Reclamation

"The Nameless Powers, where they watched through the Black Wall, saw the Aunorante Sangh breeding their servants the way a farmer breeds pigs. They saw, too, that they were building their own Realm that their servants might have a fortress from which to launch attacks upon the People. The Nameless knew those servants would one day be sent into the Realm. So the Nameless Powers spoke new words. Metthew Garismit, they said, and they created their own servant and opened the Black Wall so he might walk down to the Realm.

"Garismit knew his name from the beginning and he knew that to save the Realm from the Aunorante Sangh, he would need to move it to where the Aunorante Sangh could not reach it.

"The Teachers say that Garismit went into the belly of the Realm and spoke to it with its own name. That is not all he did, Aria.

"To make the world hear him, and to hear it, he needed the stones and their keepers. He went first to the Royal and the Noble. But they had hidden their stones in their money houses and would not dig them out. He went to the Bondless, but they had gambled the stones away years ago and did not know where they were. He went to the Bonded, but the slave had given the stones for a master's favor and did not know where they were.

"So Garismit went to the Notouch. He called her by her name—Clear Sight—and Clear Sight took her stones into her hands. Garismit opened the ground for Clear Sight and he led her down the paths to the center of the earth. The stones became eyes and ears and the Realm saw Garismit and heard him as he spoke its name and it moved at his command."

Mother had rumbled with the thong of a leather pouch then. Aria could still remember the musty smell that rose from the leather.

"Hold out your hands, daughter."

Feeling like she was dreaming, Aria had held out her bandaged hands. Her mother laid the stones in them and Aria gasped, partly from the pain of their smooth weight against her fresh hand marks, but mostly from their beauty.

"These are Clear Sight's stones," Mother said. "We are her daughters, named by the Nameless and born of their substance. We serve the Nameless by keeping them safe and close. The Aunorante Sangh still seek us. The Nameless Powers may send another servant to save us from them again. The Nameless themselves may return. When they do, they will need the stones and we must be ready with them." Mother tucked her hand under Aria's chin and raised her daughter's eyes away from the beautiful spheres. "This is the beginning of the truth, daughter of my blood, Aria of the Black Wall. There is more, and I will teach it to you. We can only speak of these things when the world is protected by the Black Wall. When the sun comes again, you cannot let anyone know anything has changed for you."

Mother'd taken the stones back, then led her daughter back to her mat. Aria spent that night shivering in the dark, but now from wonder rather than cold.

Aria kept her silence as she traveled with the other women and children to the cities and she did not show anything had changed. But something had. She knew it when she listened to the Teachers. Thoughts crept unbidden into her head when she was supposed to be filling it with the words of the Nameless Powers and Metthew Garismit.

... the Notouch are the dirt and stone of the world, but I'm not Notouch. I'm born of the stones and born of the Black Wall. If the Teachers could lose the story of the stones, what else could they lose?

If names given by the Nameless can become corrupted by the speaking of men, what else can become corrupted?

And always, always, through the other thoughts, through the anger that blossomed and the rebellion that grew into willful and deliberate heresy she remembered that the Nameless Powers had condemned their best to be Notouch. The knowledge of who she was and how she had been wronged by the Nameless Powers and all their servants shaped her life from her Marking Day to the day she'd walked unafraid up to the Skymen and asked to know how she could be of use.