“Sorry. . . .” Enk moistened his dry mouth. “Did you say something, Professor?”
More skittish laughter.
“Yes, Enk, I did.” Professor Conteh tapped his wrinkled knuckles on Enk’s desk. “I suppose you would like me to repeat the question?”
Enk cleared his throat. “Yes, sir, if you don’t mind.”
“Gheber. What does it mean in High Behdin?”
“Infidel.”
“And why are they called that?”
“Much like how the Sophic Nuns get their power from the Thousand Heavens and their oath to God, the Ancient World’s Warlocks get their abilities from their compact with Shaitan and the Hundred Hells—”
“Very nice,” Professor Conteh said, cutting in, “this proves you haven’t been daydreaming through all of my lessons, but it doesn’t answer my question.”
“I was just getting to that part, if I can continue?”
Professor Conteh smirked and opened his arms. “Go right ahead.”
“There’s a cost for dealing with Shaitan and the Hundred Hells, a cost besides eternal damnation I mean. Ghebers are the offspring of Warlocks, that’s why their name means infidel in High Behdin.”
Professor Conteh’s smile widened at the shocked murmurs Enk’s response drew, but before he could speak bells clinked outside the classroom. Wooden limbs scuffed stone as students rose from their chair.
“It seems that will be all for today.” Professor Conteh sighed. “Gently my young lions, there’s no need to push.”
Enk clasped a thick leather-bound book to his chest and joined the flow out of the door. In the hallway, a frowning Ilima fell into step beside him, but he only had time for his own concerns. Never in his life had he experienced anything approaching the strangeness of these last few hours.
A certainty burned itself into his bones, a feeling akin to religious rapture.
Somehow he had become something more.
Something powerf—
Ilima wrenched him into an empty classroom, slammed him against the wall. He spluttered, grunted as pain fluttered up his back and spine.
“Sorry, I. . . .” Ilima released Enk and whirled away. A single window plucked cluttered and empty spaces in filtered sunlight, illuminating shelves stacked with leather-bound tomes and white dogs’ skulls.
“What was that for?” Enk asked, rubbing at his aching bones.
“I don’t know.” Ilima kicked a desk, sent it skidding back with his boot. “You’re just so stubborn! You never let me help. This could have ended weeks ago if you had let me go to my father. Professor Sarr could have. . . .” He turned to face Enk with eyes moist with unshed tears.
The scion of House Gueye lowered his gaze, unable to meet the intensity in his friend’s stare. Though only a few steps separated them, it seemed as if they stood on opposite sides of a vast cavern. But Ilima was right, he could see that, yet it was just so hard to let anyone help, especially the always fearless and gallant dark-haired boy.
“You’re my best friend, Enk,” Ilima said numbly. “Do you think I want to watch you die?”
Enk remembered Ilima’s first display of heroics, back when moonbeams and rain had made a specter out of the night outside his house, when wailing winds had stolen his black-and-gold kite. “Don’t cry,” Ilima had said, surprising Enk. “I’ll get it back, I swear it, on my honor.”
Thunder had pitted silence. Enk had not expected such a response, but he watched in dismay and in awe as Ilima scaled the wall of his home, flinched with each new searing lance of cracking lightning, whimpered and groaned each time Ilima slipped to dangled precariously.
A fearless boy of six, Ilima grinned down at him, the retrieved kite clutched tight in his hand. Enk stood drenched and coughing, peering up at his friend, wanting so bad to be the one standing on the wet roof it hurt.
Now, staring at Ilima’s boots, Enk felt as he had on that night after the jealousy had faded, battered and ashamed. Once again he was the one in the wrong, the one who wanted to be something he was not.
“Say something,” Ilima spat.
“I can read other people’s thoughts,” Enk replied.
Ilima sighed. “Sometimes I wonder what I could have done to make you hate me so.”
“No, it’s true. I know it sounds unbelievable, but I only discovered what I could do last night when Merka—”
“Fine, we don’t have to talk about it.” Ilima threw up his hand in defeat and spun for the door. “Let’s get to. . . .”
“Stop. Turn around. Put your finger in your nose.”
With each command, Enk felt something flutter within him, something that escaped as a mirage of geometric lines of curving light, gleaming swirls that hooked Ilima’s back and breast, only to fade as the dark-haired boy did as decreed. Ilima’s face spasmed into a look of bewilderment.
Enk grinned. “See. I told you.”
“How? How!” Ilima pushed Enk back up against the wall, the veins in his neck bulging, contorted by what appeared equal parts rage and horror.
“I—” Enk began, only to fall silent. In all the years they had known each other, never had he seen his friend so incensed or filled with such righteous indignation.
“Never do that to me again,” Ilima spat, his breath hot against Enk’s face and forehead. “Promise me.”
“I-I . . . promise.”
Chapter Six
Madhouse
Enk followed the potbellied warden through the cramped hallways of the asylum, hope fluttering with every step, despite the horror goosefleshing his back. Aquamarine lamplight shone from atop twisted sconces, illuminating the ghastly figures leering at them from behind barred windows. Most whined and whooped with their passing. Whimpered and blubbered! Like crazed children starved for attention. Some even pulled at their hair and clawed at their faces.
“It’s been a while since your last visit,” the warden said, playing with the ring of keys that swung from his belt. “Two. . . ? No, three years.”
Enk tore his eyes away from the raving strangers, pressed his lips into a thin line, but did not respond. Dark herons patterned the surface of the hallway’s faded wallpaper, black wings spread, as if in flight.
“I must warn you,” the potbellied man said after a moment, “we were forced to move him into the basement.”
“What?” Enk spat, his breath becoming nausea. “Why?”
“It was the sunlight.” The warden glanced back at him, but did not stop walking. “He kept screaming about it holding daemons, now he’ll barely abide lamps. The basement was the only place he felt safe.”
“How long. . . ?” Enk cleared his throat, then went on in a tense tone. “When did this happen?
The warden scratched his fat nose. “A month or two after your last visit, or thereabouts.”
“He’s been in darkness for years?”
“Look,” the warden said, whirling to face Enk, “I know what you’re thinking, but it’s nothing of the sort. We take proper care of our clients, treat them as if they were family.”
A dog like howl knifed the sudden silence.
“That’s Lady Amar,” the warden said, frowning, “the Naunak bloodline runs too true in her, then again it does in most of our patients. But I doubt you’ve ever seen hair so blue. She thinks she’s a hound trapped in a human body when she’s not scrawling equations into her bedsheets with her own feces.” He shook his head and began walking again. “Never mind. Just follow me. You’ll understand when you see him.”
Enk shadowed the warden once more, trailed behind the round man with hesitant steps as he pondered the strange absurdity of the world. Madness was the Naunak bloodline’s curse, the counterbalance to its gift of instinctive mathematical insights. He shuddered at the thought one day this place could be his home.
“Here we are,” the warden said, grabbing a lamp from a nearby table.
He unlocked the door to the basement and immediately stepped back to give Enk a quick glance into inky blackness
cut by sickly light, then came forward to take the lead once more. Enk gripped the railing as he descended into the abyss, so intense was his growing alarum. The wooden stairs creaked and groaned beneath his booted feet, then the man guided him past a flickering furnace with a kind of muted piety. Dust and soot rose to whirl around them in the heat-laden air, kissing the cracked brick walls and ceiling. . . .
Soul and stomach reeling, Enk came to stand beside an iron-bound door, amazed that after everything, he had somehow found a way to make his world right again.
“Wake up, Lord-Marshal, you have a visitor,” the warden said, fitting a large key into the lock on the door. It opened with a hair-raising screech, releasing a gust of air as repugnant as the fumes from an army’s latrine.
Enk staggered back, raising a hand to his face. He could taste the promise of vomit at the back of his throat, but fought back the urge to gag.
“Aye, he’s overdue for a good wash.” The warden said, wrinkling his nose. He handed Enk the lamp and shoved him into the room. “Now in you go.”
The door clanked shut in Enk’s face before he could protest. A sonance of snoring sentience tickled his ear. The almost imperceptible expansion and contraction of lungs. The sluggish vibrations of congested airways. He closed his mouth and turned his back to his only avenue of escape. Lamplight swept across the tiny room, painting the slumbering figure in nightmarish hues. The sleeping man seemed to leer at him, sunken eyes shut, withered face frozen in a grimace, pale cheeks stained with dirt, body slumped back on a rocking chair.
Enk inhaled upon a nebulous pang, his chest knotted about clots of dread. And there was only one thought. Father. . . . Father. . . . Father. . . . A concept once golden with potency, now scabrous with fragility. Father. . . .
He jumped as Father’s eyelids fluttered, then opened into squints, narrowed against the light that attacked them like cudgels. There was a cautious pause as the Lord-Marshal took in the world, then he lurched forward, raising hands as if to fend off blows. The bottom of the rocking chair squawked. Long clumps of greasy hair sloshed across his face like tangled branches.
“You?” Father croaked, lowering his hands. “Who are you? You’re another one of his creatures aren’t you? He sent you to torment me.”
“No, it’s me, Father,” Enk said, setting the lamp down on a small table beside the filthy mattress. “Enk. Your son. I’ve come to heal you.”
The Lord-Marshal fell very still, an aura of contemplation furrowing his brow. Then he was blinking at Enk with renewed suspicion. “No. No. I have no son. No wife. The shadows are my children, the darkness my only bride.”
Enk faltered before Father, pitched upon a precipice. What else would one expect after three years of absence? Recognition? No, not for a faithless son, not from someone who—
Enough!
He was here now, that was the only thing that mattered.
He would fix what was broken, mend what before could not be mended.
The Lord-Marshal cringed back from the look in his son’s eyes.
“It’s all right, Father,” Enk whispered. A skitter of gleeful anticipation evanesced across his skin, rising from the warm buzz that swamped his heart. “Today is the day everything gets better.”
“Please, Esma,” Alapar hissed, holding the sides of his head, as if in great pain. “Have I not suffered enough?”
“Heal!”
Arcane power flared as liquid light, sinking into the Lord-Marshal’s hidden contours, as if he were an infinite void. He convulsed on his chair, spittle foaming around his mouth, tears streaming from his eyes. Enk found it hard to breathe, so great was the sudden strain on his mind. On and on it went, gilded streams swirling into unglimpsed depths. What felt like silver hooks tore at his brain, dropped him to his knees. Heal! he cried without sound. Heal! Yet decree as he might, Enk could not get his command to affix to his father’s soul. The luminous ribbons sputtered into nothingness, and world-numbing fatigue dashed both strength and hope.
No. No! He choked on the horror and anguish of another dream shattered—on the pain of not being good enough to do what one must. I failed. I—
“Die, Mindripper!” Alapar screamed, throwing himself upon his son, wrapping bony fingers around the young scion’s soft neck. “Die!”
Enk stared up into blue-eyed madness, unable to do more that claw at the hands about his throat. He felt himself begin to drift as the bur of exhaustion mingled with the need for breath. . . .
Darkness burgeoned.
He heard the door slam open, listened to it ricochet off of a distant wall.
“Lord-Marshal, let go!” the warden cried, tearing father from son.
Enk escaped into the hallway, panting, rubbing at his throat. Not looking back, he ran from the howling lamentation of his crazed father, traded the illumination of the shining furnace for the eerie lamplight of above, skulked from locked door to locked door, ushered forward by a cross-eyed nurse.
Yet with his own shadow, his father chased him.
Chapter Seven
Home of Serpents
Enk staggered away from the asylum, cool air soothing the burning in his lungs but not the ache in his heart. Fading light gleamed across the side of the waiting carriage, drawing his eye to Ilima and Obares, the boy’s gray-haired carriage driver—they stood feeding apples to their brown-maned horses. He turned from them, hating the feel of tears swimming across his eyes. A blurring crept into his view, doubling then tripling the city street, and suddenly all the world spun upon a top. His throat clogged about a soundless cry.
He dropped to his knees, clutched the pommel of his sword like a madman on the edge of violence. For a time there was no air for him to draw breath, nor light for him to see.
He heard the scuff of boots against cobblestone—stiffened.
“What happened?”
A masculine voice, tight for alarm but trying to pretend calm.
Enk’s lips trembled. He could not bring himself to open his eyes. He could not bear to witness Ilima’s poorly concealed look of concern.
Betrayer, his mother had called him long ago. He was a betrayer.
He caused this, him—the always faithless whore’s son.
“Enk. . . ?”
The lack of air spasmed the lungs of House Gueye’s heir, urging him to breathe.
“It didn’t work, did it?”
Enk opened his eyes, though all his passion raged against it. He glanced up at his friend, a little boy crouched beside a much beloved older brother.
“Next time, you will succeed. Next time.”
More self-confident prophecy than comforting words.
The dark-haired boy turned to face the setting sun, resting a palm on Enk’s slumped shoulder. As one haggard and one unbent, they watched rose-colored light fall through a dank slot between two buildings.
“Let’s go to the Pit,” Enk said after a span of reinvigorating silence.
Ilima took back his hand. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. . . .” Enk stood, swatting tears from his cheek. The asylum’s shadow loomed in his periphery, strained against the dwindling brightness, agog for the approach of night. “For once, I just want to forget and laugh and joke with my friends.”
■■■
In accordance with custom, the hereditary Lamplighters of Dilgan brought the wicks of unlit streetlights to the flame as twilight bloomed in full, covering the ancient city like the petals of an enormous dark rose.
Enk clutched at his seat at the back of Ilima’s carriage, braced himself against the door. The vehicle raced down narrow streets on the way to the Pit, rattling as it traveled deeper into the heart of the Shade—Dilgan’s most notorious district, the place the Great Gate’s blue taint fell heaviest each morning. A sense of queasiness threatened with every sharp turn and pothole struck.
“It’s not too late to change your mind,” Ilima said, grinning.
Enk grunted, but did not respond, lost in the examination of Dilgan’s nocturnal d
enizens. Under the cover of night, the Soused stumbled their way out of the tenements they called home, those diseased wretches most afflicted by the blue taint. They moved with hooded heads bowed to concealed leprous welts, though the sickness affected each differently. Some had simply lost their hair, others their teeth, but all looked stricken by some unfathomable ailment.
He shivered. He was like them, the only difference was his illness lay hidden while theirs lay naked to any who glimpsed them.
“You know, it wasn’t always like this,” Ilima said, glancing at the window. “The blue taint didn’t always blight.”
“I know,” Enk replied. Ten years ago something changed, and the morning glow from the Cobalt Gate began sickening individuals, only a handful at first, but every year it got worse—was still getting worse. The Soused now numbered in the thousands.
“Why don’t they move? Is it simply a lack of funds?”
“For some, I’m sure it is,” Enk said, “but for most, I think it’s pride. This is the only home they’ve ever known, they don’t want to be chased from it.”
“Pride? No, more like stupidity.”
“I suppose that’s a matter of vantage, it all depends on where you’re standing.”
Ilima shook his head, yet remained silent.
He sat so very close, yet seemed all alone.
The Pit approached with the suddenness of a thrown fist, its yellow domed roof large yet distant, then near and looming, loud with the bacchant of the revelers slouched about its perimeter. Enk peered at tendrils of azure smoke, lifting from the carousers’ nala packed pipes. The scent of burnt cinnamon mixed with the promise of rain on the wind. He turned and saw Dumuzi and Myron standing beside a parked carriage, fear gleaming from eyes rounded by an undercurrent of danger. He opened the door, stepped down from his seat into their surprised midst, Ilima trailing a tick behind him.
“You came,” Myron cried, lowering the bright handkerchief he held over his nose and mouth.
Enk smiled. “We did. Have you been waiting long?”
“No, not long,” Myron said, clapping Ilima’s shoulder in greeting.
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