by Neil Clarke
“A reproduction, Ambassador,” Klary says. “This is the original. Four hundred years old. Priceless.”
Asher waves mention of money aside as if it were a bad smell. He is still not satisfied with Klary’s wares. She has taken a certain pride in the taste with which she has built her collection, even if it is only a ruse to conceal her true intentions. The contents of her gallery and this room are all she has to show for the life she has led since Janary left with her xeni, and none of it interests him. She wonders now if any of it really interests her.
“One hears,” Asher says, “of a rug.”
Klary can feel the swirl of events turning him to her purpose. “I have many rugs.”
“Time passes, Friend Klary. One does not gladly waste it.” His voice changes and abruptly they are no longer speaking. Instead he is commanding. “A living rug. A soulcatcher.”
Klary gasps as she experiences the full force of the xeni’s charisma. Can ecstasy hurt? She knows the answer. “That’s supposed to be a secret.”
“Not secret enough, Friend Klary. Show.”
Klary staggers to the edge of the carpet in the middle of the office, feigning submission. Decorated with a motif of leaves and flowers on a field of blue, it is a nineteenth-century reproduction of a seventeenth-century original that was mentioned in Pope’s Survey of Persian Art. She sinks to her knees, slips fingers underneath and rolls it up to reveal a containment sunk into the floor, three meters by five and half a meter deep. A sheet of x-glass, level with the floor, protects the contents.
The xeni purrs. “So it’s real.”
“As you see, Ambassador.”
Klary’s soulcatcher has no provenance, other than horror stories told to scare children. Created by the Moccen Collective as an instrument of punishment, it is not strictly speaking textile, although it began as a matlike colony of carnivorous plants. Genetically modified to assimilate those who refused collectivization, the rugs were the Moccan’s tool to control dissidents. Since the Collective was enlightened enough to ban capital punishment, those sentenced to incarceration in a soulcatcher were functionally immortal, as long as the colony survived. The Moccen Collective had collapsed some two hundred years ago, and Klary’s soulcatcher seems as healthy as the day it captured the first dissenter.
“A closer look, Ambassador?”
Klary points at the controller and, when the glass retracts, she presses both hands against the rug’s translucent skin. As always, the surface yields to her touch, warm and silky-smooth. Beneath, the heads seem to float in a clear yellow broth of amniotic fluid. Cheeks bump against her palms and sink away, filmy, calm eyes peer through her fingers, lips part, revealing dark, inert tongues. Tangles of veins and arteries, bruise-blue and red, squiggle as blood surges; hairy bundles of ganglia connect the minds of the colony of the damned.
Klary has always found the pulse of soulcatcher hypnotic. She has spent hours at its side, hoping for some sign from those within, listening not with her ears but with her fingertips. There have been nights when she has walked across it barefoot and one when, in despair at her wasted life, she lay naked on it and contemplated slicing the skin and submitting to capture. She believes that the captured know what has become of them, that they are restless but not in pain. Suddenly she is startled out of her dream of communion with the heads. Asher kneels next her and caresses the soulcatcher’s skin with his perfect fingers.
“Alive?” croaks Janary. Without asking permission, she too has approached the open containment.
“Yes,” murmurs the xeni. “But are they conscious?”
“There is no way to know.” Klary sits back. “The stories say they are.”
“They are singing.” The xeni muses dreamily. “Do you hear that?”
Seeing that the xeni is transfixed, Klary dares a glance at Janary. Klary presses a forefinger to her lips and then nods at her sister’s kneeling abductor.
“No,” Janary says.
Misunderstanding, the xeni glares at her and she wilts back into her chair. “One feels for their plight. Name your price.”
“It’s not for sale.”
It takes a moment for the xeni’s mouth to work itself into a smile. “Not?”
“I mean, you don’t understand. This is a registered historical artifact. It’s against the laws of our world to sell anything on the list.”
“Then how did it come into your possession?”
“A gift, Ambassador, from a dear friend.” A dear friend, whom Klary had blackmailed. A parting gift that poor Terez had given as she and her husbands fled their creditors.
“Then this one must hope for your friendship, Klary.”
Klary realizes too late how close she is to the xeni. She tries to scoot away.
The xeni rests his hand on Klary’s shoulder. “Perhaps an exchange of gifts?”
“Ambassador . . . ” The hand unlocks years of grief and anger, Klary’s blistering need for revenge. At the same time, she is so swollen with the xeni’s desire for the soulcatcher that her brain feels as if it’s pressing against the inside of her skull. What she wants and what xeni-Harvel Asher wants are so nearly the same—she must acknowledge their mutual desire. The xeni must have the rug, that is the plan, and Klary must have her sister. But the plan is broken, useless, there is no plan, and Asher is so powerful and she must say something or her head will crack, she must, she must.
“Would I . . . I would . . . exchange.” How can she talk while a fist of blood is punching her chest, clutching at her throat? “I feel as if . . . .” She can’t stop herself. “Need help replacing Elloran . . . useless Elloran.” She gestures wildly at the gallery. “Help.” Now it is all she can do to point at Janary. “Her.”
She hears her sister’s strangled cry of anguish and then the xeni is across the room. Xeni-Harvel Asher thrusts a hand to Janary’s face, palm over her mouth, fingers splayed. “Nothing,” he says. “You are nothing.” She shakes beneath his grip. “Say nothing.”
Klary reclaims her anger and flicks her forefinger to deploy the blade. She slices into the skin of the soulcatcher.
“You want the pet?” says the xeni, who is still attempting to subdue Janary. His back is to Klary and the soulcatcher. “But humans can’t own humans.”
“No, of course.” Klary’s nose fills with the sweet, yeasty smell of the amniotic fluid. “Why did I say that?” As if the xeni didn’t know. “But I did, didn’t I?” She doesn’t know what she’s doing, only that she must do something. She babbles again. “It’s true that Elloran is not the best. Not to own it . . . her. No, but I could train her, perhaps. As an apprentice?”
“She’s yours.” Asher finally lets Janary go. He stoops until their faces are at the same level. “Nothing,” he whispers to her. Klary realizes this is his name for her. “As you worship and serve this one, Asher of Harvel, you will now serve that one, Klary Hamashy.” He breathes into her gaping, agonized mouth. “Your new friend.” Then he laughs.
Klary shakes her head to clear it. Janary is free. Wasn’t that the most important part of the plan? She can stop now. But the price of all those years of suffering must be accounted for. Not only Janary’s, but hers. Their two wasted lives. She looks past the xeni at her sister, who meets her gaze with brutal reproach. She knows Janary then, knows that she is about to warn Asher, who has taken everything from them. The plan, you stupid bitch. The plan.
She hurls herself across the room, throws an arm around the shocked xeni’s neck and drags him back, kicking and gasping for air. Maybe he has something to say, a last plea for mercy, desperate words of command, but he is small and Klary’s anger is large.
“Klary, stop!” Janary screams, but of course, she is nothing.
She thrusts Asher’s head through the skin of the soulcatcher into its roiling interior. Just then Klary hears the captured. They are singing. To her? The song is deafening as she feels the stings of many lashes. They want her too but she releases her hold and falls backwards. Her dripping arm is cov
ered in purple welts. The soulcatcher appears to be swallowing the xeni whole, despite churning legs and flailing arms, but then it spits the headless body out. It slumps away, blood gushing over the rolled up carpet. Ruined.
She remembers the man who sold her that carpet. His name was Lann and they were lovers for almost a week before Klary felt herself becoming attached. Lann had the oddest collection of combs: silver and bone and glass and gold. She had never met anyone before who collected combs. She wonders what became of him. Of her life.
Then she sees realizes that she is sitting in a puddle. She picks herself up. Janary stares at her.
“I did this for you,” Klary says. “Our sisters chose me to rescue you.”
“No.” Janary strangles on the word. “You don’t understand.”
“I was going to buy you afterward, bring you home. You weren’t supposed to know about this. Nobody was.”
The wound she has inflicted on the soulcatcher is already healing. Asher’s head grimaces and turns away from them.
“I had a plan, Janary. All this would have been a secret.” What is that in her sister’s eyes? Hatred? Horror? Fear?
She wonders then if anyone is coming to rescue her.
Cry of the Kharchal
Vandana Singh
She was no more than a breath, a tongue of air, tasting, sensing, divining. She swept through the hotel ramparts like the subtlest of breezes. She had done it: made time stand still. Her people, so scattered now, so weak, had helped her draw the power from the sandstorm, turning its energy against itself so that, for a brief moment, it lassoed time itself. Perhaps the moment would be long enough . . .
Incorporeal though she was, she still thought in physical terms. Thus she thought of the threads of stories that she held in her hands, ready to be woven into something that would change the fabric of reality. She thought of the heavy attire she had worn as queen, and the wings, the yearning for flight over the desert sands, the flight west. All that was gone, but she was still here. Six hundred years against the next few hours—how could mere hours matter against the weight of those years? And yet, if the stories came together . . .
The manager. The foreign poet. The woman. The boy.
It was time.
Avinash, running, crashed into a pillar at the edge of the courtyard. The physical pain brought him to his senses. He leaned against the pillar, panting, and surveyed the scene. Something had happened to the sandstorm. It rose above the hotel ramparts, a tsunami of sand, a hundred-headed cobra, a dark wave against the darkness, absolutely still. A faint susurrus of sand seemed only to amplify the silence. What had happened to the blaring alarm, the roar of the approaching storm? There were only soft sounds, the sigh of sand grains falling against a window, or the dance of a wisp of sand across the floor, borne on a breath of wind. And the bodies. Before him, in the great central courtyard, bodies sat in chairs, or leaned against pillars, or stood frozen in mid-run. Thin skeins of sand still blew about, filling plates and tureens, laps and elaborate hairdos, and the corners of eyes. But none of the eyes even blinked. Were they dead or alive? And why was he alone able to move?
“I am Avinash,” he said shakily into the darkness, as though to remind himself that he was real, that he had to live up to his name. He searched for her again, that comforting, mysterious presence in his mind, but she was turned away from him. “Queen!” he spoke without words, begging for her attention. She did not respond. Sometimes she got like that. He looked around the courtyard. The hotel had been rebuilt on the ruins of a medieval fort to bring to the twenty-first century the lost grandeur of that era. The courtyard had been designed on the same grand scale. Usually its vastness reminded him of his insignificance: he was only the tech person for the hotel’s computer system, a young man with no past and even less of a future. He had come here empty as a gourd, his small, inadequate soul rattling like a seed in the dried shell of his body, so that the scale of the rebuilt fort walls and the lavish excess of the decor always reminded him that he was nothing. Even the long-dead Queen rode his mind as though he was a beast of burden . . . yet what sweet possession! Surely she was the key to his coming glory.
Had time, itself, stopped? Why had he been spared, then?
The queen would know, but she was still turned from him. For months now he had indulged her machinations and schemes, petty though they seemed to him: collecting information, and acting on it to obtain desired results. “If you are to control people’s lives, Avinash,” the Queen had told him, “you must start small, by manipulating the little lives around you. Only then will you be able to touch the power within you.” So he had been doing according to her instructions, developing story-lines in real time, with real people, collecting information, informing, manipulating. He had found out that the manager was a closet alcoholic; the aged movie star had a thing for young girls; and that the mad Bolivian poet was in love with an elusive woman . . . Then a word here, an act there, and events could be made to unfold according to plan. But the storm was something else. Surely he wasn’t yet powerful enough to conjure up a sandstorm, or to stop time? He asked the queen in the depths of his mind, but she was quiet, preoccupied, as though waiting.
Maybe, he thought, striding into the courtyard as he had never dared to do before—maybe it is I who have wrought this. Even if he hadn’t bargained for a sandstorm, perhaps it was a consequence of some unintended magic, an unleashing of power. He had finally grown large enough in spirit and sheer boldness to fill out and own his name: Avinash, the indestructible. He was somebody. He had power over the guests, frozen as they were—look at that young woman in the white silk, frozen in her chair—he could have his way with her if he wanted. He reached toward her.
But quite abruptly a swift, cold, feeling came over him, a wave of aloneness so sudden and icy that he withdrew his hand, trembling. The vastness that he had felt in himself vanished. He was nothing, nothing but a small child abandoned in a large, noisy, frightening railway station. Come back, he shouted to her in his mind, but there was only silence. The queen was gone right out of his mind. He staggered about, pleading with her, forgetting his moment of triumph, his arrogance, begging her forgiveness, seeing nothing, feeling only the terrible emptiness. After a while the queen sighed back into his mind; everything slipped back into place and he was himself again, shaky but sane. She was playing with him; perhaps she was angry, jealous that he had thought of another woman (if only!). Although he had never seen her face, he had imagined it from the old paintings that remained from the original fort. Those almond-shaped eyes, the stern, sorrowful, remote gaze. She had kept herself remote from him also, refusing to reply to his first hopeless adoration of her, until he accepted that she needed only companionship, a tenantship in the spaces of his mind. He could never think of her as a ghost, although the hotel staff did embellish upon the old tragedy when they entertained the foreigners.
Out of habit, he glanced up at the balcony from which she had fallen to her death six hundred years ago. Now it was a place to be pointed to, and talked about, and the room adjoining it was a small museum commemorating the dead queen. Here some of the old paintings still hung, dreadfully marred by time, and on the shelves were the stone statuettes of the birds she had loved, the ones immortalized then and now in the window latticework, the kharchal of the desert—long-necked, with goose-like bodies and long, swift legs. Their eyes were set with semi-precious stones. The old story didn’t mean much to him; not as much as her presence now, with him, a constant companion, someone to talk to, an advisor, guide to his own greatness.
Standing in the courtyard, he heard a sound. Half-lost in the sibilant whisper of sand and wind, there was a distant, unmistakable tapping. Someone was using a computer keyboard.
He followed the sound through the hazy dark until he realized he was going to his own room, and what he heard was someone using his own computer. Angry, fearful, he ran down the employees’ corridor until he reached his door. It was open; a tiny spiral stairway led down
to the floor. From the top of it he could see, firstly, that the haze here was considerably thinner than outside, and secondly, his desk lamp was on, the only electric light in the entire hotel as far as he knew. Before his laptop at the desk sat a familiar figure: the odd-jobs boy and itinerant goatherd, Raju.
The boy turned before Avinash could call out. The round, obstinate face, the guarded gaze, the somewhat mocking adolescent smile. Stick-thin, wearing a second-hand pair of blue jeans, and a faded green t-shirt. What was he doing here? He wasn’t supposed to come to Avinash’s room without permission. But before Avinash could scold him the boy got up, sighing with relief, gesturing Avinash to the chair he had vacated.
“Boss, you are alive, thank god. I’ve looked and looked for you. Listen, you have to do something!”
“What are you doing here? How is it you aren’t like . . . like the others? Oh never mind, get away!”
Avinash shoved him lightly and sat down before the computer. The boy had opened the secret window to the Queen’s Game, the tangle of storylines and manipulations, and had been checking status. All right, so no harm done. The story of the Bolivian poet was important, or so she had told him, and he had located the woman whom the poet sought, and he had sent her a message purportedly from a state government minister about funding for a nature preserve. She was on her way. Was she here yet? Hard to tell because she only stopped at the Maharajah, the 4-star hotel restaurant, on her way to Delhi or Jaipur. She’d never checked in as a guest on her earlier visits. He looked at the other stories that were currently in progress. Expose the manager’s drinking so as to ultimately humiliate the man into resigning. Arrange it so that the two gay men could get a room together. Find a way for the movie star to fund a sound-and-light show—a little bribe and threat had proved effective. All of these stories showed progress, and one was complete. The manager had departed in disgrace, and his room, the best in the old wing, (once a royal storeroom) was in the process of being re-done. Avinash checked his online bank information and saw that the money, from whatever unknown source, had already poured in for the successful outcome of the manager’s story.