by C. A. Bryers
Salla wiped the sheen of wetness from his face. “Looks lovely. Which way to the sunning lounge?”
The Majdi guard’s shoulder turned away by a few degrees. “Good. We’re heading inside, then.”
He grabbed Salla by the arm and tugged him toward the left door. The steel door sounded like a despairing inmate from within wailing out as it slid open, and Salla was led brusquely through the foyer. The expansive room appeared to be in a state of disrepair similar to the facility’s exterior. Among the many spherical lights hanging from the ceiling, several bulbs were dark or broken, and more than one tile underneath their rapidly moving feet was cracked, loose, or missing altogether. Support posts were propped at random intervals throughout the room, holding sections of the old wooden ceiling in place.
Through nearby double doors at the other end of the foyer, he heard some commotion, a handful of voices echoing in a large, contained space. Before he could ask who else was in this dire hideaway with him, the guard ushered him toward the mouth of a dark passageway to the right. The two slipped into the unlit corridor, and instantly the Majdi beside him held forth an open palm from which a pale glow illuminated their way forward. Only then did he allow their pace to slow. They traveled down a set of metal switchback stairs that groaned plaintively underneath almost every step. When the stairwell terminated upon reaching the second sublevel, it seemed clear enough they had reached their destination.
The glow emanating from the guard’s hand floated toward a control box. His free hand reached forth to pry the rust-patched door open and push the lever at its center upward. With a metallic squeal and a clank, the lever was in place and the corridor lights flickered on, died, and buzzed back to life. Barred doors lined the halls on this floor, and judging by the quick glimpses of Salla’s surroundings, it appeared this level had seen even less maintenance than the main floor above. Finding himself here now confirmed his suspicions about this place. Delflore had referred to it as simply a “facility.” But it wasn’t a mere facility.
It was a prison.
The pair, now firmly established as prisoner and guardsman, weaved around a handful more support posts as they turned one corner, and then another. Salla’s boots splashed through shallow pools of stagnant water, his shoulder brushing flaking paint from the walls between cells as they went.
“So this is where the Majdi bring people they want to forget about.” The remark reverberated all about them, his voice now drained of its earlier optimism and humor. “So much for all that trust that Majdi woman was talking about.”
“Here we are.” The guard drew open the cell door facing them at the bend of the corridor. “We almost never keep prisoners down here anymore, but this one’s the cleanest cell we have. The other room Delflore is having prepared for you will be ready when it’s ready.”
“And where will that one be? A cozy stretch of pipe in the city’s sewer line?”
The Majdi smirked. “Step inside, scrapper.”
Salla did so, and the door clanged shut behind him. A vague humming sound followed for but a second. When Salla turned about, the guard was removing his palm from the lock.
“I’ll be bringing you meals down from the commissary, but don’t expect a lot of small talk out of me. Soon as I’m off the injured list, you’ll be someone else’s little project.” The Majdi’s flat features wrinkled in something close to a smile. “Oh, and Delflore scheduled a tephic evaluation for tomorrow. Get some rest.”
With the Majdi guardsman disappearing into the broken splashes of light that filled the corridor, Salla examined his surroundings. Considering he was below the waterline now, there were no windows to provide a natural light source, only a couple of flickering, naked bulbs dangling from wires in the ceiling down the hall. The cell’s furnishings consisted of a fold-down bed with a filthy mattress and an equally dirty toilet.
Salla gave a heavy-winded sigh, the bed creaking as he settled on its edge. Only now did he realize just how precarious his situation truly was. Apart from Delflore and the guard, no one knew he was here. There were others in the building, but they were two floors overhead, and he had been secreted inside for some indeterminate reason. The cold and the solitude of this place drew close about him. His joke about being left in a hole to be forgotten, perhaps to die, rang hollowly in his mind. Was that what was happening here?
He got up, testing the metal bars imprisoning him. They did not budge, did not so much as rattle. Though these lower floors of this old prison complex suffered from decades of disuse and neglect, the cell door was as solid and unyielding as the day it had been installed.
He grinned. “Let’s take a look around, shall we?”
Fingering the tiny sleeve on the inside of his belt, Salla produced a small blade and two long pins. As Delflore had reminded him—not that he needed it—his mother had been an escape artist of some local renown and had taught him a few of her tricks that had saved him in the past. But her feats of escape were largely clever orchestrations—elaborate, prearranged scenarios designed to deceive a paying audience. His basic skills would offer little help if the Majdi had used due diligence when safeguarding this room.
Inserting the first pin in the lock, Salla felt heat against his fingertips at once. He withdrew it, staring in disbelief. The pin was already shorter by half, its end glowing like superheated embers at the heart of a campfire. At once, he recalled the strange humming sound he’d heard after the cell door slammed shut. The guard must have used some sort of tephic ward on the lock that prevented any sort of tampering.
It worked.
Salla slumped back on the bed, plumes of dust rising from the old mattress. He coughed, staring blankly at the nearby opposite wall. Filling with a sense of hopelessness, Salla’s mind turned to the one responsible for his incarceration. He pictured Rainne’s face in the sparse dashes of light before him, and the feelings of hopelessness turned to anger.
She wasn’t protecting anyone when she read me, he thought. She knew I wasn’t a threat by then.
Delflore’s rationalization for Rainne’s actions crumbled to pieces the more he dwelled on it. She’d had ample time—days, in fact—to sense any ill intentions he might have had toward her or Ulong. She had to have known he was no threat well before she’d invited him to share her bed with him. When she had invaded his mind, it had been a conscious, premeditated act performed for reasons only she could explain.
After almost an hour of stewing, of trying to pull apart her decision to do such a thing and piece it back together to find some sort of reasoning behind it, Salla was finally beginning to tire. He was sick of thinking about it, sick of thinking about her. He just wanted to close his eyes, let them fall heavily down, and if they were to never open again, it would make no difference. His worst fears since Tempusalist had come to pass. The Majdi had captured him. His future, his very life lay in their hands to do with as they saw fit.
***
When Salla’s eyes did open and the fog of sleep lifted with a tortoiska’s sluggishness, he sensed a subtle change in his surroundings. He darted upright, the last of the miasma clearing as the pervasive feeling took deeper hold. In the dashes of light cast by the flickering bulb outside the cell door, Salla looked about his tiny confines. Everything—what little there was—appeared to be as he had left it when he’d fallen asleep. Yet, as the long seconds spent in utter silence passed by, the palpable sense of unease refused to diminish.
Something’s here with me, he thought, his body going cold.
There was a presence with him, one as strong and distinct as if there was another person there in the cell with him, close enough to touch. Something moved in his periphery, and Salla spun to look.
Nothing.
The movement had been insubstantial, something barely perceptible that warped his surroundings ever so slightly, like the ripples of a mirage in the desert heat. Trapped with nowhere to run, Salla waited for something to happen. But nothing did. As more time slowly ebbed away, so too did the fee
ling that he was not alone. That intangible heaviness dissipated from the air, and Salla let the breath held captive in his chest escape at last.
What was that?
As Salla felt his heartbeat slow, his mind turned to the most likely culprit. He was a prisoner of the Majdi, and he was only beginning to understand what certain members of their Order could do. What if that presence was some sort of Majdi projection sent in to take a closer look? His thoughts blackened in response to the notion of yet another intrusion. As benevolent as the populace of the Odyssan Archipelago believed the Order to be, Salla had a dark feeling that perhaps too much trust had been placed in the Majdi. They had powers most did not, and if the bloody, war-ridden history of the region had taught him anything, it was that those with power tended to use it to subjugate those without it.
12
Day and night were fast becoming abstract concepts in his underground prison, where there was no sign of the sun, moon, stars and skies. Walled off and shut away from the rest of the world, he woke at some indeterminate hour, enveloped by the ever-present wall of silence pushing in around him with greater and greater strength.
His eyes narrowed in the apparent stillness, head turning a few degrees to peer through the bars. Something was breaking the silence at last. It began as faint taps off in the distance, growing steadily louder. He stood to lean against the bars of his cell, eyes straining to see something, anything in the weak dashes of light of the corridor.
Far down the hall, from the niche which housed the stairwell that had brought him to this desolate cell block, a silhouette appeared. The figure was short by almost any standard with a somewhat ample frame, but regardless approached with a confident stride.
“Good, you’re awake,” a woman’s voice called out to him. “Salla Zair, is it?”
He cleared the grit from his throat. “Saar, actually. And who are you?”
“I’m your scheduled evaluation.” She walked under the nearest light, closing the distance between the two of them until she stood on the other side of the bars. Her eyes brightened suddenly. “Well. You’re a handsome one, aren’t you? Wait—they did tell you I was coming, didn’t they?”
In the blur of his sinking hopes and swelling tides of anger before falling asleep hours ago, he had forgotten. “I guess they did.”
The girl before him was unlike any Majdi he had ever seen. Her hair was a vibrant, almost artificial-looking red color, woven just behind her right ear into a thick braid that ran down the front of her shoulder. Eager, almost giddy dark eyes shone from a porcelain-toned face. She smiled at him, thin brows raised expectantly as if waiting for him to simply walk through the cell door to join her.
She shook her head then, laughing. “Right, I didn’t tell you my name, even though you asked for it. That was rude. I’m Iriscent. Iriscent Saffora.” She bounced on her heels, flicking her brows. “So, are you ready to get out of your clothes?”
“Excuse me?” A moment later, he understood. “Ah. Another dip in that green muck of yours. A restora, it’s called?”
“You catch on quick. I’ll make a note of that in my report,” she said with a wink, curling her lips between her teeth to suppress a smile.
Salla looked at her with a curious slant. “You’re new at this, aren’t you?”
Iriscent bobbed her head exuberantly. “Tell you the truth, this is my first evaluation. Well, certainly not the first one done on me, but my first unsupervised one on someone else.”
“Are you a…” He trailed off, trying to think of the Majdi term, but failing. “Are you a student?”
She nodded again, laughing. “An ijau. All things considered, I probably shouldn’t be allowed to work on anybody, but here we are.”
Salla almost choked. “What?”
Her smile faded, eyes narrowing. “Wait. Do you know where you are?”
“Pretty sure I’m in a prison cell.”
Iriscent gave a snorting laugh. “Funny, too.” She scribbled something on her notepad. “Well, yeah, this is an old prison—or it was, at least. The upper levels were sort of renovated, but that was clearly a long time ago if you got a peek around before coming down here. What this place is now is called the House of Falling Rain.” The mischievous smile returned. “I like to call it the place where all the bad children wind up. They throw you in this dump when you’re not measuring up to Majdi standards, for one reason or another. Either you’re falling too far behind the others, or just not getting the whole philosophy behind the Order.”
“And which are you?”
“The second one, but it’s not my fault. My stuffy old preceptor for Advanced Tephic in Applied Healing thinks I don’t act enough like a Majdi, so he convinced someone I belong here until I get more humble or stoic or something.” She shrugged. “Most ijau or Majdi here fall into the second category. Most think it’s not their fault either, so don’t listen too closely to what I have to say about it.”
“Full Majdi can wind up here?” he asked.
Another nod. “Sure. You do something wrong enough out there and they think you’re worth the time to straighten out, they’ll kick you in here for a bit for some remedial work on whatever your failing might be.” Her hands came together with a sudden crack. “We’re running behind, so let’s get you out of there and into that green stuff.”
Salla tilted his head to the side, looking down the corridor behind Iriscent, finding no one. “No guard to make sure I don’t try to escape?”
The other giggled. “Oh, no. I’d have you flopping on the floor like a fish in three seconds.” Her hand wrapped about the door’s lock, and Salla heard it click. She swung it open. “Let’s go.”
Salla followed the stocky little ijau girl back up the stairs, but she only brought him up one level rather than the two flights that would return him to the ground floor.
“Why is it called the House of Falling Rain? This place, I mean.”
“Don’t know. Majdi in the islands take influence and borrow from other branches of the Order from all over the world.” She gave a flippant shrug. “Probably has some significance to someone somewhere, I guess. I never cared enough to find out.” She stopped abruptly, looking left and right. “Um, this way.” She pointed without certainty to the left and started walking. “I was right. This is it. You know, this is kind of fun.”
“How do you figure?”
“Well, have you ever snuck out with some girl you’re not supposed to be with? You’re kind of like that, except, well…you’re not a girl, of course. Know what I mean?”
He watched her walk a few paces before him with bewildered eyes. “Not in the least.”
She turned, walking backwards. “You don’t know much, do you? Don’t worry, that’ll be our little secret. Just like you. Ha!” She burst into more laughter, pointing at him. “You get it? You’re a secret around this place. You’re not supposed to be here—or we’re not supposed to know you’re here and treat you, at least.”
Her words did little to bolster his confidence about his situation. “So why are you evaluating me? Delflore?”
She shrugged. “Salla Saar, if I had a clue, I wouldn’t bring it down here. Too dirty. It is Saar, right?”
He nodded. “If nobody’s supposed to know about me, why do you? Why let someone in on a secret who isn’t in the best standing with the Order?”
“Well, she—that Delflore woman, I mean—she couldn’t let someone on the outside come in and do any work on you. They might go sobbing and screaming to the Chamber or something, right? So what do you do? You get someone who’s already on the inside and promise them that when their evaluation comes along, they’ll get a free pass out of this place, more or less.” She hopped, laughing wildly again in the dank corridor. “You know, provided that person can keep a secret. And ‘that person’ is me, get it? Seeing as I’m the only student in the House that specializes in the healing side of things, that Delflore lady didn’t have a big list to pick from. Lucky me, right?”
She stopp
ed outside one of the cells lining the wall, opened the barred door and stepped inside. With a wave of her hand, light spheres on either side of the room gradually cast their greenish glow upon the walls and ceiling. Salla could now see the cell was two cells, rather—the wall separating one from the other torn down, and the traditional, sparse furnishings gutted. What appeared to be a temporary restora pool had been installed in the middle of the newly elongated room. Instead of being set into the floor like the one he had awakened in the day before, this one sat atop the floor, its rim standing as high as his hips.
Iriscent stared down at it, lips twisted in dissatisfaction. “Ugly thing, ugly place, but so long as it all works, I suppose.” She moved to a small table on the other side of the pool and turned on an old monitor. With a few subtle ticks, the screen brightened. “Not even a projection screen. Savages. Hey, are you naked yet?”
Salla flinched. Slowly, he started to pull off his clothes.
“Hard to say if they bothered heating the pool after installing this thing, or if these portable jobs even have self-heating apparatuses.” Again came that infectious laugh. “If not, I won’t judge. Okay, I’ll try not to, but no promises.”
Testing the waters, Salla let the thick green liquid swallow his toes first. When he felt a low warmth gather about his foot, he climbed fully into the pool. The tephic waters wrapped about him as he lay in a prone position as he had before. The density of whatever substance comprised the liquid held him suspended in its almost gelatinous grasp. His legs and torso sank a bit, but his chest and face remained above the surface.
Iriscent finally turned away from the monitor, smiling down at him. “Comfortable? I bet you are. So, everything’s set. Are you ready to start?”
“If I’m not, it wouldn’t matter, would it?”
“Not if you want to see the outside of that cell someday.” She pulled off her long, thin coat, revealing a skintight burgundy body suit.