by Evie Manieri
The front legs of the bench came down with a gritty crunch and Falkar leaned toward her.
His bloodshot silver eyes and flushed neck made it clear he was still drunk, but she wasn’t stupid enough to dismiss him because of that. She could just make out his sword, Fealty’s Strength, surrounded by dirty plates.
Isa curled her fingers into her palm until her untrimmed nails dug into her skin.
said Falkar. He got up from the bench and came around the table, carrying his sword with the hilt in his right hand and the scabbard in his left, ready to draw. She clenched her arm against her side, refusing to give him cause. She felt his strange compassion moving over her like the swipe of a damp rag.
He stared back at her for what felt like hours, his wine-muddied feelings pulling at her like sucking marsh sand. Then his presence in her mind went foggy and the sword sagged in his hand. Isa left Falkar behind, her metal-tipped heels hammering down on the uneven floor as she walked straight past the stone table toward the entrance to the cavern. She grabbed her sun-proof cape without breaking stride and pulled it over her head as she marched toward the patch of gray framed at the end of the short tunnel. As soon as her boots hit the sand, she gulped down the cold early dawn air and fumbled one of the remaining pills out of her pouch, only to have it slip through her fingers as the pain ripped through her missing arm again.
They were all lost here: every one of them.
She couldn’t go back in there; she couldn’t live among those people any more. She had tried to make it work—she didn’t want to burden Daryan with yet another problem—but she had reached the end. She would have to move into the half-built palace, even though it would make his supporters uncomfortable. There wasn’t much room, but surely Daryan could set aside one tiny corner for her?
* * *
By the time Isa flew toward the city, the rising sun had squashed the houses into flat black cut-outs and compressed the people into streaky black lines. The new school building was on one side of the forecourt of the old castle, near a broken basin that had once filled the air with the sound of burbling water. The school was a typical dome-shaped Shadari house, distinguished by the gleam of fresh whitewash and an uncovered doorway which Daryan had insisted remain open for the ceremony. A gray cloth had been tacked up on the wall above the doorway, hiding the inscription Daryan had painted with his own hand. A large crowd—a thousand people, she reckoned—had turned up for the dedication.
Isa brought Aeda down to a spot on the far side of the palace where two broken walls met in a corner, providing a rare bit of shade. There was a stone trough there, kept filled with water for the triffon. Once she’d settled Aeda, she set off toward the little platform where Daryan and his supporters were gathered. She’d hoped for a moment alone with him, to tell him about Falkar, but she found him embroiled in an argument about the possibility of Binit interrupting his speech and they went right on arguing while she stood like a ghost outside their circle: one of those misguided spirits who had turned their backs on the doors to the After-realm to cling to a life that had already begun to forget them.
“Binit’s kept the truce so far,” said Daryan. “Anyway, he prefers going behind my back. He’s not going to start something here.”
“Binit doesn’t worry me,” Omir replied. “It’s the resurrectionists.”
“They haven’t made any threats. You worry too much about them, Omir,” Daryan said. “Listen, I’m not going to wait any longer. If someone starts trouble, we’ll deal with it. Nothing is going to stop me from opening this school.”
He left the group behind him and circled round to climb up to the platform. Omir and a few of the others followed him, while the rest—the red-robed armed guards—fanned out in front. Isa found her view blocked and moved back, shimmying between a clump of frowning men and a mother with a pinched forehead and a pair of fidgeting children.
She could see Daryan’s head and shoulders rising above the throng, and heard the sound of his voice, saying the same things he had been saying to her for months: “Even if it’s just an empty building now, it will remind us of what we’re working toward. We’re going to do more than just rebuild what we lost to the Norlanders; we’re going to reclaim the knowledge that’s ours by right, and then we’re going to take our ore and make our place in the world. The worst thing we could do now is to condemn the next generation to the same ignorance handed down to us. The next time the Norlanders—or anyone else—tries to take our freedom from us, we’ll be able to defend ourselves.”
Isa moved a little closer, sliding between an old woman leaning on a cane and a young man who reached up to push a fringe of lank hair out of his eyes. He had open blisters on his fingers, dirt caked under his nails and a wide black band of filth marring the bottom of his robe, but it was the smell—the sweet smell of rotting things and the acrid tang of smoke, the smell of death itself—that gave him away. A resurrectionist. She had never been this close to one before.
Just then a gust of wind billowed out the cloth tacked up above the door of the school and it came loose on one side, flapping down to reveal a few words written in Shadari. People gasped and cried out, and most looked away or covered their eyes. Some even dropped to their knees or pulled their robes up over their faces. Only four people did not react: the resurrectionist, who folded his arms across his chest, and a little trio: a man, woman, and a girl of about twelve in a yellow headscarf, who were arguing in fraught whispers.
“I want to tell the daimon,” Isa heard the girl tell her parents. She was a scrawny thing, with big staring eyes. “It’s different now. I don’t have to hide it any more.”
“No, not after what they’re saying about Namah and his. Six, all gone,” said her father, looking about. His eyes rested on Isa for a moment, but her face was hidden beneath her cowl and he couldn’t tell that she was watching them. And most Shadari still assumed she didn’t speak their language. “Think about your brothers and sisters,” he urged.
“We shouldn’t be talking about this here,” said the mother, taking her daughter’s arm and urging her toward the back of the crowd.
“But we’re supposed to come forward,” the girl insisted. “It’s not a sin. It’s not!”
Then sand washed up over Isa’s feet, covering the toes of her old leather boots and sifting back toward her heels, rippling out in tiny waves around the girl.
The mother clapped both hands over her mouth.
An asha. The girl was an asha.
/> “I’m sorry,” said the girl, with tears streaming down her cheeks. “I didn’t mean to.”
“Come on! Hurry!” said the father, and the three of them hustled away with their heads down and the girl still weeping.
Isa suddenly became aware of a disturbance in the crowd, though she had no idea what had started it—maybe an altercation broke out somewhere near the front, or perhaps someone began running; all she knew was that the uncomfortable hush had given way to a restless muttering that was growing rapidly in volume and urgency.
Daryan held up his hands and begged for everyone’s attention even as Omir’s red-robed guards clustered together at the base of the platform to protect him. In the meantime, the girl in the yellow scarf was getting further and further away.
The people around Isa were jostling against each other and craning their necks to see what was happening; she would never be able to get through them to tell Daryan in time for him to intercept the family. She’d not heard any of their names, and the girl was hardly the only Shadari with a yellow scarf. If she lost them now, Daryan might never find them again.
She would have to follow them.
They had moved away from the palace and the crowds already, and now the father was propelling them through the rutted streets of the southern district. Isa stayed behind them as the sun peeled back the shadows and exposed a city sliding into ruin: refuse littering the scrubby garden plots and stinking waste piled up in the alleys, houses bearing the scars of old, inexpert repairs alongside more recent wounds. Her sun-proof cape weighed her down and the stale air beneath her cowl tasted like the grit kicked up by her boots, but she was determined not to lose sight of the girl and her parents.
The street flowed into a circular yard with a well in the middle and other streets leading away in several directions. Broken stuff too worthless even to loot had been piled up in charred heaps. All of the houses on the far side of the yard had burned down, leaving circles of blackened clay bricks. The neighborhood children were playing around one of the piles; a few of the boys had lashed sticks together to make swords. The family went into a house with a blue curtain over the door, and Isa heard the voices of children in several different registers as the heavy drapery swung to one side.
She turned to make her way back to Daryan, but winced as a shaft of sun found its way into her eyes. As she blinked away the tears, she heard the chink of a clay brick falling against another and when she was able to see again, she found two of the boys staring at her.
“Hello,” she said to them.
“Hello,” said the larger boy. The smaller one just sucked his lower lip in between his teeth.
“Do you know who lives there?” asked Isa, pointing to the house with the blue curtain.
“Sure,” said the boy, but before Isa could ask anything else, a voice piped up from her left.
“You talk funny.” A very small girl, disguised, lizard-like, in a robe and scarf the same color as the ground, sat right near Isa building a little city of stones and sticks.
“What are you making?” Isa knelt down beside the child.
The girl dragged her finger shyly through the dirt and shrugged.
A man came through the blue curtain and walked off down one of the streets across the way, tossing something aside as he went. Isa couldn’t see his face, but he was too thin to be the girl’s father. She stood up again and eyed the curtain still swinging from his passing. Smoke wound up from the house’s chimney, but the noise of a large family moving around inside had vanished and the quiet gave her an uneasy feeling.
“Do you think they would let me talk to them?” she asked the boys.
“Don’t know,” said the older boy, flicking shadows at her with swings of his toy sword. The younger boy continued to stare silently.
Isa took a deep breath as if she was about to dive into deep water and then strolled across to the house. She brushed up against the curtain as if by accident, and then took a quick look through the gap she had created.
She pushed it aside and walked through.
Every nerve in her body screamed, but she couldn’t move; she couldn’t even breathe, or open her eyes. She stood there for a moment, paralyzed, waiting for the shock to subside and leave her in control of her own body again. She studied the image hanging in her memory very carefully, preparing herself, as if she even could …
When she felt strong enough, she opened her eyes.
The family had been about to start a meal. Crockery lay strewn around the room, some broken, and a pungent, unfamiliar smell hung in the air. The man nearest the doorway—Isa recognized the father—was lying on his back. The pulled-up rug and scratched floor around him meant he had been trying to reach the door when he died. She could even see bits of his broken fingernails in the dirt. A trail of bloody spittle ran from one corner of his mouth and down to the floor.
Isa was about to step over him when she noticed the black lines on his chest, clawing their way up toward his neck. She hesitated for a moment, but then knelt down and pulled his robe open. The mark over his heart could have been a splash of ink or paint, but nothing came away when she brushed her glove over his dead flesh. A tangle of black lines snaked out from the blotch and then dwindled away, looking like the tentacles of some malignant sea creature.
She raised her eyes to the rest of the room.
Two boys—both younger than the girl she had followed—were slumped against the wall with their mother in between them. She still had her arms over their shoulders, and Isa imagined her holding both of them as they died. An old woman with gray-streaked hair sprawled next to the firepit, lying in the bright spot of sunlight pouring through the chimney hole above her. The old woman had torn open her robe, presumably in pain, and her exposed breast bore the same marks as the man by the door. Isa had no doubt she would find them on all the victims if she looked.
The old woman had died next to a stand holding an open kettle that was still boiling over the fire. The bubbling water inside sparkled in the light. The pungent smell came from the pot. Isa could still see the steam rising up and feel the moisture on her face as she leaned over, but she saw nothing but water inside, and she still didn’t recognize the scent.
Isa found herself irresistibly drawn to what looked to be the curtained-off sleeping chamber on the far side of the room. She drew back the heavy material and tried to make sense of the tangle of shapes in the dim light: there looked to be enough limbs for two people: one too big to be the girl, the other too small.
When she turned around, she saw the cradle.
The room spun as she stumbled back outside and fell onto her knees, retching. Her throbbing shoulder was agonizingly painful. With shaking fingers she shook a couple of the pills from the little bag. One dropped to the ground, but she left it there and shoved the rest in her mouth. She felt as if she had been in that death-house for hours; finding the same sun-bleached sky overhead came as a shock.
Insects surrounded her, drawn by the vomit; they managed to get into her cowl and buzzed in her ears. Nothing felt completely real. She looked at the piles of discarded household goods and the tenacious weeds growing in the rubble, staring at these images of the mundane and hoping they would bring her back to the normal world. Most of the shattered objects defied recognition, but she could see one small jug thrown aside so recently that liquid still darkened the inside of the concave shards, two of which, the larger pieces, were lying side by side. As she focused on them she could see marks on the outside, in a greenish-yellow chalk: writing.
She thought of the Shadari, averting their eyes from the sign over the school door. The Shadari didn’t write anything, not ever.
The smaller of the two boys came shuffling through the dirt and stood next to her. “Are you sick?” he asked.
“No,” Isa reassured him.
“You sicked up. You could have the plague,” said the boy. “People die from it.”
Isa hauled herself up on her quivering legs. “Do they?”
> “People take them away when they do. I saw them. They cover up their faces so they don’t catch it.”
She had been about to head back into the alley when the boy’s words sank in. “You saw them take people away?”
A woman came out from one of the other houses and emptied a dustpan into the street. On her way back in, she glanced up and saw Isa.
“Come inside, all of you,” the woman called out to the children. “You’ve got chores. Now,” she scolded when they hesitated and they scattered abruptly, leaving Isa alone.
She forced a deep breath into her lungs and ran for the palace.
Chapter 10
Isa ran through the streets, hugging the patches of shade whenever she could find them. Nothing looked familiar; she felt like the houses were all crouching down, ready to spring at her as she ran past. Birds streaked by overhead, spying on her. Dirt clouds chased her heels and her cape felt as stiff and heavy as iron. By the time she reached the school, the fear and the heat and the exertion had completely sapped her strength.
Nearly everyone had gone, leaving just a few people roaming through the dirt or clustered together in little groups. Isa saw a scarf on the ground, and more ominously, a single shoe. Omir and some of his guards had gathered over by the platform. One of them tapped Omir on the shoulder and pointed at Isa as she approached and he came out to meet her, quickly covering the ground with his long strides. Rocks and sand crunched under Isa’s feet as she slowed to a walk, gasping for breath and with a cramp in her side.
“Lady Isa,” said the big man, his deepset eyes telling her nothing, “is something wrong?”
“Where—?” She couldn’t get any more out through the dryness in her throat; she reached for her waterskin and drank before she could speak again. “Where’s Daryan?” she managed at last.
Omir glanced over his shoulder to the open doorway of the school. She saw the shapes of stools and tables within the cool shadows. “Why? What’s happened?”
