Yumi and the Nightmare Painter(50)

“You will adapt,” she said.

“You want to wait for that and get nothing done today?” he said. “Other than me picking up rocks and dropping them?”

She regarded him with something akin to contempt, then told him to request gloves of Liyun, who fetched some from the town—it was nearby, mere steps away really. This place of ritual was an exposed section of too-hot stone with a little fence built around it and rocks strewn about inside that looked like the remnants from a quarry.

Liyun, fortunately, had managed to clear away most of the gawking townspeople. For his audience today he had only his attendants and a few of the town’s higher-ups, who watched and whispered with confused expressions. The men wore beards like they did in old paintings on his world, but with clothing that was unfamiliar and too colorful for the bland or black-and-white image of the past he’d formed from old photographs.

The town itself was a huddle of barely under a hundred homes, with that strange water-collecting thing in the center. An orchard of hundreds of trees drifted and bumped against one another off to Painter’s left.

“Why can’t we go in there to practice?” he whispered, wiping his brow at the heat. “I’d like to be in the shade. It wouldn’t be quite as sweltering that way.”

“Most of the heat comes from the ground,” Yumi said, frowning. “It’s not that much cooler in the trees. Besides, this is the place of ritual. You’d have the people of the town move all the rocks just for your convenience? That would be a shameful act.”

Of course it would be.

His gloves arrived, and he pulled them on—feeling annoyed at being forced to put on more clothing. He swore it was hotter this day than it had been on the others, and the light of that sun overhead did not help.

“All right,” Yumi said. “Step one is to learn to evaluate rocks. To stack properly, you must balance—and to do that, you need to be able to judge each rock. Pick up one and heft it.”

He did so. It felt like a rock.

“Note how,” she said, walking around him again, “it is bulbous on one end, narrower on the other. Its center of gravity, then, will be toward the bulbous side. Using that, you can create spectacular illusions of stacking where it looks like one side is hanging out impossibly in the air, while the other side is heavy enough to balance it out. Precision work using other stones can enhance this.”

“Center of gravity,” he said, “and precise work. I thought you called this stacking of yours an art.”

“Art is all about precision.”

“No it’s not,” he said, passing the rock from hand to hand. “Art is about feelings and emotion. It’s about letting them escape, so they can be shared. It’s about capturing a truth about yourself. Like you’re ripping a hole in your chest and exposing your soul.”

“Pretty words,” she said, “but meaningless. Poetry is a luxury. And we—”

“—have no claim upon luxuries.”

“Exactly,” she said.

“This is stupid,” he said, dropping the rock. “This entire world is stupid, Yumi. You don’t need a hero. You need an accountant.”

She glared at him. Silent. Intense. Until finally he picked the rock back up. “Fine,” he said. “How do I stack it?”

“You don’t, not yet,” she said. “Drop it and pick up another one. Today we will focus only on weighing rocks.”

“Seriously?” he said. “I’m going to spend all day just picking them up.”

“Yes,” she said. “We’ll likely do that tomorrow as well. Might spend as much as a week getting a feel for the stones. In my training, we spent multiple months.”

“You’re…” He stopped himself. He’d been about to say, “You’re kidding.” But of course she wasn’t. Because kidding—indeed, smiling or joking in any way—was a luxury. She wouldn’t understand such things.

Too bad. Because the greatest joke he’d ever experienced was the one the cosmere was playing on him right now.





Yumi was terrified.


She wasn’t trained for this. Teaching another yoki-hijo? This wasn’t appropriate. It wasn’t what the spirits had chosen her to do.

She was going to screw it up. She felt herself screwing it up as Painter proved to be a stubborn student. She’d been stubborn too, hadn’t she? Liyun talked about how willful she’d been as a young girl, always demanding explanations before doing as she was told.

And yet…that tone in the spirit’s voice when it had spoken to her before beginning their swap—something was terribly wrong, or was going to go terribly wrong, and she had to stop it. Possibly through Painter.

The spirits depended on her. She was terrified she was going to fail them.

“Pay attention,” she said to Painter, trying to give her voice the same weight that Liyun gave hers. “Don’t daydream.”

He sighed, dropping his current rock. She’d caught him staring off into space, likely pondering clever ways to aggravate her.

“How,” he said to her, “am I supposed to ‘feel’ the stones and ‘know’ them if I don’t take some time to contemplate?”

“You don’t need time to contemplate now,” she said. “That’s what meditation time is for.”