Emissary

by Melissa McShane

  Akelliou Rodennos paced back and forth in front of the forge. When he saw Zerafine, he threw up his hands and shouted, “Morica, why did you let her in here? She’s going to ruin everything!”

  “I told Alita she needed to come. She’ll understand. She knows about spirit,” Morica, focused on the cage, responded absently.

  “It’s because she’ll understand that she’s a danger,” Akelliou retorted. He glanced at Zerafine, then at Gerrard. “She won’t let you continue.”

  Morica turned her gaze on Zerafine, suddenly very intent on her. “You won’t make me stop,” she stated. “I’ve done good work. You won’t undo it.” She had her hand on the table and began tapping her fingers against it, one-two-three, one-two-three.

  “I just want to understand more about what you’re doing,” Zerafine said. Morica was clearly unstable and saying the wrong thing might make her shut down completely. “Your...experiments...caused the apparitions?”

  “It was a side effect,” Morica said, still tapping. “Leaks. Cracks in the surface.”

  “Stop telling her things,” Akelliou hissed. He grabbed Morica’s arm, but she shook him off. “But I want her to know,” she said.

  “Alita said not to tell anyone,” Akelliou said.

  “Alita doesn’t understand. She does.” She pulled the lenses down over her eyes. They were round and silvery and made her look like an insect, long limbs and all. “You can look at it,” she told Zerafine, and pointed at the cage.

  Zerafine furrowed her brow. Did she mean...? She sat cross-legged on the floor next to the cage and took three deep cleansing breaths, then opened her heart’s eye.

  She nearly fell over backwards. A gigantic knot of spirit threads nearly filled the cage, the filaments so close together that it looked like a solid mass. Hundreds, possibly thousands of threads emerged from the ball toward the floor, fading into near-invisibility before leaving the confines of the cage through the gaps in the seicorum. The effect was that of a vine, or a snake, lifted in the middle by a stick and allowed to hang down on both sides. Its surface was covered with dozens of deep cracks, as if the knot were made of mud that had dried and split under the scorching sun. As she watched, she saw threads emerge from one of the cracks and tangle themselves together, drifting away from their parent until they brushed against a seicorum bar. Then the knot dissolved and the threads fell back to be absorbed by the ball.

  Zerafine reached out to touch it, then restrained herself. If a small one had killed Genedirou, who knew what an apparition this size could do to her? But—was it really an apparition? There had been no image associated with it, nothing to indicate the cage wasn’t empty. “This is a piece of a bigger thing,” she said, giving herself time to come up with the questions she actually wanted answers to. “The apparitions come from it.”

  “I figured out that it’s all one piece,” Morica said. “That was the key.” She took a long rod from the table that to Zerafine’s inner sense looked black, without the fuzzy edges most objects appeared to have from that perspective. She slid it between the gaps in the bars and Zerafine saw the knot recoil from it. Seicorum again. She let go of her meditative state and stood up.

  “I tried to tell them to stop,” Akelliou said, apparently forgetting that he wasn’t speaking to Zerafine. “After they broke it, I told them it had gone too far. It’s not my fault.”

  “What do you mean, broke it?” Gerrard said, looming over Akelliou. Akelliou cringed.

  “It cracked when Morica started to cage it,” he said. “Then the apparitions came from the cracks. Don’t blame me. I didn’t do anything.”

  Zerafine gave him a scornful look. “The apparitions are all over the city, but you only caged it here.”

  “It’s all one piece,” Morica said, tapping her fingers more insistently. “I had to isolate it so the other estates wouldn’t be affected. You know. You were supposed to understand.”

  “I do understand,” Zerafine said, and felt the lie turn to bitter acid in her mouth. She’d have to be more careful.

  “What I don’t understand,” said Alita Talarannos, “is why you are here on my estate without my permission.” She noiselessly closed the door behind her.

  “You sent her. Didn’t you send her? I told you I wanted to talk to her,” said Morica. She wrapped her arms around herself and began to hum tunelessly.

  “I told you it was too dangerous for her to see your work,” Alita said gently. She put her arm around Morica’s shoulders. “I wish you’d listened to me.”

  “I’m sorry I’m such a thorn in your side,” Zerafine said, glaring at Alita so she’d know she wasn’t sorry at all. “I imagine you’re disappointed that you haven’t been able to get rid of me permanently.”

  Alita glared back. “As I said, this is private property and I want you gone.”

  Akelliou said, “I tried to make her leave, Alita. I told Morica not to talk to her.”

  “Shut up, you pathetic whiner,” Gerrard said.

  “I wanted her to tell me how to make it do what I want,” Morica complained.

  Her words made something shift inside Zerafine’s head. How to make it do what I want. As if it were a dog, or a horse in training. Impulsively, she said, “Did you know it was alive when you started, or did you only figure it out later?”

  Alita stared at her. “It’s not alive. It’s just spirit. It flows through the city.”

  “I thought that, too,” Zerafine replied. “How could it be alive if there was no body? But there’s nothing that says a living creature can’t be pure spirit. And just now I saw it recoil as if it was backing away from something painful, which it seems seicorum is to it. That it’s a living creature that doesn’t happen to have a physical body is far less ridiculous than that it’s loose spirit or some kind of embodiment of the life of a city.

  “Let me see if I have this right,” she continued in the face of Alita’s stunned silence. “You discovered this creature on your estate because it’s somehow more solid here, or closer to the surface—the details don’t matter. The point is that here, at this estate, you were capable not only of perceiving it, but of capturing it. But you fractured it when you caged it, and it started...let’s just say ‘bleeding’, shall we?”

  “It’s not alive,” Alita said through clenched teeth.

  “You know what? I was going to give you the benefit of the doubt about that, that you didn’t realize it was alive, but now I think maybe you suspected otherwise. But, again, it doesn’t really matter. The bleeding took the form of apparitions—I’m not totally sure about that, but who knows what enough concentrated spirit in one place might do? That explains Genedirou’s banishments; he was putting a patch on the problem, but it wasn’t a perfect seal and there were loose ends. But why didn’t you let him work his ritual here? The apparitions must have been an annoyance.”

  “I needed them for the experiment,” Morica said. “If I touched the source it fought back. I learned so much from them.”

  “Don’t answer her questions, dear,” Alita said. She regained her poise and began to speak, but Zerafine overrode her.

  “Only one more question, Alita, and I’ll be gone. Just one question. What was the point of all this?”

  Alita said, “I don’t have to answer—”

  “It gives us power!” Akelliou blurted out. “All our estates, there’s a source on each one. Luck, wealth, power, anything we want. It makes us better than others.”

  “Akelliou, why are you kissing up to the emissary?” Alita said, rounding on him.

  “It’s not fair that you’re keeping it all to yourself!” he shouted. “You promised it would be me next, but you’re just saving it all for yourself!”

  “Oh, shut up, Akelliou,” Alita said wearily. “As if I would ever have helped someone like you. I may hate your uncle, but he’s three times the man you are.”

  “I would agree with that,” Zerafine said. “Goodbye, Alita. Morica, I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for what?”
Alita said.

  Zerafine shook her head. “She’s a genius, Alita. And you’ve got her torturing an innocent creature. Do yourself a favor. Take all this apart.”

  “How is that a favor to me?” Alita sneered. “I’m not going to give up my power just because some upstart thelis from nowhere tries to ride her moral high horse over me.”

  “It’s a favor to you,” Zerafine said, “because if you don’t, I will. And I will make sure everyone in your social circle knows what you tried to do. How long do you think your power will last when your peers find out you were trying to gain an unfair advantage over them?”

  “I can make sure you never leave this estate,” Alita said.

  Zerafine laughed. “Now you’re just embarrassing yourself. Unless you happen to have a few more assassins on tap.” She turned away and let Gerrard precede her out the door. “Let’s leave quickly. Just in case.”

  They found Nacalia outside at the front of the house, playing with a litter of kittens, Toria watching over her. “Does Alita know you let us in?” Zerafine asked.

  “Not so far,” Toria replied. “But I think she will.”

  “If she fires you, come to the shrine. We won’t let you suffer for this.”

  “Thanks for that, madama.”

  Once on the road, Zerafine breathed easier. The wind had died down, and the clouds provided a welcome break from the sun’s rays. She’d sounded much more certain than she was. For all she knew, Alita might have had fifty men in her household guard, and Zerafine had no doubt that she could have made good on her threat. “You could have defeated fifty men, right?” she asked Gerrard.

  He gave her a surprised look. “No.”

  “Then I’m glad she didn’t have fifty men waiting outside.”

  “I might have been able to handle twenty. Definitely ten.”

  “You inspire such confidence.”

  He grabbed her around the waist with one arm and lifted her off her feet, and kissed her, startling a few other pedestrians. “I’m not entirely sure I can handle you,” he said.

  “Put me down, ox! Such unprofessional behavior.”

  “Sorry.” He didn’t look sorry. “So. It’s an actual creature. And here I thought that was the impossible scenario.”

  “I wonder...” Zerafine began.

  “Yes?”

  “If it’s a creature, and it’s wounded, I wonder if the theloi of Kalindi might be able to do something about it. It certainly seems to have vital energy enough to permit a healing.”

  Gerrard scratched his chin. “Would they even be able to perceive it?”

  “I don’t know. It’s worth asking, anyway.”

  “And we’d have to find a spot where they’d be able to reach it.”

  “We’ve got nine of them. Eight, since Alita’s never going to let us back in.”

  “True. Do you think she’s going to dismantle her contraption?”

  “No. Maybe. I hope so. Who knows what could happen to the creature if this plan works? It might destroy her setup for her.”

  Gerrard nodded. “You want to talk to the Marathelis of Kalindi now?”

  “Is it a woman, then? I never even thought to ask.”

  “Her name is Yelenita and Dakariou said she’s a good choice to follow Alestiou. Strong-willed, a good administrator, maybe not as close to the Goddess as Alestiou was, but a good woman.”

  “I’m impressed. You managed to say all that without making the face you always make when you say Dakariou’s name.” He looked surprised, so she pursed her lips and furrowed her brow and said, “Like that.”

  He laughed. “I suppose I no longer feel threatened by him,” he said.

  Zerafine grabbed his tunic collar and pulled him down for a kiss. “Now who’s being unprofessional,” he murmured against her lips. She poked him in the stomach.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  They climbed the temple steps--it turned out there were one hundred and sixteen of them—only to find that they could not see the Marathelis, because there was no Marathelis yet. More specifically, Yelenita’s investiture would not be held until sunrise the following day, and until then, she was in seclusion to meditate and pray. In fact, the entire temple was closed in preparation for the momentous event. Waiting out a rainstorm in the temple portico, Zerafine drummed her fingers on her arm, then stopped, remembering Morica’s agitation. Her heart was full of compassion for the woman.

  “I’m all out of ideas,” she confessed. “And I feel impatient at being balked. It’s going to be nearly twenty-four hours before we can talk to Yelenita, and we can’t even ask one of the theloi healers to help because they’re all in seclusion too. Now what?”

  “I know something we can do,” Gerrard said, grinning at her.

  “In the middle of the day? I think we’d get tired of doing that after only a few hours.”

  “I was talking about getting food,” he said, his grin broadening. She blushed.

  They ate at an outdoor restaurant, Nacalia bouncing in her excitement at sitting with the grown-ups, then let Nacalia lead them on a tour of the city. Zerafine’s appreciation for its beauty grew. She knew it had its darker side. Too many parts of the city were old, decaying, their inhabitants scraping a living any way they could, but it was hard not to appreciate Hanakou’s Palace, a remnant of a two-centuries’-past regime filled with beautiful statuary, or the wild gardens surrounding the temple of Ventus, god of fate. It would not be such a bad place to settle down in. The light wind made the city’s oppressive heat finally bearable.

  They returned home for dinner, and then Zerafine and Gerrard retired to Zerafine’s room, where they found that there was at least one activity they didn’t get tired of for a long time.

  ***

  They returned to the temple of Kalindi at midmorning the next day, hoping to miss the great crowds thronging the plaza for the investiture. Their arrival was almost perfectly timed; they still had to fight the crowds, but most of the traffic had cleared. Despite the now constant wind and occasional rain showers, the plaza had been full that morning as most of Portena turned out for the ceremony. More crowded were the stairs to the temple, as thousands of worshippers clamored for the Marathelis’s vicarious blessing, conveyed through brass tokens stamped with the stylized image of the sun.

  The temple of Kalindi was as exquisite on the inside as it was impressive on the outside. The deep portico provided shade for supplicants—or would, on a day less overcast than this—and led directly to the offertory chamber, its floor a vast mosaic of green and gold tesserae, where in normal times worshippers brought items to be blessed, or came to receive blessings themselves, leaving behind a coin or two. Now it was thronged with people trying to reach one of the theloi who were handing out blessing tokens.

  A thelis noticed Zerafine’s red robe and hood and pushed through the crowd toward her. “Madama thelis, how can I help you? Have you come for the Marathelis’s gift?” Her face showed moderate dismay that a thelis of Atenas might want the blessing of the Queen of Heaven’s representative.

  “No, madama thelis, I am here to speak with the Marathelis,” Zerafine said.

  The thelis shook her head. “I’m afraid that’s impossible,” she said. “These four days of preparation are arduous, and the Marathelis is resting. You’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

  “I apologize for my insistence, but my business is quite urgent,” Zerafine said. “As the representative of Atenar I am invested—” she gave the word emphasis to make a comparison with Yelenita’s investiture—“with the authority of the Marathelos of Atenas, and as such, I require that I be admitted to the Marathelis’s presence. I promise I will not take much of her time, but I will not be denied.”

  The thelis looked stunned, and Zerafine had a moment’s flash of guilt at bringing all that power to bear on the poor girl’s head—she couldn’t have been more than seventeen—that faded when she remembered why she was there. “I’ll show you the way,” the girl said in a tiny voice, and Zerafine
had to quash another moment of guilt. She hoped the girl wouldn’t be blamed for Zerafine’s intrusion.

  The thelis brought them through a tall door at the back of the chamber, which led onto a long, narrow hallway. More mosaics, these on the walls, showed scenes of Kalindi’s victories over the forces of nature. At the end of the hall was a much smaller door. The thelis opened it for them and bowed them inside. The room was paneled to waist height in exotic woods and painted a deep blue above the paneling. Backless couches upholstered in gold silk were scattered throughout the room atop a wooden floor stained dark to match the paneling. A window opposite the door looked out on the city and Rodennos hill.

  A woman stood looking out the window. “It’s a beautiful view,” she said. “I’m not yet accustomed to it.” She was tall, as tall as Gerrard, and wore her long black hair clasped at her neck with a band bearing Kalindi’s circle. Her simple gown was dyed dark green. She turned to look at them, and seemed first startled, then annoyed. Zerafine saw that her eyes were a dark brown and her face had begun to show lines on her forehead and the corners of her eyes. They were not welcoming eyes.

  “Marathelis,” Zerafine said. “I apologize for my unannounced arrival.”

  “Thelis emissary,” Yelenita said. “Please be seated.”

  Zerafine chose a couch and Gerrard took his position behind her. Yelenita sat across from her. “I trust you have good reason for intruding on my solitude,” she said.

  The abruptness with which the woman leaped past common pleasantries startled Zerafine. “I—ah, I have a request that is quite extraordinary,” she stammered, “but I hope that you can help.”

  “Make your request, and we’ll see.” The Marathelis’s tone was neutral, but Zerafine was sure this woman was not the ally Alestiou would have been, and she felt a pang of loss. She launched into her story, explaining what she’d learned from the moment she’d entered the city until the discovery that they were dealing with a creature rather than the idealized spirit of the city. She paused, and the Marathelis interjected, “So if I understand the implications of your story, you would like our divine healers to attempt to heal this creature.”