Vanilla #1: A Sorcerer of Scent
Author: Chel
Story: Demiurge
Title: A Sorcerer of Scent
Prompts: Vanilla #1: shopping, wafer cookie, whipped cream
Rating: G
Characters: Naveed, Aqil dar Qaleen
Word Count: 3161
Summary: Naveed is siharai: she sees minds embodied as architecture and surface thoughts as a visible, tangible corona dancing around everyone’s heads. She’s in training to become a sihara - a mediator, everyone’s therapist, and societally sanctioned busybody - and part of that entails assembling a lexicon of sensory stimuli to allow greater nuance in interpreting the minds around her. On one trip to the Migratory Market, she meets a vendor with a rather unique frame of mind and receives a crash course in the difference between a perfumer and a sorcerer of scent.
This managed to balloon entirely out of control and acquire two quick little character sketches. It's also not the best introduction to the world, the characters, or what a sihara is supposed to do, which would be the reasonable thing to expect from a first entry. Hopefully it’s not offputtingly confusing.
The shopkeeper didn’t have a corona of surface thoughts circling her head. Naveed stopped short in the middle of the market’s boulevard to boggle in a way that would have Sihara Maeras sending her pointed reminders about tact. Everyone had a corona. Even animals had them, predators streamlined and focused as stilettos, prey a mishmash of sensation always on the edge of coalescing into flight. Patients in comas might not, but the woman was very much awake, her hands moving with economic grace as she transferred drops of oil between little vials. So Naveed must be missing something.
A gust of sandalwood reached her nose against the wind, and with it came a touch of calm concentration. She understood with a sharp shock of pleasure. The corona she sought lay in scent, not sight. Dogs organized their thoughts like that, in smells and sounds and vague fuzzes of color, but she’d never met a human who did so.
“I don’t have time for silly children who are going to gawk and not buy,” the woman said abruptly, without looking up from her work.
Naveed started and glanced away. The burn of curiosity and embarrassment combined to warm her cheeks.
“I beg your pardon,” she said to one of the poles holding up the awning shading the shop. “I couldn’t help noticing your corona.”
No, that was the wrong way to phrase it. It sounded as though Naveed were blaming the woman for her own rudeness. Was “I was just admiring your corona” too fawning? Too late now, in any case.
“Ah,” the woman said, a smile in her voice. “I see.”
Her sharp amusement smelled like pepper. Naveed looked back to find the woman studying the rust red lines on her cheeks that marked her as sihara-in-training.
“Caught your eye, have I, siharasena? Or your nose?” She glanced to the side as if she could see - smell - her own thoughts, and grinned. “I’ve been told we sorcerers of scent are rather unusual, for humans.”
Smugness smelled like figs, dark and sweet with an earthy undertone. Naveed inhaled deeply, for all that the siharai senses didn’t truly depend on it, and smiled back.
“You are that,” she agreed. “I’d say you’re unique in the city.”
The woman snorted and raised her eyebrows at Naveed as if to say, I’ll allow you your judicious flattery, but I am not taken in for one instant. She pointed at the cushion set before her own with her free hand.
“Sit,” she ordered.
Naveed considered demurring as she would have with a stone moiety vendor, as politeness demanded, then though better of it. The woman certainly knew her own mind, and it was, after all, what Naveed was meant to do when the Migratory Market came through Siqandar. Besides, sand moiety never seemed as concerned with the trappings of courtesy. She stepped into the sorcerer’s stall and sat.
Perception is subjective, Sihara Maeras always reminded her. Two sihara look at a patient’s corona. One sees a mess of greenery. The other sees linden, orange, and cinnamon leaves. Tell me, Naveed, are they seeing the same manifestation? Sihara saw minds embodied: surface thoughts dancing in coronas around everyone, their very self built into mental architectures walled with principles and furnished with memories. It behooved them to experience a wide range of sensations with which to interpret the minds around them; if a sihara couldn’t understand the form a thought took, she couldn’t catch all the nuance it contained. So every time the sand moiety caravans stopped in the city to trade news and goods, Sihara Maeras would cancel lessons in favor of sending her to learn new sensations. In the heat of the afternoon, when most marketgoers left until evening to escape the heat of the day and the traders had turned a profit but hadn’t reached the point of irritated exhaustion, she could always find someone to show her bolts of fabric from Liane and Kathkadir in iridescent blues and purples so dark they glowed, or let her taste honeys from across the Basalt Sea. Now she had found a perfumer so devoted to her craft that her mind shaped itself after the scents she mixed.
“I’ve worked with your lot before,” the sorcerer was saying. “It won’t be the first time I’ve given a crash-course in subtle art of scent.”
“Your generosity is appreciated, and your expertise most welcome, dar…?”
Her unsubtle fishing for a name went ignored.
“Generosity?” The sorcerer quirked a smile at Naveed. “Siharasena, this is boredom. I won’t get much more custom until the sun goes and takes the heat with it, as you know perfectly well.”
“Nevertheless, thank you.” Her insistence earned her a snort and another peppery gust of amusement.
“It’s dar Qaleen,” the woman added as she turned to the chest by her side and lifted the lid. Within lay row upon row of glass vials nestled in wooden shelves, glinting in the cool light that filtered through the stall’s canopy. As the lid rose each row rose with it, until they were arranged like steps. The smell that wafted from it was fruit and floral and spice and more blended together into something delicious and overwhelming at once. Naveed sneezed. Cinnamon pride and plum pleasure from dar Qaleen washed over her, along with a wavery scrap of memory - Father raising the lid to show off the mechanical trick that made the shelves accordion up, smiling anxiously to see if she liked it. Her own perfume chest, and the wood must have been obscenely expensive, and he might not understand why she devoted herself to the scents, why she loved them, but he bought this for her, and she smiled back with her eyes stinging - and Naveed ducked away before it could carry her deeper.
“I’ve met other perfumers,” she said. It didn’t come out too shaky, really, as she shed the lingering joy that wasn’t hers. “They don’t have coronas like yours.”
Dar Qaleen gave her a Look.
“I am not a perfumer,” she said with some asperity. “I am a sorcerer of scent.”
“I stand corrected,” Naveed murmured, and ducked her head. Dar Qaleen made a small, satisfied sound. Naveed glanced up after a moment of contrition.
“What, exactly, differentiates a common perfumer from a sorcerer such as yourself?”
From the second Look dar Qaleen shot her, it may have come out less sincere than she meant it.
“If I may ask,” she added meekly.
Dar Qaleen leaned forward and smiled at her. Naveed inhaled and caught a welter of smells she couldn’t have identified, even if they’d lined up nicely and let her guess at them one by one. Steel and rainwater and sand and strange spice and more layered on each other like a symphony in scent.
“The difference is, I know scents well enough to think in them,” she said sweetly.
Before Naveed could settle on an appropriate reply, the sorcerer lobbed something at her and ordered, “Take a whiff of this.”
Naveed caught it reflexively. It felt like a scrap of linen tied around a handful of familiar beans. It smelled like it, too, when she sniffed obediently.
“Coffee?” she asked.
“Clears out your nose. No sense trying to smell anything after you’ve gotten a faceful of this mess, otherwise.” The sorcerer’s hands fanned spiderlike above the chest before darting down to pluck out an ampoule from the bottom row. Thick oil the gold of the afternoon sunlight filled it.
“We’ll start you off on something familiar, I think. This is your own Siqandar cinnamon.”
She unstoppered the vial, started to hand it to Naveed, and hesitated.
“Are you going to go half-focused like the other one did?”
“What? Oh! Yes, I will. If that’s all right,” she added, for all that she didn’t really have a choice, not if she wanted to remember this many new stimuli accurately.
Dar Qaleen only nodded at her and extended the vial to Naveed rather than let her take it.
“The first time I did this, I lost my entire stock of attar of rose,” she said. The thought swirling from her in a cloud of pepper and strange bitter herbs added, I’d deserve a reprise if I ignored such an expensive lesson.
Naveed didn’t think she’d drop anything, even in the odd state between mental and physical worlds, but it would be begging for an accident to say as much. She only murmured, “I quite understand,” leaned forward, and inhaled.
While the scent hung vibrantly in the forefront of her mind, she performed the mental twist that took her into the antechamber of her own mind. A rushing sense of motion that didn’t involve moving a muscle, and she - or her self-aware manifestation within the overarching structure of her mental architecture, but it was much simpler and less headache-inducing to think of it as herself - stood at the border between architecture and corona with the smell of cinnamon weaving around her like a snake.
Now she needed somewhere to store it.
She called on the image of the dar Qaleen’s chest, close to the surface and well-suited to the task. At first, it looked as she’d seen it last in the relative dimness of the stall, blue-shadowed by the awning. It slid fully out of memory and into her architecture as she focused, and it began to obey the rules of her mind. Sparks of deep amber and gold glinted in the grain of the wood in the sunlight spilling through the walls of her antechamber. She hadn’t touched it, but she could imagine the slick feel of the well-polished wood, the cool rasp of iron under her hands. The tactile memories fluttered out of the windshaped caverns leading deeper into her architecture and settled into the image of her construct, giving it solidity. She knelt, ignoring the sand scattered across the floor, and flipped the lid open. Empty shelves accordioned up to meet her.
She was quite certain that if she could sniff her own corona she would smell strongly of figs.
The scent hovering around her shoulders came willingly to her raised hand. She focused on an appropriate form for storage: the slickness of glass under her fingers, how the slender vials dar Qaleen carried would fit in her grasp, oil the color of the sunlight in both her reality and the one outside. A weight settled into her hand, and she smiled at the tiny bottle before slotting it into place in her chest.
Then she leapt-without-moving in a direction that was not quite up and not quite to the side to do it all over again.
***
Aqil dar Qaleen with her masses of hair, holding what was supposed to be a flower but appears to be an odd blob. I bet it's a fantastic smelling blob, though.
Saffron, sesame, turmeric, cumin, coffee, mint, thyme, jewelflower, poppy, date, sliding into place in her constructed chest. Cinnamon from Liane, sharper and hotter than the familiar Siqandar strain. Red musk and black musk and white musk, so subtly different she had to sniff them in turn for angles before she could securely identify them. Dar Qaleen alternated the vials for her with endless patience, and Naveed tried to ignore the gusts of intruding scent from her corona. Stranger herbs and flowers and spices followed: sage, oakwood, oakmoss, tearose, lily, cherry, starberry, tart apple, sweet apple, sun apple. In dar Qaleen’s corona, Naveed caught glimpses of herbs with leaves like spears or stars, flowers with layer up on layer of petals and flowers shaped like trumpets, the taste of fruit she’d never seen on her lips. She correlated looks to textures to smells and stored the knowledge in her growing collection.
Her awareness hovered in a delicate balance between her mind and the world as she shuttled scents from nose to box. She was aware paradoxically of two bodies, two pairs of eyes, of sitting in a tent and a sunlit cavern, and she didn’t dare let herself stop moving to contemplate it. Vertigo threatened, and she held it off with the sort of abstracted effort that not thinking about something entailed. She caught the scent of something called rosemary -dar Qaleen remembered it as a tall herb with little purple flowers - and slid it into a labeled vial. She’d started adding the names to her mental representations around the twentieth scent. Dar Qaleen’s hands might never falter or err as they selected the next scent on her agenda, but Naveed was afraid that otherwise she would never remember what she’d put where when she tried to integrate them from this temporary storage into her architecture proper.
A new scent didn’t appear under her nose to replace rosemary. She focused carefully on dar Qaleen with one set of eyes, each movement slow as though she were balancing an immense load. Dar Qaleen was looking at her with a sly smile and a sparkle in her eyes. Her corona smelled like the electric ozone of anticipation and a cedar-and-stone pride. She leaned forward as if to share a secret.
“You’ve been patient,” she said. “And you haven’t spilled anything.”
She didn’t seem to require a response. That was good, nodding would be an effort.
“So tell me, siharasena, would you care to see what truly makes me a sorcerer rather than a perfumer?”
Naveed laughed. She might not have, if her attention hadn’t been split between two realms, and the jolt of amusement jarred her loose from her mind and back into her body proper.
“Dar Qaleen, I don’t think there’s a soul alive who could refuse an offer phrased like that. And if there is, I pity them.”
Dar Qaleen pressed one of the ornate curlicues ornamenting the box’s bands, and the box’s sides swung open like flower petals. An uncountable multitude of tiny vials were arrayed in the hidden shelves, and Naveed could not imagine how to rearrange her mental box to hold them all without disrupting its structural integrity and losing everything she’d stored. She kept the scowl off her face, because sihara did not frown unless someone really deserved it. Dar Qaleen plucked one from a row of identical neighbors and held it delicately between two fingers. It held no more than drop or two of liquid.
“Scent is visceral,” she said. “And that makes it powerful. With the right mixture I could rouse a saint to a killing fury, or stop a heart, or make a mule the most desirable person in the city.”
She must have caught sight of the look on Naveed’s face, because she snickered in a gust of black pepper-and-clove and flapped her free hand.
“Don’t worry, this won’t do anything so unpleasant.”
“Then what will this do?”
“You have your way of storing memories, I’m told. We have ours.”
She unstoppered the vial and held it out for Naveed. Cautiously, unsure of what to expect despite the vague answer, especially given the talk of stopping hearts, Naveed leaned forward and sniffed.
-sharp bite of greenery, floral delicate as gauze, and wetness, the smell of water distilled, not the stone-and-water of the deep cisterns beneath the city, but the smell of rain and rich, dark soil-
Green. The sounds of the marketplace disappeared, and in their place an odd susurrus began, and there was green. Everywhere around her green, a thousand living shades of it, so close and thick she could breathe it in. The air in her lungs was heavy and wet, it felt like it took work to breathe. Naveed stood in a… she didn’t have word for it, this mad profusion of plants surrounding her in every direction, towering above her and drooping under the weight leaves bigger than her torso. She let out a breathless laugh and reached out, disbelieving and delighted and nearly dizzy with both. The leaf on the nearest plant was thinner than she expected and waxy under her fingers.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” dar Qaleen asked from behind her.
Naveed climbed to her feet, the soil squishing under her sandals, and turned to find the sorcerer leaning against a seemingly solid tree.
“Very,” she agreed faintly.
Dar Qaleen smelled like figs, plums, and yet more black pepper. Interesting, that Naveed could smell her corona in this memory, the way she could have in a siharai memory.
“The first thing a sorcerer must do to prove her mastery is to capture a place so well in scent that merely smelling it will transport you there.”
Naveed’s eyes widened and she took a step closer to dar Qaleen.
“Do you mean to say that we are actually-”
“Ashes and asps, girl, no! I wouldn’t kidnap you without warning to a jungle.”
She took note of the foreign word and tucked it away.
“Actual transport’s more involved, anyways. This is a facsimile your brain was tricked into creating by my concoction. It’ll wear off in a radian or two.”
“A facsimile of where?” Naveed asked. She ran her hand over the fuzz that covered one of the vines festooning a tree like ribbons. The plants here didn’t seem content to just grow packed next to each other like books crowded too close on a shelf, when they ran out of space they simply grew on top of and over each other.
“Right outside of Iarenne… which will mean nothing to you, will it, stone girl.”
“Sihara aren’t-”
“If you’ve been more than a mile out of the city once in your life I’ll drink my entire stock.”
Having been thoroughly pegged, Naveed gave up protesting that sihara lived within and without both the moieties and went back to petting the moss growing on the vine that grew on the treetrunk. There seemed to be at least two varieties: one springy and one squooshy.
“In any case, it’s a tiny village in the tanglewards part of Liane. Nice people, good food, lovely scenery, as you can see for yourself, and you’re not listening to me at all.”
“Of course I am,” Naveed said. She reached back into her antechamber and replayed the last few seconds. “It sounds delightful, and it certainly looks it.”
She knelt and dug her hands into the thick, dark dirt. Squishy little grubs wriggled away from her fingers, and the soil felt both fluffy and damp against her palms.
“It’s so detailed,” she said. “How can my mind create this if I’ve never seen anything like it before?”
“That’s why it’s sorcery and not science, siharasena,” dar Qaleen pointed out.
Naveed accepted that non-answer with a distracted nod. Questions could wait until they returned to the familiar din and dust of the marketplace. For now, she stepped into the chaos of growth around her, senses open to gather all she could. After all, someday she might meet someone with a jungle for a mind, and she had best try to understand it while she had a living example around her.
Behind her, dar Qaleen murmured, “I cannot wait to see your face when I show you the ocean.”
Story: Demiurge
Title: A Sorcerer of Scent
Prompts: Vanilla #1: shopping, wafer cookie, whipped cream
Rating: G
Characters: Naveed, Aqil dar Qaleen
Word Count: 3161
Summary: Naveed is siharai: she sees minds embodied as architecture and surface thoughts as a visible, tangible corona dancing around everyone’s heads. She’s in training to become a sihara - a mediator, everyone’s therapist, and societally sanctioned busybody - and part of that entails assembling a lexicon of sensory stimuli to allow greater nuance in interpreting the minds around her. On one trip to the Migratory Market, she meets a vendor with a rather unique frame of mind and receives a crash course in the difference between a perfumer and a sorcerer of scent.
This managed to balloon entirely out of control and acquire two quick little character sketches. It's also not the best introduction to the world, the characters, or what a sihara is supposed to do, which would be the reasonable thing to expect from a first entry. Hopefully it’s not offputtingly confusing.
The shopkeeper didn’t have a corona of surface thoughts circling her head. Naveed stopped short in the middle of the market’s boulevard to boggle in a way that would have Sihara Maeras sending her pointed reminders about tact. Everyone had a corona. Even animals had them, predators streamlined and focused as stilettos, prey a mishmash of sensation always on the edge of coalescing into flight. Patients in comas might not, but the woman was very much awake, her hands moving with economic grace as she transferred drops of oil between little vials. So Naveed must be missing something.
A gust of sandalwood reached her nose against the wind, and with it came a touch of calm concentration. She understood with a sharp shock of pleasure. The corona she sought lay in scent, not sight. Dogs organized their thoughts like that, in smells and sounds and vague fuzzes of color, but she’d never met a human who did so.
“I don’t have time for silly children who are going to gawk and not buy,” the woman said abruptly, without looking up from her work.
Naveed started and glanced away. The burn of curiosity and embarrassment combined to warm her cheeks.
“I beg your pardon,” she said to one of the poles holding up the awning shading the shop. “I couldn’t help noticing your corona.”
No, that was the wrong way to phrase it. It sounded as though Naveed were blaming the woman for her own rudeness. Was “I was just admiring your corona” too fawning? Too late now, in any case.
“Ah,” the woman said, a smile in her voice. “I see.”
Her sharp amusement smelled like pepper. Naveed looked back to find the woman studying the rust red lines on her cheeks that marked her as sihara-in-training.
“Caught your eye, have I, siharasena? Or your nose?” She glanced to the side as if she could see - smell - her own thoughts, and grinned. “I’ve been told we sorcerers of scent are rather unusual, for humans.”
Smugness smelled like figs, dark and sweet with an earthy undertone. Naveed inhaled deeply, for all that the siharai senses didn’t truly depend on it, and smiled back.
“You are that,” she agreed. “I’d say you’re unique in the city.”
The woman snorted and raised her eyebrows at Naveed as if to say, I’ll allow you your judicious flattery, but I am not taken in for one instant. She pointed at the cushion set before her own with her free hand.
“Sit,” she ordered.
Naveed considered demurring as she would have with a stone moiety vendor, as politeness demanded, then though better of it. The woman certainly knew her own mind, and it was, after all, what Naveed was meant to do when the Migratory Market came through Siqandar. Besides, sand moiety never seemed as concerned with the trappings of courtesy. She stepped into the sorcerer’s stall and sat.
Perception is subjective, Sihara Maeras always reminded her. Two sihara look at a patient’s corona. One sees a mess of greenery. The other sees linden, orange, and cinnamon leaves. Tell me, Naveed, are they seeing the same manifestation? Sihara saw minds embodied: surface thoughts dancing in coronas around everyone, their very self built into mental architectures walled with principles and furnished with memories. It behooved them to experience a wide range of sensations with which to interpret the minds around them; if a sihara couldn’t understand the form a thought took, she couldn’t catch all the nuance it contained. So every time the sand moiety caravans stopped in the city to trade news and goods, Sihara Maeras would cancel lessons in favor of sending her to learn new sensations. In the heat of the afternoon, when most marketgoers left until evening to escape the heat of the day and the traders had turned a profit but hadn’t reached the point of irritated exhaustion, she could always find someone to show her bolts of fabric from Liane and Kathkadir in iridescent blues and purples so dark they glowed, or let her taste honeys from across the Basalt Sea. Now she had found a perfumer so devoted to her craft that her mind shaped itself after the scents she mixed.
“I’ve worked with your lot before,” the sorcerer was saying. “It won’t be the first time I’ve given a crash-course in subtle art of scent.”
“Your generosity is appreciated, and your expertise most welcome, dar…?”
Her unsubtle fishing for a name went ignored.
“Generosity?” The sorcerer quirked a smile at Naveed. “Siharasena, this is boredom. I won’t get much more custom until the sun goes and takes the heat with it, as you know perfectly well.”
“Nevertheless, thank you.” Her insistence earned her a snort and another peppery gust of amusement.
“It’s dar Qaleen,” the woman added as she turned to the chest by her side and lifted the lid. Within lay row upon row of glass vials nestled in wooden shelves, glinting in the cool light that filtered through the stall’s canopy. As the lid rose each row rose with it, until they were arranged like steps. The smell that wafted from it was fruit and floral and spice and more blended together into something delicious and overwhelming at once. Naveed sneezed. Cinnamon pride and plum pleasure from dar Qaleen washed over her, along with a wavery scrap of memory - Father raising the lid to show off the mechanical trick that made the shelves accordion up, smiling anxiously to see if she liked it. Her own perfume chest, and the wood must have been obscenely expensive, and he might not understand why she devoted herself to the scents, why she loved them, but he bought this for her, and she smiled back with her eyes stinging - and Naveed ducked away before it could carry her deeper.
“I’ve met other perfumers,” she said. It didn’t come out too shaky, really, as she shed the lingering joy that wasn’t hers. “They don’t have coronas like yours.”
Dar Qaleen gave her a Look.
“I am not a perfumer,” she said with some asperity. “I am a sorcerer of scent.”
“I stand corrected,” Naveed murmured, and ducked her head. Dar Qaleen made a small, satisfied sound. Naveed glanced up after a moment of contrition.
“What, exactly, differentiates a common perfumer from a sorcerer such as yourself?”
From the second Look dar Qaleen shot her, it may have come out less sincere than she meant it.
“If I may ask,” she added meekly.
Dar Qaleen leaned forward and smiled at her. Naveed inhaled and caught a welter of smells she couldn’t have identified, even if they’d lined up nicely and let her guess at them one by one. Steel and rainwater and sand and strange spice and more layered on each other like a symphony in scent.
“The difference is, I know scents well enough to think in them,” she said sweetly.
Before Naveed could settle on an appropriate reply, the sorcerer lobbed something at her and ordered, “Take a whiff of this.”
Naveed caught it reflexively. It felt like a scrap of linen tied around a handful of familiar beans. It smelled like it, too, when she sniffed obediently.
“Coffee?” she asked.
“Clears out your nose. No sense trying to smell anything after you’ve gotten a faceful of this mess, otherwise.” The sorcerer’s hands fanned spiderlike above the chest before darting down to pluck out an ampoule from the bottom row. Thick oil the gold of the afternoon sunlight filled it.
“We’ll start you off on something familiar, I think. This is your own Siqandar cinnamon.”
She unstoppered the vial, started to hand it to Naveed, and hesitated.
“Are you going to go half-focused like the other one did?”
“What? Oh! Yes, I will. If that’s all right,” she added, for all that she didn’t really have a choice, not if she wanted to remember this many new stimuli accurately.
Dar Qaleen only nodded at her and extended the vial to Naveed rather than let her take it.
“The first time I did this, I lost my entire stock of attar of rose,” she said. The thought swirling from her in a cloud of pepper and strange bitter herbs added, I’d deserve a reprise if I ignored such an expensive lesson.
Naveed didn’t think she’d drop anything, even in the odd state between mental and physical worlds, but it would be begging for an accident to say as much. She only murmured, “I quite understand,” leaned forward, and inhaled.
While the scent hung vibrantly in the forefront of her mind, she performed the mental twist that took her into the antechamber of her own mind. A rushing sense of motion that didn’t involve moving a muscle, and she - or her self-aware manifestation within the overarching structure of her mental architecture, but it was much simpler and less headache-inducing to think of it as herself - stood at the border between architecture and corona with the smell of cinnamon weaving around her like a snake.
Now she needed somewhere to store it.
She called on the image of the dar Qaleen’s chest, close to the surface and well-suited to the task. At first, it looked as she’d seen it last in the relative dimness of the stall, blue-shadowed by the awning. It slid fully out of memory and into her architecture as she focused, and it began to obey the rules of her mind. Sparks of deep amber and gold glinted in the grain of the wood in the sunlight spilling through the walls of her antechamber. She hadn’t touched it, but she could imagine the slick feel of the well-polished wood, the cool rasp of iron under her hands. The tactile memories fluttered out of the windshaped caverns leading deeper into her architecture and settled into the image of her construct, giving it solidity. She knelt, ignoring the sand scattered across the floor, and flipped the lid open. Empty shelves accordioned up to meet her.
She was quite certain that if she could sniff her own corona she would smell strongly of figs.
The scent hovering around her shoulders came willingly to her raised hand. She focused on an appropriate form for storage: the slickness of glass under her fingers, how the slender vials dar Qaleen carried would fit in her grasp, oil the color of the sunlight in both her reality and the one outside. A weight settled into her hand, and she smiled at the tiny bottle before slotting it into place in her chest.
Then she leapt-without-moving in a direction that was not quite up and not quite to the side to do it all over again.
***
Aqil dar Qaleen with her masses of hair, holding what was supposed to be a flower but appears to be an odd blob. I bet it's a fantastic smelling blob, though.
Saffron, sesame, turmeric, cumin, coffee, mint, thyme, jewelflower, poppy, date, sliding into place in her constructed chest. Cinnamon from Liane, sharper and hotter than the familiar Siqandar strain. Red musk and black musk and white musk, so subtly different she had to sniff them in turn for angles before she could securely identify them. Dar Qaleen alternated the vials for her with endless patience, and Naveed tried to ignore the gusts of intruding scent from her corona. Stranger herbs and flowers and spices followed: sage, oakwood, oakmoss, tearose, lily, cherry, starberry, tart apple, sweet apple, sun apple. In dar Qaleen’s corona, Naveed caught glimpses of herbs with leaves like spears or stars, flowers with layer up on layer of petals and flowers shaped like trumpets, the taste of fruit she’d never seen on her lips. She correlated looks to textures to smells and stored the knowledge in her growing collection.
Her awareness hovered in a delicate balance between her mind and the world as she shuttled scents from nose to box. She was aware paradoxically of two bodies, two pairs of eyes, of sitting in a tent and a sunlit cavern, and she didn’t dare let herself stop moving to contemplate it. Vertigo threatened, and she held it off with the sort of abstracted effort that not thinking about something entailed. She caught the scent of something called rosemary -dar Qaleen remembered it as a tall herb with little purple flowers - and slid it into a labeled vial. She’d started adding the names to her mental representations around the twentieth scent. Dar Qaleen’s hands might never falter or err as they selected the next scent on her agenda, but Naveed was afraid that otherwise she would never remember what she’d put where when she tried to integrate them from this temporary storage into her architecture proper.
A new scent didn’t appear under her nose to replace rosemary. She focused carefully on dar Qaleen with one set of eyes, each movement slow as though she were balancing an immense load. Dar Qaleen was looking at her with a sly smile and a sparkle in her eyes. Her corona smelled like the electric ozone of anticipation and a cedar-and-stone pride. She leaned forward as if to share a secret.
“You’ve been patient,” she said. “And you haven’t spilled anything.”
She didn’t seem to require a response. That was good, nodding would be an effort.
“So tell me, siharasena, would you care to see what truly makes me a sorcerer rather than a perfumer?”
Naveed laughed. She might not have, if her attention hadn’t been split between two realms, and the jolt of amusement jarred her loose from her mind and back into her body proper.
“Dar Qaleen, I don’t think there’s a soul alive who could refuse an offer phrased like that. And if there is, I pity them.”
Dar Qaleen pressed one of the ornate curlicues ornamenting the box’s bands, and the box’s sides swung open like flower petals. An uncountable multitude of tiny vials were arrayed in the hidden shelves, and Naveed could not imagine how to rearrange her mental box to hold them all without disrupting its structural integrity and losing everything she’d stored. She kept the scowl off her face, because sihara did not frown unless someone really deserved it. Dar Qaleen plucked one from a row of identical neighbors and held it delicately between two fingers. It held no more than drop or two of liquid.
“Scent is visceral,” she said. “And that makes it powerful. With the right mixture I could rouse a saint to a killing fury, or stop a heart, or make a mule the most desirable person in the city.”
She must have caught sight of the look on Naveed’s face, because she snickered in a gust of black pepper-and-clove and flapped her free hand.
“Don’t worry, this won’t do anything so unpleasant.”
“Then what will this do?”
“You have your way of storing memories, I’m told. We have ours.”
She unstoppered the vial and held it out for Naveed. Cautiously, unsure of what to expect despite the vague answer, especially given the talk of stopping hearts, Naveed leaned forward and sniffed.
-sharp bite of greenery, floral delicate as gauze, and wetness, the smell of water distilled, not the stone-and-water of the deep cisterns beneath the city, but the smell of rain and rich, dark soil-
Green. The sounds of the marketplace disappeared, and in their place an odd susurrus began, and there was green. Everywhere around her green, a thousand living shades of it, so close and thick she could breathe it in. The air in her lungs was heavy and wet, it felt like it took work to breathe. Naveed stood in a… she didn’t have word for it, this mad profusion of plants surrounding her in every direction, towering above her and drooping under the weight leaves bigger than her torso. She let out a breathless laugh and reached out, disbelieving and delighted and nearly dizzy with both. The leaf on the nearest plant was thinner than she expected and waxy under her fingers.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” dar Qaleen asked from behind her.
Naveed climbed to her feet, the soil squishing under her sandals, and turned to find the sorcerer leaning against a seemingly solid tree.
“Very,” she agreed faintly.
Dar Qaleen smelled like figs, plums, and yet more black pepper. Interesting, that Naveed could smell her corona in this memory, the way she could have in a siharai memory.
“The first thing a sorcerer must do to prove her mastery is to capture a place so well in scent that merely smelling it will transport you there.”
Naveed’s eyes widened and she took a step closer to dar Qaleen.
“Do you mean to say that we are actually-”
“Ashes and asps, girl, no! I wouldn’t kidnap you without warning to a jungle.”
She took note of the foreign word and tucked it away.
“Actual transport’s more involved, anyways. This is a facsimile your brain was tricked into creating by my concoction. It’ll wear off in a radian or two.”
“A facsimile of where?” Naveed asked. She ran her hand over the fuzz that covered one of the vines festooning a tree like ribbons. The plants here didn’t seem content to just grow packed next to each other like books crowded too close on a shelf, when they ran out of space they simply grew on top of and over each other.
“Right outside of Iarenne… which will mean nothing to you, will it, stone girl.”
“Sihara aren’t-”
“If you’ve been more than a mile out of the city once in your life I’ll drink my entire stock.”
Having been thoroughly pegged, Naveed gave up protesting that sihara lived within and without both the moieties and went back to petting the moss growing on the vine that grew on the treetrunk. There seemed to be at least two varieties: one springy and one squooshy.
“In any case, it’s a tiny village in the tanglewards part of Liane. Nice people, good food, lovely scenery, as you can see for yourself, and you’re not listening to me at all.”
“Of course I am,” Naveed said. She reached back into her antechamber and replayed the last few seconds. “It sounds delightful, and it certainly looks it.”
She knelt and dug her hands into the thick, dark dirt. Squishy little grubs wriggled away from her fingers, and the soil felt both fluffy and damp against her palms.
“It’s so detailed,” she said. “How can my mind create this if I’ve never seen anything like it before?”
“That’s why it’s sorcery and not science, siharasena,” dar Qaleen pointed out.
Naveed accepted that non-answer with a distracted nod. Questions could wait until they returned to the familiar din and dust of the marketplace. For now, she stepped into the chaos of growth around her, senses open to gather all she could. After all, someday she might meet someone with a jungle for a mind, and she had best try to understand it while she had a living example around her.
Behind her, dar Qaleen murmured, “I cannot wait to see your face when I show you the ocean.”