Beneath the Rising

by Premee Mohamed

  “Lucky,” Johnny said. “Can you give us a ride to Al-Qarawiyyin?”

  “Tariq has asked to speak to you.”

  “We can’t spare the time.”

  “I know you cannot,” the cop said. “Not if even half the rumours are true. They will raise the alarm at the station at once, and then there will be a city-wide alarm. I do not know if anything can be done about that. We cannot be everywhere at once. But I agree with their decision to bring you, and we are going all the same.”

  “Sightings of what?” she said thoughtfully, evidently agreeing to disagree with the last part of his statement.

  “…Impossible things.”

  He fell silent then, and refused to answer any more of her questions. After a few blocks, we pulled over and he bought water and a bag of smoked almonds at a haroun, then ducked into the back seat and sliced through our zip-ties. Johnny opened my water and fed it to me in little sips while I tried to get circulation back into my fingers.

  “What’s going on?” I said as we got going again, cold water splashing down my shirt. “Don’t really care who answers. Pick someone.”

  “You’ll see,” Johnny said, staring intently at the front seat. “Almond?”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I WAS ABOUT to doze off when the car stopped, and we stepped out into the coolness and silence of a back alley, ending in a one-storey white clay building.

  “Where—” I began, and flinched as the headlights turned on; we both turned and watched the cop car reverse out. When I looked back, dazzled from the light, Johnny was already disappearing into the building’s open door.

  We crossed a small round courtyard, then entered a hallway, dim and heavily scented—roses, pine cleanser, herbs. There was another odour underneath it, though, as if someone had hosed the place down with air freshener to hide something. I felt my hackles go up. The walls were hung with several layers of rugs, the floor white tile. Light came from a few dim, wide lamps, barely bright enough to show the rich colours of the rugs. A small movement as we passed showed a gray tabby darting down one of the hallways. The cats have been reporting unusual sightings...

  I shook my head, and we emerged into a low-ceilinged room ringed with wooden benches, the floor covered in more rugs, cushions, and blankets. The walls were plaster interspersed with dark wood beams. A small metal cart held a duplicate of Johnny’s coffee machine from back home, blue enamel instead of red.

  “Tariq,” Johnny said, her voice inscrutable. I strained to hear something in it: hope, excitement, happiness, fear.

  “Joanna. What a long way you have come. I almost did not believe it.” A tall man emerged from another door with his hands out, so suddenly I thought for a second that one of the shadows had stepped away from the column. He was dressed in a flowing, grey-pink robe and matching headwrap that accentuated the absolute indigo darkness of his grave face, his long hands. Something swung on a chain around his neck, hidden in the folds of his robe. As he moved towards us I gagged on the smell of roses. Johnny didn’t take his outstretched hands, waiting for so long it became awkward. He finally put his hands back into his robe and smiled.

  “Sit, sit. Both of you. Coffee? Tea? Have you eaten?”

  “We don’t have time.”

  “Of course not. We will be brief.”

  I flopped onto a bench and, seeing Johnny do it first, unhooked my bag from around my body, groaning with relief. I had been wearing it so long that there was a grimy stripe across my neck from the strap, and I felt unbalanced on one side. Tariq sat across from our bench, arranging the robe over fancy sandals decorated with blue and white stones. I sniffed the air again, uneasy.

  “And this would be the famous Nicholas,” he said.

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said automatically, almost before I was aware I’d opened my mouth. We shook hands, his grip cool and strong. Famous? To who?

  He laughed at Johnny’s expression. It did nothing to break the tension building between them, like a wall going up brick by brick between their stares.

  She said, “Thanks for sending Omar to come get us. I mean, we were almost out on our own, but thanks.”

  He waved a hand. “You know already what I am going to say, before I say it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which is what?” I said, loudly, when neither of them spoke again.

  Johnny didn’t even look at me. “That that was as much help as this chapter is willing to offer,” she said. “Not can, but will. Isn’t that it? Why did you want to talk if that’s the case?”

  “You are a terrible scientist because you think everything is simple, Joanna,” someone said; the heavily beaded curtain at the other door parted with a clatter and revealed a woman, much shorter than Tariq, beautiful, compact, maybe in her seventies, long silver hair visible through a translucent silk scarf. A white cat followed her, gaunt, with one blue and one green eye. It studied me for a minute, then jumped up onto our bench, as far away from Johnny and me as it could get.

  “Helen,” Johnny said. “You’re a long way from home, too. When did you get here?”

  “We have questions for you to answer, not the reverse,” the woman said, glancing at me and dismissing me in the same glance. “And you have brought them upon yourself, starting with that ridiculous phone call.” She remained in the doorway not as if she were uncomfortable or awkward, but as if she expected this conversation to be short, necessarily so, because there was so little to say. If so, I thought, she didn’t know Johnny very well.

  But the way they looked at each other spoke to me of a strange, deep knowing—almost the way she looked at Rutger. I wondered who this Helen was, so erect and pale in her royal-blue dress—and where she had come from. As far as us? Her voice was unaccented to my ears, which meant she was from Canada or the States. It made me homesick suddenly—longing for a place where there was more sky than building, where I could understand people, where things were mostly decades old instead of millennia, where a building made out of baked mud would disintegrate in a month, where magic didn’t roll downhill.

  “Things are more complicated than when I first called,” Johnny said. “And you guys are complicating them even more, with all due respect.”

  “With all due respect,” Helen repeated. Her face was cool and hard. “Now, Tariq, she speaks to us with respect.”

  “Of respect, I think,” Tariq said, smiling, or smirking.

  “Yes, ha ha, kids these days,” Johnny said, getting up and gesturing at me. “I get it. Again, thank you. Nick.”

  “Sit,” Helen said. Johnny’s legs snapped out from under her; the bench vibrated as she landed on it again. I looked at her instinctively: her face was white and startled, as if she too had not expected to obey.

  “Out of nowhere you call us, demanding information from our most closely guarded archives,” Helen said, finally coming into the room, standing next to Tariq’s bench. Their shoulders were almost the same height. “Need it, she says. Telling, not asking. And she can’t extend the courtesy of asking, of risking a refusal, because what? Because the world is about to end. And she knows this how? How does she know this, hmm? Upon what is this based?”

  Johnny looked up at her mutely, as if waiting for it to be over. I recognized that face and wished I could surreptitiously squeeze her shoulder or touch her hand, the way I did with the kids when they got yelled at. Especially because no one ever spoke to Johnny like that. She wasn’t the one who would come home with low grades or truant notices. No one, since the day she’d begun speaking, had ever accused her of being a terrible scientist.

  “But you believed me,” Johnny said. “Or you wouldn’t have let Omar come for us.”

  “We believed at the time that you were credible. Then we began to make our own inquiries,” Helen said.

  “So you know what’s happening.”

  “No. Nothing is ‘happening,’ Joanna.” Helen crossed her arms over her chest, the pale scarf spilling over them like milk. “There… is a little more raw
material around than usual, but well within background levels.”

  “Background levels for here. You need to get out of the city,” Johnny said urgently. “There’s so much that Nick can see th… can see things.”

  “The uninitiated cannot recognize the products of magic,” Tariq said, still smiling. “Not even ordinary trickery. Pick a card, mm?”

  “Don’t talk down to me,” Johnny snapped. “Listen, if you would just let me look for the scrolls—”

  “Absolutely not,” Helen said.

  “Why would I lie to you?”

  “Lie, perhaps not,” Tariq said soothingly. “Exaggerate, surely. There have been alignments before; you said as much. And I, in my lifetime, have seen three. They are asleep, Joanna. For what we understand as sleep. For what They understand.”

  “They’re about to not be,” Johnny said urgently, leaning forward on the bench. Her bag slid off and landed on the floor with a thump that sent the cat careering off into the scented darkness, slinking back slowly. “Did I not make that clear? That They’re awake, that They’re coming? Would we have come all this way for a—a—a vacation?”

  “Ah, but it is lovely here,” Tariq said.

  Helen ignored him. “Would you?” she said. “Why would They target this alignment out of all others, why even approach? What have you seen?”

  Johnny hesitated, visibly. Maybe not a bad scientist, but a terrible poker player: I knew that already. And Tariq and Helen looked like they suspected as much. If Johnny admitted what we knew, she might also have to admit, cagily, to being the one whose invention had awakened Drozanoth from its shallow, watchful sleep. To have, even without meaning to, drummed on the membrane between our two worlds, sending the sound as far and as deep as the dropped stone in the Chamber of Mazarbul in The Lord of the Rings. Not a hero selflessly saving the world from a random disaster, but someone frantically trying to clean up her own mess.

  Johnny swallowed, and hung her head. “We need to find and shut a great gate somewhere near here, and soon. When I called, I didn’t say what I meant. What I meant was, will you help us?”

  Helen fell silent, watching Johnny’s face, still ignoring me. “You are too used to living a life without help,” she said. “Before you reply, no, you are wrong, Joanna. Hiring people is not help. Who would help you without recompense?”

  “Is that what you’re asking for?” Johnny said. “Recompense? Is the world not enough for you? Is life not enough?”

  “It is not a matter of enough,” Tariq said firmly, looking up at Helen. “Every price comes with a new payment. And the price can change any time; and you, little one, have changed your prices on us too many times for us to look each other in the eye. You will never change. What we do, we have always done for other reasons.”

  “So you say,” Johnny said. “So you always say. Listen. You dragged us here to get answers, and I don’t have time to give them. Let us go, if you’re not going to give us anything. Just let us go. I know you’re going to call the authorities as soon as we go. Do that, if you want. I don’t care.”

  “Ah yes, the defiance that covers fear,” Helen said. “Like a snake that hisses and hisses and hisses and will never bite, because it knows it will not be able to kill.”

  “Good one,” Johnny said. “I got called a dog earlier today.” But she didn’t get up. My skin was crawling, and I felt woozy from the stench below the smell of roses, so I also didn’t feel like moving, but there was something different about Johnny’s stillness—as if she had been pressed to the bench. Tendons stood out along her neck.

  “Just to clarify,” I said into the silence, flinching as Helen and Tariq turned to me. “You’re from that... that group that used to... worship Them. The Ssarati. Aren’t you?”

  “Is that what she told you?” Helen said stiffly. “We are nothing of the sort.”

  “Oh, the stories I could tell you,” Tariq said, smiling and tapping his feet on the floor. “A girl, a hundred years ago, from my father’s tribe, no older than you, who led them into the true way of the Ssarati... lured from our people by a white adventurer, so-called...”

  “We do not have time for those stories, Tariq,” Helen said. “Thousands of years have passed under our supervision, young man. We once fought Their incursions; now, we cloud Their curiosity and hand down the old ways. We guard the gates, monitor various indicators, keep the wards and sigils fresh, discourage tourists and adventure-seekers, strengthen the spells where we can, preserve the old scrolls and tomes, copy and disseminate. We are a society of knowledge and wayfinding. We are scholars and guardians.”

  I had run out of nerves, and could only nod as they lost interest and turned back to Johnny. Tariq’s gaze remained on me, though: amused, even delighted.

  “But we did use a cloaking spell to get you out of that police station,” Helen said sharply, “and if what you are saying is true, we will attract more attention than is our due.”

  “What do you want, an apology?” Johnny snapped.

  “We want merely to know what you know, so that we may decide what to do next,” Tariq said, soothingly.

  “That’s not what you want at all,” Johnny said. “No matter what I say, you won’t pick a side.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. We are on the side of the preservation of humanity, as are you. You are no… lone light in the darkness, Joanna.”

  “You’re not on our side.”

  Tariq said, with a note of pleading, “We have asked you to join us many times, we have asked for use of your facilities and the academics who work for you; we have never asked you to use your great intelligence for us directly. Why have you always refused? Why do you even deny an association with us?”

  Johnny stared mutely at them.

  But I knew the answer she could not give them: that if they were allowed to close the distance between them, they would know what she really was, and how she had become so.

  They would know she owed everything to something they had spent all their lives fighting.

  The air seemed to darken; hidden in its nest of pillows, the white cat bared its teeth. Something screamed at the back of my neck, not merely itching but burning, the half-healed welts on my cheek where Drozanoth had touched me beginning to burn too. I got up slowly, aware that Tariq and Helen were staring at me, and slung my bag over my head. “Come on, Johnny,” I said, hearing my own voice thin and brassy. “We have to go.”

  “Check,” she whispered, but still didn’t move. Tariq got up, though, and crossed the room to me, hands out.

  “Nicholas, sit down, let us talk like adults,” he said.

  I retched from the smell as he approached, and backed away, getting between him and Johnny. “Don’t,” I said. “Let us go.”

  “No one is keeping you here,” Helen said icily. “Go, then, if you believe your own tale.” I looked up at her, and back down just in time to see Tariq reaching for my chest; casually, not fast.

  I got a hand up and found the silver pendant half-hidden in his robe, seized it—a blinding burst of pain, as if I’d grabbed a wasp and had the sting driven into my palm—and yanked, snapping it from the thin chain and dropping it on the floor, then kicking it under the bench. Tariq’s hands stopped moving; I looked into his baffled eyes, the confusion slowly turning to anger. Under the bench, something was screaming, a tiny noise, that too like a wasp.

  “Your name is known to Them,” he snarled, unmoving. “Yours, boy. It hangs about you like a cloud. In Their books, hidden in a dark place, in an obscene script, it is written that your time will end in sorrow. Leave her, before it is too late. Stop paying her price.”

  “I picked my side,” I whispered, much more quietly than I intended. Some hero. “Come on, John.”

  I slung her bag on the same side as mine and reversed out of the room, not wanting to turn my back on them. They watched us go, till I fumbled at the door, emerged into the cool night air, shut it behind us. The last I heard was a soft voice, so quiet I didn’t know whose: “No
. Let them go.”

  I didn’t know which way we were supposed to go, but I needed to get Johnny away from there; she was wheezing, half-canted over, as if with cramps. I walked as fast as I dared, making sure she kept up. Wherever Omar had taken us, it was as busy as the bus station—despite it being long past midnight, there were still people up, talking, smoking, eating, haggling, turning to look at us. Two kids in a dark alleyway. Great.

  But no one approached us—maybe I didn’t look touristy enough, I thought hopefully. Maybe I looked like a guide, like one of the guides who had yelled and gestured at us when we’d first gotten into the city, trying to get us to come with them. And if that was the case, Johnny looked like my customer, and they wouldn’t horn in on that. Thank Christ, if it was true.

  When Johnny’s breathing finally eased, we turned down another alleyway, into the meager yellow light from an all-night tailor, printing its list of prices in shadow on her face. It was just enough for her to look at her map and for me to check my hand. I was sure there would be a cut, or at least a burn-mark, but there was nothing. “Weird,” I said.

  “How did you know?” Johnny said, looking at my open palm as I held it between us.

  “I have no idea. I think it was the smell coming off it.”

  “The smell?”

  “You didn’t notice? Like Theirs, under all that air freshener?”

  She looked up at me, obliquely, like the cat, and then got her laptop out, balancing it on one forearm while she used the other to scroll and tap.

  I said, “Do you think they’ll turn us in?”

  “I don’t know. They don’t like interacting with authorities, they like to fly under the radar. Maybe they’ll get someone to do it anonymously.”

  “Who were they?”

  “Tariq lives here—he’s been head of the Fes chapter for four hundred years. I wasn’t expecting Helen at all; she lives in Prague now, she was there when I spoke to her. When she came in the room, I thought... I mean, she’d come all this way because of what I told her. I got excited, thinking she’d come here to help us.”