CHAPTER TEN

  -The Day Began Again

  Torhun gave twelve gifts for one impossible glance.

  — Old Shaman Korkut, "Torhun’s Twelve Gifts"

  He opened his eyes to a pressure behind them. Not pain, just weight. Nothing hurt, and that was the first thing that felt wrong.

  The ground beneath him was flat and dry under bare skin. That was wrong too. No stone pressed his cheek. No dirt filled his mouth. Air entered his lungs cleanly, too clean. It carried no smoke. He pushed himself upright slowly. His joints responded without resistance. A throb centered behind his eyes, a dull pressure that pulsed once and steadied.

  The space around him had no walls. No ceiling. No clear edge. He stood on a plain that might have been the steppe and might have been nothing at all. The ground under his bare feet was covered in something that looked like grass, but each blade was black and unnaturally still. There was no wind here. When he shifted his weight, the blades didn’t bow under him; they slid and brushed, cool and dry, against his skin, soft as hair and just as wrong. The sky above wasn't blue. It was a dull, heavy gray with no sun, no moon, no stars.

  A pressure sat behind his eyes, a presence resting just out of sight. He lifted a hand toward his head and froze. The sensation didn't change. He took one step forward. The ground didn't resist. It didn't welcome him either. The pressure sharpened suddenly. Not around him. Inside him.

  His sense of where he was slipped.

  [Memory incoming…]

  [Memory unstable.]

  [Fragmenting.]

  This wasn't his memory. It felt like a small piece of something larger he couldn't see. It arrived unfiltered, without asking permission. Something was remembering, and he was only borrowing the shape of that memory. That was how he knew it was important.

  The sensation of cloth against skin came first. Rough. Familiar. Except it wasn’t.

  A hand closed around something cool and solid before thought formed. Smooth along one edge. Sharp along the other. The hand didn't feel like his. Or if it was, it refused to be recognized. Breath came fast, too fast, and wrong.

  The pressure in his skull was the same. Not new. Not foreign. The same wrong weight that had pressed behind his eyes just before the world broke.

  The space was closed in. Curved walls pressed inward. Air moved gently, carrying the sound of wind brushing against fabric in slow, patient rhythm.

  No voices. No footsteps.

  A heartbeat that didn't match the body. Cold earth touched bare feet. A hand tightened around a knife hilt nearby. Fingers shook. Not from cold and pain. From urgency without direction.

  The jade pressed into his palm felt familiar. Too familiar for a memory that wasn't his. Not new. Just not his. The jade was warm in the palm. Too warm. The same impossible warmth, a second heartbeat confused for the body’s own. The cloth around it was worn thin. The weight settled there and fit, but not to him. The grip tightened once. The pressure inside the skull surged.

  For a moment, something else lay over the feeling, a short, flat thought that didn't sound like his.

  [Memory Fragment [3/7] acquired.]

  He frowned. The words blurred at the edges of his mind, already slipping away. Maybe he was just tired. Maybe he'd imagined them. The scene folded in on itself.

  The boy staggered as the dark ground returned beneath him. The sky closed overhead again. The headache surged and settled lower, like a breath being held.

  He stood. The ravine was gone. No snow under his back, no broken trees above, no streak of green light, no skull masks closing in. He stood on a plain that could have been the steppe or nothing at all. The ground under his bare feet was black and still, whispering faintly when he moved. No wind touched it. No trees, no walls, no river, no cabin. Only absence. In the distance, a single yurt sat on the formless plain. Its felt walls were pale with shadow. Its edges wavered, never quite fixing into place.

  A figure sat cross-legged before it. Its hands rested loosely in its lap. Between long fingers, a single pale thread hung from nothing, quivering each time the fingers twitched, drawn out of the air by feel alone.

  The boy knew, immediately and without thought, that he didn't want the figure to look at him.

  Too late. Its head turned. The outline refused to hold steady. Tall, squat, hunched. Jagged shapes curved up behind where its head should have been, bare branches reaching into the sky. Where a face should have been, there was only absence, a place his eyes slid away from.

  Only the eyes held. They were darker than the ground. Darker than the sky. When they settled on him, the skin on his arms prickled as cold crept up every hair.

  “Again,” the figure said.

  The voice didn't pass through air. It settled at the base of his skull, dry and rattling.

  “Where is this?” The words scraped out of him, small and hoarse.

  The figure made a sound shaped like amusement.

  “Between,” it said. “Not where you were. Not where you are going. Not yet.”

  His side still burned where steel had gone in, and there was a dull ache deep in his chest, but he could breathe here. He raised a hand to his chest. The jade-moon stone wolf totem rested there. Whole, smooth, warm. No crack marred its surface. His fingers closed around it hard enough to hurt.

  “Am I dead?” he whispered.

  The figure tilted its head. The shapes behind it shifted, skewing the sky.

  “Not yet,” it said. “You died badly. It offended me. I took you before you were fully gone. Waste not.”

  “Who are you?”

  The question tore itself free before he could stop it. He remembered being warned once about names and shadows.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  The figure considered him. “Names are for straight threads,” it said.

  Its gaze dropped to the jade. “You are not a straight thread.”

  It paused for a moment.

  “They call me Aldac?.”

  The word lodged somewhere under his ribs and refused to move.

  “Why me?” he asked.

  “You were closest,” it said. “And still moving when others would have stopped.”

  Aldac? watched. “You broke the line,” it said, and the pleasure was unmistakable. “You were meant to end tonight under boots and laughter. The jade would have cracked. Your Sky would have turned away. Your story would have stopped in the mud beside a dead dog and a man whose name would die with him.”

  The black grass rustled without wind.

  “But you killed instead,” Aldac? went on. “Small hands in a man’s eyes. A blade finding a throat. Life taken that was not yours to take. The line bent.”

  It laughed softly. “I like bends.”

  The memory hit him. The weight of the man. The wet sound in the man’s throat. The spray from the dog’s eye. His stomach lurched. He bent over and retched. Nothing came up. There was nothing in him to empty.

  But I didn’t die there, he thought. Should I have died there?

  “I didn’t plan it,” he said. His voice shook. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “I do not care what you meant,” it said. Its voice was calm. The place around him wasn’t. “I watch what is.”

  The black grass shuddered beneath the boy’s feet, whispering louder, as though the ground itself had drawn a breath. The pressure behind his eyes spiked, sharp enough to make him sway.

  “What you are,” it said, “is interesting.”

  “Is there,” the boy said, “a way to go back?”

  Aldac? tilted its head.

  “Back where?” it asked, and there was a hint of amusement. “To the ravine? To the fort?”

  It let the question hang for a moment.

  “To be broken again?” Aldac? asked at last again. “Endings differ. The pain does not.”

  The boy swallowed. His throat worked; even that felt like effort.

  “Back is a direction,” it said. “You are asking about endings.”

  The boy’s fingers tightened once at his chest.

  “Then die now,” Aldac? said simply. “A neat end. A short thread. No more bends.”

  The word neat landed wrong inside his chest.

  Aldac? watched.

  “You can go back,” Aldac? said. “To snow or mud. To dogs or masks. Whatever shape the day chooses. You will run. You will die. Again.”

  The air itself seemed to pull tight, like someone was tugging on an invisible rope.

  “Each time,” Aldac? said, “the line bends.” It let the silence hang for a heartbeat, the thread twitching in its fingers. “Either way, I will be entertained.”

  The boy thought of the barracks: the cracked boards, the other boys curled tight in sleep, the way the overseer looked through them. He thought of the Hermit and his small cabin in the trees, of Iye in her soft cat-shape and in the other one that hurt to look at, of the seven men in skull masks who had come to take it all away. He thought of the steppe. Wind. Horses. His father’s back. His stepmother’s smile. He thought of the stone at his chest. The shape. The weight..

  “I will not die the same way,” he said.

  The words felt too big for his mouth, but they came out anyway.

  Aldac? laughed. Quiet. Satisfied. “Good,” it said. “Then we have an understanding.”

  The black plain shifted. A thin white line opened across the sky. Through it, he saw lanterns frozen mid-swing. Boots suspended above dirt. His own body curled and broken.

  “Go, Ouz,” Aldac? said, speaking his name as if it had always known it. “Run again. Break the line again. Die differently.”

  The ground vanished.

  He fell.

  He woke to the sound of a bell. For a moment it was only noise, meaning still out of reach. His hands came up before he was fully awake, fingers curling to protect his throat. They stopped only when nothing grabbed back.

  Exactly the same sound as always. Not the sharp crash of a dropped lantern. The dull, tired clang of the morning bell, swung on its frayed rope outside the slave barracks. The day felt a fraction too sharp, his thoughts still catching up.

  The boy jerked, sucking in air like he'd been underwater. The cough in the far corner hacked on and on, just as it had before. The smell of damp straw, stale sweat, and unwashed bodies slammed into him. Fifty boys in one long, low hut, laid out on rough planks, wrapped in the same thin, greasy blankets. Too many bodies, not enough air, and never enough blanket to go around. Someone snored wetly nearby. Somewhere close, the same thin voice that had hissed his number on the night he ran muttered in its sleep and turned over. Boys swore and shoved at him.

  “Stop kicking, rat.”

  “You dreaming about pigs again?”

  A heavy pulse throbbed in his ears, the noise trapped inside his skull. His ribs hurt with the familiar ache of old bruises, not the jagged, white-hot agony of fresh breaks. His throat was sore but whole. His ankle throbbed where the iron ring bit, but it was the old pain, the one he'd learned to ignore.

  He lay very still. His body felt rested. His mind didn't. The ceiling above him was a patchwork of boards and gaps. In the faint gray seep of dawn, he could see the same crooked crack he always stared at when he couldn't sleep, just over his head. It looked like a river on a map, splitting, joining again, wandering across a blank land.

  His fingers, of their own accord, flew to his chest. The jade-moon stone wolf totem rested there, smooth and whole and warm. His hand trembled as he closed it around the stone.

  Again.

  The word wasn't his, but it shivered through him.

  Outside, somewhere beyond the walls, a sound carried briefly. A single meow. Distant. It came once and didn’t repeat. Its source stayed unclear. No one else reacted. Ouz paused for half a breath, head tilting slightly. It sounded like a cat. They didn’t keep cats here. Nothing soft survived long inside the camp.

  “Iye?” he whispered, before he could stop himself.

  Silence. Straw rustled. Someone nearby cursed and rolled over. The thought snagged on that wrongness for an instant, only to dissolve before he could follow it.

  The moment passed. He lowered his hand. The sound didn’t register as important. The sense that it didn’t quite belong here slipped away like everything else he couldn’t afford to think about.

  A second, sharper thought cut across his awareness, the same strange flatness that had come with that earlier not-quite-his memory.

  [Skill acquired: Practicing Death.]

  [Death teaches only those who persevere.]

  [Error: Skill already registered.]

  [Switching to update mode…]

  [Second passage recorded.]

  [Error: First passage cannot be found.]

  [Warning: All other skills locked until First Passage is recovered.]

  The lines flashed through his head and vanished, leaving the echo of them behind. This time they did not feel like a mistake or a dream. He’d seen lines like that before, in the pit when he was about to die, and again while the Hermit was drilling him.

  Practicing Death again. Whoever was putting those words in his head seemed to think what he had just done counted as training, and had slammed every other door shut until he fixed whatever had gone wrong first.

  Outside, the bell rang again. A voice followed, rough and impatient.

  “The bell’s early today,” someone muttered. “Means the overseer woke up angry.”

  “Up, rats. Work waits. Move or no porridge.”

  Boards creaked as boys rolled and sat and swung their legs down. Muttered curses in three languages. A cough that would not stop. Someone rubbing sleep from their eyes with filthy knuckles.

  Ouz sat up easily. Too easily. It felt like someone else had done the work of pulling him upright.

  Every sight, every sound, every smell was exactly as they had been the last time he’d woken to this morning. Only he wasn’t the same.

  He remembered the dog’s scream, the jelly-soft give of an eye under his fingers, the knife sliding into a throat, the spray of blood, the jade-moon stone cracking. He remembered the Hermit in his cabin in the trees, rough hands on his wrists and shoulders, turning his feet, setting his grip. Iye curled on a pillow by his head, and Iye as the other shape that hurt to look at. Seven men in skull masks standing in the yard. Snow in a ravine. A spear punching through her back and out her chest. He remembered the world slowing, the black grass under his feet, the lone yurt on the empty plain, and the eyes that had watched him there.

  Aldac?’s voice, dry as bone.

  You will die again.

  That same voice had called him by a name he hardly recognized anymore. Ouz. He drew a slow breath and held it until his hands stopped shaking. Outside, a dog barked. Just once. Farther off than in his memory, but the pitch was the same. He turned his head and looked toward the barrack door. The space between now and the moment he'd run in that other today felt thin, like a skin he could press his thumb against and feel something push back.

  Ouz slipped off the plank. His feet met cold earth. He tightened his grip on the jade-moon stone until the edges bit into his palm.

  “I will not die under boots,” he whispered in his own tongue, so quietly that even the boy dozing on the next plank didn't stir. “Not again.”

  If dying was the price of learning, then he’d pay it. He didn't like the thought, but it stayed.

  Above the hut, the strip of sky visible through the gaps in the roof was a pale, blank gray, dull and empty. Somewhere beyond it, too far to see, a god of the open steppe might or might not be watching. Under the floor, somewhere he couldn't reach, something that called itself Aldac? chuckled, unheard.

  Morning went on just as it had before.

  And the day began again.