Mindripper

by Baron Blackwell

  Merka pulled a scarlet-cushioned chair back from the table, and he took the seat, blinking against a sudden cutting pain, her remembered words wounding anew.

  He sat in seething silence. It was the truth of her words that hurt the most. He was doomed, doomed to ever remain in the shadow of the Immortal-Emperor, in his own mind and the mind of the woman he loved. How could he even begin to compete with a man who was old before the Empire was even an idea, a man who had been chosen by God?

  “Enk. . . .” Merka began, only for her voice to falter.

  He peered down at his empty plate, avoided her gaze, listened to her sigh then saunter away. His eyes lost focus, and images billowed up from the deep recesses of his mind, memories, like golden leaves scuttling free from the branches of an unseen tree. Merka perched on his rumpled bedside, her voice raised in a soothing aria. Countless afternoons clustered beneath a massive oak. Warmth and kindness radiating out from her to comfort what was broken and unmendable. . . .

  “How long. . . ?” Enk cleared his throat. Merka had remained by his side when all the others had left. She loved him, had always loved him. Whatever animus she had turned against him last night had been borne out of hurt. Out of his rejection of her love.

  “What. . . ?” Merka asked from somewhere behind him.

  “How long since I last heard you sing?” He turned around and found her standing with her hand on the doorknob and her head cocked to the side. “Feels like forever. Once this place was filled with your songs.”

  “Enk . . . you’re sixteen.”

  “Your point?”

  “Don’t you think you’re a little old for lullabies?”

  He lowered his gaze. “I’ll never be too old for lullabies, not from you.”

  “Oh, Enk.” She rushed him, tears lacquering her eyes.

  Enk jerked, taken by surprise as his former wet nurse clutched him to her bosom. For an instant, his fingers clawed his sweaty palms, then he relaxed into her embrace.

  Chapter Two

  Mother

  Enk savored the sudden immovability of being clasped in Merka’s arms, wondering whether comfort always seemed so all-consuming when preceded by hurt. His breast thumped, buzzed in a way that set his whole body ablaze. Her fingers swept through his hair, felt like half a dozen points of sunlight teasing his skull.

  “About last night—” he began.

  “Don’t,” the former wet nurse squeaked, looking down at him through teary eyes, a vision so beguiling it stole all breath for simply being. “There’s no need to speak of it, not ever.”

  “No. I want you to understand. You’re like a . . . mother to me. More of one than my own. Don’t you see, that’s why last night couldn’t happen. It would ruin something beautiful. Something pure.”

  Merka stepped back, a lifetime of emotions running across her face—decades of petty hells and little heavens all bound in a brittle smile. “You know . . . when you want to, you can be the sweetest of boys.”

  She touched a knuckle to his bruised cheek, then fled the passions shimmering in his eyes.

  Enk brushed a treacherous tear from his face and gazed up at the portrait of the red-coated Lord-Captain that hung on the wall in between two windows. Like every other morning, his father’s portrait towered from its perch, painted eyes glaring, judging. He sat straighter.

  His home dwarfed him in so many ways. It was more than the architecture. It was the history of the place, all the Gueyes that had come before him. Their great deeds and accomplishments weighed on him, none so much than Father’s own. Yet not today. Not right now.

  A smile curved his lips.

  The door opened, accompanied by the swooshing of fabric, impassioned murmurs, and the exchange of lewd kisses. The smile slipped from Enk’s face. He did not turn to look, to look was to ink the degradation into his flesh anew, to tear at the canvas of his heart.

  “Sweet, so sweet,” spoke a man in a voice rendered cavernous by hunger. “Your lips are candied fruit.”

  A peal of child-like laughter.

  Enk exhaled. How could such lasciviousness sound innocent? How could one trust in mere forms when beauty could conceal such poison? A certain blankness of expression, he had long ago decided, was the only solution to such contradictions.

  The table jumped back, knocked by the thrashing of limbs entwined in a fumbling, groping dance. Enk locked eyes with Mother, Lady Phebe Gueye. She graced him with a sly smile, her fingers interlocked behind her lover’s head, her backside pressed against the table, her tongue flickering against the man’s own with an animal-like ferocity.

  Colored ribbons pinned the cloth of her white dress like festive curtains, so that she appeared as something prized, something reserved for the most deserving. A bracelet of jade obelisks etched with ark motifs dangled from her left wrist. A headdress of rose gold wings and roses crowned her head, imposing order on her luscious blue hair. Yet despite her nearness, she seemed as distant as the alien horizon glimpsed through the Cobalt Gate, no less beautiful for its falseness.

  “Morning, Mother.” He did not look away. If the years had taught him one thing about his mother, it was that she would exploit any weakness, slip her claw into any crack.

  The smile dipped from her face, replaced by an air of boredom. She placed her palms against her lover’s chest and pushed. “Utu, my boy is watching,” she said in her sing-song way.

  “Let him watch,” came Utu’s flippant response. He was a brute of a man, his knuckles scarred with the evidence of his barbarism. A member of the Peacebringers by uniform—a blue coat with brass buttons and red epaulets.

  Mother shied from further advances, turned rosy cheek to puckered lips. Her voice cooed admonitions, rejections steeped in the erotic aura of innocence. Utu retreated, his face blotched by lust, another man made slave by want. Only fiends of the most mythic stature could resist such an allure—this Enk knew. Better men than this hapless fool had fallen victim to his mother’s invocations. Marshals and Generals. Priests and Senators. And to them all, she had brought ruin.

  Face impassive, Enk glanced at the blue hat clutched in the man’s hand. “Lord-Captain . . . Utu, was it?”

  “Captain Utu Levin, boy,” Utu said, the challenge naked in his beady-eyed stare.

  Disgust hooked Enk’s heart and hate steadied his gaze. He understood the rules of this little game, had learned them out of necessity. For men such as Utu, there was only the rabbit and the jackal. Power was the precarious fulcrum upon which his life swung. To retreat before him was to become prey.

  “A lowborn then.” Enk found himself resenting the ease with which he slipped into his practiced highborn arrogance. “Tell me, Captain, is this the etiquette with which you greet all members of the Second Estate? From a man of better breeding such a thing would be almost tolerable. But from someone. . . .” He allowed his voice to slide into nothingness, allowed the man’s imagination to supply the insult.

  “Be nice, Enk,” Mother said, a mocking purr in her voice as though she were a cat toying with loose string. A move meant to excite the man to violence, Enk was certain. Few tested as Lady Gueye tested, few knew how to cut to the heart of a man with nothing more than a honeyed phrase.

  Utu bared his crooked teeth. “The resemblance is uncanny. You even ape his mannerisms.”

  Enk did not ask the obvious question, but it was a lie. He looked nothing like his father. In a way, all insults returned here, not only to his feebleness but to the gap that lay between him and his legendary father. Alapar Gueye. Lord-Marshal of the Empire, savior of the Second Crusade.

  The silence became dangerous, edged with acidic wisps.

  “Will you be joining us for breakfast?” Mother asked, taking her seat at the head of the table

  “No, not this time, my sweet.” Utu donned his hat. “May I call upon you again?”

  “Perhaps. . . .” Her eyelids fluttered with coy shyness, but her smile . . . her smile was all courtesan.

  Utu left, the swagger of hi
s steps matched by the broadness of his grin. And Enk met his father’s painted glare, raging, fuming. How much? His fingers clawed at his thighs. How much more must he endure?

  “Do you like him, Enk?” Mother asked.

  “You two make an interesting pair,” he heard himself say in a passionless voice. They had been friends once, he and his mother. Secret conspirators.

  “Sweet of you to say so, Dear. I’m glad you approve.” She touched a finger to her lip, drew a slow circle once, twice. . . .

  “Excuse me, Mother.” Enk sprung from his chair, propelled by welling revulsion.

  “But you haven’t eaten.”

  The scion of House Gueye made his retreat, heedless of his mother’s beseeching calls, fleeing as any sane man might from the gates of the Hundred Hells. The door closed behind him, and he broke into a sprint, chest heaving for the festive madness of repressed torments, for the fear of weathering further such transgressions.

  Reason dictated that he should return to his room and unravel the mystery of what happened with him and Merka, but he could not stay in this place, not with Mother so close. He needed to get away. Sunlight swam through the windows, bathing him in cold light.

  Suddenly, his ears tingled, plucked by the wordless song that escaped from behind the kitchen door. He slowed, wheezing slightly, then stopped. His throat tightened around a human heart, thrummed with each chest-thumbing beat.

  Like a crisp morning breeze, Merka’s voice swamped through Enk’s chest, stirring, stroking. Every note was the remnant of a golden hoard, unmoored from time and space, possessing the ghosts of happier days.

  Enk pressed his head to the door, closed his leaking eyes.

  Chapter Three

  The Scarlet Apron

  As always, horror lay in the span between panted breaths.

  Enk grimaced and slackened his pace, watching light dapple across the pristine and serene greenery of his front lawns. And when the horror that clawed at his lungs had become more fiery still, he slinked beneath a mighty oak, curled against its familiar shade, ran fingertips along his and Merka’s names, bound by a heart carved into the bark. He turned back to gauge how far he had come, the way he so often did while pausing to recover his strength.

  His home loomed, its sunlit beauty contradicted by the memory of its hidden decay. He squinted against the glare of its most modern addition—its glass-roofed arcade. The mansion was a different place when glimpsed from outside, one that shimmered with grandeur. He could not stare at it without some kind of pang in his throat.

  “Thirty-three,” he said, continuing his journey.

  Thirty-three, the number of steps from the oak to the gate. The gate was a tall tangle of blackened iron, hemmed in on either side by a white-bricked wall, overrun with a snarl of vines and leaves. On the cobbled street, a black carriage waited.

  Suddenly the morning trek struck Enk as pathetic. It would be a simple thing to have the carriage meet him at his door. Like so much in his life, it had seemed nobler the day before, a way to push back against his affliction. Yet after years of practice, the daily odyssey never got any easier. He still paused in the same place, still wheezed after the same number of steps, his pride a goad around his neck.

  In another life, I. . . .

  Enk banished the thought and pressed onward. More than anything else, he was stubborn. He would not quit now, and he would not ask Ilima to meet him at his door. To do that would be to admit defeat to his most hated enemy—his ailment. No amount of comfort was worth such a betrayal.

  When he staggered into the carriage, it was all he could do to keep his eyes open as he gulped air into his constricted airways. Bent double, he clutched at the pommel of his sword to stop from clawing at his throat.

  “I have news,” Ilima said, handing him a towel. His dark eyes, opposites to his sister’s blue, seemed hooded with unspoken dread. He wore a green coat whose finery screamed nobility without being too ostentatious, and, like all males with more than a touch of the Senmonth bloodline, he was a near giant, towering over Enk even when seated.

  The young scion’s reply was all heavy breathing.

  If bothered by such a response, Ilima did not show it. “There was another one.” Heartache and disgust pitched his voice higher than normal.

  “What? When?” Enk lurched upright on a wheezing intake of air.

  “Last night. My father only just came home. He said the Censors mean to keep it from the newspapers, but I doubt that will do any good.”

  Enk studied his friend’s profile. Ilima was an image of what he might have looked like in another life: broad-shouldered, dark, vibrant curls chopped short, caring eyes, and a perfectly curved smile to melt the heart of any maid. Fire knotted Enk’s chest. He hated this, hated the way his own inadequacies stood manifest while perched in his friend’s presence. Ilima was everything he was not. Everything he wanted to be.

  “Look,” Ilima continued, motioning at the city. “There’s an edge to them that wasn’t there before. Do you see it?”

  Enk glanced out his window, the unused towel still balled in his hand. The citizens of Dilgan seemed entangled with shadow, clustered beneath the sprawling architecture of magnificent tenements, shops, and gleaming, cube-shaped churches, voices pitched low in early morning chatter, deaf to the thunderous chorus of the city. Women traveled in groups of no less than three, huddled against each other, shivering as the wind fumbled at their dresses, their faces haunted with unspoken horror.

  “I see it,” Enk said, his voice quiet with astonishment. Why had he not noticed this before?

  “Some among the Third Estate have begun to call him the Scarlet Apron.” Ilima sighed, as if injustice of any kind was a weight upon his soul. “Mark me, if he isn’t caught soon, there will be riots. There’s only so long the men will allow their women to be preyed upon.”

  “The Scarlet Apron? An apt name.” Enk sponged the sweat from his brow. “Much better than the Dilgan Murderer.”

  Ilima clicked his tongue with an exasperated twitch. “Could you at least pretend to care? Women are being butchered like cattle, strung up in grisly scenes. You should have seen my father’s face this morning. This case wears on him. It’s in the cast of his eyes, the way he stares off into space for minutes on end.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  “Think, Enk.” His voice was tight, hooked by a thread of luminous dread. “How many years has my father worked for the Black Agency? How many thousands did he watch die in the Second Crusade? For this case to affect him as it has, it must be . . . it must be—”

  Enk clasped Ilima’s arm. “Peace, Ilima. There’s nothing you can do.”

  “I know that but. . . .” Ilima hesitated. For an instant, he appeared broken, a vase shattered against the stone of a jagged shore, then the look receded, replaced by iron-webbed determination. “But I can’t help thinking that together we could bring the killer to justice.”

  “You and me?” Enk tried to laugh, but the sound lodged in his throat, caught on a sudden sense of pity for his friend. “Two sixteen-year-old youths doing what every thrasher, Blackcloak, and secret informant cannot?”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not?” Enk spat. “Sometimes, Ilima, I think if I only had your confidence, I would already be a Lord-Marshal of the Empire. Other times, I’m certain that I would be dead.”

  Stricken mute by the rebuke, Ilima leaned back in his seat, his cheeks flushed. Enk returned to his eastward vigil, peering up at the tip of the Cobalt Gate and the orb of burnished gold, rising up above it, causing the illusory mountains to ripple oddly. More than some mere trick of light, this exposed the falseness of the view that concealed the near Ancient East.

  “Inanna left something for you,” Ilima said, breaking the silence. “She told me to give it to you the day after she left.”

  Enk stiffened, jerked his gaze away from the Great Gate as Ilima pressed a letter into his hand. He traced the flowing script inked into the ivory-white paper. There
was no mistaking Inanna’s hand. The gloom of the carriage became enveloping, transformed darkness into fanged manacles, tightening across the base of his skull and spine. His fingers trembled.

  “Are you going to open it?” Ilima asked.

  “Later.” Enk stuffed the missive into an inner coat pocket. Ilima said nothing, but he could feel his friend’s concern. “How many victims have there been now?”

  Ilima blinked, eyes glowing with the specter of hope.

  “I’m not agreeing to anything, understand?” Enk continued in a rush before his friend could respond.

  “Of course not,” Ilima said, smiling.

  “I’m not.”

  Ilima’s smile widened. “Officially, the count is up to four.”

  “And unofficially?”

  “My father thinks there was a fifth victim, a Devotee of the Holy Harlots that was murdered four weeks before all this mayhem started. He thinks that case and these ones are connected, but he wouldn’t say why.”

  Enk rubbed his nose. The legend of the Holy Harlots was sacrosanct in the minds of the populace, he knew, one of the four pillars from which their faith hung. According to scripture, ere they were harlots they were the wives of the Great-King of Old Uruka, the Immortal-Emperor’s title in Deep Antiquity. When God sent the Great-King visions of the end of the world, they convinced him to save their household instead of placing two of every creature onto the Holy Ark as was commanded. For their greed and avarice, they were forced to become wombs for the seed of their fallen nation’s champions. The Devotees—lowborn women for the most part, all with a touch of noble bloodline—carried on this tradition, laying with those the Church has chosen, giving birth to new generations of the Children-of-the-Ark.

  “Interesting,” the young scion muttered.

  “How so?” Ilima asked.

  “Why don’t others agree with his theory?”

  “The way the Devotee was murdered was different than the other victims. Less gruesome, or so he said.” Ilima scowled. “But why do you think it’s interesting?”