by Nik Korpon
She holds her hand up, opens and closes it, mimicking a mouth.
“It’s not talk, Môr. Others feel the same, and now there are enough of us allied. All the pieces are moving,” he says, “and Ragjarøn is backing me on this.”
Even hearing the name Ragjarøn – the fearsome governing party led by Ødven and Federijke Äsyr in one of the far northern lands – makes me queasy and cold.
“They’re thousands of miles from here,” she says. “Those elk-sodomizers aren’t going to hop-to for some skuffôlse like you.”
“No, not for me.” A smile creeps into his voice. “But they will for Daghda.”
His mother straightens slightly, as if invoking the name has inflated her body with pride. “Daghda’ll never come back to Eitan. He barely even came back for that cooze and her girl he kept up in the hills.”
“I don’t know about any woman or kid, but he’s tired of wandering. He wants to retake what’s rightfully his. He is a Morrigan, after all.”
“You a psychic now? Reading people’s minds?”
“No,” Belousz says. “Ødven told me.”
“You went to Vårgmannskjør?” She says something in her language that sounds resignedly impressed.
“Three weeks ago,” he says. “That enough initiative for you?”
She pauses, says, “Three weeks ago you told me you couldn’t bring me to worship because Fannae had you running around.”
Now Belousz pauses, likely arranging his words perfectly. “You can’t confess what you don’t know. If something went wrong, I didn’t want it to come back on you.”
“So now you care about your old Môr?”
He ignores her. “I know all about them from your stories growing up. I know Eitan. They have the firepower we need.” He shrugs. “It made sense, so Ødven is calling on Daghda.”
“Screw me sideways,” she says.
Belousz shakes his head, scratching the patch of skin over his eye. “The rebels are going to attack again, and we’ll make sure no one stops them. They’ll finally have their chance to cut down Walleus, and there will be no reason not to go after the Promhael and the rest of the Tathadann too, probably destroy half of Eitan in the process. Then Daghda will swoop in with all of Ragjarøn behind him and put the city back together again. The people will see their savior returned, and my group takes control behind him, with or without a hypothetical daughter. Eitan becomes an ally of Vårgmannskjør, Daghda gets to sit on high, and everyone’s happy. And then you can get a better apartment, OK?”
“Don’t discount his girl. That’s his bloodline. They said she’s a miracle. Conceived when he was past sixty. No man I’ve known can get it up that old.”
Belousz conceals his shudder. “Môr, that would make him nearly eighty years old now.” She gives little response, instead going through the motions of her devotionals, though it looks half-hearted at best. “Now can we please stop talking about this? It’s been a really bad couple days.”
She rummages around in her handbag, pulls out a tampon, and sets it in his palm.
“Why the hell do you still carry these?” This earns him another slap.
He starts to protest but she raps him on the knuckles to hush him, and nods to the front where a squat man appears from a door behind the altar, adorned in a torn velvet robe with a jeweled glyph hanging at his sternum. He holds his hands up in the air, calling out to all the gods in the same tongue as the mother. It reverberates through the empty cavity of the temple, splintering into hundreds of incantations. Belousz’s mother begins to whisper in concert with the priest. Belousz moves his lips but I doubt he says any words.
I wonder how long they’ve been planning this, and how they were able to keep any word away from Walleus. He might be preoccupied with Morrigan at the moment, but he needs to know this. And I will be more than happy to inform him that Belousz is planning to have him killed, though I do feel a little bad for him, seeing as how his new best friend is a duplicitous asshole. That’s the price he has to pay for rank, being too busy putting out the many fires at his feet to notice the axe swinging at his neck. And to think that this is who he’s selling me out for. I suppose ambition and self-preservation can also be an affliction.
The incantations become louder, their voices harsher. They move through two movements of the service. The priest rolls his sleeves above the elbow, blue veins like a river map. He holds an exquisite knife above him, asking the gods to anoint the cold steel. Light glimmers on the handle, the jewels winking at me.
The mother whispers harshly to Belousz, who stands and slowly proceeds up the aisle to the altar. A flutter in the rafters, sprinkling ash down on us. I find myself suddenly missing Silas. Belousz kneels before the priest and offers his arm. The knife glides through his skin like a swan in water. His body shuddering, he raises his arms above his head, allowing the blood to flow down in quiet pulses.
The priest creates two matching marks on his own forearms. He places his wrists over the patch of skin on Belousz’s face where there was once an eye, blood pooling drop by drop. He dips his finger in the blood, draws a slash on his forehead and each cheek, then does the same to Belousz.
He walks down the center aisle, flicking blood over the congregation, anointing them. It’s only now I realize all the brown flecks on the mannequins I thought were dirt are dried blood. He finishes his procession not more than ten feet from me. I can smell the copper on him. He returns to the altar and resumes his chanting.
Belousz stays genuflecting for a minute, his body shaking, but I can’t tell if he is laughing or shuddering. He stands and wipes clean his eye, flicking his hand at the ground as if the blood is a piece of tape he can’t remove from his fingers, then goes back to the bench and bows without his mother having to rap his knuckles. While their heads are bowed, I creep through the shadow without a sound save my own pounding heart, hurrying between stone columns to a side door, and exit into the street.
They come out an hour later. I follow them back to her tenement and wait.
* * *
When the hot needles of circulation deprivation prick the bottom of my thighs, I finally admit the possibility that while I’ve been hiding amid the dirt and grime in the alley beside the burnt-out carcass of an official Tathadann vehicle, that bastard has been inside sleeping. The sky lightened hours ago. Emeríann has to be wondering where I am. Again. If she even came home. She might still be holed up in Johnstone’s with Lachlan and the others, preparing Forgall’s body and refining the plans. I wonder if she used anything I pointed out.
I don’t believe Belousz’s talk of Ragjarøn, that a low-level grunt like him could pull off a coup like this. He must be drawing on his mother’s stories to bolster his position within the splinter group, and maybe get back in her good graces alongside his dead brother. But still, I need to tell Emeríann, make sure that she and Lachlan are prepared for what may come. Except I don’t know if I can tell her yet. I promised that I would support her in her plan. And I have, by staying away, by not interfering, by telling her I believe in her. But telling her that all of her hard work and planning has only been made viable by the betrayal of one of the very people she is fighting against – I’m not sure how well she’ll take that. Or maybe, more accurately: I’m not sure how well she’ll take that from me. For now, we’re all fighting for the same thing. I won’t rob her of that accomplishment until I have to.
Walleus, though, Walleus is in for a hell of a shock with Belousz. If I was a more magnanimous man, I would knock out Belousz and bring him to Walleus, make him answer for his transgressions and let Walleus have the opportunity to right them. But I’m not. This bastard killed my family, and it’s my right to kill him.
And I suppose Belousz’s betrayal – of the Tathadann, of Forgall, of Walleus – shouldn’t come as any shock. We’ve all betrayed ourselves time and again, and only sometimes was it in the name of survival.
A crooked woman shuffles up to me, woolen field blanket draped over the hump of her sho
ulders. Dirt covers her face, only streaks of skin visible. She carries the overall impression of a walking knoll.
“Greens, grasses,” she says. “You trade. You have? Please, help.”
Before I can shoo her away, I hear the door open. I watch the window reflection of a slightly less destroyed car on the street. Belousz steps out the door, stretching his arms over his head. My knees crack and the brilliant burning sensation of blood courses through my legs as I stand. The woman asks me again and I tell her I’ll bury her headfirst if she doesn’t leave me be. Belousz begins to walk.
I grab the rebar and take up behind him. I will learn why my wife was murdered. I will find out what he actually knows about the coup, though I have a feeling that Emeríann will be sorely disappointed: Belousz will not be the one to make me change my position on Daghda’s returning, or his being a savior. A Morrigan is a Morrigan.
As we pass the next alley, I glance around to make sure there’s no one to see my face. Then, rebar in hand, I approach him as quickly as I can while remaining quiet – the muscle memory never leaves – and wrap one arm beneath his armpit and around the back of his neck, my other arm cinching his wrist backward, up over his head. Part of me hopes he tries to fight so I can rip his shoulder free from its socket. I push him into the alleyway, slam him against the wall of his mother’s building. Soot from the wall covers half of his face. His throat trembles, his one eye burning bright with hatred.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” he says. Dried blood crusts his covered eye.
I push words through my teeth. “Why did Toman kill my wife?”
“Because I told him to.”
“Why?”
His lips curve upward slightly. “Because they told me to.”
I smack the butt-end of the rebar against his mouth. Teeth shatter, sprinkle over the ground. The faint vibration spreads through my palm. He sucks in hard through his nose, trying not to give me the satisfaction of seeing him suffer. Blood drips from the corner of his lips. I hold the metal before his good eye. “Next time, I take your sight. What happened to my wife and son?”
A smile slithers across his face. “You want me to beg? Bargain with you so you won’t kill me?”
“Rest assured, there’s nothing you can say that will keep me from killing you.”
“She was working with us.” Every ‘s’ whistles over his broken teeth. “Told us about every one of your raids, where and when.”
I slam his head against the wall. His knees wobble, body lilting to the side but staying upright. His eyelid flutters.
“She knitted sweaters for the half-breeds we kept in the basement, crocheted gloves for the flipper-babies.” He pauses a moment like he’s waiting for me to laugh. “They don’t have fingers.”
“Answer me.”
“You’re going to kill me anyway. It’s how we’re wired.” He licks the blood off his lips. “But once you and Emeríann Daele bomb the water plant – and I know you will, Henraek, because you’re like me–”
“I am nothing like you.” I hear Walleus’s voice clanging in my head.
“–all it’ll do is give Daghda more reason to return. And there’s no way you can’t bomb it because it’d still be hanging out there, some obstacle that got the better of the great warrior. It will eat at you for the rest of your life. Then he’ll come back, and everything you fought for…” He blows a puff of air at me. Poof, it’s all gone.
“Daghda’s dead,” I say, gauging his face for a reaction. “Years ago.”
“But he’s the great hope, right? The man who saved Eitan, only to be displaced by Morrigan? They’ll eat that story up because they need it, and when the first shot is fired, they’ll rise against the Tathadann.” Smug satisfaction radiates off him. “You can kill me, Henraek, but that’s not going to stop anything. It’s all in motion already and it’s bigger than me anyway.”
“How many of you are there?”
He shakes his head, but that lazy smile persists. His top lip catches on a shard of tooth. “So you kill me today. In a couple days you’ll be as empty as you are now.” Faint voices in the window above us, like crinkling paper. “Without a purpose, without some feeling that you’ve been wronged, you have nothing. The only thing that keeps you moving is revenge. You don’t know who you are, so the only way to know where you stop and something else starts is by what’s pressing against you.”
“That’s a dangerous amount of insight for a man about to die.”
That smile will not go away. Maybe blood is seeping into his brain. The voices above us get louder, become clear, and his expression finally withers. That burning in his eye shifts. Fear now, not anger. It’s his mother, arguing with another old woman. Moira, probably.
“And you can keep your goddamned room, you old flappy bag,” she says. “Your son is a lazy, no good schælis.”
All I do is smile.
“Henraek, look at me,” he says. “Look at me, Henraek.”
“My Bellie, my bårn? He’ll be a goddamned king, he will.” The other woman crows at his mother’s bragging but it doesn’t dissuade her. “While you’re selling out your parts for a couple coins a ride, he’ll be watching over this city from his perch, watching that goddamned Clodhna burn.”
He tries to jump forward but I slam him back against the wall. “Henraek, you stay the hell away from her. She’s done nothing. She is not in this, you hear me? You stay away from her.”
“Your bastard children are going to see statues and those damned holograms of my bårn. They’ll read about him in their history books.”
“This is how we’re wired,” I say, finally swinging my eyes down to his.
“Goddammit…” He reins in his voice, struggles to keep it level, to not let his ragged breathing obstruct his words. “Henraek, listen to me.”
“You sold out your best friend in the Tathadann,” I say, “and I should listen to you?”
“It’s easy to make decisions during peace.” He bucks against my arm. “But we’re about to start a war. He would understand, and he would make the same move if he were me.”
“You don’t know him at all, do you?”
“My Bellie’s a good goddamned boy,” his mother says. “He’s a boy a mother can be proud of.”
“Whether you know what happened to my wife or you don’t, whether Daghda’s alive or not,” I say, cocking my head, “you were never going to tell me anyway.”
He lunges at me, and I scream and strike. The rebar clanks when it hits the brick wall behind him. Belousz sucks in hard, his eye wide, mouth agape. Blood leaks from his mouth while more pours around the edges of the rebar now sticking out of his throat.
I slide the needle into his temple and harvest him.
“Before you disappear,” I tell him, “you need to understand something.”
His pupils dilate, irises vibrating like a terrified animal, trying to look up in the direction of his mother’s voice.
“I am nothing like you.” I switch the vials, slipping the other into my pouch, tipping his head to aid the flow. Where in all of this liquid the memories of my dead wife reside is a mystery and I will not let this be for nothing.
His eyes roll to the side, mouth moving, but the words are wet with blood and the only thing I can make out is Forgall.
“This has nothing to do with him,” I say.
He whispers, “Don’t watch us.”
The liquid continues to drip even after his eyelid flutters, fades, and comes to rest half-open. I’m suddenly aware of how bad this alley smells, not like the tang of rotting meat but more the acrid smell of chemicals, of bodies pumped full with medications. I wait until there is no liquid left, then slip the vial next to the others and drop him on the alley floor. If I knew anything about his mother I would leave her a memento of him, something small to remind her that her son loved her and is in a better place. But I don’t, and he’s not.
Her son has brought me some solace, though. The still-shining streetlamps cast everything with a
weightless sort of tint through the morning haze. I will finally understand why Aífe died. I will find something – anything – that will help me discover what happened to Donael. It won’t close the hole in my chest, but perhaps it will be a little less gaping.
As I pass through the city on the way back home, I feel the Earth tilt ever so slightly on its axis.
* * *
Noise inside our apartment. Scuttling. Banging. Scratching and cursing.
I was followed. Someone else saw Belousz and Forgall. Morrigan found out about Emeríann and me. A hundred variations rush through my head as I lay my hand on the doorknob, but they’re all the same: someone has come for us.
I slam open the door and hear Emeríann grunt in the bedroom. I hurry across the living room, already reaching for the rebar but realizing I left it in Belousz’s throat. No matter. I will destroy them by hand.
I burst into the bedroom. Emeríann is poised on one foot, trying to slip on the only nice shoes she has. Her dress rises up her thigh and I can see the ripple of muscle as she balances herself.
“Again? Really?” she says.
I consider explaining it all – Belousz, the albatross that I no longer carry, Ragjarøn – but stop myself short. “It’s a long story.”
“Then tell me later.” She exhales as her foot finally slips into the shoe. “We have to go.”
“Go?” I can feel the vials radiating heat, my fingers and brain twitching to watch them, begging for understanding, an answer.
“Forgall’s funeral starts in an hour.” She grabs clothes from the bed and tosses them at me. “I picked something out for you. Get dressed. Now.”
I strip off my dirty clothes and toss them in a corner, laying the padded vial belt on the foot of the bed. She picks up a bag, packed with extra clothes, and sets it by the door.
“I need to clean up,” I call to her. “Go ahead without me.”
She ducks her head into the bedroom, raises an eyebrow. “Your job right now is to get dressed.”