Maya spent the first few days walking around, keeping an eye out for Gray and the others. She recognised the areas immediately around Bandra soon. The Bandstand was where all the taverns were, where most brawls happened, indoors and out in the snow. Beyond the Bandstand were a series of chemists and amateur license-less doctors, and beyond them the Shipyards. A lot of different banners flew there. There were small skiffs, frigates, man o’ wars, a couple of omega warships, and even one of the last surviving prime battleships—from merchants to mercenaries to pirates—all docked within a few yards of each other without complaint or incident. Most folks knew better than to try and bend the Frozen City’s rules.
The parallel street running behind the Bandstand was called the Bazaar, and it was the only place in Frozen Bombay where the lawkeepers had no say. Maya went to the Bazaar whenever the lawkeepers would ask her too many questions. Who are you? Why are you staying here? How long for? Are you with a man? She hated them. Now the Bazaar, it was a curious place. A single street, curving and snaking through back alleys and secret paths, entering scores of businesses conducted in the open and in shops big and small. Several gambling joints rubbed shoulders—wherein the rumour was that one could gamble away one’s life—and fights were being fixed in every corner between dogs, chicken, exotic creatures from distant lands, and professional cage-fighters; a wondrous contraband market that had it all. Then, the coarser pleasures, a neighbourhood marked by red lanterns.
Try as she might, Maya was never recognised as anyone but a customer in the Bazaar. It did not matter how many lunches and dinners of special stew and paranthas she had from Nawaz’s, or how much she stood and watched and cheered in the gambling and the fighting joints. No one would remember her. They did not even let her enter some of the places, and she felt insulted and almost picked a fight with a bouncer on one occasion. Before she could settle the matter, however, she was whisked away by another merchant who begged her to see his wares, leading her to another part of the Bazaar entirely. He then proceeded to treat her to a lovely cup of Ahzad tea before introducing himself as Labadon, a merchant from the Middle East.
Beyond the Bazaar was a place called the Pit, but that was all that Maya knew about it. She had tried to go there on several occasions, but there was a dead end, a wall of bricks. Maya saw others go towards it at times and she followed them, but they too, would look at the wall, dumbfounded. It seemed to Maya that the act of finding the Pit was the entry fee the place demanded.
On the absolute other side of the Bazaar, away from the Bandstand, were the residential houses, quite a few of them. The present Sea Lord had granted men of power houses and titles, and they stayed here in peace, though apparently Bandra was no longer the posh name it had once been. Now it was vulgar, with travellers of all kinds docking in the shipyards and staying in the inns, drinking and making merry in the Bandstand and the Bazaar. There was enough on this side of town to keep Maya engaged for days and days, and she did not feel any need to explore beyond Bandra.
‘Why am I noticed as an outsider?’ she asked Labadon during one of their tea drinking sessions.
‘Because you wear a Soul Hunter’s garb, Sorcerer,’ Labadon replied casually.
Maya looked down at the cloak; she hadn’t known it to be one of a kind.
‘It is a Moon Cloak,’ Labadon continued. ‘With the right incantation it can hide you.’
‘I don’t need to hide,’ Maya said. ‘I need to be seen.’
Labadon offered Maya another cloak in exchange of the Moon Cloak. It was a northlander cloak, quite weathered and frayed on the outside, but with a near perfect lining of thick, white fur inside. Maya tried it on, and it was warm and snug. She accepted Labadon’s offer, pleased with her new purchase. Labadon also suggested that she leave her hood off from now on, and try something else, a different look which would build a presence. Something a little more exotic, perhaps from Labadon’s hometown? The world was large and full of people, after all. He suggested a head sash, a series of dark rags, bound around Maya’s head, weaving in and out of her long hair, making her look more menacing immediately. This done, the merchant examined her closely, frowning. ‘Something else,’ he muttered.
Labadon rummaged around a little, and then added a quick spray from something in a glass bottle. Maya took a deep breath and smelled peppers, spices, dunes, a rare flower, camel excreta, sunsweat. Mixed, confusing, powerful. ‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘Duran, one of the eastern spices,’ Labadon held up the bottle with a red liquid sloshing within. ‘Yours for only a measly silver.’
Maya accepted the price, even though it was steep for a perfume which wasn’t one. There was an imperfection about it, the smell of a life already lived, experiences already gathered. Maya did not know why she wanted to blend in and yet stand out, and why she took this gamble, but she did, darkening her eyes with kohl, multiple rags twisting their way around her head, falling in several pieces along with her long hair, a dark, almost tattered cloak trailing around her when she walked.
Building a presence among the locals was a slow task, and Maya knew she mustn’t lose her patience. She didn’t. She lived off the purse Zabrielle had given her, a purse which grew lighter every single day, a grim reminder. It was a counter, a panic as opposed to the patience which she must have.
The murders also started during this time, with bodies turning up in all sectors of Frozen Bombay, including the Bazaar. The corpses were always pale, missing blood, and there were whispers of another vampire outbreak, like the one the third Sea Lord had fought, the only time Frozen Bombay had been quarantined by the Druids. The killings lasted a week, a tense week. Maya often found the Bazaar shutting down hours before its time and more lawkeepers near the Shipyard, near the Bandstand. She did not like it, but she did not want to leave Bandra either, and so she stayed. Then the Sea Lord proudly announced that the vampire had been found and killed, its head apparently on display on Drake’s gates. People thronged to see it. Maya didn’t bother.
It happened after a while, and Maya knew she was on the right track—people did not stop talking when she was around. Shopkeepers slowly brought their prices down when shouting out, and then they stopped shouting to her altogether. Bouncers started giving small nods of acknowledgment. And when she sat down at the gambling tables, there were no more murmurs than necessary.
Maya gambled. The tables played a game called DeadSpell—deceptively simple at its core. Maya observed first and learned fast, then joined in. She won and lost her silver in fair amounts, had verbal fights, and threatened her opponents.
She was harassed by quite a number of men. Men had tried to get close, drug her, even force her. The first incident had been an unpleasant shock, a scarring encounter in which she managed to somehow hurt her assailant and run away. She had wanted to run away from Frozen Bombay then, run all the way to New Kolkata, shatter all her plans. She spent a week in her room, thinking about the incident, repeating it over and over in her mind. This was different from her encounters with supernatural creatures, with enemies who wanted to kill her. These men wanted to do something much, much worse, and the prospect of that deeply scared the woman in her. It wasn’t something she was used to. Nor should she be.
Then the anger flared again, the old anger, the hidden anger, the anger that had scared Gray and made them part ways. She welcomed it, for it let her step out again. The next time it happened, Maya gave way to the anger, calling the magic—she froze their hands solid and then broke them with her gauntlets, she set their hair and their clothes on fire, she stabbed them in their genitals with daggers of ice. She maimed and scarred them for life; she gained her earlier confidence again, and moved around Bandra as a menacing presence for all the molesters and stalkers. She enjoyed it. They hated her, and kept their distance.
It took Maya weeks to reach here, and she was intrigued by the fact that she did not run across Gray, Fayne, or Zabrielle in the Bazaar, which she haunted. They must have moved on to Zaleb Hel. Som
ehow. Adri Sen might even be back by now. Life went on. Her practise sessions with magic continued—she would climb to the roof of the inn from her window and practise there, sometimes in the noon, sometimes in deep night. She summoned the magic as usual; it had become easy. The dragon’s skin was even darker, the light purple seemingly an odd dream. It would come at her summons immediately, with an urgency she liked. Maya also learnt to differentiate between different energies, manifested rudimentarily as feelings, things that could almost be emotions. The warmth of the weak sun, a cold winter chill, a tremble beneath the skin, a shudder, a jitter, a sudden loud sound, silence—she would feel these things, let them get under her skin, and manipulate the feelings as she liked. She managed ice the easiest, as it was easy to draw the energy off the Frozen Bombay air with the right feeling. She summoned weapons of ice, basic forms shaped into whatever she would please. Fire was difficult here, but she managed strong flames soon, then fireballs, then fireballs that could be thrown like the Demons did. But these objects made of fire melted away; she was never able to hold on to a shape. She interpreted jitters and body shivers into electricity, but found it extremely difficult to control. She could not project it in directions she pleased, and would often give herself unpleasant jolts. There were more feelings, many more, but she could not project them into something tangible. She felt like someone trying to write books without knowing the alphabet.
She needed a teacher.
She heard about the Arab on one of her late nights out. A tavern, where she had been sitting, nursing a drink. By this point in time, the lewd and the smooth knew she wasn’t one to be bothered, everyone carrying their own burn, their own scar. They let her be. Maya simply sipped on the alcohol—a recent taste—and overheard conversations. Her mind was on other things, but she always kept a sharp ear for a few keywords.
Magic. What was that? ‘. . . to be bothered with that kind of shit,’ the man’s voice said.
‘He never pays for his passage, Earl,’ the other man complained. ‘If magic gonna buy me free docking then I’m gonna start a learnin.’
‘He doesn’t teach nobody.’
‘But he does, Earl. I heard stories.’
‘Listen to me. Drink up and forget what you heard. Best to not go looking for the Arab.’
A clichéd conversation, an urgent aura of mystery. Maya wasn’t impressed, but she decided to watch out for the Arab. If he knew magic, perhaps something could happen.
Maya was slowly gaining an identity with the locals as the weeks passed. They were calling her Xavier—someone had definitely peeped in the logbook, and there were rumours about her as well, some of the more amusing ones involving the killing of multiple husbands, and lost daughters of the desert. Maya allowed them, and enjoyed them secretly.
However, everything was not rosy. The money wasn’t, for example. Maya, quite stubbornly, did not want to move out of her room in The Ancient Mariner, the room facing the sea, though she had discovered establishments much, much cheaper. That left one possibility—that of this silver having to be earned. There were too many ways to spend money in the Bazaar, and now that Maya looked at the other side, work was interestingly rare. Most offers made to her had to do with her flesh, and Maya would not be that desperate, no matter what. That left some other kind of jobs, jobs that might not be morally enviable.
She met Jed Alfan on a weekend, a noisy one. Weekends were when things in the Bazaar would get the roughest, when people would drown their week’s work in rum and keep hangover cures ready. Maya was in a shady inn called Old Tide, a place infamous for attracting the wrong kind of people. All sorts of loners, half breeds, and hooded figures would frequent this place; to Maya it was just another lookout joint where she would hunt for another magic user. She had seen plenty of Sorcerers here in the past, but they wore MYTH robes and she wanted nothing to do with them. Someone else perhaps, someone who would light a cigarette without a match, or someone who would not be wearing warm clothes—Maya kept looking. On that particular night, she was in the middle of a heated game of DeadSpell.
‘Black wizard takes white knight,’ the bald heavy better grinned. Maya did not like him. He had bet too much and didn’t seem like a fool.
‘Yes, I suppose,’ Pokerface said, maintaining his favourite expression.
‘Am I the only one who’s got no hammers?’ one of the regulars complained. His name was Martuk and he was all right. Maya had played many times with him in the past.
‘You must be the only one,’ Maya said darkly, keeping down two cards. ‘I’ve got a white golem and a neutral shield-bearer here.’
‘Trying to race for it, girl?’ the bald man grinned again. Maya resisted the urge to knock his teeth in.
‘Don’t call me girl, you bald shit,’ she said. ‘Pokerface, you’re up.’
‘Two black knights,’ Pokerface said, putting the cards in. ‘Martuk.’
‘You’re killing me,’ Martuk groaned. ‘One white wolf.’
‘Wolf’s no use now, man,’ Maya muttered, staring at the cards on the table.
‘Damn you Xavier, don’t you think I know that?’
Their game was gathering a fair bit of attention in its dying throes. The winner would emerge any second, a well-earned victory. A crowd ambled around the table, muttering to themselves, shaking and nodding heads. Maya knew they did not matter. Her attention stayed on the table.
‘I’ll end this,’ the bald man laughed loudly. ‘Black wizard, white gnome, neutral golem.’
There was silence. ‘Two white shield-bearers and one black immune,’ Maya said, keeping her cards down. She hadn’t won, but she had managed to save half her silver. Not too bad.
The bald man’s smile faltered for a second, and then he was grinning at Pokerface. ‘Well?’
Pokerface laid down the winning set. ‘White cross set. Let’s see—a white Templar, and a golden cross card to take out the black wizard. The white gnome’s whipped by the neutral hunter. And three neutral golems and the triple absorption card takes over your golem. And a last white knight, just in case the next move has another golem in it. I win. Nothing Martuk plays can change the game now.’
The crowd around the table erupted into murmurs and cheers, people patting Pokerface on the back and congratulating him immediately. He was sitting as blank as ever, pulling the silver towards himself—Martuk was looking at his cards, making sure, and Maya was pulling half her silver back. No one noticed the bald man pull out a pistol. He fired once, in the air, and then aimed it at the bouncers as they crept towards him. A hushed silence fell immediately. People froze. No one made sudden moves.
Maya knew this was rare. Almost no one was fool enough to try something like this here. She also knew the bouncers did not carry weapons.
‘I’ll be taking that now,’ the bald man muttered, his face glittering with sweat. He pointed at the bag Pokerface had swept his winnings into.
‘You won’t get far, brother,’ Pokerface said in his dead voice, as if this happened to him every day.
‘Shut the hell up!’ the bald man roared. He threw the bag at Martuk. ‘Your share too! And the girl’s!’ Martuk wordlessly opened it and started scooping his own silver into it, then Maya’s.
Maya looked at the pistol. Not a modified one; this was a traditional weapon, packing a simple bullet, deadly nonetheless. She could render the gun useless by freezing or melting it, but that would take close contact and she was on the other side of the round table. She considered, doing a small count of the silver she had back in her room. Shudders went through her body as she called the magic then.
Martuk was handing the bag over when Maya slammed her palm on the table, using a feeling she called a sudden pull on the arm. Pure electricity zapped across the surface of the wooden table, something impossible, and onwards into the bald man. He jerked back in pain, the shock frying him in that moment. The gun skidded away.
It was over in seconds. Maya was sure he wouldn’t have gotten away with it, not here, but she could
n’t take the chance. The bouncers were on the man in the next second, escorting him outside—either to the lawkeepers or for some old fashioned justice—Maya didn’t care which. She counted her silver and kept the half she was meant to keep. People were muttering and whispering, but others were also beginning to cheer. Maya warily felt a few ginger pats on her back. Time to get out. Nodding at Martuk and Pokerface, she made to leave, and found herself face-to-face with the old bearded owner of the inn, the man who had no name.
‘We don’t allow magic in here,’ he said, the hint of a smile legible.
Maya shrugged.
‘But I’ll make an exception tonight for sure,’ he nodded. ‘All drinks you have here on this night are on the house. You have my thanks.’
‘I was planning to leave,’ Maya said.
‘Well, you heard the offer,’ the man said, shrugging as well. ‘You have yourself a nice time, Xavier.’ He moved off. The incident was over now, new people were playing DeadSpell again. Maya looked at the clock. Late. Cold. Perhaps a couple of drinks to warm herself up a little. She headed to the bar, but two men intercepted her. Their employer wished to talk. She followed them to a corner of the inn, the one table which was always reserved. A man was sitting there. Incredibly fair, red-haired; he was a giant, an incredibly large, well-built man. He wore a midnight blue tuxedo and smelled of money.
He smiled at her. ‘Jed Alfan,’ he rumbled, introducing himself. ‘Please, Xavier, sit.’
‘You already know my name,’ Maya said, sitting across him. The bodyguards took position a short distance away.
‘Quite the hero,’ Jed said. ‘Back there.’
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