by Cat Hellisen
With a soft shh; a ridge of sand rises around me, circling. It’s barely a wall, more like a child’s sand castle. The feather grows in solidity, becoming a small black stone, sharp as glass. I stand and step back as it grows. “And Traget only finally got Anna because she was a fool, and he wore her down with all his endless monologuing. You’ve at least spared me that, and I am only a fool sometimes.”
The stone shimmers then it is gone. In its place Jannik sits curled up, his arms crossed around his knees. He coughs into his fist, then smears his bloodied hand against the sand and winces. “Anna only agreed to marry Traget because she saw her finances failing and knew he was her best chance.”
“So romantic,” I say. “And that’s not why I married you.”
He squints. “What do Traget and Anna have to do with us?”
“I hate you,” I say as he grins at me. “Stand up and help me kill Eline.” I hold out my hand for him and he takes it hesitantly. His palm is sticky and hot.
He gets to his feet and stares at me, his expression almost quizzical. “We can stay here,” he says. “It’ll be … .”
“What?”
Jannik shrugs. “We’ll live longer. Make time stretch.” He half-smiles. “We go back out there, and I know what’s waiting for us.” He has his left hand pressed against his stomach, where there is not even a memory of a wound. Jannik looks down at his hand, seems to laugh, and then looks back up at me. “What are you going to do?”
“Why can’t I use your magic out there?”
“Presumably because I’m not conscious.”
“And we change that how?”
“I – I can’t. I don’t know how.” He closes his eyes as if he is trying to sense something beyond his skin. When he opens them again to look at me I can already tell from the small weak smile that he gives that I’m not going to like what he has to say. “It’s just darkness outside me. I shouldn’t even be here now – talking to you.” He surveys the empty desert that is all that is left of his mental defences. “I didn’t even know it was possible for this to happen, and still live through it.”
I hold on to that. “It means something.” I crouch down to pick up a handful of sand, let it trickle through my fingers. The stream falls, time running out. And it occurs to me that there is nothing left here to keep Jannik anchored. That what he’s hanging on for is not a house of sand and secrets, but me. I’m the anchor. The wind whips my hem around my legs, tearing my hair loose and spitting hard sand against my face. It’s rising, a final scouring storm.
“Jannik?”
He looks at me in silence, the edges of his form already dissolving under the growing wind.
“Take my hand,” I say, and reach out for him. The fingers that close around mine are barely real. I can see my own skin though the ghosting memory. “Hold fast.”
The desert tears away from under us and we are falling though a dark so intense that for a moment I think we have died, and this is just the final, endless moment.
Then my back hits something and all my breath is knocked from my body. There is a solid weight next to me, and the darkness, the darkness. I open my eyes and stare at a ceiling I know from year after year of counting the cracks and water stains. I twist and hold Jannik tighter, all that’s left of his magic seeping into my pores, and breathe in the familiar smell of him, of leather and white soap, and fainter, blood and sweat, and fainter still, sea salt and dune grass. His breath hisses against my ear. I am about to break him. I can feel the bond between us, bright as ribbons. I wonder how much it will hurt. I have his magic, and I no longer need this bond.
It seems I will always be doing the exact thing I shouldn’t.
“Ready?” I don’t wait for an answer. The muscles in his arms tense, and I snap the ribbons, their ends reaching up for the stained ceiling as they fray. The bond between us breaks and it is worse than the pain outside. For a moment. Then it is gone and his body with it and there is only his magic, completely under my control.
I push back into consciousness, into my gasping body. Immediately the pain down my back returns, no longer distant. Or perhaps my sojourn through our minds has made the pain all the more real.
“–capable of.” Rutherook’s voice is strained. “Damn it all, I think the bat just died.”
“How annoying,” Eline says.
I open my eyes. Jannik’s magic is surging through me. I feel like I have too little skin to hold me together, that I’m bursting. I almost expect my body to split like an over-ripe fruit, spilling my insides out along with all this last gathering of power. I suppose it barely matters now.
Eline steps back from me, frowning. “This wasn’t what I envisioned. Ah well, I shall simply have to make do.” He shrugs. “It was the bat I wanted. You can let the girl die.”
Rutherook’s scriv-fuelled magic bites at my throat, cutting off all my air. I have seconds, minutes at most. I draw all the stolen power up in my core and stop fighting the urge to break beneath it. Giving in never felt so sweet. It will be my final act, to slip him from his leash. Peace consumes me. And I am left stripped of all of Jannik’s magic, released.
My eyes are still pinned open as power lashes out in whirlwind of invisible knives, tearing Eline’s surprised head straight from his neck and sending it hurtling across the room to land at Yew’s feet.
Yew blinks, then throws up a shield before it can do the same damage to him. Rutherook, preoccupied as he is with strangling me, is not as lucky. I feel his death, the way he splatters, chunks of flesh and bone spraying across the room. Karin explodes like a berry popped between finger and thumb. My hair is matted with his brains and blood, and I slide to the floor gasping, released from the magic at last. The storm rages all about me, tearing Eline and Rutherook and Karin into increasingly smaller pieces. Their blood paints the walls, drowns me under, and soaks into the carpet, turning the deep blue wool a sodden black. It batters uselessly against the scriv-shield Yew manages to keep up.
When the storm blows itself out, I crumple, and close my eyes. Let Yew kill me then, it is already past the hour of my ending.
“Interesting,” he says in the sudden silence. “Fascinating, even.”
I slip back into the dark and the memory of Jannik.
DOGLEAF
I heard funeral chants. They were distant dreams while I was buried under a blanket of soft goat wool. I was neither awake nor asleep. Instead of being alive, I lay in a half-world of raging sands and alternating fogs so damp and heavy that they pinned my arms to my sides, kept my eyelids pressed shut. It was better to stay there than wake and deal with everything I’d lost.
My skin feels tender and stretched, even the slightest movements pull at stitches, remind me of my bruises.
The thunderstorms rolled out the days, counting each passing afternoon in flashes of lightning. In the dripping silence after the rain, the pied crows kah at each other in the gardens. Light seeps into my room.
Carien’s ghost watches me silently from the dusty streamers of sunshine.
Or perhaps I am dreaming.
I fall asleep again.
* * *
“You should be glad you missed the funeral,” Harun says. It sounds like he’s sitting near me. I’m almost alive. Servants bring me light soups, tea for the pain, they shake me gently awake and make me eat, but this is the first time I remember Harun coming here to this sick room. So I have been saved, but I don’t care.
“Bloody awful affair.” He sighs, and the leather of the seat creaks. “I’m not grateful to you. Not for going off at Eline like that, thinking you could save everyone like some grand hero.” I suppose, at the very least, with Eline’s death the proposals will be forgotten, and we have bought Isidro and the other vampires a little more time before the next fool decides to revive the idea. There will be no more vampire murders. I’m sure Jannik would have thought it worth dying for.
Harun’s boots sound dully on the carpet. He’s pacing now, his voice moving away, then closer, away agai
n. It’s annoying. I will him to stand still. “You’re damn lucky, and you should be dead.”
Damn lucky. If I hadn’t broken the bond with Jannik, I would be dead. Luck. I suppose. If one wants to call it that.
I drift back into my safe little cocoon of nothingness. Inside my head, the childhood room is gone. There is no sign of Jannik or anything else. I set to the painful task of rebuilding, even though I don’t know why I am bothering. Using my room again seems wrong, somehow. Instead, I call up a desert of glittering sand; a white beach without the sea to soften it. An empty world. I sit cross-legged in the sand and pull the walls up around me, raising them higher and higher and curving them overhead, blocking out all the light. I stay there in my dark empty house.
It feels wrong. I am not Jannik. He is no longer a part of me. I am a War-Singer, and our art is strange and subtle and fragile and sharp. I press against the sand, heating, changing it, and the walls shimmer and turn pale, letting in a golden wash of light.
An empty glasshouse. Jannik had his birds, his rippling streams. I fill my house with secrets and memories that are as varied and alien as the plants I have painted in my little botany books.
* * *
When I am finally able to sit, the servants help prop me up with hard pillows, bring me heartier fare to eat, and send for their master.
“Finished sulking, have you?” Harun drags a chair across the room, and sits in it with an irritated sigh.
I wait for him to tell me the news. I want to ask him about what he did with Carien’s body. I want to ask him how Jannik’s funeral went – who went to mourn him, but the words burr up in my throat, tangled and tight.
“Yew turned his coat,” he says. “But I suppose you must have realized that much. He asked for the Lark, in exchange for bringing you back to us.”
The stew is cold and thick. My hand trembles as I press the spoon to my mouth.
“I thought it a small price to pay.”
I wonder if the time will come when I will not care.
“You broke the bond,” he says. “Isidro didn’t know that was possible. He still insists that it’s not.”
“You have your proof.” They are the first words I have spoken in so long that my voice sounds as if it belongs to some other person. Perhaps it does. There is an emptiness in this new Felicita that can only be filled up with a lifetime of bitterness and longing. In my glasshouse, the memory of lying against Jannik unfolds, the petals curling outward. The words I never said to him hide thornily among the black sea roses. “I am, after all, alive.”
“And as waspish as ever.” He stands. “Eat your food. Rest. Recover.”
I close my eyes and wish him away. This time it seems to work. When I am ready to look again. I am alone. I force myself to push down the covers. I feel feeble, and old. Brittle. Somehow I manage to hobble to my dressing table, to the little hand mirror. All it shows me is my own reflection, wan and ghostlike though it is. Of Carien, there is nothing.
Even so, I press my mouth close to the glass, so that my breath mists the silver. “I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I killed him.” For you. “You can go now.” I bring the hand-mirror down on the corner of the table, so that it shatters into a thousand pieces and scatters across the plush carpet.
With that done, I manage to drag myself back to bed.
* * *
I wake to a face that I wish I could bring myself to hate. Isidro is standing in the doorway of my room, leaning against one side, almost hesitantly. It seems that he is not yet ready to walk into this sickroom. He is holding a leather-bound book in one hand, a slim volume with gilt edging the pages.
“Of all the people I do not wish to see, you are the very first of them,” I tell him. He is a reminder of everything I have lost. Lost because of him, if I choose to look at it that way.
“Tell me how you broke the bond,” he says.
“Regretting your marriage?” I look away from him. Someone has cleared away the broken mirror, and left an arrangement of dried dogleaf on my bedside table. One of the Hobs, I suppose, determined to ward off the cats while I was dreaming. A fixative for perfumes, meant to help it last longer. Somewhere in my glasshouse, dogleaf is blossoming. A fixative for memory, meant to make it last longer.
Isidro laughs in derision. “Not as much as you seem to regret yours.”
“I regret nothing,” I say. “Nothing about that, at the very least.”
“And yet you’ve not once asked about him.”
“What good would it do to ask after a corpse?” I ask bitterly. “Am I to ask what was inscribed on his stone, if the rain fell or the sun shone, how many mourners you had to hire?”
Isidro frowns. Finally he steps into the room and throws the book on the bed. It lands just off my lap. A copy of Traget’s Melancholy Raven. My heart seizes, and my face feels frozen and dead.
“Here,” Isidro says. “Jannik can’t walk yet, but he says to read it again, that this time you might even enjoy it.”
I make myself look up at him, too scared to ask him to repeat himself.
“Yew kept his heart beating until the physicians could be called.” The vampire shrugs, and for a moment he looks almost vulnerable, his cold mask slipping. “And so we are both in Yew’s debt.” He snorts, and the flicker of emotion passes. “Or were you hoping that you’d freed yourself?”
I take the book in both hands and hold it close to me. I can see Jannik as I remember him. Head bowed at his desk, tea growing cold at his elbow as he reads this book for the thousandth time. The skew-sharp smile, the fox-fast kisses, black hair and white fingers and all the futures Harun has seen for us. I’m crying. I wipe the tears away and find laughter and relief bubbling together in my chest. My glasshouse brightens, the flowers throwing back their heads to the sun.
“Just for today,” I say to the surprised Isidro, “I will forget to hate you.” I break a sprig of dogleaf free. Keen interest, and a fixative. “Go tell Jannik that I’ll read his damn book. And give him this.” I hold up the innocuous little sprig of grey leaves and yellow buds.
Isidro leaves me alone in the room with Jannik’s treasured poetry for company. I brush my hand across the thin creased leather of the cover.
Not that alone. Not alone at all.
The following is the opening chapter from the upcoming novel Bones Like Bridges where the lives of three disparate people meet and entwine in ways they could never have expected, changing the face of their city, and their world, for ever.
THE GRINNINGTOMMY
There’s going to be a burning down on Lander’s Common.
Burning days don’t come along often. Here in the Digs outside MallenIve city - well it’s a bit of entertainment to go watch someone die. Better’n picking over the rubbish the Lams throw out from their fancy houses, at any road. Better still than sitting on my own, feeling all sorry for myself because Prue went an let herself die.
I’m cutting through the Digs to get to The Scrivver’s Hole where Oncle will be throwing back a pint, stone dust still in his hair. The old brick pub is squeezed twixt a pawn shop an a butcher’s; the edges of the bricks crumbled an turning black from the mine smoke. I turn down a dirt street, dodging nilly shit an beggars. The reek of blood an inners from the meat-house almost smothers the sour-porridge smell of the brewery behind the Hole. The sun beats down, high an far away.
Speaking strict, I ain’t allowed in the Scrivver’s Hole ‘til I turn eighteen, but I’m so close that old Lyman never stops me coming in if I’m alone. It’s my pack he won’t put up with.
“Your lot’ll rob me blind and then spit in the beer,” he says, which is mostly true ‘cept for the spitting part. The pack would just drink it. No sense wasting a good high.
But I’m alone - most of the Digs’ pack has already headed down to the common to go watch the burning - so Lyman pays no mind when I slip in to the dark pub. He’s talking to Oncle, who has his back to me.
“The lad’s not going to like it much,” says Lyman, poli
shing a murky glass with a rag that’s almost as black as the bar counter.
Oncle leans forward, all tired-like. “It’s not that I like it myself. But I’ve no power in this, the law’s on that bastard Lam’s side. Besides,” he says and sighs into his pint. “Might be that he could do a better job with Jek than me or Prue ever did. Lad runs wild, an there’s no denying it.”
“Firm hand is all he needs – Jek.” Lyman’s spotted me, an the conversation stops. Oncle shifts on his stool, nods me over. I’m wary now. Just what the old codger has up his sleeves, a body’s got to wonder.
The bar counter is full of tired old Hobs, backs bent from years working underground. All the scrivvers are up from the mines, cooling their burnt hands on the glass, their iron picks put up for the day. They drink slow, sipping to make the ale last. Oncle’s near the end, so I slip over to him an sit, pretending we’re all chummy-like.
“You gonna buy us one then?” I says.
Oncle just laughs into his bitter. He’s been working longer an longer these days, trying to make his quota in Deep Black. Said he’d try an get me a job working scriv, but there’s more’n more old Hobs laid off recent. The chance of Oncle having a spare bit to buy me a pint is about as likely as our scrounger shitting silver nuggets.
Then he says, “Might do,” which surprises me, cause we play this game all the time an the answer is always no. May be that he’s feeling bad for me ‘cause of Prue. Been less than a week an it still don’t feel real.
Even now she’s gone I can’t call her mam. She never did like it.
Oncle waves the keep back. “A half Rusty Black for the lad - on second thoughts, make it a pint, Lyman.”
Lyman lifts an eyebrow, well he only has one – a huge thing that crawls over his eyes like a windle-grub. Still, he pours me a bitter an pushes the glass over to me.
The faint tang of scriv an hops wraps round my face, heady as magic, before I take a sip.
Scriv is what gives the Lams their power - what they use to tap their magic, an it‘s more precious than air. It’s what they use to protect the city from the Mekekana and the like. So we owe the bastards at least that much – without them we’d have been churned under iron wheels a long time ago. So we mine their scriv an clean their houses an say yes-sir, no-sir, whatever-you-say-sir. An in return, they get all addled on scriv and keep the city mostly safe.