text: Blood poured down Anavha's arm, thick and dark as honeyed wine. The injury from the animal that had attacked him before he opened the black gate was severe. He could barely move his fingers. Natanial stood over him, gripping Anavha's uninjured arm in one hand and his own weapon in the other. Natanial peered out at the unfamiliar landscape, cursing the black gap in the world that had closed behind them. Natanial started up a slurry of Tordinian curses while Anavha wept.
  
  It had happened again – blood, fear, a door to nowhere…
  
  Natanial took him by the shoulders and shook him. Anavha imagined Zezili over him again, yelling "What did you do?"
  
  Anavha gasped. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry…"
  
  "What happened?" Natanial said.
  
  "I… I don't know."
  
  "There was a door. You opened a door. You must have closed it. Open it again. Laine curse you, where did you take us?"
  
  "I… don't know." The sky was black. Anavha saw something very far in the distance, some purple glowing orb that put him in mind of Sina, but Sina was at least two years from rising. It winked out, and the sky was clear again. He wondered if he was going mad.
  
  "Where are the moons?" Natanial said. "Stars, yes, but the moons…?"
  
  Anavha trembled. "Please, take me to my wife. Take me to Zezili. She'll know what to do."
  
  "Laine's eye, you're an omajista," Natanial said, breathless, and started muttering in Tordinian again.
  
  "Please, don't–" and Anavha wanted to finish by saying, "don't tell anyone!" but this man answered to no woman. He was lawless. He would do whatever he liked, and there was no woman here to stop him.
  
  "Where did you take us?" Natanial asked. "Do you know that much? How do you use the power to navigate?"
  
  The air was cool, not cold. There was no snow like there had been in Dorinah. They sat in a great meadow of trampled reddish-brown grass.
  
  His arm throbbed. He clutched it to his chest while he bled. A soft wind started, blowing his hair from his face, and the clouds away from the sky, and there were the moons – big Ahmur and its tiara of satellites, and Zini and Mur.
  
  Natanial gave a whoop when he saw them, and raised his fist to the sky. "We are not so far lost on the web, then," he said. The moons' light illuminated the clearing. Anavha saw the bunched blackness of scrubland on the horizon, but mostly it was broken grass as far as he could see.
  
  "Let's attend your arm," Natanial said. He crouched next to Anavha and took his arm gently. Anavha shuddered. The pain was intense, as if his arm were on fire. "Get your tunic off," Natanial said.
  
  It was difficult, so Natanial helped him. Natanial got behind him and unbound the girdle, then pulled off his tunic. The chill night air met Anavha's skin, and he shivered. The tunic was off, but Natanial remained behind Anavha. Anavha turned. Natanial was staring at his back.
  
  "Did your wife do that to you?" Natanial said softly.
  
  He must have seen the scar on Anavha's back: Zezili's initials, carved into his skin. In the light of the triple moons, it would be easy to see. "I am hers," Anavha said.
  
  Natanial said nothing. He knelt beside Anavha and began tearing up the already shredded sleeve of the tunic. Anavha held out his arm. It looked very thin and pale in the milky light.
  
  "Did she do these as well?" Natanial thumbed the scarred slashes on the inside of Anavha's arm.
  
  "No," Anavha said.
  
  "Someone else?"
  
  "I did," Anavha said.
  
  Natanial grunted and bound Anavha's arm. "I took you for a foppish Dorinah man," Natanial said, "but this is something else. Not all men in Dorinah are treated this way."
  
  "Zezili loves me."
  
  "She hurts you."
  
  Anavha's face felt hot. "Sometimes… sometimes that's all right. Sometimes I deserve it. I even… I even like it, sometimes."
  
  "Some do," Natanial said. He knotted the makeshift bandages. "I will grant you that. But far more common are those who fetishize the abuse they endure because living under the alternative is too much to bear."
  
  "Don't tell me what I feel." Tears burned Anavha's eyes again, and for the first time in a long time, he hated himself for it. Hated to cry about his own life in front of a stranger. "You don't understand anything."
  
  "I understand more than you know," Natanial said. "Come, we need to go on. If this is Aaldia we have a much longer distance to travel back to Tordin."
  
  "Aaldia? How do you know it's Aaldia?"
  
  "The stars," Natanial said.
  
  They traveled all night. When Anavha collapsed, Natanial carried him, lifting him up over his shoulders as if he weighed nothing. And perhaps he did not. He was no one, of importance only to Zezili, and then only if he pleased her. Natanial carried him because Zezili would pay for him.
  
  Finally, Natanial came to a stop. He set Anavha back on his feet. The moons had risen and nearly set.
  
  "What is it?" Anavha asked.
  
  "Lights," Natanial said. "Stay here. I want to make sure it's safe."
  
  "Don't leave me!"
  
  "Anavha."
  
  "Please!"
  
  "Stay three paces behind, then. Laine's bloody spit."
  
  Natanial crept across the broken grass and onto a worn path. He called out in Tordinian. An answering call came from the house in another language, one Anavha didn't recognize.
  
  Natanial yelled something else, then returned to Anavha. "There's a village two miles further on," he said. "We should find a tavern and a room."
  
  "So we are in Aaldia?"
  
  "Yes."
  
  "How did we get here?"
  
  Natanial cocked his head at him. "You took us here, you tell me. Let's just hope it's our Aaldia."
  
  "What does that mean?"
  
  "You really have no idea? Has no one trained you?"
  
  "Zezili would never let the Seekers take me. Never."
  
  Natanial swore again.
  
  When they walked down into town, the moons were high in the sky, and Anavha was exhausted. His armed throbbed and his feet ached. He would give much for a warm meal and a bed.
  
  Anavha expected the tavern they entered to be a loud, raucous affair, full of drunks and people selling their bodies, but even from the outside, this place looked different than a tavern in Dorinah. The town was very small, just one main street. It was paved in clean oblong stones, their seams filled with sand. One half of the village was built into a broad hill. The few buildings with two stories all had their first nestled within the ground, windows and broad doors peering out into the streets. The roofs were flat, not sloped, and Anavha saw a few figures glance down at them from nearby roofs where milky blue fire burned on long poles. Insects buzzed around them, their bodies blinking green, then white, then blue, each as big as Anavha's thumb. They rested on doorframes and hitching posts, giving the whole street a merry glow, as if it were decorated for some festival.
  
  Natanial stepped into a large two storied tavern at the far end of the street. Anavha gasped as he disappeared into a black shroud. Natanial poked his head back out. "It's an illusion. To keep out the bugs. Come in."
  
  Anavha stepped gingerly forward. "Illusion?"
  
  "A parajista-trained door, hexed into place. It will admit you, just not the bugs. Aaldians have the best tricks. Come on, it's warmer in here."
  
  Anavha took Natanial's hand and stepped through. He smelled jasmine and cloves. A small crowd was gathered at the far side of the room, attention rapt on a figure standing on a low dais, surrounded by misty multicolored spheres. The figure was tapping and moving smaller floating spheres and dragging them through the air into the larger ones. As the smaller spheres touched the larger spheres, the small ones disappeared. The room was still but for the low murmur of appreciation when a sphere disappeared, or a collective gasp when the manipulator chose a new orb.
  
  Anavha was drawn to the game. Natanial went to a broad opening in the far side of the room that looked like it opened into the kitchen. A dark woman with a lean face and stout form gave him a warm smile as she wiped her hands on her apron.
  
  The person on the dais was, Anavha assumed, a woman, like the proprietor. Anavha wasn't sure, as his vocabulary gave him just two choices. The woman was lean and dark, with expressive hands. Her low brow was furrowed in concentration as she selected another small sphere. Anavha could see no pattern to the game – the larger spheres were scattered widely just outside her arm's reach, so she had to lean out to place them. The small red scattered spheres were all inside the sweep of her arms. He thought the object of the game had something to do with colors, at first – matching the small purple to the large purple – or maybe it had to do with size, but the only size discrepancy was between small or large sphere. His inability to understand what was going on actually made the game that much more interesting.
  
  "It's a game that the Aaldians play, with doors," Natanial said. "Each projected sphere is a door. Each of the pieces on the board matches one of the doors. They have to choose which piece goes with which door. An old game, but even the young people play it. It's part of the entrance exam for government officials."
  
  "But how is it played?"
  
  "It's something to do with mathematics," Natanial said. "It takes a long time to master, unless you have a head for it. It's calculating the distances between the doors, I believe. Certain ranges of numbers are assigned colors, and the color corresponds to the pieces on the board." He waved a hand. "Not my talent, alas, but Aaldians have a particular passion for numbers. It makes them very good tradespeople. They are mad for this game."
  
  "Do you travel to Aaldia a lot?"
  
  "I am Aaldian, originally. I was born here, anyway."
  
  Anavha looked at the small, black-skinned people around him, then back at the broad, bronze-skinned Natanial. He was uncertain what to say to that. Surely there were Saiduan people born in Dorinah, but they were always Saiduan. No one could be a citizen in Dorinah without… looking like someone from Dorinah. "You don't look like it," Anavha said.
  
  "If you're born here, you're Aaldian," Natanial said. "My mother looked more local than my father, though, to be sure. Just so happens I look more like him than her. You can't always tell a person's parentage in their face."
  
  "How many languages do you speak?"
  
  "Eight."
  
  "Eight! There aren't that many languages in the world."
  
  Natanial laughed. "Sheltered Dorinah child. There are three languages in Dorinah alone – high Dorinah, spoken by your priests and empresses; low Dorinah, spoken by most everyone else; and Daj, the patois the dajians speak. Dhai has two – Woodland Dhai and Valley Dhai. Saiduan has seven – let's not get into that. But it's a big country, and with those kinds of distances, it's inevitable that languages proliferate. Tordin has at least five, and Aaldia, though it recognizes only one common language, has five provinces with very distinct ways of speaking that language. And we have not even discussed the southern continents, like Hrollief, or the eastern kingdoms–"
  
  "I'm foolish, then," Anavha said. "Does that please you?"
  
  "You're not foolish," Natanial said, glancing over at the woman playing the sphere game, frowning as the crowd drew a collective gasp as another sphere winked out. "You're just ignorant. The wonderful thing about being ignorant is that it can be resolved very easily. Foolishness cannot. Once a fool, always a fool."
  
  Anavha turned back to watch the game, too. Only three large spheres remained, but there were over two dozen smaller ones left. As he and Natanial watched, the woman chose a small gray sphere, and flicked it into a large one over her left shoulder. It winked out. A hush descended over the crowd.
  
  She hesitated, then, fingers hovering over the final pieces. Then she plucked out a small sphere and popped in into the larger one at her right.
  
  The misty spheres all turned purple. The crowd howled; some hooted, many groaned. The misty game burst apart. Anavha wondered what parajista had conjured it. Like the bug screen on the door, it all had to be some elaborate gifted invention, though he had never seen a jista in Dorinah do anything like it. The look of defeat on the woman's face was so palpable that it gripped Anavha's heart.
  
  "She chose wrong," Natanial said, rising.
  
  "What happens?"
  
  "They play again tomorrow. Lucky for her, this was a casual game. She wasn't playing for an entrance exam, or the fate of the world, or anything like that. She'll try again. Come. I got us a room."
  
  Anavha followed him upstairs. "I'd like to learn that game," he said. There was something about the complexity of it, the geometry, that captivated him. It was easy to lose yourself in a game like that.
  
  "We have more urgent places to start with your education. On the upside, it's a long way back to Tordin. I'd prefer we didn't rely on your spotty ability with your gift to get us back. There are few things I distrust more than an untrained jista."
  
  "Why would you teach me anything? Aren't I a prisoner?"
  
  Natanial hesitated, his hand on the bannister. "I have seen the fear in your eyes before," he said. "I know what can be achieved when knowledge replaces fear."
  
  "You think I'll become a killer, like you?"
  
  "Not at all. I'm an artist. The killing has its purpose. There's a greater goal. Come, I asked the matron to send up a medic for your arm. I'd prefer you didn't lose it before I delivered you to Saradyn."
  
  "Zezili will come for me."
  
  "I don't doubt it. Saradyn won't either."
  
  "Am I worth a lot, you think?"
  
  "Likely more than Zezili will pay."
  
  "I don't think so."
  
  "It won't matter at all if we're in the wrong world," Natanial said. "Until then, let's work on your mathematics, and your Aaldian. You may need both before the world ends."
  
  Anavha thought that an odd thing to say.