Needle Rain

by Cari Silverwood

  He lapsed into silence. Tatiana liked rats? It must be a ruse. She knew of Ermitruse and was coming at him sideways – aiming to get him to sympathize with her, make her seem human. Absentmindedly he counted off the palm trees on the island as they went past. Five, seven, nine...oh, scum, damn and fuck.

  He lay back on the deck and watched the stars go past instead. He did sympathize with her. Though not just for that reason. The woman intrigued him.

  “Joss, do you think a man who goes to bed with a woman to save her life should be damned in the sight of his wife?” He never expected an answer. Be lucky if Joss even vaguely understood. Saying it out loud just helped things crystallize.

  “You mean have sex with her, Samos? Don’t know. Guess I’m too young to figure out those sort of things.”

  His eyes widened. “Uh-huh.” If this was what kids were like, maybe having a baby was a bad move. He needed more information about the missing men. Having sex was one thing. Dying was another. Though he wasn’t sure if Pela would forgive him for doing either one.

  C H A P T E R N I N E T E E N

  Animus – the essence or spirit of an animal or plant,

  often used by a trinketologist in the creation of trinkettons.

  *****

  He might not know how he felt about Heloise coming to the orphanage but Thom knew exactly how he felt about the beetle – terrified, hypnotized and enthralled in fairly equal proportions. He needed to distract himself.

  “Hey! Wilyam!” Thom jogged over to the quadrangle where Wilyam and two other boys were hauling about sections of khiri log and setting them on their ends.

  “You want to help Mister Thom?” Wilyam wiped sweat off his face.

  “Sure.”

  “We’ve got a master carver coming today to show some of the kids how to carve timber. Can you help me saw the other log out there into four pieces and then we’ll have enough?”

  The log was lying near the two-handled saw. The khiri timber was dense and would be hard to saw through.

  Chitin scraped against wood. Inside Thom’s pants pocket was the box with the Somm beetle. He shivered. The craving nibbled at his resolve. If he could just see it. “Wait a minute, Wilyam.”

  Leaving it in his pocket made it too easy anyway. He shoved his hand in and drew out the plain gray-green box. The box vibrated against his skin as something tiny prowled about inside the little cardboard world.

  As if they belonged to another, his fingers pulled open the drawer, set the box on a chunk of weather-beaten timber. He squatted and stared at it. The beetle raised its head, brandishing its mandibles and antennae. Black and shiny. Orange swirls on chitin body. The needle-fine proboscis was so infinitesimally sharp that light seemed to bend around it, distorting the air into whorls of rainbow wherever sunlight collided with proboscis.

  “Mr. Thom? Mr. Thom?”

  Gradually he withdrew, became aware again. The world jumped into place. His thighs ached from squatting. A circle of faces stared down at him. He looked from one to the other. “What?”

  Wilyam scratched his head. “You’ve not moved for half an hour, Thom. We’ve done the log. See.”

  The khiri log lay in four pieces. Not so neatly sawed as he might have achieved, but it was done. The beetle had marched five feet from its box and was valiantly attempting to scale the trunk of a paperbark eucalypt.

  “Don’t touch that!” In two strides Thom reached the tree, with the box in hand ready to capture the beetle again.

  “We weren’t gonna touch it. Omi said to let you look after it.”

  He’d messed up. The thing was dangerous. Better that he fail than that the children be endangered. He raised his boot-clad foot, ready to crush the beetle against the trunk.

  “Hey, you! Silly man! Don’t hurt the beetle! What beetle do to you?”

  “Uh.” He paused, foot in mid-air. An angry-looking Bloodwoman was rushing at him, whipping a white towel from side to side in agitation.

  “Stop!”

  He lifted away his foot, folded his arms.

  “You the man who likes somm? Yes, course you are!” She poked his chest with one brown finger.

  Who was this woman? Since the top of her head barely came up to his neckline, it wouldn’t be fair to poke her back so he merely folded his arms and glared at her. “Listen, woman. This!” he jabbed his own finger at the beetle, “This creature is monstrous! The children –”

  “Silly,” she muttered. “Silly, silly.” Again she poked him. “You are more monster. The beetle is just a beetle. Ignore it and it will ignore you! Stick it to your skin and, ah yes, it is a monster. Idiot! Now, pick it up and come and attend class. Time wasting, time wasting.”

  She marched away back to the quadrangle still muttering curses at him, the broad backside of her tan trousers swayed, her knobbly prehensile toes stomping the ground, hard, as if the dirt too needed chastising.

  The children giggled at him then peeled off to follow her, the youngest of them skipping.

  “Who? Is that?” he muttered to himself.

  Wilyam shook his head in disbelief before joining the tail end of the trail of children.

  “It’s okay, Mr. Noname.” Mara took his hand. “Come on, Momma Abeywa is waiting to teach us to carve wood.”

  He ended up sitting at the back of the wood-carving class, observing. Bloodmen lived their lives in the trees of their forests. Folklore had it that they were born with tails but chopped them off at birth. Whatever the truth of it, timber was in their bones, sap in their blood. Not surprisingly, the woman, Momma Abeywa, knew her craft. The children quickly picked up the knack of using the various chisels and the hammer. The box with the beetle sat upon his own, unused timber stump.

  He supposed, in some ways, she was right. People had corrupted the nature of this beetle. It wasn’t evil in its own right. If he couldn’t handle it, far better that he return it to its own place. That place was the forests of the Bloodmen Clandom which brought him to wondering how much Momma Abeywa knew about the Somm beetle.

  He opened the box and tipped out the beetle, observing as it clumsily teetered down the side of the stump, stopping a few times to prod its proboscis into the wood, searching for prey, he supposed. The somm drug would be some natural poisonous juice used to kill whatever it ate.

  He was careful to stay focused, to not let that all-absorbing state close down his mind again.

  Absurdly, he found himself grinning when he realized he could stop that happening. The wanting, the hunger was still there deep inside, but he’d gained some control over this addiction.

  For the first time in many years, he felt the euphoria of knowing that anything was possible if you tried hard enough.

  Lunchtime – at the orphanage it was a time of day that always got noisy. Again, he couldn’t help grinning when he looked up from his plate and along the row of children sitting either side of the table, when he listened to their cheerful chatter and saw the gusto with which they ate their food. After lunch he set out to find Omi.

  “He’s in his house,” Wilyam told him, talking round a finger he’d jammed into his mouth to free a morsel of food.

  “Thank you.”

  Omi was right, again, being a zhenjui Needle Master wasn’t wrong or evil, it was what he’d done with it.

  He slipped off his boots. The steps leading into the house were smooth and warm. In the lobby he paused and unfurled his mind for the first time since the slaughter, reaching for the knowledge of needles that he’d won through hard years of study. Nothing. He imagined a needle in his fingers, imagined a patient...something simple...maybe a blocked sinus...a swollen leg. Where were the key points? Nothing. He pressed his fingers into his eye sockets. Where had it gone? Scum.

  Without this, he couldn’t help anyone. Not Heloise, not Samos. And, for once, he admitted to himself that he wanted to. Like the beetle, he’d been seeing things the wrong way. Samos – well, he’d always been on the man’s side, just unable and unwilling to put himself in harm
’s way to help him. Other priorities, like making enough money to live and finding a safe place to raise Leonie had taken precedence.

  Leonie.

  No matter how much time came between them, no matter how much good he did to balance out his stupidity, and gods, how right Momma Abeywa was on that fact...he’d never forget Leonie. He’d blamed the girl/woman, Heloise, yet when it came down to the basic facts, the only one to blame was himself.

  He sniffed, stood up a little straighter, and drew back his shoulders.

  Omi was in his study, piling up books on top of his woven cane and oak desk, his red robe hitched up and tucked partly into his sash.

  “Ah, Thom. Yours.” He pointed at the books.

  “Mine?”

  “Yes. To study.”

  Gingerly, Thom lifted the leather cover on one book. The leather was blotched and partially nibbled away at one corner.

  “A Partial Compendium of the Research of Rogi Vassbinder? You’re wasting your time,” he said tiredly. “I cannot recall even the simplest needle recipes.”

  “You can’t? Hmm. It will come back.”

  Thom shook his head, frowning. “Sadly, I believe your faith is misplaced, but I didn’t come for that, or this.” Well, he had, partly, but now it seemed fruitless.

  He prodded the book. “I came to ask you how you can be so sure the woman, Heloise.” Even naming her made his heartbeat hasten. “How you can be sure she is going to come when you call her? And not tell the Enforcers where to get me? You missed explaining that. What is it you know, that I don’t? Actually...” He frowned again. “Why are we reading about Vassbinder?”

  “Sit, please.” Omi gestured at the floor rug then folded his limbs and flowed into his usual cross-legged lotus.

  With some awkwardness, Thom did the same. Lotuses weren’t his favorite flowers, especially when named after a torture like this. He lifted one foot and shifted it into a less painful position.

  “Good.” Omi smiled. “Now that we are comfortable, I will tell you some history.”

  “Will this take long?” He tried not to wince as the blood in his legs began to pool and throb.

  “A little while.”

  He rubbed his forehead. “Go ahead.”

  “The reason I know what Heloise will do is because I have the same problem.”

  “Say that again?” He wasn’t making sense.

  “I was one of Vassbinder’s victims. The pattern he used on me is the same as the one you used on Heloise. Twenty-five needles. All the key points.”

  The room spun. Ice trickled along his skin. “What are you? Impossible! How can you know that? You’d be...a hundred years old.” He lost his next words, peered at Omi. “What did you eat for lunch?”

  Omi chuckled mirthlessly, his body rocking a little. “Oh, Thom. I’m not hallucinating.” He steepled his fingers and stared at them. “Listen to me. There were many of us that he kept in his sea-mansion. Bloodman children as well as Grakks and Burgla’le. You have heard of the tales told about Vassbinder?”

  Thom nodded.

  “Of how he would drive needles into children’s eyes to see what it would do to them? Of vile experiments as he searched for some new and amazing combination of needles?”

  “I have heard of such tales.” His voice came out strained and harsh as if he’d shouted for hours. “I thought them silly.”

  “Alas.” Omi pointed in the general direction of the ruins of the sea-mansion, joggling his finger in emphasis. “That is where such acts happened. One of the combinations he tried was the same as that you used on the girl...and I was one of the children.”

  Such a ludicrous statement, it must be false. Yet dread clutched at him. Thom picked at a stray thread on his pants. “You joke. A hundred years ago?”

  “Feel.” Omi stood and came over to kneel before Thom. He took Thom’s hand and positioned it flat on his chest then dragged it down the front of his thin red robe. Pressed it down, hard. Under the skin the hard nubs of scar tissue bumped against his fingers and he felt the flickering power of a multitude of broken needles. “You see? I need you to heal me. What the girl suffers, I too suffer.”

  Though his lips parted as if he would speak, something made Thom feel for his pocket and pull out the beetle box. He turned it over a few times then opened it and set it on the floor.

  Omi backed away and sat. “Why have you let it out?”

  “Patience.” His gaze flicked up at Omi only for a second. “You’re teaching me patience. Yes? This...problem, is too big.” He clapped his hands on his knees. “I need to think.”

  “Patience? No.” Omi shook his head, exasperated. “It’s to get you to overcome your addiction.”

  “Whatever.”

  Indeed, it took him ages before he could make sense out of everything swirling round in his thoughts. It was too big. From being asked to reverse what he’d done on Heloise, to helping Omi? And Omi had been like this for a hundred years?”

  “A hundred years?” he asked again.

  “Give or take a few.”

  “So this recipe gives you immortality? Yet...you want me to take that away?’ He wiped a hand across his face. “Why? My gods, this is incredible. Think of the implications...”

  Omi slumped. “There is more to it than that.” He stared straight at Thom. “Immortality is what Vassbinder sought, though mostly to prolong the lifespan of Immolators. An immortal invincible army – that was his goal. Or so the records say.” He gestured at the books. “What it did to me, and to Heloise, was to make us attract ghosts. And Thom, they don’t just disturb our dreams, they possess us, they take over every single facet of our bodies so that they can finally do whatever it is that they need to do.” For the first time Omi seemed truly upset; his hands shook, his voice quavered. “Sometimes they make us kill. And that is not the worst of it.”

  Silence smothered the room.

  Thom dropped his gaze, staring again at the beetle that was marching steadily across the timber floor. He licked his lips.

  “How? How do you know what she is going through?”

  “In those hundred years I have studied. I have searched and dug up records. I have screamed and cried and railed against my fate. I have made a fortune or two, and at the last, I made a deal with Amora.” He fingered his robe. “It is the only reason I am still sane. She led me to the Bloodmen. The Bloodmen showed me a way to keep the ghosts at bay, at least while I live here. She told me that you may be the answer I seek.”

  “Ah. While you live here? I remember nights when we were travelling here when you went missing. Was that, you know?”

  “Yes.”

  Thom rubbed his temples and sighed. “I’m sorry.”

  “You didn’t do this to me.” Omi’s eyes shone with truth and conviction.

  “No, I didn’t.” He picked up the beetle. Its legs went on marching in mid-air. “This seems so trivial compared to what you and Heloise suffer. “I can’t promise anything, but if Amora has told you I might be able to help you, I will try.”

  “Good. And Heloise?”

  The image he’d had of Heloise, hanging by her neck, spinning, came back to him. It seemed as if he’d achieved that already. He’d damned her to eternal torture.

  “Yes. Of course. Though from what you’ve said, she really won’t be pleased to see me. And even gods aren’t infallible. Amora may be wrong.”

  “Hah!” Omi grinned. “You will be our savior.”

  The beetle marched on, though upside down in his grasp. That was he, marching forever on air, going nowhere. Maybe it was time he changed direction.

  “What do these beetles eat?”

  “Hmph! Other bugs. They’re an assassin beetle.”

  Thom raised his head. “Know anywhere that has lots of edible bugs?”

  “What? Are you crazy? The forest! It’s the big thing out there where the trees are.”

  “Good. Good.”

  C H A P T E R T W E N T Y

  The priest arrived while Heloise
was standing in her front doorway. She surveyed her rooms and despaired at how so much mess could have happened in so short a time. Grunt had a cat flap to get outdoors but it seemed as if he’d still spent days scratching rugs into piles, raking claws down her quagga hide sofa and shedding fur. Kane may have fed him but he certainly hadn’t done much else.

  Kane. Now there was a problem. Since the morning at Uncle’s house she’d not heard from him at all. She tipped her head forward to let her hair fall forward in a curtain across her face. Go away world. I’m not here.

  Grunt meowed and softly patted her leg, half-climbing up with his forepaws.

  “It’s okay, Grunt. I’m not an ogre. I’m just me.” Me and a half a million ghosts.

  “Ahem.” Behind her someone cleared his throat. “Excuse me, would you be Miss Heloise Ormitrad? I have something for you.”

  She turned to find an Amoran priest hovering on the doorstep. A local man, she thought, she’d seen him at gatherings. In his hand sat a dormant homing fly. Blue-black and mauve with silver teardrops down the side, it was a perfect miniaturized Bheulakk airship. The priest rolled it onto her palm.

  He stuttered. “It’s f-from a fellow priest. A man I know well. T-trust him.” Smiling, he folded his hands demurely together, backed away and was off down the street.

  “Wait...hang about.” Already he was too far away. The only way to find out more was to listen to the thing. Grunt followed her to the dilapidated sofa and jumped onto her lap as she settled. Once nesting on her earlobe, the fly made faint ticking noises as the trinketton warmed up its engine. The message began.

  “A man called Thom Drager is here. He wishes to speak to you and to help you if you can convince him of your innocence in his daughter’s death. Though he says he would hang you if you are guilty, he is silly. I know him. He is a better man than when you met him. I, Omi, a priest of Amora will guarantee he will do his best to remove your needles and heal you. If you seek enforcers, he will be dead instead. Since being a corpse is not a state from which he can help you, I recommend you come here and talk first.