“Apory.”
“Nothing to appize for. My mother met triple numbers, and no one can be down about that. Now where are you from?”
“Niance.”
“Obvious. And,” the woman leans in, “why have you stowed away on this kleep?” She beams as if the whole affair is a bit of salacious gossip.
Iahel indulges her, leaning in too. “I’ve run away.”
“I see. And what, sur lady, from?”
She’s unsure. “From . . . Niance?”
Aerial laughs. It’s a loud laugh that echoes across the dining hall. Nearby citizens turn their heads in a bit of disgust. Aerial calms and wipes under her eye. “You remind me of a dew drop.”
Iahel’s not sure what that means and whether to take it as a compliment or an insult. She decides the former but fears the latter.
“Why don’t we return to my cabin? I’m sure where you have slept the past week can’t compare, but hopefully it meets your standard.”
Iahel flushes. She nods, hiding her eagerness and joy at her turn of fortune. They place their hankers on the table and leave for the cabins below.
Aerial’s cabin is three times the size of any room Iahel has ever slept in. There are seats and beds, dressers and closets. “Do you have any belongings?” Aerial asks as she removes her coat.
Iahel shakes her head.
“Tragic. Perhaps when we dock in Yikshir, we could find something to dress you up with? I assume you’ve never been to Philsburg?”
Iahel remains quiet.
“It’s a fine city. Not my first choice, but I manage to make it work.” She heads into her sleeping room and closes the door, leaving Iahel alone in the lavish living room.
Iahel swings back and forth, dancing with herself while looking around. The dark wood walls are covered in ink paintings of nude men and women. Some embracing. Some sitting back to back. On closer inspection, Iahel reads the initials A.R. signed on the bottom east of each.
After a major, Aerial returns dressed in a nightgown and silk robe and drops onto the couch, staring intently at Iahel. From the sleeping room ambles a little pink cog. It’s overweight and walks with a challenged waddle. When it reaches Aerial, it paws at her to be picked up. Aerial obliges, grabbing it between its chubby little limbs. Iahel, happier than ever, hops onto the couch and kneels beside Aerial.
“This is my cog, Lady Floon.” She hands over the little fuzzy frek.
Iahel holds and squeezes it tight. Floon changes from pink to yellow.
“How sweet, she likes you.”
As Iahel stares down at the cog, attempting unsuccessfully to see its face, it vibrates softly in her lap. Aerial reaches into a small drawer in a stand beside the couch and retrieves a tiny vial filled with violet powder. After unscrewing the cap, she pinches a bit of powder between her fingers and brushes it into her gums. Before it hits, she screws the cap back on and within a minor closes her eyes, moaning and leaning her head back.
Iahel has never seen anyone rub violet before. Bodies from the seedier parts of Niance would sometimes solicit her to try some, but she had always been warned against it. “A steep slope one stumbles on when rubbing gums,” her caretakers would caution. Iahel’s attraction wanes a little as she watches Aerial float away, unable to hear anything Iahel has to say. In the quiet, Iahel thinks about snipping the woman but finds the idea flam in the middle of the sea with nowhere to run. And the woman had been kind so far. Why ruin this? Instead, she continues to play with Floon, who is eager but unwilling to fetch the small object she tosses across the room.
Over the next week, Aerial and Iahel stay together. Aerial details the beauty of Canerio and speaks in awe of its green sky, which she says gave her her eye color. She comments on the dreariness of the brown Niance smog, the stacked city buildings, and “those awful Dustian crowds.” Her admiration of Philsburg, where she works and lives, is limited to the magnificent sight of an entire city built atop the redrock formations. Philsburg is one of the largest cities in Yikshir.
Above all, Iahel enjoys when Aerial plays the timple. She is masterful with it, especially when high on violet. She closes her eyes and drifts as the music swims through the air. Aerial calls the timple “ . . . the instrument of the sea. Music of the freks beneath the waves.”
Iahel is in single souls with the woman.
Their relationship becomes so strong that Iahel thinks she might ask Aerial to, perhaps, stop taking violet. She thinks it is unhealthy. The first few times she asks, Aerial laughs off the suggestion in the same loud chortle she always makes, but it isn’t long before Aerial’s mood reveals a hidden rage whenever Iahel pushes too much.
On the day before they reach Yikshir, Iahel attempts to hide the vial of violet. Aerial reacts with wrath, screaming so loudly one of the captains comes to her quarters. Floon turns a bright red. The captain settles the situation by giving Aerial a pinch of his own stash. Iahel appizes, and Aerial accepts, knowing she is only acting out of care. “For Dustian’s sake, you don’t interfere with the makers of happiness, sur lady. Not your own, and especially not others’.” The conversation ends abruptly when Iahel returns the vial, with Aerial taking it hungrily.
On the following day, standing on the main deck where they first met, Iahel waits as Yikshir’s redrocks come into view from the sea and stand as a sight to behold. The towers and constructions built along their plateau rival the natural formations of the Land. After docking and unpacking, they’ll ride a flat-backed horsal along the sea to Aerial’s home city in Philsburg. With Iahel’s trip across the sea complete, she can’t imagine a better beginning.
❖❖❖
Over the next year, Iahel became Aerial’s acolyte, assisting with keeping a calendar and her many assemblages but mainly acting as a sympathetic ear to the many unresolvable complaints Aerial faced. Aerial labored as one of the leaders on the Philsburg Council, which attempts to regulate and resolve conflicts between the religious sects of the city. For Philsburg, this is the Dusters and the Rainmen, a religious rule that never ended. At the end of long days, Aerial would lose herself in violet, a habit Iahel eventually gives in to as well. Though in doing so, she crosses herself never to use it because she needs it but instead to use it only when she is in the mood.
The first time Iahel rubs gums, she floats away. Or, in truth, her hands and feet float. Through her closed eyes, she rises to the ceiling, spinning in a circle, where an unknown face appears in its middle. It smiles and transforms into a peculiar blend of her old caretakers and Aerial.
On this calm summer’s eve, over duskmeal, Aerial suggests to Iahel that she should leave the walls more often. Be more social. “Go out and see the Land before you lose your youth, sur lady. You’re almost eighteen.”
Self-reflective but in agreement, Iahel decides to venture out that night. But what to do?
Later, she finds the streets of Philsburg relatively clean. As with most cities in the state of Yikshir Sands, it’s characteristically covered in a thin red dust, remnants of the sands below. About a mile from Aerial’s haynest, an alehouse and dance bar curamed Tunnel Visions, which Iahel passed by over the last few months, looks relatively inviting. She hesitates at the entrance. She has never been one to approach others, to start conversations. She likes to be the loner. The friends she’s made come from bodies who’ve cornered her first, usually by asking for a favor. Realizing she’s been standing outside too long, she takes a deep breath to start anew. She walks inside.
Darkness greets her, along with a thin yellow neon line that circles the wall. There are four unispar bars in each corner of the alehouse, each designed to replicate well-known landmarks in the Carvinga Tunnels. One is curamed Krakes Pit, another Radiba Lasts. A shirtless bartender tends to Greren and Tapsters, and the last bar is called Fogs of Misipit. Not wanting to go near the crowd of men and women huddled around Greren’s, she decides to grab a drink at the decidedly less crowded Krakes Pit. The blue neon sign above the bar resembles a large-scaled frek she’s
never seen before. The female bartender pours her a small mug of water, adding the slightest pinch of violet.
She sips and watches the citizens of the alehouse when a handsome young woman walks up to her. Iahel straightens up as the girl speaks. The bar is loud, so the woman leans in close and yells, “Drinking alone?”
Iahel blushes slightly. The girl wears a sweet and intoxicating perfume. “Yes. First night out,” Iahel yells back into the girl’s ear.
“Long week?”
“Well, first night ever.”
The woman leans back and grins with a crooked, toothy smile. She pushes Iahel’s shoulder. “Ever? We should celebrate then. Can I buy you another?”
“I shouldn’t mind.” She pauses. Don’t. Swallows. “Iahel.”
“Ruth.” They shake hands and Ruth orders two more light-violet mugs of water. “I took a chance you might like a drink with a girl like me, being how you’re alone and didn’t sit over there with Wilson.” She points to the shirtless bartender, who at the minor is tongue-in-throat with a girl across the bar.
Iahel giggles. “Not sure why, but they’ve never appealed to me.”
“Me either.” Ruth simpers and clinks her mug.
Stumbling out of the bar hours later, Ruth and Iahel are updown friends. Ruth mostly carries Iahel, a lightweight drinker, as they blunder back to Ruth’s small apartment. Iahel, barely able to keep her west foot ahead of her east, peppers Ruth’s cheeks and neck with kisses. It’s the first time Iahel has been with anyone. Not that she’s never thought about or had kiptales of when the time would come. She’s barely able to contain herself, as the smell and the tenderness of Ruth envelop her. Waves of pleasure course up and down her body. When they fall into her bed, they come and rest and come and rest until the sun beams through the apartment’s dirty windows. As they enfold each other, arms and legs, Iahel falls asleep, entirely, completely satisfied.
When she wakes, Iahel finds herself naked and alone and the apartment still. Cold. Wrapping the sheets around her small frame, she wanders the rooms, yawning and rubbing her hand through her hair. Photographs of a family, a man and a woman and their child at different ages, line the hallway. There’s a note to pick up lyn and garons at the market. A room filled with a kid’s toys. The more she looks, the more she realizes nothing in the house resembles Ruth or the presence of a young woman like Ruth. Puzzled, she continues to tour the halls and rooms, calling out for the girl of the night. And no one answers.
She returns to the sleeping room to recover her clothes and finds them missing. Along with her purse and all the coin she had stored away. Truth sets in. “Shnite.”
The sound of clicking. Someone coming home. She spins around the room, looking for an escape, and catches sight of the window, red dust piled in its corners, leading out to a second-floor rooftop. She tucks the sheet closer to her body, tight enough to hold, and opens the window, listening as a family enters through the front door on the other side of the house. She hops outside, meeting a brisk, chilly wind and bits of red dust striking her skin. She closes the window and scampers across the rooftop, hopping down from the second floor, losing the sheet in the action. Gathering it around her body again, she retreats to Aerial’s. Angry, confused, and laughing. What a tale I hold now.
Entering the haynest, she calls out for Aerial, who doesn’t answer back. Most likely at work, though the thought is odd bearing in mind the time of day. Rubbing gums, then. Iahel heads upstairs, ready to shower away her sticky, sloppy night. Eager to make herself decent again.
Once cleaned and outfitted, she decides to make Aerial an excellent duskmeal. For giving me the courage to see the Land, even if it was just a mile away. As she steps into the kitchen, she sees Aerial lying flat and still on the floor. Facedown. Floon, currently blue, sleeps beside her, whimpering in its sleep.
“Aerial?” She hurries over and turns the woman onto her back. Sent left with a purple face and wide, bloodshot eyes. “Aerial, no.” In her hand, Aerial grips an empty vial of violet. “No. No, no.”
The house sits in silence. Floon wakes and hops innocently into Iahel’s lap. Iahel falls over the large woman’s body. In tears. To run so far away from tragedy. To attempt escape from the horrid life. It wasn’t far enough. She wipes her eyes and stands. The house suddenly feels six times its size. Everything waiting for her to act. To move. To run. What happens to me now? She isn’t family to Aerial. Or Yikshir. She is an alien to the state. What do I do here? In a town built on its own selfish views, in arguments and debates over who is the real god, she instantly feels an outsider.
I’m leaving again. With that, she deposits a hefty pouch of coin into her pocket, snipped, no, borrowed, from Aerial. Locking the door behind her, with an unforgotten Floon underfoot and following, Iahel heads south. To the real Tunnels. Not a kiptaled bar. And where she’s once again a stowaway alone.
Chapter 16
HIDDEN WITHIN THE FOG
The young woman sleeping next to Iahel, the woman Iahel slipped with when she shouldn’t have, the woman who shouldn’t be here, is Ruth. And when she came up to the gang the previous night, Iahel thought she saw a gapsian, a remnant of the sent left. When it sank in that it was Ruth, Iahel’s first reaction was to hide her face, causing Sanet, Bernard, and Logan to prod for details, which made Iahel eventually transgress on her uncomfortable past transgression.
As the night continued, it became apparent, painfully apparent, that Ruth had no recollection of snipping from and leaving Iahel over three years ago. This revelation became a competition between the gang to see if they could get her to remember without outright asking. They each started dropping diminutive hints to Ruth as she passed by or handed them another round of ales, but as the night wore on, the whispers grew less subtle, and ultimately, Ruth caught on. Her face flushed with embarrassment, and she spilled an expletive of appizement with what Iahel took as a genuine sense of regret. She had changed since then she repeated on every pass of their table.
Iahel didn’t take the appize at first. Remembering that day brought back forgotten heartache. When Iahel told Ruth what happened later that morn, detailing finding Aerial’s body overdone on violet, Ruth’s face sank. She reached out her hand and took Iahel’s, squeezing with an unconscious compassion. At this, Iahel recoiled, remembering Jules.
“I’m truly apory, Iahel,” Ruth insisted again.
Later, Ruth took Iahel aside and gave her a long, forceful hug. She told her how much of a tale Aerial’s death became in Philsburg, since she was such a prominent figure on the council. “It was such a scandal. But where did you go? Why didn’t you stay?”
“I couldn’t. Around all those strangers. And after you left . . .” Iahel trailed off, still unsure of her feelings for Ruth. “In any case, I just needed to keep moving. Philsburg was only along a longer path.”
“Where did you end up? It’s been, what, three years?”
“I headed south for Radiba but ended up in the Tunnels and started working at Greren and Tapsters for a while.”
“You did? I’ve always wanted to go there. I hear it’s just wild.”
“It . . . was.”
“You’ve led such a savage life, Iahel.” Ruth smiled.
“And why are you here? Why’d you leave Philsburg?” Iahel asked, attempting to ignore her growing attraction to the warm, alluring aura of Ruth.
“Oh, I’ve been all over Yikshir since you left. I went north for a bit, passed Salsman, and then strolled to a few of the smaller sand towns. Thought I might even head farther up to Porsans, but instead chased a girl south along the coast until we ended up here. But she did what I do and left without a wave, and I haven’t seen her since. So, been working here, thinking one day I might head out. Maybe. Though the owner has been thinking about moving on, and since we’ve become good friends, I might take the lead at Radnicks when she’s retired.”
“You have enough experience to run a killhung?”
“I basically do it now. Only thing that changes i
s the coin.” Ruth grinned. “But, yeah, I don’t know. I’ve been bored, I guess.”
Iahel didn’t answer.
Ruth reached out her hand again, taking Iahel’s, massaging the skin between her thumb and index finger. “I missed you.”
Iahel gave in.
It wasn’t long before they kissed and left the gang for the eve. They tipped choice fruin until they stumbled back to Iahel’s sleeping room, in fits of giggles. Between breaths and slips and moans, Ruth continued to insist on how much she missed Iahel. Such a performer. But Iahel didn’t mind. She’s handsome. And sensual. And exciting.
On this night, however, she didn’t sleep, instead watching as Ruth closed her eyes and spoke, half-unconscious. “Be still, Iahel, I’m not cruel enough to snip from you twice.”
And I’m not flam enough to fall for your sweet smiles and lies twice.
❖❖❖
After the night passes, and the morn arrives, Ruth wakes with a soft yawn, catching Iahel already dressed and standing across the room applying color in the mirror. “I didn’t take you for one who wears color. Where are you headed?”
Iahel doesn’t answer because she doesn’t know. She figures she might tag along with Logan, as secret as he is about why he is going all the way west to Organsia. Or perhaps with Bernard and Sanet, who are continuing north with the fragments of brass of which Sanet crossed to share part of the rewarded coin. But going north doesn’t feel right. Going farther into Yikshir seems backward, and the thought of Aerial’s left body still haunting the sands doesn’t double on the choice.
Ruth stands from the bed and wraps her arms around Iahel’s neck. “Why don’t you stay? Come labor with me at Radnicks?”
Iahel smiles at the thought, for only a minor, because it would bring her too close to Ruth. Not because the trust between them is glass in a tormisand but because she doesn’t want to get close to anyone. For her, tragedy follows intimacy.
Advent of the Roar (The Land Old, Untouched Book 1) Page 18