Though if they lose theirs, the consequences for them are much more immediate.
I wait a distance away, leaning against the grey stone between tomb entrances. Caeror’s arm is around Tash, their heads bowed close. Then Tash nods. Embraces Caeror, a tight hug that holds more emotion than anything I’ve seen from him. He starts back toward Qabr.
“I think that’s enough for today.” Caeror says it quietly as he joins me, wiping gore from the obsidian.
“And tomorrow?”
“You know the answer.” Apologetic.
“But it barely worked. Harmonic links are supposed to be the difficult part, and maintaining the linkage easy. I was only connected to him for a moment, and—”
“A moment longer than anyone else I have ever heard of, except the Concurrence.” He fixes me with a look. “Vis. Youdid it. It doesn’t matter how long it lasted. We have our starting point. Next time, we’ll tell him not to feel that way. We canworkwith this.”
Fear.Fear. I can’t shake it. “I’m just … not sure I can do it again. Even if we tell him not to feel those things, Caeror … he’s still aperson. He’ll still remember. He’ll still have to live with it when the blade’s not in him. The horror of knowing he is so completely and utterly under someone else’s control.”
Caeror rubs a hand across his face. “He was afraid,” he says slowly, “but he is willing to keep going. Yes, Vis. He was terrified. But this is exactly what Ka does to thousands of people, what Tash has spent his entire life, and death, hiding from. He understands the importance of what we do here.Whywe do it.”
There’s a heavy silence. My hands are still shaking.
“Let’s head back,” says Caeror gently.
We leave the crashing of the toxic waterfall behind us, its echoing chasing us into the gloom of the chasm. Neither of us say anything for a while. Caeror, I suspect, is letting my frayed nerves settle.
“You are wondering what you are becoming,” he says eventually.
“I’m training to kill someone. There’s not a lot of wondering to it.” I kick a loose stone ahead of me. It skitters into the hush. “A friend once told me that we needed lines we cannot cross. Are yousurethere is no other way?”
“This isn’t some clever application of Will that some other clever application of Will might be able to counter. Ka wields the power that split the world into three. He has done it for thousands of years. And people have tried to stop him for thousands of years.” Benignly delivered, but no doubting his certainty. “I prefer for you to think of it as impossible, than think of it as optional.”
I nod slowly. Take a deep breath. It’s an acceptance I’ve already made, but I make it anew.
Caeror sighs. “You should know—there is something else we need to test. It’s about getting into Ka’s pyramid in Duat. The walls are guarded not just by iunctii, but by a … kind of barrier. It’s the main reason that you, specifically, need to do this. Yusef believed that only people who are Synchronous can survive contact with it.”
Another lull as I digest it. The black mouths of the tombs wide around us. “You didn’t mention this earlier.”
“I wanted to be confident that you were Synchronous. It’s not a second-chances kind of thing,” he adds dryly.
“And you think we should test it now?”
“If you’re capable.” Caeror’s reluctance is thick, his tone rueful, but it’s all threaded with determination. “We have to push. Weigh prudence and your comfort against the time we have.”
I feel like nothing more than sleeping. “Alright.”
Neither of us speak for a while as we walk. I study the glyphs carved around the paintings on the tombs we pass. My initial impression was right: according to Caeror, it runs very close to the Nyripkian language back home. There are hundreds upon hundreds of different characters.
“What do they say?” I ask it absently as I inspect them. Trails of sand drift down the crags and catch the fading light, shifted by some gust of wind above. My voice echoes into the gathering dim.
“Names. Their lives and deeds. Their families.” He joins me in my quietscrutiny. “The paintings show what they wish to do when they reach Aaru, the Field of Reeds. Their afterlife,” he adds, though I’d guessed that much.
“It’s a strange style.” Faces always in profile, bodies always drawn from the front. Everything simple and defined, a sense of orderliness and balance to it all.
“Yusef said they didn’t care so much about what something looked like, but rather what was itwaslike—not drawing for creativity or expression, but to give something permanence and meaning. So once they worked out how to depict the essential qualities of what they were representing, consistency was more valued than originality.” He sees my inspection of one tomb in particular, the symbols on it clearly scraped away. “I don’t know why some of the names are scratched off. Sometimes people don’t like monuments to the past, I suppose. I don’t think it happened recently.”
We press on; after a while we’re getting close to where we started this morning, and I’m just beginning to wonder whether Caeror’s forgotten, when he abruptly stops in front of an opening to our right. “In here.”
The tomb entrance looks like any other. Carved stone pillars on either side, etched with symbols I do not understand. I trail after Caeror. The mausoleum is as utterly dark as any of the others, and three steps in I slow, despite hearing my guide’s footsteps echo ahead. “I can’t see.”
“Just wait.”
