You do; but it has no hold on you, not anymore.
He walks away, his swallow-tailed jacket shining like obsidian in the greenness of the gardens.
Time passes—months flipped forward like the pages of the books you used to love so much. Your master sits behind the gleaming windowpanes of the house, smiling and sipping fine wines, ageless and fattened on the blood of his sacrifices. Your mother dies, and your friends move on—your name becomes like you; buried, broken, and forgotten; your place long since taken in the library and, in the depths of the house, the circle where you died grows faint and bloodless, every scrap of pain long since absorbed to feed the magic that keeps the world at bay. Outside, the city is burning, tearing itself apart over polluted water, over grit-filled rice and rotten fish. Inside—green, verdant gardens; food on the plates; and music and love and laughter, all the things you used to take for granted, when you lived.
Time passes—there is a girl who comes to sit by the river’s edge. Who steals books out of the library and knots red ribbons into the raven curls of her hair, unaware of what lies beneath her. Who runs, laughing, with her friends—except that you hear the slight catch of breath—feel the slight stumble as, just for a moment, her heart misses a beat and her feet become unsteady on the ground.
“Isaure!”
“I’m fine,” the girl says, pulling herself together. She looks down, then, at the slight bulge of the earth. “That’s funny. What is—”
“Ssh,” the other, older woman says, shaking her head. “Don’t speak of it. It’s bad luck.”
Beyond the gardens, the house waits—walls of golden stone, paneled doors with intricate carvings that seem to come alive at night and, in the cellar underneath, the circle, almost faded to nothing now, the growing hunger of the house’s magic, the price that must be paid, again and again, by those who cannot be allowed to live.
I’m sorry, Charlotte.
Liar.
When Isaure comes back, she is paler; and unsteady on her feet; and red has bloomed on her cheeks like blood. “I know you’re here,” she says, standing over your grave.
You feel something shift within you—some indefinable rearrangement of your self—a femur, poking upwards, jellied muscles suddenly finding consistency, hair strands spreading farther and farther away from your remains, like tendrils extended toward the house. But you’re still here, still held fast by the earth, by the river’s endless song, the lullaby that offers no solace or appeasement.
“The others won’t talk about it, but I need to know.” Isaure sits, for a while—no red ribbons in her hair, which tumbles thick and unruly in her lap. “I—I don’t even know what happens.”
You could tell her, if you still had a voice—of the day they will come for her, two footmen and a butler and the master behind them, solemn and unsmiling, and as grave as if this were her first communion—of how they will bring her to a part of the house she’s never been to, a place of embroidered carpets and silk curtains and wide, airy rooms—of how they will comb her hair, doing it up with fine silver pins in the shape of butterflies, and give her clothes—a red dress, or a red suit, whichever she prefers—delicate, luxurious confections embroidered with birds and flowers—brand-new, for your own clothes were torn and stained when you died, and were as unrecognizable as your body was, a mess of stiffened lace and slashed cotton that they buried with you, not finding the heart to separate it from your mangled remains.
And then the slow descent into the cellar—that tightness rising in her chest, as if the air she’s breathing was being taken away from her—and the circle, and the altar, and—and a last draught of poppy, an illusory comfort that will not hold when the darkness at the heart of the house rises and she strains against the shackles, trying to stifle the scream that’s tearing its way out of her …
Isaure—don’t— you whisper. The earth shifts above you, and your bones push upward, as sharp as razor blades, the tip of one femur barely breaking the surface—and Isaure bends, as if she could hear you.
“Please,” she says.
Don’t, you say, but she’s already gone—her breath coming in short, sharp gasps, her heartbeat irregular, feeling as though it might be snuffed out at any time. You wonder how much time she has—how much time you had, when they came for you and your rotten, consumptive lungs, how much life the house and your master stole from you as it will steal from this child. You’re dead, and the dead cannot intervene, but if only you could—
When Isaure comes next, your master is with her. He looks as he always did—as if time passed him by, leaving him only slightly paler, only slightly thinner—and he moves with the grace and elegance you remember from your own lifetime—you remember him, pausing down the stairs halfway to the cellar and waiting for you as you struggled with the unfamiliar train of the dress, a reassuring presence in this oppressive place—a comfort you could cling to, even if it was a lie.
“There’s not much time left,” your master says. “Isaure—”
Isaure shakes her head. She’s scarecrow-thin, as if a breath of wind would tumble her, her face pale except for her blood-red cheeks; and her legs wobble, sometimes; she keeps herself upright only through strength of will. “It’s too short.”
Your master doesn’t say anything for a while. “It’s always too short. I can’t heal you—I can’t prolong your life—”
“Liar,” Isaure says. “You’ve lived forever.”
Your master grimaces. “It’s not life,” he says at last. “Just … a continuation—a stretching of time.”
“I would take that,” Isaure says, slowly, fiercely.
“Don’t be so sure.” His smile is bleak; the mask lifts again, and for a moment he’s nothing more than a skull beneath stretched, paper-thin skin, with eyes shriveling in their orbits, and a heart that keeps beating only because the house stands. “Eternity is a long time.”
“More than I’ve got.”
“Yes,” your master says. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re not.” Isaure watches him, for a while, stares at the river again. Today the sounds of fighting are distant: Outside, most people have died, and the sky is dark with poisoned storms and acid rain. There is little to salvage in the city—perhaps in the entire world. “Are you?”
His eyes are dry; his face expressionless, with not an ounce of compassion. “I do what I have to. So that I survive. So that we all survive. And no.” He shakes his head, slowly, gently. “The house will only take you one way, and it’s not the way it took me.”
Isaure shivers. “I see.” And, turning slightly away from him, kneeling on the grass, one hand inches from the edge of your exposed bone—“Will … will there be pain?”
He pauses then; and time seems to hang suspended, for a moment; it flows backward until he’s standing at your grave again, and your mother asks that same question, slowly and fearfully—and he could change the course of things, he could speak truth, instead of lying as he’s always lied, but he merely shakes his head. “No. We’ll give you poppy and opiates. It will be like going to sleep.”
Liar. You want to scream the words, to let the winds carry them all the way around the house, so that they know the price they pay for their safety, the price you paid for their sakes, only to lie unremembered and broken beneath the gardens, the only ones who still come a betrayer and a doomed girl—but you have no voice, and the earth chokes you, and you cannot …
Above you, Isaure rises, smiles—cautiously, reassured by words, by the presence she’s known all her life.
“It’s time,” your master whispers, and she’s turning toward him to follow him meekly, back into the house, to the wreck of her body and another grave at the bottom of the gardens, and soon they’ll both be gone, beyond your reach until it’s too late for anything but futile grieving—
No!
You push—with broken bones, with decayed hands and arms and legs—and your body twists and shifts as the earth presses against it, and your muscles shiver and coale
sce again, and butterfly hairpins melt as if within a furnace—and you turn and turn and change—and rise, bloody-mouthed, four-legged, from the earth.
Your horn is the yellow, gleaming bone of your femur, sharpened to a killing point; your mane is your blood-matted, earth-clogged hair, dragging worms and flies’ eggs from the shadowed rest of your grave; and your skin is scraps of red, blood-drenched cotton, knitted and patched over the rawness of muscles bunched to leap.
Isaure watches you, her mouth open—the flames of your eyes reflected in her own—and your master is watching, too, but—unlike her—he knows.
“Charlotte…”
Isaure jerks, as if something had pulled on strings at her back. “No,” she whispers, as you paw at the ground with silver hooves.
You run her through, before she can say another word—her blood splatters, warm and red—the same hue as your skin, drenching the grass in vivid, obscene colors—a crunching of bones beneath you, and then you’ve leapt over her remains, and there is only you and your master.
He has not moved. He stands, watching you—no expression on his face, his blue eyes dry and fearless. “You know I do not lie,” he says. He stands as if rooted within the earth, his swallow-tailed jacket billowing in the wind, his face alight with that same strange, fey radiance. “There is always a price to be paid for safety. Don’t you know this, Charlotte?”
You know this. You have always known this. Blood and pain and sacrifice and the power of the house—the only true things in a dying world, and what does it matter if not everyone pays them? Only the sick and the weak, or the innocent, or the powerless?
There is no rest. There is no forgiveness. And never, ever, any safety.
“It’s too high a price,” you say—every word coming out distorted, through a mouth that wasn’t meant to shape human sounds—and you drive your horn, slowly and deliberately, into his chest—feeling ribs crack and break, and the feel of a body bending backwards, crumpling under you—an odd, twisting sensation as the house flickers—reeling, wounded and in agony, retreating to the safety of the underground altar.
Too high a price.
You look at the house in the twilight, in the rising wind and shadows—at the golden limestone walls still untainted by smoke; at the pristine, unbroken windows facing the desolation of the city; at the vast, brittle abundance of greenery in the gardens—the tapestry of lies that made your old, careless life possible.
It’s gone now, smashed to splinters beneath you, and that price will never be paid again.
Then you move—running toward the house, the grass shriveling under each strike of your hooves, strands of darkness following in your wake like nightfall—toward the fading circle in the cellar and the dozens, hundreds of people who sent girls to die in agony for the good of the house—you run, to finish what you have started here.
About the Author
Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a day job as a System Engineer. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, as well as numerous short stories. Her works include The House of Shattered Wings (Roc/Gollancz), a novel set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, and The Citadel of Weeping Pearls (Asimov’s Oct/Nov 2015), a novella set in the same universe as her Vietnamese space opera On a Red Station Drifting. You can sign up for author updates here.
Copyright © 2016 by Aliette de Bodard
Art copyright © 2016 by Alyssa Winans
Fatma el-Sha’arawi, special investigator with the Egyptian Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities, stood gazing through a pair of spectral goggles at the body slumped atop the mammoth divan.
A djinn.
An Old One, at that—near twice the size of a man, with fingers that ended in curved talons, long as knives. His skin was a sheath of aquamarine scales that shifted to turquoise beneath the glare of flickering gas lamps. He sat unclothed between tasseled cushions of lavender and burgundy, his muscular arms and legs spread wide and leaving nothing to the imagination.
“Now that’s impressive,” a voice came. Fatma glanced back at the figure hovering just over her shoulder. Two long graying whiskers fashioned in the style of some antiquated Janissary twitched on a plump face. It belonged to a man in a khaki uniform that fit his thick frame a bit too tightly, particularly around the belly. He jutted a shaved round chin at the dead djinn’s naked penis: a midnight-blue thing that hung near to the knee. “I’ve seen full-grown cobras that were smaller. A man can’t help but feel jealous, with that staring him in the face.”
Fatma returned to her work, not deigning to reply. Inspector Aasim Sharif was a member of the local constabulary who served as a police liaison with the Ministry. Not a bad sort. Just vulgar. Cairene men, despite their professed modernity, were still uncomfortable working alongside a woman. And they expressed their unease in peculiar, awkward ways. It was shocking enough to them that the Ministry had tapped some sun-dark backwater Sa’idi for a position in Cairo. But one so young, and who dressed in foreign garb—they’d never quite gotten used to her.
Today she’d chosen a light gray suit, complete with a matching vest, chartreuse tie, and a red-on-white pinstriped shirt. She had picked it up in the English District, and had it specially tailored to fit her small frame. The accompanying walking cane—a sturdy length of black steel capped by a silver pommel, a lion’s head—was admittedly a bit much. But it added a flair of extravagance to the ensemble. And her father always said if people were going to stare, you should give them a show.
“Exsanguination,” she declared. Fatma pulled off the copper-plated goggles and handed them over to a waiting boilerplate eunuch. The machine-man grasped the instrument between tactile metal fingers, folding it away with mechanical precision into a leather casing. She caught her reflection in its featureless brass countenance: dark oval eyes and a fleshy nose set against russet-brown skin on a slender face. Some might have called it boyish, if not for a set of full, bold lips passed on by her mother. As the boilerplate eunuch stepped away, she used her fingers to smooth back a mop of cropped black curls and turned to the constable. Aasim stared as if she’d just spoken Farsi.
“Those markings.” She tapped the floor with her cane, where curving white script engulfed the divan in a circle. “It’s an exsanguination spell.” Seeing Aasim’s blank look, she reached down to her waist to pull her janbiya free and placed the tip of the knife at the djinn’s thigh before sliding it beneath a scale. It came back out clean. “No blood. Not a drop. He’s been drained.”
The inspector blinked, catching on. “But where did it … the blood … go?”
Fatma fingered the dry edge of her blade. That was a good question. She slid the knife back into a silver-worked sheath fitted onto a broad leather belt. The janbiya had been given to her by a visiting Azd dignitary—a present for banishing a particularly nasty nasnas troubling his clan. It had been one of her first assignments at the Ministry. The half-blind old man had called her “pretty, for a young man, so brave to take on a half-djinn.” She hadn’t corrected him. And she’d kept the knife.
“Do you think it might have been…” Aasim grimaced, cupping his well-coiffed moustache before almost whispering the word: “.… ghuls?” The man hated talking about the undead. Then again, Fatma supposed everyone did. Ghul attacks were up in the city; three separate incidents had been reported in the past week. The Ministry suspected a radical cell of anarchist-necromancers, though no one had come up with any leads.
She crouched down to inspect the markings. “Not likely. Ghuls wouldn’t stop with feeding on just blood.” Aasim made a face. “And they don’t practice magic. This script is Old Marid. Djinn sorcery.” She frowned, pointing with her cane. “These, however, are unfamiliar.”
They were four glyphs, arranged equidistant around the circle. One looked like a set of curved horns. The second was a sickle. The third was an odd axe with a hooked blade. The fourth was larger than the res
t, a half-circle like a moon, shrouded in twisting vines.
Aasim bent to look. “Never seen them before. Some sorcerer’s sigil?”
“Maybe.” She ran a finger along one of the glyphs, as if touching it might provide an answer.
Standing, she stepped back to stare up at the djinn—a giant who dwarfed them both in his considerable shadow. The eyes on that bowed head remained open, bright gold upon gold that beat down on her like molten suns. His face was almost human, if you ignored the pointed ears and cobalt-blue ram horns twisting from his head. She turned back to Aasim. “How long ago did you find the body?”
“Just past midnight. One of his regulars found him. Alarmed the neighbors.” He smirked. “She didn’t emit the usual screams, if you know what I mean.”
Fatma stared at him flatly before he continued.
“Anyway, she’s a plump little slum rat who comes into Azbakiyya for work. Greek, I think. Only got a few words in before her pezevenk lawyer arrived.” He made a disgusted sound. “The old Khedive had whores rounded up and sent south in my grandfather’s day. Now they hire Turkish pimps to read you the law.”
“It’s 1912—a new century,” Fatma reminded him. “Khedives don’t run Egypt anymore. The Ottomans are gone. We have a king now, a constitution. Everyone has rights, no matter their work.” Aasim grunted, as if that itself was a problem.
“Well, she seemed upset. Maybe it was at losing that.” He gestured again to the djinn’s exposed genitalia. “Or maybe at losing clients after this bad luck.”
Fatma could understand that. Azbakiyya was one of the more posh districts in Cairo. Having a client here was good money. Damn good. “Did she see anyone? A previous visitor, maybe?”
Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2016 Page 11