An Echo of Sorrow
Enk sits in the crawling shadow of his favorite oak as it stood ten years ago, the fire in his chest waning as goosebumps pimple his skin. The sun blazes in the center of the sky, penetrating the tree’s shade when the breeze rustles its leaves just right. Rufus, his floppy-eared hound, rests with its wet nose upon his lap while Merka coos to him about the Empire’s war against the last Ahrimen and the Hundred Clans. Behind her, the groundskeepers plant seedlings into the fertile earth. The air reeks of cherry blossoms and spring.
The six-year-old spins his teacup slowly on its saucer, lifts his head and addresses the gloom, as if too afraid to peer directly at his former wet nurse, “Why would the Hundred Clans willingly serve evil? Why would they pledge their life to their slavers? Why raise villains to the stature of gods?”
“Those are good questions, Enk,” Merka says, smiling. “I’m not sure, but I suppose from their perspective we are the ones in the wrong, we are the ones worshiping a false God.”
“But that’s stupid.”
Merka snorts. “Is it? Every man from the most pious to the most wicked thinks the path they tread the correct one.”
A tear spills from Enk’s left eye. He blinks it away
“What’s wrong?” she asks, lifting his face with a warm fingertip.
“Nothing.”
“Is it about your father?”
Silence.
Merka runs her knuckle along the little scion’s cheek, traces the outline of moisture on his face. Her gaze shifts to regards the toy soldier, lying on the blanket next to him.
“Don’t you like his gift?” she asks.
“Why does he have to go so soon?” The six-year-old takes the wooden soldier into his arms, runs his fingers across its musket and scarlet uniform. “Why can’t he stay here longer?”
Merka stiffens, as though stricken mute by sudden sadness. “Duty . . . Enk. Duty. The World-beyond-the-Gates is not a kind place. Your father does what he must to protect us from that horror. He goes to war so you and I can know peace. Do you understand?”
He nods, even though he does not.
“Until he returns you always have me and your mother.” Merka tussles Enk’s hair, her eyes alight with a playful twinkle. “We’re not such bad company are we?”
The six-year-old presses his lips into a thin line. “No, not so bad.”
Merka gropes for him, laughs as she clutches him tight to her bosom. He allows himself to melt into the embrace, breathes deeply on her scent. Jealous of their intimacy, Rufus nestles closer, whining. Enk smiles, overcome by a sense of belonging. Through Merka’s golden threads of obscuring hair, he sees a spider dangling from a branch above them, twisting slightly in the breeze.
“Enk!” a feminine voice shrieks.
■■■
The banging of a fist against a wooden door.
Enk’s eyes opened, and phantom pictures retreated before the glow of morning. For an instant, the immense dread of last night’s events seemed something he might have imagined, so great was his disorientation.
He touched thumb and finger to his forehead. The memory of what he had witnessed in Sargon’s mind pulsed in his throat, a second more fiendish heart. Merka’s face, paler than he had ever seen it, mouth opened like a gaping fish.
No, not a dream. He pawed at the bedsheets, closed his hands into fists. Merka was dead. Murdered.
The door shook on its hinges.
“Enter,” he hissed.
Ilima skulked into the bedchamber, fiddling with a white envelope. He seemed diminished, bent against the billowing curtains of an unglimpsed storm front. He took a seat at the edge of the bed, his eyes skirting the room, avoiding Enk’s own. “Here,” he said, placing the letter in the space between them, “you left it in my carriage.”
Enk clutched Inanna’s missive in a trembling hand. A fat tear splattered onto the ivory paper. Nothing wounded so deep as the lost of a loved one; no calamity was more profound—or irreversible. It turned men into wailing infants, transformed warriors into raving widows. And he felt it as an icy tingle in his bones, felt it in the crescendo reverberating through the hollow in his breast.
“My father told me what happened. . . .” Ilima said softly.
A choking gasp. “Oh?”
“Enk. . . .” Ilima’s shoulders shook, then he went on in a tight voice. “You loved Merka. Now you hurt, and I hurt for you.”
Panting silence.
“I remember the way you comforted me when we learned of Ipip’s passing. And now Inanna has also become a Tribute of Flesh, walking in her footsteps.” Ilima swiveled until he fixed Enk with a teary-eyed stare. “I lost one sister, now I fear I might lose the other. . . . What I’m trying to say is that I know something of what you’re feeling, and I’m sorry.”
“Inanna will return to us unscathed,” Enk said, placing the letter on the nightstand. “And you have nothing to be sorry about, you’re not the one who hung Merka from hooks.”
“He can’t get away with this,” Ilima’s said, his voice throaty with rage and hatred. “The Scarlet Apron must be stopped!”
“He won’t. I will stop him!”
Ilima’s face contorted, but he remained silent.
Enk clapped his friend’s shoulder and slid off of the bed. He flung open the doors of his wardrobe, searched for a suitable outfit, casting aside the old as he donned the new. Routine precluded the need for thought, allowing him to shamble through the task bereft of feverish passions.
Threads of faded blue soon enveloped Enk’s arms and chest, clasped close by blood-colored buttons engraved with swirls. Light glittered, caught and reflected off of the gold-plated buckle fastening a snake-skinned sword-belt about his waist. Narrow, black breeches slinked down his thin legs into white stockings housed within overlarge leather boots.
Thus attired, Enk departed the quiet familiarity of his room. Ever more distant, ever more obscure, Ilima shadowed his steps, the hale trailing the infirm. The mansion closed in on Enk, chitinous teeth needling his breast. Spasms seized his lungs, forcing the billowing of breath, and clumps of blackness scribbled enigmatic cacography about his periphery. An adipose orb pulsed at his back every time he slowed, swept through the bruise of noxious fumes, battering aside all thought of rest.
“Do you really hate me that much?”
Words gasped through a sob-filled throat, a flood of emotion swelling to encompass the space that separated the hale from the infirm. A voice clotted and trampled with sorrow.
The wretchedness of it yoked Enk to stillness steps from the front doors of his mansion. He wheezed through congestion, grew deeper on untouched wells of air. Confusion whirling like skirts, he turned to face his friend.
Ilima stood at the center of the hallway, patterned in the refracted light of the glass chandelier swaying ever so slightly above his head. Face gouged in ire, eyes moist with dismay, he towered over Enk.
“Do you?” Ilima repeated.
Enk blinked. “W-what?”
“You don’t mean for me to help you at all, do you?”
“I . . . I don’t hate you. Why do you always say that? You’re my best friend.”
“Am I?” Ilima’s bottom lip quivered then firmed. “Then why? Why don’t you want my help? You said you would stop him. You would find the Scarlet Apron. Not we or us, just you!”
Enk gulped and said, “I loved—”
“And I didn’t?” Ilima asked in a half snarl. “No. You must hate me, that’s the only thing that explains this. No one would treat a friend this way.”
“This is just something. . . .” A distant thud vibrated the air, pinching the very words from Enk’s mouth.
He spun away from his bewildered friend and strode outside, only to be confounded by the sight that greeted him. Mother swinging an axe at the base of his favorite oak, the one he and Merka had spent so much time under in his youth.
The young scion could only gape as he walked closer to the scene of horror, his ha
nd gripping the pommel of his sword ever tighter, all but deaf and blind to Ilima’s stalking company. Lady Phebe Gueye struggled against the unholy congress of iron and wood, yanked and pulled on the handle of the axe buried in the oak, clothed in a silken nightgown that revealed far more than it concealed. Muscles bounded by the horrendous sum of her feminine curves bugled and strained.
Numberless emblems of previous traumas suffered slowed Enk’s steps, transfixed him and Ilima both with its newest iteration. They could not move. His mother’s actions were not so much an attack as a defilement of the last vestige of the thing called home. He had thought nothing else remained to be undone. And so the first punishment was made anew by the depths of the inexorable hole called Mother.
Ilima did what he could not, spoke where he remained silent.
“Lady Gueye. . . ?”
Phebe whirled, freeing the axe from its bride at last.
Ilima danced back, but Enk remained fixed to his place, his eyes aching. The white rents left in the dark bark cut him more deeply than any physical wound could have.
“By our High Lady’s glory, Ilima! You nearly frightened me into the Thousand Heavens.” She smiled her sweet little smile, hefted the axe and rested it on her shoulder. Sweat coated her brow, glistened on her exposed skin, made milky silk diaphanous about her plum bosom.
Ilima returned to Enk’s mute side. “What are you doing, Lady Gueye?”
“Phebe, Ilima. Call me Phebe. How many. . . ?” She puckered her lips into a dour pout, then sighed. “And what does it look like? I thought I would do a little gardening. You heard about Merka? Of course you have. They say it's supposed to help ease the sting when you’re heartsick. Gardening.”
“Oh . . . I see.”
Phebe tilted her head back, squinted eyes bejeweled by tea scoops of watery lamentation. A gentle breeze plucked at overhead branches, rustling leaves and shoots of grass. The hem of her thigh high nightgown flapped upward, but she did not seem to notice or care.
Enk averted his gaze. Ilima gasped at his side, letting Enk know he had glimpsed the gates of ruin. Phebe lowered her upturned face and shared a smile, a smile no less wolfish for its lack of canines. And as always it did not reach her eyes, her luminous eyes.
“You’ve grown,” she told Ilima, reaching for him.
Ilima rebuffed her, stopping her hand before it could stroke his face.
“Thank you for the compliment, Lady Gueye,” Ilima said in a breathless gulp. “But I think it unearned, we’ve all grown.”
Phebe giggled, a sound like birdsong chirped from the mouth of a fanged spider. Not fraudulent for its harmony, but alien for the remote octad that watched and the unseen pedipalps that twitched.
“It seems your grandfather’s humility runs true in you, if not as deep as in your father,” she said softly.
Ilima stiffened, stricken speechless by the verbal blow.
“Well, I think that’s enough adventure for one day, Darling,” she said, transversing the intervals that separated her from her son. “Don’t come home too late, and try to stay out of trouble, would you?”
Phebe pressed warm lips to Enk’s cold cheek, gave him a kiss that lingered and lingered. And he stood as still as the Cobalt Gate, a boy engulfed in motherly sweetness made putrid for what lay hidden, empty save for an organ throbbing within a hollow, numb but for where his face burned.
Finally, the doom-pinched heat receded, and Mother sauntered away, the axe resting on her shoulder as easily as the silk of her nightgown.
Enk glared at the oak in renewed horror. A gash split in half the bark where his and Merka’s names lay bound by a heart. A few more swings and there would have been nothing left to mark those golden moments but memory.
“Did it work?” he asked in a half growl. “Did gardening help relieve the ache of Merka’s passing?”
The retreat of footfalls stalled.
“You know what, Darling, I think it did,” came Mother’s merry response.
Enk’s knuckles cracked about the pommel of his sword. He exhaled slowly, listening to Mother’s footfalls restart then fade from hearing.
A hand dropped onto his shoulder. “Enk. . . .”
“I’m sorry, Ilima,” Enk said, continuing to stare at the evidence of his mother’s hatred.
“You have nothing to—”
“But I do. I’m sorry for being such an idiot. I would be happy to have your help . . . if you still want to work with me that is.”
Ilima wrenched Enk about, clutched him tight in a hug and laughed a laugh equal parts sob. “Of course I do, you scrawny oaf.”
Chapter Ten
The Hunt
I’m not alone.
This thought possessed a will of its own, repeating within Enk’s mind, sometimes roaring, sometimes lower than a dead man’s murmur. No matter the volume, it possessed an urgency that set his heart to fluttering. It was at once a haunting cry of hope and a gasping admission of guilt. Like so much else, Merka had been taken from him, wrenched from his very grasp, but still he was not alone, and this seemed wrong somehow.
Breathless, he stared out at Dilgan through the carriage window; the city’s great gutters and streets had been washed clean by the night’s downpour. Scoured of old muck until wet masonry glistened beneath a bright and clear sky. Voices floated up from alleyways, snatches of conversations rendered incomprehensible by the rest of the disorganized swell.
“I really do think it’s best if we start at the beginning,” Ilima was saying, scribbling onto a piece of white parchment in the seat next to Enk.
Enk savored the taste of dank air on his tongue while studying Ilima’s calligraphy. Six names were written in columns: Merka at the top and Nanefe Yosef scratched out and replaced with Devotee of the Holy Harlots at the bottom.
“We already went over this,” Enk said. “We start with Merka.”
Ilima frowned, yet said nothing.
“It’s more than just sentiment,” Enk continued.
Ilima dipped his quill into his inkwell and returned to his scribing. “I know you have your reasons, and after you explained them to me, I’m sure I’ll marvel at the depth of your preternatural intellect.”
Enk snorted.
“Still waiting,” Ilima said just as dryly. “Dazzle me already.”
“Time rots all things, it’s simple as that. The farther back we go, the less evidence there will be for us to discover. Memories will have faded. Witnesses will have moved on. Merka’s murder, on the other hand, is only hours old, it hasn’t even made the newspapers—”
“I see,” Ilima said, cutting in before Enk could continue.
“Do you?”
Ilima ran a hand through his hair and said, “Well, as far as one of us lesser minds can.”
“You’re a donkey’s ass, have I ever told you that before?”
“A lesser ass to your great. . . .” Ilima faltered and his cheeks flushed a deep crimson. He took a breath, then went on in a more hesitant tone. “I-I swear that sounded more clever in my head.”
Enk’s laughter cracked the gloom, and the hooked talons of inner hurt gave way to gold threaded amusement. Ilima joined in, matching the young scion’s roar with his own much hardier boom.
■■■
Once, when Enk was a child, his uncle, Gezer, had smuggled him out of his gilded pen, out into Dilgan’s much larger encampment. Disguised as paragons of the most degraded, they had escaped opulent splendor and descended into squalor. The world had roared about him like a whirlwind laden with neoteric wonder. He had gaped at the unfamiliar, coughing, clutching his uncle’s much larger hand. Then it had ended with a gasp, a whimper. He could remember his uncle leading him from a dusty bookshop and into a seedy tavern. He could remember gulping on air heavy with narcotic smoke, then lurching to a stop, enchanted by the bare-chested vixens that approached him and his uncle. Horror had replaced surprise, and contorting ceiling beams had replaced sparkling bosoms.
Enk stared up at a cracked and wea
thered facade, unafraid.
This was a different tavern.
And he was far removed from that naïve boy he had once been.
The Dancing Bell was like half a dozen taverns found near the edge of the Shade, once luxuriously painted stone had succumbed to neglect until its former hue had become a mystery.
“Are you sure this is the place?” Enk asked.
Ilima rifled through a leather folder stuffed with loose parchment and sketches of the victims' families. “The Dancing Bell. Yes, this is it.”
“Why would Merka come to a place like this?” Enk tapped his fingers against the hilt of his sword. “It makes no sense.”
“Be thankful I was able to get this location from my father, but to answer your question, her sister runs this place.”
Merka had a sister?
The question stirred a memory. He nodded. Yes, she did—does. Merka had mentioned her on more than a few occasions, though he did not recall ever meeting her.
Her name was . . . Minna.
Ilima pulled Enk away from the carriage and whispered, “I want to talk to you about something. I don’t want you to use your power on any of the people we interview. Well, not unless you really have to.”
“You what?” Enk tore Ilima’s hand from his arm.
“I’m serious, Enk,” the dark-haired boy hissed. “I’ve given this a lot of thought. You know nothing of this new ability. Where did it come from? Does it cause long-term harm?”
“You want me to give up our most powerful tool? I thought you wanted to catch the Scarlet Apron as much as I do!”
“I do,” Ilima said, undeterred by Enk’s ire, “but I care about your wellbeing more. If forced to pick between the two, I would choose you every time. Power corrupts, Enk. You’ve heard the whispers about the Lord-Governor, the rumors about the Immortal-Emperor. If you start down this path of commanding people to do whatever you want whenever you want, where will it end? Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.”
Enk scowled, not wanting to but seeing the logic in his friend’s words. It was always the correct yet unwanted advice that needled the most, he decided. Once heard, it could never be unheard.
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