The Ingenious

by Darius Hinks

  “I see fear in your face,” he said. “Fear that your friends would learn of your dealings with me. And I certainly couldn’t have it known that I was dealing with someone like you. So it would seem we’d have a mutual need for secrecy. In that respect, at least, we would be ideal partners.”

  Isten nodded, her thoughts racing. He was right. And if she played along with Alzen for a period of time, she could benefit from his help. Then, later, if she wanted to be rid of him, she could find some way to reveal his deviant behaviour without exposing her connection to him.

  “Partners in what?” she asked, shrugging off his grip, but also letting go of her knife. “What exactly are we discussing?”

  Alzen locked the door. Then he checked the window and sat back down on the cushions, waving for her to do the same.

  When she was seated, he took a small paper-wrapped parcel out of his robes and looked at it. Again he hesitated, mouthing something and frowning. It was clear he was unsure whether to proceed.

  Isten’s pulse hammered in her temples. She didn’t know if it was the Sisters’ house playing with her mind, but she felt as though something momentous was about to happen; something that could finally turn her fortunes around.

  Finally, Alzen nodded and folded back a corner of the paper parcel.

  The smell hit her immediately. Cinnabar. And not just any cinnabar. It was peculiarly potent. Just like the shipment she had seen in the warehouse.

  Alzen held the parcel towards her.

  Isten licked her fingertip and reached out, then hesitated, remembering Naos’s warning. The smell was already causing her vision to change and her heart to slow but she did not have to taste it, she told herself. She had a chance, here in the Sisters’ house, to change, to resist, to rethink who she was and make her future better than her past. Then she remembered who she was, remembered every wrong choice she had made in her life, and realized she was kidding herself. She had never resisted anything. She never would. Sadness gripped her as she realized that, for her, there was no way to really change, even here. She stroked her finger across the crimson block and tasted it.

  “It’s good,” she said, leaning back in the cushions, watching the room melt around her, letting the cinnabar drown her shame. “Very good.”

  Alzen nodded. “And I can supply you with a lot. For free.”

  “Free?” Isten was busy watching the plasterwork bloom, but she could still hear how unlikely that sounded.

  “Free. All I’d ask is that you sell it cheap and to anyone who needs it. I want it spread across the whole city, particularly the Azorus Slums. I have my own reasons.”

  “And what about the Aroc Brothers?”

  “Well, there are two things we can do about them. You would be selling cinnabar so cheaply that no one would be interested in buying any more from the Aroc Brothers. That will quickly bring them down to earth. But, before that, I could help you achieve your plan of killing Sayal. I know his movements. I can give you enough information to hit him when he’s at his most vulnerable. I know, for example, that tomorrow night, he’ll be at the Festival of Undying Fire. He’ll be in a certain catacomb beneath the necropolis while the celebrations are in full flow.”

  “Grave robbing?” Isten sat up and tried to clear her thoughts again. “There are no corpses in those tombs. They were plundered centuries ago.”

  “Not all. He has learned the location of a tomb that is still intact. The tomb of one my ancestors – one of the original Curious Men. There will be all sorts of–”

  “And he learned of this tomb from you?” interrupted Isten.

  Alzen gave her a warning look and ignored her question.

  “The tomb will be full of precious metals,” he said, “which he will use to acquire even more men and weapons. But, if I give you the location of the tomb, you could give him a surprise. There will be no soldiers down there, because no one will expect anyone to be digging around beneath the square.”

  “For good reason,” muttered Isten. At the Festival of Undying Fire, the boundaries between the living and the dead were said to become less clear. People dismissed the legends as nonsense, but no one liked to stray too near the crypts’ gaping mouths.

  “It’s not the dead who’ve wronged you,” said Alzen. “It’s the Aroc Brothers. And I can give you a chance to strike back at Sayal when he least expects it. He thinks you’re dead, or as good as. He won’t expect to see you coming at him with a knife.”

  Isten nodded, excited by the idea, but then she shook her head. “But it’ll only be me. I’ll never be able to convince the other Exiles to follow me after what happened last time – not until I can show them I’ve actually done something good. Can you give me some soldiers from your temples?”

  “The whole point is that I must have no hand in this. Is there no one who could help you?”

  Isten pictured the desperate, unshakeable devotion she had seen in Brast’s eyes. “There is one friend. Someone I might be able to convince.” The thought made her skin crawl, but there was no one else who would come near her. “But that still wouldn’t be enough for us to take on the Aroc Brothers if they arrive in a large group.”

  “Two might be enough. You won’t need to fight them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The catacombs are only opened during the night of the festival. All you need to do is follow Sayal down there and make sure only you come out. There are doors all through the catacombs. Doors with locks. They’re ancient, but some of them still work and I can teach you how to work the mechanisms. If you follow the Aroc Brothers until they are a few levels below the square, you would just need to let them go ahead, then lock the doors. As you head back up, you could lock the others too, in case they managed to make it through the first one.”

  “Leaving Sayal stuck down there.”

  Alzen nodded. “Until the next festival. By which point he will be as dead as everyone else in the crypts.”

  Isten started pacing around the library. She looked at the packet of drugs that was still on the table. “And the cinnabar?”

  “Kill Sayal, and I’ll know I can do business with you. You will have your first shipment within the week.”

  Isten stopped by the screen and closed her eyes, letting the sunlight warm her face, relishing the pleasant dizziness that the cinnabar had left her with. The kora player was playing faster and Isten could see the music filtering into the room – a blizzard of crystalline notes, weaving around her. She smiled. This was it. Finally, after years of waiting, years of promising, she was going to lift the Exiles from the gutter. She couldn’t get them back to Rukon, but she could make them the lords of their new home. She pictured Gombus’s face. Finally, she would show him that she was worth something.

  “We have a deal,” she whispered.

  “Hold out your hand,” he said.

  She did as he asked, thinking he was going to shake it, but, instead, he pressed his fingertip against her bicep, leaving a faint orange stain, like faded henna.

  Isten was about to ask what the mark meant, but he held up a warning hand. “A mark of trust. Don’t wash it away.” Then he reached into his robes and took out a purse containing more money than Isten had seen for years. He dropped the purse into her hand. “Get yourself some food and decent lodgings. You’re no use to me dead.”

  11

  Ghosts stretched under the city like knotted roots, gossiping and muttering, talking constantly, content with their own company, until the day when they finally saw through the lie. Then they spread up through seams of rock and bled through Athanor’s walls, desperate to share what they had learned. They encircled the living and screamed the truth at them. No one is above death, they cried, not even the Elect. The living walked on, oblivious, and the dead fell back in despair, forgetting what they had learned, sinking into darkness.

  Crowds flooded into Verulum Square, a golden tide, drowning the mausoleums in yellow cotton and catching the light o
f its mandrel-fires. Tradition dictated that the celebrants wore yellow robes and wooden masks, painted gold in tribute to the Curious Men and in thanks for another successful conjunction. The people of Athanor revelled in this chance to mimic their enigmatic lords. Some were pushing huge, wheeled, wicker sculptures made in imitation of the Elect’s automata – domed, spider-legged chariots and winged skeletal serpents, all woven by hand and painted gold. Everything was in motion, dancing and leaping, apart from the regiments of hiramites mustered at the back of the square, watching the proceedings in silence from behind their tall, silver helmets, swords drawn and legs apart, ready to march on the crowds at the first sign of trouble.

  It was almost midnight and the square’s crumbling architecture was as black as the sky, silhouetted by the fires, adding to the theatrical feel of the festival. It seemed as though the whole necropolis was a stage peopled with teetering, wicker titans. At one end, there was a stage, a huge, tiered platform, dozens of intersecting metal circles raised high above the crowd on a latticework of curling struts. The struts were made of polished metal and, as the lights flashed across them, they seemed to burn, giving the impression that the stage was held aloft by a raging furnace.

  As the crowds surged between the ruins, the Curious Men were walking onto the stage, dressed in the splendour that the crowds were trying to emulate: plush, yellow robes, tall, flame-shaped helmets, rods of office and, in some cases, ceremonial swords so long they had to be carried by scrums of stooped, shuffling attendants.

  Isten and Brast were crouched on the empty pedestal of a long-gone statue, looking down over the crowds and sharing a bottle of wine.

  “What if he’s not there?” asked Brast.

  Isten did not really register his question. She leant back against the shattered masonry, thinking of her glorious return to the Blacknells Road, imagining the Exiles’ faces when she told them she had robbed the Aroc Brothers of their leader and gained a free supply of cinnabar. After Alzen left she had spent another blissful hour with the Sisters, satisfying a lust more potent than anything she had felt in years. When she was done, they had bathed and clothed her and made her look almost human. “What?” she muttered, turning away from the crowds to focus on Brast’s yellow mask. She had made both the masks and deliberately given his a jolly grin, amused by the idea of his wry, bitter eyes glowering at her through such a juvenile face.

  “What if Sayal isn’t in the catacombs?”

  “Then my informant lied and we’ll leave.” Isten’s voice echoed strangely through her own mask. She had given hers a thoughtful, wise-looking expression, finding that contrast almost as amusing as Brast’s grin.

  “No, I don’t mean that. I mean, what if Sayal sends his men down there, but hasn’t bothered to come himself? What if it’s just his grunts?”

  “That’s not his style. And, from what I’ve been told, this job is particularly important to him. He’ll be there.” She stood up, adjusted her mask and checked she had everything. She was wearing the same leather armour Brast had given her the night before and she had the knife tucked into her belt. In her trouser pocket she had the note Alzen had given her. It described the entrance they needed and the route through the catacombs, and it also explained the door mechanisms. “Let’s go,” she said, heading for the pedestal’s steps.

  Brast took a moment to fold away the picture he had been sketching, so Isten stood for a moment, looking out over the crowds, feeling as though she were on a stage, surrounded by thousands of devoted followers. It occurred to her that this must be how her mother had felt, back in Rukon, when she addressed the huge audiences that came to hear her in the final months of her life.

  “Ready,” said Brast, dragging Isten back into the present.

  They climbed down the slumped steps and entered the crowd, swallowed by the noise and stink. The majority of the celebrants were human, but the city’s other races were represented too. Isten had to fight through towering carapaces and charred, smouldering haunches as well as red-faced drunkards.

  “We’ve got plenty of time,” she said, glancing back at Brast. “Sayal’s not planning to make his move until the end of the ceremony when all the fireworks start going off. They’re hoping the fireworks will drown out any noise they make getting in.”

  “Noise? But the gates to the crypts are open on festival night.”

  “But none of those passages are used any more. Apparently, their plan is to wait for the noise to start – in case they need to smash through collapsed walls or broken railings.”

  They clambered up onto roofs and balconies and managed to cross the square reasonably quickly. Everyone else was too busy celebrating to notice the two slender figures who slipped past them.

  “You’ve changed,” said Brast, as they dropped from a broken portico and landed back in the mob.

  “What?” she yelled, struggling to hear him over the noise of the crowd.

  “You’ve never kept secrets from me before,” he said in her ear, as they passed the stage, where the Curious Men were performing one of their obscure rituals, preparing to address the crowd. “But you looked furious when I tried to find out who your informant is.”

  She halted and glared at him, wondering if she’d made a mistake asking him along.

  “Don’t worry!” he said, his mocking tone sounding absurd through his cheerful mask. “I’m just intrigued to know who you could feel so protective over.”

  She realized, to her relief, that he had no inkling of who she had been talking to. Incredibly, even now, even here, he was just jealous.

  She took another swig from her wine bottle and hurried on. “It’s not important who it is.” She nodded to the teardrop-shaped archways looming up ahead of them. “We’re almost there.”

  On this side of the platform, there were hardly any celebrants. Only those who had arrived too early and were now too inebriated to realize that the festival was about to begin, slumped across the ruins like landed fish, belching and mouthing gibberish into the moonlight. There were also a few groups huddled in the shadows, making deals or threats or trying to sell things that weren’t theirs to sell.

  Isten and Brast rushed on until they stood before the row of arches. They were each over thirty feet tall and too deep to be penetrated by the glow of the mandrel-fires. They looked like gaping mouths, locked in a silent scream, and their breath was a cold, damp breeze, quite unlike the dry heat that was still radiating up from the stones in the rest of the square.

  Isten hesitated as she looked up at the towering shapes.

  “Scared of ghosts?” laughed Brast.

  She ignored him and waved to a toppled statue a few feet away. “Sayal isn’t due for another couple of hours, but we should hide just in case. They might send a scout over here early.”

  They climbed over the rubble and found a comfortable vantage point from where they could watch the arches without being seen.

  “Which arch is it?” asked Brast as he squeezed in next to her.

  She pointed. “Third from the right. The one with the crack up the side.”

  “Tell me again how much you’re paying me for this?” he whispered.

  “Still nothing,” she replied.

  He laughed, quietly. “I can’t believe you’re listening to another tip-off after what happened at the embassy.”

  “This is different.”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  He finally fell quiet and the two of them waited, watching the occasional drunk stagger past and waiting to see if Isten’s luck really was on the up.

  Behind them, they heard the sounds of the festival. One of the Curious Men was addressing the crowd, using alchymia to project his voice across the square. It was the usual rubbish. He was explaining how grateful they should all be. The Elect had used their noble, glorious Art to once again steer Athanor to a place of safety and bounty. Over the last few months, he said, their diplomats had brokered deals with their new neighbours, ensuring tha
t Athanorians would want for nothing. Isten had to stifle a curse as she thought of the poor souls in the Azorus slums or the doss houses on the Blacknells Road. Most of the crowd knew they were being duped, but they loved their golden lords all the same, howling in delight, drunk on the pageantry and mysticism. Isten could picture the scene – the Curious Men would be performing some parlour trick, summoning shadows from flames or blessing statues with speech, anything to keep the mob entertained and stop them asking why so many people were starving when a single phrater wore enough gold to buy a lifetime’s food. Then there would be a parade, as representatives of the new immigrants fawned to the Old King and swore allegiance. And after that, the mandrel-fires would die and the fireworks would begin. Isten had avoided the festival for years, sickened by the hypocrisy. At least from behind the platform she would not have to watch the farcical performance. Alzen would be up there, she realized, with a jolt. He would be nodding and smiling and endorsing the lies. Suddenly, she felt the urge to tell Brast what she had done, tell him about Alzen and ask him if she was doing the right thing. She gripped the knife in her belt and kept her mouth shut. It was too late for that. Brast would despise her. As would all the others.

  They were so tightly crushed together that Brast felt her tense and looked at her. “What?”

  “Nothing,” she muttered.

  He was about to say something else when she nodded through the hole that was acting as their window on the arches.

  A group of men had emerged from the shadows and were moving towards the arch with the cracked wall. They were walking in a way that made it clear they were not just escaping the sycophancy in the square. They were gripping brutal-looking metal crossbows that Isten had only ever seen in the hands of the Aroc Brothers, and they were looking all around as they approached the arch, scouring the shadows for any sign that they were being watched.

  Isten carefully raised her mask and leant forwards, staring into the darkness, trying to see if Sayal was there. There were six of the lumbering brutes and they were all wearing the same wooden masks as the rest of the crowd, but their bulbous heads meant the masks were crooked and only half attached.