by Jordan Reece
“It was never a problem in Sesaic.”
“This was not a problem to touch farming communities, or villages tucked into the leaves. It was the streets of cities that became a battleground, and I am sure a catalogue of the atrocities resides in your head from boyhood, and motivated you to lie about your age to the enlisting officer.”
“The Siege of Philadelphia. The Falling Dead in Chicago. The Piper and His Sons, and all of the missing children of Williamsburg.”
“Yes, and many, many more. It was like the boiling of water in a pot: bubbles, a ripple, suddenly froth! Then it was out of control, hexes flung this way and that in utter madness. With no swiftly built dam to staunch them, the entire country would have in time destabilized. So the government passed a succession of laws against the sale, purchase, and any and all uses of hexes. It shut down the dealers and their companies, yet failed to stem the tide. Cabals of criminals sneaked them in and sold them any way they could, and the unrest grew worse than before. The regular police forces were overwhelmed, and there was no choice but to involve the military. And this is where I joined this immense story in a very small part, the oxymoron of a Redeemer soldier, because my involvement was a necessity.”
“Why?”
“What is a Redeemer but a dove? We are Christ God’s search for truth, with weapons of words and pens, not swords and shooters. The kingdom of God is peace, and this is what we should strive to create upon this earth. If I have two loaves of bread and you have none, then my second loaf is yours since your hunger is mine. These are the roots of Redeemer philosophy; my boyhood was spent in offering an olive branch. Violence was never the answer. But then war came, as it does too often, and I was forced to reconsider.”
“What was your struggle?”
“How can some of God’s children hang back and let others fight for the benefit of us all? This was the question to keep me up in the darkness. The world is not mine only when it is good, passed off to others when it is not. I am a Redeemer yet I am also a citizen, and though my community would argue that the Redeemer comes first, I feel them equally firmly beneath my feet. So time and time again I marched into battle, battling with myself all the while about the ethics of spilling blood.”
“I would not think a hex man spilled much.”
“Hex men drew enough in combat over caches. Tucked into purses and trunks and coffins and tubes . . . I ate hexes and drank hexes and breathed hexes in those years. I held hexes made in the last few decades by a thousand Mother Bette assembly lines. Also have I held four thousand year old hexes unearthed from sarcophagi, slipped through the underfunded hands of archaeologists wishing to further their study with the money those hexes will summon-”
It happened too quickly, a harder nudge than Nicoli intended to his glass of water. It fell with a clatter, his fingers lashing out blindly and missing. “Damn!”
The bed beside him squeaked. “No matter. I will clean it up.”
There was the sound of footsteps, and a rush of air as the napkin was lifted to wipe up the spill. The cup was replaced upon the tray with an empty click, and Nicoli reached into the darkness on an impulse. His fingers closed on an arm.
Just like the voice did not belong to an old man, neither did this arm. Nicoli ran his fingers along the smooth skin, firm muscles underneath. “No casts upon your legs since you walked here, and no cast upon this arm. You do not cough or moan in fever, and those with mental complaints are housed elsewhere.”
“So you are left to conclude that I am simply here out of boredom,” Bruno said.
“I am afraid so.”
“And you are right. When I have nothing better to do, I come to the hospital for a long rest and to lecture my roommates on history.”
Nicoli smiled, though he did not know exactly where to direct it. “A strange hobby, I must say, but I do not regret your company.”
“How lovely to not be regretted.”
It sounded harsher than Nicoli had intended. “Not regretted but treasured, if I am to be honest. I could not have asked for a better person to share this room.”
“The pleasure is returned, my dear fellow. I am enjoying our companionship. There, you are tidied.”
Footsteps walked away, and the second bed squeaked.
“May I ask who Vincenzo is?”
“A lover. A light.”
“Will he visit you?”
“Only in memory. He has gone to the grave, Christ God rest his gentle soul. And may I ask who Dallen is? You’ve called his name in the night.”
Betrayed by his dreaming voice, Nicoli said, “It is always night to me.”
A lover. A darkness.
Chapter Four
“Are you there?”
Silence.
Nicoli swallowed hard.
“Is anyone there?”
Silence.
“I’m here.”
Relief replaced his blood and coursed through his veins. It sounded like he had woken Bruno, so he said no more.
He had never been afraid of the darkness until now. Not even in childhood did the night hide terrors. Nothing was there but what had been there by day, his bed and closet, his father’s rifle over the front door and everyone asleep in every house in the world. As a man he plumbed the night for its secrets, and took his part in creating them. There was ale slipping down his throat, and bawdy shows of filthy jokes and half-naked dancers, and dark eyes under thick lashes across the bar.
Night was better than day, because day had no mystery. Everything was laid out before Nicoli on a track, his feet moving in lock step around the same monotonous routine again and again and again. The pale red ribbons became a temptation in his dull daylight hours, and since the old man who owned the trinket shop rarely came in, those ribbons often found themselves being tied around Nicoli’s ankle.
A connection. Like a candle flame lit and swiftly extinguished. Once the day was weathered, he could wear a ribbon to Clant’s and spend his nights in ecstasy.
But it was the dreariness of his days that turned him to the rings of deeper red ribbons. For how many men had popped the button of his trousers and slid inside, so many that he could not remember them all. There was Jacob and Esau and Thomas and Richard and Elliott and Gerald and beyond, the men of Nicoli’s nights blending to a wash of quick smiles and wet mouths. Pumping hands, pumping hips, hot streams gushing through the dry riverbeds of rumpled sheets and then the sun peeking through the window to Nicoli alone. Lust quenched, but lonely.
Quite suddenly, Nicoli found that he wanted more. Not more men, but one man to spend more time with. A man to breakfast with; a man who liked to stroll in Central Park and upon Fifth Avenue; a man whose eyes lit up to see Nicoli come around a corner. A lover, a friend, a companion, a family.
He had warned customers a thousand times not to wear the darker ribbons lightly. Ten thousand times over the years. But he did not heed his own warning, just as his customers did not. Stripping the very darkest from the ring, Nicoli then took a second in his fervor to have someone brought to him to stay.
The power of this internal change frightened him on the walk to Clant’s, and he went instead to the night market. That was not a place where Nicoli would meet someone, granting him a little more time to get used to this new desire in his heart.
By day the Spider was a mighty intersection of towering banks and businesses, their faces gray and set in stone, sunlight reflecting off dozens of silver glass eyes. Buildings of less impressive stature spread out from the Spider upon roads in every direction. It was a world of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich, the streets their processions and these proud edifices their coronations.
Yet at dusk, it changed.
With the kings and queens swept away with the light, the unseen masses of servants then took rule of the Spider. Ropes flew up to knot to posts and curtains flying after them, a city of tent stalls filled the body of the spider and stretched down its legs. There was meat to be had, burned to blackness on sticks, or fresh o
n two legs to be sampled in private. There were ball-and-cup games of chance adorned in cheering crowds; stalls where fabric from wool to silk could be smoothed under a hand and purchased. There were trinkets, of course, Nicoli having no interest in those, music and art, teas and cakes, and always something new.
Through the dim light of lamps people scuttled like beetles, nibbling at stalls and moving on. Nicoli passed through the night market in confidence that he would find his man at Clant’s later on. Wending from one leg of the Spider to another, he ate meat from a stick and listened to the universal language of haggling, though more often than not, he understood nothing but the gestures.
How could one find love in this? It bordered ever on chaos, tumults of children surging this way and that like the ground was an angry sea under their feet, women snapping out fabric and men barking with laughter, goods tumbling and vendors shouting and dogs barking and this, this was why Nicoli had no fear of the ribbons on his ankles. Once again returned from a leg to the body of the Spider, he bought a flower to drop at the statue of All-Christ, his feet concealed in a ring of soft petals and his hands wide open and empty.
This was the Christ that he loved, a gentle face and understanding eyes, and a hand offered to Nicoli’s own. As the flower dropped to join its compatriots, Nicoli squeezed the statue’s hand. An old Jew with a skullcap stepped up and clapped All-Christ on his back like they were the best of friends. Seeing Nicoli’s look of surprise, the man laughed and said, “You see him as messiah; we see a mighty mensch.”
Another coin bought Nicoli a stick of meat and he ate it as he wandered. The sea hurled the children past him and he slid his hand into his pocket to grip his wallet. It passed on to strike an invisible shore and double back, but instead of gushing around him, the wave came apart and flowed into various stalls.
At the end of the seventh leg, Nicoli turned to double back rather than traverse the eighth. That was not a place he had ever gone, the commerce done there much rougher than any fabric sold in the night market. In savage rings a man or woman could fight for money, or play a deadlier game of chance with poison. It was the kind of place where hexes would be sold, though Nicoli wouldn’t know for sure since he did not seek them out.
Fighting held no appeal to him, nor did anything else the last leg had to offer. Yet he started down it without knowing why. Lamps glowed dully through the curtains of the first stalls, and when he passed the shivering fabric walls to look inside, often there was nothing but a bare counter and two dark eyes over the star of a burning cigarette. He did not ask those vendors what they sold, for Nicoli’s engagement and interest in crime extended no further than helping himself to a few trinkets at the shop.
When he came to the fighting rings, he was careful not to look or be charged as a spectator. Once beyond them he could still hear the heavy thumps of fists, and the heavier thump of a body hitting the ground. Then he pushed through the crowds at the chance games, looking straight ahead to the body of the Spider not too far in the distance.
The chance games ended and the stalls became commerce. It felt safer to look, so high upon this leg, and he did. The goods upon their counters were stolen, no doubt, and much of it was jewelry. He did not linger, the eyes of the vendors hard upon him as if consecrating his face to memory should he steal. In another stall were rumble buggy parts, Nicoli curious how all of these pieces came together in the whole. Only the well heeled could afford a rumble buggy, and days could pass between the times he saw one tootling down a street.
The remaining stalls held fortunetellers. Reading the future in palms, heads, bones, urine, and more, Nicoli ignored their calls to him. Then, for no more reason than he had come down this road, he turned to one.
And knew.
To this dark place, at this dark hour, the ribbons had led him. He felt it in an instant when the slim male form turned among curtains stitched with stars. A small pool of light from a lamp touched only a corner of the tent, yet the weak glow was caught within two amber eyes. Nicoli stood there dumbly as the man came to the counter with cat-quiet steps.
They said nothing. The man climbed over the counter and walked at Nicoli’s side into the body of the Spider. There were the children gathered once more and still caught in a storm, and All-Christ with flowers growing up to his calves. Thousands of voices coalesced into a singular beat of noise, and all of it was drowned out by the frantic beating of Nicoli’s heart. In a patch of better lighting, he saw the man’s fall of dark hair, and a shirt parted around a muscled, gleaming chest.
Then they were away from the Spider and headed home. They did not make it even halfway there before the man pushed Nicoli into an alley and dropped to his knees.
“I’m N-Nicoli,” Nicoli stammered. “And you are?” But that head of dark hair was already bobbing, and the rest of the night was spent in bed in every configuration of carnal pleasure known to mankind.
It was not until morning that Nicoli learned the answer to his question. Written upon a scrap of paper and left upon the second pillow, Dallen had been scrawled within a heart.
Chapter Five
“He’s seizing.”
“Doctor? Doctor! Quickly!”
Nicoli turned in agitation to the invisible commotion from the other bed. “What’s happening?”
“No, don’t hold him down! Put those extra pillows here by the lieutenant’s head so he does not knock himself on the bars. Note the time that it started-”
“Just now as we looked in, Doctor.”
“Bruno?” Nicoli called, upset that he could do nothing.
“It’s stopping already. Let me check . . .”
“What are you checking for, Doctor?”
“I’m making sure there’s nothing in his mouth. Now I’m listening to his breath. Normal. Good. Let’s move him onto his side as he recovers.”
“Is he all right?” Nicoli asked as the bed creaked.
“He’s all right,” the doctor replied. “It was to be expected.”
“He’s coming round now.”
“Well, and how are you?”
“Well?” Bruno asked in soft confusion.
“Yes, well enough. How many fingers? Two? Three?”
Bruno’s voice strengthened. “Enough to get me good and drunk.”
“Then you’re fine.”
“But he hasn’t had a seizure in days!” a nurse protested, and Nicoli recognized the thin nasal strip of her voice. She was young and brand new to hospital work, though felt herself to be very well educated in matters of sickness and health. The staff spoke to her in exasperation even in Nicoli’s hearing, all of them taking offense to receive her thoughts about things they’d mastered long ago. “This looked very serious! I was reading his chart not ten minutes ago. His vitals have returned to-”
In ill temper, the doctor said, “Young woman, I have treated this lieutenant for several years, and I know damn well how it goes with him. He comes in a mess and stays a mess and when I’m just about to size him for a coffin he at last turns the corner to wellness. But he backtracks a few times along the way and a small seizure is nothing to fret over. I expect this is the last of it, and tomorrow or the next day he’ll dance out that door for what respite these hexes afford him. Come outside: I want to know why every time I stop to see the Higgins boy I have to push through thirty of his nearest and dearest when the limit of visitors is three.”
The voices overrode one another like a deck of cards being shuffled, and out they went into the hallway.
“Bruno?” Nicoli called.
“Never fear.”
“Is it hexes to bring you to this hospital so many times?”
“Indeed.”
“Hexes sustained in the war?”
“Yes. It was a bad day.”
“Are they killing you?”
“No. They are letting me live, and that can be, at times, a greater cruelty.”
“Will you tell me what happened? No lies, if not. I’d rather have silence.”
S
ilence.
“I am sorry to waken such bad memories,” Nicoli said.
“You didn’t wake them, Nicoli. They never sleep.”
Silence.
“It was a month from the end. That was how close I came to walking away unscathed in body. All soldiers bear wounds in their souls.”
Nicoli turned sightless eyes to face the second bed, to show that he was listening.
Just when he thought that this was all Bruno was going to tell him, the honeyed drawl resumed. “We had had long months of success in campaigns and smashed them to the ground. The Miller Boys and their hexes cleverly hidden in hollow tubes had gone down; the tentacles of the Red Six spreading out from countless American docks was crushed to scales and guts.”
The Red Six! Once they had soiled every front page of every newspaper with almost unspeakable villainies, spurring Nicoli’s boyhood ambitions to find his glory by cutting them low. “I had not heard of the Miller Boys, but the Red Six, Bruno! They were the stuff of nightmares.”
“The Miller Boys were a plague of locusts, yet what do locusts do? They strip the fat of fields and fly away. The Red Six, however, were heartless barnacles cemented to the hard substrate of the New World. But brought to an end at last, and what remained of the enemy by then was a handful of smalltime gangs shrinking into the shadows, and the Queen’s Mob.”
“I am familiar with the name, though not much more.”
“The Queen’s Mob was a festering pustule on the backside of humanity, such a collection of misfits and scoundrels and imbeciles as they were. They were simply so disorganized that they foiled our attempts at capture time and time again. The right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing. The left hand had no idea that it was attached to a foot. The foot was disobeying the head while the head was searching for treason among its own eyes and ears. Somehow these discombobulated parts survived despite themselves. But to give the Queen’s Mob a body is to grant it a shape, and there was no shape. It was a malevolent mist, dissipating in the wind, reforming in its absence, always thickest in the lowest points.”