Chapter 11: Chapter 11 – A Simple Solution To The Malus of Hunger

When I woke up the next morning, drifting out of slumber in warm contentment, I was alone.

I was almost ashamed at how relieved this made me. Almost, and not at all; gratitude waged a short and overwhelming war against shame, victorious in a matter of heartbeats. The sun was shining through the window, every bit of me was perfectly warm without any of me being overheated, and I was more perfectly rested than I ever remembered being. I was mystified by the dream I’d had, both more coherent than I’d ever experienced and still totally incomprehensible, and I could hear people in the hallway chattering in Shemmai, distant and muted.

I was in another world.

It would be a lie to say that hadn’t sunk in. From the moment I’d woken up after Artemis’s transport of me, I’d believed it. But it was sinking in again, now that I’d woken up in a strange room, sleeping on what I’d thought was a mattress but was actually something like a tatami mat. Poking at it, I could tell that it was only two, maybe two and a half inches, but it had been more comfortable than any bed I’d slept on.

There was an itch to that thought, a percolating warmth in my mind that urged here, touch this. I recognized the connection, the bridge to the Theurgist’s System I’d been inducted into the day before. Following the mental—or spiritual, possibly—patterns that Captain Meredith had walked me through, I touched it, smiling in anticipation of its ridiculousness.

 

Your Divine Flame Wakens With You!

Behold These Boons And Rejoice: Traveler’s Rest

As Boons, So Too Are Maluses: Hunger (Moderate)

New Skills Enter Your Repertoire: See, Inquire

Divinities Have Left Their Mark Upon You: Artemis (Least), Hephaestus (Minor)

The World Trembles, For Your Feats Grow: Godtouched

Live. Change. Grow. Transcend.

 

“Huh.” I blinked at that a few times. Meredith had said something about how I’d unlocked a Skill from seeing her hair color, which had presumably been obscured by some magical effect. Maybe I could get more information about them, or about… well, nearly everything there had something I was curious about.

Nothing for it but to try, I reasoned, and built a packet of thought as though I were back in the Hall of the Thousand, praying to the Gods.

Dear Divine Flame, or Theurgist’s System. What benefits does the Boon “Traveler’s Rest” confer?

I released it, guiding it to the bridge in my mind that led to the System. It made it there, encapsulated in an act of willpower, but then it… popped, for lack of a better word, the words spilling back into my mind with a sense that nothing had received it.

Well, I thought to myself, that was worth trying. On with the day! What to do next…

What to do next, I decided, was getting up. The mat I’d slept on was barely higher than the floor, so this was going to be easily enough done; shoes, shoe buckles, and then I rose smoothly to my feet from the floor without a single pang of pain or crackle-crunch of joints.

“Bless you, Hephaestus of the Forge,” I murmured, “for the grace that renewed my body. Blessed are you, who reforges the flesh.”

“Taken to grace so quickly?”

“Ayah! Warn a girl!” I glared at Kelly from where I’d fallen flat on my ass. “I don’t know how you snuck up to the door like that, but don’t!”

“That’s Qatn, right? What’s it mean?” She just about bounced on her feet, emanating a ridiculous degree of good cheer. “Ooh, ooh! I know! I bet it means ‘Good morning, Kelly! I am up and ready to start the day!’ Did I guess right?”

“Wow.” I tried to glare at her, but I was giggling, which probably detracted from the effect. “You sure woke up and chose violence today.”

“Travelers and your funny sayings.” She held out a hand to help me up, and then looked disappointed when I rocked forward onto my knees and then smoothly stood without help. “What did that Qatn word mean? I recognize it but don’t remember it.”

“It’s just an expression of surprise.” I momentarily regretted not taking her hand, so I went in for a hug on impulse.

“Ayah!” She hugged me back, squeaking in surprise. “Was that right?”

“Close enough.” Her accent wasn’t amazing, but it wasn’t bad, despite the fact that there wasn’t much in the way of trade between Shem and other countries. “I apparently am hungry enough to have a Malus on my Status. I don’t know why I think that’s so funny.”

“Maybe you’re silly when you’re hungry?”

“Prob—”

“Not as silly as when you’ve got Godtouch.”

I leaned against the wall and buried my face in my hands, groaning. “Gods, literally, spare me.”

“Sophie, like I said yesterday, it would be ridiculous for anyone to hold that against you.” She caught my eye as I lifted my head, smiling reassuringly. “I mean, it’s not called Godtouch for nothing! I wasn’t joking! Holding that against you really would be getting mad at the Gods, it’s screaming at the lightning!”

“And people here… don’t get mad at storms.”

“It’s a saying.” She huffed dramatically, folding her hands across her chest.

“So people are going to hold it against me.” I squinted at her, then hazarded a guess. “Specifically, Elder whatever-her-name-was is going to hold it against me.”

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“She absolutely is!” Kelly beamed at me and started walking down the hallway. I followed her, muttering darkly in her wake. “She’d find something to dislike you for anyway,” she said after a moment. “She always does. This way, it’s something that nobody can agree with. A couple other people, too. But… four, maximum.”

I nodded at that, and we walked in silence for a bit. Not for very long; the hallway was short, or at least the room I’d stayed in was close to the stairs. Only about fifteen feet of stone, with tapestries on the walls for beautification and rugs on the floor to cushion our steps.

Well, the tapestries also cushioned me when I accidentally rammed my elbow into a wall after I more or less tripped over my own feet, but that probably wasn’t their primary purpose. Temperature mediation, maybe, since I seemed to remember something about stone being awkward to build with because of that? But they were definitely gorgeous, covered with abstract geometric patterns in a riot of brilliantly saturated colors.

I’d had one rug that could have maybe competed with what was so casually displayed here. It had been an heirloom from my great-grandmother of blessed memory, whom I’d met when I was too young to form memories; it was the only thing she’d bequeathed specifically to me.

My mother got it into my hands when my father had disinherited me—disowned, really, though even that was understated. It might well have been the first and only open act of defiance she'd engaged in, made in a calculated—and desperate—bid to remain part of my life, even clandestinely.

I smiled at the tapestries, feeling a bittersweet joy. I didn’t know what Artemis had told her, and I might never know, but I found myself content to trust and look to my future.

“Sorry, what?” I realized belatedly that Kelly had said something while I wasn’t paying attention, and turned to her. “Say that again, I wasn’t listening.”

“I asked,” she said, smirking, “that you seemed lost in thought. Also, in the way!”

“Oh shit, sorry.” I stepped to the side, letting the person behind me pass. The corridor was wide, but I’d been in the exact middle of it, and the stairs were a bit narrower than the hallway. “Yeah, lost in thought.”

That got me a contented grunt as they passed me. “Happens. Traveler, Avara. Morning light’s blessing.”

“Sunshine on your crops, Farmer.” Kelly sounded a lot more formal and respectful than I’d heard her be before. She touched my arm lightly as I made to follow them down the stairs, shaking her head minutely. “They don’t like having people behind them. Don’t crowd them, okay?”

“Sure.” I kept my voice to the same murmur that she was using. “Sounds like a history?”

“Probably. But don’t ask! It’s rude, and they’re really nice in their own way.” She hesitated. “They’re not Shemmai. I don’t know where they’re from, but they specifically came to where ambition goes to die, okay? Tethanne, she was one of the village’s First Friends until she died—”

“May her memory be a blessing,” I added automatically, as she drew a circle over her heart with her thumb.

“—and she had the settling of them, and she said,” and Kelly’s voice dropped even lower, “that they were moving from a different outer ring village, one that’d grown too big for them. They just go by Farmer, no other name, and they bring in six hundred bushels of grain a year, mostly wheat and barley.”

“Sovereign power bless them, that’s a lot.” I did a bit of quick mental math. “They feed the entire village?”

“In grain, and only about half of us.” She made a side-to-side gesture with her hand. “We don’t just live off of bread.”

As if on cue, my stomach gurgled loudly, and I flushed a little, laughing with Kelly’s giggles. “Speaking of. You said something about breakfast!”

“If you’re done walking the Darkness!” She headed down the stairs, and I followed in her wake.

“Okay. That one, you’re going to have to explain to me.”

“Well, the world is a sphere surrounded by nothingness.” The stairs were even, with enough tread to have perfect footing. Fully enclosed, they had grab-rails on both sides, though they were a little lower than ideal, possibly for children to use more easily. “I know that sounds crazy! But it’s true. And out there in the Darkness, there’s just nothing, no mana, nowhere to stand, so walking it—you’re laughing.”

“We call it, uh, space, which I guess is the old word for volume. Sorry, I should have stopped you, instead of letting you flounder.”

“Well.” She stepped out into the main hall we’d eaten dinner in the night before, hands pressed together, and took a deep breath. “That was rude,” she said after a moment.

“But funny.” 

“But funny!”

She was grinning, and I was snickering, and then the smell of the food hit and my stomach growled loud. “Right. Food?”

“Food.” She nodded at me, then pointed to the long trestle tables against the back wall of the hall. They were in a sort of broken u-shape, starting at the wall and jutting outwards with the same food on the outside and inside of both sides. “Breakfast sittings are at Thesha, but for breakfast there’s always help-yourself where there aren’t sittings. They’ll do bespoke lunch and dinner for a crown.

“That’s a lot, it should be five scepters, half a crown, but that’s how much goes to tax. And anyway, it’s not actually great to have a lot of people eating bespoke, since that means more consignment and that means outflow, and we don’t collect much coin except from the delvers, and most of that goes to Tower and Writ.”

“Wow. That’s… a lot that I don’t know how to unpack.” We’d kept walking while she talked, making progress towards the food. “Ten scepters to the crown. What else is there?”

“Ten crowns to a balance, ten balances to a city, a hundred cities to a world. That’s Shemmai coinage, but everyone has different coinages under a world, so it’s just a city or a balance but it’s a Shemmai world, or just a Shem. Then there’s a thousand worlds to a God, but I don’t think Shem has a God’s worth of coin circulating, but Midan or Sar might, they’re a lot bigger.”

“Got it.” I didn’t, not really, because the practical value of coinage depended on a huge number of factors like how it was set and whether or to what extent there was international exchange, but I’d gotten a very vague sense for how much my eleven coins were worth. “Do we just… how do we do this?”

She’d marched us up to the nearest of the tables, one of the two that abutted the wall. Reaching over to the wall, she grabbed a handle I hadn’t noticed and slid a panel down, revealing utensils and dishes. “Grab a plate!”

“Huh. Neat.” Stops it from getting knocked over, I thought to myself, and followed her lead. New food, cooked in new ways, on the level of the dinner I’d had last night, and this morning I might be able to actually appreciate it?

I took a deep breath, closing my eyes for just a moment to better appreciate the aromas.

My new life was going to be good.

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