Needle Rain

by Cari Silverwood

  Briefly, as they trudged up the hill path, a head-throbbing nausea clutched at him. He stopped, panting, with his head held as low as was possible. It passed quickly and he continued on. Somm, he supposed. Would it ever leave him?

  The wooden gate to the orphanage was painted white to match the little wall and a crudely carved wreath of flowers at its middle made clear its dedication to Amora. Ten or more children of ages ranging from the late teens to those Mara’s age, surged forward.

  “Omi! Omi! I’ve got another tooth through!”

  “The she-devil goat’s eaten part of the lectern, Omi!”

  “What did you bring us?”

  Joyful cries mixed equally with sobs.

  Thom stood well back with Mara clutching his leg, his hand on her head in reassurance. They watched in silence.

  “I’ve brought you Mara.” Omi beckoned her over and took her hand. “Our new family member. And I’ve brought these!” He jiggled a sack then untied the neck. “Line up, please! Youngest to oldest!”

  When the line was formed he let them one-by-one reach in and pull out a sugary lolly.

  Thom looked about. No adults had arrived. Five buildings formed a long U-shape along a quadrangle: a well to the right in front of a hall with a roofed-over assembly area then three smaller houses and, lastly, at the left post of the ‘U’, was a larger two-story house with a gable roof. All were of basic construction, in a mixture of crudely dressed blue stone with red-painted timber for the frames of doors and windows and roof beams. Long garden beds overflowed with vivid pink carminiums. Off to the sides were dirt mounds with trellises of tomatoes and other vegetables.

  “Thom! Wilyam will show you where to put everything,” yelled Omi.

  Startled, Thom looked over. A gangly, pimple-spotted youth sauntered over, grinning, the lollipop in his mouth making his cheek stick out as if afflicted by some awesome deformity.

  “Give him other clothes, Wilyam, and bring me the robe. He’s not a priest. He’ll be sleeping in my house.”

  “Come on. F-follow me,” the boy said wetly, sucking on the sweet as he spoke.

  “Tell me, Wilyam. What keeps you safe? There’s nothing here but that low wall.”

  Wilyam paused to shift the lollipop across his mouth. “Omi does. He’s got f-friends.”

  “What?” For the first time in what seemed forever Thom felt a growing perplexed anger. How could the priest leave them unprotected while he danced off to Carstelan? These were children and the border across into the Bloodmen’s territory was only a few miles north.

  In the front lobby of one of the three dormitories he changed out of the red robe, pulling on a pair of brown drawstring trousers and a black shirt. He emerged onto the little veranda that ran the length of the dormitory. Already Wilyam was back among the throng of children.

  Where do I fit in here? He wasn’t a priest. He wasn’t a child. The red priest robe hung from his hand. If they needed anything here it was a man skilled in weapon handling and combat. He certainly wasn’t that.

  He sighed. He’d find his place here. The air was clean. No one to judge him for his past. Find peace, maybe.

  Days slid past, punctuated only by back-breaking work and nightmares. Three, four, five times, every night, he woke with thumping heart, clothes soaked with sweat and a fading memory of panic and something monstrous pursuing him, one step behind. His bed was set up in Omi’s library at the front of the house. On one such night, he sat up in bed and saw a dark figure gliding past the doorway that let onto the entrance hallway. Breath stopped in his throat, he strained to see. It was no monster. It was Omi. Returning to his own bed.

  He slumped. The nightmares were tainting his life. He had so little sleep each night. When would this end?

  Thom recalled the disjointed trip to the orphanage. Omi had disappeared some of those nights too. For whatever reason, the priest had a habit of roaming at night.

  The days he filled with chopping wood so they’d have wood for cooking and for heating the washing water each night. Plus he fetched water, herded the cows each morning into a yard for milking, repaired the fence around the cow and goat paddock, and so on. The children all had similar tasks but as the only other adult, Thom found himself given most of the work despite his lack of any real skill. Perhaps this was Omi’s way of punishing him for not speaking.

  The axe used for the wood chopping had a loose head and needed tiny timber wedges driven between the head and the handle to tighten it. Thom stood for a moment, hand on aching back, stretching to loosen the muscles. The scent of cow dung and fresh-cut timber mingled with the sea-salt brought on the breeze. He inhaled and smiled. Strange how good that smelt. Clean dirt. The country. The dirt in Carstelan had a different scent. It was an ugly dirt made up of the worst parts of humanity.

  A Bloodman, teeth and lips red from that god-awful dye they used, was sauntering through the front gate.

  Was he here to attack?

  Thom gripped the axe in one hand, and sprinted faster than he could ever remember doing. Mara stood, fingers jammed in her mouth, not four yards from the gate.

  When he skidded to a halt before the Bloodman, axe now held upright in both hands, the man grinned at him. Thom glared back, baring his own teeth, and tried not to show he’d seen the bandolier of hatchets across the Bloodman’s naked chest or the long knife at his belt. Incongruously, he wore a wide-brimmed leather hat with many strings dangling down from the edge of the brim. At the end of each string, still buzzing indignantly and flying in tiny circles, were iridescent beetles.

  Despite the breeze, beads of sweat sprang up on Thom’s forehead and trickled down his back.

  “Mr. Noname! Mr. Noname!” Mara had been saying something and plucking at his arm.

  “Not now! Run and find Omi! Go! And you!” He intensified his glare. “Time to leave! This is not your territory!” Would the man understand? Even more important – did he have other warriors with him?

  “Mr. Noname!” Mara stomped around and stood arms akimbo before Thom. “Wilyam says this man is a friend! You should not shake that axe! It’s bad manners.

  “Oh.” Uncertain, he lowered the axe.

  Panting and red-faced, Wilyam ran up to them. “H-he’s okay.” He paused to catch his breath then turned to the Bloodman. “Hi, Munnweya. Sorry. This man is new.” He nodded curtly toward Thom. “Come with me. I’ll take you to Omi.”

  “Thank you.” The Bloodman bowed his head politely, grinned again at Thom, and set off after Wilyam.

  “See?” said Mara.

  “Yes, guess I do.” Still fuming a little, he watched them trek around the side of Omi’s house, and up the grassy slope, seaward.

  Later, once the woodpile had climbed to a satisfactory height, he sat on a seat under the assembly area and picked at a burst blister on his hand. “Ouch!” A callus had grown at the base of his thumb. A callus. And he’d managed to chop the wood in half the time it used to take him. There might be a place for him here. He had a headache from the lack of sleep but the nightmares seemed distant in the daylight. Bearable.

  There was also a black line under the callus – a splinter. A hard brown piece driven deep into his palm. A needle of wood. A needle.

  The wave pummeled him, drowned him in black memories – the sounds of flesh meeting rock, the acrid smell of the ash upon the funeral bier and the tang of blood...the girl’s blood...the unique smell when he drove in that final needle. Strange and disturbing. The ache of losing Leonie. He’d not even been there, not been there to help her. A failure in all ways...

  He...remembered, all of it.

  “Mr. Noname? Mr. Noname?”

  It was Mara, resting her tiny hand on his shoulder. He was on his knees in the dirt, vomiting. He straightened, dirt still clinging to his hands as he propped himself onto one leg then the other, and stood. “It’s okay, Mara. Thank you.” He wiped his mouth, swallowed the vile taste. He was losing control, again. “Do you know where Omi is?”

  “Yes.”
She pulled on his hand.

  “Wait.” He found his water bottle, took a swig and swilled it round in his mouth before spitting it out. Then he took her hand again. “Now I’m ready.”

  “Are you going to talk to Omi?” She smiled up at him. “That will make him happy.”

  They found Omi meditating, sitting cross-legged at the cliff’s edge on the westernmost boundary of the orphanage. Below was the roaring sea, swirling and smashing against the dark rocks. Above was the haze of salt air and seabirds crying sadly and wheeling on the wind sweeping over the cliff.

  “I’ll be best seeing him alone.” Solemnly he shook her hand. “Thank you.” She ran off down the slope toward where a group of the younger children were running about screaming.

  “Why have you come to me, Thom?”

  Surprisingly, Omi’s eyes were still closed. The wind played with the strands of white hair on his left scalp, tossing it, flicking it across his face.

  What did he mean? For days, he’d been the one who wanted to talk.

  “I...I’m having visions, memories of things that I’ve done. I guess, I need to find a way to come to terms with what I’ve done. What’s happened because of my weakness. I can’t live like this.” He struggled to keep the frustration and the fear, and yes, the loneliness, from his voice.

  “Sit here.”

  Thom frowned. Where? Unsure, he settled onto the ground and rearranged his stubborn limbs until he was also cross-legged, though uncomfortable. The gray-green salt-tolerant grasses up here were spiky at best.

  “What do you see out there, Thom?”

  What had this to do with anything? Time wasting, that’s what he saw. “Uh, I see the horizon where the sky meets the sea. It’s flat looking.” Indeed, despite the strong gusts, the surface of the sea was, at worst, choppy with waves no higher than the gunwales of a dinghy.

  “And?”

  “And?” A few inches in front of Omi, a small mound of gray sand marked the entrance to a crab hole. “And a crab has made a home way up here, many yards above the water – surviving despite being subjected to harsh conditions.” There, that sort of answer would have gained him an “A” in a philosophy exam.

  “And?”

  He frowned. What was the right answer? “The sun, birds, seagulls, terns, water, further north...” The cliff swept around in a crescent and there, on the distant point, a gray shambles of tumble-down rock. A building, perhaps. “An old house? Watchtower? Fort? Rocks? Can’t tell which.”

  “Those rocks are the remains of Rogi Vassbinder’s sea-mansion. You know of him, of course. All zhenjui Needle Masters are taught his history.”

  “Yes.” His mouth was dry. Rogi had been a fearsome man, probably insane, at the last. “He made Immolators – the first of them. A genius, if mad. I didn’t know he lived here.”

  “Only in his last years.”

  Thom spread his fingers, stared at his hands. The tendons that linked fingers to hand. The blue vessels. The whorls and lines of wrinkles at each joint. Needle Master. The ache inside him awakened and clawed fresh wounds. How I have failed. Let me count the ways.

  “I asked what you saw, Thom, because I wanted to also ask you this: in any of all those things, do you see yourself?”

  “Myself? No. Thank the gods.” He laughed bitterly.

  “And yet that is where you need to be.” Omi opened his eyes and stared earnestly at Thom.

  “You want me to jump off this cliff? Gladly.” Again he laughed and realized that he had spoken the truth. A simple solution to an agonizing problem.

  “Pah! There is no joke in this! You seek self-enlightenment. Relief from your inner ills! You blame yourself, and yes, I do know what you’ve done! You have betrayed your country. To assuage your sadness at your wife’s death you took somm. Your child is dead at least in part because of your weakness.” He paused a second or two.

  “The children here, many of them have been abused, assaulted in some way. If we simply ignored them and went to those who injured them and made them say sorry, would that be enough? Huh? Do you ever wonder what happened to that girl you attacked? Heloise is her name. Or the man you forced to betray his country? Samos Goodkin? You sit here stewing in your own juices when you could be, and should be, doing.”

  Thom found he was leaning backward. This priest was insane. What could he do?

  “That girl is alive. Your needles are still inside her. Why not remove them?”

  His mouth half-open, Thom fought to bring order to his thoughts. “But, you brought me here,” he whispered. “How can I –” He slumped and shoved his hands into his hair, left them there half-covering his face.

  It was true. He stewed in his pain, mulling it over, day, night, in his dreams even, but that woman, Heloise, his anger permeated his every thought of her. Anger and also, he realized to his disgust, a tinge of lust. He frowned.

  “I hurt her because she helped to kill Leonie. My daughter. She threatened her and then she killed her.”

  “Ah-h-h. That I did not know. A terrible crime if it is so. Are you sure of this?”

  “I –” If it was true, there was reason behind his rage, and if false, there was none. He knew she’d made the threat and Leonie had died. But, no, he had no facts. Though he searched every one of his dubious memories, he found no proof, just the bitter aftertaste of rage. “I can’t be sure. But it must be true.” He drew away his hands.

  “Thom. Even if it is true, do you believe what you did was right?” Omi paused. “If you do, you are not the man I thought I rescued from a hanging death. Do you remember what you did?”

  A seagull floated in a rising air current just out from where they sat at the cliff’s edge. Serene, effortless, at one with its world. As he watched, the bird seemed to study him also with those black shiny eyes. Don’t you judge me too.

  “Twenty-five needles. I remember those. I was wrong. Of course, I was. Terribly so. But there should be justice for Leonie. And I’ll never get it through the judiciary. I’m a traitor.”

  Omi was looking out to sea. “It takes more courage to face your own wrongs and those you injured than to simply say, sorry, and forgive yourself, and do nothing.”

  His whole body trembled. “I vowed never to touch another needle.”

  “Then undo that vow. You are a zhenjui Needle Master. It is only what you do with your skills that has been wrong, not the skill itself.”

  “Ah, yes. Truth also,” Thom said bitterly. “You’re not as crazy as I thought.”

  “Then you will help this girl if I bring her here?”

  “You want me to heal her? What? When she deserves a trial?”

  Omi rummaged in a pocket within his robe and withdrew a slim opaque tube as long as his finger that he waved before Thom’s eyes. The trapped things within buzzed angrily. Homing flies. Some trinketologist with too much time on his hands, or an expensive commission, had crafted these into miniature versions of Grakkurd airships. They were little oblong balloons. Some bronze and purple, others green and black and shiny steel, and all of them bumping against the thin hollowed-out horn of the tube and ready to launch.

  “I can have a message to Carstelan in a day. My fellow priests will carry it to her.”

  “A day?” Thom stared sightlessly out at the horizon. Truly, he didn’t know. He felt as if he’d fallen into another river in full flow and was tumbling helplessly.

  “I can’t remember the exact placement of the needles. The somm, perhaps, caused this, I don’t know.” He slowly shook his head. As he had done for several days, he struggled to recall the days after the fight at his clinic and found only a disconnected junk pile of dismembered memories. His anger as he attacked the girl, Heloise, yes, that he remembered. He felt it even and shrank inside as he did so. But the order of the needles, the depth, the angles, even the positions on the body – none of this was in his memories.

  “You may, if you see her again. Neh?”

  “I remove the needles and miraculously become a worthy soul a
gain?” It was peaceful up here, at least on the outside. The seagull tilted a wing and dived away with a shrieking cry. “But she will still be a murderer.”

  “Very well. If you need this then listen: On one other small condition, I promise to seek this justice for you, and if she is truly guilty of the murder of your child she will hang.”

  He turned and stared at Omi. “You? A priest? You’ll seek this? Besides, she’ll only bring the Enforcers up here.”

  “I can almost guarantee that she will not contact the authorities. Almost, but then nothing in life is certain, is it? The other.” Omi spread his hands. “Amora weighs both love and hate. It is well within my governance. Do we have an agreement?”

  His tongue became glue inside his mouth. He should ask why Omi was so certain, but what did it matter? He would only be delaying things. “Yes.” As he said it, he imagined Heloise being hung by the neck, spinning, spinning, on the rope, dead, and suddenly felt ill and unsure. Was he right to ask this of Omi?

  She’d brought Leonie to the clinic and exposed her to the dangers that involved. He bit his inside cheek. But would she have ordered her killed? You idiot, why would she? It wouldn’t make sense. Somehow, belatedly, he knew she would never act so callously.

  “The small condition,” Omi said, reaching into his robe. He produced a small cardboard box. The hissing sound coming from within was distinctive.

  Thom found himself shuffling, clawing, scrambling backward, while still on his knees. “No. No! Keep it away!”

  “Ah, but that is the condition. You must learn to resist your addiction if you ever want to be in control of your own destiny.” Omi slid out the drawer of the box to reveal a somm beetle. Its mandibles were up and waving about like a miniature pair of tusks. Its flame orange body flashed in the sunlight. “You will carry this with you wherever you go.”

  C H A P T E R S I X T E E N

  By a combination of bluster, anger, and pure determination, Heloise got past the guard outside her bedroom door. With Bull and two guards in tow, she made her way downstairs to the small dining room where a selection of breakfast delicacies sat on the sideboard. Finding her mouth watering and pastries, eggs and crispy-fried bacon sitting there all perky and scrumptious, she grabbed a slice of bacon with finger and thumb and munched down on it.