by Darius Hinks
Naos had vanished but Isten was not alone on the sand. Gombus was at her side. Not Gombus as he was now, old and weary, but Gombus as he had been in the old country, when Isten was still a child.
“She loves them,” said Isten, listening to the delight of the crowd as they cheered her mother’s every word.
“She loves everyone,” replied Gombus, smiling, not realizing how his words knifed into her.
Gombus handed her some bread and, as Isten took it, she guessed that, back in the house, Naos was giving her something more powerful than bread. She took the illusory food and swallowed it.
The beach faded as Isten ate, swallowed by a fast-growing dusk that turned the waves to iron peaks and flooded her joints with cold. Stars blinked into view and her mother’s voice began to fade.
“No,” she begged, wanting to hold the memory a little longer, wanting to hear a few more of her mother’s words. Even if they weren’t directed at her, they were still a treasure.
It was no use. The darkness spread until Gombus was little more than a silhouette. The last echoes of her mother’s voice vanished, replaced by groans and whispered prayers. Other shapes appeared in the darkness, other silhouettes, and the stars became cracks in a distant ceiling, spilling shards of light onto a sea of upturned faces, children mostly, like herself. Their faces were anguished and afraid and, instead of damp sand beneath her, Isten felt hard, dry metal, lurching and swaying as though the world had been cut adrift.
“Did she live?” she asked, looking up at Gombus, already knowing the answer.
He looked down at her, his eyes full of tears but also full of pride. “More than any of us,” he said.
Isten pressed her face into his side. He knew that wasn’t what she meant.
Gombus held her as moans turned into howls. People were dying.
“Will we make it?” she said into his robes, relishing the briny smell of the cloth.
“Some of us.” He handed her another piece of bread.
She ate, and the scene changed again.
There was a little more light now, and Isten was in a small, filthy bedroom. The window was boarded shut, but there was dry, harsh light breaking through the cracks and she knew she was back in Athanor. There was rubbish piled on the floor – scraps of food, empty bottles and the flat, desiccated remains of a rat, staring up at her with one bright, accusing eye.
A shadow loomed over her, but it was neither Gombus nor Naos. It was the man whose smile framed her nightmares. He led her gently to the bed and told her to lie down and remove her top. Then he turned away and stooped over a metal bowl. After a few minutes, flames filled the crucible, lighting the man’s face from beneath, stretching his features into a fiendish mask. He placed a knife in the hot coals, muttering a prayer. Then he returned to the bed. In one hand he was holding the glowing knife and, in the other hand, he had a small bottle.
“To ease the pain,” he said, giving her the bottle, still smiling.
Isten hesitated. This was the past. The decision was already made. But still she hesitated. Could she undo everything, here in the Sisters’ house? No, she knew she could not. She took the bottle and drank, closing her eyes, wishing her past away, waiting for the pain to begin.
When she opened her eyes she was back at Alabri House, lying on the warm grass of a trellised garden, bathed in sunlight and surrounded by the strange, contorted trunks of juniper trees. The trees rolled and turned across the garden in such a wild profusion of shapes that they looked like ecstatic dancers, their gnarled limbs frozen at the climax of a sacred rite. Isten could imagine them springing to life and sweeping her along with their frenzied devotions.
The garden was surrounded by verandas and there were other people sprawled on the grass. Some were entwined, lost in passion, and others were insensate, dazed by whatever delights the Sisters had shared with them, but others were simply talking quietly in the sunshine. Most of the figures were as solid as the trees, but others were like an afterimage, translucent and faint, moving through the others like ghosts. There was none of the frantic mania that characterized much of Athanor. A sense of calm filled the garden, carried on the heady, woody fragrance of the juniper trees. Back inside the house, someone was playing a kora and the sound filtered through the garden, shimmering in time with the dappled light.
“There are quicker ways to kill yourself than cinnabar,” said Naos.
She was sitting behind Isten, cross-legged in the shade, heating the bowl of a tar pipe.
Isten sat up, feeling much better than she had done for days. There were breadcrumbs on her jacket and she realized that Naos had given her food rather than cinnabar. She patted down her limbs. They were painfully thin but intact and they had finally stopped shaking.
Naos nodded, her eyes closed as she smoked the pipe. “And you can’t stay here, revisiting the same scenes, living in the past.”
Isten shook her head. “I don’t want to stay. I just needed to recover.” She gripped the knife at her belt. “I have a debt to repay. One of my countrymen lied to me, Naos, one of my own people. He sent me into a trap and Amoria died.”
“Colcrow.” Naos seemed, as always, to know what Isten was thinking.
“Amoria died because of him.” Even the tranquillity of the garden could not dampen Isten’s pain. “He must have known what was waiting in that warehouse. I think he sold us out to the Aroc Brothers.”
Naos took another slow drag from the pipe, keeping her languid gaze on Isten. “You think that Colcrow knows the plans of the Curious Men?”
Isten was about reply when she realized how unlikely that was. The Elect did not share their schemes with lowlifes like Colcrow.
“And was it the Aroc Brothers who were waiting for you in the warehouse?”
Isten shook her head, confused.
Naos extinguished the pipe and dusted ash from her robes. “You have a visitor.” She stood and held out a hand towards Isten.
“A visitor?” Isten frowned as she let Naos pull her to her feet. “I told Brast to go home. I don’t want–”
“Not him.” Naos led her back across the veranda and into the house.
They returned through the long, tall hallway that Naos had originally led her down. The two old men were still seated outside the curtains with their copper bowl, but they were both asleep, slumped back against the faded tiles, snoring and muttering into their beards.
Naos led Isten down the hallway, past several more archways, until she came to one that was smaller than the others and framed a door. The door had been left ajar.
They entered a library. Pale, diffuse light was radiating through screens at the far end of the room, washing across walls decorated with the same glazed tiles as the hallway outside. The library was lined on all four sides by alcoves, each of which was crowded with books. All of the folios were bound in identical white calfskin and decorated with gold leaf. The sound of the kora was drifting through the screen and the library had the same calm atmosphere as the garden outside.
There were cushions on a rug in the centre of the room and Naos waved Isten to one of them, then she turned to leave. She hesitated in the doorway, looking back at Isten, seeming unsure whether to speak.
“What?” asked Isten, sinking into the cushion.
“The past is fixed.”
Isten frowned. “Of course.”
“Even here.”
Isten shook her head. “I didn’t come here to undo my past. I just needed a rest.” She pictured Gombus, Puthnok, Lorinc and all the other Exiles. “So I can find a way to help my friends.”
Naos nodded. “You’ll be at peace for a while. We’ve given you a remedy. If you stay away from cinnabar you’ll continue to recover. But…” She shrugged.
Isten was about to reply when she heard the sound of footsteps approaching.
“Consider the choices that lie ahead,” said Naos. “The future is not fixed.”
Isten was about to reply, but N
aos was already smiling in greeting to whoever was nearing the door. She ushered him into the library and left, closing the door behind her.
The man was handsome in a dignified, aristocratic kind of way and looked decidedly out of place in the plain, threadbare robe he was wearing.
“You poor thing,” he said, crossing the room and taking her hand. “You look exhausted.”
“Do I know you?”
“Forgive me,” he said. “My name is Phrater Alzen. I belong to the Fraternity of the Elect.”
He took a small, silver egg from his robes and placed it on the table in front of her. “I have come to help,” he said, smiling warmly.
10
There was a father, just out of sight, hovering at the edge of her memory. No one would speak of him but she knew he was there. She could feel the bristles on his chin and the pain in his laugh, and, when she closed her eyes, she could almost picture his face, painted in blood across her lids, daring her to remember his name.
Isten stared at Alzen in surprise. Even in a house this strange, he was an oddity. There was a faint metallic sheen to his face, as though his skin was impregnated with fragments of gold, and his irises sparkled the same way, glinting as he smiled. Beneath his tatty dark robes, she caught a glimpse of finery, folds of luxurious amber-coloured cloth.
“You’re one of the Elect?” She felt a mixture of revulsion and fascination. The Curious Men were an extreme example of everything the Exiles despised: privileged, unelected, remote, feeding off the sweat of their starving subjects and hiding behind a smokescreen of mystery and ritual. The Exiles had no interest in changing Athanor, even Puthnok was not that ambitious, their battle was far from here, but Isten still felt a flash of rage as Alzen beamed at her.
He nodded, still gripping her hand, and laughed. “My disguise is not a particularly inventive one.”
The Curious Men were a mystery even to the oldest citizens of Athanor. Isten felt dazed to be talking to one. “Disguise?” she said. “Why would you need to hide your identity?”
He loosed her hand and dropped down into the cushions, starting to fiddle with the metal egg he had placed on the table. “We’re a cloistered bunch, Isten. The Art demands it – focus and purity, purity and focus, nothing else.” He nodded at the screen separating them from the garden. “Not for us the pleasures of the flesh. My fraternity would not approve of me visiting Alabri House, even if they knew I had only come to nurse the sick.”
Isten shook her head, wanting no help from such a man. “I’m not sick any more. The Sisters have treated me. I was about to leave.”
Alzen nodded, still adjusting the egg’s delicate mechanisms. “I understand.” He took a small ivory pipe from his robes and breathed a cloud of dust into the air. It was beautifully scented, and Isten felt a wonderful sense of relaxation wash through her limbs. The feeling blossomed in her chest and she lay back across the cushions, staring at the floral plasterwork on the ceiling. The moulded petals moved in response to her gaze, growing and twisting, furling and unfurling.
“Leaving to go where?” asked Alzen, in the same cheerful tone as he clicked the egg open.
“I have to kill someone,” she said. As the words left her mouth, she felt a flash of alarm. Why had she said such a thing out loud? Especially to a man like this?
Alzen leant over her and she saw that he had taken something from the egg. It looked like a delicate, folded sheet. “And whom do you intend to kill?”
“Sayal,” she said, finding, to her dismay, that she was powerless to hold back her words. “He leads a gang. The Aroc Brothers. They stole our money and our businesses. They killed my countrymen. I have to ruin them.”
Alzen faltered, clearly shocked by the mention of Sayal. He had been about to unfurl the folded sheet, but he stopped and lowered it onto his lap. “How?”
Isten was feeling increasingly dazed. She could no longer move her limbs or sit up and her words were slurred, but the whole experience was so pleasant that she made no effort to fight the drowsiness. “I’ll raise funds and re-arm the Exiles. I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again…” Isten was about to say more but, to her relief, her mouth would not obey, mumbling gibberish.
Alzen was studying her closely. His smile had faded. “The Exiles? That’s the name of a gang?”
She nodded.
“Your gang?”
She nodded again.
Alzen muttered and shook his head, a puzzled expression on his face. Then he lifted another pipe from his robes. It looked like a penny whistle. He took a box, like a snuffbox, pressed powder into the pipe and blew it into Isten’s face.
A delightful euphoria rushed through her. She was still too weak to sit, but her mouth was once again able to form speech.
“We’ve lost dozens of men at their hands,” she said, still finding it impossible to hold back the truth. “I was absent for a whole year, and without me to hold the Exiles together, people just lost faith and fell away. But we still have Lorinc, Feyer, Korlath and Piros, and maybe Puthnok and Gombus. And there will be others I can round up. I think maybe I could convince Brast to come back. Maybe even Colcrow.”
“Not enough,” said Alzen. “The Aroc Brothers have forged an empire over the last year. They control everything illegal that happens along both sides of the river: whores, drugs, gambling, pit fighting. And they have an army of heavily armed thugs at their disposal.”
Even in her confused state, Isten found it strange that a Curious Man would know so much about a criminal gang.
“But Sayal is still an idiot,” she said. “All I need is a tip-off – some details of whatever they’re planning next, and I could pull the rug from under their feet. We never had any problems dealing with them before, but then they got their hands on the best weapons in the city and suddenly have a limitless supply of cinnabar to sell.”
Alzen looked away from her, staring at the ceiling. For a while he said nothing, obviously lost in thought. Then he stuffed another lump of powder into his pipe and filled the air with a new aroma.
Isten felt strength returning to her limbs and managed to sit up. She also found that she could think without blurting out every thought that crossed her mind.
“The Sisters of Solace are very skilled, but I have hastened your recovery,” said Alzen. “I realize the effects may have felt a little strange, but you should now feel quite reinvigorated.”
Isten found that she did, indeed, feel better than she had done for a long time. But whether Alzen had helped her or not, she still felt like she was conversing with a serpent.
She nodded to the small folded sheet that was still lying on his lap. “Were you going to do something with that?”
He gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “Just another remedy. It won’t be needed now. You have recovered so well.” He placed the cloth carefully back in the metal egg.
When he had closed the egg, Alzen rose and stood next to Isten. “The Aroc Brothers are a scourge.”
As Isten’s head began to clear she tried to connect the events of the last couple of days, sensing that this conversation could be far more important than she at first guessed. The drugs in the warehouse were the property of the Aroc Brothers but they were guarded by alchymia. Alchymia could only be produced by a Curious Man. That in itself was peculiar. The Elect never mixed with the city’s lower orders, and they expressly forbade the use of drugs, executing anyone caught dealing them. And now here was a Curious Man who knew of the Aroc Brothers’ dealings and seemed angry at them. There had to be a connection.
“I’m surprised you’ve heard of the Aroc Brothers,” she said, speaking more carefully now that she had regained control of her words.
Anger flashed in his eyes. “I’ve heard of them. Would you really like to see them ruined?”
“Would you?”
He did not reply, but she saw from his expression that he would.
“But you can’t be seen to move openly against them,”
she suggested.
He glanced at the metal egg, seeming to debate whether to start fiddling with it again.
“Perhaps we could work together,” she said, feeling that she was pushing on a door with no idea of what lay beyond.
Alzen looked back at her with a mixture of wariness and excitement.
She shrugged. “Look, I don’t know what connection you have with those lowlifes, but if you told me, and I didn’t keep it secret, you’d just kill me. It would be as easy for you as crushing a fly, wouldn’t it? Or is everything I’ve heard about Curious Men wrong? So what do you have to lose by talking to me?”
The doubt was still in his eyes but she could see that he was intrigued. She realized that, for some reason, he was as desperate as she was.
“If I were to do something as unpleasant as killing you,” he said, “the rest of your gang would spread rumours. They’d try to smear my reputation.”
Isten laughed, genuinely amused. “You think I’d tell the Exiles I was working with you? They hate me as it is; if they thought I was getting help from a Curious Man, they’d want to kill me.” Her smile faded. “They certainly wouldn’t consider me fit to lead them any more.” She shook her head, realizing how dangerous this whole conversation was and wondering if the cinnabar was still messing with her judgment. The Exiles despised Athanor’s ruling elite. It would be the end of everything if they found out she had even considered working with Alzen. “Perhaps it’s not such a good idea,” she muttered, looking away from him, suddenly feeling very uncomfortable in his presence. She rose and looked at the door.
“Wait,” said Alzen, gripping her arm.
She reached for the knife Brast had given her and grabbed the handle, glaring at him.
He gave her the same kind smile he had shown when he first entered the room. The doubt had gone from his eyes. “Perhaps we might be of use to each other.”
She said nothing but didn’t pull away, still enticed by the idea of overthrowing the Aroc Brothers.