by Kim Smejkal
The plague doctor felt Diavala’s anger—only a simmer at first—surge with Michali’s declaration. “I’m not a believer either,” he said slowly. “But fools are those who think they know everything, not those who claim the unknowable.”
Michali cocked their head, trying to puzzle out the plague doctor’s meaning. Celia called it Riddlish, but to the plague doctor, his Riddlish words were often the ones he thought made the most sense. “I just mean,” the plague doctor said, “that any soul who knows anything knows he doesn’t know a thing.”
Understanding dawned on Michali’s sharp-featured face, and they laughed. “And any soul who knows nothing knows he knows everything,” they added.
The plague doctor’s smile widened. “Exactly so!” How was it he’d manage to find someone exceptionally fluent in Riddlish in such an isolated town?
After promising to deliver the pants to the shop later for mending, Michali left, their long hair swishing against their back as they walked away.
Diavala’s irritation at Michali’s secular views felt like a wasp’s nest swarming inside him. He held up his hand, wondering if he could see his bones humming from the outside. Lately he’d felt her emotions so much more.
For someone who’s existed a thousand years, the plague doctor thought to Diavala, you’re quite sensitive.
“Profeta is a religion of caring. Of love,” Diavala said. “You of all people understand what lies at the end of life. I know you see my work as the mercy it was.”
He cursed out loud, startling the horse tied to a post nearby. Profeta reassured believers that they would get the afterlife they deserved: follow the ink, rest assured you’re making the right choices, all will be rewarded.
He’d do anything to believe that what he did in life actually mattered, rather than to know that everyone got the same afterlife, regardless.
No reward for virtue, no punishment for sin.
Everyone gets the same helping of that same nothingness . . .
He shuddered, remembering that place for only a moment before he slammed that door shut.
It’s so damned inconvenient that I can’t lie to you, Diavala. If Celia ever found out that he sympathized with Diavala’s intent, she’d never speak to him again.
But if the plague doctor was tired of one thing, it was of Diavala acting like a blameless victim. I think you might have started in a good place, but that doesn’t discount that you ordered throats slit and unwavering obedience. He resumed his pacing after scanning the side streets for Celia.
“You know so little about me. I am entirely separate from what the religion Profeta became. I didn’t tell the mistico to be so harsh. I didn’t tell them to mercy kill those with the Touch.”
At any point, you could have stopped it, the plague doctor pointed out.
“I couldn’t. Before I knew it, I had acolytes ready to do anything. You probably won’t believe it, plague doctor, but the beginnings of Profeta had very little to do with me.” She laughed without mirth, the sound echoing in his temples like tinny bells. “I’ve been powerless for much of my own story.”
That resonated with the plague doctor more than he wanted to admit, but memories of Vincent screaming with the Touch were seared into him. Those pained screams, and those blades that silenced the screams of his dear friend. His first crush, years ago, which he’d never admitted to anyone, let alone Vincent himself, and now, infuriatingly, only Diavala knew about.
Diavala might have thought she was powerless, but she’d taken a lot of people down with her. You still gave people the Touch, he said, breathing through his sadness. That was a power you wielded indiscriminately.
Diavala didn’t say anything for so long, the plague doctor thought their conversation was over. People began scurrying home for the supper hour, and the sun began to set. How long should he wait before getting truly alarmed? He trusted Celia, but he couldn’t decide if it was a good thing or a bad thing that her conversation with Halcyon was stretching into the night.
He took some Kinallen powder out of his pouch and played with a small flame, bouncing it in his palm as he paced. The purple and blue fire helped chase away dark thoughts and sad memories.
“Not indiscriminately,” Diavala finally said. “Never indiscriminately. I wasn’t always this way.” Diavala was uncharacteristically quiet, as if she were confiding in him.
The plague doctor snatched the flame from the air and snuffed it out, his fist as hard as a stone. Are you talking about your life? Your human life, before you . . . changed? He pushed against part of the redbrick wall of the inn and slid down, ripping the fabric of his jacket and giving Michali another thing to mend.
“My human life was as short as a blink. No, I’m talking about the beginnings of my curse.”
He’d never thought about the origins of her body-stealing powers; she was just Diavala: a nuisance that would eventually drive him mad and kill him. But he had to admit he was intrigued, and what an excellent name for a Commedia production: The Curse of Diavala—the Curse of the Divine . . .
“At first I stayed in every body until they died of natural causes,” she whispered. “I couldn’t control where my soul went next. It was always the closest body. So I lived and then died with one person, then lived and died with the next. There was no decision on my part, and because I didn’t leave them until the end, no one wailed with the Touch. But take the time to understand, for a moment, that I wasn’t just inside their body. I was also inside their mind. I felt everything they did.”
For the first time, the plague doctor saw the child she must have been so long ago. Her eyes were wide. They were scared. According to Profetan doctrine, she’d been only ten or so when she’d been killed, so the curse that brought her back to life—of a sort—had been inflicted on someone considerably younger than himself.
Diavala had died over and over again. He’d only died once, and he was the first to admit it had all but wrecked him.
Despite the surge of sympathy he’d briefly felt, the plague doctor couldn’t keep the scorn out of his thoughts. But at some point you decided it was better to have control. Even if the Touch was an unintended consequence of leaving a body before their time, it was still a choice she’d made, over and over.
Torturing Vincent had been a choice. Not keeping the mistico from slashing his throat had been a choice.
This Curse of the Divine is the curse of everyone who’s ever encountered you, he said, opening his hands and lighting more Kinallen powder. The merry flame danced in his trembling hands. It’s my curse now. It’s Celia’s. It’s a curse with a long trail of bodies and mourners.
Without any warning—like casting open a window to let in the breeze—the barricade between their minds came down and Diavala cycled through a series of her memories. Some were blurred with the passage of time, some were crisp brands that would never fade. But all of them were so viciously inside him, they could have been his own memories. The flow of Diavala’s consciousness trying to penetrate his had been a trickle before. Now it was a flood. She was him, and he was her.
The flame snuffed out with his gasp.
In a moment, he lived death upon death: lung infections that took a long time to squeeze out that last breath, accidents with horses, or falls that had everything to do with fate, even death by poison, in one person who’d made one too many enemies.
And with them, he felt their fear of the unknown, he felt every grief and regret.
Then a plague struck.
His soul went from sufferer to sufferer, death after death, all in quick succession. No lapses without pain. No family.
All around him, over and over again, only death.
“What was the purpose of all that suffering?” Diavala asked, letting him go.
He gasped again, putting his hands to his eyes and ducking his head to his knees, panting. It was the plague that broke you, he said. Maybe she would have continued on living with each soul until their natural passing, if not for that unnamed plague, ce
nturies ago. Even though she’d closed the window between their minds again, he still smelled the stench of rotten flesh, felt the despair of parents holding their dead babies, knew the horror of eyeballs that oozed blood. In one of her memories, a plague doctor with a mask exactly like his had bowed his head and offered a lily—the flower of death—before walking away. And she’d turned away from the gift because she’d already received so many lilies before.
“Maybe you’ll see now, plague doctor, why I turned my curse into something Divine,” Diavala said. “I stepped forward and claimed my role as deity. I vowed to bring comfort to those who needed it. Through Profeta, I gave people hope. In me and those tattoos, they found solace. A few casualties will never outweigh the good I did for thousands upon thousands of souls.”
Still reeling from the onslaught, his heart thundering fast, the plague doctor brought out his purple and blue fire again, tossing it up and down in his palm like a feather, trying to calm down. The purple was like the shadows under grieving eyes, the blue was like the lips of the dead . . .
He snuffed it out again and stood. Scattered. Shaking. It was taking too long for him to feel like a plague doctor again. He flicked out his hands and jumped up and down in place, briefly considering running. If he ran fast and far enough, maybe he could outrun Diavala. He had youth on his side, after all.
That thought made him laugh, earning another concerned look from Davi through the window of the inn.
No, he thought, still jumping. You’ll never convince me that Profeta was more good than bad.
Maybe Diavala had started out with good intentions—he could certainly see the appeal of fervently believing the afterlife wasn’t a terrifying place—but that couldn’t erase what Diavala had done, going from host to host, adopting their lives, taking over. If he entertained the idea that Profeta was a blessing for Illinia, that would cast him and Celia in the roles of villains for bringing it down.
That wouldn’t do.
You’re selfish, he said. You should have suffered your curse alone and kept right on dying with everyone.
That would be his final judgment. For Vincent.
He had no doubt he would be Diavala’s next casualty, and he dreaded everything about the place he would be visiting again soon, but he would rather die a thousand deaths than torture innocent souls with madness.
As if sighing, her thoughts weary, Diavala said, “Well, I hope you don’t have to face that choice, plague doctor. I hope you never realize what a bullshit sentiment that is.”
The plague doctor barked out another laugh—a discordant sound to the wasps still rattling around inside him—as Diavala retreated.
What an odd thing for her to say. Not real and upside down.
Then he did what he did best when he was confused.
He smiled.
Chapter 7
Celia appeared in front of the Outside Inn. Their horse, Aaro, nickered with faint alarm and tugged at his hitch, confused about where she’d come from. Same, Aaro, same.
She didn’t know what to make of the meeting with Halcyon. Her body tingled with adrenaline—the crash was coming—because it had been so much more than she’d expected. In hindsight, following him into his home had been an exercise in stupidity.
Knowing what she knew now, she could have just as easily not come out. Anyone with the ability to rearrange a town at will, move people from one place to another, and mix a lethal poison in a matter of seconds wasn’t someone she ever wanted to upset.
It was also what made her zing with possibility. He’d confirmed in a handful of ways that he was more powerful than Diavala. That he had answers.
Celia had acted on impulse at every juncture of that meeting, following emotions rather than calculating responses, because there’d been literally no time to think. New information piled on top of new circumstance, and she’d gone from one step to the next without any thought to where the path would go.
You got lucky, her bees whispered. From now on, beeeeeeeee smarter.
She giggled, appreciating the pun, and then had to grab the hitching post so she didn’t keel over, lightheaded from whatever had just happened.
Too bad his power came from the ink she hated so much.
“Celia?” Griffin bolted to standing; she hadn’t seen him there, leaning against the front of the inn. “Dia, what happened?” he said, wrapping her up in a hug made of pure panic. “It’s been hours. I thought Obi—”
“I’m fine. It worked out fine,” she said, pushing him away and almost toppling over, still wobbly. She had thought Halcyon had made the town disappear, not her. A vortex of rearrangement, with her inside the eye of it, untouched. As if the town were a changing maze and he was in charge . . .
She could be in charge, if she agreed to his terms. She hated to admit it, but she was curious as to how he’d done it. She could wrap her mind around illusions, even complicated ones, but transporting a person from one spot to another seemed more akin to folktale magic than to illusion. How powerful was the ink, truly? How far did its capabilities stretch?
“Well? What did you find out? Can he help? How does he do his”—Griffin waved his hands in a poofing motion—“tricks?”
Griffin, in a bit of a state, grabbed her arms again and held on tight, as if to make sure she didn’t dematerialize again.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asked. “I said everything was fine. Relax.”
“Diavala said that if you didn’t come back within the hour, you wouldn’t come back, and it’s so hard to ignore her when she’s right inside your head—”
The smile fell off Celia’s face. “Wait, you’re talking to her?”
Griffin stepped back. “Don’t you dare lecture me, Celia. It’s not like I have much choice.”
“When did this start?”
Griffin flushed at the accusation in her voice. When he spoke again, his voice trembled. “We both know where she stands. Nothing’s changed. What I don’t know is what you’ve been doing for the last three hours, why you smell so terrible, why you have a wild look in your eyes like you saw Obi the Giant himself, and whether or not the director in charge of Wisteria’s stage is going to help us.”
“It surely hasn’t been three hours,” she said. But the sun was a little too low on the horizon . . .
“Oh, Dia, save me,” he muttered, looking to the sky. “Of all the things I just said, that’s what you’re going to focus on?”
As they walked around the back of the inn and up to their room, she stared at Griffin, wanting to tell him everything, tortured that she couldn’t. Hoping a few details could appease him, she told him some of what had happened.
To anyone listening—to one creature in particular who was definitely listening—Celia had encountered an eccentric artist.
One who somehow had his own batch of Divine ink and had raised Diavala’s wrath a few years ago because of it. One whose hatred for Diavala ran deep, but who wasn’t at all interested in getting involved in Celia’s current quagmire.
Most of that was true at least, but she said nothing of Halcyon agreeing to help her if she agreed to help him.
There, see? she told her bees. I’m already being smarter.
If Celia decided to stay, Diavala couldn’t know about their true alliance until it was too late to do anything about it.
With every word, Griffin moved from panic to curiosity to revulsion and back again, cycling through every emotion just as Celia had. “The ink,” he kept mumbling. As if that explained everything and nothing at the same time. “If he’s not going to help us, we need to leave. Anya would hate this.”
At any mention of Anya’s name, Celia’s stomach went into knots. “You think I don’t know that?” she said.
Griffin trembled, his eyes shining fever-bright as he stared at her. And his reaction was merely at the idea of her conversing with someone who used the ink. How red would he be if he knew the rest?
“If Halcyon had told me how he survived the Touch, trust me, I w
ould have led with that,” Celia said. She had to sit down. Bare floor planks for a seat and hard bed for a backrest. The lies were starting again. Her life was made of them. “But this is a good start. I just need more time to convince him to help us.”
More time as in by tomorrow, when she had to make a decision.
Griffin didn’t look reassured by this in the least. “More time with someone who almost blew us out of town with a windstorm? With someone who plays with the ink you supposedly hate so much like it’s a toy?”
“The only person who’s ever used the ink as a toy is currently the one I’m trying to get out of your head, Griffin. Diavala is the one who used the ink to manipulate most of the country. She’s the one who used it to enslave people like me.” Celia inhaled and puffed it out quickly. She needed time to think, not talk in circles. “Halcyon is a weirdo, a hermit, an eccentric, but it looks like all he does is use it for this town. We’re here because we need him, remember? And he almost blew us out of town because he thought we were here to steal from him!”
Griffin stood over her, his hands resting on his hips, looking anything but convinced that this was the right move. His head cocked to the left, but his eyes were narrow slits. He looked as if he were debating whether to shake sense into her or haul her out of Wisteria over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
Did he see how all her reassuring words covered her unsaid ones? And more important, did Diavala?
Griffin ground his teeth. “Your stubbornness is infinite.”
“Think about our options here,” Celia said, trying to quell her building frustration. “None of them are good. But at least with Halcyon there’s hope of more than just running forever.” As the words left her lips, she realized they were for her more than for him.