The Colors of Alemeth - Vol. 1

by V. Cobe

CHAPTER 7

  Tjiq

  It was past eleven when I left the house. I ran into the shadow of the trees, lifted the sewer lid and descended through the cold and black air.

  Qepiem Thirteen was waiting for me at the end of the iron ladder, his face was behind a mask that seemed to be made of pink jelly. The hood of his red cloak was too big for his head.

  I broke the silence as soon as we entered Umbraland.

  “Do you know the best way to go?” I asked, reaching out with the paper on which Nimda had written the address.

  He nodded and kept walking.

  The mysterious redemptores. After Ahsiqa and his asking questions through words on a paper, I wondered whether they were all mute.

  “I speak,” he said, without much tone in his voice. “But at Redemptio, we have the habit of saving our voices for important words.”

  I began to see orange on the walls, floors and ceilings.

  “Is it in niche Festum’s territory?”

  A plate on the wall indicated ‘Paul II Goaf’. That meant we were below Paul II Park. We were close.

  I followed Qepiem through the tunnels, noticing the names of streets written on rusty metal plates on the wall, until we arrived at St. Matthew’s Hole, the area below St. Matthew’s Square.

  It didn’t take me long to find the sign No. 3 – Dead Doves. Qepiem was already walking toward it.

  My confident walk failed.

  He knocked seven times on the door. A crack opened and two blue eyes peeked through it. It felt like the first time all over again.

  “Qepiem Thirteen,” said my redemptor.

  “Cev Rá.”

  We presented the sign with our hands and the door opened. When we entered, the man returned the salutation.

  There was a long and straight corridor, with only one door at the end, through which loud music emanated. Qepiem Thirteen opened it and stopped so that I could get in first.

  The bar was small and packed. It had a counter all across the right wall, tables and chairs in the middle and to the left, and a pool table and dart board at the back. The walls and cracked stone floor were completely covered in an obfuscating orange paint.

  I sat at the end of the counter and made sure my hood cast a sufficient shadow over my face. Qepiem stood at my side. A couple of boyfriends was arguing next to us about some love treason, an impossible occurrence up above.

  “Do you know this Tjiq?”

  The redemptor turned his face to me, his eyes blinked under the gelatinous mask.

  “Everyone knows her,” he answered.

  “What is she like?”

  But he didn’t need to tell me. The door opened and a twenty-year-old girl entered. Her long, bare legs walking in incredibly high heels. Her black cloak almost scuffed the floor, and her hood didn’t hide her long, greenish blonde hair. She walked confidently toward us, without taking her eyes off me, uncovered her head and said, “Cev?”

  The way she acted demonstrated she was well aware of the beauty in her almost symmetric face, beauty which not even a profound scar across the entire right side could take away.

  She raised her hand to her chest.

  “Tjiq, for short. My name is one of those unpronounceable ones down here.” And she smiled graciously. She had a Nordic accent, but I couldn’t identify which country.

  “This is Qepiem Thirteen, a redemptor.”

  “I can tell,” she replied and nodded at him slightly with her head while sitting at my side.

  “Nimda roughly explained your mission to me. You’re in search of…,” she lowered her voice to a whisper, “the Great Superstition, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Has it been too long since you descended?”

  “Ten years. It’s become a lot busier.”

  “It keeps getting better!”

  A filthy, drunk middle-aged man approached Tjiq and touched her leg. While she was rotating in her chair, the man’s hand climbed and entered her skirt. She returned his provocative smile, grabbed him by his neck and raised him in the air with one arm. His face turned red and then purple, all the veins in his neck about to explode. He kicked and struggled, but couldn’t break free. Not everyone knew her, apparently.

  Tjiq pushed him against a wooden pillar at the center of the bar, kneed him between the legs and released him. Someone nearby laughed. The man curled on the floor and moaned until a friend went to help him up.

  Tjiq returned and sat by my side, trying to smile, but I saw annoyance in her eyes.

  “You’re going to niche tomorrow, right?” she asked, flipping her hair to the side. “Niche Feminismus always has its doors open to every woman.”

  My parents and my grandfather were intellectuales. It was in my blood.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  Snapping her fingers, she ordered two drinks from the bartender.

  “Redemptores don’t drink, right?” I didn’t know whether the question was directed at me or Qepiem.

  He shook his head without saying a word.

  “How’s your son?” she asked.

  “Don’t talk about my son.”

  “Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you. Don’t worry, you can trust me.” She blinked at me.

  “Nimda said you spoke with the last umbriferum in search of the Great Superstition.”

  The bartender left two green, foamy drinks and turned his back. After checking him out from bottom to top, Tjiq lowered her voice and said, “He didn’t stay that well after that.”

  “What happened?”

  She gulped her drink and licked the foam off her lips.

  “A few months ago, we heard about some mystici venturing through Territory 47. I don’t know if you’ve heard about it.”

  I knew it was an area no one would want to walk in. Abandoned since decades before, it was said to house wild animals from the sewers, ‘monsters of the darkness’ for the most imaginative ones, a confusing and dilapidated labyrinth.

  “Don’t tell me they saw monsters.”

  “Don’t insult me, please. Monsters or not, the truth is that there’s a sinister energy in that place. I don’t know if you know that it was the main area of Umbraland when the sewers first started to be used? It was, until that tragic accident killed so many people. ‘The tumults of September’s fire’, you’ve heard of it, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Why were the mystici there?”

  “They wanted to find the energy that’s connected to the deaths of all those umbriferos. Mystici, what can you do…,” she said, rolling her eyes before taking another sip. “And what they found there was just that: death. At least that’s what people say. Not one of them returned.”

  Regardless of the deal I had with the Conclave, I was definitely not going to venture through Territory 47.

  “And why did the previous missionary want to go there?”

  She set down her glass, moved her stool closer to me and whispered, “I told him not to go. I insisted. But he said he had clues leading him there. Something one of the mystici who had died there transmitted to others. He thought he was really close. Men are very stubborn; we can’t do anything about that.”

  “But he came back speaking nonsense about fire and darkness. Totally nuts.”

  Qepiem spoke to her for the first time.

  “Who is he?”

  Tjiq looked at him from top to bottom before answering, “Qefso Nokabo. The festivi gave him a few chores at their niche for solidarity after what happened to him. He’ll be at the Winners Ceremony the day after tomorrow. But don’t tell him you’re coming because of me. He knows I’m the second-decider of Feminismus and kind of fears us, especially after the Conclave took him all that blood.”

  “Blood?”

  She goggled and covered her mouth with one hand.

  “I’m sorry, I’ve said too much already.” She got up.

  “What do you mean, blood?” She couldn’t keep quiet after something like that. “What’s going on?”

>   She shook her head.

  “I have to go, Cev. Speak to Qefso; he can help you more than I. That was all I came here to tell you.”

  “Wait, Tjiq,” I asked.

  She placed her hood over her head and before turning around said, “Good luck.”

  Then she walked away with a sure-footed pace. On her way out, she looked at the man she had previously kneed and blew him a kiss, right before disappearing through the door.