Ikenty

The bird caught Sen before his second foot touched the threshold.

Tia heard one beat of wings, a sound like a sail struck flat by wind. Then Sen was on his back with a black talon across his chest. The scrap of white cloth he had been reaching for fluttered down beside his hand.

She ran toward him. Heat drove her back.

Above the talon rose a body clothed in overlapping feathers, broad enough to fill the entrance. But the head bending over Sen was a cat’s: black muzzle, upright ears, pale eyes that followed Tia as she staggered sideways. Nothing in that face hurried. The foot had already done everything necessary.

“Don’t move,” she told Sen.

“I wasn’t planning to.” He tried to laugh. The sound stopped under the talon.

They had kept each other company since the riverbank where they had awakened without their bodies. Sen had found the descending path. Tia had remembered the names to speak at its turnings. He called her Mistress whenever she corrected him, which was often, and she had begun to think that when they reached the fields beyond, she might tolerate him there as well.

Now his heels scraped furrows in the dust.

“Ikenty,” she said.

The cat’s ears turned toward her.

She spoke the name again, carefully, as she had learned it. Then she addressed the entrance, the veiling of the weary god, putting all the steadiness she possessed into the words.

A flame ran up the left side of the opening. In its light she saw a hanging stretched behind the creature. White linen covered the passage from lintel to floor. A long tear divided its lower edge.

Sen lifted his chin, waiting.

The foot did not rise.

“Again,” he whispered.

Tia began again. Halfway through, she heard herself pleading rather than naming. She stopped.

Ikenty lowered his head until his whiskers almost touched Sen’s face.

The Torn Edge

Tia set her bundle on the ground. It was the one thing she had carried from the riverbank: a strip of fine linen wound around her needles and an old bone bodkin. She had mended temple hangings with those tools for thirty years. When her fingers grew stiff, she had taught younger women to make the stitches and kept the difficult corners for herself.

She selected the bodkin.

Sen saw it and shook his head as far as the talon allowed.

“I’m not going to stab him.”

She approached along the wall, where the heat was bearable, holding out her empty hand. Ikenty watched her. At this distance she could see the separate dark plates of the toes and, between them, Sen’s tunic drawn tight against his ribs.

She slipped the bodkin beneath the outer claw.

“Breathe out,” she said.

Sen obeyed. She leaned her weight against the bone.

It snapped.

The talon settled lower. Sen’s open mouth made no sound.

Tia let go of the broken tool. “Stop. I’ve stopped.”

The pressure eased enough for him to drag in a shallow breath. Behind the creature, the torn linen stirred. A narrow line of light appeared through it, whiter than the fire along the doorway.

Tia looked up.

All her working life, she had been permitted to touch the cloth and forbidden to see what it covered. Priests brought the hangings folded, their damaged edges turned outward. Once, a young attendant had started to tell her what stood behind them, and an older man had silenced him before he finished his sentence.

She had imagined gold. Later, stone. Near the end, when pain kept her awake, she had imagined that there was nothing behind the linen at all.

The tear lifted another finger’s width.

Ikenty’s head swung toward it.

Tia caught herself leaning forward. She stepped back instead, and her palm struck the heated stone beside the opening.

Pain flashed through her fingers. She pulled away with a cry.

“So we can still burn,” Sen said faintly.

She cradled her hand against her stomach. A blister was rising across the pad beneath her thumb. Of all the things she might have expected to lose at death, pain had seemed the most certain.

Sen stared at the hand. “I’m sorry.”

“For the heat?”

His eyes moved to the fallen cloth.

Tia followed them. The scrap had not dropped from above. One of its edges was straight; the other was ragged, trailing threads. On the hanging behind Ikenty, a strip of the same width was missing.

“What did you do?”

“I thought a piece might help.”

“Help what?”

“Get us through the next place. You knew the names here. There might be something further on that neither of us knows.”

She looked at him until he turned his face away.

“I wanted something to carry,” he said.

The fire brightened along the lintel. A brown edge curled on the scrap beside his hand.

Tia had spent the whole journey correcting his words, choosing when they walked and when they rested. She had carried her little bundle where he could see it. Once, when he offered to hold it for her, she had said he would lose it.

“Can you reach the cloth?” she asked.

His fingers crept toward it.

Ikenty’s claws closed.

Sen went still. Tia waited until his breathing returned, then crouched beyond the foot and picked up the scrap herself.

It crumbled at the browned end.

What the Cloth Concealed

She laid the fragment against her knee. Too narrow. Even before it burned, it could not have covered the tear it had started. Sen had pulled down; the strain had run upward along an old fold, splitting sound linen above the strip he took.

Tia knew that kind of damage. A careless hand could make it in a moment. Repairing it took half a morning.

Sen did not have half a morning.

She glanced at the tool bundle.

“No,” he said.

“You don’t know what I’m thinking.”

“You looked at it the way you look at me when I’ve done something stupid.”

The wrapping was long enough. Folded twice, it would cover the opening. There were needle holes in it already, where she had tested thread and tucked unfinished work. She could fasten the upper corners to the hanging, then secure the bottom within Sen’s reach.

If Ikenty let her approach.

If her hand could hold a needle.

Beyond the tear the white light swelled, and for a moment she saw a curve within it. A shoulder, perhaps. The edge of something resting against a larger shape. She could not tell.

Sen saw her looking.

“It’s right there,” he whispered.

“I know.”

“You’ve come all this way.”

He meant to give her something. Even pinned beneath that foot, frightened and ashamed, he was trying to offer what he had found.

Tia turned her bundle over. Her needles clicked against each other inside it.

She had imagined standing before the hidden thing with whole hands and an answer waiting for her. Instead she was kneeling in dust beside a man who could barely breathe. If she pulled the tear wider, she might see. He might even help her.

She unwound the linen.

The needles fell into her lap. She chose two, pulled a length of thread free from the wrapping’s hem, and tried to pass it through an eye. Her burned thumb would not meet her forefinger. The thread slid away.

“Give it here,” Sen said.

She hesitated.

“I can see a hole, Mistress.”

She laid both needles beside his free hand and pulled a second length of thread from the hem. He threaded them with small, deliberate movements, his cheek pressed to the ground. When he had finished, she took them without correcting the uneven tails and tucked the spare into her sleeve.

Then she rose with the folded cloth held before her.

Ikenty turned his black face toward her. One wing opened a little. Its feathers darkened the firelight on Sen’s body.

“I have something to mend,” she said.

She took a step.

The free foot shifted. Three hooked claws scraped the stone within reach of her ankles.

Tia stopped. Sweat ran beneath her arms. She waited for the wing to fold, but it remained open.

She could still put down the cloth and retreat to the wall. She could call the name again until Sen stopped asking her to.

Instead she lifted the patch across the white slit and stepped close enough to fasten it.

The hidden light disappeared.

The Last Stitch

Tia pushed the needle through the hanging’s sound edge. Her thumb failed halfway. She caught the shaft between her teeth and pulled it through, tasting metal and salt.

Ikenty stood beside her, so close that the feathers of his breast brushed her elbow. She kept her eyes on the weave.

One stitch. A second. The patch hung from its upper corner, leaving the bottom loose.

She reached across. The burned skin of her palm stretched, and her hand opened before she could stop it.

The needle dropped.

It struck Sen’s shoulder and slid against the talon.

Neither of them moved.

From behind the hanging came a pressure like a warm breath. The loose patch lifted toward Tia. For an instant the slit opened directly before her eyes.

She shut them and pressed her forearm against the cloth.

“Sen. Hold the bottom.”

He touched the hanging, then stopped. She felt his hesitation through the linen.

“Hold it closed,” she said.

His fingers caught the lower edge. The strain eased against her arm.

Tia opened her eyes onto cloth. A little crooked ladder of stitches ran down beside her wrist. She found the second needle tucked into her sleeve and worked it through both layers. Sen held the bottom steady while she made the knot. He was trembling so badly that she had to follow the movement with her whole arm.

At last she bit through the thread.

The covering remained in place.

Tia lowered her hands. One corner sagged. She had made better repairs in bad light, while angry, while half asleep. She waited for the weight of the cloth to pull her stitches loose.

They held.

Ikenty bent his cat’s head toward the patch. His muzzle passed over the place where the light had shown. Then he lifted his foot.

Sen curled onto his side and coughed. Tia caught him under the arm before he could try to stand. Behind them, the great bird settled across the entrance, its wings folding over its body. The hanging moved once against its feathers and grew still.

A narrow path continued along the outer wall. Tia had seen it before. She had thought it could not be their way because it led past the entrance instead of through it.

Now she helped Sen toward it.

After a few steps she looked back. Her remaining needles lay scattered in the dust beside the broken bodkin. Beyond them, her linen hung over the tear.

Sen waited without speaking.

She turned toward the path again. When her burned hand slipped from his sleeve, he took it carefully between both of his.

“Not so tight,” she said.

He loosened his fingers.

They went on.