Nightfire | The Whispering Wall #1

Forty Eight: Meetings

Yddris was waiting for him in the courtyard when he stepped out. It had been dark when he arrived, and it was dark when he left. He was already tired of it. He missed the sun. He missed normality. He missed libraries where shrieking maggots didn't hide in the crates.

He sighed. Yddris was facing the other way when he left the temple porch, but turned just at the moment Jordan reached him, a sandwich wrapped in wax paper in one hand. Jordan's stomach growled. The priests hadn't offered him anything to eat or drink all day.

"Vek's?" he asked, grinning when Yddris nodded. He unwrapped his food with feverish desperation, posted a sliver of meat into the depths of his hood which was snatched up immediately, and then dug in.

"How was it?" Yddris asked, leading them out of the courtyard and into a narrow street. They plunged into total blackness, the light from the streetlamps not reaching this far, and Jordan stopped dead. Slowly, Yddris released his gift, and the world glowed with magic.

"Quiet," Jordan replied around a mouthful, and began walking again. "Boring. Best day I've had since I got here, honestly." He sensed anticipation in Yddris's silence, and added, "I didn't see anyone."

"Good," Yddris murmured. "I think."

Jordan frowned, but didn't press it. He didn't want to get into this conversation again.

He screwed up the paper from his sandwich and shoved it in his pocket, then thought for a moment. He'd managed to piece together a few words he'd read in the logbooks, based on letters alone; names, mostly, since they didn't require any complicated grammar. He'd been half-looking for Nictavian names that weren't too unbearable or alien in the event of being pressed to choose, and one had stuck out to him.

"When you choose a name," he asked slowly, "Do you just kinda know when it's the right one?"

Yddris glanced at him. "Sometimes."

"Is it..." he was bound to sound stupid, but he asked anyway, "is it a kind of magic?"

"Some would argue it falls more into the category of spirituality," Yddris replied. "Depends on if you believe in a greater purpose or not. The oldest books in our guild's records, from the first Unspoken, liken it to part of a puzzle; there are myriad ways to live, a million people you could become, and the pieces to make you you are scattered across the universe. Which pieces you find, in what order, and whether or not you discard them are the decisions that shape your soul. Some believe that, when your life has made the divergence into the ranks of the Gifted, it helps you find one of the pieces. A true name. Most people never think to look."

"Do you believe that?"

"It has its appeal."

"But you don't actually believe it?"

"If we all had fractured souls, Geists would have a much harder time getting a full meal. But they seem to do just fine for themselves."

"You had to make it morbid, didn't you?"

Yddris snorted lightly. "We're talking about missing pieces of soul, boy, it was already morbid. What were you angling at? If it was just an errant thought, then, no, it isn't magic. The selection of a name could be spiritual, if that's your thing, or you might just really like it."

"Just asking," Jordan said. He hoped Yddris couldn't tell he was flushed with embarrassment.

"If, however," Yddris said after a moment, "you have stumbled across one that you like, make sure that the first person you speak to is Ortin, in private."

"Okay... Why?"

"Precautions."

They emerged from the dingy grasp of the dead quarter, the river stretching out before them. Jordan couldn't get across the bridge fast enough; inside the stacks there had been some sense of security, but the quarter itself had earned its name several times over. The dead quarter wasn't dead in the sense that nothing was there; the dead quarter was an atmosphere more than a place, cold and hostile. His magic-assisted sight picked out figures crouched in doorways and alleyways he would have missed otherwise, who watched them pass with greedy eyes. If it wasn't for Yddris, Jordan was sure he would have been robbed by now – and by the looks of some of them, that was if he was lucky.