by Devin Madson
‘Why do you talk to him?’ Kimiko asked, opening one of the older bags of feed and making a face. ‘It’s not like horses understand us.’
‘Kaze does. At least he understands what I mean now.’
She straightened, hands on her hips. ‘Did you mark him?’
‘Mark him? No! At least, I don’t think so. We’re just friends.’
‘So why do you talk to him like he’s a child?’
It was hard to explain. ‘I think because his mind works differently. He is both simple and wise. Like a child.’
Kimiko patted her horse absently, staring out the open stable door and into the courtyard. ‘I’m going into the town for supplies,’ she said. ‘I’ll see if I can get some more feed while I’m there.’
‘I can go.’
‘No, stay here.’
‘Darius’s orders?’
‘Darius doesn’t give me orders. I’ll be back later. Don’t burn the house down.’
Her whisper cut into my head. He hates what he is, unlike you.
After Kimiko left, I stayed with Kaze before wandering back to the house. It had been another warm summer day, but with evening came a sharp breeze that sent petals dancing across the courtyard. There were hundreds of them, twirling and skipping like children over the uneven stones.
One million, three hundred and twenty-one thousand, one hundred and four. And one of them was Malice, drawing ever closer.
When sunset came Kimiko had not yet returned, so taking coals from the box I knelt to heat the cooking stone. It had once been my job every evening to heat the stone and wash the rice while Jian prepared what little else we had to eat. Our dinners had always reflected our location, consisting of fish in port cities and goat curd in the mountains. Once we had bought a catch of fish and dried them ourselves, rubbing in salt and stringing them from the side of the wagon.
Jian had been so pleased with himself. Now I could barely remember the taste of food at all. Had I eaten the night before? Kimiko had offered me rice, but I had no memory of eating it. Jian had never let me go without food. Even if he had sacrificed his own meals, he had seen me fed. A growing boy needs more food than a drying-out old man, he had always said.
Was he dead or alive? Why didn’t it seem to matter anymore?
The stone was getting hot. I looked toward the open door; darkness thick beyond its rotting frame. ‘Darius?’
I thought I had felt him there, but it was just the ghosts. But he was here somewhere, Kimiko, too, now I came to look, but the house had its own barriers. It was keeping me out.
I went to the door, peering into the dim passage. ‘Darius? Kimiko?’
There was no reply. The sound barely seemed to reach a few feet in front of me before vanishing, the echo deadened by old air. Stepping back into the room, I took down one of the lanterns before venturing into the passage.
The house was quiet. Unfriendly. It stank of dust and moss, a smell like the waterlogged forests near Lin’ya. They were affectionately know as the dead woods, where pockets of luminescent gas lent the trees a purple hue.
Holding the lantern ahead like a talisman, I crept through the lifeless house, committing each turn to memory. Right. Left. Moth-eaten fabrics and broken screens, faded watercolours with curling corners, books with leather spines so covered in dust their words could not be read. I was following the presence of life, my Empathy unable to quite grasp the souls for which I searched.
Left. Right. Right again, following them like a vague scent on the air. Then the space opened around me and I was in an enormous room, its collapsed roof replaced with the broad canopy of a great banyan tree. Like a thousand bats, its leathery leaves fluttered against the night sky, a living roof surreal in its beauty. Whatever structure had once stood here, stood no longer, covered instead in branching, vine-like roots. Hundreds of them trailed down columns and walls, taking the shape of the house as it grew. And in the centre, as though a part of the tree itself, a broad stairway rose to another floor. Broken fretwork ran up each side, as delicately carved as the lantern hanging precariously from what remained of the roof.
I crossed the mosaic floor, stepping over thick roots searching the tiles for cracks. Damp leaves made the ground slippery, and picking my way to the base of the stairs with care, I placed my hand upon the thick trunk. Here was the beating heart of the house, this tree with its reaching arms and its rustling hair. Here was the hatred and the sadness and the pain, this living being giving life to the neglect.
I pulled my hand away, conscious of its dislike, of its terror. Anger sounded in its shifting leaves. I though to turn back, but the faint call of living souls drew me on.
The first step creaked beneath my feet, its glittering obsidian inlay winking like stars. The bannister was rotten and my fingers sank into its soft, crumbling wood.
A passage waited at the top, narrow after the grand hall. Here sharp cuts of moonlight scattered silver across silken hangings, and the smell of old incense hung heavy. I walked on, dreaming, mesmerised by a spill of golden light at the turning. It flickered. Voices murmured through the open door.
Leaning against the wall I removed my sandals, hooking them on my fingers before continuing along the passage, bare feet sliding soundlessly.
I stepped into the doorway, letting the light bathe first one foot then the other as I peered into the room. A pair of lanterns sat side by side on a low table, their puckered paper covers painted in pink and white. They coloured the room with life. Light glinted off glass vases and pretty trinkets, every one dusty and stained with tarnish. Broken windows let in the warm night air, gently stirring silk hangings.
Darius had discarded his robe and sat on the edge of the divan, his fair skin glistening with the sweat of a summer night. Kimiko sat facing him upon his lap, her arm half concealing the line of her breast as she held him close, her cheek resting on his dark hair.
It was a fragile moment, like the thin shell of a painted egg, beautiful in its transience. Like all others it would end. There was no world in which time stood still.
As if at that thought the image came to life. Kimiko ran her hands through Darius’s hair, tugging gently at the strands while she sang. It sounded like a sad song, but I could not feel it, could not feel them at all. It was as though they were not there, a mere mirage, unable to be read, unable to be touched. Yet my heart ached.
Darius’s shoulders were shaking.
Unable to bear my own sadness, I stepped out of the light, catching my breath at the depth of the darkness as it clawed me back. The house would hold them, protect them, but the only thing it could not protect them from was time, as it had never been able to protect itself.
In time, everything would decay.
* * *
Pale pre-dawn light lit the courtyard, drawing dense vines out of the night. With the sun came the birds, calling to one another, singing in the new day that dawned with a lump in the pit of my stomach, constricting thought and motion until all I could do was sit and stare as time flowed past me, uncaring. Perhaps if I sat long enough I would turn to stone – a statue, forever sentinel over the house, over the only thing I had ever seen worth fighting for.
The sound of footsteps came to me like a dream. They came from behind, from inside, the steady, unhurried click of sandal on floor. There was something inevitable about it, about this moment, time refusing to cease for me as it had refused to cease for him.
‘Hiding?’ Darius asked, his voice even. I had been listening for a change, feeling for it.
‘I want to learn,’ I said, not looking around, not giving voice to the other words in my head. I want to protect you. I want to help you. No one else can.
Linen shifted by my ear and Darius sat on the step, stretching sandalled feet toward the sunlight. For a time he said nothing, just stared at the gate at the far
end of the courtyard, his perfect profile slightly frowning. Then he said: ‘Do you understand what you are?’
Threads of the previous day came back to haunt me. He had been afraid of me. ‘I’m a monster,’ I said.
‘The beast lives inside you as it lives inside every man. Yours just has access to greater power.’ He turned to look at me then. ‘Men are animals, Endymion, it is what allows soldiers to kill and torturers to maim. It is hatred, lust, power, justice, everything that turns your blood to fire. In this you are no more special than any other. Your priest taught you well, he–’
‘Is he alive?’
Darius blinked. ‘A change of heart?’
‘You could say that.’
He looked pale, stretched thin, but when he spoke his voice held its usual power. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Your Jian is alive, although most likely still recovering.’
‘They shouldn’t have hurt him.’
‘No?’
‘No. He was innocent of any crime. He was a priest. An old man.’
Darius’s brows rose. ‘Innocent? I think hiding the heir to the Crimson Throne and keeping the knowledge of his identity from him would be a crime in most people’s eyes.’
‘He did it for the best.’
‘Did he? I rather think he did it because his brother told him to. Surely you met Father Kokoro. I confess myself unsure of his motives.’
‘It was still unfair,’ I said. ‘Jian had never done anything to harm anyone. He looked after me though he could ill afford it. Everywhere we went people jeered at him for fathering a bastard son.’
‘The whole world is unfair, Endymion. It is broken in every possible way. That’s why we invented gods to see our justice done, because it is easier to say: “Don’t worry, he’ll go to the hells for killing that boy”, than to deal with a world in which the wicked get away with whatever they want and the good suffer for it.’
He was scowling at his hands, twitching the dark linen that covered his Empathic Mark. He looked different in linen, more natural, no longer the perfect doll of the Imperial Court. This Darius was a man, troubled in the way all men were.
‘You don’t believe in the gods?’ I asked.
‘I am a god.’ He did not look up, just frowned at the dancing petals, his brows brought low upon his eyes.
I chose my words carefully. ‘You haven’t always thought so,’ I said.
‘Yes, I have.’ He got to his feet, his linen robe stirring around his ankles. ‘I just learned that I should not.’ A little sneer turned the corner of his lips. ‘They say power corrupts men. What do you think being a god does to him?’
Darius walked away. ‘If you want to learn to control it before it controls you,’ he threw back over his shoulder, ‘then I suggest you come with me. We’re going into the back field today. I have something to show you.’
Knives of sunlight sliced through the vine-laden portico as I jogged to catch up, falling into step beside him. From the courtyard, Darius led the way down a narrow path squeezed between the house and the outer wall. He went ahead, pebbles crunching beneath his feet as he passed through a moon gate and into an open wilderness. It was an overgrown pleasure garden. A dry canal wound through miniature bamboo forests and beds of fleeceflower, the water once deep enough to be spanned by a bridge, its paint worn to dull flakes. There was wisteria here, too, let run so wild its thick stems had crushed its wooden support like twigs in a man’s hand.
Darius seemed to know his way, picking the easiest route through the tangles. We crossed the bridge and found a path, at its end another moon gate set into the garden wall. There, Darius stopped and bowed, gesturing for me to enter before him.
What waited beyond was a field of lush green grass stretching all the way to the clumps of twisted trees and the rocky peaks of the Kuro Mountains.
‘Welcome to my grave,’ Darius said, joining me.
‘Your grave?’
‘This was where our father tried to kill me. There used to be a maze here, an enormous thing, or at least it seemed so to me as a boy. The townsfolk said people used to come from far around to walk it, back when the house was welcoming. Of course it became as overgrown as the rest of the garden, the original paths barely recognisable from weed.’
I looked around the field again, this time seeing the scars. Here and there sat dark patches the grass had not covered, the charred stumps of old growth protruding from the ground.
‘I was a very sickly child,’ he went on, looking out at the waving grass with ill-concealed loathing. ‘Empaths often are, I believe. Half a dozen times the doctors prophesied my death from little more than a chill. So, one night, in the middle of the worst storm of the season, our father dragged me into the centre of the maze and left me there in the dark.’
It was cold. It would have been so easy to lie down and give up, but I wanted to live. I still want to live.
‘You survived.’
‘Obviously,’ Darius said. ‘And I came back and set it on fire. I stood right here and watched it burn. It was the closest I ever got to telling my father how much I hated him. Even when I watched him die I could not say it.’
‘You watched him die?’
‘I could hardly do anything else. I could not have gone for a doctor even had I wished.’
‘Why not?’
He gave me an odd look. ‘Because I couldn’t talk. It was my maturation. Despite everything he did to me, I was a late one.’
I said nothing. The wind whipped past us, rustling the tips of the tall grass.
Darius’s eyes narrowed. ‘You must have had one,’ he said. ‘A time when you couldn’t speak. It felt like my voice had abandoned me.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘After we met in Shimai, but I didn’t know it had a name. Malice never said.’
My Empathy brought back whispers. After Shimai? No wonder he was so weak. Brought up by a priest who was never cruel to him. And Malice knew. Still keeping secrets, brother?
‘You were looked after too well,’ he said, breaking upon his own thoughts to speak. ‘That’s why you’re different. They thought kindness would be the making of you. They wanted you to be so good you would forget what else lurked inside you.’ He started to laugh, his features twisting into a cruel grin. ‘I see now. That’s what Kokoro wanted. That’s what our father wanted. And here you are, the strongest of us all because your maturation came too late. And now you grow stronger every day.’
He kept laughing, a manic sound that echoed back from the distant hills.
‘Why are you laughing?’ I demanded. ‘It isn’t funny. Tell me how to stop it.’
Darius shook his head. ‘I can’t, little lamb. I don’t know how.’
‘Then tell me how to control it. How to switch it off. How to kill it.’
Those amethyst eyes glittered angrily. ‘Your Empathy isn’t alive, Endymion, it doesn’t have a life of its own. It does what it’s told. If you want to connect to someone it connects, if you want to hurt someone it hurts them, if you want to kill them they die. It is as much a tool as your arm or your leg, but just because you own a hand doesn’t mean you should slap someone.’
I wanted to slap him, to stop that rictus-like grin. I dug my fingernails into my palms. ‘What are you saying? Are you saying there’s nothing I can do?’
‘No, idiot, I’m telling you to stop blaming your Empathy. It doesn’t have its own mind. It only does what it’s told. It has no personality. It has no thoughts. That whisper you hear in your head isn’t some dark creature that has taken over your soul, it’s just you, just your thoughts magnified by fear or anger or lust. You are the only one you can blame. I had to learn that the hard way, had to learn that it was me, me I hated. I could never stop being an Empath, so I had to stop being myself. Do you have any idea how hard that is?’
He
gripped my shoulders, his teeth bared in a snarl, then with a humourless snort he let me go. ‘No, of course you don’t.’ He put back a stray lock of hair from his brow. ‘You have no idea how much pain it caused me to force that mask onto my face, to become a man I did not know, a man I did not even recognise when I looked in the mirror. I could feel it killing me, little brother, sucking the life out of me, and for what? Whole nights spent staring at myself, unable to sleep. “Those are my eyes”, I would tell myself, like I was looking for likeness in a baby. “He has Lady Melia’s eyes and that is the lord’s brow. But wait, he has balls, that means he can’t be a Laroth”.’
I felt dizzy, transfixed by those flashing eyes. ‘Why did you do it?’
‘Why?’ Darius repeated. ‘What choice did I have? It was either live the crippled life of a Normal or go back to being the boy who had hunted helpless children for sport, just to see them run crying to their mothers. I gave them such fear, filling their heads with nightmares. Anger was fun. All I had to do was infuse them and sit back to watch them rip each other to pieces over the last nut in the bowl.’
Darius stepped closer, peering into my face, his gaze flicking from one of my eyes to the other. ‘I know that expression. I used to see it on my own face in the aftermath of a bad night. Malice never suffered from contrition, but I did. It was so easy for him. So easy to sleep at night. Trust me, if there had been a way to kill the Empathy, I would have found it.’
My heart pounded with his anger. ‘If you could control it, then so can I,’ I said. ‘I killed one hundred and four men on the road to Rina. I drained them of their hope until they killed themselves. I don’t want to do it again.’
‘Why did you do it?’
‘Because Malice told me to. I was marked… I was–’
‘Able to break the mark any time you wanted.’ Darius jabbed me in the chest, his finger digging painfully into my wound. ‘Why did you do it?’