The Ishim Underground

by Carrie Bailey

CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The sun had erased any evidence of that morning sunrise by the time the fifteen emerged from the lodge along with Eron, Amit, Ester and Gil. A slight coating of dampness still clung to the plants and a light chill permeated the air, but the dew had long since evaporated. Eron trudged with the other representatives to the center trying in vein to hide his ambivalence to Gil's plan.

  Eron doubted strongly that Gil could remain in character. And despite his best effort, he hadn't convinced the actor to hold back and let the others generate solutions. The resurrection of Uri's Liam, as he imagined it manifesting through Gil, was already falling apart.

  Gil had gathered a burgeoning crowd around him and was explaining how to breathe fire. The younger villagers followed him like ducklings as together they departed Rotorua. And Amit. Gil waved his slender fingers apart mimicking the burst of fire he had just described as he opened his arms wide demonstrating its size. Mesmerized by Gil’s theatrical motions, Eron could have counted each of Amit’s crooked teeth as he held his mouth wide open in wonder. Unlike Able, who stoically kept to himself and habitually refused the company of other thieves, Gil reveled in it. His eyes smiled wildly at the approach of every tricorn hat.

  But, the representatives couldn't hide their bewilderment. The man who united them and shepherded their schemes seemed to come and go throughout the day often replaced by a foolish looking ham.

  After only hours on the march, sweating and talking and walking on freshly troubled feet, the four hundred plus caravan left the endless reaches of the red woods, tall, majestic and eirily dark, and blazed their way through the lesser forests to a green summit. Nestled in the valley below like a golden brick disk in a bed of trees was Auck City.

  A cloudless white sky hung above.

  Eron was home.

  Close anyway.

  A surge of anger rushed through him like an aquifer of hate at the sight of it. Aden allowed Thadine to be contracted. Thadine had lied to him. Malak was an Ishim. And then there were the archivists. Nothing was what he thought it was. Auck City looked like a blight on the surface of the island and from its harbor poured its disease and destruction. Some vision.

  “We can enter the city through the sewers,” he said to Ester, suddenly overtaken by his rage. “But, how are we supposed to get out? And what are we doing here?”

  Amit had finished his apple, part of his daily ration supplied by the thief’s kitchen. He was already eating Eron’s. Eron grabbed the apple from Amit’s mouth, looked at the bruised patches, and then threw it against the trunk of tree. It burst into juicy chunks.

  Ester twiddled the end of her bow in the dirt.

  “Are you Eron?” said a nomad Eron recognized as a glove vendor from Waimate. “You’re prewanted by Gil.”

  Eron rose and trailed after the vendor toward a cluster of highwaymen and a few of the representatives the Rotorua Meeting. Amit trailed after him. Ester seemed to be following Amit. Gil stood at the heart the men quietly sharing confidence.

  “Have you been inside archive?” Gil asked Eron.

  “I know how many people guard them it if that’s what you want to know,” said Eron. "But, they're next to the barracks and the foundry. It would take only minutes for them to be overrun."

  On many occasions Eron had expected Tunkukush’s tube to start rattling, but it had remained silent for days. He wished someone would stop Gil from planning.

  “Can you take a small troop, maybe three or four, inside?”

  All hopes seemed pinned on his response.

  “I can lead people to the entrance,” said Eron with some caution. “Achazya is the only one who knows how to get inside. That is, when you're not supposed to be. And he's seen the Golem."

  As the highwaymen starred at him, even the man with the heavy brows, drips of sweat cut through the dust that caked their tired faces. There were twigs in their braids and grass stains on their tunics where they had rested on the ground. No one had slept. And everyone knew four hundred people, vardos and a few horses would be noticed. But, in someways, they were also a distraction.

  “There is no Golem,” said the fierce, but small man with the heavy brow.

  “Have you seen it?” Gil demanded.

  “Who is Achazya?” said a woman with short brown hair. It was Miriam. She was not beautiful, but she was as powerful as most of the men and possibly meaner.

  "He was my tutor," said Eron. "He’s been to every level of the Archive and he is the smartest person I know.”

  “He can't help us if he's not part of the order,“ said a man with pale braids and wide cheeks. He was a thief. Not a highway man. And not very bright looking, but stern enough to intimate Eron.

  "I'm not part of the order," Eron reminded the man.

  "You will be," he said.

  “The Golem doesn't protomatter,” said Miriam, emphatically waving her chubby hands. “No matter how strong that clay monster may be, it won’t give us an advantage. We need to focus on the workers.”

  "The Golem is like a computer," said Eron. "A speaking library from the modern era."

  "People who destroyed themselves?" scoffed the highway man with the heavy brow, crossing his arms. His closest associates, two men very similar in demeanor, nodded their approval at him noisily closing his mind and affirming their nomadic ideals of ignorance.

  Eron relaxed his fists.

  At least, he was being heard if not understood.

  "Can you humor me?" he said, looking directly at Gil. "Exactly what is the plan?"

  “We’re taking the boats,” said the man with wide cheeks. His face was covered in stubble and wrinkles, but it cracked a wide smile.

  “And we’re going to Ton,” said Gil.

  As if he had dropped a boulder from his shoulder, his body surged with relief. They were not going to fight the guard or try to take the city. They were going to steal boats! And flee to a tiny rubber producing island many weeks away from the city and the whole of Auckland.

  “My mother is contracted by the Archivist," said Eron almost giddy. He looked down the tree spattered hill to the city within the walls. Compared to the camps it did not compare. Even the procession and the square and sky tower could be detected among the yellow structures, but tiny as they were, the mind was fooled. It was a massive, beautiful city, boasting no less than 150,000 residents. And he wasn't there to destroy it. Eron could almost kiss Gil's stubbly angular face.

  "And the Golem?" said Ester, who rarely added her voice where she didn't feel she belonged.

  "We're not just raiding the city for plunder," said Miriam.

  Prosper grunted. He had been named the interim governor of Rotorua, but having taken part in their meeting the day before, he felt obligated to leave with the handful of villagers that chose to follow.

  Miriam smirked. "We're freeing the workers," she said. "We might take a little plunder. Maybe that Golem even. But, it's friends and family that matter."

  "On the island," explained the small fierce highway man. "We can plan."

  “Good,” said Eron slowly processing mental images of the thieves sailing north to the minor islands. “Very good. They say the Golem is slow, but it is probably the most valuable thing in the Archive. It has a library in its head.”

  “We don’t need to know everything,” said one of the highwaymen.

  “But, we do need to know how to find Ton,” said Miriam thoughtfully stroking her tiny chin. “If the sailors don’t cooperate, we could run out of supplies and find ourselves back in Auck City.”

  "And," said Eron, disbelieving. "It could help us make modern weapons."

  “Glad it’s sorted,” said Gil, clapping his hands. “Eron, take Amit and the luscious Ester. Go get your tutor before the gates close. And report back at sunset. It's hard work planning a disorganized riot.”

  “Luscious?” mouthed Eron.

  Ester scrunched up her nose, but no one was convinced by her feigned disinterest. It was in her eyes. Even Eron could
tell.

  “Lumpish nit,” muttered Ester through her pursed smile.

  “That’s no way to addressify our captain,” said Miriam, almost sounding reluctant.

  “My apologies, Captain,” said Ester to “Captain Gil” who gazed coyly back in her direction.

  She blushed.

  Gil hadn’t changed his thin garments or put on any additional aires since the thieves adopted him into his new role. Eron thought it might not be a bad idea to offer him his fur, which would bulk up his shoulders, lending a certain regality. At least, that was how Eron felt in it. If Able had looked the part, Gil looked the opposite of a natural leader.

  “Tell me all about it when you get back!” shouted Gil as Eron marched away into the brush. Their “captain” waved after them like a teenage girl.

  Eron cringed.

  As they pushed through the camp, a trickle of rain fell through the warm air and Ester dallied with a food vendor, mostly for cover from the light shower.

  “Are we going through the sewers?” she asked him. “Where do they start?”

  Eron knew she'd never seen the city and had only the natural aquifer in the den to help her imagine it. Auck City rerouted water from a near river that spread in channels, above, below and through the city like arteries, coursing slowly toward the ocean. The five openings at the coastline emptied directly into the sea. Some tunnels had been repurposed and maintained from the modern city underneath, but as sea levels fell, the only ones maintained served the nearby forests communities of Ponsonby and Mount Eden. In the city, Auck City proper, only the square and the archive had been built on modern ruins. The procession and most of the residences had been laid on ground exposed by a tide that never rose again after the apocalypse. With their depleted populations and limited resources, the settlers could not maintain the systems of the old city. But, they could break it down for materials, which had been done effectively for over five centuries. Some of the Auckian sewers dated back to the first century after the apocalypse. Many of them regularly developed blockage and the Green Guardsmen took light underground to break it free, but no one else braved the dark and narrow block passages, because they stank. Worse than the breath of the lamassu.

  “I can send a message to Achazya and ask him to meet us," said Eron. "We should do that before he leaves for the beefalo barbecue stand this afternoon.”

  “Because greasy fingers?" said Amit.

  “Pardon?” said Eron.

  "They smear the words,” said the boy in a man’s body.

  Eron drew a blank.

  “Books,” said Amit. “You’re going to steal books, right?”

  “I’m not planning on it,” said Eron. Although if they did enter the archive, he might borrow something to read. “Look, after “the beefalo stand, he goes to the wine tent or the alley of the wine makers. The man is like clockwork.”

  Uncomprehending silence fell over Amit and Ester. Naturally, they'd never seen a clock since there was only one and that, maintained by an archivist.

  “Sounds like a race against intoxication,” said Ester, accepting a ration of bread and meat from the vendor.

  Eron wasn’t hungry. Since the thieves left the den, food had been provided communally and organized by the highway men. In fact, the logistics of moving and supplying the caravan occupied most of their worries, but, resourceful and generous, they kept the hoards organized and fed.

  The rain, or more accurately, the sprinkle lifted. Amit scurried ahead, dodging branches that swung back at them, as they descended the hill. Forced to waded fitfully through the dense brush, there was no trail to the gate.

  Skidding and zigzagging down the slope, kicking up dust and dry leaves, they ran until Amit tripped and tumbled into a heap yards ahead of Ester and Eron. At the base of the hill, the brush thinned and a clear line of sight opened to the main gate and the primary road leading inside. They stopped at the base of a tree. Eron stepped up on an exposed root and tried to balance on his toes as he thought over the problem.

  “I need some paper,” he said.

  “What about them?” asked Ester.

  She was pointing to a group of men, young and clean shaven, possibly traveling from a farm. She was right. They might take a message.

  “I still need paper,” said Eron. “Let me think about this.”

  It felt important to prove to Achazya that his pupil, his literate pupil had sent the message. He wanted there to be no doubt in his former tutor’s mind. Eron unrolled his bundle unwrapped the leather from his scrolls. Although it went against everything he believed in, Eron tore a square about the size of his palm containing notes Achazya had written himself before presenting them to Eron. Rather than spewing long winded explanations about how messengers were often used by con artists, he asked his companions to trust him.

  “Give me the tube,” said Eron.

  Amit shook his head.

  The Ishim drained slowly from the tube, shifting from a placid gray mist, wisps of the man milling about condensing around Eron, until finally a pair of reading glasses solidified at his feet. With thick wooden rims and a joint between the eyes that allowed a wearer to adjust the positioning, they were unexceptional by Auckian standards except for the false nose attachment.

  “I didn’t think of that,” said Eron turning them over and pressing it against his face. The glasses, the pointed joint and the false nose conformed and held to his features, obscuring them.

  He couldn’t argue. The disguise would work. Balancing them carefully, Eron tied the straps around his head. Not all Auckians who needed glasses could afford the carefully crafted lenses. And many who could, didn’t wear them, but enough did that no one would look twice.

  “Soggiest thing I’ve ever seen,” said Amit.

  “You don’t look anything like Gil,” Ester exclaimed. “It looks real. Of course, Ishim, but it’s incredible. It’s brilliant.”

  “When did you last clean your teeth?” echoed Tunkukush’s voice from Eron’s nose.

  Eron flushed red with embarrassment as Ester winked at him. He hadn’t spared a single thought to oral hygiene since he first left the city. Maybe that was why she was choosing Gil. He rolled up his his scroll, tossing the needless torn piece in the center.

  “Gentlemen,” said Eron, motioning them to follow. “Let’s go.”

  Ester folded her arms.

  “Sorry,” he said, but he wasn’t really.

  Starring at the brick walls in the distance as they advanced to the road, Eron reached up and touched his face. He felt no weight on his nose, only a sort of itchy wetness, as if a small layer of paste or mud had been applied. The exposed side was dry to the touch. He bent the cartilage in his nose to one side. He couldn’t tell which part was Tunkukush and which wasn’t.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t recognize me?” asked Eron, turning around and lifting his hair to feel his ears and neck.

  “You look much better,” said Amit, reaching for Eron’s brow, but Eron slapped his hand away.

  He quivered slightly as they shuffled up to the two stone lamassu beside the gate whee four Red Guardsmen gripped their gleaming pikes and the teeth of the metal grate hovered over the opening.

  “Destination?” said a short and stocky guardsman with a scroll spread on a short table.

  It was the census taker, probably the most unwelcome sight he could imagine. A yellow guardsman, he had responsibility for conducting an inventory of the citizens many of whom worked outside the city walls. Next to him, leaning casually on the shaft of his pike, a Red Guardsman ate an apple, probably a gift or a bribe from a traveller. Only the dark bags under his eyes hinted at the full extent of his distress.

  Ester, Amit and Eron, with their soiled garb and ratty tunics, blended well with the late arrivals. Villagers swarmed the entrance with goods for the Harvest sales, a celebration that would culminate in a firework display and an effigy burning of the mad man.

  “City square!” said Eron in the same tone and ma
nner as the villager that passed before them.

  “Are you citizens?” he asked, not looking away from his work.

  The parchment contained a list of names, people from the previous census not yet counted. Likely, Eron’s name would be on that list, but Thadine had kept his census documents and she would have registered him. Except, now, she was under contract. No longer a citizen.

  “We’re from Ponsonby,” said Eron shaking his head. “Horse breeders. Well, you see my aunt-“

  “Weapons?” he droned.

  “My aunt says I’m deadly with my cooking,” said Eron, attempting another horridly weak joke.

  “Straight down the procession. Visitors remaining in the streets after dark are penalized. Stick out your hands,” he drolly instructed them.

  Amit immediately thrust his freckly fist out, but the Red Guard drew back from his outstretched hand.

  “You’re diseased,” he shouted.

  Even though Amit had less spots as a man than he did as a boy, they could not be easily accepted as a natural feature by the average Auckian.

  “They’re just freckles,” said Ester. “He was born this way. It’s not germs.”

  But, this was the city. Villagers and nomads didn’t understand how fast disease travelled. The guardsman had a responsibility to protect them from every enemy, no matter how small. In Eron’s own lifetime, waves of disease had culled their population. It took the young. Sometimes, the old died. Only ten years ago, twenty percent of the city had been killed or crippled in a single week. And no one could explain it.

  The man drew a face at her aggressively conveying his disgust, she shrank back in surprise.

  “You can’t enter without a special allowance from an Auckian physician,” said the guard dubiously to Eron, ignoring that Ester had spoken to him.

  He stepped away. Amit thrust his arm an inch closer and the guard backed into his pike, knocking it to the ground. A few of the Yellow Guardsman had popularized the idea that disease could be transferred by direct sight or sound. Not everyone believed it at first, but many had taken to wearing thin white veils, the type of fabric his mother got from the far island traders to make covers for women’s hair. It was an expensive, but attractive talisman.

  “All the Auckian physicians are inside the city of Auck,” said Eron. “How can he see one?”

  The Red Guardsman stretched his face in thought. “I don’t make the rules,” he said motioning to Eron to lift his hand up. “Figure it out yourself.”

  He slapped down a streak of red dye that marked Eron for admittance. “Go back up the road and wait for us by the first bridge,” said Eron, pointing in the direction of a short wooden bridge he knew that spanned a small stream not far from visual range.

  “I know it,” said Amit, who marched away almost gladly.

  He pulled up his sleeves as he walked and scared the other travelers queuing to enter Auck City while Eron thanked the guard.

  Though the procession opened before him, the reality hadn’t really penetrated that his mother would not be waiting in the shop or that his brother would not be coming home from work and that no lessons were scheduled in the morning. Everything that made Auck City his home had disappeared in the ether of service and war. Though full of more people than Ester had ever seen, for him, it was empty. People starred at them. More specifically, at Ester. She was certainly not dressed as an Auckian woman.

  Forward.

  That was the direction he had to go. Commonly called the procession, the street opening from the main entrance at the south was the widest in the city and rather than being lined by pillared houses and their doorways and windows, like the streets in the villages, only walls of repurposed brick stood high and far. The walls were decorated in tile, a pale mosaic that told the history of how the modern world ended and the Liamic Era begin. Achazya had often taken him and the other students there to conduct quizzes. The walls held in the city that burst over them with laundry lines and stacked structures, some in disrepair. Arched exits led into the city streets at the end of each era in the mural’s painful narrative. It was old. As long as Eron could remember, the nomad’s carts and vardos had obscured most of the mural with their activities. But, now there were gaps where many had used to fill the space along the procession. The villagers were vending. The nomads were absent. A terrible emptiness.

  The procession emptied into the town square in front of the Administrator’s Office, the Municipal Court and the Archive, tall magnificent structures built from modern ruins where the old city had once stood. As they marched toward the square beside the unlit lampposts, Eron saw imagines in the mural in a new light. Liam, though drawn stylistically and fading, stood at the entrance on the wall. Eron had thought the man looked like him, but only now could he be sure it was meant to be the first Administrator. The Yellow Guard often debated it.

  And though fragmented in the rock, the face of Uri captured the wisdom Eron thought he’d gained in his incredibly long life. Next to them stood other men who legend said became the Ishim and the in the distance behind them, on the blue painted waters, the Alliance, their ship was docked in the modern port. Eron touched the wall.

  And then he saw it.

  “Your braids,,” he whispered as though speaking to himself. Ester was too busy taking in the immensity of the sounds and smell to notice or hear him. “I recognize them.”

  Tunkukush’s image was tucked away in the lineup at the end of the mural, but he was there. Still plastered to the tip of Eron’s nose, the Ishim stayed quiet.

  Ester, finally noticing him lost in his own sad thoughts, put a hand on his shoulder and they walked on as Eron battled the fog of memory and regrets. He wanted to run. When they passed a cobbler’s cart by the arch that entered the street named for the weather gawds, Eron darted around a group of women in yellow robes. Ester pursued. Eron leapt over a crate left on the cobblestone pathway. She scrambled to catch him up. In the dank, but cool air in the shade of the pillared buildings, he was comforted to see nothing had changed. As if the buildings could.

  Unlike the alleys in Dunedin, only two or three people could walk side by side through the narrow passages. Water and waste covered the stones where it made its way slowly to the sewers below. The smell. Eron had never fully experienced it before.

  He ran faster, feeling the space close between him and the one place in the world he really needed to be, stomping the puddles, rounding corner after corner toward the factory where he had lived since Thadine rescued him. Where he had been abandoned by Uri or someone Uri sent him with. Eron had had hope, but it was struck a formidable blow when he saw that a fragment had fallen from tiled symbol embedded in the stucco outside the factory. He had not fully believed his brother. It lay on the ground trampled across the doorway as if no one had been coming and going, especially not his mother. The mark of the rain gawd still adorned the space above the door, one dark cloud and three drops of blue, but part of the dark cloud had fallen.

  No banners hung from the barred windows. In the empty doorway, he saw the rooms inside were empty. No looms, no workers, no stock, and no fire stood as evidence to Thadine’s little industry, her little woolen empire, as she often called it. Even the stockpiles of wool were gone. And only a body lay in the corner. There was nothing else.

  “Mother?”

  Eron’s voice echoed as he cried into deep shadows of the empty building. He touched his cheek where the spider still clung in silence as Ester splashed through the muck behind him coming to the dark doorway.

  “My brother said the Archivist would keep the factory running,” he said softly almost pleading with the rain gawd who was supposed to have protected them.

  Eron rushed beside the body, but it was clearly not Thadine. A beastly old man with gray hair snored and Eron backed away as his apnea made him jump.

  “Where is your tutor?” asked Ester.

  “Where is Thadine?” he shouted at the man. Eron couldn’t resist. Part of him had lost any conc
ern for the thieves, for his friends or for the slaving, the very moment he thought he could do something for his mother.

  The lump on the floor rolled to face him and tipped himself up on an elbow, “Gone!”

  “Did you live here?” said Ester.

  “My mother’s factory,” said Eron. “She’s a slave now.”

  “Not so soggy now,” said Ester for the first time not extending the compassion Eron had grown to expect. The betrayal stung, but she was a thief and in comparrison to the hat wearing, painted and robed people of the city, it showed.

  Diving darkly into his fears, Eron plodded over the cobbled street between the icons of storms, sun and clouds in silence with Ester following him. Auck City may have looked the same from the cliff where the thieves camped, but inside the walls closed in on him. They found their way through the puddles of waste water to the alley where his tutor lived and walked up a rickety stair to the top floor of a pillared building. Smoke wafted from the downstairs neighbor’s open window. Eron coughed and before he got to the platform that clung to side of the building like a vine, the woolen cover to his tutor’s tiny flat opened.

  “I can hear you,” said the man. It was Achazya. “I have a knife and I can locate human kidneys faster than you can say your name. Go on. We don’t have anything of value. Try my neighbor. Now, there’s a man who hasn’t been paying his taxes and has all the wealth to show for it.”

  “You bastard!” shouted a woman from the window on the lower level.

  Eron laughed. Ester looked at him and suddenly he forgave her as his own pain lessened. He couldn’t risk revealing himself while people were strolling along below on the road or the neighbor continued to eavesdrop.

  “I have a new student for you,” Eron lied.

  Achazya stuck his red face through the door and beamed at him. His beard was longer, thicker even, but he still looked like a young man trying too hard to appear like a hardened old sage. His belly protruded from his marigold robes, which had always dragged on the floor boards leaving them ragged.

  “I don’t teach women,” he said, eyeing Ester with extreme suspicion. It was very unlike the Achazya Eron knew.

  “Since when?” Eron said, somewhat in shock.

  “Our son wants to be a scribe,” Ester covered like applying a bandage to the conversation. “You’re younger than I thought you’d be.”

  “Not meaning any offense,” said Achazya. “I’m often mistaken for being much younger than I am, too. I think it’s the coffee they serve in the Archive when I was training. I drank a special mix of it every morning. And me, now nearly fifty. I could probably get you some. Not cheap.”

  Liar. His face was flushed and his eyes bloodshot. He did not look entirely well.

  When Eron had been his student, only five months before, Achayza had already described the three times he’d visited the Archive in great detail. Few lower level scribes, guardsmen or not, were allowed in. And he had never mentioned special coffee, Ishim or otherwise. And he was probably twenty two. Not fifty.

  “Can we discuss tuition with you inside?” said Eron.

  Achazya, standing behind the heavy banner suspended on a stressed looking wooden rod, blocked the entrance to his flat entirely.

  “You want your boy to miss the fireworks?” said the tutor mockingly aghast.

  He stepped out onto the first plank of the platform, which creaked under his incredible weight. It was not a support that three people should stand on. Eron stepped back, “Yes, it is very important that we discuss terms and arrange a schedule now.”

  “My fee is reasonable and I happen to have an opening. And unlike others, I take on reluctant students. Why don’t we discuss a contract over beefalo rib?“

  “I’ll have to go to Ezekiel,” Eron blurted, invoking the name of his bitter rival who happened to be a significantly more popular tutor among the city’s elite.

  But, Achazya looked dumbfounded. Not concerned. His tutor’s expressions were normally blander than a bowl of steamed rice.

  “Ezekiel’s dead,” he said. “I thought everyone knew he was caught teaching his housekeeper to write. Where are you from? You’re not Auckian.”

  Eron reached for his glasses, but the spider clung on without budging, so he quickly pushed past Achazya, ducking under his arm which he had rested against the side of the building and then tumbled and stumbled over the junk that lined the floors and the walls inside. Eron understood immediately why he’d never been let in before. His main chamber held a hoard that even Uri might find admirable.

  Achazya was not married and it was doubtful he ever would be, considering there was no space in his home for another person. Eron picked up a cone made of old greenish glass. It was modern.

  “I have permission to bring my work home with me,” his tutor said, dropping the wool banner behind him, but Ester peeked in anyway though she was easily fended off by Achazya’s girth.

  Eron surveyed his rusty pile of tools. He had always imagined his tutor lived in a tidy space, not a collection of mouse droppings, cobwebs, crusts, garbage and all the disorder that found in the home of the truly miserable and discontent. Each object seemed grouped with like kinds though the effect was still a multicolored mountain range of artifacts. Modern artifacts. Another thing Eron had not suspected. The hoard of artifacts probably bowed the floor below them and worried the neighbor. Or maybe she’d caught him bringing something in. Either way, the neighbor had more than enough right to be concerned.

  Eron tripped on a rusted box and landed painfully on a pile of wood, metal bits and another pile of the green glass cones.

  “Tunkukush!” Eron said.

  “Quiet up there,” shouted a voice through the cracks in the floorboards.

  He tried to remove the glasses and the false nose again. this time the Ishim released its grip, mistily and lazily streaming away from his face as Eron pulled on the hinge. White mist wafted upward as the glasses disappeared. Eron’s former tutor gaped and pointed as Tunkukush began to reform in the air before him. Achazya leaned a stack of heavy text, almost as tall as the large man, and knocked some papers back onto the hoard behind him. His face flitted between awe and fear and cowardice and questioning. Eron could only imagine that he had looked the same that day on the bay at Pict City when he first met the Ishim.

  Achazya turned his red face and pressed to the dusty book spines and loose papers and fragile, moldy scrolls as a slender string of web shot from the cloud the Ishim had formed and attached itself to the ceiling. Tunkukush condensed into the shape of a spider. Achazya pried on eyelid open, looking much younger than Eron remembered him. He still had acne and the patches on his face where the hair did not grow were larger than Amit’s red scruff.

  “Eron?” he said.

  “It’s me?” said Eron.

  “Are you dead?” said Achazya looking up at the spider. “Give me a sign.”

  Eron waved his hand across the man’s line of vision, “Do I look dead?”

  Achazya blinked, but remained focused on the many eyes of the large arachnid.

  “You put a white hat on my head during our first lesson in the square. Remember?” Eron said.

  “Was it possessing you?” he whimpered and pointed to Tunkukush still dangling from the ceiling on a glistening thread.

  Tunkukush climbed up its thread and scurried away across the ceiling. Achzya screeched somehow making the sound of a cart skidding on cobblestone while rolling down a hill. The neighbor pounded the wall from below. The spider disappeared.

  “What was that?” he asked.

  “I can explain everything,” said Eron.

  Finally able to turn his attention from the Ishim, he grabbed Eron in a soft, but powerful bear hug and breathed out heavily.

  “Phbbbbbfft,” he sounded, his relief passing over his lips, like air escaping from a three horned sheep’s bladder. “Thank the gawds. Eron,“ said Achazya with a quavering voice and teary eyes as if broken from a trance. “Look at you.”


  “Where’s Thadine?” Eron asked gravely, pulling himself from the man’s mighty embrace.

  “Your mother is working in the Administrator’s Office in Sky Tower. Third floor,” he said eyeing the hoard for sign’s of the spider. They auctioned her belongings to pay for her maintenance. She’s alive and well kept,” he said. “Unlike her workers and all those other volunteers.”

  “Other volunteers?” said Ester folding her arms in the doorway.

  Achazya extended his hand to her, but then hesitated and pulled it back, “Have you come in from the roads, too?”

  Ester was wearing pants, leather pants, and a functional airy tunic. She had no paint on her face and no cloth to wrap her hair. Eron had grown so used to her appearance over the weeks that he forgot how foreign she seemed to him at first. But, that was because most nomads coming and going from the city made an attempt to blend in while Ester could not have imagined what she would find.

  “But my mother is a citizen,” interrupted Eron. “How could she be contracted?”

  Achazya timidly looked Ester up and down from the leather wrappings on her feet to the messy dark braids on top of her head.

  “Are you talking about people your guard have forced into slavery?” spat Ester.

  She wouldn’t have spoken that way to a thief, but this was instinct. She knew a weak man by the inflections in his voice. Fortunately, Eron’s former tutor was smart enough to recognize a rhetorical question. He muttered something apologetic sounding and led them through his monstrosity of a living space into a kitchen in the back of the flat, considerably less cluttered. Almost tidy even. This was more how Eron had pictured his tutor’s living space. It had a bed in it, in a corner where a family might have dined, opposite a fire place, clearly connected to the floor below and the irritable neighbor. And a small bundle of vendor crates formed a wardrobe, which held a variety of robes, all yellow. Thadine often paid him in clothes. Whereas most average Auckians owned only two or three heavy outer garments, Achazya had at least eight. The basin was free of dishes. The counter stack purposefully and even a wooden set of drawers kept his personal belongings in order. And the red tiles on the floor coated with a glossy polish.

  He landed heavily on his cushioned bed, offering Eron some medicinal wine, who promptly declined, but took the bota from him.

  “We came with a proposition for you,” said Eron.

  Achazya motioned for his bota. Eron shook his head.

  A ratty, thin gray cloth of the style made by his mother, was covering the window. Eron tossed the bota through it. They could hear it land on the roof of the building next door. Everyone knew Achazya didn't stop once he had started. His former tutor scowled at Eron sparing no indignation and then felt around an empty box, producing a corked bottle and defiantly drank from it. It made little difference. At this time of year, most Auckians slept on their roofs or their neighbor's roofs. Even in the villages, the roofs were flat and accessible although the buildings not quite as crowded together. Achazya sat back on the sagging cushions in his kitchen and put his head in his hands.

  “What is your proposition, Eron?”

  “We want to take the Golem,” said Ester then hovering in the archway between the hoard and the minute and somewhat spartan studio.

  More explanation was needed.

  “The city will be overrun by thieves tomorrow,” Eron blurted. “Not an organized attack. We need your help.”

  “To steal the Golem?” said Achazya raising his brows and taking another swig of wine. “And take it where? Or is that detail not organized either?”

  Eron hesitated for the briefest instant.

  “Or maybe you can tell me about Tukukush?” said Achazya, swishing the liquid remaining in his bottle. “I know its name. And I know what it is.”

  “Have you met an Ishim?” said Ester.

  He shook his head.

  Negative.

  Ester elaborated on the plan with some contributions from Eron as wonder and disbelief alternately washed through his former tutor’s expressions. Eron tried to explain Gil. Achazya nodded and listened stroking his wispy beard. He told him about Micah and the monks. Achazya didn’t challenge the idea that Ishim were really. In fact, he knew all of their names and had studied banned writings on the Ishim stolen from the Archive. Micah. Tunkukush. The bailiff. The oracle. He knew them all. When Eron described Uri’s workshop, Achazya set down his bottle.

  “But, why do you want with that clay coated hunk of junk in the Archive?” he asked.

  “It contains all the knowledge of moderns,” said Eron surprised at the callous sounding question.

  “It sorts the artifacts,” said Achazya. “Hardly ever talks.

  “You told me it knew everything,” said Eron.

  “That’s what the thieves believe, too,” agreed Ester.

  “You need to someone who can get you in and out of the Archive,” said Achazya. “Someone who knows the Guard’s schedule. I see the Golem every time I go collecting.”

  Blood rushed through Eron’s veins like race horses, “Will you help?”

  Achazya got up from his cushions and sought a heavier robe from his wardrobe.

  “The Yellow Guard allocated ten licenses for tutors. I couldn’t afford the fee. A man’s got to eat, Eron,” said Achazya patting his rotund glory. And your mother made excellent robes, but they don’t last forever,” said Achazya showing them the threadbare patch under the arm. “I’ve got a side job teaching a potter to take inventory, but it’s the only thing saving me from being contracted.”

  “What is inventory?” said Ester brightening.

  Achazya droned down to the minutest trivialities of accountancy to Ester’s rapt attention, but Eron stopped them.

  “Thadine is not my mother,” said Eron fingering a metal rod with four prongs on a wall hanging. The only decoration in the room, it was a map of the island. “She found me.”

  “She loved you and she is proud of you, Eron,” said his tutor.

  Ester melted. Eron tried to smile.

  “My parents left me this apartment,” he said gesturing toward the main room. “They died of disease. One of the archivists took me on, but he died a few years later. I have zero family and zero connections and zero licenses.”

  “Sell your artifacts?” said Ester, shrugging.

  “Anyone caught with even one is disemboweled, beheaded or beheaded with his own intestines,” said Eron.

  “Come with us?” said Ester.

  Achazya went pale.