Ariah (2 page)

He frowned and glanced out at the street. The shaper in him had cut its teeth on noticing the fear and disgust of those around him. He held out a hand to me anyway. “I am sure you are Ariah. I am Dirva. We have corresponded.”

There was nothing to do but take his hand. I was there in that unknown city, alone, with no money. I could not have gotten back to Ardijan. I knew no one else in Rabatha. All I had was him. “I am glad to meet you,” I said.

He laughed. Like most people, he has many laughs. This one was sharp and cold. He looked me over and sighed. “Oh, you came on the train.”

“
Yes.”

“
You have had a long day.”

Suddenly the weight of it all bore down on me. I felt tears well up. Oh, it was awful; the shame of it was a force to drown in. I wrapped my arms around myself and stared at the ground. I nodded and somehow managed not to cry. I felt I would die if he saw me cry, if that was the first thing about me he saw.

He took me gently by the elbow and led me down the street. “I have had long days, too,” he said. “Tomorrow will be kinder.”

* * *

The next morning, I woke facing
The Reader
. The actual painting, the original. At first I thought it was a dream. When he is not working the assembly line, my father is an artist who specializes in portraits. He is something of an expert on the Nahsiyya Movement. He has copied
The Reader
himself for at least a dozen dignitaries. He invented a press to print paintings with a high level of fidelity. He prints books of art, and his books end up in Qin libraries all over. Every one of those books has a print of
The Reader
in it. In short, I was extremely familiar with this particular painting, this monstrously famous painting, which inexplicably hung on the wall in a cramped set of rooms in an elvish ghetto.

Food sizzled in the kitchen, and it smelled slightly strange. I crept out of bed, barefoot and timid, and studied the painting, which my father himself had seen only once. It had hung in a gallery in Tarquintia for a fortnight many years ago, and my father spent all of his money to get there and see it. He wanted to drink it in, absorb it, let it burn into his mind so he could replicate it again and again. No one was entirely sure what had happened to it after that. No one besides me, Dirva, and the artist.

My father’s copies are excellent copies, but they are still copies. The copies couldn’t quite show the way the bold lines captured movement and obscured it at the same time. The palette was brighter than in the copies—the blues and the greens burned bright and ice cold at once. I think it might have been a matter of the medium, of my father’s use of ink instead of the original artist’s use of oil paints. The paint gave it a dimensionality lacking in the prints. The artist slapped it on thick in ridges that cast subtle, shifting shadows. The shadows made the subject look like he was breathing, like he was just about to turn the page. I studied the figure: a black-skinned boy with black hair and green eyes. He wore a subtle smirk. He had broad shoulders and long, graceful fingers. It was a face I’d seen a thousand times before, and it dawned on me as I stood there that it was a face I had seen the day before.

Curiosity got the better of me. I crept around the corner and peered into the kitchen. Dirva was at the stove. I watched him for some time, star-struck, before he noticed me there. “You survived the night,” he said. “Are you hungry?”

“
I…yes?” I said, though it came out closer to a question. He glanced at me quickly. His eyes were overly expressive; you could tell precisely where he looked. He is a reserved man, but his eyes give him an air of penetrating intensity.

“
Did you sleep well? Will the cot suffice?”

“
Yes?” Again it came out like a question.

He turned towards me. It was then I learned he is not a patient man, that he has a brusqueness rooted to the core of him. “You seem to have some question for me. It would make sense for you to have questions, considering the circumstances. You should ask it.”

“
What?”

“
You should ask your question.”

I blinked. I likely blushed. “I don’t have any questions.”

Dirva stirred the food but kept his gaze pinned on me. “If you have no questions then there is little I can do for you as a mentor. Curiosity is a virtue, so say the wise.”

“
The wise say curiosity, in moderation and used with tact, is a virtue.”

He frowned slightly. “Just ask it. Whatever it is, just ask it.”

“
There’s nothing to…” He looked at me again. I laughed erratically, nervously, and he frowned a little more. “I have…I have just a little question for you. I guess. You don’t have to answer it. I didn’t ask because…I don’t know…it struck me that the answer might be personal? I didn’t want to pry. There’s no reason for me to even know the answer, whatever it is, and…”

“
Ariah. Please, just ask it,” he said, turning his attention back to the stove.

So I asked it. “Is that…is that the actual
Reader
? The original?”

“
Yes.”

My mouth fell open. “
How?
”

“
How what?”

“
How is it here?”

“
Where there are borders and guards, there are also smugglers, Ariah,” said Dirva. “It was smuggled to me.”

“
It must have cost a fortune.”

“
I am sure it cost quite a lot to smuggle it, yes, but it cost me nothing. It was a gift.” He turned away from me. He opened his mouth to change the topic.

And I couldn’t let him do it. My heart thudded against my ribs. I had to know. “Is that you? Are you
The Reader?”

He froze. His eyebrows knit together, then he sighed and looked over. “Your father is an artist. He mentioned that. You know about art. Yes. It’s me.” He pulled the skillet off the stove and emptied the contents into a bowl. He gestured at the table and laid out flatbread for each of us. I sat across from him and scooped up some of the potatoes and peppers in a bit of flatbread. They had been spiced with something uncommon in the Empire, which was not bad but unfamiliar. I couldn’t help but stare at him. It was him, undeniably him, but he had none of the magnetism or quiet enthusiasm of the figure in the painting. The sharpness was there, the quickness, but in the painting, as a boy not much older than myself, he looked happy. Across the table, as a man approaching middle age, he seemed mostly irritable. How did one grow into the other?

“
Please don’t stare,” he said. His eyes flicked up at me when he said it. I tried to stop, but I couldn’t quite do it. I resorted to staring at him from the corner of my eye while pretending to be very much interested in the floor. He let out a short, impatient noise. “It is me. Yes, I know the painter. I trained in the City of Mages, and I knew Liro when I was young. He sent me this painting some years ago. Please don’t ask me why he did such a fool thing. He was always prone to grand gestures. I do not follow art closely, but I know enough to know that, if word got out it was here, I would be very quickly robbed. Please don’t say anything to anyone about it. Do not write of it in your letters to your father, for example. I do not want to be robbed. Do you have any other questions?”

I stopped chewing. I swallowed. I felt vaguely sheepish. I cut a quick glance at the painting, just visible through the doorway, then back at him. “Just one.”

He flicked one hand at me, dismissively, irritably, and rested his forehead in the palm of his other hand. “Ask.”

“
I’ve always wondered. What are you reading? In the painting, what book is it that you’re reading?”

Dirva looked up at me. “That’s your question?”

“
Yes?”

“
That is an odd question.”

“
Well, it’s, uh…it’s my question.”

Dirva smiled. He stood up from the table and went into the other room. I followed closely at his heels. He studied the painting and began to laugh. “I’ve never looked. You know in all these years, I never looked. It could have been anything. It’s not really a book.” He covered his mouth with his hand and looked over at me. His eyes were bright; they crinkled happily at the edges. It brought out a warmth in him that I had not thought he had. When he looked at me like that, conspiratorial, surprised, that was when I began to trust him. That’s when he became my mentor, and I became his student. He laughed again. “I am not proud of this. I can’t believe he painted me like this. That’s not a book. That’s my brother’s diary. I’d stolen it. I used everything I read in there to get under his skin. He never knew I read it.”

CHAPTER 2

Dirva did not have the patience to mentor me conventionally. I had expected to do the cooking and the cleaning during the day, to run his errands and do his shopping while he worked. I had expected to have some time to myself. My expectations were not met.

Dirva was employed as a translator to the Rabathan Office of Foreign Relations. He worked closely with the Qin bureaucrats who developed suggestions about foreign policy, which eventually filtered up to the Emperor. The Qin did not quite trust Dirva—no one quite trusted Dirva, not even the Semadrans—but they valued his skills with something that approached respect. He transcribed foreign documents. He worked as an interpreter for diplomats. He was conscripted with regularity to teach language classes at Ralah College for the sons and daughters of well-to-do Qin families who were interested in foreign politics or foreign trade.

To the Qin, he was his work: a cultural and linguistic resource. To the Semadrans, he was his magic: an auditory mimic and a man who had once been considered for training by a shaper. Exactly like me. He wasn’t there to teach me his trade, exactly. That’s not what we do. We had been paired because his mind worked the way mine did, and he could show me how to live with a mind like mine. That he was a linguist was not really important. He was supposed to help me hone my gifts, understand them, grow comfortable with them. I very much needed training. Mimicry nagged at me, surfaced at inopportune times and in odd places. When I grew nervous, I sometimes repeated what was said to me in the same voice in which it was said. More than once I’d been thrown out of places, assumed to be mocking someone. Before my training, it had already gotten me arrested twice by particularly bad-tempered Qin policemen. Shaping was even worse. I had no control over it. It was a needling curiosity, a need to know, and it was unearned knowledge that got me in trouble. I didn’t always know when I’d read something, and when I was reading someone, I didn’t know how to stop. This particular set of gifts I have is not common. It took my parents some time to find a match.

Dirva was supposed to train me in the skills that let me control how the magic expressed itself. I’d gotten some training in school, but school was primarily to teach literacy and math and mechanics and our history. The five years of mentorship is how we dealt with magic. Dirva was supposed to sit with me at night and drill me through established exercises. He was supposed to talk me through what scared me and what didn’t. I was supposed to have the time during the day to reflect on what I’d learned, and to make myself useful around his house. That’s what was supposed to happen. What happened instead was Dirva and I had one short conversation about my gifts. I told him I picked up languages easily, both if I heard them and if I read them, and I was extremely insightful when it came to other people. He asked me if I was a shaper, and I told him emphatically that I wasn’t. The Ardijan shapers had met with me, felt me out, but decided the gift was not present enough to benefit from training. He decided I would make a good linguist. He decided to mentor me in action instead of through abstract evening exercises and heartfelt conversations. I have wondered in the years since if he decided that because he had so little patience.

I became his right hand. He took me everywhere with him, and he was valuable enough to get away with it. I served as his secretary, his attaché, his note taker, and his teaching assistant. Whenever my gifts got the better of me, he stopped whatever he was doing—a meeting with diplomats, a class, shopping in the market, it didn’t matter—and he had me tell him how it felt. He coached me through and told me what he did when he felt like that. The entire world waited for me to grasp his techniques. It was quite a lot of pressure, but in time it began to work.