From around his neck he removes a leather necklace. Strung there like an amulet is a falcon’s egg sapphire. It’s one of the more priceless gems in all the desert, but one would never know by looking at it, with its surfaces grimed with oil and soot. It’s wrapped tightly in leather cord so that it looks like a cargo net lifting a dirty chunk of sky. This is my prison, the place I’ve been held since Brama and the girl known as the White Wolf trapped me here.
Wrapping the leather necklace around his hand with a flick of his wrist, Brama tightens his grip on the gemstone and steps down into the mud. His sandals sink as he walks, squelch as he trudges forward. When he comes to a place where the water has pooled, he squats and stares into a reflection that is imperfect—much like the landscape of his scar-torn face. The scars are an unsubtle reminder of a time when I was the master and he the chained. He was a comely man once—even I recognize that, a being who’d seen countless years pass in the Shangazi. It might have been why I was so pleased to make him cut himself; something about seeing himself destroy his own beauty pleased me. Part of me now regrets having done it to him, but I was wroth with the godling children who’d come for me; wroth as well that I’d been forced to take Brama when the one I’d really wanted was the White Wolf.
“She was never yours to take,” Brama said to his reflection.
For months now Brama has somehow been able to hear snippets of my thoughts. It happens when my guard is down, so of course I quickly replace my walls, but I know already they will fail once more—my will is strong, as is my god-given power, but nothing I have done in this place seems to last.
In the water’s reflection, a new visage forms, slowly replacing his. Long black spikes lift from his scalp as his curly locks of hair recede. Horns jut from a black-skinned forehead, curving back and around like a ram’s crown carved from ebony. Slanted eyes tinged with rust replace the green of Brama’s, and while Brama had always possessed features that were fair, more feminine cheeks and lips and chin replace his own.
Fear, as it always does, builds in Brama’s breast. It isn’t so much as it once was, though, which pleases me greatly. He of all people knows the danger I represent, but he’s become accustomed to me, a necessary first step in gaining my freedom and all the more important considering the effect we just witnessed illuminating that girl.
I say to him, “What is it you wish, my master?”
“How many times must I ask you not to call me that?”
“Are you not my master?”
“You are a fiend, and my enemy.”
My visage laughs, and both of us feel a brightening, a candle lit and doused in as little time as it takes a mortal child to giggle. “What shall I call you, then? Brama the Mighty? Brama the Bold?”
Though he chooses not to reply, curiosity overrides his fears, creating a strange alchemy of caution and hope. “Tell me of the girl,” he says. “Why was she twinkling like that?”
“It’s how I see you sometimes.”
“Mortals, you mean.”
“Yes.”
“But why does it happen? What has it revealed about her?”
“It means that she is someone who will affect your fate, or the fate of others who are dear to you, or both. It means she is someone around whom the winds of fate do whorl.”
“That tells me nothing.”
“It’s no more complex than predicting the weather by judging the clouds and the smell in the air. It is another form of sight, granted me by Goezhen, or perhaps a thing passed to me when I was crafted from his soul. Who can know any longer?”
“Is that why you wanted Çeda? Was she like that?”
“Oh, yes.” How bright that one had been. How very bright.
Brama considers this for a time, and I wonder what happened by the river. He’d been as transfixed as I, watching that girl rush away from the Haddah. For the first time since I’ve known him, I feel curiosity emanating from him like heat from a brand, and an urge to involve himself in something, anything, outside the tiny world he’s made for himself. I resist the instinct to influence him—he’s grown disturbingly good at sensing when I’m doing so. Instead, I simply wait.
“Shall I find her again?” he finally asks.
I hide my grin as I speak, “That is completely up to you, my Lord Brama.”
He seems irked by the answer but says nothing in return. Slowly, my visage fades from the silty puddle, until he’s staring at himself once more. He runs his fingers over the kindling-pile pattern of his scars. He stares around, to the now-empty banks of the Haddah. He feels the empty space inside him opening up again. He may hide it from others but I know how desperate he’s been to find someone. A friend with whom he can share stories. A woman he might love and be loved by. He’s confusing the lights with the sort of young love all mortal youths seem to experience. I do nothing to disabuse him of the notion—it is yet another step on the long road to freedom, after all—but it also touches my heart. I’ve not lived with humanity for so long that I am unaffected by the emotions my hosts feel.
Soon, he’s standing and tugging on the cowl that keeps his face hidden from the world. His mind is elsewhere at last, and it leaves me alone with my secret. The girl. The lights around her. It’s true that they are tied to Brama’s fate. But more accurately, they are tied to mine, and I have no doubt now that this girl will be the key to escaping my faceted prison once and for all.
* * *
Three days pass before Brama spots the same girl. He’s standing in a darkened doorway as she approaches a spicemonger’s cart a half-block distant. She’s wearing a different dress, a blue and white jalabiya. It’s as threadbare as the last but well made, with fine stitching, the sort a woman of means might once have worn. Her black keffiyeh lies loosely around her head, but oddly, as if she wasn’t born to it and had only recently started wearing one. She glances warily along the street as the plump fruit seller uses her pewter scoop to fill a burlap sack with dried wolfberry.
Brama’s curiosity rises. And for good reason. Wolfberry has a pleasant enough flavor, but the aftertaste is bitter as oversteeped tea. For this reason the fruit is not favored by most market-goers in Sharakhai, but it sells well enough in the Shallows, mainly for its ability to help ease the lows that go hand in hand with an addiction to black lotus. The girl shows none of the effects of addiction herself. Her hands don’t shake as she passes over a small handful of copper, nor are her lips bloodless, and her eyes are anything but sallow. There is, however, an undeniable weight on her shoulders. A sense of worry. A natural reaction, I suppose, if someone she loves is deep in the throes of withdrawal, but that wouldn’t explain why she’s constantly looking up and down the street as though she’s worried about being discovered.
As it did the other day when Brama first spotted her, a play of lights flit about her, tumbling through the air. They look like a chromatic flock of cressetwing moths, mesmerizing as they brighten in the shadows and fade in the shafts of morning sunlight.
They have never failed to amaze me. And it’s no different for Brama. He stares, rapt. But as the wind-tossed flecks of light slowly disappear, it bothers him greatly. He’s suddenly convinced she will die. Brama has no way of knowing, but the lights never remain with a single soul for long, and I have no way of sharing this with him, not until he summons me again. Truth be told, though, I don’t know that I would even if he did. His indecision glows like a beacon fire, a thing somehow pleasing to my muted senses. It’s clear he wants to go to her, but what would he say? He knows by now, or at least suspects, that her fate is entwined with his, but the likelihood of scaring her with but a word is a near certainty.
No sooner does the thought cross his mind than the girl spies him in the doorway of the shisha den. The sheer depth of terror seen in her eyes convinces me of two things: first, she’s afraid of being found, and second, she isn’t sure who might be hunting her, else why be so frightened of a man she’s never met?
Wrapping he
r keffiyeh tighter around her face, she snatches the bag of wolfberries from the spicemonger and sets off briskly down a different street than she’d taken here.
Brama, feeling more than foolish, debates whether to follow. What would I tell her? he muses. Hello. I’m Brama. I’ve seen lights around you. We’re fated to meet. He laughs at the very thought, but then notices a man exiting the street the girl had taken here. He wears beaten trousers and a dirty, sweat-stained shirt. He’s short and lithe as a willow, and moves with the gait of a man used to masking the sound of his footfalls. He weaves past two men carrying a dusty, rolled-up carpet, then follows the girl.
He is the one she fears. Brama and I both know it.
Another block up, where the traffic grows thicker, the girl glances back. She looks straight past the man following her to Brama, and then ducks into a winding street that will take her toward the heart of the Knot, a maze of narrow alleys where one might easily lose pursuers if one knows the paths to take. No doubt she does, but she doesn’t see the man turn and sprint along the street closest to Brama, an avenue that could easily be used, assuming one moves fast enough, to cut her off.
After a moment’s indecision, Brama draws his knife from its sheath along his forearm and sprints after him. Brama takes more care than I’ve given him credit for. I forget that he grew up on these streets, that he once prowled the city’s rooftops. He moves deceptively fast, and uses the crowd to his advantage, hugging the edge of the street, so that when the man glances back, Brama slows to a walking pace and angles toward a ramshackle chandler’s shop. He reaches for the candles hanging like sausages from a length of twine as if they were exactly what he’d been after.
The man moves on, and Brama resumes the chase, moving faster now, nearing the place where the angled avenue the girl took rejoins the street they both now race along. Ahead lies a square where the buildings lean precariously, a tangled courtyard of sorts, formed and held in place by a crisscross of rooms and roofs and makeshift bridges built on the shoulders of the original structures. The man steps into the shadow of a bath house awning as the girl appears ahead, moving briskly but warily.
Brama creeps along the rough stone of the bathhouse behind the waiting man, his confidence and nervousness mixing to create an intoxicating brew. I, on the other hand, sense something amiss, the sort of worry that buzzes at the base of the skull like a trapped hornet. Had I my proper form I could discern what it was with a moment of concentration, but trapped as I am all I can do is to try to warn Brama.
One moment I’m pushing Brama to be wary, and the next, Brama’s senses flare as the sound of pounding footfalls nears. Brama dodges to one side as someone barrels into him from behind. Pain bright burns along his side and the back of his ribs.
Brama loses his knife as he tries to break his fall against the dusty street. He scrabbles away from his attacker, a man with a wild beard, wilder hair, and a ratty thawb—a beggar from the looks of him, but I can already see he’s no beggar. His teeth are clean. His hair and beard, though messy, are anything but grimy. He’d pass for a beggar at ten paces, but to my eye the disguise is plain as a mummer’s mask. Whether Brama senses the same, I do not know, but given the man’s aquiline nose and high brow, I have few doubts he’s the ally of the Malasani who waits in the shadows.
As Brama and his attacker wrestle across the dusty courtyard, those who’d been loitering or walking along the street back away. Brama takes another cut along his forearm from the slim, straight knife. They roll into a trash heap and his assailant pounces on top of Brama. The man stabs the knife at Brama’s neck. Brama snatches the man’s wrist, holding the knife at bay. Then he rams a knee into the attacker’s ribs, and rolls out from under him, twisting the man’s wrist until he drops the blade on the dirt.
As the man Brama was following rushes to help his comrade, Brama rises and backs away, spreading his attention between the two men. Wisely, his opponents fan out, and soon it’s plain to see they’re used to fighting with one another. The smaller man darts in. The moment Brama turns to face him, the wild-haired one rushes forward. In one sinuous move, he throws Brama over his hip and slams him to the ground.
Blood pours from the knife wound along Brama’s back. It flows along his forearm as well. For me it is like a fount from the gods, the very source of the essence of life. I would drink of it if I could, so heady is its scent, but a wall stands between us. Yet it doesn’t have to be so. If Brama would simply accept the power I’ve offered him... I offer it again as the beggar straddles him, as he holds the tip of his slim knife against Brama’s neck. For the first time since being trapped within this gem, I worry. There’s no telling what these men might do when they find the sapphire hidden beneath Brama’s shirt. Please, I beg Brama, take but a sip of my power. Take it, and save yourself.
Brama, however, remains resolute. I feel the revulsion and hatred he holds for me. For the first time, however, I feel temptation as well.
The man kneels on Brama’s chest. “Who are you?” he asks, his Malasani accent thick.
“I am but a relic of a man,” Brama replies. “A ruin.”
The Malasani grins. “Even ruins can be buried, so I ask you once again—”
He never finishes those words, for just then a length of wood appears, piercing the man’s neck with a sound like a hook piercing a pig’s neck before it’s hung for slaughter. Yellow fletching graces one end of the shaft of wood, a bloody broadhead the other.
The man’s eyes go wide. He coughs wetly, spitting warm blood across Brama’s face. He tries to pull the bolt free, but stops when his own blood spurts in a torrent across Brama’s shoulder. His jaw works, as if he’s still trying to ask his question of Brama—who are you?—but then Brama rolls him aside and scrambles to a stand.
Ten paces away stands a man in a stained nightdress, one foot in the stirrup of a crossbow as he strains to lever the string back. He looks as though he can hardly keep his feet, but he manages to lock the string in place. With shaking arms, he lifts the crossbow and sets a fresh bolt into the channel, but before he can lift it and aim, Brama’s second attacker darts away into a tea house that has just opened its doors. As the tea house’s proprietor shouts in surprise after him, the lanky man in his night clothes lifts the tip of the crossbow until it’s aimed at Brama’s chest. The girl stands behind him, a slim knife to hand, looking like she knows how to use it.
“A question was posed to you,” the man says, crossbow poised and ready. He speaks Sharakhani well, but with noticeable notes of a Malasani nobleman’s upbringing. He glances at Brama’s attacker, who’s fallen still, staring at the sky as blood drains weakly around the shaft of the crossbow bolt sticking out of his neck. “As he seems indisposed, perhaps you would be so kind as to give me the answer in his stead.”
“I am no one,” Brama replies.
“You’re a liar,” he spits back, and raises the butt of the crossbow to his shoulder.
The lights have begun to swirl around the girl once more. Her eyes are round with worry. She keeps looking back over her shoulder, toward a cluttered alley that leads to another part of the Shallows. She’s deferring to the crossbowman, a malnourished man with sunken, jaundiced eyes and hollowed cheeks, but she clearly wishes to leave, to run, to hide themselves in the city. As she swallows, perhaps stifling something she was about to say, the lights around her move to encapsulate the man as well, though the effects aren’t nearly as bright as they are around her.
I can feel Brama’s desire to leave, though he isn’t so desperate as this girl. He wants to return to his room and hide from the outside world, but his curiosity over the lights, the girl, is too strong. “I am a man born and raised in these very streets,” Brama finally says. “I see who comes and who goes. I’ve seen her”—he points to the girl—“come here, bright-eyed, worried. And today I saw that man, the one you just let get away, follow her. I know when there’s trouble about, and I didn’t want it to befall her.”
Aft
er a moment’s pause, the man lowers the crossbow a fraction. “These are your streets then? You’re like to the Silver Spears, beholden to the Kings of Sharakhai?”
Brama spits onto the dirt. “No. But this is my home, and I would protect it.”
He looks Brama up and down, his eyes lingering on Brama’s scars. “A tattered prince.”
Brama nods. “A tattered prince.”
“In the future”—he begins backing away, grabbing the girl’s arm as he goes—“if you happen upon me or my sister, you’ll be sure to walk the other way.”
“Wait.” Brama takes a step forward, but stops when the man brings the crossbow up. “Who are you?”
The man merely backs away, crossbow in one hand, the girl’s wrist in the other, then he and the girl turn and jog down the street. Soon they’re lost from sight, and the bystanders, who’d been watching warily, one by one lose interest and return to their day.
* * *
The following morning, an insistent pounding shakes the door of Brama’s room above the tannery. The smells in the air are horrible, acrid, like horse piss, but it keeps people away, and that’s all he really cares about. As he rolls out of bed and stares at the door, the memories of the fight in the streets play across his mind. He wears only his trousers and bandages around his wounds. He probes them gently, finds them to be healing faster than he’s expected. A gift from me, though I don’t tell him so.
When the pounding comes again, it’s more insistent. “Open this sodding door, Brama!” a deep voice shouts.
Brama pulls on a shirt, takes up his curved kenshar from the bedside table, and unsheathes it. He stares at the sapphire, my sapphire, and a vision of the man he’d fought in the streets flashes through his mind. As he slips the necklace over his head and stuffs it into his shirt, I feel something I’ve been working toward since becoming trapped in this gem. I was beginning to think it would never happen, but the relief in Brama, even if slight, is clear.
Evil is a Matter of Perspective: An Anthology of Antagonists Page 27