by Kaden, John
“It’s bad out east?”
“It must be. Most of us are too young to remember, and the older ones don’t talk about it.”
Jinn carries in a bowl of water and a leather flask, Hilen holds a little clay pot and strips of rough-woven cloth.
“It’s not much, but it might help. Take these off,” says Jinn, motioning to their soiled bandages.
They start peeling. The crusted wrappings pull at their scabs and draw fresh spots of blood, and besides the bites and cuts they are covered with a range of welts and bruises. Jinn and Kas clean them with soaked rags until the water in the bowl is opaque with crimson.
“How long were Ethan and Renning here?” asks Jack, wincing as Jinn douses his chest with stinging liquid.
“A few days.”
“Did they say where they were from?”
“Somewhere south, that’s all. They showed us things, they asked a lot of questions, wanted to hear where we came from, where we’re going. We didn’t have much to tell them.”
“What did they show you?”
“How to do this,” says Kas, smearing honey from the clay pot over their raw wounds. “It stops you getting sick.”
“They asked if we can plant things,” Tryna adds. “They told us to go east to the valley, but the silent ones don’t trust them.”
“That writing,” says Kas, tapping the pack where they keep the map, “it said something else. Nezra knows… something…”
“Alexandria,” says Lia. “We don’t know what it means.”
“Is it someone’s name?”
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s a place,” says Jack.
“That’s where you’re going!” Kas sits forward. “What kind of place is it?”
Jack shrugs. “It’s supposed to have answers.”
“To what questions?”
“We’ve heard stories about it, but that’s all.”
“Stories! Do you even know if they’re true?”
“Not really.”
Kas throws her head back and laughs. “Well, I hope you find it.” She and Jinn finish their work and bandage Jack and Lia up with the course fabric, tying off the loose ends. “Here,” says Kas, handing over the leather flask to Jack. “Drink this.”
“What is it?”
“It’s good.”
He drinks the reddish amber liquor and nearly chokes, a tingling hotness spreading down his windpipe. Kas takes it and passes it to Lia.
“Drink,” she says, and Lia does, gasping and fanning her face with her hands.
Jack takes a few apples and wanders over to lonesome Balazir and feeds him one at a time. He crunches sloppily through them and nuzzles against Jack’s honey-reeking chest, and Jinn brings over the supplies to treat his arrow-shot behind.
Kas rummages along a sagging wall for a length of dry wood and twists the rest of the fabric around one end, then wets it with the liquor and touches it to the dwindling flames. Holding her makeshift torch she beckons them forward.
“Come on,” she says, “we have things to show you.”
“You’re crazy,” Cirune says, shaking and drenched in the unabating rainstorm. “We should have took them this afternoon.”
Halis stares at him coldly.
They nest in a cluster of trees, downhill from the arcane mansion, their horses hitched and miserable. Cirune slackens the tourniquet twisted around his thigh and casts it away, then peels back the saturated wrappings and feels gently along the open gash on his leg. His fingertips are coated with fresh smears of blood and heavy raindrops wash them away almost instantly.
“This is stupid. They’re just roaming around, they’re not going anywhere.”
“They are.”
“I shouldn’t have listened to you. We can’t go much farther like this.”
“Get some sleep.”
“How am I going to sleep in this?”
“Then don’t sleep,” Halis barks, “but shut your mouth up.”
“Crazy. They should never have put you on this brigade. Should’ve known you can’t handle it—you’re wasted in the head, you know that?”
“I said shut your mouth.”
Cirune limps a pace toward Halis. “Our orders are to kill the boy and take the girl, not follow them around for days because you have a feeling.”
“Turn back then, coward. I don’t need you here.”
“Coward? I’m not the one who’s afraid to go get them.” Cirune clumps forward and stands with his arms folded, surmising Halis from close vantage. “What happened to your face?”
“I’ll kill you if you don’t stop talking.”
“You’ll do no such thing so don’t threaten it. I know your problem—you fear the boy. You’re scared he’ll kill you like he did your brother, or tear off the other half of your ugly face.”
Halis charges forward and punches Cirune in the jaw, and Cirune comes right back with a sharp uppercut that sends Halis stumbling backwards.
“A little boy crushed your face and you fear to see him again. A little boy, Halis, and you call me the coward. If you can’t beat a boy then you can’t beat me and you’d better not try it again.”
Halis kicks their gear and sends it flying, then throws his head back and screams until every last bit of air is evacuated from his lungs, doubling over and shaking on the ground. Cirune watches in disgust. Out in this dismal environ, soaked to the bone, shot in the leg and stationed with a lunatic. He’ll ride on them tomorrow, he decides, and with all the strength he has left, with or without Halis.
A wretched cry rattles between thunderclaps and dissipates into the surging racket. They stop in the center of the leaking gallery and listen to it fade away.
“Coyote?” asks Lia.
A twitching strobe of lighting strikes nearby, illuminating their faces with blue-white clarity, and the crash that accompanies it shakes the stone floor under their feet, setting the whole mansion alive with creaks and groans. Jack glances up at the high ceiling, swathed over with wisps of cobweb and fungal discolorations, afraid some loose tiles or joists will break loose and crash down. He and Lia step over fallen shards and moldering woodwork and look at the vague designs still showing through on the wall, baroque and complicated. Gilded portrait frames, tilting like parallelograms, the canvases long-since eaten away, spindly columns and wasted furniture, overturned tables with bent metal legs, cracked marble tops. Kas lights a newly swept area where crystal vases and cups are arranged in lines, cleaned and polished, encircled by an odd collection of tarnished silverware and broken ceramic figurines, their rosy smiles fractured and flaking away from protracted neglect. She moves ahead with the torch and the others crowd close behind.
They jag through a short hallway and emerge in a candlelit foyer, vacant of debris, with the front entrance and broad windows covered over with leafy branches and warped planks. No furniture, no rats nests, no salvaged heirlooms. Empty, save for the seven unmoving figures arranged in an arc. In the dimness they appear as sculptures, as if constructed from found objects like the centerpiece in the courtyard. Kas walks around front of them and lights them aglow and still they look carved or cast somehow, delicately whittled for long years by ascetic craftsmen. Their faces bear the deep character of age—thin lips, concave eyes, gray hair touching the floor, and they wear their loose clothing in disordered fashion, slipping and falling off their frail, bony shoulders. They look like they’ve been sitting in this arrangement for Ages, at least since this rotting mansion was first deserted centuries ago during the long lost years of history.
“Did you find them here?” Jack whispers.
“No.” Kas looks at him sideways. “They’re family. We brought them.”
“Oh.”
A few have their eyes closed in repose, and some stare straight forward with unwavering eyeballs that do not flinch or dart when Kas and her small band pass by.
“They don’t talk,” says Jinn. “Not for years.”
“Did something happen to th
em?” asks Lia.
“I think a lot happened to them,” says Kas. “Our parents won’t tell us and they don’t tell anything, not even hello. Ever. But we followed them west. They led us.”
“They walk?”
“Ah yes, they walk. They’ll lead us away from here, too. And soon, I guess… if what you say is true. That there are people coming here that will kill us.”
“How do they know where they’re going?”
Kas just shakes her head. “I don’t even ask anymore. Come on,” she says, pivoting around and heading off in another direction. “We shouldn’t really be in here, I just wanted you to see.”
She leads them down another leaking corridor, stained olive-green with mold, and they enter a different wing. A chandelier lay bent and twisted in the center of the chamber and dark shapes hustle into the shadows as they enter. A bolt of lighting flashes blinding light across the walls, illuminating the imagery painted from floor to ceiling—sparse curved lines, abstract and indiscernible. Another flickering strobe bursts outside and the images reveal themselves with abrupt clarity—tangled human figures, naked and writhing, their enigmatic expressions showing either twisted pleasure or horrifying pain, perhaps both at once. Jack shirks back from the walls, fearing that the thin-lined faces are watching him somehow.
Kas sits on the remaining lower steps of a collapsed staircase and warms her hands together. Roaring wind rattles the gray wooden planks covering the doors and windows and an icy chill swirls around them. The storm is worsening, rain coming down in silver sheets.
“So, this is what we think,” she says, and she flashes her eyes toward Jinn, Hilen and Tryna. “Our group used to be very big, and there were more people.”
“A lot of families, living together,” says Tryna. “East.”
“Ah yeah, somewhere east, they say.”
“They talk about what they had. What they had… like it was good, like they didn’t want to leave it.”
“But they had to because of something—”
“Something went wrong.”
“What?” asks Lia.
“I think maybe they had a fight,” says Kas. “A fight they couldn’t make up from, and so we left. I think the rest of our family is still living out there somewhere.”
“Mmm,” says Hilen, “this is what you want to think. Probably nothing is out there. Probably they are all dead.”
“Yeah,” says Tryna, “I think that’s right. Dead. And from something… terrible.”
“It must’ve been if it made them never talk again,” Jack marvels.
“Sickness?”
“Maybe sickness. Or something like happened to you two,” Hilen says. “Maybe they had found a good place, and other people decided they would take it from them. That’s what happens, isn’t it?” He looks at Jack. “Isn’t it?”
“I… it happens. Yes.”
“Yes,” Hilen repeats, feeling vindicated of his theories.
“Whatever it is, it’s gone. If it was good, it doesn’t matter, because we never knew it,” Jinn says despondently. “And we just walk. One place to another. We always move. We don’t settle.”
“We don’t get attached.”
“Hold nothing, they say.”
“Ah yeah. Hold nothing with you.”
“When we got out here, close to the water, I think they were hoping for… hoping to find what they lost. Another good place,” Kas explains. “And they haven’t found it and now they’re sad all the time and they pretend not to be, and they don’t want to tell us why because they don’t want to scare us. But I can tell. Like I said, they mean good.”
The others nod in agreement.
The strange liquors they drank seem to amplify every sorrowful statement and Jack feels a comfort of sorts—relief to know they are not alone in running. He reaches an arm out for Lia and she folds herself into his side. Kas watches, and Jack watches her watch.
“You are lovers,” she says. Jack’s face flushes with hot embarrassment and he says nothing. “Were you told to be together?”
“No. No one told us,” says Lia, thinking back on the arranged Temple life that was almost her destiny. “Why? Do they tell you?”
“Yes,” Kas says simply. “In a way. They tell us who we can mate with. We have to keep the blood mixed around.”
“What blood?”
“Family blood.”
“Why?”
“Or else it goes sour,” says Jinn, “and the children don’t grow right.”
“Oh.”
“Of course,” says Kas, her gaze touching back on Jack, “new blood would fix that.” He gets that hot feeling again, like his ears are on fire. He’s not well acquainted with the business of childbearing, but he knows what she is driving at. Jinn watches dully, not seeming to mind her advances in the least. “Do you have children together?”
“Huh? No,” says Jack. “We… we don’t.”
Lia looks up at him glassily, then rolls her eyes toward Kas.
“That’s sad,” says Kas, “you’d have pretty children.”
“Thank you,” Lia says firmly.
“Mmm,” she says, and the moment stretches out clumsily.
“Are you tired?” Tryna asks, saving them. “We can go back, if you want.”
“Yeah, we should sleep. We have to leave early.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“No, it’s okay. We should leave before dawn anyway.”
They wander back the way they came and Jinn and Hilen prop up a little tent and gather some furs.
“You can use this,” Hilen says. “Do you need anything else?”
“Thank you, no, this is good. Everything is very kind.”
“Good,” says Kas. “And if it storms tomorrow, you can stay here if you want, I don’t care what they say.”
“We’ll be fine.”
Outside the wind screeches and drives hard rain onto the veranda. They climb into their tent in the corner of the front chamber and huddle together.
“They’re nice,” Lia says, “but they’re so strange.”
She curls against him, shivering, and he wraps his arms around her. As he lies there, the tent and the whole world beyond it seem to swirl around him, pulsating to the beat of his own heart, and just as he starts to fall backwards into a dizzying sleep, Lia speaks.
“You think it’s true, don’t you? I mean, I know there’s something there, but… do you really think it’s that place you heard stories about?”
“Hunh?”
“Alexandria.”
“Yes. I do.”
“Me too.”
Chapter Twelve
A blue eye.
It stares, distorted, from the polished glass. Arana leans closer, his wine-rankened breath fogging the surface and tinting the orb with a milky haze. It speaks nothing to him, offers no condolences, reveals no hint of any cosmic significance. It stares coldly back from the other side of the mirror, blasphemous.
Outside his parlor, the Temple sleeps—only the creaking echo of sentries on their rounds, the static of crashing waves, low murmurs from the corridor—all else is silence. He withdrew here early in the evening, his absence palpable in the Temple Hall. He imagines them whispering about him—he wonders if they quietly suspect that he is an impostor.
He narrows his eyelids down to slits and focuses solely on the little black pupil at the center of that mocking blue halo. He strains again to conjure the endless worlds that were promised him, and the lies of his father ricochet through his addled mind, the great and lofty bestowals—the cruel mixture of sincerities and deceptions.
Arana takes the glass in his hands and hurls it across the length of his parlor. It shatters against a portrait of himself, standing valiantly at the head of the reflecting pool, the Temple rising above him like some gaudy behemoth. Broken shards tinkle to the floor and the frame tilts askew. He walks to it and faces himself. Beams of light descend upon him from the churning skies, highlighting his features with a golden spirit glow.
He pulls it from the wall and breaks the frame over his knee and extracts the stiffened canvas and rips it again and again, rending it to tattered shreds.
He takes the pieces and cants drunkenly toward his fireplace, steadying himself on one of the high-backed lounge chairs, and throws them into the flames. The mismatched collage of his own image catches afire and turns to fluffy white ash, the pieces curling in upon themselves. He sits and watches it burn, a sheen of perspiration on his hardened face and two small reflections of fire sparkling in the middle of those dark, bitter pupils, consuming a likeness of the very face that beholds it.
When the canvas is all but cinder, he rises and staggers to the door. The sentries startle when he bursts into the corridor.
Arana makes for the balcony and the men attending him hustle to keep up their escort. He acknowledges none of them, his mind consumed of only one thought—more effective methods. His arrhythmic footsteps reverberate through the empty Temple passageways, through the foyer, and finally to the sunken landing that spirals down to the underground keep. The guard unit stationed at the bottom watches him descend, perplexed looks falling over them. He stops in front of the barred wooden door that conceals the keep.
“Open it.”
The sentries do as they are bidden, lifting the bar and pushing the door open to the dismal interior. A tiny sconce fights off pitch-blackness. New courses of stonework lay drying in the back shadows, the tiers standing over waist high. Small, dark shapes race along the walls. It smells of decomposition. The man guarding Renning snaps awake and stands nervously at attention when his leader enters.
“Give me your knife,” says Arana. An instant of hesitation passes and the man offers it forward. Arana wraps his fingers around the hilt. “Get out.” They start back ever so gradually, riveted by their King’s every movement. “Get out!” he screams, trembling. They collect in the antechamber and watch. He paces over and slams the door, then turns to face his prisoners.
Renning hangs slack, his shoulders straining against the weight of his body. He does not stir. A short distance away, curled on the floor like a sleeping dog, lays the boy. His lip quivers. His slow, doleful countenance looks up at Arana, a glint of sorrowful hope in his sluggish eyes.