Wrapt in Crystal

by Sharon Shinn

  At the third house he tried in the second neighborhood, a very large, very friendly woman in a brightly flowered housedress offered him a tall glass of lemonade and a wide box of old records. “Diadeloro?” she repeated for the third or fourth time, watching him sit down at her kitchen table with the box before him. “No, I don’t think so—can’t say that the name is familiar. Diadeloro. Diadeloro. Pretty name, though, isn’t it?”

  He wanted to snap at her to leave the room—but it was her house and she was doing him a favor. The pounding in his head was rising to a crescendo throb, and he wondered almost idly if he had heat stroke. “Very pretty,” he said, and began to comb through the records.

  All the contracts were written in the landlady’s hand, and so he almost missed it, the name he had been seeking for two days. At the head of the contract the name was printed in small, distinct letters: AURORA PERDIDA. Drake read it three times before his Semayse came back to him.

  “Lost dawn,” he said aloud. “Lost dawn.” The golden day vanished. A wash of excitement temporarily quieted his headache.

  “This Aurora Perdida,” he said, pulling the papers from the box. “Do you remember her? She might be the one I’m looking for.”

  The big woman leaned over him to scan the document. She smelled like spicy foods and hand soap. “Aurora Perdida—oh, her,” she said. Disapproval was plain in her voice. “Yes, I do remember her. She wasn’t here long.”

  “Why not? Where’d she go?”

  The woman sniffed. “Well, I don’t know where someone like her would go. Down to Camino Rojo, I suppose.”

  Camino Rojo—the red boulevard. He did not need further translation. “She had men to her room?” he asked in surprise.

  The landlady sat across from him at the table. The chair creaked as she settled in. “Not at first, no. At first I thought she was a very quiet girl. A little strange. It was hard to tell what she did for a living, where she got her money. Then—she became careless. She had a few boys over, now and then. She stayed out later and later. She would come back—well, she smelled of whisky and beer. You understand, my daughter was thirteen at the time, very impressionable. I could not have that behavior going on right under my roof.”

  “No, I see that,” Drake said quickly. His headache had returned full force. He thought his skull would split open. “She was wild, then—she was—would you say she was actually deteriorating while she lived with you? Getting worse?”

  “I don’t know how it could have gotten worse,” the woman said primly.

  He nodded; forget it. “And how long did she stay with you?”

  “About four months.”

  “And do you have any idea where she went after she left?”

  She gestured at the papers still in his hands. “It’s written down on the last page there, if it’s written down anywhere.”

  He flipped quickly to the final page in the sheaf of papers. Under the typed heading of “Forwarding Address,” someone had scrawled a general post office number. Drake’s eyes narrowed on that hasty notation. The handwriting had degenerated so much it was hard to be sure, but it had a few loops and slashes in common with the writing in the letter Diadeloro had sent to Maria. It was like hearing a familiar voice slurred by alcohol, altered but unmistakable. He wrote down the scanty information.

  “Thank you, you’ve been a great deal of help,” he said, rising to his feet.

  “You think that’s her? You think Aurora is this Deloro you’re looking for?”

  “I don’t know for sure. Maybe.”

  “What’d she do? Kill someone?”

  “No,” he said, startled. At least he didn’t think she’d killed anyone. However much he might believe she was somehow tangled in a bizarre series of murders. “Thanks,” he said again.

  “Well, come back if I can help some more,” she said, following him to the door. He climbed back into the white sedan, now so hot the air was unbreathable, and turned the car back toward the hotel. He planned to sleep away the rest of the day.

  Chapter Ten

  A long nap refreshed him, but it did not take away the headache, only made it bearable. He was awake when Lise stopped by to invite him to dinner, but the thought of food made his head hurt again.

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “Looking sort of peaked,” she observed, leaning on the door frame. “Too many late nights with seductive priestesses.”

  He smiled wanly. “The late nights haven’t been as much fun as you might think.”

  She grinned and turned to go. “Maybe you’re spending the nights with the wrong women,” she suggested, and left.

  He had a tray of food brought up to him but ate very little. He forced himself to study a few of the case histories of Madrid crimes, but his eyes would not stay focused, and the constant pounding of the headache distracted him. He did not recall ever having a migraine before, but he felt a sudden and complete sympathy for anyone who had so suffered and for whom he had felt only contempt in the past.

  When he went to bed again, early by his standards, he fell instantly asleep and slept heavily most of the night. Once he woke with a raging thirst and stumbled to the bathroom to drink glass after glass of the tepid water. His skull seemed ready to shatter from within. The night air, drifting in from the open window, seemed cold to him. He lay back on his bed—carefully, to avoid jarring his head—and shivered until he slept again.

  He woke briefly in the morning, no longer cold—in fact, smothering with the sense of heat. He barely registered the fact that the room was flooded with light and that there seemed to be a dull symphony of sounds from the corner where the door should be, but he had no interest in either of these facts. He closed his eyes and went back to sleep.

  The next few hours were a series of confused impressions—a sound of shattering wood, low voices, cool hands, a sudden sharp pinprick of pain in his arm. He thought, with a moment of blinding clarity, I’m sick, but he was too exhausted even to attempt to say the words aloud. His eyesight was not clear enough to enable him to identify the figures in his room. All his training screamed at him to sit up, to take stock, to ascertain whether he was in the presence of friends or enemies, but he could not move. He did not want to move. He felt so wretched that he thought it might be a relief to die. He slept again.

  Day transmuted to night while murmurous sounds and shifting patterns of light eddied around him. Now and then he caught a few words or whole sentences, and he puzzled over them in a detached, disinterested way. It teased at his mind that he should know the speakers, that he should be grateful or surprised or embarrassed that they were in the room with him and saw him in such a state; but he could not raise even that much energy.

  “You’re very good,” one voice said. A woman.

  “It’s my fault, to some extent.” Another woman.

  And then—hours later or only a few minutes later—the women spoke again.

  “It’s not necessary for you to stay.”

  “I assure you.” The second voice was very firm. “He will be in for a bad night. I am more familiar with this fever than you are. I believe I can help him more.”

  “But for you to lose your night—”

  “I often lose my nights in the service of others. But it is pointless for both of us to lose our sleep.”

  “In the morning, then—”

  “Yes, in the morning. He should be better by then.”

  More voices, more sounds; light faded and died. Drake slept and woke and slept again, but this time, sleeping or dreaming, he never quite lost the consciousness of another person in the room with him. When he opened his eyes, he tried to locate her, but his back was toward the center of the room and she was behind him. He did not have the strength to turn over.

  A dream; he thrashed about violently. He woke again to find severe hands wrapped around his wrists, an unexpected will forcing him back against the pillows. A liqui
d voice spoke his first name three times. It was the dead of night, but light came in from somewhere and haloed her head. She was bent over him, and long pale strands of her hair had fallen free to brush across his face.

  “Cowen,” she said again.

  He wanted to lift a hand to feel the density of the witchlight glowing along her hair, but he was too weak. “Laura,” he whispered. He thought he was still dreaming.

  “Yes,” she said calmly. “Go back to sleep.”

  He slept.

  The rest of the night passed in a blur of thirst and terror and unexpected moments of comfort. It seemed to him that she had, at some point, come to sit beside him on the bed, where she had remained for hours. His hands would not stop flailing unless she held them in hers. He could neither sleep nor breathe unless she was close enough for him to touch. Her fingers across his brow eased his headache. From her hands he could drink the cold, foul mixture that he had refused earlier so violently that it had spilled across his bedclothes and his sheets.

  “Stay with me,” he gasped once, as he swallowed the vile draught and she laid the cup aside.

  “I will,” she said. “Go to sleep now.” He slept once more.

  * * *

  * * *

  He woke up covered with sweat, disoriented but passably lucid. The sunlight bounding in through the tall window looked jaunty enough to be late morning or even early afternoon. His body felt like he had been beaten mercilessly and left for dead on the side of the road.

  He stirred, repressing a groan, and instantly footsteps pattered over to his side. He squinted up, prepared to find himself mistaken; and it was Lise’s dark face he looked up at.

  “I’ve been sick,” he said. His voice sounded hollow, as if it resonated past bones that had been vacuumed clean.

  “Coupla days now. How you feeling?”

  “Couple of days?”

  “Well a night, a day, a night and now half of a day. How are you?”

  “I feel horrible.”

  “I guess.”

  “What’s wrong with me?”

  “Some kind of desert fever. Didn’t you get your vaccines?”

  He put his hands up to cover his eyes. His head still hurt but, by comparison with the torture a couple of nights back, it was almost a benevolent pain. “Thought so. Something must have been left out.”

  “Well, don’t worry. Leo and I both got it when we first landed—not as bad as you, though—and we’re still alive.”

  “How much longer?”

  “The sister said you’ll probably be in bed another couple of days. She said you’d have a few good spells today but that you’d relapse around nightfall.”

  He dropped his hands and stared at her. “The sister?”

  “Yeah, what would you call her? The ermana.”

  Was it possible it had not been a hallucination? “Ermana Laura?”

  “Tall blonde? She introduced herself but I don’t remember what she said.”

  “Yeah, tall blonde. She was here?”

  Lise grinned at him. “All night, big guy. Was it fun?”

  He closed his eyes. “Not for me.”

  “Anyway, she says you picked up the virus at the temple the other day. One of the women who came in to help apparently infected everyone, so they had a bunch of Fideles sick, too.”

  “Then how did she have time to come waltzing in here to take care of me?” he grunted.

  “I gather they weren’t too bad off. She figured, you being an off-worlder and innocent of natural immunities, that you would have gotten it, and gotten it bad. Seems she was right.”

  He rubbed his left arm, which felt sore and a little swollen. “She give me a shot?”

  Lise grinned again. “No, that was the medic. Medic also tried to make you drink this junk—smelled like piss, can’t imagine what it tasted like—but you wouldn’t have any. Knocked it all over the place. This ermana woman brought some more, though, and she said you took a little last night. She seems to have quite a way with the ill and the wayward.”

  “ ’S how she spends her days,” he said. He felt his eyelids growing heavy and gritty; he fought to keep them open, without success. “She ought to be good at it.”

  He thought he heard Lise laugh, but he drifted off to sleep again. He did not even have time to ponder over the strange fact that Laura had come to nurse him through his fever, and that was something he desperately wanted to think over. His body disobeyed the dictates of his mind, as it so rarely did, and he slept again.

  He woke twice more that day, lucid once and delirious the second time. Lise forced him to eat and drink both times, a light broth and a chilled juice; he suspected her of flavoring the drink with medicine. When he woke again, he had the sense of a great many hours having passed. The window outside showed the sky to be completely black and the tolerably accurate clock of his body told him it was somewhere around midnight.

  He moved irritably in the bed, trying to unknot his blankets, and he heard someone behind him rise to a standing position. “Lise?” he croaked.

  His visitor came to the side of the bed and began to disentangle his arms. Again, the long hair was unbound; again, it fell across him as she bent over his bed.

  “No,” he said. “Laura.”

  “Are you hot?” she asked. “Or cold?”

  “Just—caught in all these sheets and stuff—”

  She rearranged the covers and folded them back more comfortably under his arms, and then she straightened up to look down at him. “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  “Crabby, sore, thirsty, half-crazy and a little silly,” he said. “But much better.”

  She smiled. “I can take care of the thirsty part,” she said, and turned away. A moment later she brought him a glass. When he reached up to take it, his hand trembled alarmingly. She shook her head.

  “Better not,” she said, and perched on the side of the bed. She held the glass to his mouth while he drank. It was cold and fruity and tasted better than anything he’d ever had in his life.

  “Thank you,” he said, leaning back against the pillows.

  “Simple enough thing to give a thirsty man something to drink,” she said.

  “No, for—coming here at all. Lise says you were here last night.”

  “I have seen how the fever can take people. I didn’t want you to die from some virus you picked up working in my temple.”

  “Die?” he said drowsily. He widened his eyes to their fullest to counteract the insidious desire to sleep. “Could I have?”

  “It’s been known to happen.”

  “Then thank you again.”

  “You’re welcome, Lieutenant.”

  “It was Cowen last night,” he said.

  There was a short pause. “You were too sick to remember that,” she said.

  “Some things,” he said, “I imagine a man might hear from the shores of hell itself.”

  She nodded somewhat ironically. “You are getting better,” she said.

  He laughed weakly. “Please,” he said. “Make it Cowen.”

  She smoothed the covers across his chest. “Why don’t you try to get some sleep, Cowen?” she suggested.

  “I’ve slept for two days,” he said. “I want to talk.”

  “About what?”

  He moved his head restlessly on the pillow. The bout of drowsiness had passed, but he felt fretful and imperious. “Anything. Tell me about you.”

  She folded her hands in her lap but did not get up and leave, as he half expected. “My story is not so interesting. I have lived on Semay my whole life and done little except work in Ava’s service. I’m sure your stories must be much more fascinating.”

  “I know my stories,” he said.

  “And you’re too tired to tell them, even if you would,” she said.

  “Please,” he said. “Talk to me. How did you come to be a Fidel
e?”

  She was silent awhile, looking down at her hands. He did not think she would answer, since there was no reason she should, but after a long moment, she spoke. “I had—there are parts of my life I am not so proud of, things I have done that I would undo if I could,” she said at last. “Through my carelessness, people that I loved were hurt.” She looked at him directly. “That cannot come as a surprise to you. You have remarked on it often enough.”

  “I have remarked on the fact that you don’t care much about yourself. I didn’t say you didn’t care about others.”

  “That’s why I don’t care about myself. Because of things I did . . . things I didn’t do. Maybe I could have averted a calamity, if I had done one or two things differently.”

  “What things?” he asked. “What calamity?”

  “Betrayal, dishonor, death,” she said sadly. “The things that usually break a person’s heart.”

  “You’re not telling the story.”

  “I can’t tell the story. I can’t forgive myself.”

  “So you’ve put yourself in perpetual service to Ava to atone for whatever crime you committed.”

  She glanced down at him, a spark of anger in her face. “You don’t understand at all,” she said rapidly. “I did not become a Fidele to punish myself for wrongs I had done. I became a Fidele to save my life. I was unhappy—I was desperate—I didn’t care what happened to me anymore. I wanted to die. I had decided to let life kill me any way it chose.”

  She paused, and Drake said nothing. His eyes burned as he watched her. He was afraid to blink for fear of missing a single expression on her face.

  “Then I came to the temple,” she went on, her voice a little quieter. “A small chapel, actually, maintained down in the barrios by the Fideles. I had not—I had been raised to love the goddess, you understand, but I had not done her much honor right about this time. I had not been inside a temple in, I don’t know, months. Maybe it was a year. I walked in—and she spoke to me. I can’t tell you the words. I’m not sure she spoke in words. But I felt her there—I felt her presence wrap around me like a mother’s hand wraps around a child’s wrist. I felt—loved, for the first time in months. I felt safe. I saw that there was a way I could come to peace. I fell down on my knees and I wept. And I wept and wept and wept.