by Danie Ware
‘Jay never got the sample back from the Hospital,’ Ebi said. ‘But we did have one other case before they shut the station.’ At his look, she went on, ‘Another merchant, very senior, very superstitious. She died the same way. She claimed the spirits were speaking to her, that they’d marked her for some ‘glorious purpose’—’
‘The spirits were speaking to her,’ Proteus said. He was nodding somehow unsurprised. ‘It makes sense: Galeas was a moneylender, and you said he dreamed of wealth. This woman dreamed of the spirits’ touch.’ And Lyss… He lit the reed, unable to believe that he hadn’t realised this before. ‘So, what if this stuff gives you what you want the most? Grants your dreams, if you like? Who could resist that?’ He snorted. ‘And if Galeas had that much reach in the merchants’ districts, maybe he knew exactly the right people to target…’
The people who’d follow Cloudglass, he finished the thought silently. It would explain why the drug had not been seen at harbour, or at the wharf – Galeas had not been selling, he’d been buying, and what he’d been buying had been loyalty.
Ebi said nothing. She sat with her reed in her hand, smoke curling from her fingers.
Proteus watched her, trying to gauge his next step. ‘You’ve gone all quiet.’
She met his gaze, held it. Then she said, her voice tight, ‘What is all this? What the hells are you involved in?’
He let out his breath, considering, giving ground. ‘Honestly? I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But I’m trying to understand something.’ He blew smoke, a thoughtful plume. ‘Is there anything else you can tell me? About the drug, about…?’ It ended in spread hands.
She shook her head, frowning. Then she looked up and him and said, ‘I could cast for you again? If you wanted?’
He stared at her. It wasn’t the answer he had come here looking for, but hells, she’d been right once.
‘Okay.’ He heard himself say it. ‘Why not?’
*
Caph was half-dozing, uncomfortably on the boxes, when the door clanked unlocked and slammed open.
He started and scrambled to his feet, his back stiff and his heart pounding, but it still wasn’t Ganthar.
It was Anatar.
Her expression was bleak. ‘It’s your lucky day,’ she said. ‘In more ways than one. The morning has passed and the criers are come to the steps of Kier. It seems City Hall has issued an edict.’ Her smile was rich and dark. ‘And it demands the presence of house Caphen.’
‘Oh, you’re joking…’ Caph stared. In the middle of everything else, this was about the last thing he needed.
‘Hardly,’ she said. ‘The Selection hasn’t yet been formally called – but the rest is academic. You and your family are required to attend for your Assessment, and then to join the Assembly for the observation of your assets. All, as they say, will be revealed.’
Assembly. He didn’t manage the word aloud.
She tapped her cane. ‘Not even Raife can keep you out of City Hall,’ she said. ‘At least… not yet.’ She stood back to let him out of the door, her expression edged. ‘And keeping you here would be far too much of a risk. But.’ She tapped the cane. ‘Please understand that I will be sending an escort with you, all the way into the upper city. And you can be sure, Caphen Talmar, that Ganthar will be at the Assembly, and that he’ll be watching you.’ Her cane tapped out the threat as she stood back to let him go. ‘Watching you very closely.’
*
‘Before I do this, are you going to tell me what all this is about?’ Ebi asked.
From in among the cushions, she’d retrieved the bag that contained her little figures – dozens of them, by the size, perhaps one for every spirit and every hell. She’d handled it with a careful reverence, laying it down between them.
Proteus said, ‘I can’t do that, Ebi, I’m sorry. But I’ll take any info you can give me.’
‘Info?’ The word made her smile. ‘I’m not a seer, Ad, and I don’t have some magical key.’ He watched her, his curiosity caught by more than just the need for answers – there was more to Ebi than he’d realised. ‘I can’t solve your life’s crisis, or pull answers out of thin air. If I were in the market, I’d glean what I could from your clothing, your conversation, and I’d interpret that knowledge in the light of which figure I withdrew. In short, I’d give appropriate suggestions, and your needs and wants and fears would do the rest.’
‘But you can’t do that here?’
She didn’t answer him. ‘You can ask me three questions,’ she said ‘Clear in your own mind as well as clearly spoken. For each, I’ll draw one figure. I can’t conjure you a miracle solution, but they may give you guidance, or confidence in a decision, and enable you to find that solution for yourself. Does that make sense?’
He grinned. ‘Perfectly.’
‘And then I want you out.’ Her tone was flat. ‘I’ve got enough to deal with. Whatever it is you’re up to, I don’t want the greycoats tracking it here.’
He nodded, and she went on, ‘Okay. So you have a think for a minute, and make sure that you know what you want to ask me. And then tell me when you’re ready.’
Questions tumbled, as if he’d been granted three wishes and didn’t know what he wanted the most. But he let out his breath and his worries, and tried to pinpoint the right words, the insights that he needed.
He said, ‘Where’s Lyss?’
Ebi drew a figure from the bag, held it up. It was obsidian, a little carven skull.
Proteus felt his heart shrink.
‘Oeir,’ she said. ‘The traditional face of Death, or of waiting in line for your particular hell to be assigned. Oeir is the indicator of the ways, the judge.’ She flickered a smile. ‘She doesn’t indicate death, she just points it out. To me, she suggests… limbo.’
Proteus nodded, feeling a chill shiver go through his blood. Again, Ebi’s accuracy was uncanny.
She said, ‘Ask again.’
Proteus thought about it, then said, ‘What’s Cloudglass? What’s actually down there?’
She drew the second figure from the bag, this one a face of glass, its mouth open. It was completely transparent.
‘Lasseh,’ she said. ‘Truth. Usually seen a ‘good’ spirit, but a hell all of his own. Truth can be brutal, stark and more than we can handle. Lasseh can be used as a weapon, or as a personal justification. He can strip us of our comforting illusions, the lies we tell ourselves, and he takes a pleasure in inflicting his understanding.’
Proteus looked at the light as it caught in the little figure.
‘In response to your question,’ Ebi said, ‘I can’t tell you specifics, but I would say that you’re very close to where you’re going, very close to the answers, but that the result…’
‘May be too much?’
‘May be too much.’
Proteus leaned back, looking at the figures. His nervousness flickered again.
A shadow passed the window. Ebi said, ‘You don’t have to have a third question, if that’s enough.’
‘No, I….’ Proteus stopped. He’d had a specific question in mind, but now wondered whether he should ask it – whether it would give too much away. Perhaps he should ask, instead, about the Selection? And somewhere, some ludicrous teenage part of him wanted to ask about Caph – does he, did he?
But this was no time for foolishness. No, he needed to know more about what Austen had told him. He needed…
He wanted to know who he was.
And that thought rose so fast it consumed the room, the cushions, the cross-legged from of Ebi. Suddenly, more than anything, he wanted to ask ‘Who am I?’
It came so close that his lips parted under the pressure, it escaped him in a soundless sigh of smoke.
Ebi watched him, understanding. She said, very softly, ‘Ask.’
‘I don’t know what to--’
‘You’r
e afraid?’
‘Yes.’ It was perhaps the most honest thing he’d ever said.
‘Would you like the third figure drawn?’
Proteus paused, ‘I… I don’t know.’
Slowly, still studying Proteus with that odd intensity, Ebi shook the bag. She said, ‘Ask.’
‘I’ve got too many questions,’ he told her, trying to grin.
‘Go on.’
He took a breath, the risk, the opportunity. ‘Do you believe in hellspirits?’
Hand halfway into the bag, Ebi paused. ‘What?’ Her voice was chill. ‘Is that your question?’
He shrugged. ‘No, I just… wanted to know.’ He tried to make the statement into a joke. ‘I want to know if they’re real.’
Ebi put the bag down, said, ‘They’re real enough – though perhaps they exist within us and not without.’ Her tone was dangerous. He could hear her alarm, and the cushions between them seemed to have become treacherous with sudden traps. ‘You thinking of summoning one?’
That made him laugh. ‘Hardly.’
She searched his face, then relaxed, but only slightly. ‘Ask your question.’
He said, almost under his breath, ‘What happens next?’
Ebi pulled the third figure from the bag, holding it concealed.
‘Interesting,’ she said. She was watching his face, her gaze sharp, her hand closed around the little figure. ‘This is Viluy; though he has other names. He – or she – is a deceiver, a player of games, a master manipulator. A spirit whose face suits whatever company they’re in, whatever is the most expedient…’ She tailed off, as if waiting, but he said nothing, so she continued, ‘Viluy is usually thought of as ‘evil’, but he can bring good if it will benefit him in some way.’ She held it out on her palm, and Proteus stared at it, his face grey as ash.
The little figure was carved from bone, but it carried a vicious and powerful emotion that seemed to focus the room around it. And it had a dozen faces, all of them stretched in terrible pain, and all of them trying to pull away, or apart, from the main body.
And she said to him, ‘Is that the answer you wanted?’
*
Bruised and stained and dirty and exhausted, the Cloudglass goon at his shoulder like a shadow, Caph came at last to the peak of the city’s rising spiral, and the nine headless pillars of City Hall.
This was the heart of the caldera, the great hope crafted by the Builders, ten thousand years before. And it was beautiful, it towered over him, intricate and dizzying, wrought with writhing stone creatures that seemed almost to move, to crave freedom from their prison of millennia. City Hall was visible from any place on the water, an icon of power that none could ever fail to witness; it knew all things, and it governed with efficiency so ruthless that it controlled the movement and coinage and cargo of every man and woman in the city.
It also held, very closely, to the secrets of its own power.
In the fore garden, great abstract metalworks stood as though they had been grown there, tributes to the Builders’ impossible skills.
They made Caph think of Artifice and the mining machine.
At the gate, the greycoats saluted him, their faces impassive. He was given an armed escort, wordless and marching, to take him along the last and highest of the city’s walkways, marching pillars at either side, and the whole design of the servants’ districts laid out in flawless pattern below.
City Hall was magnificent.
And it was utterly, ghoulishly cold.
He told himself he was imagining it – he’d had every hell of a night. And he’d not felt it the last time, four years previously, when he’d played his zanyar for the high families. He’d been a city luminary, then, young and bright and utterly naïve, the protégé of his University…
And all too interested in himself.
And now, he was a mess, again, his clothing creased, his face still hurting despite Raife’s touch. As he came to join his family, they stared at him, silently horrified. His mother raised her chin, tight-lipped, his father stood upright, obviously furious. Bectar was there, immaculately turned out in a jacket and waistcoat of a slightly more shaped cut that his own, and with them stood Darrah, his hair and face as flawless as ever. He shot Caph a single look, and turned away.
The greycoats that stood by the gate to the inner garden were stone-faced. They stared straight ahead, saying nothing.
Jularn took his elbow, drew him to one side. ‘Did you see Raife?’ she asked him, her voice low. She was still pale from her ordeal at the mines, but this was as much her moment as it was her husband’s, and Caph knew she wouldn’t have missed it. She wore the robes of her skills and office, the full cloth weight of the ranking metallurgist.
‘I saw him,’ Caph said. He had no time for explanations; the family would be called any moment.
‘And?
‘He made the offer,’ Caph said. ‘But it came with a price.’ He looked at her, searching for their previous closeness. He wanted her help, her support – he wanted to understand everything, but she seemed very austere and far away. ‘Who is he? Raife, I mean? How did he learn…?’
‘I told you.’ Jularn studied the contusions on his face, but made no remark. ‘We were at the Academy together.’
‘He lost his family name, didn’t he?’ Caph said. ‘Why? What did he do?’
Bec hissed, ‘Sssh!’
The door opened, and a gaudily uniformed servitor offered them a short bow. ‘House Caphen,’ he said. ‘Be welcome in City Hall. Today is a time for celebration, and for new beginnings. Truth lies within. You are Invited. Will you come?’
And Kolmarch stepped forwards, his family around him, and said the words he’d waited a lifetime to say, ‘We will come.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: POWER
‘House Caphen.’
High at the city’s apex, the air was cold and slow, and red clouds drifted across the sun. The nine pillars of City Hall rose like blood-stained shadows, tall enough to make your head spin. Awash with exhilaration and dread, Caph walked slowly down a long curve of decorous stairway, his parents in front of him, his sister at his side like a bodyguard. And as they descended, sedate as a funeral procession, the uniformed crier called their names. The swirl of people below them stopped to give a moment of applause.
Quiet music chimed alongside the calls of soaring birds.
Bec’s hand twitched for her absent blade. ‘You ready for this?’
‘Not even slightly.’
Caph was drained, dirty, and he’d not had the chance to go home. He was trying to forget his bruised face, his split lip, his overnight ordeal, the fact that he would be stared at by everyone present – this whole thing just felt ever more unreal. The tease of music sounded like Raife’s temptation; the memories of the Caphen machine rumbled a bass counterpoint in his head. If he actually stopped to assimilate what had happened, it was all too much, too crazy - Anatar, Ganthar, the man with no face. His hands hurt like pure nervousness, and he kept wondering if this might just be the end – if formal Selection would just solve all of this and make it go away.
Yet he still gripped the little metal box as if it was the only thing he really wanted.
The final courtyard waited, eager as a predator. It was dazzling, bright with mosaic and decorated with impossible sculptures of metal and glass that caught the sunlight and threw it back in a dazzle of colour. Caphen blue-and-gold hung from the unlit lamps – bunting, fluttering like mockery. Though it was early, wide tables rested with wine and elbows and there were a series of dancing fountains, their spray wind-blown and sparkling.
The four of them, Darrah following them like a footman, came to the bottom of the stairs as it they’d arrived at Judgment, the first level of hell.
‘Smile, Tal,’ Bec reminded him.
In amongst the bruises, he stuck the right expression to his face
.
As if they saw his fakery, the birds cried and lifted away, silhouettes headed for the distant wall of the crater.
The noose of insincerity closed round them. The perfect women, their perfect men. The congratulations, the elegantly hollow conversations, the pointless, refined queries where no-one listened to the answers, only cared that they’d asked the right questions…
No, the mines were quite operational thank you. Just an accident, all resolved. Yes, his hands were much better and he would be playing again, in time.
Bec caught snide queries about her lack of a husband; her expression clouded to thunderous.
Caph caught a couple of his own; carefully hooked remarks, all swathed in silk. You should meet my nephew, Caphen, he’s about your age… He controlled an urge to snap back, or to scratch and scratch and scratch at the too-tight collar of his shirt. In the mines, looking at his family’s power and history, he’d wanted to come here, wanted to pick up the weight of his name and it everything it stood for. But this? This charming, empty dishonesty?
He wondered where he would’ve been, if he’d walked out after all. If he’d taken the other direction. Down there, over the edge of the courtyard’s wall, all the way out at the wharfside…
But Aden was too far away now, the memory only wistful.
‘It’s like a bloody circus up here.’ Bec interrupted the thought, her hand on his arm. ‘Good thing we know how to perform.’ The reminder was deliberate, and he knew it. He stood upright, ready for the games.
People caught their attention, waylaid them, hampered their progress with discussion about the Selection, with requests for favours or reminders of favours done. This woman was a guildmistress, and their patronage would be well worth their time; this man was a craftmaster and wanted metals for his work. He could offer them much in return, he said, trade-routes and insights and tap-of-the-nose connections. Kolmarch caught them all, flawlessly polite, carefully neutral, promising nothing. And Caph admired his father’s sheer skill as he navigated waters more treacherous than anything below.