Naive

> “Before the first fire was struck, there was only Talay the black, unmoving water that held no reflection.”

> — *From the Fragments of the Asena-Bitig, Verse I*

---

Ertan ran.

Ahead of him, Tomris’s long brown hair whipped behind her like a war-banner. She glanced back every few strides, and each time she confirmed he was still on her heel, she flashed him a grin and pushed harder. That grin was the one thing Ertan wished he could keep. It was fast, proud, and fearless in a way he had never learned to be.

He wanted to freeze the moment. To seal it inside one of his precious life-essence traps and carry it with him for the rest of his life.

But they had a ritual to break.

Or fix, depending on who lived through the next hour.

The forty-third Grand Ritual was already underway. Thirteen hundred volunteers and thirteen hundred sacrifices stood on the holy platform at the heart of Kut-Orda, the holy city — the largest Akın ever launched at the other side, where the magical surges had been eating the world year by year. Thirteen hundred names in thirteen hundred temple scrolls, all of them about to be sung into the archives as Akıncı — the Crossed. Legends. Heroes of the Kaganit.

Or, more accurately, bodies. Thirteen hundred bodies, to buy a single passage into the Ergenekon, the realm between worlds. The same passage had been opened forty-two times in thirty years, and forty-two times, nothing had returned but silence.

The Akıncı of the thirty-eighth had been his first teacher at the Academy. The thirty-ninth had been his father’s old squire. The fortieth had been a girl from his first tutoring class.

Ertan was going to end it today. He had to. The worse the surges grew, the longer the Akıns ran and the higher the sacrifice numbers climbed, and every climb of the number made him sick to his stomach.

The outer plaza came up fast. Tomris skidded around the last corner of the pilgrim road and Ertan followed half a step behind, his satchel slapping against his ribs. The crowd opened in front of them like a dam giving way.

Half a million pilgrims.

That was a conservative count. They filled every stone of the plaza, every rooftop, every balcony of the seven towers that ringed the holy ground. Kut-Orda had been built around this place, not the other way around. The city’s avenues all aimed inward like the spokes of a wheel, and at the hub of the wheel stood the statue of Ülgen Han, Lord of the Above, hand of Tengri. The statue had been carved from a single slab of mountain granite by a sculptor whose name had been stripped from the record on purpose. The work was supposed to belong to the god, not the artist.

Ülgen’s open palms lifted toward the sky, and in the shadow of those palms, raised on a circular platform thirty paces across, the ritual was already alive.

Ertan’s stride broke for half a second so he could read it.

He couldn’t help it. His hands shook when he tried to cast, but they had never shaken when he studied craft.

The platform’s outer ring burned with root-sigils. They were gathering. Every pilgrim’s voice, every praying breath, every belief in the plaza below was being drawn up by the root-sigils and channeled inward like a hundred rivers running into a single pool.

The middle ring was binding-sigils. Those locked the collected power into the bodies of the Akıncı lined up around the spiral.

The innermost ring was the crossing pattern itself. A tight spiral of glyphs carved into dark metal -moonstone alloy- prepared for the grand ritual. Today, it would tear a temporary seam between Kut-Dünya and the Ergenekon.

Simple, in principle. Elegant, in craft. Monstrous, in cost.

A life for a single passage.

Ertan’s satchel thudded against his side, and inside it, something small and alive shifted. His throat tightened.

“Keep up!” Tomris shouted.

“I am keeping up!”

“You are not!”

She was right. She wasn’t even out of breath.

They hit the outer ring of temple guards. Two men in pale blue sashes spotted them and broke into a run. Tomris didn’t slow. She threw her hands forward, and the air in front of her folded into a staircase of her own making.

Light and Shadow.

That was her inheritance. The Turan line had bred teleporters and binders for six generations, and Tomris had come out of the womb drawing both breaths at once. She wasn’t the teleporter her father was -not yet- but she was the only student in her year who could form Light and Shadow constructs on a run, at full speed, without faltering. Each step hung in the air in front of her as a pale plane of Light, braced underneath by a black vein of Shadow that locked it against gravity. The stairs climbed the platform’s side in four swift bounds.

“Up, up, up!” she called, already on the second step.

Ertan hit the first step at a sprint.

It held. As long as Tomris kept it held.

It always held, and he always distrusted it anyway. Light-and-Shadow didn’t feel like stone. It felt like a drum skin with something serious underneath. His boot sank half a finger’s width. The Shadow beneath caught him and shoved back up. The sensation was wrong. His stomach agreed it was wrong. He ignored his stomach and climbed.

On the platform, the chant broke.

Forty shamans in white and gold stood in a great ring around the spiral, and the gray-bearded man at their center had just opened his eyes.

Magister Sanqar Turan.

Head of the Ritual Arm of the Gök Akademi. Master teleporter ,the finest in the Kaganit, the only living shaman who could cross the length of a battlefield in a single breath without losing a finger to the jump. Master of Light and Shadow. Ertan’s oldest living teacher.

Tomris’s father.

Sanqar was tall and rawboned in the way of men who had been soldiers before they were scholars. His gray beard reached past his ceremonial sash. His hands were lifted over the spiral, and the Kut-draw was pouring out of them like water from an upturned jar. He did not stop the chant when he saw his daughter. He only flicked two fingers, and the guards running up behind Ertan staggered and went still, pinned by a Shadow-bind around their ankles.

His eyes gray, cold and tired found Ertan’s.

Ertan knew how hard the old man had worked to find thirteen hundred souls for this Akın. And he knew, too, that today he was going to humiliate that work in front of the entire Kaganit. There was no version of this that did not cost Sanqar Turan something. The only thing Ertan could offer in return was the proof: that all of it could end. That after today, no Bahadur, no shaman, not even the Kutless of the border companies would need to beg a pilgrim to die for them. That the surges might finally stop bleeding the world.

If the regime did not throw them all in the dark for trying first.

*He’s not surprised,* Ertan thought. *He knew we’d come.*

Then he caught the small twitch at the corner of Sanqar’s right eye.

*Well. Maybe a little surprised.*

Ertan cleared the last step and dropped into a crouch on the platform’s edge.

The wood under his boots was two millennia old and saturated with a century of ritual. It felt warm. Hot, almost. The closer he got to the spiral, the more the air tasted of copper and burned mine-stone.

He reached into his satchel and lifted out two things.

The first was Canavar.

*Canavar.* Monster. A joke-name, and also the truest name Ertan had ever given anything. The little golem fit in one hand, about the shape of a stubby-legged cat crossed with a pup. His clay body was patched with sewn linen along the belly, where Ertan had opened and rebuilt him a dozen times. His amber eyes —two chips of real moonstone, the most expensive stones Ertan had ever owned— glowed faintly in the Kut-charged air.

Inside Canavar’s small body lay forty-seven essence-soaked mine-stones, connected by hundreds of mineral filaments in a threading pattern Ertan had designed himself. Vein-Weaving. The art of layering Kut-pathways inside a construct until the flow no longer ran in simple loops and it moved like thought, with logic riding on top of it.

No other golem in the Academy had more than three Heart-Stones. Canavar had forty-seven. Smaller, cheaper, repurposed stones but enough to power his small, strange motions. More than enough to power a crossing, and return.

And when Kut ran through Canavar in the right pattern, at the right density, the stones wept. Tiny gold drops gathered at the junctions where the threading was densest. Life Essence. The same substance that a sacrificed body released now produced here by a handful of stones and clay and careful, patient craft.

Ertan had proven it alone in his room, weeks ago, on the night of a random Tuesday.

He had not told anyone but Tomris. He had not let anyone but Tomris practice.

He set Canavar down in the center of his own carefully drawn counter-spiral and pulled out the second object.

The polyhedron.

Twenty faces of pure blown crystal, each edge inlaid with a ha salary. The most precise piece of craft he had ever made with a master craftsmen, and the only vessel i salary. The most precise piece of craft he had ever made with a master craftsmen, and the only vessel iir-thin line of silver-lead alloy. An essence-trap. Four months of grinding. Three months of Ertan’s salary. The most precise piece of craft he had ever made with a master craftsmen, and the only vessel in the Academy capable of holding raw Life Essence without weeping it through its own walls. Inside the crystal, nothing — empty space, waiting.

le city what was possible.

He could have filled it in his room, but he wanted to show the whole city what was possible.

He set it down at the spiral’s outer edge.

“Tomris,” he said. Then, louder: “Jump!”

“Five seconds,” she called back.

She was already drawing the sigils for her own teleport. Her hands moved in quick, practiced arcs. Light-and-Shadow in a tight ring. Not a long jump. Her range was short — ten, maybe fifteen paces on a good day. She claimed twenty-five, but that would have made her sick, and anymore than that might have taken a body part with it. Enough to cross the platform at the moment of the crossing and ride Canavar’s essence across the world-seam.

That was the plan. That had always been the plan.

Tomris crosses. Canavar drains. The polyhedron holds his life essence. The Academy learns that a golem can replace a human sacrifice. Tomris returns. No more forty-third. No more forty-fourth. No more thirteen hundred names in thirteen hundred scrolls. After that, every Bahadur, every shaman, even the Kutless soldiers could go through without begging a pilgrim to bleed for them. The surges would stop being a tax on the next generation. The world would finally stop bleeding.

Unless the regime change everyone whispered about came first, and threw the work back by twenty years.

His hands shook as he began to draw the collector-glyph in chalk around Canavar’s paws.

*It shouldn’t shake,* he thought. *I have practiced this a thousand times.*

“Don’t betray me now, hands,” he muttered. “You gave up manifesting years ago. You don’t get to give up on this too.”

They shook the way they always shook when he tried to cast. The body’s old habit. A childhood-broken thing the healers at the House of Umay had never managed to repair.

He drew anyway.

Chalk. Willow-leaf sigil. Binding-stroke. Counter-willow. A hair-thin line connecting Canavar to the polyhedron. The pattern came out clean. His hands had practiced this in his sleep for three months straight.

Then he felt it.

A wrongness, off to his left. A small cold wrongness at the edge of his thoughts, like a draft coming under a door that was supposed to be sealed.

He looked up.

At the foot of the platform, flanked by his household guards in black-and-silver, stood Governor Kultigin Kara.

The Governor of the Holy City. Tomris’s grandfather. A stout, broad-shouldered man in his late seventies with the bearing of someone who had never walked into a room he did not believe he owned. He was not chanting. He was not praying. His mouth was set in a thin flat line, and his eyes traveled across the platform with the calm irritation of a man forced to watch an expensive ceremony he disapproved of.

Everyone in the Kaganit knew the whispers. The Governor claimed a drop of the ruling Kut of Kagans — the divine right to rule — ran in his veins. He was only one political misstep away from declaring himself Kagan in his own name.

None of that was what bothered Ertan.

What bothered Ertan was the man standing one pace behind Kultigin’s right shoulder.

A tall figure in a deep red cloak.

*The new head of the City Guards,* Ertan thought, distantly. The previous head had been handed over to the Kaganit by Kultigin himself a week ago — a sacrifice meant to prove the Governor’s house was loyal and just while the Governor’s house quietly prepared for something else.

The red-cloaked man had his hood up. The hood hid the face almost completely. All Ertan could see was the line of a jaw and a pale, patient mouth.

The man was not praying. The man was not moving.

The man had no shadow.

Every other figure in the plaza cast a shadow toward the east, bent by the morning sun. The red cloak stood alone on a white stone, and beneath him, the stone was clean. No pooled dark. No angle. Nothing.

Ertan stopped breathing.

*That’s wrong. That is not a thing that can happen.*

A horse at the outer line of the Governor’s guard screamed. It was a Kagan-bred stallion, a warhorse, the kind that did not spook for cannons. The groom fought the reins with both arms. The stallion’s eyes rolled white, foam flying. It was staring directly at the red cloak.

The red cloak did not turn. But the pale mouth curved upward, just a little.

A cold line ran down Ertan’s back — deeper than sweat, older than thought. The part of him that had once been twelve years old and standing in a destroyed village recognized this feeling. It was the feeling of being looked at by something that should not be in the world.

“Ertan,” Tomris snapped from three paces away. “Sigils.”

He tore his eyes down.

*Later. Think about him later.*

His fingers closed the collector-glyph.

The instant the last stroke met the first, the platform’s Kut-draw reached into Ertan’s counter-spiral and locked onto Canavar. A thin thread of gold light opened between Canavar’s chest and the polyhedron. The crystal’s empty space began, very slowly, to fill. Liquid gold climbing the inside of the trap.

It was working.

"*WHAT IN ÜLGEN’S NAME DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING?*"

Sanqar Turan strode toward them. Three long steps across the platform, his ceremonial robes snapping around his ankles, his chant left behind for the other forty shamans to carry. His voice carried over the ritual-song like a hammer over a bell.

Ertan did not look up. He couldn’t. If he looked up, his hands would falter.

“Magister,” he said. “I’m proving a better way.”

“You are *desecrating the ritual.*"

“No, Magister. I’m augmenting it. No one dies after today who doesn’t want to.”

"*Thirteen hundred have already given consent! You do not alter a Grand Ritual mid-working! You will collapse the draw!*"

“I won’t. I’ve run the numbers. My counter-spiral is tuned half a degree off the main. It siphons surplus, not core flow. My way only follows the road the ancient ritual is already opening.”

“You will do no such thing.”

“I left my notes in my chamber, Magister. Every calculation. Every sigil. If I die today, you can still read them and fix this. Fix our world.”

A boot landed beside him on the wood. He smelled the old ceremonial incense that clung to Sanqar’s sleeves.

“Ertan.” The Magister’s voice had dropped. Lower. Harder. The voice he used on students about to be expelled. “Stop. Now. If you break this ritual in front of Governor Kultigin, my influence cannot save you. You will be dragged behind horses through every ward of this city before sundown. Do you understand? I cannot shield you this time.”

“I know.”

“Then stop.” He roared it.

“I can’t, Teacher.” Ertan kept his voice low. “I’m sorry.”

Sanqar Turan looked down at him for one long beat. And then — as the old man had always done when faced with Ertan — he turned his attention to the more dangerous Turan in the room.

“And you.”

Tomris’s hands stilled on her half-drawn teleport sigil. She lifted her chin.

“Father.”

“You are three months into your teachership.”

“I know, Father.”

“Your grandfather cannot protect you from this.”

“I know, Father.”

“Get. Off. My. Platform.”

“No.”

Sanqar’s face did not harden. It did the opposite. It softened, for one instant — the softening of a man who has just realized he has already lost the argument, and is preparing for the cost.

Then the outer chant reached its apex.

The Group of Akıncı began to glow.

One by one, starting from the outermost ring of volunteers and working inward in a slow bright wave, thirteen hundred men and women began to release their Life Essence. It was the most beautiful and terrible thing Ertan had ever seen. Their bodies grew translucent. Their eyes filled with warm gold light. Their Kut — all they had, all they were — peeled away from their flesh and flowed back to the volunteers behind them.

Some of the volunteers were smiling. Some were weeping. Most had simply closed their eyes.

Ertan’s chest locked.

*This is what the Academy calls a necessary cost. This is what they do every season.*

He looked down at Canavar.

The little golem was staring up at him. The amber eyes were full of light now — Canavar’s own threaded Kut, rising in response to the draw. Canavar tilted his head the way he had started doing this past month. The gesture was not one Ertan had ever taught him.

“I’m sorry,” Ertan whispered. He knelt. He pressed one shaking hand against the clay of Canavar’s back. “I’m sorry, buddy. If — if she comes back, I’ll make you again. I have all the stones. I have every thread drawn. I have —”

The Kut-draw took the last of Canavar.

The gold light inside the little golem blazed bright, brighter, and then poured out through the collector-glyph into the polyhedron in a single continuous torrent. The polyhedron filled. Faces of crystal blazed. The essence inside moved like captive sunlight.

Canavar’s amber eyes dimmed.

The little head drooped. The stubby legs folded. The clay body settled gently onto its side on the wood.

And stopped moving.

Ertan could not breathe. He could not make himself breathe. His hand stayed on the little golem’s back, and for one terrible second the entire ritual fell away and there was only the fact of Canavar gone still under his palm.

“ERTAN.”

Tomris’s voice. Snapping him back. The polyhedron was full. The gate was open.

“Jump,” he said, and his voice was raw. “Tomris, jump now, the polyhedron is full — jump!”

Tomris closed her eyes. Her hands lifted toward Ertan. She was ready to grab the polyhedron and ride Canavar’s essence across the world-seam, exactly the way they had practiced.

She never made the step.

Sanqar Turan moved.

The Magister had been a master teleporter for forty years, and he gave no warning of what he was about to do. He simply reached out, closed one hand around his daughter’s wrist, and the flash of his teleport bloomed around them both.

One heartbeat, Sanqar stood five paces away.

The next, both of them were gone.

The next — Ertan’s eyes found them — they were fifty paces away, on the far side of Ülgen’s statue. Sanqar clamping Tomris against his chest. Tomris already fighting him, twisting, clawing, trying to break the grip. Her Light-and-Shadow sigil still glowed above her open palm, useless, short-circuited by the jump.

The polyhedron was still full.

The ritual’s energy was still holding the gate open.

Ertan was alone on the platform.

His lungs unlocked in a single hard breath. His brain ran a hundred calculations in one second. Akıncı all around him had gone nearly transparent — they were about to be pulled through. The collector-glyph was still tethered to the polyhedron. The polyhedron was tethered to the spiral’s intake. Whichever living vessel stood closest to the spiral when the crossing pulsed would drink the extra essence and be carried through with Akıncı.

That vessel was Ertan.

“ERTAN!” Tomris’s voice rang across the plaza. “Break the polyhedron! Jump off the platform! ERTAN, BREAK IT!”

He looked at her. Fifty paces. Fifty impossible paces.

He looked down at Canavar’s still body.

He looked at the polyhedron.

“If I break it,” he called back, and his voice came out steadier than he expected, “they’ll never let anyone try this again.”

“ERTAN.”

“They’ll say it didn’t work! They’ll sacrifice two thousand next season! And four thousand after that!”

“You can’t manifest!” Tomris screamed. Sanqar had locked both her arms now; she couldn’t draw a teleport if her life depended on it. “Ertan, you can’t even cast a spark! How will you come back?”

He swallowed.

He smiled at her. It was a small, crooked smile, the one Canavar had always seemed to approve of.

“I’ll find a way,” he called. “I always find a way.”

Tomris stopped fighting her father.

For one heartbeat, she went utterly still in his arms. Then she twisted hard enough to face Ertan across the gulf of the plaza. Sanqar’s grip loosened — not in surrender, but because even Sanqar Turan was not quite willing to break his daughter’s shoulder to hold her still.

She met Ertan’s eyes.

And across fifty paces of air — across half a million pilgrims, across the gold rising off the platform, across the statue of a god who had once sacrificed himself for the same reason Ertan was about to — Tomris said it.

“I love you.”

The word love hit Ertan harder than the Kut-draw.

He stared at her.

His brain, which had run a hundred calculations a second just a moment ago, could produce exactly one question in response. It came out of his mouth before any better answer could be assembled.

“Really?” he said. “Me?”

He never heard her answer.

The crossing pulsed.

The polyhedron’s essence poured up out of the crystal and into him. It entered through his chest in a single cold-hot wave that was not pain and not pleasure but something entirely its own. His bones rang like struck bells. His vision split into a hundred colors at once. He saw, for half a breath, every sigil on the platform as if he had drawn them himself. He saw the spiral above him take shape as a shining willow-leaf gate, as tall as a temple.

The last thing he saw clearly was Tomris’s face.

Lit from below by the rising gold. Lips still open on whatever word she had been about to say next.

Then the world folded.

No sound. No sense of motion. Only every color compressed into a shape he had no word for — then a pressure like being pushed through a keyhole the size of a grain of sand — then silence so absolute that his ears invented the sound of his own heartbeat to fill it.

And then —

Sand.

Cool sand under his cheek.

A sky the color of an old bruise, with no sun in it.

The polyhedron lying half a pace from his outstretched hand, half empty now — just enough left to push one body back.

Ertan opened his eyes.

The Ergenekon opened back.