Julia Unbound

by Catherine Egan

  The awful sound keeps wheezing out of her. I am kneeling next to the chair, and she rests her forehead against mine. When she is able to speak, she says: “I have to go back to him.”

  “Lie down,” I say, and she does. I take out a dart of sleeping serum.

  “You’d better use two,” she says.

  “We’ll start with one. I’ll be back. Sleep well.”

  I stick the dart into her, and her head falls to one side.

  “Do I shoot her if she tries to leave?” asks Gennady.

  “No,” I say, giving him my last two darts. “If she starts to move, stick her again and stay out of her way.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To find Casimir,” I say. “I’m going to bring him down. I just need a minute alone with Shey.”

  I feel strong again, never mind that I haven’t slept.

  “Minutes alone with Shey never end well,” says Gennady.

  There is a sound like thunder.

  “A storm?” I say, startled, pulling open the curtains.

  “Guns,” says Gennady.

  The revolution has begun.

  Luca.

  I return to my body on a high balcony at the palace. Soldiers in formation surround the palace and the parliament. Revolutionaries are mobbing through the streets, building ramshackle barricades and being shot down in horrible numbers already. There are fires all over the city. It looks set to be a massacre. Uselessly above it all, I don’t know what to do. I meant to get Luca out of here, but perhaps the revolution is going to be cut down before they can get to him.

  A shrill keening sound from above. I look up and see witches astride flaming branches. They are flying over the city from every direction, toward the palace. The soldiers start firing pointlessly into the air. The witches fly lower, circling the palace grounds but still out of range of the soldiers’ bullets. I huddle behind the balustrade, peering out over it as the witches come in close and hurl what appear to be cylinders of flame through the palace windows. Judging by the smoke rising up all over the city, they’ve been dropping these fairly indiscriminately. The gates to the palace grounds open, a swarm of soldiers pouring back inside now that the palace is under attack from above. I see close to a hundred people dressed in crimson and black with odd masks over their faces among the armed rabble along the river. The Xanuhans, I’m betting.

  A chorus of screams from soldiers and revolutionaries both—fingers pointing at the sky. Something is coming from the west. Like great dark sails in the sky, or some vast bird. Not a bird. No bird is that big. As it gets closer, I feel my heart drop. The keening of the witches gets louder. The formation of panicked soldiers is breaking up, and the Xanuhans are pushing through, into the palace grounds.

  The dragon must be twenty feet long at least, its narrow body undulating, rippling and snaking through the air, with two pairs of wings ballooning out like sails on either side of it, keeping it afloat. Something bulges at its neck, swelling and growing whiter, expanding outward, and then a blade of flame comes from the thing’s mouth, striking a high tower of the palace. The stone dissolves, runs black and molten.

  The palace grounds are in chaos now, more and more revolutionaries making it over the walls. A Xanuhan warrior below holds up what looks from my vantage point like a telescope and fires something into the air. A little metal ball hurtles up into the sky, way up, somersaulting. The weapon Dek was building. It pops, and a thick bluish smoke billows out of it, enveloping a few of the witches. They plunge downward, off their flaming branches, falling to the palace grounds far below. I catch a whiff of the gas, and my head spins. I’m about to flee inside when the dragon swoops right past my balcony, and instead I’m frozen with wonder, staring over the edge of the balustrade at the tremendous length of it—its blunt lizard face and that balloon at the neck swelling with white fire again. I see Lady Laroche’s face as she flashes by on the dragon’s back, hair streaming out behind her, arms raised in triumph, exultant. And then she is past, swooping around the palace. Another blast of dragon flame. Another tower melts blackly over the stone below it.

  A witch alights on the balcony next to me, burning cylinder in hand. She stares at me, openmouthed, then makes to throw the cylinder. I vanish across the tower room, swing open the door at the end, and race down the twisting stairs as fast as I can. The room explodes into flames behind me.

  The palace is full of shouts and clanging bells and people running. I find Luca in the crown room, wearing heavy new robes, crown askew on his head. He looks stunned. His mother has a pistol in her hand. Both Agoston Horthy and Lord Skaal are with them. Lord Skaal is pulling aside a tapestry on the wall.

  “Take them to safety,” Horthy is telling Lord Skaal as he opens a door behind the tapestry.

  I am poised on the stairs just above them. The door at the other end of the crown room flies open, and the guards posted there fall bonelessly to the floor. In comes Lady Laroche, lit cigarette in hand, her hair pulled into a hasty updo. Three witches in black come in behind her and, slithering on its belly, those great ballooning wings closed up so tightly that they look like a frill along its sides, the dragon, like an enormous snake. The dragon swivels its head up high, some flash about the eyes that makes me avert my gaze, vanished though I am. The duchess shoots the dragon’s side, and the creature thrashes its tail angrily. One of the witches is writing on a slate, and the pistol tugs free of the duchess’s hand, flying across the room and clattering against the far wall.

  Lord Skaal curls a lip and snarls.

  “Lord Skaal, you’ve always been an opportunist,” says Lady Laroche pleasantly. “This might be a good moment to switch sides.”

  Lord Skaal nods in Horthy’s direction. “Until I see his dead body laid out, I would not bet on this man being defeated.” Then he sniffs the air and turns to where I am vanished at the top of the stairs. “And who are you here for?”

  Lady Laroche stiffens.

  I reappear, and they all go still, looking up at me. Agoston Horthy meets my eyes for the first time while the dragon slides across the floor.

  “Julia!” cries Luca. The poor boy looks terrified.

  “I’m glad you’re here, Julia,” says Lady Laroche, though I’m sure she’s anything but. “This is our moment. Here before us is the man who murdered Ammi!”

  “I thought you just made a deal with Casimir to leave him alone.”

  She looks alarmed that I know this, but she doesn’t miss a beat: “You didn’t, though.”

  Then everything seems to happen at once.

  Lord Skaal turns into a wolf and lunges at Lady Laroche. The dragon swivels toward him, the balloon at its neck swelling hugely, and this close I can see the heat and flame swirling inside it. Agoston Horthy shoots the translucent, bulging sac at its neck with a pistol I didn’t even see him draw. The dragon makes a horrible screeching sound. Shots are being fired in the hall just outside the crown room. Lady Laroche and the two other witches are trying to strangle the wolf, who snaps and snarls and gives them no moment to write magic. The dragon is slithering fast toward Horthy, its jaws wide, but the balloon at its neck is bulging and sagging, leaking. Agoston Horthy shoots another hole in it. Something too bright to look at is pouring out of that sac at its neck, eating away at the floor, melting the marble. Horthy has a knife out now, and he is approaching the wounded dragon, the witches grappling the snarling wolf, one of them immobile and probably dead, the duchess pulling Luca through the door that was hidden behind the tapestry. Black-and-red-clad Xanuhans pour into the room, all of them wearing bulky black masks over their mouths and noses. I recognize Dek’s work—the masks are to protect them against sleeping gas.

  “Julia!” screams Lady Laroche from beneath the wolf. “Choose your side!”

  A Xanuhan tosses a metal ball in the air. It somersaults over and over. I make a vanishing leap to the entra
nce of the tunnel in the wall, reappear to grab Luca’s hand in one of mine, his mother’s in the other, and as I hear the pop of the metal ball, I pull them with me out of the world, away from the burning palace.

  I take them to Liddy’s shop. The door is closed and—for the first time ever—locked. We can still hear gunshots from West Spira. The smell of smoke is everywhere. I bang on the door, but there is no answer.

  “What is this place?” cries the duchess.

  “I’m rescuing you,” I tell her.

  “We should go back and fight!” she protests.

  “You’ve already lost,” I say, thinking of the Xanuhans pouring into the room, the dragon thrashing on the floor. Zara let the Sidhar Coven attack Horthy’s armed forces and then brought both down herself. Everyone will hear how her Xanuhan allies gassed the witches out of the sky. “Zara’s going to take the throne, and you’d better not be around for it.”

  Luca puts his arms around his mother, and they embrace in the street.

  “We’ll flee to Ingle,” the duchess murmurs. “Our ships in Corf can take the rest of the family across the channel without having to touch on Fraynish soil. Oh, thank the Nameless they stayed there!”

  “They’ll have a few days before anybody gets there, I expect,” I say. “Send a telegram and tell them to meet you in Ingle.”

  I bang on the door again. Suppose Liddy has truly left Spira City? I can’t believe somehow that she’d leave without saying goodbye to me.

  I haven’t got a lockpick or even a hairpin, so I smash a window with a brick lying in the street. Immediately two glowing, hissing spiders the size of my fist appear, flying out the window, forelegs raised threateningly. The rhug. I back away, shouting, “Liddy! Are you in there?”

  More of the spiders come out the broken window, positioning themselves by the door and windows.

  “What are those?” cries the duchess, pulling Luca away from them.

  Can I really be barred from Liddy’s shop? My heart is thundering in my chest. I hear voices nearby, and Luca is still wearing the bleeding crown. I grab their hands to vanish again, but then the door opens.

  It isn’t Liddy. It’s the woman with the bruises—Flora. A fresh bruise blooming on her cheek. And behind her, the brutish-looking fellow I saw going into her house.

  “You,” I say.

  Her eyes widen. The brute says gruffly, “Let them in. Hurry.”

  The rhug make way, obeying this man’s command. She pulls the door wide and then closes and locks it behind us.

  “Why did you smash the window?” asks the brute angrily.

  “Where’s Liddy?” I cry.

  “Shh.” Flora puts a finger to her lips. “The children are asleep upstairs.”

  Mr. Faruk comes out of the back room, dressed simply for once, in boots and a light coat.

  “You certainly know how to pick your moments,” he says to me. “Why have you brought the king here?”

  “Where’s Liddy?” I push past him, dread closing around my heart like a fist.

  “Julia, wait,” he says, grabbing my arm. His grip is hard, but I vanish out of it and reappear by the door at the back of the shop, throwing it open.

  Liddy is sprawled across the floor, her throat cut wide open. Her eyes stare up at nothing, already hard and very dead. I stagger backward, clapping a hand to my mouth, and spin to face Mr. Faruk, Flora, and the young brute.

  The brute says, “I suppose we’re going to have to explain.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” says Mr. Faruk wearily.

  “I owe her that much,” says the brute, and then to me he adds, “It’s not what you think, Julia.”

  “Isn’t it?” asks Mr. Faruk.

  Everything has gone cold inside me. Luca and his mother are standing together against the closed door, unsure if it’s safer in here or out in the streets.

  “How do you know my name?” I ask the brute.

  “Look again,” he says, pointing into the back room. “What do you see?”

  The body of my old friend. I taste iron on my tongue.

  “Not there,” says the brute. “On the table.”

  “What are you doing?” asks Mr. Faruk sharply.

  “She’s not going to take it,” says the brute.

  “You said she was a thief, among other things,” says Mr. Faruk.

  Liddy’s dead body seems to take up my whole view. I hear their voices as if from another world. But I pull my gaze up to the table. There it is—the thing I’ve only seen in pictures and visions—a little double-spouted clay pot with hieroglyphs on its side.

  “The Ankh-nu.” I turn to look at them. The answer is right here, but my head is spinning.

  “I am Liddy,” says the brute. That familiar, easy tone—of course, I ought to have recognized it, even coming from a different voice and body. “I mean to say, I was never really Liddy, but the Liddy you knew is now…this. Me.”

  The Ankh-nu. For switching bodies. I look at the brute, but I can’t believe it.

  “How?” I say. “Liddy?”

  Mr. Faruk looks impatiently at his wristwatch. “The hackney will be here any minute.”

  A choking laugh bursts out of me. “You’re not going to get a hackney in the middle of a revolution!”

  “Oh, I am,” says Mr. Faruk.

  The duchess is pulling on Luca’s sleeve, whispering something.

  “If you go, you’ll be captured,” I call to them. “I can get you out safely. But I need to know…what is going on here.”

  “I’m sorry, Julia,” says the brute. “I wanted to explain things earlier, but it was dangerous and I didn’t know…well, where to begin.”

  “Where did you get the Ankh-nu?” I ask. And then a horrible thought strikes me. “Are you…were you…my mother?”

  Mr. Faruk gives a bark of impatient laughter.

  “No,” says the brute. Liddy. Maybe. “Your mother is dead, Julia. Ammi drowned. I am Lidari.”

  Mr. Faruk goes past me and takes the Ankh-nu off the table. He tucks it into a leather bag and slings it over his shoulder.

  “We really do need to go,” he says. “Before the city burns down.”

  I look at him, and it comes together, painfully. My mother dead. Lost all over again. That stupid, bright hope of finding her goes out in a sharp, hard puff of understanding.

  “Marike,” I say coldly.

  “I used to go by that name,” says Mr. Faruk.

  “You put the Book in Theo.”

  “Yes,” says Mr. Faruk. “I thought I’d come up with a very clever way of destroying the fragment—getting it apart from Gennady. I didn’t expect Gennady to run off, leaving me with a concussion down at the harbor. Thank goodness I didn’t need that brain much longer.”

  Poor Ko Dan. Poor everyone who ever stood in Marike’s way. I feel sick, everything in me grasping for answers, for any possible hope.

  “Then you can take the Book out of him,” I say.

  “That was always a lost cause,” says Mr. Faruk. “Two essences in one body! The Book fragment is completely entwined with Theo’s essence, a part of him, to live and die with him. There is no taking it out without taking him apart.”

  I look at the body of my friend again and tears spring to my eyes. I feel so lost. My mother is dead.

  “Why did you kill Liddy?”

  The brute says gently, “The body is just a casing—a house for the essence. You know the power of the Ankh-nu. Your mother brought me from Kahge to the world, but she was reluctant to take someone’s body. The body she consented to put me in…a woman who had suffered a stroke, her mind gone, empty…it was only ever a temporary home. Like every body I’ve had.”

  Liddy. Lidari. Oh, but I’m such a fool. I used to be the best liar I knew. How I miss those days.

&
nbsp; “What about the body?” asks Flora, pointing at Liddy’s corpse.

  “Leave it,” says the brute—Lidari—dismissively. I am shocked by this callousness.

  “Why is she dead?” I ask. “I don’t understand.”

  “Flora’s husband was a monster,” says Lidari harshly. “He hurt her and he hurt her children. I needed a new body—a strong one, a young one. We made a deal with Flora. She brought him here, we tied him up, and I switched bodies with him. But his reaction to being put into a new body was such that…well, killing him was the only way to calm him down, frankly.”

  “Calm him down?” I sputter.

  “Call it self-defense, if you like. I have no qualms of conscience concerning the death of such a man.”

  Flora’s face is blank. “Can we shut this door? I don’t want the children to see when they wake up.”

  I take the blanket off the back of the chair where Liddy used to sit—Liddy with her fresh rolls and coffee and easy conversation, Liddy, whom I could always trust—or so I thought. I lay the blanket over the body and close the door.

  “I’m going to check on the children,” says Flora.

  “You’d better wake them,” says Mr. Faruk. “Our hackney will be here any minute.” At my incredulous expression, he adds: “Do you imagine this is the first time I’ve fled a city as it falls?”

  “What about Lady Laroche and Zara?”

  “I’ve wanted to see this come to fruition for a long time—Zara on the throne, a girl raised and trained to be the perfect ruler—but my role is that of a relatively disinterested observer. I was curious to see whether Lady Laroche could really work with anyone else. It turns out she can’t, and now it’s time for me to move on. I’ll be interested to see how it all plays out, but it’s bound to be chaotic.”

  “First explain it,” I beg the brute—Lidari. “Why can I vanish? Why did the shadows in Kahge think I was you? Why do I have your memories?”

  “Do you know how Marike brought the Gethin from Kahge?” asks Lidari.