A Thousand Glass Flowers (The Chronicles of Eirie 3)

by Prue Batten

  Melancholy shadows touched the djinn’s eyes. ‘This takes us away from your brother and your niece for a moment, Lalita, but it also has a bearing on why I stand here before you now so I shall tell you.’ He barely paused, as if the particular telling should be relayed quickly. ‘I was in love with a mortal girl. I would have given my life for her. She was lively and beautiful. I chose to leave the world of the djinn and she and I ran to Fahsi where we thought, fatefully on bitter reflection, to lose ourselves. But my father found us and ordered me to leave Mika and return to the world of turmoil that is a djinn’s life. I refused him outright. In a second he turned her into a pillar of salt and contrived a kizmet to blow her away, scattering my love to the dusty corners that make up Fahsi. Then he placed me in a minikin lamp. Truly I cared little. Mika had been murdered and worse; turned to particles and blown across the world. What was life worth to me after that? My naïvety caused her death. I believed I could love her and protect her against the most powerful djinn ever.’ He paused and took an anguished breath. ‘I was content to suffer my punishment. But I vowed that should I be released I would take my revenge on my father, even on my race, by being the very antithesis of my father’s son.’

  ‘Did you indeed?’ muttered the afrit.

  A noise at the far end of the library caused heads to turn, breath held. Rajeeb moved from pillar to pillar as if he were a wafting shade. Eventually he returned with a coffee and cream cat in his arms, the obscure eyes bright blue and staring, the tail flicking from side to side.

  ‘A cat.’ Lalita breathed out, her fingers loosening.

  ‘One of the palace cats, missed when they locked the doors. We shall mind her until we leave.’ The djinn ran a hand down the animal’s spine as he sat and the cat rumbled and sank against his side, eery eyes half closed.

  ‘Adelina was well advanced with the robe and in her terrible loneliness had secured the friendship of a secret Other – a Hob. She needed a tiny lamp to sew into the hand of an embroidered Aladdin and the contessa, gratuitously generous, gave her the bracelet ornament that was my prison.’ He stopped for a moment and drank from a pewter goblet, dabbing at his lips with his knuckles after. ‘The Hob had Adelina polish the little lamp because… do you know the story of Aladdin? Yes? Well, that action released me just as the djinn was released in the aforesaid story. Similarly, I was obliged to grant the stitcher three wishes. And here, my dear Lalita, I will cut a long story short by saying I magicked Adelina far away. Eventually she met Phelim who proved to be a blessing with his care for her. She had some terrible experiences, too awful to relate, and it is a wonder she didn’t lose the child she was carrying.’

  ‘And that is it?’ The afrit was indignant. ‘I swear you jumped over whole chapters of the telling, djinn. What have you missed?’

  ‘Indeed, Rajeeb.’ Lalita wondered at the djinn’s swift abridgement. ‘You told me I would hear of Isabella and you have said almost nothing.’

  Rajeeb sighed. ‘Adelina had such a terrible time of it, Lalita. Her last hurt was to come from my very own hands and I will not talk of it, not at all. Except to say that Adelina was finally free and I was able to help a little in that. The Contessa received…’ he stopped. His voice had dropped and his hand moved over the feline’s back as if the rhythmic sweep could mesmer the awfulness of whatever he was thinking far away. Lalita said nothing, allowing him to find his own equilibrium. Even the afrit was silent, gazing at the djinn with eyes closed to slits. Finally Rajeeb gave another mighty sigh. ‘She received just punishment.’

  ‘How?’ The afrit sat up.

  Rajeeb stopped stroking the cat.

  ‘It’s of no matter, afrit. I do not wish to talk of it. It is difficult enough that I was involved at all.’ He walked away into the shadows and Lalita and the afrit sat waiting. When he returned, his face was expressionless. He sat again and the cat moved in under his hands, arching its back as the smoothing continued.

  ‘You will say no more?’ Lalita asked.

  He shook his head. ‘It is of no account.’

  ‘Then tell me this. In what you are not saying, can I assume that Adelina did indeed avenge my brother’s death, that the just punishment you mentioned was as just as one could hope for?’

  Rajeeb nodded.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘You sound hard, Lalita.’

  ‘Perhaps. But I am still of the opinion that my brother might be alive if he hadn’t met up with Adelina.’

  ‘One can’t look backward. And dislike for Adelina will only cause a rift between you and your brother’s daughter.’

  Lalita stood and walked back and forth. She had a niece. Family. Her brother had been going to marry the mother of this babe. He had loved her. She imagined him bringing Adelina to Ahmadabad, introducing her, wanting his family to accept her. He’d want me to love her. He’d want me to be her sister. She went back and sat amongst the silk cushions. ‘I need time to adjust to the events that led to my brother’s death, Rajeeb, so let us say you are right for the moment. But ultimately, if I am a little circumspect with his lover then I can’t help it. Try and understand.’

  ‘I do, I do.’ said Rajeeb. ‘The concept of family and loyalty raises all kinds of emotions. I know this to my cost.’ He turned to the Other reclining on the floor. ‘Afrit, you know of my father. Powerful beyond our imaginings. I have been forced to face many truths over the years.’ He continued; a forced lightness injected into the conversation. ‘But let me tell you about your little niece. Isabella is superb I have heard. Her hair is as black as her father’s and she has her mother’s unusual eyes. She might even grow to look like you, Lalita. Adelina’s husband, Phelim, and his stepmother, Ebba, dote on the babe. Importantly for the moment, she is safe.’ He smiled then and Lalita’s own lips lifted.

  ‘But Rajeeb, you need to tell her of your own punishment, it affects her.’ The afrit spoke up, his voice unsettling the images of the sturdy babe that was Kholi’s child.

  Rajeeb nodded. ‘Indeed.’ Another sigh, so many sighs, as if the whole telling could be called The Night of A Thousand Sighs. ‘Lalita, because I am the antithesis of my father’s hopes, he has cursed me. I am unable to leave the palace boundaries. This is my eternal prison just as the lamp was. If I do, then everything I have ever done that is good will turn bad as quick as a goat carcass in the sun, flyblown in an instant.’

  ‘But you scooped me up when I jumped. You were outside the Palace walls.’

  ‘The river is the boundary of the palace, not the walls.’

  ‘This is unbelievable,’ Lalita began to track back and forth again.

  ‘It’s not so bad. I have the afrit for company even if he is like a mosquito sometimes.’ He grinned as the afrit laughed out loud. ‘And I am able to help innocents such as yourself. That is the most important thing.’

  ‘But you don’t understand.’ She kept walking. ‘If you can’t leave here, how shall I get away? For I need to.’ As she looked around the library, the walls seemed to lean down on her and her heart began to flutter.

  ‘Of course. And,’ Rajeeb shifted the cat as he reached to pull her gently back to her seat. ‘I can send you on your way anywhere you wish.’

  She closed her eyes briefly. ‘Then you must and soonest. But before I leave, there is one other thing I need to know.’ She dug in her pocket and pulled out the washi strip. ‘How did this get into a paperweight?’ She had a thread of concern beginning to knot itself in her belly, intimately tied to her new niece.

  ‘Ah, the charm.’ He slid his fingers over the cat’s fur. ‘The contessa found them all, the deadly Cantrips of Unlife, knowing precisely of their volatile nature. She was a creature of malicious cunning and hid the strips inside the flowers of paperweights. What an ingenius device of concealment! One must admire her for that if nothing else. The contessa tried to barter her life for the knowledge of where she had hidden the Cantrips but the Færan would have none of it, maintaining they would find them.’

  ‘Huh’, said the
afrit, his words laced with ribbons of sarcasm, ‘they still search and here we are with one quite literally falling into our laps.’

  Rajeeb frowned. ‘Your uncle bought yours in the Fahsi souks you say? They must have been pilfered from her famous collection and it would be natural to assume the others are in the souks as well. Perhaps all this is not as innocent as one may think. Perhaps Fate again.’ The cat butted his stilled hand. ‘By the Lady Aine,’ he spoke as if to himself, mouthing thoughts. ‘Fate again.’ He stood with the cat looped over his arm. ‘But the hour is late. The stars and moon sit high. I think you should try and sleep and at cockcrow I shall send you wherever you want. Come, at the other end of the library is a room they call the Celestine Observatory. It is a private and comfortable space where you may sleep on a divan. The afrit and I will wake you when it is time.’

  Lalita had no hesitation in following. Worn out and bemused, she was unable to think clearly, unable to frame any more questions and yet she knew she had thousands. Slipper clad feet slapped over the marble tiles of the library – plain, unembellished tiles that allowed the coloured and gold-leafed spines of the many books to repose in unchallenged beauty, tellurions and orreries glistening as they glided on their silent orbits. She followed behind Rajeeb into a space with a vaulted ceiling and a large glass dome high in its center. Waving his fingers, Rajeeb lit the room by a single lamp safely ensconced in a star-punched casing. Lalita stood at the edge of the room, wondering if she stood on the threshold of a universe. The midnight walls glistened with a sprinkling of stars, more shooting out in beams from the apertures on the lamp. In the center of the chamber, a low table was shrouded in chart after chart of the heavens and over the top weighing them down, a telescope lay.

  A divan stood pressed against the inky walls, covered in cushions and with a blanket folded over the end. Rajeeb led her to this couch and bade her lie down and as she curled her legs off the floor to stretch them along the chaise, her back throbbed and she realized how infinitely tired she was.

  Infinitely, infinity, illimitability.

  Within seconds she could see herself back on the edge of the parapet, the wind screaming around her and death pitching her forward. She clutched at the edge of the divan, her eyes widening and her palms clammy. She wanted to run, to flee whatever was wending her way. Not any amount of joy at Isabella’s being could arrest the panic. If I have a charm that is widely sought, am I not vulnerable? If it can kill me, can it not also kill my only family? She lurched from catastrophe to catastrophe but Rajeeb’s hand glided between she and the lamp and she began to drift amongst the starlit highways of the heavens.

  Chapter Twelve

  Finnian

  Finnian turned away from the mother and baby, pushing against the curious crowd of onlookers, against tides of sickening emotion. He had never cared about anyone other than his brother and himself before, why should it be different now? I want freedom not sorrow. Freedom had been the focus of his existence for so long, guiding his escapes when young, whispering in his ear as he grew older. And now guilt and grief bound him so firmly he wondered why he had bothered to escape Castello at all. Frustration at such a tie rubbed back and forth but something else stirred, some deeper, darker sensation that pulled with its own feather-like touch.

  The alleys beckoned and he followed the path up and down dusty stairs, passing alcoves of merchants and busy housewives. Women carried pots on their heads, babes slung like loose bosoms at their chests. The men eyed him as he passed, assessing the value of his clothes and chasing after him,’ Buy effendi, good rugs, Fahsi tables, cashmir, only the best quality. You buy, you buy!’ But he cast them out of his way and strode further as if distance would erase the sight of the dead baby and of Poli, even the old man. He wanted his feet to take him far from a conscience that grew like a throttling vine.

  The sound of the dusty bazaar had faded and he stood for a moment to get his bearings, realizing he was deep in the convolutions of the souk. He knew he should be searching for the charms immediately but he wanted to obliterate everything, an urgency that almost choked him. Thus he began a search of a different kind.

  He smelt hashish on the air, a musky sweetness, and followed the aroma down a narrow alley upon which light fell from a thin skein of sky that showed through a rent in striped fabric. Doors led to alcoves of men smoking hookahs. They sucked on ma’sal, tobacco or jurâk flavoured with mint, sherbet or molasses and in between puffs talked softly with their neighbours or played shatranj. The noise of conversation burbled, a gentle hubbub like the water in the hookahs. But Finnian bucked at such genial and inoffensive pleasure; he craved overpowering sensation, something to annul life and the taking.

  He had heard of a drug that could transport one far away from the dark abysses in the mind. The seafarers in Castello had talked about it with awe. Those who indulged spoke of it with a fondness reserved for loved ones, an obsessive affection, their stories redolent of release and freedom far beyond the realms of reality. It would be here in the souks – it was cultivated in the hidden rock plains of the Raj after all, in stretches of pale pink blooms and bulbous green seedheads.

  The thinnest thread of a fragrance caught in his nostrils, acrid and titillating and he knew he was close. It was just as the ‘fallen angels’ had described. His head became fuzzy as he breathed and a thread of smell wrapped around his neck like a soft chain, pulling at him as he stopped to check his surroundings. He tried to define a doorway, a wall, anything to guide him to an exit should he need it but the constraint shifted to curl under his nose, pulling at the membranes, enticing, promising. He moved into shadow, the imperative of Isolde and the paperweights slipping away utterly.

  A hand pulled aside a canvas curtain and stuffy warmth slid around his ankles, undulating up to his knees. He could see little but the hand guided him and a voice asked softly, ‘Effendi, you want?’ Finnian nodded, opening his hand where a pile of gelt lay and the voice said, ‘Of course, effendi. This way.’

  He followed the voice into a dusky light, a room lit only by braziers, where men lay on filthy divans in alcoves. Some slept the sleep of the almost dead, others moaned or spoke to some imagined companion. Some stared vacantly. As his heart jumped in anticipation, it crossed his mind that he might have entered Hell, that he could pay a price beyond his dreams for the act he was about to undertake. But I have known Hell. I’ve seen Hell. What do I care what happens now?

  The voice pointed a hand at a cushioned divan, half curtained, its cleanliness wanting. ‘Yours, effendi. And what would you desire?’

  Finnian had heard only one name in Castello taverns. ‘Black Madonna.’

  ‘Of course.’ A plate was held out, the fingernails curling over, dirt-filled and broken. Two black tablets lay on the earthenware, evil eyes staring into Finnian’s, daring him, promising untold experiences. He took them in his fingers. The voice poured a pitcher of cloudy water and left it on a tarnished brass table, pointing at a bowl and then throwing a block of brown resin onto the glowing brazier in the center of the room. Voices sighed as a fresh mist trailed into the rafters and Finnian watched with intense fascination as it crept craftily from one hidden alcove to another, pulling the sense and sensibility of the inmates behind it.

  His chest expanded, relief gushing in and then out, as if all the awfulness of his life was breathing away. The foggy aroma clutched at his nostrils and momentarily he gritted his teeth, afraid for just an instant that he might have reached the end of his life.

  At least I get to choose the ending, not Isolde. Quickly he threw the Black Madonnas under his tongue and held them there, bitter bile filling his gullet. He swallowed the dissolving paste and let his knees collapse as the drug unlocked the nerves, muscles and sinews, his mind losing any sense of self. He unfolded onto the divan, the room advancing and receding, the inarticulate sound of painful enjoyment around him rising to a hum as if the room were filled with a hive of bees. Then an enveloping blackness smothered him, a darkness like the to
mb. Frightened, he called out as he collapsed, a hand dropping down off the divan. In his mind a memory surfaced of a little boy angered at life, running into the sombre recesses of the library to hide.

  ‘Finnian.’ He stirred much later as fingers touch his brow. ‘Finnian, do not feel anger. Remember that it is you and only you who have been chosen to do this task, to seek. Is that not an honour above all else?’

  He gazed up from his divan; lids as heavy as if weighted with the coins of the dead, limbs heavier, deathly lassitude pressing him into the cushions of the divan. He stared into eyes the colour of the Bittersweet flower and infinity stared back. The light in the room glowed as if the stars and the moon had descended. A face of celestial beauty hovered over him, haloed by silver hair in which gems were laced.

  ‘To seek? Chosen to seek?’ He gave a weak laugh. ‘And honour?’ He tripped over a thick tongue. ‘Honour’s for mortal men in tales of chivalry.’ He shook his head slowly from side to side, closing his eyes as everything around him began to vacillate.

  ‘You will learn to place value on many things, Finnian. It is your Fate.’ The woman sat on the side of the divan with a rustling of the midnight layers of her gown. He opened his eyes to gaze at the folds and he felt he was spinning through the heavens, a path of stars glittering in the universe around him. ‘Honour is but one of those things. Above all, you will learn to value yourself and those around you. Many years ago as you lay on the floor in the library escaping through the pages of your books, you spoke to your brother. She beats me, you said. She ties my hands together and beats them with a strap till they bleed. She screams that I am of no value, less than a worm to be pecked from the soil. Every day I bleed. Are you beaten too? Do drops of your blood have as little worth?’