by Gregory Ashe
Chapter 22
Abass pushed past Fadhra and ran to the stairs. Attacked. Segi and Naja had been attacked. Tair fend, let them be alright, he prayed. If those fool women got themselves hurt asking after me . . . He couldn’t finish the thought. Segi and Naja had been family to him, just like Scribe. In part mothers, in part sisters, they had listened to his problems with women, laughing at him most of the time, scolding him even more. He had kept them safe after Inka died and there hadn’t been anyone else to step in when a man refused to pay, or when he had a mind to pay the women in stripes rather than coin.
And now they might be dead. Because they cared for him. He sprinted down the steps, cursing the pain in his side like a knife with every breath. A burst of air pressed against him, and somehow Maq and Fadhra stood at the front door of the house, waiting for him.
“Out of my way,” he cried.
“Look at you,” Maq said. “You can barely walk, let alone run. Let Fadhra carry you. I’ll follow.”
“Carry me?” They weren’t making any sense; Fadhra was a good hand shorter than Abass, and she was lithe, although perhaps a bit more muscular than Abass liked. Not muscular enough to carry a full-grown man, though.
Fadhra grabbed one of his arms and wrapped it around her neck. “Hold on to me tight,” she said, a smile tugging at her mouth. Her strange aggression from their first meeting had disappeared. “If you’re lucky, that won’t be the only time I say that to you. But for now, keep a close grip. Traveling this way is not easy.”
Abass barely had time to wrap his other arm around her before she hoisted him up so that his feet dangled an inch off the ground. The effort didn’t seem to bother her at all. She nodded at Maq, who pulled the front door open and then . . .
It was like being pulled behind a wagon. A wagon, in turn, pulled by a hundred wild horses. The force of Fadhra’s first step sent Abass flying back, his legs fluttering behind him like loose pennants, his arms around her neck threatening to tear free from their sockets. With one great whoosh the air left his lungs. Buildings streamed past, a blur of color that swam into a muddy brown streak, only discernible by the fuzzed ray of green that marked the long swaths of grass. Everything moved too fast for Abass to wrap his mind around it. The sky pressed down on him, trying to crush him against the ground, squeezing the last of the breath from his lungs. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t move.
He held on for his life.
As quickly as it had begun, it was over. He hit Fadhra’s back as his momentum carried him forward and let out a muffled yelp of pain. Dimly he felt her loosen his arms, and then Abass found himself standing on the ground. The world spun around him. Two and three buildings vied to occupy the same space, then swam away again. He vomited into what he hoped was grass.
“Tair fend,” he said. “Never do that again.” His eyes focused and he saw the two-story building, its peeling red paint familiar.
The sun, hot and high in the sky, pounded down on him, and Abass’s eyes watered at the unfamiliar light. He staggered forward through the heavy, warm air, grateful for the breeze on his skin that helped distract him from his roiling stomach. Men and women surged around him, the normal press and swell of Khi’ilan’s midday traffic. No one gave him or Fadhra a second look.
Naja’s and Segi’s set of rooms sat above a run-down flower shop. Even at the distance, even with the press of bodies, Abass could smell the lilies and white-hearts, the peonies and thousand-glories that filled the fenced garden behind the shop. He swallowed the scent; it smelled like hope. Tair send they’re alright, he prayed.
Abass pushed through the crowd, heart pounding painfully again, and this time not from the disorienting trip with Fadhra. People spoke to him, angry at being jostled, but their voices dwindled away, the faint buzz of crickets riding the floral redolence. Distantly he noticed that more than one angry man drew back at Fadhra’s glare. All of it—the press, the noise, awareness—was pushed to the back by the sight of the faded red paint.
He hurried up the staircase that ran along the side of the building. Abass could hear nothing over his pounding heart, and the silence pressed in on him, weighing like the stones of the Sleeping Palaces. He rounded the terrace.
From the street, he had not noticed the door. It hung loosely from one hinge, the frame splintered and cracked to reveal the newly exposed wood. He pushed through into the front room.
The smell of bile hung in the air, a thousand times stronger than the flowers below, and underneath it lurked the bitter, salt-taste of blood. Rust-brown stains marred the plain floorboards and ran in a long streak along one wall. The cheap furniture was destroyed—the low table hacked in half, the chairs splintered and legless, cushions torn and shredded. Abass’s legs threatened to give beneath him.
He grabbed the frame of the door, grateful for the red-hot lances of pain as splinters of wood drove into his hand. The pain kept him from falling. He stepped deeper into the room, wilting as the fetor, stewing under the hot sun, billowed up around him.
“Hello,” he said, his voice threatening to give. “Segi? Naja? Are you here?”
No one answered; the stillness threatened to swallow him.
Staggering around a piece of broken pottery, Abass made his way to the bedroom. The door had been hacked to pieces; someone had tried to hold it shut, and the attacker had forced it. Abass’s blood pounded so that he thought he would pass out.
He lifted the ruined door and slid it open as best he could.
Death, thick as a cloud, washed over him.
Scribe, his hazel eyes fixed in a glassy stare, lay on the floor. Deep, brutal wounds had shattered his body, opened his throat and chest and gut. In other places, along his thighs and waist, whole sections of flesh had been cut away with surgical precision. Torture, perhaps, or cruelty, or pettiness. Or evil.
Behind him, as though, even in death, she sought to take refuge, lay Segi, her beautiful blue eyes, as pale as spring-water, meeting an unknowable, eternal gaze. One breast had been severed by the blow that opened her torso almost to the spine. The other hung exposed from the shredded, blood-stained silk blouse, in mockery of whatever sensuality life had once given her. Similar surgical cuts marked her body.
Somehow, Abass realized, he had fallen to his knees. Everything seemed distant. He crawled forward. Broken glass and pottery sliced his hands, but the pain was a cry for help from thousands of miles away. He could not hear it, could not heed it. There was only a pair of hazel eyes that no longer knew him, a boy who would no longer laugh at witty comments, or tell Abass to be more careful.
“Tair, tair, tair, tair,” Abass whispered. The god-made-flesh did not answer. He stopped inches away from Scribe. Even behind the wall of death, the boy would not want to be touched; Abass could honor that.
Someone was saying something behind him, voices, angry and hard, but they were like the pottery and glass—shards that left only the most distant and graceful cuts, like butterfly wings.
Abass stood there and stared. Scribe was dead. The boy he had rescued from death on the streets and given new life. A friend. A brother, dead. And it was all Abass’s fault, and in that distance between his hand and Scribe’s cold body, the memory of Isola fell.