She Who Hears All Whispers

By DaVaun Sanders

The Matriarch rules over Mataano Qahndo with casual ruthlessness and unimaginable power. Her focus is entirely on the Bay, which seems to contain the mysterious source of the phage — an infectious agent that is both the cause of a bewildering array of maladies and the power source for all magic in the Revealed Lands.

Suraldisha is a woman who has lost everything but a tiny pouch of bones and an all-consuming need for revenge. She is one of hundreds streaming into the city, hoping to offer their bodies as vessels for phage in service of the Matriarch. But she is hiding more than seething hatred and a fish knife in her sun robes.

Will she get close enough to the Matriarch to carry out her plan? And what does justice look like in a world where power is drawn from the suffering of so many?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dancing Star Press
• Release date: Jul 23, 2019
• ISBN: 9781732141834

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Copyright © 2019 DaVaun Sanders

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any informational retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

She Who Hears All Whispers by DaVaun Sanders

First published by Dancing Star Press in 2019

w.ww.dancingstarpress.com

Cover Illustration by Chelsea Geter

Dinkus design by Vectors Market from Flaticon

ISBN: 978-1-7321418-3-4

For the Twins

I approach the city ruled by She Who Hears All Whispers well after second dawn. Two guards tense at my passage, peering closely as if they somehow sense my intent. But how could they? Hundreds of weary riftlanders drag themselves through the northern gate of Mataano Qahndo for today’s celebration. Hope carves their hearts hollow and sunlight etches blindness into their eyes as the rising Twins climb higher in the sky. Deep gongs reverberate from the dark six-sided spires silhouetted by the suns, trembling the bridge beneath my feet.

The guards descend the steps from their overlook and press through the ragged throng, straight for me. Their faces are pinched; the day will be hot. Riftlanders scurry away from their approach. Soon I shuffle alone across the gleaming bridge, paved with the shells of brilliant white heckler crabs and burnished red slickback turtles . I stop. Nothing should give away my familiarity with this trek and the city. My split-skirt is travel worn but not yet ragged, my sun cloak is as plain as any other riftland villager. This morning after first dawn’s break, I held my face over the reflection of a tidal pool until I saw nothing but a malleable vassal’s gaze. One ready to be chosen for the Matriarch’s kaydka.

Move your feet, rift rat. Step into the shade.

I obey. The first bronze-scalped woman parses me from eyes to ankles with a bored, stern gaze. The second uses her hands. Rough but practiced fingers canvass my skin. Her nails are cracked and curling away from their beds, though she’s dyed the tips in blue casmus to disguise them. I swallow. Her veins at each wrist are an alarming shade of black from a common strain of phage. Either clotting fever, or vein blister sickness. She must be kaydka, which marks the stern guard as her siphoner. My breath catches when her hand discovers the hilt of the knife within my split-skirt’s pocket, a rusted old fish-gutter.

Nothing. She addresses the first in a scandalized tone. At all! Search yourself if you don’t believe me, Bashra.

The first guard, Bashra, flashes a frown back at their stone overlook, where a dozen more women whoop at the pair of them. They all wear the same sleeveless orange tunics and black neckbands as the guards before me. If that’s true, you just lost me six sakhma, riftlander. Bashra thumbs aside the second guard aside to search me herself. Where are you from? she asks, calloused palms probing for pustules beneath my earlobes, calloused eyes searching for rashes or open sores hidden by my hairline. My skin is shamefully clean in their eyes. How did you arrive here?

Draft swoop out of Scorcia. So I am to be the gate guards’ sport. I consider it a small humiliation in exchange for gaining entrance to Mataano Qahndo, at least until her touch lingers on the small leather pouch that dangles from my neck. She squeezes my daughter’s tiny knuckle bones curiously . My stomach clenches. I kneel as if the Matriarch herself stood before me. The gesture is ridiculous, but pulls my daughter’s pouch free of Bashra’s undeserving grasp. The third crosswing’s leather nearly caught fire on our rise, just there. I gesture vaguely to the horizon behind me, where Darkuzia, the greater Twin is already cooking the descending rifts for a hundred leagues in every direction. Razored fissures sweep across the entire horizon, radiating out from the Great Bay like frozen waves of shattered stone. The updraft from the Great Bay finally pulled us down — there were only five of us — but the pilot, she said that’s shallow fortunes for Half Season, and we should all thank the Boundless Mother for not draining the Bay like the mongers all say she will and —

Riftlander... Bashra pulls me roughly to my feet, and continues searching for malady of any value. The rising jeers from the guards’ platform deepen the bronze in her cheeks. You come today, of all days — to my gate, no less, when there are five others — and bear no tribute? No phage?

But I have! I roll up the hem of my split-skirt, exposing a sickle-shaped scar, still pink and raised against the brown of my thigh. My prayer is simple, Twins blur their sight for just a moment and let me pass.

The two grow still and share a long look. A handful of travelers crossing the bridge see the scar before the fabric covers it again. They press on in a sudden haste to be anywhere else. A few turn back the way they came; there are other gates into Mataano Qahndo.

Tes...that’s barely a cycle old. Bashra assesses my old wound. This was a mistake. No longer a hollow-domed riftlander , I’ve grown just unusual enough to kindle her suspicions. Give or take a week.

Tes coughs into the back of her hand. How did you come by this? she demands. Strange wound for a Scorcia villager to suffer.

Meekness, half-truths will see me into the city. Twins, be kind. I squeeze my daughter’s tiny fingers for luck before

I reply. A witch in my village thought to siphon the phage without guidance.

Bashra and Tes both spit reflexively, affronted at the notion of phagefire in a man’s bumbling hands. I didn’t know phage witches had spread as far as Scorcia, Tes murmured. The Boundless Mother will purge them soon enough.

Soon enough, Bashra agrees. She kisses two fingers and raises them to the sky. As the Twins give light.

If they don’t kill themselves first. At their scowls I add quickly, He burned half my village before phagefire killed him, too.

These words, at least,