Their names were Akasri, which meant One Who Is First, and Chayne, which was the name of a sign that could be written beside One and mean One Also Here: One and One Prime. Because they were one spirit they could not be given two truly different names. Because they were two bodies they could not both bear the same name.
This was considered very unlucky and no husbands could be found for them, because no man wanted twins to run in his line, nor the trouble of two wives at once. Numbers were important to the people. Numbers were power and the sign of power and could foretell and calculate all. Twins could not be reckoned. Twins meant two lines of numbers; one and one prime, two and two prime . . . they never joined but they had come, as all things, from nothing. Twins made two worlds. So it was that they were used to being outcast and this did not make them afraid, although they were lonely and their hearts were broken.
With the blood-sight, the rage sight of violence, they saw through a red wall to the east, to the coast, in the footsteps of the Eater. They made spears of their hut posts, put their feet on her trail and started to walk.
Their journey was years long and filled with troubles. They were ill-used and beaten, eventually to cross the ocean on a pirate ship whose captain prized their ferocity.
He told them of a place close to the Empire, a city-state, ruled by religious men who had gathered a great army of the best warriors. No fighters were better trained or equipped than these few, and their services were sold across that continent. They led the armies of the Empire of Koker Ai and fought in its ranks and would close battle with anyone if they were so paid and instructed. They owed no man anything and their masters were sorcerers and warlocks of great cunning.
The pirate captain’s tale of this place was long and fuelled by wine, but the twins understood that this was to be their destiny. The captain knew of the ghost-eater and her kind too, and he told them that there was no power in an ordinary man or woman able to withstand the will of an Eater, but he had heard the men of this mercenary brotherhood were very interested in acquiring an Eater of their own. Perhaps—and his sniggers made it seem unlikely—they would be lucky enough that their mission and that of the brotherhood could be combined.
When he had concluded his story he set them free, unmolested, on the understanding the crew must not know of his qualms, for their extreme colour, their ugly faces and their large, unwavering eyes had made him lose all appetite for the pleasure of their bodies.
Akasri and Chayne did go to that place, named Orcrya, and passed its trials of pain, endurance, fighting and meditation. It was harder for them because they were female, foreign, strange to look on and uninterested in other people. Their fear made them easy to provoke and excessively savage. They soon became captains and, after many trials and campaigns, centurions. But through all those years they did not see another Eater, except for the white stone woman who ruled from beneath the Empress’s foot. But she was not the one.
Besides, the white stone woman was too powerful even for the Order of Orcrya, for she did not eat single ghosts and take their deaths, she ate little all the time, from all the people who trod the earth of the Koker Empire and she was beyond them. It was at her command they took war to the south, to search for another of her kind.
Late in their thirty-fifth year Akasri took ill while commanding the naval arm of this campaign in the southern ocean and died at sea. Chayne was presented with her skeleton at the quayside, each bone carefully filleted, dried and preserved in white cloth according to Akasri’s final instruction.
Chayne had spoken but little before this event to anyone but Akasri, and now she spoke only to issue commands. She had a helm made of bronze, with the skull’s face as her faceplate.
When she put it on she saw through two pairs of eyes; forward into life and backwards into death. In death her sister stood alone, unable to reach across the generations to the old world.
In life, with the faceplate on, Chayne saw who was witch and who was not; mages, mind readers, seers, clairvoyants, ghost-listeners, the makers and eaters of dreams. They were seeded throughout the human world in all manner and kind of talent or wretchedness, as many of them as weeds in a badly tended garden. The helm taught her how to see them, and later she saw them even without it.
Years passed. Chayne came to a battlefield in the heat and dust of a flyblown place—a wretched and worthless horse town falling to another routine emancipation—all sense of purpose lost, when she felt her sister’s face rise beneath her skin. It made her to look towards her captain where he bore down swiftly upon a warrior of the plains town. Her captain was young and keen, his sight perfect, and he knocked this fighter off his mount before turning his own beast hard on its haunches to finish the man.
At that moment Chayne felt her own horse shudder horribly and falter. It took two more steps and fell on its face, flinging her forward at the feet of the man who had killed it. He was unusually quick and strong. He pulled her towards him and, when her leg caught in the leathers and trapped her, kicked at her helm and sent it spinning away.
A stray arrow nicked his arm and made him falter enough that Chayne could find her feet on the horse’s neck and deal him a blow at his hip with the side of her axe. He spun around, and in the pause it took for him to turn she was already swinging again when she saw that he was the ghost-eater.
It was hard, very hard, to turn aside and she could not stop. The axe head bit into his side and buried itself to the shaft. He fell across her horse’s body. She turned him quickly and he was not dead, but nearly. Around them men and horses fell and screamed.
She did not understand why he was here, dying on this forsaken patch of land. She did not know why he did not eat her army and leave its empty bodies for the crows.
She thought of her orders, to bring it back alive. Alive. She couldn’t see her sister now. Her own bones felt old inside her, and her teeth chattered with fear, but she made herself look into his eyes because she was sure he was going to die and she wanted to die too, at that instant, and if he was death, then he was welcome.
His eyes were wide and already beginning to glaze over. For a moment she feared he was a body-changer who would push her spirit into his dying body and take her living one for its own. Instead she saw blue sky. A ghoulish face was looking back at her from the surface of an unquiet and boiling darkness. It was full of desire and rage, without understanding or hope.
“You,” she said in disappointment, recognizing herself.
By nightfall, when the battle was won and the wounded were being taken up on carts towards the surgeons and the infirmary, he was still not dead. Prime stripped him of his armour and weapons, and sent him north according to her orders. When the garrison was established there, and the new frontier secured, she also returned to the north, but this was later in the year and by then he was quite changed.
Kya paid the agreed price for him—the weight of the Empress in gold—because he had been some barbarian war leader, some warrior of the people who had become Empire’s people. He was mortally wounded in the conflict, but, being a sorcerer like her, of course he did not die. The first thing she did was to place her cool hand on his filthy head and try to eat him, as sorcerers were able to eat all things by a touch, if they wanted. She only wanted his power, as deserts want rain, which is to say with scorn for its nature and despair at its necessity. But he was not eaten, and if he had power, then not one trickle of it ran up her arm. She felt that what was common between them was not common enough. She and other sorcerers and the people were of one matter, but he was of another.
Then she didn’t want him anywhere near her, because he would certainly be her rival. But she didn’t want him far from her, because then she wouldn’t know what he was doing, and he might find her other half, and use her to destroy the peace of the Empire. This was how Kya now thought of her own peace of mind: she was the Empire and it was sacrosanct.
For ten days after his journey he lay in a stinking coma as she thought it out and she decided
that, if he were like other sorcerers, then in a moment of weakness like this she could mould him, for sorcerers were vulnerable to the thoughts of others as they came from sleep.
He might have been strong and powerful once. She decided she would make him vulnerable, controllable, weak.
She would make Intana tend him until he was recovered. Intana longed for love. She would become attached to him and he to her in that stupid, sickly, fawning way. Then all Kya had to do was control Intana and he would be hers to do with as she wanted, without the danger of attempting any further direct contact. That was how it had happened to Kya long ago—that she was made an idiot by feelings—and so it would happen to him.
Cadenza danced me to a seat and set me down. I was tipsy and tired, I fell asleep here, drunk on the lives he remembered for me.
Intana was standing in the atrium on a warm summer evening, preparing to go to an Imperial function to celebrate the birthday of a general, when there was a commotion in the street outside. Shouting and at a run, their armour and leathers clanking, two guards dragged in a war slave and flung him face-down on the polished marble floor. He slid a few inches and ended up at her feet. From behind her Kya said,
“Leave him.”
The guards, already well paid and anticipating a night on the town, wasted no time in making an exit. As their voices and noise receded from the high hall the metal chimes tinkled in the draft of early-evening air. The women looked down, each cautious in her reactions, lest Kya notice something she didn’t like. Intana felt pity but she didn’t move to help him.
Kusurg, Kya’s bodyguard, came over, heavy muscles oiled and sliding under the soft fat of his skin. He dug his foot into the man’s ribs to lift and turn him over. At Intana’s sides the other women and the girls of the afternoon gathered to see what unlucky person had come to join them. It was rare to get anyone in from a war. It was rare that young men lived long enough to make it this far. They were sooner sold as gladiators, guards, soldiers or sent to the mines and the navy cutters where sail and steam drove the fastest ships and exacted the hardest work.
“The coaches are here,” Kya said.
As one they turned to leave, casting glances at the prisoner’s body, his face hidden behind matted trails of long black hair. His clothes—a filthy set of worn riding leathers bearing a clean shadow where armour had lain over them—were hacked and torn, caked in mud and blood and stinking in the humid night.
“Not you.” Kya glanced at Intana as the others melted away, burning with a curiosity they daren’t show. “Get him cleaned up.”
Intana, grateful to be spared the party but shocked and disarmed by the request, glanced down. “But I . . .” She didn’t know where to start.
“Kusurg will help you,” Kya said. “I don’t expect you to carry him. But make a good job of it. He was expensive.” She paused on her way up the staircase and turned back. “He’ll talk Imperial when he wakes up, so don’t take any nonsense.”
From the words she’d used Intana knew she hadn’t meant him for another bodyguard, although he was clearly a fighter. They had men at the house, boys as well, some pretty and some not, but none of them had been war booty and none of them had fought in battles. Intana knew what kind of men did. She looked down at the unconscious man with loathing.
“Pick him up then.”
Kusurg was just standing there, like a witless automaton. He bent at her instruction and without apparent effort hoisted the body up over his shoulder, cracking the skull against the edge of the vast cherry-wood desk where Sikri was tallying the accounts. He tensed with fear.
“It’s okay. She’s already gone,” Intana said, unable to stop herself pitying Kusurg, whom she’d heard yell more than once at the sting of a lash for his dim-wittedness. There her compassion ended and her trouble started. She could take him to the bathhouse, but that was for people who were well, and anyway, that would be so public and who knew who might be there to revel in this new humiliation? She had to get him out of sight.
At her shoulder, Sikri said quietly, “He’s already been allocated rooms. Why don’t you take him straight there? Third level, the suite with the balcony facing the Palace. It’s got its own bath.”
Intana looked at the thin girl whose face was worried behind the lenses of its spectacles, the thin wire frames emphasizing Sikri’s large brown eyes. She knew that Sikri was thinking the same thing, namely why on earth the best room in the place had been set up for someone more likely to murder, cause a riot or burn the house down than earn money, but they didn’t say anything in front of Kusurg.
She took him there, Kusurg following her directions with amiable smiles, when he saw that she wasn’t going to tell on him. He was about to fling the man cheerfully onto the white damasked bed when she cried out, “In the bathroom, on the floor!” Intana wondered if she could get Kusurg to stay. If the man woke up, she had a good idea of what he’d do first—try to escape and kill her if she stopped him.
He showed no signs of it however. He seemed almost dead and, to her disappointment, tall and heavy with it. He covered the floor where Kusurg had dumped him. Intana, dressed in her finest body gauze—no more than a net bearing tiny jewels for decoration—looked at all the filth. “Strip him.”
The leather and the cloth underneath all the mud that had dried on it seemed to have fused into a single mass of rigid putrefaction. In the close quarters the smell was nearly unbearable as Kusurg tugged here and there, finding a brass buckle and trying to unpick it before he lost his patience and drew out his short knife. He stuck the single-edged blade down the front of the long jerkin and started sawing.
“Careful,” Intana said, torn between a desire to see more damage done and the knowledge that she’d be whipped if it happened. She busied herself running hot water and pouring salts into the bathtub.
Kusurg grunted as he struggled with the man’s boots, hacking at the straps around his knees, but then pausing for breath. He looked up at Intana and his bland face was knotted with curiosity. “Not really his clothing, I think.”
“Why?” She crouched down to look.
He showed her the jerkin more closely. Besides his efficient strokes it had been punctured at the line of the ribs. The blood that was caked there and crawling with maggots wasn’t matched by a wound in the skin underneath.
Kusurg’s thick finger poked at the man’s side. “If he was stabbed, this would be rotten. Dead now. Black rot poisons the blood. He’s not hurt there. Bang on the head back here’s put him out—new today, maybe an hour ago, and just a little touch of the lash.” He indicated the reddened end of what they could both recognize as a long curlicue from the auctioneer’s mate. Around it the flesh was bruised darkly under a skin that was almost metallic in its sheen. “Funny colour,” Kusurg said, looking to see if it had rubbed off on his fingers.
Intana nodded. She kicked at the clothing. “Burn this, would you? And wait outside. No wait. Lift him into the water first.”
Kusurg did as she asked and stood up, arms dripping. He glanced at her with a sudden, personal interest she didn’t care for, but only said, “I don’t like it when you get hurt, Francine.”
How could he have said my name?
“Thanks.” She put her hand on his arm briefly and saw him almost blush. He gathered up the ruined clothing, sweeping lost maggots into his palm, and took it away, whistling.
Intana put her hand under the new man’s jaw to stop him from sliding in and drowning. With the tips of her long nails she picked away the heavy hair that was stuck over his face and neck, flicking it away from her as far as she could, pushing the ends down into the rapidly darkening water.
Mud and blood from a cut on his scalp had formed a thick coating across one eye and his cheek. She used a cloth to wipe it off with hard, efficient strokes at first, but then more and more gentle ones as the whole face was revealed. Under her hands it seemed to change. Here and there. A little. No, she wasn’t sure. But then she let her hand sink down into the water t
o clean the cloth and left it there, mesmerized by looking, drunk with looking at him. He was more beautiful than any living thing she had ever seen. The hairs on the back of her neck prickled with the fear of unknown powers. She knew this kind of trick. She thought she did. Well, it didn’t matter. It wouldn’t work on her.
She found one of his hands and drew it up for inspection. Although he had broken nails and there was dirt there, she could tell he was no habitual soldier—the calluses and blisters, cracked skin and thick joints weren’t there. She ran her finger along the line of his jaw, turning at the edge of his chin. No beard, although he was full-grown. She set the water to run and drain continuously and as it cleared she looked down and saw he had no hair on his body at all, except for a fine sheen on his legs and forearms and the usual thicker tangle between his legs, ending in a neat line up to his navel. She’d never cared to closely examine a man’s sexual parts before—except in her younger days before Koker Ai—but now she looked without concern, relieved to find he was after all an ordinary man in that respect.
His hair was full of lice. She had to wash it in stinking soap more than five times before she could call and get Kusurg to lift him out. Kusurg looked at the prisoner when he had been put on the couch, his brows drawn together.
“He looks very strong,” he said, apparently puzzled. “Felt light though. Like a woman. Like a girl.”
Intana, wondering what she was going to do now, said, “You must be stronger than you think, Kusurg.”
“Don’t think so,” he said, but then smiled awkwardly. “Nice to say it. If he wakes up and makes trouble. I’ll be right outside. Break his arms.”
“Thank you. Call the maid and ask her to get some clothes, would you?”
Living Next Door to the God of Love Page 37