Episode 02
The Nymphen
I was sent with a name. That is how it starts, always: one of us, one name, and a direction.
I'll tell you what I am first, because I'd rather you heard it from me than from the people who've written it down. They write killer, or they write angel, and it's neither, and it's not in between either.
We are called Nymphen. We look like women. We are not women. We are not anything you have a shape for, and I've stopped trying to give you one, because every shape fills in the wrong way. Say: three women on a road at dawn, and you'll be close enough for what follows.
We belong to the ancient kingdom. You'll have heard of it as the closest friend of the walled city with the twelve-thousand-year ledger, which is what that city calls the only neighbour who has never yet tried to kill it. We are older than the walls. We are older than the ledger. We are the safest place in all the worlds, and the reason is the same reason we are the most dangerous: we have never once, in all that time, needed to be careful.
And we are the answer to a question. The question is: what do you do about a person who has done something that cannot be undone.
The answer is us. We come. We find you. And we take your life.
Which is not killing you. Killing is what a bullet does; it ends a thing. What a Nymphe does is take: the years, the account, the whole column in the ledger, out of you and into her. And then you're left standing, exactly where you were, a page with no writing on it, and you can walk around like that for a very long time. People do. You've passed them.
One of us, one name. We read what is in front of us. We do not ask follow-up questions. Write that down; it matters later.
The kingdom heard about six weeks after the clean city went.
Of course it heard. A small clean new city had been built on its border, and the kingdom had sent a princess into it, the fourth one, to marry. She'd married. She'd had six grandchildren of ours, one at a time. And the man she'd married had been sent as well, in a manner of speaking: the right blood, a version of a king, the kind you keep for when you need one. All of that had been in the clean city.
And then there was a place where a city had been. And a rumour that a thumb had done it.
Whose thumb, the rumour didn't say. That's the nature of rumours and also of thumbs.
The kingdom does not file a complaint. It sent three of us, with three names, down the border road towards the crater, and I'm not going to tell you the names, and it isn't tact. A name is the one thing a Nymphe carries in, and a life is the one thing she carries out, and between the two there's nothing left over for you.
We came at dawn. There was already something there.
Not a person. Persons had been there: I could read that, the way you'd read a room somebody's just left. Six of them, on horses, through the night, gone again before the light. A man. A woman with the whole shape of a continent in her head and the wrong note in her mouth. Four more, quiet ones, the kind who can keep their mouths shut; they'd kept them shut so hard I could read the effort. And, in a bag, something small and green and alive, about the size of a loaf, which had not been asked and had come anyway.
What they'd left was a message.
It was cut into the ground of the crater in the language we read, which is older than words: the language a truth is in before somebody translates it into a sentence. It said who had done it. It said why. It said what should happen next. The woman's phrase for it, I learned much later, in her flat voice, was a creative message.
I've never been able to improve on that. Creative, because it wasn't true, or wasn't all true. Creative, because a Nymphe reads what is in front of her and does not ask follow-up questions; I told you that would matter. Creative, because three of us were coming with three names, and they needed there to be different ones.
We read it. We took three lives. We went home.
Not theirs.
That's as much as I'll say, and if you're waiting for me to tell you whose lives, or what the message said, understand that it isn't kept from you. It's in me. What a Nymphe reads, she takes, and it's in the same place the three lives are, and things in that place don't come back out. The man, I heard, cut the whole thing into a diamond the same night, because that's what he does. So it exists. It's just not mine to read twice.
I said I'd learned things later. Here's how.
He came over the border. The man from the crater. Not straight away; a few years after, with the green thing on his shoulder and a star in his eye. He had to talk to somebody, and I was somebody, and I'd already read him once, from the ground, so there wasn't much left to hide. He told me the rest in pieces, walking. I'm putting it in order because he never did.
He'd been a page. Sold down out of a temple in the mountains as a child, meant for a hole in Nepal at eighteen months and not put in it, carried across the world and put in a hat by a prince, and the prince had died on a table, and none of that is my chapter. What's mine is what happened to him at thirty.
He was at the edge of a warm bath, hand on the tiles. His heart did something. There was a hum. His eyes went long, the way a telescope goes long. And a green star came up in his left eye, five points, and he'd been told, by physicians who can keep a man walking for twelve thousand years, that it was a symptom.
It wasn't a symptom. It was a birth.
He woke up, is how he put it. Whatever he'd been carrying since the temple came up through him like a dial being turned, and at that second, a very long way off, an egg he'd never seen cracked and something small put its head out and pointed at him.
That's the star. It's not a mark. It's a place. It's where the dragon was, at the second it looked for him.
It found him in eleven days, which I'm told is the average. Came in under the eastern gate of the walled city at night, between the feet of four hundred dowry-dragons, who all stopped what they were doing and looked down at once, and up the service stair, and into his room, and sat on the hat.
The size of a loaf. They always are.
He looked at it and it looked at him and he said, because he was thirty and an idiot, "Oh no."
And it said, "There you are."
He told me that's the first thing they ever say, and the only thing that matters. He said it very quietly, on a road, a long way from any hat, and I didn't ask a follow-up question, and I'm glad, because I don't think he could have answered one.
The walled city didn't have a word for what he'd become, so it used the old one: avatar. It means the one who has to go and stand in front of things.
The duty, they told him, was peace. The avatar brings peace to the world. Everybody said it the way you'd say the sun comes up, and nobody, in all the time he was there, explained what he was meant to do with a duty like that and a dragon the size of a loaf. So he did what a page does. He watched. He waited for the room to tell him.
The room told him about six weeks after the clean city went. It told him: the Nymphen are coming, three, with three names. And he knew whose, and so did the woman, because they'd both been in the war room when the thumb came down.
That's what the crater was for. The first job the avatar ever did was to stand in front of three of us and make us look at something else.
It worked. I want that noted, on their behalf. It worked completely.
And then it kept working, which was the problem.
The woman from the crater had a sister: the scientist, gold hair, the smile, the one who'd built the clean city in the first place. She'd known about us. Everybody knows about us. What she found out afterwards was what they'd done: the message. What it said. Who it named.
You'd expect that to break a person, or shame her, or send her back into some silence. It did none of those things. She'd already been through the hardest thing in her life, by a hospital bed, sitting with a man who'd been shot and got up again, and what came out the far side of that had no bottom left to hit.
She got worse.
He didn't have a better word and the city didn't either. A person you could not be in a room with. Kind to everyone, still, one at a time, in a corridor; and then in the Kanzlei, on the rail, with her hand on the pedals, doing things to four hundred households that he wouldn't list and I didn't ask about. And if you asked her, she'd smile the gold smile and say: "You did worse in a crater, page."
And she was right. That was the point. She had it over them and she'd always have it over them, because a creative message is a thing you can never afterwards say you didn't send.
I read what's in front of me. What was in front of me, when he said that, was a man who'd taken three lives by proxy and never once been able to put them down.
Now the part that's actually mine, because it's my kingdom.
We wanted the prince back too.
If it had only been the scientist, this would be a story about a woman. But the boy with the hat had our blood in him, from the marriages, a long way back or not so long, and the ancient kingdom does not let go of a thing it considers its own. It had a plan for him. Older ways. Nothing to do with clean cities and calculated light. Our way.
So he came over.
A page from a hole in Nepal, with a small green dragon in a bag and a green star in his eye and a duty nobody had explained, across the border that isn't a border, into the safest place in all the worlds. To learn how we meant to bring his friend back, and, if he could, to be in the room when we did.
He should not have been able to live here. I'll be plain about that. Someone from the first world, which is what we call yours, cannot simply live in ours. The air is wrong. The time is wrong. Things that are decoration where you are, are alive here, and things that are alive where you are, we sit on. You need someone to walk beside you.
He had one mentor. One. In all that time.
I know who. I'm not going to say, and this time it is tact; he asked. I'll say what the mentor did, because that's not a secret. Somebody walked beside him, for a long time, and taught him to navigate. That was the word. Not fix. Not save. Find the way through the room without breaking anything that's alive.
I saw the first lesson. I was on the road that day; we're on the road a great deal.
He'd stopped by a stone at the border, the sort you'd rest a hand on, and put his hand out towards it, and the mentor, without hurrying, said:
"Don't touch that. That's a person."