The Forgotten City

by Nina D'Aleo

  “You don’t know anything about her or me,” Ismail dismissed him.

  “I know … her journal … when you were alive her writing was full of hope and future and promise, and after you died – that all vanished. You meant everything to her.”

  Ismail’s face contorted with pain and he looked away. When he spoke, his voice was shaky. He’d switched or been jolted out of military mode back to the man. Unsurprisingly, the mention of Ev’r seemed to be a consistent trigger of the shift.

  “And do you think I didn’t care for her?”

  “I’m sure you did.”

  “No!” He clenched his fists. “We were going to get married. Her father had me captured. He sold me to the Militia.”

  “I’m sorry,” Eli whispered.

  “There was no way out,” Ismail emphasized the words. “I tried everything. And no matter what they did to me, the worst torture was knowing that she would think that I had left her – that I didn’t love her. They threatened to kill her if I ran. Do you understand what it’s like to have to hear that, and not be able to do anything about it?”

  Eli gulped and shook his head.

  Ismail’s eyes were starting to blank out as the memories became too painful. He said in a monotone, “I heard she wasn’t doing well. Her father was going to marry her off to a boy – I knew he was cruel. I heard there was a witch granting wishes. They called her the Mocking Witch of O’Tenery Asylum. One soldier had gone bald – she gave him a head full of hair. Another wanted a girl who didn’t want him – next thing she was madly in love. What I wanted … was for Zara to be safe, happy and free. The witch told me everything came with a price. She said I’d have to give my life … and I said, take it.” Ismail closed his eyes. “I thought she meant to kill me, but instead she enslaved me, so I stabbed myself, not realizing that would break her spell over Zara and make everything worse for her.”

  “Dark magics twist everything,” Eli said. “Even the greatest acts of love.”

  “If me dying now, this second, could bring her back, I would. I wouldn’t hesitate. Do you understand now how much I love her?” Ismail looked up at him.

  “I understand you love her so much you’re willing to die for her – but do you love her enough to live for her?” Eli said.

  Anger flickered into Ismail’s dulled eyes, the man still just below the surface. “What are you talking about, imp-breed?”

  “That’s one part of your journey together that I understand – I mean – don’t understand,” Eli said. “Why did you let yourself die out there in the desert after you’d been reunited with Ev’r, why didn’t you come to the city to get treatment? I know you were a fair way out, but you must have known you were sick for a while … and with your skills and hers, you would have been able to make it back – you would have survived.”

  Ismail’s face had paled and his eyes were burning, and Eli thought that this time he might not have just accidentally stepped over the line, but leaped over it with both feet. He expected the beast to emerge any moment, but Ismail managed to restrain himself; he even surprised Eli by responding.

  “I knew it wouldn’t last.” He stared out to the river, looking into the past. “We were happy, but I knew it was only a matter of time before it changed. The witch would never let us be. I thought … with me gone, she would finally be free of her …”

  The logic of if was so damaged that Eli’s mind ached. He understood what sort of life had brought Ismail to this thinking, but still, it made him want to cry.

  “I’m only telling you all this, imp-breed, so that you can explain to her …” he said, his stare boring holes into Eli’s face. “I saw in your mind the lengths you’ve gone to to revive her. It’s beyond my understanding why you’d care for strangers, but I’m … grateful … that you do.”

  “I think it would be better if you explained it to her yourself, because you’ll be there too,” Eli said, stubbornly. “Hero-complex, remember.”

  “I’m dead,” Ismail told him. “There is no hope for me.” He lowered his eyes to the cursed shackle locked around his ankle.

  “Hope is infinite,” the boatman spoke up, “and time not always a traitor.” He gave a long whistle that echoed into the silence around them – and was answered by a chorus of other Twibowl whistles. He wasn’t the last one left, there were others who had survived. Despite everything, Eli smiled, his spirits lifted by the thought of it.

  When he looked back at Ismail, he jolted. The scullion’s eyes were completely white and his body was shaking.

  “Ismail!” He lunged over to him. He grabbed his arm and Ismail snapped out of the trance, his eyes rolling down to normal.

  “What was that?” Eli asked. “A vision?”

  Ismail looked genuinely shocked as well and lost for words. Finally he managed to say, “I haven’t seen the future for year-cycles.”

  “That’s because, as you said, you felt there wasn’t a future – but now that you’re —”

  “I saw Silho,” Ismail cut in. “She’s somewhere near fire.”

  “The Omarian realm,” Eli said, his heart picking up pace at the mention of Silho. “Is she…is she okay?”

  Ismail ran an exhausted hand over his face and murmured, more to himself than Eli, “We should have tried to help her, but we just left…”

  “What do you mean,” Eli said, not understanding.

  Ismail snarled his lips, “Hammersmith – that Blue-Ten addict – that selfish, weak trutt. I saw into his mind. He sold her out to that – Lecivion. He planted something in her back so that the Omarians would always be able to find her wherever she went … and now they’ve come and taken her, and … she’s dead. I saw her dying in a sea of flames.”

  The words shook Eli, but he refused to believe them and muted his grief. “After everything that’s happened to you – you’re still affected by a girl who you met briefly in the desert so many year-cycles ago. Maybe I’m not alone in caring?”

  “Silho wasn’t just a girl … She was …” He shook his head, unable to explain. “Consan,” he said in scullion-tongue, and Eli understood it to mean a stranger who is family – kindred. It was a complicated scullion belief where people were linked through time and rebirth.

  “Well, I know Silho well,” Eli said, trying to sound positive. “And I know she’ll fight to the last, so I’m going to keep searching for her until I find her or I die … these are not just my work colleagues, or even just friends – they’re my family – Silho, Copernicus, Diega, Jude, Ev’r.”

  “They’re all dead. I saw it.” Ismail told him, flatly, all the fire and feeling in his eyes burning out to a blank stare as he switched back to soldier mode.

  “No,” Eli refused. “I don’t believe it.”

  He closed his eyes, needing to zone out for a while to regather his control.

  When he opened them again, he saw they had left the inhabited areas of Adliden and had entered murkier waters, where coral trees grew along the banks beside abandoned homes made of shell and rock. A thick, brown silt covered everything as though it had all recently been flooded. Eli sensed they were coming close to the end of their journey and he still had no plan for their escape from LaNoria. He blinked open his front-core menu and called Diamond.

  “I wasn’t asleep – just resting my eyes,” she said immediately.

  It put a flicker of a smile on his lips. “It’s okay, you’re allowed to sleep,” he said. “But I need some information. What do you know about entries and exits from LaNoria? The short version.”

  After a moment of silence, in which Eli wondered if they’d actually found one topic that Diamond didn’t know about, she said, “There are several ways in, but they all require magics and there’s only one way out that won’t get you killed. There’s an old elevator – an antique, really – that used to run between the old asylum, which was the Galleria Majora before it was destroyed, and Level 4 – remember, they were trialing it as the new asylum before the contamination?”

  “
No, I didn’t realize,” Eli admitted.

  “Well – the elevator is shut down and sealed off, but if you could get inside it and hack in, you could get it started, and then it looks like there’s a clear run up, based on the grids I’m looking at.”

  “Excellent,” Eli said, feeling his spirits lifting. “Can you send me through the location of the elevator?”

  “I can do one better, I can send you through the location, with the quickest route from the portal.”

  “Brilliant, Diamond – I keep saying it, but really brilliant. You’re amazing.”

  “So will you marry me?” she responded brightly.

  “Ah … well,” Eli said, struggling for words. “I’m going to see if we can live through this first and then … reassess afterward.”

  The plans started loading into his front-core and he saw the route maps flashing up in front of his eyes. The distance between the portal and the elevator really wasn’t that far.

  “You know that LaNoria is a white-out zone, don’t you?” Diamond said. “We’ll be completely cut off.”

  “I know,” Eli responded, trying to sound upbeat. “But we’ll be out soon. Don’t worry.”

  After a pause Diamond said in a small voice, “Eli?”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t forget to fly.”

  It was a complex imp-breed saying that at the core of it meant something like “keep breathing because I love you”. His gran’pa use to say it to him. He missed him.

  “You too,” he whispered and ended the transmission.

  Before Eli had a chance to memorize the maps, Imrad dragged his oar hands in the water to bring them to a halt beside a rocky plateau leading into a cave.

  “Through there, my weary travelers,” the boatman said, pointing to the cave. “You’ll find an entranceway.”

  “My friend said that LaNoria can only be accessed by magics,” Eli said.

  “Then your friend is very right,” Imrad replied.

  “Is it safe?” Eli asked.

  “Absolutely not,” the boatman said and Eli gulped. He stared into the blackness inside the cavern and nerves crawled in his skin. Ismail was sniffing the air with distrust.

  Eli forced himself to stand and step out of Imrad’s boat body. Ismail followed, and when they were both out, the boatman rowed around to face them, saying,“Sometimes this world falls against evil and sometimes it stands. I hope this time it stands.”

  “So do I,” Eli said.

  He and Ismail turned and walked across the rocks to the shadow of the overhanging cave mouth. They stepped inside the ragged shade. Eli looked back to wave at Imrad, but the boatman was gone, the river was gone, and a black wall stood blocking their exit.

  “Dark magics,” Ismail snarled.

  Eli turned and saw himself reflected in the scullion’s eyes. He saw the monster hand reaching around his face a second before it wrenched him backward into the wall.

  Chapter 31

  Croy

  Kullra Fornax

  Nÿr-Corum (Saint Mariread Borough)

  By the time she’d almost freed the Dray from the cruel head cage, her hands were shaking so badly she could barely grip the last steel hook embedded deeply in his flesh. She had to hold one hand with the other to finish the torturous task. Throughout the ordeal he hadn’t uttered a sound, just sat forward in the seat with his head lowered. The only indication he was feeling any discomfort was the tightness with which he gripped the sides of the chair and the sweat pouring off him. Croy’s knee was aching horribly from crouching for so long on the hard floor of her house, but the presence of the Dray distracted her from the pain. Always in the past when she had thought of the Drays, she’d imagined some kind of grotesque shadow-form, twisted and inhuman in every way, but nothing about this man suggested demon or monster. His eyes were darker than any she had seen and they shone when the light reflected off them, but they were full of emotions that she recognized and wisdom that she wished she had. He even had parasite-scars and windscars marking the hard muscles of his body, just like a human Fleetsman.

  Croy noted that the bruises on his legs from the chains were fresh and the puncture wounds from the cage were not infected. It suggested he was captured just recently, yet some of his other injuries looked dayturns old, or older. She dropped the last of the hooks onto the floor near to the swabbing alcohol and her Firestorm, which she had placed right beside her leg.

  She wiped a hand over her face – the freezing storm was still howling outside, but the Dray was radiating heat like a fire. She wasn’t sure if it was actually him or the clothes he was wearing. The top had been ripped and hung off him, but the pants were intact. The fabric looked like some kind of animal skin, with heavy black scales that seemed to blend with the darkness. Croy had tried to cut away the rest of the top to stitch some of his other wounds, but had found that her knife, made from the strongest steel in the city, hadn’t been able to penetrate the material. It made her wonder what had torn his suit up – clearly nothing human-made.

  After struggling to her feet, Croy gripped the cage and lifted it completely off the Dray’s head. Sensations bombarded her, feelings so intense that she immediately dropped the cage to the ground with a clatter. She recognized the emotions. She’d felt the same way just after John L had died and she had dreamed of him alive again, only to wake to find him gone. It was that feeling – that ache and void – that longing to see someone again and knowing it would never happen. It surged through her so powerfully that she found herself gripping onto the Dray’s arm, just barely stopping herself from actually climbing onto him and hugging him. This was a dangerous stranger whose true intentions she didn’t know. With supreme mental effort she managed to release him and back away, but only a few paces, where she crouched down and lowered her head so as not to see him. She shook from the effort of keeping away from him and her chest ached with it. The cage had obviously been some kind of barrier to his power.

  “Switch it off! Make it stop!” she demanded through gritted teeth.

  “I can’t,” he spoke, his deep voice piercing right through her to where she hid in her mind. “It’s the rete calling you in.”

  “Into where?”

  “Into me – into your family line,” he said.

  Croy shook her head. “I don’t understand.” The shaking was worsening and her body was dragging her forward, toward him.

  “Come closer. I’ll explain everything,” the Dray said.

  “No!” Croy responded.

  She sensed movement and looked up. He had stretched out his hand and she could see some kind of exotic marking imprinted in the skin of his arms. She couldn’t stop herself, she reached out a shaking hand and placed it onto his. He closed his grip and gently drew her closer until she was sitting at his feet. He leaned down and touched his head to hers. The warmth of him, the scent of him rushed through her. She heard his voice in her mind.

  It’s alright. I’m here.

  She fully realized that a stranger being there shouldn’t be comforting, yet it was. She reached up and put her arms around his neck and all the fear drained out of her, leaving only silence in her mind, and something else she could see – a line stretching out into darkness.

  He released her and she leaned back, kneeling beside him. Immediately she felt it – the pain in her knee was gone. She’d never been able to kneel on it like this. She shifted gingerly – but still felt nothing. The shock and extreme relief brought tears to her eyes.

  “Who are you?” she whispered.

  The Dray looked down at her, his eyes shimmering like flames over dark waters.

  “Shah-Jahan RaAhura … Captain of the Scorpian Manticore.” He flinched and pressed back in the chair, holding the stab wound in his side. He closed his eyes and seemed to drift into sleep.

  Croy watched him for a long time before standing and walking, without any limp, into her bathroom. Feeling as though she was moving in a dream, she unlatched her toilet pail and from her hiding spot dragge
d out John L’s papers, stashed beneath his leather jacket and his last packet of tigaros. It was some of his research into the Dray. Just before Controllers had raided John’s house she’d hidden the papers, hoping the Conference wouldn’t have enough evidence to convict him, but VP already had more than enough. She stared down at the parchments covered in John L’s black scrawl. Until now she’d never more than glimpsed over it, some part of her always wanting to believe he was innocent and not wanting to see anything that proved otherwise. She realized now how stupid this was. She scanned through the writing and found what she’d been looking for, she had a memory of seeing it once before, the name RaAhura – Vesuvius RaAhura – Captain of the Scorpian Manticore – perhaps Shah-Jahan’s father? She read a note beside the name – the Captain is the core of the family. The strongest of them all, who holds the rete together. Through him and by him all cerebral communications pass. Without him the clanship falls apart.

  “Cerebral communications?” Croy whispered. What did that mean? There were many parchment sheets of writing, but the words blurred before her eyes and she found she couldn’t read them. She placed the parchments down and went back out into the lounge room. Shah-Jahan still sat with his eyes shut. She could feel his pain pulsing through her, as well as hunger and thirst.

  She went to her food stores, took out a decanter of water and some bread and carried them to him. She touched his arm and his eyelids blinked open. She offered him the water and he took it and drank deeply.

  “Why are you here? What happened to you?” she asked him. “Where’s the rest of your family?”

  A shadow crossed Shah-Jahan’s face. “The Arequium Mors drove the human ship, the Chimera, into the Scorpian Manticore and since then they have been hunting me, through humans, through animals – whatever they can possess. The entire family was at risk. I had to leave and cut the rete.” He swallowed painfully. “I found my way into the city through air pipes in the Crematorium.”

  “The Arequium Mors crashed the Chimera?” Croy repeated, trying to understand what he was saying. “What are they?”