication.” She paused, breath stopping in her throat. An unpleasant thought struck her like a spear through the gut, puncturing and twisting. “You’re not like…dying or anything, are you?”

“No, I am not dying,” he echoed, sounding exasperated. “What sort of Healer would I be, if I were dying? Are you reading more of those ridiculously melodramatic novels of yours? From what you say of them, it seems that the slightest headache always, without fail, foreshadows a fatal aneurysm. Real life often doesn’t work like that. Certainly not in my case.”

She exhaled. “Then why—”

“It’s a Healer thing.”

She scowled and focused on forming the skin-pockets. “You didn’t give me anything to deal with the guards or the warden.”

“Because you can only carry so much,” he pointed out.

She hated that he was right; she would have liked to bring a broadsword with her for reassurance, never mind how she had no idea to wield one.

“A little vasodilation should do the trick; then you make them sleepy, because unconsciousness will only last for a few seconds, or a couple of minutes at most. Unless they hit their head falling and there’s brain damage. I learned that one the hard way.” His tone remained light on that last part, but she wasn’t completely sure that he was joking.

“I always wondered why you had me read up on that. But I haven’t actually done it…”

“As I have always said: the world is a dangerous place. You have some time to practice once you’re done with the pockets.”

“So, um.” A thought struck her and a chill shivered down her spine. “What about—other people? I have a friend, you know. Rana.”

He hesitated audibly. “When the trouble begins, I do not think you will have the time to look for your friend and I am sure you know the same. It is convenient that you only have one.”

“Convenient—” Aliyah sputtered in outrage, her concentration lapsing. The sheet of skin forming under her hands withered at the edges. “And here I was thinking that you’d say something helpful. Convenient to abandon one friend instead of two? I’m not going to just let her die.”

“You’ll have to leave anyways,” he said. “Don’t tell me that you’ve changed your mind now, for the sake of but one person.”

“Lady Kionah is—she’s just one person,” she said quietly, stilling in her work. She thought back to the dungeon, to the pinkish water seeping into the grates, and imagined Rana in the spymaster’s place. Her stomach churned. “Once you think about it, if you insist on putting it like that—it’s a one to one swap, isn’t it? Who lives and who dies. If you’re—if you’re making me choose between saving the traitor spymaster and saving my best friend, then I will choose Rana.”

Zahir sighed. “It isn’t just the Lady Kionah, remember? You’re a lowborn too.”

“I don’t care,” she said.

He scowled faintly. “I presume this ‘Rana’ is a lowborn like you? Scion?”

“Yes, but not Scionsong. More important than me because—known progenitor. Rana Khan. So then the Magicians—”

“What does she do?”

“She’s a scribe.”

“Merely the Lower Library, I presume?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then, all other logistics aside, you can’t take her with you. She’ll only be a hindrance.”

“You made it very clear that the lowborns are likely to be siphoned off by Magicians,” Aliyah snapped, working at her newly-formed false-skin. “If you want me to flee, surely there’s a way I can take her with me.”

“I’m sure this is very difficult for you, but I place a lot of belief in your sense of pragmatism,” he said. “I don’t relish the prospect of scores of lowborns dying, either, but it’s risky enough as it is to have you cooperate with the Lady Kionah.”

“I could warn her, or hide her before they take us—”

“Well, my well-meaning apprenticeling, if she believes you, then she will likely have other friends or family that she wishes to save. And those friends will have friends or family too. So on and so forth. Also, Magicians on the prowl. In case that little detail slipped your mind.”

She thought about it, about leaving. Forever? To never see Rana again? She felt cold, and a little shaky inside—hollowing out. Tears prickled at the edges of her eyes and she tried to blink them back. When that didn’t work, she swiped them away on her sleeve.

“You’re asking me to leave and to never return,” she said through the tightness of her throat. “You want me to leave forever, not knowing if she’ll be okay. To not ever know if she’s okay.”

From the other side of the door, Zahir sighed. “No, Aliyah, not ‘forever’. I’m sure you can stop by in a few years, once everything’s cooled down, though perhaps with a disguise at hand. The Magicians aren’t guaranteed to—”

“No,” she interrupted. “No, I won’t just leave her.”

She finished up the task of making the skin-pockets nonetheless. She dropped the keys into one and the spell-slips into another, shuddering as she melded the flaps shut. Then she stormed out of the bathroom.

He sighed. “The first rule of being a Healer is that—”

“That you can’t save everyone,” she hissed. “I know. I know! But she’s not just anyone. She saved me.” She glared at him with as much menace as she could muster. “She’s the reason I’m even here in the first place. The whole Library thing—she talked and bribed to fix it and before that, she searched for people who could help me. You helped, sure. But if not for her, I might not have survived the aftermath. She went out of her way to save me from a lifetime of needless pain and you’re saying there’s nothing you can do? You want me to leave her to die?”

Zahir pinched the bridge of his nose. “I want you to make wise decisions.”

“Actually, no,” she snapped. “Never mind, I don’t care what you want. You have to help—there’s got to be something you can do.”

“I…” He looked uncertain, for once. “I don’t think so.”

Anger gripped her by the throat, heavy and dark—chased by fear, of course. She clenched her fists and willed herself to stop trembling.

“You don’t think so?” she asked. “You, the second-rank Healer highborn with all of your—your books and trinkets? Can’t you, I don’t know, put in a word with the Magicians?” Her tone was pleading now; she hated herself for it, but she’d hate it more if Rana died.

He furrowed his brow and sighed. “You greatly overestimate my influence.”

“You don’t even have another dose of the anti-haemolytic?”

“If I did, I would have given it to you,” he said tiredly. “I’m not a monster, Aliyah.”

Her thoughts raced. She took a deep, steadying breath, sifting through anything and everything she could possibly do, which wasn’t much.

“I’ll give her my anti-haemolytic, then,” she said.

He frowned. “Really? You had best be sure of your ability to free yourself quickly. And pray that you don’t run across any Magicians on the way out.”

“I’m the apprenticeling, aren’t I?” she said. “I can—if I get hurt, I can fix it better than she’d be able to.”

He made a tutting sound, one that suggested she was being unwise, but remained silent. Well, whatever. That just meant she had a point. She’d take what acquiescence she could get.

“What can I slip your potion into so that it doesn’t look like I’m trying to steal her kidneys?”

He walked over to his desk and dug around in the drawers, scowling. “Oh, I don’t know, vanillin tea? That stuff’s usually sweet enough to disguise a whole myriad of things.”

“We don’t have that in our dining halls.”

Zahir tossed her a small leather pouch. It clinked as she caught it. “So bribe the cook.”

She unlaced the pouch, frowning as she peered into it and saw the glint of gold. “Are these crowns?”

“Thirty seven of them,” he said, and winked.

A cold feeling suffused her chest, slow and crushing like a glacier of old. “You…you can’t just…”

He waved his hand dismissively. “You’ll need it more than I do. I do hope this friend of yours is worth it.”

She fell silent. The dread continued to flood through her body in cold waves, steady and relentless. Was this what the beginning of the end felt like? This was all she had—a room in the castle, one mentor, one real friend. This was so little, and all the more precious for it. And she was just going to run away, based on the word of a traitor? But the Magicians…Lady Kionah had been hurt. She’d been more than hurt; she’d been tortured. And she had seemed so terribly sure.

“Will it be enough to keep Rana alive?” she asked. “Through the…bleeding, that is. And after.”

“I can’t promise anything, though the potion’s as good as you can get. I wouldn’t have given it to you if it did nothing.” Zahir frowned. “And those who survive being bled extensively are hardly killed once the threat is past. It will be chalked down to luck, or the light of some merciful star or other. The Magicians may indulge in a little madness, but they are not insensate.”

“Right, she said, swallowing hard. “Okay.” She placed the vial and bag of coins into her belt-pouch, seeing as both pockets were compromised. The keys felt cold against her skin. “Now what?”

He sighed. “Now, you should attempt to use vasodilation to force me to fall unconscious.”

She startled. Vasodilate him to unconsciousness? Had she heard that right?

“Not that I think you’ll succeed,” he continued, “but I will be able to approximate if your efforts are sufficient.”

“Well, um. Really?” she asked. He had used himself as a test subject for her learning before, for mild injuries like when he slipped up chopping brewing ingredients—both because he could fix it if she didn’t do it right, and because there were no other volunteers unless she counted the rats and the occasional chicken or goat. But those exercises had been in actual healing. This felt…like the opposite. It felt…sort of violent, actually.

“You’ll probably need to do it,” he pointed out. “I know you can cast false-sleep, every apprentice learns it in the first few weeks lest they can take naps on command, or else they die. That is to say, you don’t have the selection pressure of their workload, but you do have the skill. Don’t you?”

“Yes,” she said, thinking of her late shifts. “I’ve done that a few times. Only on myself, though.”

“Excellent. It’s not that different. You don’t have to worry, but you can try it on me as well if you like. Just to be sure. But the vasodilation is the trickier one here.”

“So I just…go ahead and…?”

“Yes,” he said. “Though in an actual fight, you would preferably get the drop on me. Nonetheless—” and here he rolled up the sleeve of his robe and held out his arm, “—try your best, and we’ll go from there.”

She spent the next hour or so pushing magic into his circulatory system. He was right; she couldn’t make him actually faint. He held himself in bodily equilibrium; there was always a resistance wherever she pushed, a counter-force that kept his veins from actually widening enough to make him fall unconscious. She guessed that he could measure the relative strength of her casts, though in what units, she couldn’t imagine.

“Again,” he kept saying. “You can vasodilate harder than that. There is a large margin of error when it comes to this particular cast. I highly doubt you’d be able to permanently injure, much less kill, anyone with this.”

So she did, even though her gut churned uncomfortably when she thought about actually having to use it on someone. But whether it was Zahir’s presence or the repetitiveness of the drills or the passage of time itself, she eventually found herself lulled into a calmer state, immersed in the shape and rhythm of the cast, refining it bit by bit until he said that she had performed it strongly, and with enough efficiency. Then he pointed out that the warden likely wouldn’t have his sleeves rolled up. So she tried it through the fabric of his sleeve, which she managed at the cost of a nosebleed. He assured her it was simply the effect of the cumulative spellwork, which wasn’t actually reassuring. What if she had to vasodilate ten different Magicians? Though, if she found herself up against ten Magicians, perhaps there’d be little point in trying.

“You’ve got it now,” he said. “Don’t expect it to be flawless when—if you end up using it. There is mental stress to consider, and other factors unique to such spontaneous situations. But from what I’m seeing, you won’t dip below the effective threshold; it will do the trick.”

“That’s it?” she asked. A part of her doubted him, doubted that this last-minute lesson was enough to prepare her for whatever Magician-led, ritual-mass-murder event was to come.

“Don’t look so worried,” he said, retreating to his armchair. He gestured at the low table between them. “You’ll be fine. Take a seat, have some biscuits. You don’t want to burn yourself out in advance.”

She did, and felt her anxiety rising once more. The biscuit was dry, and seemed to stick in her throat. “It’s just…I really don’t know that much. I can’t fight, and…”

“You can heal cuts and set bones,” he said calmly. “You’ll be fine. Try not to get hurt, of course, but I’d say that you can take a spell far better than most apprentices your age. And who knows, perhaps that eyesight trick of yours will prove helpful in these circumstances.”

“But I don’t,” she began, and twisted her fingers together into a white-knuckled knot. “I’m not a real mage. The Magicians are, and I can’t even shield, for goodness sake. I have cutting spells, but they’re all specialised for stuff like desert-radishes and ironwood. Not for—uh, people-flesh. I mean, they’re really not for combat. I don’t know any combat spells and I can’t fight with a weapon or anything like that. From what you said, and what Lady Kionah said…”

“Then you’ll have to play to your other strengths.” He raised an eyebrow. “You seem quite worried. Do you think you’re going to die?”

“No?” she asked, startled. The thought had occurred to her, of course, but she knew it was a baseless anxiety-thought. Hearing him say it made it worse. “No! I don’t know,” she snapped. “You’ve been making enough jokes about it that it’s making me worry.”

“I’m a Healer, not a seer,” he said breezily. “Don’t read too much into it, Aliyah, they’re just jokes. True, any of us could die. But realistically speaking, it isn’t going to be you.”

She unknotted her hands and stared at them, palms-up on her lap. “But I’m not like you,” she said. “I can’t cast anything strong enough to guarantee my protection. You realise that, right?”

“No one is,” he said sharply, and sighed. “No one can guarantee they won’t die in a fight. I can prevent myself of dying via surprise venous thromboembolism, but I can’t definitively prevent myself of dying via surprise enemy spell to the head.”

“That’s not funny—you know what I mean,” she said, and it came out harsher than she meant it to. “Sorry,” she added guiltily. “I’m just—this is crazy. I can’t fight a Magician. I’m not sure I can fight anyone. It’s not like I’ve ever done it before. Maybe I’ll be one of those people who just…freeze up.”

“I knew what you meant,” he said. “But you have to realise that we’re going to be in different predicaments that scale with our respective abilities. Don’t worry too much about the Magicians after you escape and find your way to Lady Sadrava. Even the most mundane of mages will be able to do something with the spell-slips I gave you. Besides—most, if not all, of the proper Magicians will be out on the field, where I have to go. If you run into any so-called ‘Magicians’, they’ll likely be senior apprentices at most, even if they look the part.”

“I guess,” she said, still feeling uneasy. “I just…I don’t know. Even a Magician apprentice is an apprentice, right? Like, with formal schooling hours and stuff. And what about the faeries?”

“What about them?”

She frowned. “If I get attacked by an invading faery, is any of this healing stuff going to work? Remember when you said that I should kill people, if I really have to? It’s starting to feel real. Not that I could, even if I tried, but I don’t like this.”

“I suppose so. It’s unlikely that you’ll have to fight a faery, but what little I have read about them suggests they’re biological entities, albeit with a higher saturation of magic keeping the more implausible structures running…” He fell silent. Then he said, “do you remember what you did in the Higher Library?”

She flinched.

“Um. Yes,” she said. She didn’t see herself forgetting anytime soon.

“You could cast that,” he said quietly. “Inflict it on someone else, if it were an emergency.”

She blinked into the silence, shock warring with anxiety in her head. “I…don’t think I can,” she said slowly. “It was a very…specific set of circumstances.”

“An emergency is also a very specific set of circumstances,” he said with grim cheer. “It was your doing, right? Once you’ve learned how to cast something—and this is especially true of Healing—you generally don’t unlearn or forget.” He stood up and wandered over to his desk and leaned against it as he picked up some paper or other to read.

“I know,” she said, and clenched her fists into her skirts. “I know. I don’t think I can do it, though—physically, I mean.” And psychologically speaking, there was probably something there too, she thought to herself with no small amount of dread. “I’ll keep it in mind, but, uh. I don’t think it’s something good, or um, to rely on. It only happened that one time, and it was…”

“I wasn’t recommending it, now,” he said agreeably, not looking up from the paper. “Best to stick with vasodilation and false-sleep. But you do have more dangerous tools at your disposal, if you so wish.”

“I’m not sure I would call it a tool.”

“You’re a Healer. Closing a wound is a tool. Opening a wound is one, as well.”

She startled at that. “I’m not a Healer.”

“Not officially, you’re not,” he said, and this time he put the paper down to look at her. “But you know the magic, and you can certainly use it. You’re enough of one that you could start figuring stuff out on your own if you wanted to.”

She shook her head. “No, I…probably couldn’t. Not without accidentally injuring myself, or—or torturing other people for practice, or something.”

“That was the traditional method,” he said, then glanced over to the dying light at the window. “I suppose we should stop here, if you’d like to visit your friend for dinner.”

The thought of Rana brought uneasy feelings to mind. She frowned down at the patterned rug beneath her shoes. If Zahir was right—and he seemed disturbingly certain about supposed mountain faeries wreaking havoc, not to mention Lady Kionah’s words—then this could be the last time she would ever see Rana—and him, too, for a long, long time. Perhaps she would never see either of them again. That was a cold thought.

“Will you be okay?” she blurted out as she stood up from the armchair.

She hadn’t really thought to ask it until now, but now that she’d asked, it all coalesced into an awful picture—her question: is healing stuff even going to work on faeries and before that, he had said predicaments that scale with our respective abilities.

Idiot, idiot Aliyah, she thought. Zahir was a Healer, and he was going to have to face a mystery magic species whose physiology might not respond in the same way as a human’s against his defenses. She’d been too wrapped up in her own anxieties, not seeing the pieces that were right in front of her—

“I should think that I can fend for myself,” Zahir said dryly, cutting into her growing terror.

He crossed his arms. The red silk of his robe crinkled; so flimsy and easily punctured by spell or sword or magical faery weapon. Then she remembered that he was a fully-fledged Healer, could fix damn near any flesh wound, could probably crush her lungs into paste from where he stood if he wanted to. And right now, that was oddly reassuring, because faeries probably also had lungs too.

“Not sure whether to be touched or offended by your concern,” he continued. “Run along now, little apprentice.”

She turned away. Walked to the door, steps heavy. Placed her hand on the handle and fought the urge to turn back around.

“You’ve— you’ve done a lot for me,” she said. “Far more than you ever needed to. It means—a lot. So. Thank you.”

“And you’re only about half as annoying as my other apprentices,” came his reply. He almost sounded like he was smiling. “Oh, and I almost forgot—don’t let anyone see you with the anti-haemolytic. Unofficially forbidden. The Magicians’ll cut your hands off for it.”

Her hand clenched around the handle and her eyes prickled hotly.

“Bastard,” she swore. “You are such an ass.”

That got a laugh out of him, at least.

She cracked the door open and hesitated. “I…um. I’ll miss you.”

“Come visit in a few years if the city’s still standing.”

“Planning on burning it down then, are you?” she sniffed.

“Hah. Get out of here,” he cheered. “Take care of yourself. Cut someone in half if you have to. Do me proud.”

She fled before he could point out that she was crying.