The Poison Master

by Liz Williams

  An ill time, full of sickness and disappointment, old sorrows… She would rather be at home, tending her plants, than traipsing across Deadwife Causeway to pay her devotions, but the summons had been slipped beneath her door that evening, only an hour before. She could not disobey; it was her turn to take the Search tonight. It was the duty of all chosen citizens to participate in the Searches, the one thing that united them against the Unchurch.

  Alivet trod in a puddle of fen-rot, turned her ankle, and swore. Seven weeks ago, the ceremony had been held in the basement of one of the old buildings at the back of Luce Vo; a more salubrious location in the city's center. A cold and sudden raindrop snaked down the back of her neck and Alivet was relieved to see the outlines of the stilt-farm rising out of the waters of the marsh.

  A guardian was standing at the door. In silence, Alivet held out her summons. The guardian took her hand.

  “One moment.” She felt a pinprick at the end of her finger, sending a single drop of blood to hiss into a crucible. The clear liquid within turned a glowing red as soon as the blood touched it. The guardian nodded.

  “You're marked off. Thanks for coming. In through the left entrance. You know what to do.”

  Alivet followed these instructions and found herself in a long, low room. It was a barn; she could see the barrels of frogs and creek creeper, destined for Levanah's markets, stacked with untidy haste against the wall. She sat cross- legged on the floor, tucking her long dress beneath her and noting with annoyance that her top-skirt had a fresh burn. Around the hem, acid had eaten away the fabric until it resembled the skeleton of a leaf. How had that happened? But she remembered a drop spilt from a crucible the day before, sizzling to the floor as it fell. She had bought the skirt only a month ago and already it looked old, but it would have to wait another year before she could afford to replace it. All the money between now and next Memory Day was earmarked for Inki.

  Wing cases crackled beneath Alivet as she settled herself. The farmer could have swept the place more thoroughly, but probably had not had time. News that this was the meeting place would have reached the farmer only a short while before Alivet received her own summons. The barn was filling up, people filing in behind Alivet and sitting down around her, all in silence. A seeker appeared at the front of the assembly, carrying a second crucible. Alivet's sensitive nose caught the odor of tonight's drug: dreaming menifew, combined with opium. It was to be one of the trusted psychopomps, then, nothing new and experimental.

  Be thankful for small mercies, Alivet thought. She did not fancy staggering home across the causeway, nauseated and shaking from someone's experimental brew. She wondered briefly what the Search must be like for someone who had little knowledge of hallucinogens and alchemicals. As a professional drug-maker and apothecary, at least she herself was familiar with the substances involved.

  Still no one spoke. The crucible was handed to a person in the front row, who hunched over it for a moment and took a long, unsteady breath. The crucible was passed on. Alivet watched impatiently as each participant breathed in the drug in turn. The sooner this was over and done with, the more quickly she could return home. She had work to do that night, a preparation for a client on the following day, and she was already tired.

  Alivet took a deep breath of musty air and closed her eyes, reciting the five-year-old reminder. The harder she worked, the more she would earn. The more she earned, the quicker she could pay the unbonding fee and buy Inki back from the Unpriests and their masters. If she continued to work hard and all went to plan, Inki could be back home within the year. Then perhaps she could find her sister an apprenticeship, and they could rent a few rooms in a decent house…

  It was an old dream, and this was not the place or time for it. The crucible was already at the end of her row. She needed to prepare for it, not spend her time in daydreams.

  The people in the front row were starting to slump, lying huddled in their cloaks on the dusty, wing-sharded floor. At last, the crucible reached Alivet. She took its warm bulb in her hand, then hunched over the flute-hole and breathed in. The smoke filled her senses, murmured in her head. She did not remember passing the crucible on, but her hands were suddenly empty. She stared down at them: her fingers were callused and stained with acid and ash, and they seemed suddenly magnified to incredible significance. She could feel the weight of her long braid, dragged down by the twelve rings of her apprenticeship. Her head was suddenly too heavy to bear.

  Alivet pulled her hood over her face and curled up on the floor, staring into warm, sparkling darkness as the drug coursed through her. Dreaming menifew: green, chthonic, familiar. It was one of the companion plants, not an enemy that needed placation and the small sacrifices of vomiting or mania. She focused, conjuring up an image of the plant: a thick, sap-filled stem, fleshy leaves with a black-jade gloss, small crimson flowers like drops of blood. She sent the image within, calling up the spirit of the psychopomp.

  All drugs had spirits attached to them; it was simply a matter of whether those allied beings were friendly or not. But Alivet had met those attached to menifew before. Obligingly, the drug's spirit whispered to her, promising visions. Last time, it had been vetony and she had had to fight it, driving it back as it threatened to swamp her rational mind, but all the menifews were a friend to the Search.

  Images pulsed past: a marsh mome drawn to the ceremony, its blades wheeling and snapping; then a vision of her own small room as if viewed through the end of a telescope. Patiently, Alivet waited for the neural froth to subside. Her aunt's voice murmured in her head: Don't ever be afraid. Even if the spirit of a drug is your enemy, you must trust it. If you fear it, it will snatch you into the world of the lost until it passes from your blood and you will come back with nothing except shakes and fever. That had happened once or twice, of course, until Alivet learned how to steer and guide.

  You must learn, Alivet. She could see her aunt Elitta standing before her, dressed in her customary long black skirt and red shawl, holding a bundle of knitting. The women of our family have been apothecaries for generations, Searching like so many others, involved in the Long Dream. It is your duty to participate, to find out where we come from.

  Aunty? What are you doing here? Oh. Of course, you're not really here, are you? Why, for a moment I thought—

  Stop babbling, Alivet, her rational mind instructed her kindly. Attend. Concentrate.

  She still had occasional nightmares, of things glimpsed in a drugged depth, but that was common to everyone. At least she had not failed as a Searcher; a few did, every year. The Search was secret, but somehow everyone still knew, as though folk held the knowledge of that failure in their faces.

  Alivet, unfearing now and acquiescent, slid down the green and growing paths of the drug, seeking lost answers. Nothing was there, only the conjurings of menifew: water dreams, the flick of a fishtail into deeper seas, a voice whispering at the edge of hearing. Alivet turned in to the susurrus, but it was only a rhyme, chanted over and over again as if to a child. Here we go round the mulberry bush…

  What was a mulberry bush? Alivet wondered if it could be important, then dismissed it.

  It was at that point that she thought she saw something on the horizons of her mind: something small and glittering against an abyss of night. She directed her gaze toward it; it grew rapidly larger. It was a drift-boat, hanging in the heavens against a skein of stars. Alivet sidled against it like a seal, peered through a porthole to the massed ranks of human captives: her ancestors, with the dancing form of a Night Lord moving between them.

  They were all a little different, the Lords, as if their species had borrowed scraps and patches from all manner of creatures. This Lord had a narrow, inhuman face, sharp mandibles twisting at the base of the jaw, and long clawed hands. But the drift-boat was the means by which humans had come to Latent Emanation and she saw her world now, hanging over her shoulder like a great dark eye.

  Only the boat? Alivet questioned the menifew. I have
seen this before; show me more. Show me where we come from, which world. Show me the Origin, the object of our long Search. Her phantom fist hammered on the porthole of the boat, seeking to wake the rows of floating forms. Their limbs had become entangled, as though they lay in water, having recently and sweetly drowned. Her gaze fell on an elderly man: a sleeping figure in a plain black robe, with a forked beard and a narrow face. The man's face was closed and grim. Even in sleep, he looked angry. Alivet wondered why.

  Who are you? My many times great-grandfather? What is your name?

  But the unconscious man did not reply.

  Alivet cried out into the void to her ancestors: You knew! You knew where you, and therefore we, came from, but you did not speak. Why did you never speak? For surely this was the greatest secret of all, concealed by even the most ancient texts. And in the midst of her drugged dreaming, Alivet thought that perhaps heresy was truth: that her ancestors had never known, or, worse, were the creations of the Night Lords themselves, golems of animated clay who shambled and shuffled out their days and had no secret to tell to the ones who came after.

  Even as the thought sped out, she knew it was a mistake. With vegetable slowness, the scene seeped and changed. The boat was no longer there. She was standing in a long hall, ringed with lamps of unlight. A Lord stood before her, its shadowy carapace swathed in mottled robes. Beneath its arm, Alivet saw a girl with a pale, drawn face. She held a smoking brazier, offering it beseechingly up to the Lord's jaw. As she bent forward, Alivet saw that there was only a puckered pinprick hole where the girl's left eye had been, and in the same moment she recognized her sister.

  “Inki!” she cried. “Inkirietta!”

  The girl turned and her face twisted in puzzlement.

  “Who are you?” she asked. “Do I know you?”

  “It's me, Alivet…” and then as the girl's mutilated face still betrayed no recognition, she cried, “I'm your sister! Don't you know me?”

  She sprang forward into the scene, like someone stepping into a picture, and gripped Inki by the shoulders. The Night Lord towered above them. Alivet saw its head swinging from side to side like an anube's muzzle. On each cheek, a slit opened to reveal a lining of bristling darkness. This Night Lord could not see, but it could smell.

  “Inki,” Alivet whispered. “Inki, run!”

  But the dreaming menifew, with a psychopomp's unreasoning power, deemed that she had seen enough and snatched her away and out of its lure. Or perhaps, the thought came to her, the Lords of Night watched even this most secret dreaming and had flicked forth their power, casting her out.

  She lay shivering on the floor of the barn. A guardian hastened over to help her up. The moment a person was free of the drug, the watchers wanted them gone, in case they disturbed the dreams of others. Alivet was tugged gently to her feet and into a small adjoining chamber full of grinding equipment. A recording device stood on a mangle and the person seated behind it spun the recorder's wheel so that the brass drum started to rotate. Alivet leaned forward and in a rapid, trembling whisper related her vision into the speaking-tube. She told it only of the drift-boat. She did not mention Inkirietta. When she was done, she was given a reviving cordial and shown through the door of the barn. The lights of the distant city gleamed at the edges of the marsh, and a haze of autumn stars hung above her head. Alivet, breathing cold fresh air, swallowed her despair and started on the long walk home.

  She felt as though she had really stood next to her twin, that it had not just been a vision. But if it had been a true seeing, then her sister still remained in the grip of the Night Lords; half-blinded, not knowing those dearest to her. She should have tried to keep hold of Inki, she should have some how done something—as though it would have been possible to pull a living person through the visionary barrier of a drug and into the world.

  Alivet's eyes filled with tears of anger and frustration. She brushed them away and wiped her nose. This was foolish. The only thing that she could do to save Inki was to work as hard as she could and buy her sister back.

  Her senses, stimulated by the drug, were still resonating. Lights danced at the edges of vision, and as she was halfway down the causeway, she heard a sudden sharp footfall behind her. Alivet whipped around. There was nothing there. She could see a little knot of people by the barn, illuminated by the sudden opening of a door. Then the door closed and they were gone. She looked toward Levanah. The lights of the city lay before her, glowing in the darkness.

  Uncertain, Alivet looked back once more. A figure was standing behind her, eyes like hot red coals. Alivet cried out, stumbled away. The figure was abruptly gone, down into the marsh. Alivet stood shaking, with her hand pressed to her mouth, trying to make sense of what she had just seen. But the causeway was quiet and the surface of the marsh untroubled. It was the residue of the drug, she told herself, or some phantom or lich come to lure her from the causeway. Turning, she hurried toward the city and the light.

  It took her another fifteen minutes to reach the end of the causeway. From here, she had the choice of returning via Fond Hope Hill, or taking the quicker route through the series of alleyways known as the Strangulations: a reflection upon their labyrinthine narrowness. Neither was safe. The neighborhood of Fond Hope Hill was known for footpads and garglers, whereas the alleys bordered on the Unpriests' districts, a place called Ettar Vo. At this time of night Alivet decided to chance the alleys: a deadlier risk, perhaps, but one more swiftly run. She set off in the direction of the Strangulations.

  Alivet's luck held as far as the end of the alleys. She saw no one apart from a man and a child, whispering in a doorway, but then she turned a corner and came face-to-face with two Unpriests. Both wore the same garments—the long coats, the leather boots, the round rotating monocles—but one of them was a woman. It was the woman who veered toward Alivet.

  “You! Show me your pass.”

  Alivet, reaching into the pocket of her skirts, complied.

  “Name: Alivet Dee. Address: some slum somewhere. Profession?”

  “I'm an alchemical apothecary.” Alivet peeled off her left glove and held up her hand to show the trademark wheel tattooed upon her palm.

  “Make perfumes and possets, do we? Yes”—she seized Alivet by the chin and turned her face to the lamp—“you've got the pinched face of a drug-maker. And where have you been this evening? Servicing some whore with cut-price odors or cheap hallucinogens?”

  Since this was entirely likely, Alivet decided not to take offense.

  “Actually, yes.”

  “Where does she live, this whore? Or is it a boy?”

  “It's a woman,” Alivet said, improvising madly. The Unpriest's monocle began to rotate, slowly unscrewing itself from the pale mask that was the Unpriest's face. Alivet remembered her aunt's early instructions: Do not look them in the eyes. They will be able to see into your head and steal your thoughts away.

  Who knew if that was true? Yet she had no desire to seem shifty. She fixed her gaze on a point slightly to the right of the Unpriest's shoulder.

  “And where does she live?” the Unpriest repeated.

  “Back there somewhere. The place has a blue mark on the door; I don't know the address.”

  “You don't know.”

  “No. I could probably find it again, though, if you want to go back with me and look.” She was risking a lot on their laziness, but if she cooperated as much as possible they might grow bored. Indeed, the male Unpriest tugged at his companion's sleeve.

  “We have better things to do. Wasn't there a rumor of a game in the Trowels?”

  His tone was filled with a suppressed urgency, suggesting an imminent relief would be required. Alivet decided that she'd prefer not to know what he was talking about. Whatever it was, sex and violence were probably on the agenda.

  She saw the woman give a slow, cold smile.

  “Can't we bring her along?” She tickled Alivet under the chin.

  It was all Alivet could do not to bite the Unpr
iest's finger off.

  Then the woman smacked Alivet so hard across the side of the head that she fell against the wall.

  “Go away. I'm tired of you.”

  With pleasure, Alivet thought, and hastened away before the Unpriest changed her mind. After a few steps she realized that she had dropped her glove, but she had no intention of going back for it. Replacing the glove would cost money that should go toward Inki's unbonding, so she'd just have to keep her hands in her pockets if the weather grew cold.

  She hurried through the Strangulations and did not look back until she turned the corner into Small Maim Street. The Unpriests had gone, and good riddance to them. Alivet was going home.

  Chapter III

  CITY OF LEVANAH, MONTH OF DRAGONFLIES

  Once home, Alivet adjusted her gauze mask and leaned over the swarm tank. The memory of the Search, and the red-eyed stranger, would have to wait; there was work to be done. With satisfaction, she noted that three more hatchlings had appeared since the previous night, making twelve altogether. She reached for the tongs and chased each squirming hatchling through tendrils of wire-weed and water-moss, catching them with care and drawing them from the tank to be placed in the celled saving jar. This done, she rotated the glass seal that kept the contents of the tank secure, and locked it. Then she carried the saving jar to the sink, and stood it in the smallest water-bath. Impelled by this soothing heat, the hatchlings would grow, and then she could take them to her booth in the public alchematorium and begin the first stages of extracting the narcotic fever from their cells.

  It was a painstakingly delicate process and Alivet much preferred the plant-work—in addition to feeling sorry for the hatchlings—but river-fever dust was pricey and popular and she had little choice. Besides, Genever Thant had made the commission and since he was her principal employer, that was that.