Nomvula

51. The Eastern Storm

"How confident are you?" the Queen asked.

Anathi didn't need to turn her avatar away from the window. Her consciousness saw the Queen sitting in a copper bath in the middle of the bedroom, leaning forward and sliding her hands along her shins, white suds sloughed down the curve of her back as she did so. The movement was lethargic, deathly so. A human mouth and nose would not pick out the boa salts in the water or the yeasty stench of beer on her breath, but the effects of the deep-sleeper ritual were clear as the beat of her slowing heart. She would need to come out soon.

"Please." A bead of sweat rolled down the crease of her brow, to the tip of her nose, and dripped into the bathwater. "How prepared?"

An audacious question. Anathi's human part, that grit of sand buried at the bottom of her seismic consciousness,  was almost offended.

Anathi pushed a bit more of her consciousness into the avatar, and the room took on a slight haze. A moment ago, she had been aware of the twelve different tannins in the floorboards, as well as the specific ash in the soap that had washed the Queen's linens, but as she centred herself the clay body, the room melted into a swirl of old wood, fresh cotton, and steam.

In that clay imitation, she centred herself just below where a human liver would be. An invisible tether linked her spirit to the rest of the house. She tugged on it, and ceiling trembled. Annoyance. It had been so long since she had done this. She tugged again, a little firmer. A clod of clay fell from the ceiling and plonked on her shoulder. She drank it in. She tugged again, and caught the next clod in her pure-black hand.

Her avatar didn't grow any bigger or change shape as she did this. Clay absorbed clay, deepening to the density of wood, then bone, then bedrock. When Anathi was done, the ceiling was bare wooden beams and the floorboards creaked underneath her. (She had made sure she was standing along a reinforcement beam in the tunnel below.)

"Come closer," the Queen said, eyes hooded. "Let me make sure."

It was awkward shifting the weight of an elephant with the frame of a twelve-year-old girl. Somewhere in that grit of memory, Anathi had the vague notion of climbing out of a lake after a morning of swimming and taking those first heavy steps onto the shore. By the time she stood in front of the Queen, however, her balance had mostly reconciled with the impossibility of the clay's properties.

"Strong?" 

Anathi nodded.

The Queen pressed her thumb against her canine and drew a single bead of blood. Every particle of Anathi's spirit told her to attack, to quell danger, to staunch, but the Queen had drawn her own blood so it would not be too much for her to control the Sunspear. Still, the change was enough to remind her what itching skin felt like.

Only the old King and the Queen's family had ever looked deep enough into her eyes to notice the slim yellow fractals in the brown irises, flecks of gold in a sandstorm. They sparked when she pricked her thumb, then flared, then glowed bright enough to reflect off that single pearl of blood. Something changed in the air. It wasn't as overt as a foul smell or the thickness of humidity, but despite its subtlety, it was low and wide and far-reaching. A glamour, meant to settle fear into the hearts of man in the way a coming quake told frogs to scatter.

She looked up at Anathi's featureless face. The bathwater rippled around her, not away but towards. The tub's legs groaned, and at the bottom of its copper belly, a drop of condensation had formed, less than a hand's width from the floor. It quivered, then dripped.

The Queen's strike was viper-quick. Well, quick by the standards of creatures bound to the temporal plane. Anathi watched the Queen's fist arc up towards her chest with all the interest one watched a leaf drifting along a meandering stream. That was disappointing. She had great respect for the Queen but it was moments of paranoia like this that tempted her to kill the corrupt power within her once and for all.