Act Three: The Laws of Engaging with the World (XIV)
fourteen
Yakov felt his hands move before his mind could even process it. He barely knew what he was doing. Experience, discipline, orders, responsibility. What guided his actions? Yakov didn't know. He felt like a terrified recruit, but this shouldn't be happening; Yakov had never been so out of control before. He was utterly confused yet perfectly clear-headed. He knew what he had to do.
The blood slave named Christina died before she could utter a sound. Yakov pulled his longsword from her body and then chopped off her head. The blood flowed like thick soup spilled from a bowl, a symbol of an irreversible catastrophe. Yakov knelt in the pool of blood, held down Yubi, and ripped off his embroidered shawl, searching for his wounds—the wounds below his neck, clearly piercing some vital blood vessel or organ. Yubi's mouth was open, gasping for breath, a terrible howl emanating from his throat, like the broken bellows in a blacksmith's shop.
Yakov removed his helmet and gloves, pressing his fingers against Yubi's bleeding gash. The gash was so small, yet the blood flowed incessantly. He desperately thought of the northern battlefield. He had seen a soldier whose neck had been pierced by an arrow from a tower, collapsing after only a few steps. This thought made his ingrained image burn with a numbing, boiling sensation, as if scalding hot water had been poured over his chest.
"What should I do!" Yakov shouted. "Shumer! Think of something!"
No one responded to him.
Yubi's cotton nightgown was as smooth as sand, its spreading red like a raging tide, engulfing everything. Yakov held him, noticing the soft body rapidly losing temperature. Death had crept up to his feet. In a daze, Yakov felt an indescribable sense of relief and helplessness. He thought, perhaps this way he could regain his freedom, break free of the mark? But something deeper made him painfully reject the thought. He felt as if he had lost his soul, his spirit, as if he had been thrown into the sea in the coldest winter, a large rock tied to his feet, sinking him into a bottomless icy abyss, leaving him without even the strength to struggle. Yakov thought, he was beyond saving.
Gradually, Yubi's labored breathing subsided. His hands and feet grew as cold as ice, just as Yakov had when they first met.
Yakov suddenly realized something. He pulled the body in his arms up by the arm and groped for the left hand. The obsidian-backed ruby ring on the middle finger of that hand gleamed with the light of a furnace. It was stained with blood, looking both demonically sinister and newly pure.
With a gentle pull, Yakov ripped it off his cold fingers. He trembled, staring at Yubi's face.
In the soft wound that Yakov had been pressing for so long, the skin and flesh crisscrossed like woven fabric, as if a thousand unseen hands were threading a needle. Yakov looked on in astonishment. The vivid red stains that had been lost on the ground, on the knife, and seeped into the fabric's texture, flowed back into the wound like countless fine strings, like spider silk, like sticky honey, like time flowing backward, and were spun back into Yubi's body. For a moment, Yakov felt as if he were holding a lifeless, soft rag doll.
The doll grew a skeleton and muscles again. He opened his eyes and touched his neck in horror.
“…This really hurts, Yakov,” he said, his voice devoid of warmth.
Yakov felt the weight in his arms lighten, as if the stones binding his feet had disappeared, allowing him to surface for air. He slumped to the ground, only then realizing that his clothes were soaked with cold sweat.
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